Francis Weller on Grief and Sorrow (2013)

I listened to Francis again this morning… to this talk.

he soothes my soul…in these moments when I allow grief to wipe me inside out and leave me sometimes empty.. sometimes with gratefulness and appreciation of the human soul… sometimes with hate… sometimes with soft love for myself.. compassion for my coming home… kindness for he soul-mates who are walking the same path.

what I remained with from his talk touched my need of sharing my emotional stories… of communing… of the tribe where to let my sorrows out… for us to share our hearts in a contexts of trust, in acknowledgement of that we also carry this for so long already… where we ca to come together and be seen… vulnerable… with no control… powerful at the same time.

and I will take that into reality… I wanted it for so long… that time is here… let’s see where this goes…

there are so many things he said that I could quote from this talk that it would take me to do the transcript of the whole conversation to put everything that touched me here…

thank God (that is implying myself too <3) for coming close to Francis at these times.

first thing we shared he sat down and he said face-to-face and he reached over any part of this big rock that he had by his chair and he said “this is my clock, I operate at geologic speed and if you’re going to work with the soul you need to learn this rhythm because this is how the soul moves” and he pointed to a clock and said “it hates this”.

I have no interest in improving your life, I have no interest

in fixing your problems. All i want to do with you is help you listened more deeply to what your soul is actually asking of you to live this life more fully and the symptoms that brought him in the room, whether it’s depression or addiction or anxiety… that’s the grace, that’s what got them in the room… that’s not the problem. The problem is a dissociated relationship to their soul which is by

a large how we are conditioned to live in this culture.

your grief will not end; it will change over time; it will become this bitter sweet melancholy that will accompany you forever. but this is your new relationship to your wife (me: lost one), this is how you will walk with her forever now this is this is how she is. this is the evidence that you choose to love, this is the evidence that you allowed someone to penetrate your heart and take up a dwelling-place there.

this is the true right of love as well that love and loss the first Gator grief is that everything you love you will lose.

“you have so much joy” … “that’s because I cry a lot”

grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions it is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live dumb and small […] grief is necessary to the vitality of our soul; contrary to our f,ears grief is fused with life force it is riddled with energy and acknowledgement of the erotic coupling with another soul, whether human, animal, plant or ecosystem; it is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness… grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. resist the demands to remain passive and still we move in jangled unsettled and riotous ways when grief takes all of us. it is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.