Community Grief Ritual
Community ritual space to honor & give expression to personal & collective grief, to be witnessed and accompanied in togetherness and beauty.
Details:
Sponsored and organized by Wilderness Youth Project
November 8 & 9, 2024
Friday November 8, 7 - 9pm (an evening led by Alexis Slutzky) +
Saturday November 9, 9am - 7pm (community grief ritual)
Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara Parish Hall
This is a two day event. Friday night is preparation for Saturday. Both days are highly encouraged to create our container. For more details and to register, please visit registration website here.
We gather together at the common well of grief to tend our hearts, sing our tears, be with whatever your particular experience is at this time - whether grief, shame, rage, numbness, fear, joy, resistance - and witness, accompany and have each others back, when, as Martin Prechtel says, ...the grief may be so strong, we fear we might drown and we need to know someone is there to pull us out of the water.
These are times marked with grief. So much loss and sorrow in the personal and collective areas of our lives. We are not in this alone. Grief is a given in this life, a natural part of the human experience, meant to be shared with others, not in isolation, and with a ritual container big enough to hold the magnitude of our losses.
Grief is intimately connected to our love and can deepen us if we allow it. Tending to and metabolizing our grief often transforms into gifts of beauty, action and care for our world. It softens our hearts and opens us to our humanity with more capacity to respond to those around us with compassion and wisdom.
This ritual is inspired by the Dagara people of West Africa, and we would not be doing this work without being impacted by the work of Sobonfu Some and Malidome Some. We also recognize the Chumash people, on whose land we gather and all of our ancestral traditional rites and condolence ceremonies from around the world. Our team has had the great fortune to work with Sobonfu Some, Malidoma Some, and Francis Weller, as well as training in related work with Joanna Macy (Despair and Empowerment/The Work that Reconnects), Deena Metzger (Grief into Vision) and Martin Prechtel (Grief and Praise).
““Coming home to grief is sacred work. a powerful practice that confirms what the indigenous soul knows and what spiritual traditions teach: we are connected to one another. Our fates are bound together in a mysterious but recognizable way. Grief registers the many ways this kinship is assaulted daily. Grief becomes a core element in any peace making practice, as it is a central means whereby our compassion is quickened, our mutual suffering is acknowledged.””
““Something needs to be broken in order for a new state of grace to be born. It is the natural cycle of our spirit. In this way we are born and die many times in life before we eventually return to the land of the ancestors. If we are going to achieve our purpose in life, we must be willing to fall out of grace and accept its lessons. When we feel righteous about ourselves, or deny our brokenness, we are fighting agains the higher states of grace that await us.””