Grief, like death, is often considered a failure in our culture. But grief, like death, is part of a natural cycle, like snowdrops giving way to roses and summer blazing into autumn leaf fall.
What It Is:
Truth and reconciliation is essentially the acknowledgment that we must honestly encounter the past with all its sufferings and abuses in order to create sincere movement from conflict and tension to peace and connection.
A two day community Truth and Reconciliation Grief ritual focused not only on personal grief but on the collective grief saturating the founding of this country, which is based on the pain, loss and death of the First Nations Peoples, followed by the pain, loss and death of the trafficked Africans brought here in enslavement. The long suffering and difficulties from these two threads that founded our country are alive and active still and are asking for our care.
When:
Saturday November 8th, 10-5, and Sunday November 9th, 10-6:30 2025
Where:
November Meeting Center, Case Western Reserve University Farm, 37125 Fairmount Blvd.
Hunting Valley, OH
Why:
Grief is an expression of love, of what we hold dear and when we close the door to our grief, we separate parts of ourselves from who and what we love as our heart becomes constricted to the flow of life energy that needs to move through us uncensored. Grief metabolizes the pain of where we feel separate— from our true nature, from others, from our spiritual and creative power, from whoever we might consider divinity; and in this transformative process of surrendering and allowing, an illuminated pathway is formed between the loss and pain we feel and the wholeness and freedom from unnecessary suffering we long for.
There was a time when all of our old ancestral Indigenous traditions very naturally acknowledged death, loss and impermanence as natural aspects of existence because they were in relationship with the earth for their very survival and nature’s patterns teach us this. Within this acknowledgement was the recognition that there are fundamental and universal responses to these states that are helpful for how they dynamically move through both psyche and soma. These responses are all the different forms of grief that we still see arise; however when viewed as failures, if indeed these expressions ever come to light at all, we tend to insist that they need to be encountered briefly, quietly and in restrictive isolation, hiding the shame and weakness our culture considers implicit and protecting all others from the discomfort of facing their own unexpressed sorrows.
At a time in history when the sense of uncontrollable loss and suffering is occurring exponentially throughout the world—to people, animals, plant and other life and the very skin of the Earth herself—and there are few acceptable, ritualized ways to meet our innate grief responses to life as it comes, it is critically important to our sanity and to our very destinies that we learn how to soften and accept our beautifully evolved nature. This includes the need to grieve pain and loss in good ways, including in a caring space with others, and learn to recognize that these are powerful skills for being an intelligently adaptive, loving, humble and creative species in a world which demands our fullest and most compassionate humanity as we learn to understand and encounter the tidal currents of impermanence, loss, death and grief which unite us all.
Ways To Come:
To support calling in a powerful circle that will be OUR grief ritual, I am offering participation in this way:
All BIPOC attendees will be fully funded by me, Damaris Chrystal and The Raven’s Lamentation. All you have to do is register so I know how many people are coming and read and bring the items I suggest in the section “What To Bring”.
All other participants I ask to please consider possibly supporting this gathering in the following way. If you plan to come, please register. No payment needed up front. After the grief ritual and in your own space I ask you to reflect on what you experienced and ask yourself if it had value for you in some way. If it did I then ask you to consider what you think would be an appropriate donation to make in support of that value, regardless of whether you can actually afford it or not. Then I ask you to evaluate what amount of support you could actually give that aligns with your ability. At that point you will likely have two different amounts. So then choose the lower amount and make that donation, if it satisfies you, as a way of supporting an event like this, through my website here: Payment
Ex. 1: As an event, you estimate the value you received from the weekend to you to be quite high, $500-600. However, your actual finances can support $250 without hardship. You donate $250. Or you come not knowing what to expect but find that the weekend gave you something that feels like it saved your life(which is something people often report happening). It is priceless to you. Unable to attribute a money amount to this value and having come knowing you are stretched beyond all limits, you have a hard earned $15 extra you feel good about donating, so you give that knowing it would also be ok if you didn’t.
Ex 2: You don’t feel you personally derived enough significant benefit from the grief ritual at this time for some reason despite what you felt was a thoughtful, well prepared and welcoming event. Compared to other events you attend you estimate the value it held for you at $120. Your actual financial capacity for a significant weekend event is $500-$600. You consider donating the suggested lower amount of $120, but realize that many other people were reporting great benefit from the event and you especially want to support the scholarships provided for the BIPOC so you donate $170..
What The Weekend Will Look Like
We will spend most of Saturday engaged in ways that help us come together as caring community; that help us soften our bodies and prime our hearts for noticing and being able to encounter whatever grief might be coming up for the weekend. These activities will likely include some of the following: grounding and ancestor acknowledging rituals to help align us with the heartbeat of the Earth and our forebears; waking up our body’s emotions and memories with a highly simplified form of Gabrielle Roth’s 5rhythms; forms of authentic movement in small groups with mover and witness responding to prompts; circle/round singing; group creation of poetry, prayer and blessings; connecting with compassionate spirits of the land (no experience needed); circle stories naming our grief; and periods of potent stillness inside and outside if possible, all interspersed with rest.
Depending on time during the day and in the interest of not overwhelming ourselves, we will hopefully end the day with an earth based, medicine wheel grief ritual which can be easily done at home by solitary practitioners or in dyads or very small groups—family, friends or in small communities.
On Sunday we will gather and do a little bit of communal singing after greeting the land and then get in touch with our bodies through whatever movement is being called for at the time. From there we will work together on the creation of three communal altars; a forgiveness and compassion altar, an ancestors’ altar and an altar for the Earth. And then we'll learn about how to work with and tend the space and each other as we move into the main grief ritual for the rest of the day, until we end before a simple restorative meal and closing out the day.
If you are a person with mobility concerns as I have been lately, please know that all moving done is adaptable and can be done sitting down and to whatever degree you are comfortably able. None of what we do in this space is performative. There is no “ getting it right.” There is no forcing anything.
What Has Inspired This Truth And Reconciliation Grief Ritual:
When I moved to the Appalachian Mountains 28 years ago I had already been called to the land as a listener and witness. Without having sought this or even learned what was happening, I witnessed and related to the dead, both the clear and the encumbered, and I listened to the spirit songs of the earth’s wisdom paths flowing like sparkling underground rivers as well as to the imagistic voices of spirits of the land.
In retrospect I feel fortunate that in the early days I began moving within illuminating visions while I was still so unschooled because I brought no expectations to them; had no dogmas to apply. They came without notice or my preparation. In such innocence there was very little for my biases and blind spots to attach to. What transpired was always an absolute fascinating, revealing wonder, even when it was difficult to experience, as was one I had in Chagrin Falls, near where our gathering will be held. I was there previewing the location where the remarkable Christopher Reynolds and I were soon to give a talk about a possible offering through Lake Erie Institute called Time Spirits and the Ancestral Weave.
This local experience swallowed me into it as I was getting out of my car to lay offerings in front of the Town Hall. I felt the skin of my feet tightening and the growing of long sharp talons; my hands, too, painfully contorted and I felt the sharp claws on the end of each short appendage. My back wouldn’t straighten and I basically felt I was clawing my way out of my car, at which point I was overcome with an earth-quaking urge to rip up the asphalt road under my feet and go on to tearing up the concrete sidewalks while one part of my awareness, the witness, was bewildered and trying to maintain stability.
My main sensation, other then the physical anomalies was that the earth desperately needed to breathe, that she was somehow suffocating there and that there was something(s) or someone(s) trapped below all the human paving and my brain and body cavities echoed with a rising bellowing for release. Within the overwhelm I noticed a deep desire to get near strong running water and since Chagrin River was within a hundred yards or so, I stiffly got my strange body down to the riverbank, at which point unstoppable howls, wailing and sobbing overtook me to the point where I had foot long streams of mucus hanging from my nose and I was continuously throwing up, intermingled with long periods of continued keening. I felt filled with so many disparate voices. When I returned to my car I called Chris and he was instantly aware and prepared; it was like he already knew what had happened and was already supporting me and returning the experience to a calm place.
This is how the land called me that time; through a felt sense of unimaginable distress from what seemed murderous trespass of foreign armies encroaching on the Native American lives and lands, and it demanded witness, bodily empathy and understanding; dynamic movement through relational care in the ordinary light of day.
Different disturbing visions sometimes call to me on lands that were sites of other deep betrayals and discords between settlers and the First Nations peoples. This can occur at the point where there is just too much of a backlog of old human detritus from past harms or even the presence of lingering dead for the land to rest well because there is human accountability at issue which gets ignored. Other times when the land grabs my attention and my senses become deeply involved in living a vision is when I’m on a plantation or old family farm, sometimes near old courthouses where lynchings were held or on private lands that once were part of the Underground Railroad for those following the Drinking Gourd. I often find it very difficult to breathe and like I’m carrying a millstone on my back and initially have a rising sense of panic and despair only until I’m clued in enough to what’s happening and can modify the effects of disturbance on myself and address it.
These callings of old pain from the land indicate unresolved imprints from the horrors of death, loss and enslavement and the presence of lingering dead from the great deaths of the First Nations peoples, the Africans, and the settler folk as well.
This kind of communication from the land has led me to the inspiration for this specific kind of grief ritual. It appears to me that in the US there are these two powerful, primary threads that were a large part of the founding of this country and they lie at the heart of so much ongoing national and personal distress and we live mostly in collective denial of this: the murder, rape and theft of land and resources of First Nations peoples and then the theft, enslavement and destruction of lives of trafficked Africans. I acknowledge these qualifiers are simplistic, incomplete and with much overlap; but I am not writing a treatise here, I am creating, with the assistance and impetus of compassionate spirit intelligence, an invitation for you to assist in some restoration of peace within all our hearts and on behalf of these two groups of Ancestors and their descendants, as well as for the health of the creative songlines of the Earth that keep land vitality and relational balances in good movement. Truth and reconciliation is essentially the acknowledgment that we must honestly encounter the past with all its sufferings and abuses in order to create sincere movement from conflict and tension to peace and connection.
From the beginning when I first attended a small grief ritual with Sobonfu Somé who introduced the modern world to the African Dagara tradition of maintaining ritualistic awareness of the calls of grief, and then larger and larger ones with her and began facilitating them myself, I understood the enormous, overlighting role grief has in our lives. Through the years, changes have been made, influenced by what I’ve witnessed and felt, along with input from attendees, compassionate spirits and my own Ancestors, to make these event even more adaptable to earth centered practices and the contemporary psyche. As a result I have sponsored so many different kinds of grief rituals, drop-in grieving circles, workshop explorations of grief, given talks in person and online including through Carillion’s Center for Grief and Healing and the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation education series, and I believe in the benefit of them all. But this one I’m passionately inviting you to carries a large part of my heart and soul. It is a grief ritual expressly to encounter whatever needs to come to light from our connection to these two threads of historical national carnage and the subsequent outcomes that have played out since the beginning.
It will be a space to feel, express, connect and experience some healing for whatever lies within you in relation to these two major implicit cornerstones of American life that are rarely directly encountered collectively for how much they have shaped our current life denying culture. Without this sincere witnessing and the acknowledgment and intrinsic movement of grief through our bodies—whether it is “ours”, our Ancestor’s or the land’s, it will be difficult to envision and implement a truly beautiful and workable new system of organizing ourselves equitably as a national collective because we will be so shaped by what still lies unacknowledged.
If we don’t allow ourselves to become well acquainted with the language of loss there will remain so much that cannot be touched or named; and what is not named cannot be fully grieved. Grief is energy, it needs to move dynamically into its original nature as Love. When it doesn’t, it collapses down in our bodies and psyches into hidden recesses that can morph into contorted beliefs about ourselves and about life along with all the attendant shame, disgust, fear and apathy from not only our own lifetime but responsive to what we carry from others.
So I’m asking you……please come; for yourself, your Ancestors, for these two populations of people, for the next generations and for land. You know what’s occurring in the zeitgeist right now. Please bring your beautiful raw, honest self to be with other wonderfully ensouled people and be held in as well as hold a very spirit supported circle as we join our hearts, minds and bodies in ways we can move with deep grief while also enlivening our capacities for peace, joy, wonder and creative flow.
What You Need To Bring
1 bagged lunch for Saturday and 1 bagged lunch for Sunday; there is a refrigerator and microwave on-site . Refreshments including hot teas will be available at all times. A simple one bowl meal will be served at the conclusion of the weekend before we disperse. If people want to bring food to share for this, you are welcome to.
2-4 pieces of fabric, each approximately 1’ x 3’ .or 2’ x 4’ or larger if you want. These will be for the group altars One in colors mostly of green and/or white, one in colors mostly of blue, one in colors mostly either red or yellow. These can be taken home with you. Please notify me if you would like help with this. I ask you to bring these pieces of cloth that you have chosen yourself that you will be placing on the altars because your choice and participation here can create more connection to the ritual for you. You will often be more invested and it’s a way to begin moving within the community we will create together. However if this is something that doesn’t work for you for any reason please contact me and I will address it.
1-2 bouquets of flowers and/or live greenery with water holding containers (jars are fine); these are to be taken home with you. They can be flowers from a florist or wild-picked., if there is anything left in early November! (If wild-picked please make sure they are not toxic plants, especially something like water/poison hemlock which looks very much like tall Queen Anne’s Lace.)
Family/ancestor photos, letters, memorabilia; totemic family artifacts.
Items connected to your relationship with the Earth—photos, writings, artifacts—both the gifts and losses of it.
Also bring a few items related in some way to your relationship to compassion and forgiveness for self and/or others: All to be taken home with you.
note-taking materials
blanket, bolster, yoga mat, camp chair, etc. There will be times when you might want to be sitting or lying on the ground or floor if possible so bring what will help you be comfortable.
water bottle and your personal mug for hot tea
personal pocket kleenex
Offering for the land at Case Western Reserve Univ. Farm; it can be a story, a song, a poem, a dance or something biodegradable like bird seed, plain oatmeal, corn meal, lavender, dried flower petals—something that symbolizes your reciprocity with the Earth as a gift to the spirits of the Earth and to your Ancestors who will be your witnesses. If you are moved to create or bring some small object of beauty to honor the land please make sure that it is made from all natural materials with nothing that would attract wildlife to eat it while we are present on site and then take it home with you when we are finished..
We will often be In enclosed spaces and working closely together. Please do not wear perfumes, colognes and/or essential oils for these two days. Many people are allergic to fragrance.
Please keep your eyes open for any emails from me as we lead up to the grief ritual. I will sometimes send out something to consider to help orient your receptivity and senses to the days we gather.
It is not your grief or my grief; it is the grief
My Invocation for this gathering
Calling on the vast dreaming soul that lives at the heart of our grief for cultural transformation.
Who comes in response to this call?
An unfettered imagination; a dreaming that includes birdsong, the undercurrents of creeks, decaying flora and fauna–which means you, too–the unknowable flow of your ancestors satisfactions and losses, their ecstasies and heartbreaks, the scorned monsters under the bed, the moist coolness of forests and their chthonic underbellies and the vast cycles of the spiraling galaxy and beyond. These are just some of the presences who merge into the Earth's flow of relationship with your spirit heart to express the mostly unplumbed possibilities of our human nature– a holographic waveform of inspirited dreams and longing—all of which rest in the arms of the disavowed grief woven into our dreaming . When acknowledged and met in the heart, this lavish dreaming has the power to loosen the cultural ties of conditioned colonized realism and return us to the fertile Void beyond Time where more than we know of is possible.
And so……these words are an invocation, a call of Eros to our original ground of ever-shifting plurality of identity and expression, of the divine Self who moves knowingly within the power of both joy and grief and also beyond those boundaries, to emerge from the abyss of their sundering, however ragged we are, and shape our focus around the anomalous experiences weaving through our lives that, even with all the horrors in the world, can also be filled with wonder, enchanting beauty, a sense of suspended time and space, and an indescribable yet palpable sense of magic, an “otherness” our routine pattern of days can seem to lack, which gives us the next elemental breath needed to shake loose our solidified status and summon the bright creative forces within and around us; while acknowledging as well the shaking soil of dread that can accompany this feral unknown like a stalking lover lost and keening in the underworld. This is the necessary threshold; to be woven so by the Great Singing until opposites disappear and all is Love.
Grief is a threshold to the unknown. And all thresholds hold a paradox of tension and within this tension, our dreams and actions may conjugate into the miracle of form. Those who have the privilege of opportunity can do this on behalf of those whose circumstances overshadow the possibility so we can call in a better way of life for all beings. We do this not for ourselves alone but for all beings.
Wonder, longing, sensuality, enchantment, dying, ripeness, awe, becoming, passion, birthing, beauty, magic, fecundity, mystery; what do these sensibilities mean to us? As we become beguiled by the unnameable presences that arise as we seed our field with these sentient wordspells, as we touch memories, fears, longings and hopes through our grief and joy, we will likely find our elemental, ancestral bodies spontaneously riding the accompanying waves of our unknown cosmologies with all they hold as well– how they are woven through our lives; their effects on us and life around us and what powers to call on we have available to embrace, alter, honor, modify, and navigate such inherited realms of earthbody experience.
We might discover how all of this yearns to be metabolized through life-generating art which is funded by the totality of all we feel, nothing disinvited. Without the soul artistry of our woven nature being inspirited, honored, and employed, creative efforts to address contemporary cultural suffering from the theft of Turtle Island indigenous and African lands and lives lack sufficient breath, passionate courage, unencumbered flow, right relationship, and Spirit to remain generative. And so we call in these qualities as the great Beings they are.
Can we surrender into this dreaming art of the grieving soul, a rhizomatic ground of consciousness which some might locate in an underworld realm, without falling into projected fantasies unsupported by the dynamic truths of this Earth and cosmic home? Can we imagine a true letting go of the dominant cultural hypnotic trance to always be barrenly realistic and punishingly logical in known acceptable ways that rise from ancient histories of oppression and loss; to not yoke our necessary practicality to the status quo; to no longer shame our imaginations, knowing, aching and yearnings; to dissolve our experience of ourselves from a notion of discrete and rigid hyper-individualism and the ensuing tyranny which strangles the original wild and diverse songs of life and silences the wise ancient ones rising through us who also have their keening? Invite….call yourself and all your unknowing and gifts, Ancestors and spirit allies into this shifting edgeless realm of mystery, so we can begin to free ourselves from the separatist, solely human-centric mode of feeling and imagining, and rejoin the great dance heralded by the emergence of the Raven's lamentations into our vsision.
To unshackle one’s imagination from a poisoned gestalt can be a difficult process within an insane culture even when you are part of a privileged population; and so much more so if you are not, yet when we attempt the impossible with emotional awareness and our passionate commitment to the beauty and fullness of our dreaming, great forces do awaken to accompany us…. we do not have to do this alone… We call in these great, compassionate Bright Forces to be among us.
some Explorations to consider about grief if you wish:
what grief really is and its many languages; how to notice when it’s first arising and early and late ways of addressing it; the inevitability and the wisdom of falling apart
what is grief asking of you?
personal beliefs, cosmologies and experiences as well as cultural beliefs about death, loss and grief.
What is the relationship between grief and power when it’s a toxic power? When it’s a benevolent power?
examining our beliefs about time, identity and control and exploring what comes up for us when we truly become aware of the impermanence of everyone and thing we love
exploring our personal vs transpersonal loves and losses
reflections and recognitions that “MY” grief (my rage, my hatred, my doubt, alienation, loss, fear, resentment, anxiety, pain, confusion, shame, etc.) is not solely mine but includes currents of sensation; visceral, psychic, biological, ancestral threads experienced by all humanity; that when we feel these, we are sensing through the collective as well as the personal and how this acknowledgement can help create more spaciousness and tenderness for ourselves and others
how to be with ourselves with some stability when we are in different expressions of grief
how to be with people we know when we are in different expressions of grief or they are
how to be with different expressions of grief in ourselves when around strangers and how to be around strangers who are presenting different expressions of grief
how to come together as a group to explore ways of making death, loss and grief our allies
leaning into the sense that grief is not simply an expression of sadness over an event but is a total embodied, psychic and sensual acknowledgement of the impermanence of everyone and thing you love; that grief is a waveform stance of humility that no one can control life; that this relationship to grief not only embraces sadness but enhances a capacity for joy as well
how the earth and elements receive, ground and transmute varied aspects of grief; coming into direct relationship with earth consciousness as an elder who can hold, support and nourish
encountering the rapidly growing phenomena of ecological grief; cultivating deep listening to this voice and ways to respond without either spiritual bypassing or feeding despair
examining what grief looks like, feels like in the land; what is needed to transmute the grief in land and address how other species might be experiencing grief; owning the challenges incurred and the effects on other species from our unexpressed grief and cultivating care in response to ourselves, other beings and elemental life
what is ancestral grief; what is needed to recognize and encounter it in ourselves and turn to our lineages in an honoring and healing way; for their sake, our own, and to not pass along unresolved grief to our descendants
what kind of spirit allies might be helpful when working with grief and why this might be important.
how to create space that invites people to be able to meet their own grief and express it, and support others in doing so as well. how to establish the physical and energetic space; how to prepare yourself
