My Sweet Ones!

Last weekend I went to the Grief Retreat.

Facilitated by Samantha DiRosa and Summer Estes. We spent two and half days in the Haw River State Park, in the Piedmont of North Carolina. On Saturday night, we did a grief ritual designed by Francis Weller and West African healer Malidoma Somé, based in Burkina Faso. After a day of journaling, singing, and walking in the woods, we built a grief altar with all of the items each of us brought from our homes.

I have never experienced anything quite like a communal grief altar.

Candles and flowers adorned the space. Circle members brought items and photographs to place on the cloth. At the center, a bowl of water from the Haw River had flowers floating in it. We prepared to be a loving community. To sing together as we sent off and received one another, to and from the altar to speak our grief.

Before we began, they asked us if we had questions. I was so embarrassed and I waited to see if anyone else would ask my question. No one did. I could feel us ready to move on. And my hand shot up.

“What do I do at the altar?” My mind was racing. Do I scream? Do I wail? What if no tears come? What is my job? Looking back now, this panic is funny and completely understandable. I have been so distanced from my body. I wasn’t sure I could even trust my own stomach, heart, hands, lungs, and skin to know what to do. My question was met with compassion and some stories were shared. I settled into the mystery.

Standing there in the village, swaying to the drums, my mouth full with the song we’d just learned, I imagined approaching the altar and attending to my list. That’s right. I had the list handy in my mind; had been thinking of it for days leading up to my drive out to the Haw River Park. My list felt fresh with all the hurts and sorrows I yearned to reflect on once I got on my knees.

But when I approached the space, gently supported by a circle companion, and I took in the photographs, flowers, candles, and cherished items of all the people at the retreat, including my very own items, my spirit took me somewhere else.

As I knelt in front of the altar, all I could see were the faces of my parents.

Floating in front of me, clear, wearing enormous smiles. Vangie, gone 20 years, and Sam four years later. Grateful to cry and forgive and catch them up on my news. Little me, teenager me, and adult me - we all had a good sleep that night.

The power of ritual and community consistently amazes me. The ways my mind and body can find preverbal connections, safety and belonging. The deep satisfaction of having a witness, the broader definition of love! This was my experience, I was ready and it was awkward, inviting and ultimately quite joyful.

Even as my mother faced personal perils for much of her life, she stopped to smell the roses. And she made it her business to encourage other people to do the same.

Vangie existed on this earthly plane from May 10, 1929, to February 15th, 2006.

My mother’s unrelenting dedication to joie de vivre took many forms. She was smitten with her loved ones and maintained a full correspondence with friends and relations her whole life, even as she and my father moved house across the Atlantic Ocean on two separate occasions. Vangie found immense satisfaction in giving the strangely perfect gift. She taught me how to tell a Van Gogh from a Gauguin and how to make an excellent brisket. One of my favorite memories is when I went home from college for Thanksgiving, newly vegetarian. My mother exclaimed proudly that she’d made vegetarian stuffing just for me. I looked around the table and asked “Where is it?” Her face became quite still. She looked at me and answered, “In the turkey.” We laughed until our stomachs ached.

An amateur stargazer, she pointed out Orion’s belt or the Big Dipper every chance she got. Maybe some part of my space metaphor for antiracism work traces back to her kicking off her sandals and looking up?

When I started my white people work, space felt like an apt metaphor. An antiracist planet is an unknown planet. We have never known a world without oppression - How will we build together? What will the oxygen supply be? The strangeness of a world where justice thrives.

I want to inspire white people to consider how we must rearrange ourselves for the mysterious landscape to come?

Part of our antiracist work is to grieve. White people have not been trained for outer space.

What our ancestors had to choose to survive, how we have been systematically cut off from multiracial experience, how the responsibility for unlearning racism overwhelms with the support of institutions and families. We know the separation of our minds from our hearts. We have been making our way back to our bodies.

Astronauts tread carefully, ready to experiment. We must balance self-preservation with collective care, staying open-minded as they/we learn to navigate a landscape that calls on us to be brave and intentional. Anti racists and Astronauts must pay attention, lest our carelessness cost us a just and beloved future.

Poem of the Month

***Darling Coffee***

By Meena Alexander

The periodic pleasure
of small happenings
is upon us—
behind the stalls
at the farmer’s market
snow glinting in heaps,
a cardinal its chest
puffed out, bloodshod
above the piles of awnings,
passion’s proclivities;
you picking up a sweet potato
turning to me ‘This too?’—
query of tenderness
under the blown red wing.
Remember the brazen world?
Let’s find a room
with a window onto elms
strung with sunlight,
a cafe with polished cups,
darling coffee they call it,
may our bed be stoked
with fresh cut rosemary
and glinting thyme,
all herbs in due season
tucked under wild sheets:
fit for the conjugation of joy.