Visioning new worlds to hold our grief
This ritual and art installation was a communal feast of possibility.
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It’s been three weeks, and I am still reflecting on the Five Gates of Grief, the immersive art and ritual experience co-created by Salt Trails, the collective I co-founded in 2021 to offer community grief rituals, and Threshold Collective, a duo serving those at the end of life and their loved ones.
The vision for this three-day event, which was held at the end of April, was seeded last year when I wondered how we could bring these gates, as outlined by psychotherapist and soul activist Francis Weller in his book, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow,” to life using art.
The gates are:
Everything we love we will lose
The places that have not known love
The sorrows of the world
What we expected we did not receive
Ancestral grief
Many on the path of grief quickly realize that one of the more popular models of grieving, “The Five Stages of Grief,” also known as the Kübler-Ross model, do not apply to their experience — as least not linearly or as a framework expansive enough to accommodate the nonfinite nature and vast range of emotions that accompany grieving. This model was never intended for grievers in the first place but meant as a guide for those facing a terminal illness.
It’s no wonder then that whenever I share Weller’s Five Gates with clients and others, and in classes, it lands with greater resonance, meets the sorrowing with a deeper recognition and more spacious to hold and tend what they carry.
In visioning April’s experience, we wanted to invite the public into a communal experience of exploring and feeling affirmed in their grief through creative expression. We gathered an incredible cohort of Philadelphia artists — Jordan Deal, Lauren Silver, Joshua Marquez, Samantha Rise, Bennett Kuhn and Dwight Dunston — who interpreted and activated each gate via sound, music, clowning, visual art, crafting, reflective reverie, and interactive invitations.
Salt Trails opened and closed the space with ritual, inviting all on the first night to step across a threshold, which the late poet John O’Donohue described as “a frontier that divides two territories, rhythms and atmospheres.” This frontier, he wrote, cannot be crossed “without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.”
To come to grief, to experience loss, is indeed a threshold state. One in which we must leave behind what we knew and held as familiar to walk a trembling, uncertain ground where we cannot know what we will encounter or how long we will wander this vast wilderness. We may not have roadmaps but we can build and find containers to hold us, spaces and practices that allow us to keep our grief fluid, soft, moving through us instead of becoming stuck and stagnant in our bodies. Spaces that invite an engagement of heart and soul. A slowing down to touch the contours, textures, shapes of what lives inside so much wordless aching — as we begin to offer more care and attention to what this culture has many of us deny and suppress.
This is the space we wanted to create with The Five Gates of Grief, a communal container that validated grieving as a natural human response to loss and change. A collective heart-holding through art, ritual and the gathering of so many grieving bodies in one place that affirmed, “You are welcome here. All you carry, known and unknown, named and unnamed, is welcome here. Whatever your losses, you do not have to carry or work their knots and tangles alone. In fact, you were never meant to. You have always deserved a village to walk you through this night, however long it takes.”
To put the actual experience of this event into words, however, is challenging. I could share a little about the performances and activations at each gate or about our rituals or what was like to have Rev. Rhetta Morgan, a member of Salt Trails, close out opening night by leading us through a joy portal. I could mention the tears that spilled on our closing night when each artist spoke to their own unique journey with this project and their specific installations, or how when I stepped into the courtyard of the Maas Building, where the event was held, on the second day, I could feel a potent energy in the land and the space, something that marked a shift, an opening, an alteration with reverberations many of us who co-created and attended this event are still carrying and unpacking.
But much like grief, this was an experience that needed a dropping into with all of the senses — an attunement to the what of the moment, without having to ask why. A being with that allowed room for whatever wanted to emerge. I could say, “you had to be there,” but I do hope these photos and videos maybe stir something in you. Maybe a glimmer of what is possible when we throw off the normative constraints of what grief care and support can look like. Maybe a hunger to be held by more than the crumbs and fleeting moments you’ve been allowing yourself. Or perhaps the recognition that music, art, poetry, singing, anything that brings you close to your own aliveness, that draws water or sparks fire, grounds you or gives you back your breath is worth embracing as solvent for your grief.
And maybe somewhere deep in your bones, there is a rising — some memory from ancient lands, some ancestral whisper or animal knowing that bends you to the cries and stomps and wails of another. And another. And another still. Until you, too, are woven into a circle, a community, that has always been waiting to see you in your vulnerability, your gifts, your gorgeous humanness — and to hold and meet you where you are.
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Honoring the truth in challenging relationships
How do we grieve the death of someone we had a complicated relationship with? What do we do when the love we feel for them is tangled up in the messy, the hard, the complex? Join me for a session to honor both/and. The love and the challenges of loving the difficult people who were in our lives can co-exist. In this writing workshop, we'll make time to explore our truth around these relationships, to honor our experience and create room for what we might struggle to say when others might insist we focus on the good or not speak ill of the dead. This session will include a brief guided meditation, writing prompts inspired by poems of grief and loss and time to reflect and share. Please bring a journal and a candle with you.
Payment can be made through Venmo @Naila-Francis, CashApp at $NailaFrancis (include email address for Venmo and CashApp in description), PayPal at naila.francis@gmail.com or via Stripe.
‘Grief isn’t something to be fixed’
I wish this article, which I am so grateful to be featured in, could also drop you into the conversations I’ve had with its author, Constance Garcia-Barro since she first reached out to me in January. As a mother grieving her son, who died after a lifelong struggle with mental illness, Connie shared with me how she’d been coping with her grief — the challenges, yes, but also how much softer and more expansive her heart had grown, big enough, it seemed, to love whomever she encountered who could use a warm hug or some extra tenderness. This includes children, animals and the strangers she meets, some of them panhandlers who receive more than they imagined they would when they ask her for money. Connie, too, as she wrote in a beautiful opinion piece for Mother’s Day last year — her first without her son — is gifted solace and a sense of purpose in those meetings.
I’m so honored that she was the one to interview me for this article, and deeply grateful to have connected with her. To be in her presence is to feel held. May we all have and encounter such gentle and generous souls on our walk with grief.