10/13/2024
🌀 SHAPES OF GRIEF 🌀
over the month of September I participated in a daily imagination practice, called forth by dear friend . I was traveling at the end of august when I received the invitation, feeling an intuitive need to ground while in transit. A few days into the practice my world was shaken with an unbearable grief after losing my soul companion, Lila. No stranger to grief, this loss awoke something different in me. I’ve never lost a familiar before & continue to feel as if a part of my being is missing, unexpectedly gone. I often look for her in the corners of my eyesight to be met with her absence, & an emergence of tears.
Grief has many shapes & can create reverberations, sometimes in the shape of ripples & others in the form of tsunami waves. The loss of lila resurfaced an immense amount of grief from various experiences in the past 5 months of my life ~ the loss of my grandmother, an ending of a partnership, the grief of dreams ending, loss of my bodily independence, & lastly that of Lila.
recently wrote in her substack that “grief can be seen as the loss of a world, and that mourning can be something different. Mourning may be an “ongoing imaginative engagement that keeps the absence alive yet renews a sense of hope as one goes forward.¹” So if grief is world loss, mourning may be more like world making.”
These shapes feel like the beginning of a contemplative inquiry for me as i continue to bear witness to collective grief in the forms of genocide, war, & climate catastrophe… while navigating the waves in my personal life. creative practice helps. community helps ♥️
