May We Be a Forest For Each Other
Golden sunlight beams into a circle of deciduous trees in leaf. Image from Unsplash
If you’re in the Portland area and/or a semi-regular reader of this newsletter, you’ve probably heard of the Grief House.
I get to spend my Fridays there, offering Grief Care. With community building in mind and heart, the founders and stewards of Grief House recently invited me to guest edit their lovely newsletter. At first, I was at a loss for what to say. Then suddenly, it came to me.
This is a weaving together of the ideas and possibilities that you and I have been dancing with. I’m sharing it here, for you dear ones. Thank you for all of the ways you build community and connection, always.
Let our hearts be broken. Let our heartbreak rise up all the way through and then fall from our eyes as seawater. Let memory circle and thread through the heart and mind. Let joy bubble up with teeth-bared laughter. Let our throats constrict with as-yet-unspilled tears, with as-yet-unlaughed laughter, with as-yet-unsaid stories - and then let our throats open wide to pour out lamentation, song, delight, shouts and memories…
Love and grief twine together to create the double helix that makes up our bones and blood, our soul and mind, our very lives and our dying and our death. When we have the fortitude to live amongst them fully, welcome them in both - we put down roots, entangle with those around us and those that came before and those to come, and we are nourished as we nourish.
Mother trees (far beyond the limitations of human gender) let us know: our living bodies can be sturdy homes, can send out just the nourishment our beloveds need, can receive just what we need from our beloveds. We can eat light, air, soil - the deaths of all that came before. And from this rich and satisfying stew, we make new life, new possibility.
And then, someday (please may it be so), our body falls and is eaten, is taken up through roots and tendrils, becomes home in a whole new way, becomes always-already life in a whole new way.
There is something to grief and joy, life and death that sometimes/often needs more than just one body. More than one body to feel it and hold it, more than one to let it move through or be still, to sing it or cry it, to be composted or crystalized.
May we be a forest for each other. May our roots weave together so that when the fierce winds blow we can hold each other up. May our branches be close enough to tell each other of danger and opportunity.
As a forest we are ourselves and our selves are each other.
The sapling is the great grandmother stretched out across the forest floor, the grandmother the tender trees who grow up from her body.
Our love and grief, our lives and deaths are shared, collective - each an essential and connecting knot in the great web of being.
Let us be a forest for each other.
