Inviting Abundance - Blog: Recent Episodes
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Since the beginning of these pandemic years, I cannot stop thinking about the grief illiteracy that capitalism fosters. It's that I saw the multi-generational effect of the WWII survivor generation of my family left with unprocessed collective and individual grief. Such that when my first son died, they urged us to move on, get over it, that support groups were for "crazy" (ableist capitalism) people. They told us providing therapy or other support for our older living children or sharing with the kids what was happening was "bad parenting." My own grandmother said she refused to speak to me ever again if I insisted on ever "mentioning that dead kid" 6 mo. after his death. And our lives since 1999 have been a scramble to survive a world that demanded men don't grieve, we be productive asap and constantly, that we individually figure it out even though the grief had collective effects. We were homeless in our car for a bit. We've had many years where we lived at the poverty line, sometimes on food stamps, either had no health insurance or have it only because the Obama administration secured the healthcare credit. As each of us has had health deteriorate to disability, we endure ableism.
And this was just one family experience. As I've offered creative grief heARTwork in the world, I've met hundreds of other families who had similar. And now here in year 3 (about to be 4) of pandemic, all I can think about is how the unresolved collective grief of WWII affected us all. And now, how will the collective and individual grief of these pandemic years and the absolute genocidal approach of our USian government affect my grandchildren's generation and the next and next. Very quickly my grandkids were being told "get into the classroom"/ be productive instead of grieving. Throughout the pandemic, our adult kids have been told to keep working or lose their housing, access to food, etc. The grief they face or their kids face is being swept into erasure by the carrot and stick of capitalist productivity. I see mirrors of the WWII survivor generation or maybe these are extensions of living in a culture of unprocessed grief.
“Some the mirrors or extensions I feel like we are seeing include things like:
- At the end of WWII, women and people of color were forced out of workplaces like factories, forced out of source of income, and even those who had served in the armed forces were segregated away from various benefits that white men were seeing from their service. That extended, I believe, into the Reagan era in California where the white men of institutional power destabilized education opportunities for funded higher education because they didn’t want women and people of color to benefit any longer. Was there any real time acknowledgement of these things as they happened? Were the later explosions of feminism and civil rights in part response to this?
I feel we are seeing a similar force being used against our children to not process emotional intelligence around all we’ve lost in the pandemic years and focus rather on “get back in the classroom” and academic intelligence. Instead of using the pandemic years to really build infrastructure of accessibility for virtual learning - which is an entirely different animal than in person classrooms - we squandered it and just began destabilizing opportunities by chanting “back in the classroom” and even various groups organizing to force “no masks allowed” inside schools. Our genocidal tendencies are showing! * Another area that seems parallel is the denial of what white supremacist capitalism does to our culture and communities. Again reflecting on how Black women and men were exploited during war time in the military and factory systems and then denied benefits with segregation reinstated post-war, there is a reflection there about how the rates of covid illness/death is so high in Black communities. There is reflection there of how frontline workers have been exploited. The latest being railroad workers denied paid sick leave!!!!? * Another reflection I see is how capitalism, not actual need, drives infrastructure. So during war time when women were required to keep the factories going, infrastructure was created to make that happen. When the white men returned and “needed the jobs more,” women were relegated back out of the workplace. During these pandemic years, I believe we’ve seen an ableist capitalism reflection of this, in that in 2020 when Ableds suddenly needed access, overnight accessibility was put in place for working remote, virtual access to education and cultural events, even healthcare suddenly opened up video and phone healthcare. These were things disabled people had been screaming for for decades but were told were impossible, too expensive, too difficult, etc.. We were thrilled to see these things come to be OVERNIGHT. And now that Ableds want to believe that in-person everything is more important and safe again, all the access is slowly being revoked. Although, the numbers of disabled people have gone up so high with long COVID, that we’ll possibly not see things revoked in healthcare? * What other reflections might you see now that we’re talking about this??
This is big stuff to process. And no, I don't think there is one answer to this. I'm not sure that there is more than exhaustion-rage and scrabbling to survive right now. But this grief illiterate, capitalist genocide is at play for us all. Even if you are in the best circumstances possible. This is collective! Best or worst circumstances, this is collective. And don't start asking therapists and coaches to be automatons lining up strategy etc. They are your equal humans suffering this. It will take a million approaches, projects, and collective doings. I don't know why I bother to keep writing these things except that it helps me be less scared, less hopeless to encourage us all to start now, right where you are. Rest. Seek the deepest meaning of mutual aid and do it. Understand that we are all affected now. All of us. Even those who deny. Even those who call you "crazy" (again ableist capitalism) for stating these obvious things unfolding all around us. Even those who call you Cassandra or say you should be grateful for what has been done. Even all those folks are in this grief illiteracy deep end. So you keep trying anyway.
Much like abolitionist theory + practice tells us, we need all the thousands of answers. There isn't one blueprint. It's all of us continuing to try to survive and then reduce harm in whatever ways we can. Keep taking the next small step, Loves.
If you are looking for a bit more learning around possible next small steps consider:
○ Mariame Kaba’s work from “Hope Is A Discipline” to “We Do This Til We Free Us” and everything she’s offered this world is a good place to start. Her “One Million Experiments” collaboration alone shows you explicit, real world examples of starting where you are and how it will take a million answers, not one, to shift our culture!
○ If you are not familiar with how marginalized community issues intersect with what we see happening, you might start exploring resources like Disability Justice Resource List, The Radical Death Canon, and Queer Attachment.
○ Do an in-depth read of Malkia Devich-Cyril's words on "Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It?" excerpted from Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by adrienne maree brown (AK Press, 2021).
○ Try exploring what people are creating in collective and community ways by doing internet searches for terms like “Faces of COVID,” “covid ritual,” and “covid collective grieving.”
Kara is on Vashon Island, WA, the traditional lands of the sx̌ʷəbabš (meaning Swiftwater People) Peoples. Learn more about Kara and her heARTwork at www.GriefAndCreativity.com and www.CreativeGriefStudio.com
For more, listen to our To Grieve podcast interview with Kara Jones!
I recently talked with my friend and Performance Philosophy colleague, Stuart Grant, about how grief is one way that death lives. His interest in the phenomenology of death leads him to believe that death is always here with us, the living. It doesn’t exist as some limit of life or transcendent otherplace. Death, too, lives.
We may not like to admit this, and yet we can hardly avoid it. Ants carry away fallen butterflies. Autumn comes and goes. Fungus composts all into new life. In the social world of the human animal (though certainly in other animal worlds, too) death also lives here with us in the form of grief. There’s a beautiful equation in the making here: Grief is love; we love those who are dead; the dead live on in our love and our grief. This grief and love can take many forms, including ritual rememberings, anniversary celebrations, and telling stories of our most dearly departed. I suspect grief and love also dwell in the scars we wear, both physical and social. All in all, then, grief helps us see death in a new way.
This past summer, I’ve learned how grief helps me see health and healing differently. Our son, Ren, two years old, is now home and healing after his second open-heart surgery. The surgeons performed what is known as the Fontan Completion, the final stage in a palliative process that reroutes Ren’s circulation so as to remove all burden from the right side of the heart. His condition, hypoplastic right heart syndrome with pulmonary and bicuspid valve atresia, will be stable for at least a short while and all signs of disability will remain practically invisible except to those of us who know how to read his various scars. The surgery itself was relatively easy. The healing process was arduous.
Ren needed 18 days in the hospital in order for doctors and nurses to help his body drain excess fluid, steady its electrolyte balance, and rebuild the proteins lost in the fluid discharge. With all this time to observe and think, I found myself studying the relation between grief and healing. Most people associate grief with the traumatic event itself, and from this association comes a, to my mind, false comparison between grief and injury. My experience has taught, to the contrary, that grief walks astride the pain of the healing journey. I believe that the two walk in such close lockstep because they carry each other. Healing is slow; it hurts; it unfolds in a nonlinear fashion. Grief is the time signature of that slowness, the wisdom resulting from the pain, and the optic perspective afforded from the haptic experience of nonlinear movement.
And so the equation expands: death lives in grief; grief manifests as love; love enables health; health and healing can hurt; death and life are never far apart from each other. Grief, health, and death: neither opposites nor remote strangers but, rather, three fine threads woven finely throughout the fabric of the day-to-day.
The time has come to free grief from its status as untouchable, as something to be avoided at all costs, as something to be nudged away in order to bring a person back into the threshold of normalcy (whatever that is or was). What does grief become when we see it alongside health? How does our notion of health change when it’s freed from its seemingly polar opposite constructs of sickness or death? When we admit and acquiesce to the transformative pain of healing and recognize the communal effort required for healing to occur, might we be able to make some space for grief, to learn from what it reveals?
Related posts:
- “Grief Dissolves Opposites”
- “Grieving Penguins”
- “How to attend: from nursing to teaching”
When the first winter arrived after our son Finlay had died inexplicably during childbirth in June 2014, my husband Will and I knew that we had to leave home. And go far away. We couldn’t bear being in the Finlay-less house with its memories of our previous Christmas when I was pregnant with our first child. Through a set of intuitive decisions, we booked a flight to Copenhagen, a place neither of us had visited before. It felt right to be going to a northern country where so much of the daytime would be in darkness.
On Christmas morning, we went to Frederik’s Church where we attended a rather somber mass spoken in Danish (although I had thought that particular service would be in English). That night we visited the famous Tivoli Gardens amusement park. A bitter chill made being outdoors very painful. Like the darkness that pervaded Copenhagen for much of each day, something seemed appropriate and even comforting about a Christmas Day that began with a stiff and foreign gathering of strangers and ended with a physically uncomfortable evening that threatened frostbite.
One aspect of our time in Denmark that did feel nurturing, though, was experiencing the ubiquitous candlelight dancing on bar counters, flickering on restaurant tables, and greeting pedestrians on sidewalks and in storefront windows across the city. In fact, when we arrived at our Airbnb apartment in the early morning after an overnight flight, our host greeted us with candles aglow. We felt immediately welcomed and could relax. The practice of lighting candles each day contributes to a making-of hygge – the Danish expression for a mood constituted by coziness, well-being, friendship, warmth, and slowing down. Combining soft lighting, comfortable furnishings, and a relaxing activity can generate hygge. Think: knitting or reading in front of a fireplace or enjoying a home-cooked meal with your favorite people.
When the darkness felt a little too dark and our grief felt a little too overwhelming, we stayed in our temporary Danish home, enveloped by the warm glow of candles. This made me think about Finlay’s life inside me – how hygge was that? For his entire life, he knew only a gentle, soft, warm, cozy home created and maintained by the love of devoted parents.
This year, during our fourth Christmas without Finlay’s physical presence, I am bringing hygge into our grief and holiday-filled home that we now share with Finlay’s two-year old brother Phalen.
My plan has two parts. Part 1. A Day of the Dead/Hygge Mashup. Instead of adorning a homemade altar with photos of and favorite treats for loved ones who have left this world (a la a Dia de los Muertos ofrenda), we will use candles, lots of them. This light will evoke our dearly departed and see us through the long winter nights. We’ve lit a candle near Finlay’s urn many nights over the years, and so it seems natural to extend this practice. Perhaps for Finlay’s grandfather Stephen, who stood 6’6”, we’ll light a slender taper. For his great-grandmothers Frances and Dolly, who entertained long conversations with me, I’ll find slow-burning beeswax pillars that stay lit for hours. And for our sweet friend Ivone, a colorful votive holder filled with graceful light might capture something of her joyful energy. These candles can surround Finlay’s, marking an ongoing relationship between all of these lovely souls.
Part 2. I will light a candle for my grief. Since my grief will be showing up for the holidays anyway, why not invite it in and make it feel as welcome as our Danish host made us feel? It is, after all, a dynamic, ever-changing condition into which I live each day. Why not honor that with the flickering energy of candles that produce what the Danish call levende lys or living light?
The challenge will be selecting a candle that can materialize the current state of my grief. Perhaps a candle that floats gently in a bowl of water; this would speak to the shifting currents of grief. Or maybe I need to pour my own candle so that I can collaborate with my grief. Might this creative process produce some illumination about the contours of my grief journey this past year? My grief candle will help to externalize the pain or sorrow that arrives alongside cheery holiday wishes in the coming weeks. It will also act as a reminder that brightness can be found in even the darkest places.
Since the only souvenirs we purchased in Copenhagen were candle holders, these objects will help to activate our hygge grief space. These Danish things carry the history of that dark cold Christmas in Copenhagen and will help us to animate the very present love we feel for Finlay and our dear ones every day of the year.
This piece was originally published in Still Standing Magazine* on December 27, 2018. See original blog HERE.
Janik Coat’s children book Hippopposites has made me doubt that opposites really exist. Or, rather, I now wonder what are opposite? Are opposites not already unified in a way that we might assume opposites could never truly be? If opposites oppose each other, then how do we account for their status as pairs. Small and large are opposites, but they are united as a pair. In that pairing, they are close together. They are bound by a kind of negative magnetism (opposites attract). Ultimately, this is the lesson I have learned from this book. Opposites are intimate, and that intimacy undoes certainties about what individual words mean and how they function in the world. So: What is grief’s opposite?
In this piece, originally written for Still Standing Magazine, Will reflects on his experience living in New York City in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He asks: “What happens when we realize that grief comes from the outside?” Fast-forward nearly 13 years, and Will is now a grieving father making sense of the death of his infant son Finlay. In processing this new loss and grief, he contemplates those grieving all around him.
Regardless of whether or not these penguins are grieving, we can still learn something important about grief from this striking image.
A thinking sessions for all the scholars out there. Will talks with theatre historiographer Pannill Camp about the intellectual underpinnings of his current book project.
Nico Swenson, aka Miss Texas 1988, thinks with Will about “individuals.” They aren’t close-off, autonomous beings. So what are they? What are the political implications of a multiple individuality? How does the queering of gender(ed) pronouns relate to this topic? Listen in to hear us think through these questions and more!
An amazing linking-together of scholarly texts, close-readings of The Sopranos, and visions of a Chicago-based work of street theatre that centers the day-to-day experience of Palestinian Americans.
How can we get to a place where we feel sadness each time another person is hurt (regardless of that person’s race, class, or cultural background)? Listen to Greg and Will think through this question together.
Aligned with the international organization Performance Philosophy, Will helps explain the upcoming conference’s key theme: Problems. A problem is not something to be solved. Rather, it is something like the generative matrix that continues to inform all scholarly thought and/or artistic expression.
It is getting harder and harder to have productive, critical conversations with people who occupy different ideological stances than our own. What are we going to do about this? How can we meaningful talk with others?
Thinking while walking my infant son, I enter the wide terrain of “Art and Trauma” headed toward the notion of “damage-centered research” articulated by Eve Tuck in her open letter of 2009. Why would we doubt that artists can express traumatic experiences without reifying the damage caused through such experiences? It turns out that this is the important question.
Listen to other episodes of “Thinking Will” EPISODE 1(The Pharmakon of Conspiracy Theories)
EPISODE 2(Death onstage - death in life)
EPISODE 3(The Performativity of Plants)
EPISODE 5(Conversing with Others)
EPISODE 6(The Problem with Problems)
EPISODE 7(Thinking With: Gregory Hicks, “To Feel Each Other’s Pain”)
EPISODE 8(Thinking With: Gloria Imseih Petrelli, “Devising Possible Futures”)
EPISODE 9(Thinking With: Nico Swenson, “What An Individual Isn’t”)
Episode 3 of “Thinking Will”: Have you thought about how plants “perform”? If you have, have you considered not using the performance when doing your thinking? This and other ethical questions arise while thinking through the “performativity of plants.”
Episode 2 of Thinking Will, in which I think through the relationship between myself and the deaths I witness both onstage and in life.
“Thinking Will” is the name of a 6-part project dedicated to extemporaneous thinking. I invited topics from friends and colleagues, and then I whittled the list down to 6. In episode 1, I think through conspiracy theories by drawing on the term “Pharmakon,” which itself has a rich history in philosophical thought.
Listen to other episodes of “Thinking Will” EPISODE 2(Death onstage - death in life)
EPISODE 3(The Performativity of Plants)
EPISODE 4(Art and Trauma)
EPISODE 5(Conversing with Others)
EPISODE 6(The Problem with Problems)
EPISODE 7(Thinking With: Gregory Hicks, “To Feel Each Other’s Pain”)
EPISODE 8(Thinking With: Gloria Imseih Petrelli, “Devising Possible Futures”)
EPISODE 9(Thinking With: Nico Swenson, “What An Individual Isn’t”)
Reflecting on teaching Reiki, Will unpacks the Buddhist concept of emptiness and discusses elements of Tendai Buddhism that shed light on the more esoteric aspects of Reiki’s philosophy.
Reflecting on a recent long hospital stay and the ongoing pandemic, Will investigates the classical history of the word “nurse” and its related practices of care. The connections he makes lead from the nurse as “one who attends on the sick” to the philosopher (who cares for the souls of his interlocutors) and then to teachers. Will asks whether teachers today would benefit from considering these different valences care and “attendance.”
The term “My Story” is everywhere on social media. In this post, Will asks whether we would benefit from shifting our focus from “story” to “plot.” To make a case for the latter, he goes back to the Ancient Greek word systasis.
Will turns to the Ancient Greeks to find some help navigating the uncomfortable experience of repetition.
In a relatively limited number of steps, Will maneuvers from a dictionary of Ancient Greek words to a theory of political revolution embedded within a jazz musician’s sound. The Loeb Classical Library sends him back to A Love Supreme. The keyword here is nomos.
A guest blog from our friends Sam Butler and David Harradine of UK-based Fevered Sleep. Here, Sam and David reflect on their ongoing project, “This Grief Thing,” which opens up space for grief through pop-up shops in cities around England. In these spaces, the typical silence around grief gives way to stories, intimate moments between strangers, and the many kinds of expression made possible by bodies gathered together in solidarity. This post links back to our episode with Fevered Sleep on the To Grieve podcast . Please listen to that after reading Sam and David’s reflections.