Grief as the Secret that Opens into Praise

When I tried to imagine last night's book event beforehand, I found it impossible. By this time I am quite used to the fact that somewhere between seven and fifteen people will show up (averaging ten to twelve, though a few have numbered as much as twenty-five), and that I will feel connected and supported by my local contact.

This person, usually a woman, is the one who, at my request, agrees to organize the event and contact her friends and others who might be interested in actually looking at and working with the deep wells of unexpressed and unprocessed grief that seem to live inside all of us, both individually and collectively. All along, I have felt that the key to this kind of independently operated tour is the network of local contacts, as well as the willingness of the person who is going on the tour to actually ask for help!

This was my biggest stumbling-block, as I am stubborn and proud, and prefer to do things on my own rather than risk rejection. Indeed, I think I said here in an earlier blog that during the two months that it took to organize the this ten-week tour there were a number of days when I felt paralyzed, unable to act. All my old voices would come up, especially the "Who do you think you are?" (said sarcastically) that I heard from my mother so long ago, and probably not even very often. But of course, that was the one remark from her that I remembered. As a typical Mom of her pre-feminist generation, she felt an unconscious need to make sure her daughters didn't stick out too much, less they be ruthlessly cut down— "by the patriarchy" I used to add, but now that phrase seems so hopelessly dated and angry and, even if true, unhelpful, in terms of my own personal healing.

At any rate, all along my intention for this tour felt strong and clear, and when those days would take me down I'd just notice the place in my body that the pain was constricting, breathe deeply into that place, and honor and embrace the pain for how it served me in the past. Finally, like a vise grip (or is that vice grip?), the pain would ease, let go. And the next day I could once again pick up the phone or write an email to some friend or acquaintance on the route I had chosen to ask if she would help me create an event in her town.

At this point, after seventeen of these events and ten more to go, I feel immensely grateful to all who have supported me in this quest, and indeed, I'd say that whereas during the first year of my grief I was intensely grateful for solitude, in this fifth year after Jeff's death I am learning, through this amazing journey, just how inextricably interdependent I am with all living beings. All the new and old friends who have surrounded me during this odyssey feel like a deeply-held, purposeful human matrix of caring that I am just barely beginning to tap into on a feeling level. So thank you all, so much!

Which brings me to last night's event, the only one for which I have NOT had a local contact. I arranged the reading/discussion event myself, by looking up bookstores in the Bay Area on the web, and contacting three of them. The Open Secret bookstore in San Rafael was the only one to agree to an event by this non-local author whom they didn't know beans about. Given the clamor for book events in California where I imagine most alternative people are either authors or in the process of becoming authors, I felt gratified—and actually somewhat amazed— that the door to the Open Secret Bookstore and Cultural Center actually opened for me.

But I didn't know anyone here. And would anyone show up?

Amazingly enough, nine people did—including an old friend whom I last knew in New York, and who had seen the poster on the door—and once again, we found ourselves circled up, talking intensely and deeply about various multidimensional and paradoxical aspects of the grieving process and how the layers upon layers of our grief, when processed as fully and with as much awareness as possible, can serve as a transformative agent for both ourselves and the culture at large.

Three of the people there mentioned with great praise a CD called "Grief and Praise," by Martin Prechtel, as well as books by Malidoma Some´—both aboriginal teachers who work to help us Americans who are unknowingly stuffed with and paralyzed by a mass of lifetimes and even generations of unprocessed grief. So once again, I feel the continuity of the work of this tour with the work of others, and I am full of appreciation for all those who both bear grief willingly and expressively and who work at ever deepening levels to access the wonder and awe that greet our recognition of grief's continuity with praise.

Next up: Dillon Beach for the afternoon. YES!