## Metadata - Author: [[Francis Weller, Michael Lerner (Foreword)]] - Full Title: The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Category: #books ## Highlights - Complexes are fragmentary bundles of concentrated emotional energy formed when we were confronted with an experience too intense for us to successfully digest. In these moments, the psyche splinters off the difficult material and creates an autonomous, semi-contained bundle to hold the highly charged material. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=340)) - Establishing a relationship with grief, developing practices that keep us steady in times of distress, and staying present in our adult selves are among the central tasks in our apprenticeship with sorrow. This is the hard work of maturation. In the traditional language of apprenticeship, this would be called achieving mastery. In the language of soul, this is the work of becoming an elder. An elder is able to touch grief deftly and is able to craft sorrow into something nourishing for the community. Teacher and grief specialist Stephen Jenkinson says, “Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so.”11 Becoming skillful at digesting our grief makes us a source of reassurance and stability for the wider community. ([Location 359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=359)) - Grief is subversive, undermining our society’s quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=401)) - Ash speaks to what remains, the barest semblance of what once was. James Hillman wrote, “Ash is the ultimate reduction, the bare soul, the last truth, all else dissolved.” ([Location 488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=488)) - “If sequestered pain made a sound,” Stephen Levine says, “the atmosphere would be humming all the time.” ([Location 546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=546)) - My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. ([Location 620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=620)) - As Diane Ackerman wrote, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just to the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” ([Location 780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=780)) - While many of us suffered mightily because of unconscious parenting, we must remember that our parents were participants in a society that failed to offer them what they needed in order to become solid individuals and good parents. They needed a village around them—and so did we. Of course we were disappointed with our parents. We expected forty pairs of eyes greeting us in the morning, and all we got was one or two pairs looking back at us. ([Location 853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=853)) - This is the gate where we most directly experience the soul of the world, the anima mundi. Here the alchemical observation that “the greater part of the soul lies outside the body” becomes evident.38 As Jung noted, we live in psyche; psyche does not live in us. We are enveloped in a field of consciousness; everything possesses soul. This was known to every indigenous culture. What we feel from the surrounding world is not a projection of our own minds outward into the environment. ([Location 931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=931)) - We are depleting, with an ever-growing tenacity, the complex, multilayered song of the world and replacing it with a single-pitched monotone, depositing empty calories, sterile seeds, and meaningless objects in every developing country while silencing forever the voices of hundreds of cultures. Every few weeks a language is lost and, along with it, a nuanced imagination of a people who were rooted to a place for perhaps thousands of years. Soon we will be left with only the barest semblance of the exuberant matrix that we once had, as the monoculture of modernity plows into the lives of every culture, replacing their traditions with imitations of our own pale expression of life. ([Location 950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=950)) - Naomi Shihab Nye says it so beautifully in her poem “Kindness.” Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. ([Location 973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=973)) - Human biologist Paul Shepard said, “The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” ([Location 984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=984)) - We are born, as psychiatrist R. D. Laing reminds us, “as Stone Age children.”42 Our entire psychic, physical, emotional, and spiritual makeup was shaped in the long evolutionary sweep of our species. Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what our minds and bodies expect. Ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning calls this original enfoldment in the natural world the primal matrix. We were embedded in this matrix of life and knew the world and ourselves only through this perception. It was an unmediated intimacy with the living world, with no trace of separation between the human and the more-than-human world. What was once a seamless embrace has now become a breach, a tear in our sense of belonging. Glendinning calls this our original trauma. This trauma carries with it all the recognizable symptoms associated with psychic injury: chronic anxiety, dissociation, distrust, hypervigilance, disconnection, and many others. We are left with a profound loneliness and isolation that we rarely acknowledge. It is as if we have completely normalized our condition. And yet, this feeling of separation profoundly affects the range of our reach, the ways we participate in the landscape and sense our allegiance with the living world. Our soul life flickers dimly, and rather than feeling a kinship with the entire, breathing world, we inhabit and defend a small shell of a world, occupying our daily life with what linguist David Hinton calls the “relentless industry of self.” ([Location 1000](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1000)) - To feel valued for the gifts with which we are born affirms our worth and dignity. In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment—simply being who we are confirms our place in the village. That is one of the fundamental understandings about gifts: we can only offer them by being ourselves fully. Gifts are a consequence of authenticity; when we are being true to our natures, the gifts can emerge. ([Location 1099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1099)) - In our modern culture of hyperactivity and stress, we are seldom asked what we have carried into the world as a gift for the community. The frequent question is: “What do you do for a living?” Or worse: “How you do earn a living?” I find that question obscene. We have gone from being seen as valuable to the community, a carrier of gifts, to having to earn a living. No one asks, “What is the gift you carry in your soul? What have you brought with you into the heart of the village?” ([Location 1102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1102)) - We long to feel cosmically significant, that it matters that we are here and that we make a difference. Like the Pueblo Indians who know it is their cosmic duty to sing the sun up every day, we also long to feel that we are needed to keep the whole wild, spinning world happening. ([Location 1105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1105)) - We often feel flattened under the weight of domestication, which smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves. We feel eviscerated, made tame by rules and conditioning that blanket the world with uniformity and mediocrity. ([Location 1119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1119)) - One of my most memorable teachings about slowing down came from my mentor, Clarke Berry, a Jungian analyst with whom I apprenticed, following licensure. I was young, and I knew I was in need of a mentor, someone who could teach me the art of sitting with others in therapy. The Jung Institute in San Francisco referred me to Clarke along with other analysts, but when I met him, I knew I was in the right place. Our first meeting, over thirty years ago, was unforgettable. When we sat down, Clarke reached to his left, placed his hand on a large rock lying on a table, and said, “This is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you are going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves.” Then he pointed to a small clock also sitting there and added, “It hates this.” ([Location 1135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1135)) - To be empty, to feel empty, is to live in the wasteland near the gates of death. This is intolerable to the soul. We were not meant to live such shallow lives. Our heritage and our psychic makeup are designed for an elaborate richness of imagination and creativity that allows us to feel intimately connected to the ongoing creation. We were meant to drop below the surface of things and to experience the depths of life in the same ways that our deep-time ancestors did. Their lives were filled with story, ritual, and circles of sharing. Their lives were not shamefully hidden away but known—losses, defeats, grief, pains, joys, births, deaths, dreams, sorrows; the communal draw of life was open and acknowledged. This is what the soul expected, what it is we need today. ([Location 1172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1172)) - We have much work to do here as a culture, and it may take many grief rituals and rituals of reconciliation with the Native Americans of this land, with the descendants of the Africans who were enslaved, and at places of death and destruction to begin to heal this lingering sorrow. The long shadow of this violence persists in our psyches, and we need to address it and work with it until there is some genuine atonement for these wrongs. This is clearly part of the “sequestered pain” that Stephen Levine spoke of that generates the persistent hum of sorrow in the background of our lives. ([Location 1262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1262)) - Ultimately, these gates all lead to the same chamber, the communal hall of sorrows. It makes no difference which door we open, which threshold we cross. Every one of us has grief at each of these gates. When we feel hesitant or uncertain of our worthiness to touch our sorrow, knowing these gates are there offers us a way to connect with our losses, wounds, and disappointments. ([Location 1283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1283)) - Grief is our common bond. Opening to our sorrow connects us with everyone, everywhere. There is no gesture of kindness that is wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless. We can be generous to every sorrow we see. It is sacred work. ([Location 1290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1290)) - The urge to create rituals to help us hold the intensity of day-to-day living exists deep within our psychic structure. For most of our history, rituals provided the means by which the community could address the need for healing and renew the people’s relationship with the place where they lived. Over generations, a call-and-response between the individual, the community, and the land evolved that centered on ritual as the primary technology for maintenance of the living world. ([Location 1364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1364)) - Simply said, ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation. ([Location 1371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1371)) - There are many concerns that are addressed through ritual; these are universal themes: healing, gratitude, initiation, visionary or divinatory processes, grief, maintenance, renewing the earth, reconciliation, and peacemaking. ([Location 1388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1388)) - African healer and elder Malidoma Somé calls ritual the anti-machine.54 Ritual helps us remember and reestablish our inner rhythms and to place them once again in accord with the deeper cadence of our soul. It restores our psychic foundations. By this I mean we are aided in ritual space to remember what we really need to live in community with other humans and the natural world in a meaningful and enlivening manner. ([Location 1407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1407)) - These times of entering into a shared state of attunement offer a unique opportunity to experience what anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas.57 From his time living with various tribes in Africa, he witnessed how the feeling of belonging and social bonding were strengthened in the midst of deep ritual process. We need times of communitas, times that reinforce our connection with one another. Ritual can bring us into that state of togetherness, and there we can remember our deeper affinity and communality. ([Location 1530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1530)) - Once again, I encourage you to experiment with rituals. Gather a circle of people and allow the imagination to inform the moment. We need to build faith in ourselves as ritually literate people. At times we will be asked to create rituals that can dress the wounds of suffering in our community; someone has died or is ill, has lost his or her job or is facing a divorce. At other times, we will need to spontaneously create a ritual to help hold space for someone who is in intense pain and grief. It can be very simple. The main thing is that we begin to take risks, that we contribute something to the moment that can potentially offer healing. Once we begin the ritual, it is out of our hands; it now belongs to Spirit. Life is far too complex to rely solely on our intellect. We need the invisible hands of Spirit to shelter us, to support us, and to offer us the nourishing comfort that comes from that Other World. This concert between the human and the sacred is ancient; it is held in the bones. Trust this bond. It is our healing ground. ([Location 1541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1541)) - Every one of us lives in the creative tension between belonging and solitude, arcing around this helix in a rhythm that acknowledges the soul’s simultaneous need for connection and freedom. In times of deep grief, this rhythm may become altered and exaggerated. We may experience wild oscillations, at times wanting others within reach, when our solitude is an aching territory of loneliness, while at other times, we will require the absolute stillness of our own interior landscape, feeling even the barest of contact to be too much. How fluidly we follow these two strands as they twine together affects how well we are able to navigate the terrain of loss. ([Location 1555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1555)) - In the long breath of grief, we will inevitably find ourselves facing periods of time alone, chosen or not. ([Location 1560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1560)) - We need to learn the skills of restraint, of holding close to the heart what needs our utmost attention. Without thoughtful hesitation, what precipitates out of our grief will not have had the time to ripen into something worthy of utterance. We are often too quick to reveal, lacking subtlety in what we expose about ourselves. We suffer from what I call premature revelation, sharing too much, too soon, and with little regard for the shyness of the soul. We can also feel pressure from others to reveal what is moving deep within. We must learn to modulate our exposure, allowing things to ripen and mature in the container of the heart before revealing our secret inside flesh to others. ([Location 1589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1589)) - The rupture that occurs with significant loss often precipitates a separation from the ordinary world. The constant din of activity, technology, schedules, and noise are too intrusive to our vulnerable, sorrow-drenched heart. The heart shuns the garish display of our neon society, seeking instead places of solace and quietude. We don’t fit in the commodified world during these eras of grieving. The soul longs for—in fact, it requires the spaciousness that comes through silence and solitude to simply catch its breath and come to a stop when the demands around us remain ceaseless. ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKQ646Q&location=1627))