Hard times call for more softness
How to find support and connection when the world breaks your heart.
I do not have words for these times, often finding myself inarticulate in the face of the brutality we humans continue to inflict on each other. I also know speaking to the genocide happening in Gaza, and the horrific slaughter of lives on both sides, means amplifying voices outside my own, including those directly impacted and those who have been fighting for decades for an end to Israeli apartheid.
But I can acknowledge the collective grief we are feeling and the ways that may be playing out in our bodies and our lives: insomnia, aches and pains, anxiety, exhaustion, paralysis, despair, rage, confusion, fear, difficulty focusing and functioning…The instantaneous and frequent exposure to so many distressing, graphic and traumatic images can be traumatizing to our own nervous systems and psyches.
I know I have had to dip in and out of the news this past week to protect my own energy and capacity — and also to stay open, not just to the devastation unfolding before us all but to what feels life-giving in any moment.
These words I wrote, amid other horrific world events years ago, found me this morning:
let the world break your heart, make you soft in locked-away places, until your eyes become an ocean of compassion where others find courage to swim.
And though I have been turning to poetry, reading and writing, as balm for what aches and a place to hold my weeping, I know how challenging it can be to stay soft, to let the world in when it feels like a ravaging of our hearts.
How do we make space to be with the bitter and harrowing without shutting down or turning away? How do we keep choosing compassion and nurturing empathy without depleting ourselves?
Yesterday, Salt Trails, the Philadelphia-based collective I co-founded in 2021 to offer community grief spaces of ritual, care and support, held its annual grief processional, partnering this year with The Thread, a public art installation holding space for grief and connection in the city. The processional, called Carrying Our Grief Together, is an invitation to gather to share our sorrows, to move through some of our grief, to be witnessed and affirmed by each other and to engage in transforming our heartbreak through the medicine of ritual.
During our closing circle, we harvested these words as part of the individual and collective shift experienced in our time together: grounded, connected, grateful, lighter, nourished, loved, celebratory, peaceful.
In each other’s presence, we moved from profound heaviness and tears, from the searing weight of personal and global grief, to a greater spaciousness. To a deeper capacity to hold the unbearable and still meet the reverence, the beauty, the joy, the aliveness of right now. That right now moment, when after crying and walking and singing and threading our grief into a web of connectedness, we stood beside each other with bright faces and smiles of warmth and gratitude.
One of the ways to be with these times is in community. To connect to other grievers in a space where you can openly share what you’re feeling without judgment, shame, fixing or advice-giving. To be met fully where you are, and resourced by empathetic listening, by caring presence and — depending on the space and facility of its holders — by practices that help you drop past your thinking mind and into your body to feel into what’s there and to find some release.
One of my guiding impulses in founding Salt Trails is knowing we are not meant to grieve alone, that outside of the privatization of grief in Western culture, grief is and always has been a collective coming together to fall apart and be with what is. To allow ourselves to be witnessed in the full range of our humanity and create space for whatever wants to emerge as we descend into this mysterious terrain together.
If you’re feeling alone in your grief right now, where do you find community, and how can community support and shelter you?
If community care isn’t accessible to you, please know that self-care is just as important. Allow yourself to go slowly. Push pause. Rest. Cultivate moments of softness. Be mindful about the media you consume and how often you consume it. Being informed doesn’t mean staying plugged in 24-7.
Consider: What are the places, the people, the practices and connections that bring you joy and nourishment, invite in play and creativity, offer you hope and gratitude? Find anchors here.
Maybe it’s helpful to expand your prayer or meditation practice — and to remember these can be living practices that move with you through the day. As you hug your children, imagine all children being well, safe and loved. As you water your plants, envision seeds of peace being watered in places of bloodshed. Whatever you bless or give thanks for, hold the intention that all people may experience that goodness, that moment of peace, that ease or abundance, whatever is filling your cup.
Spend time in nature. As my Salt Trails sister Amy Mermaid reminded us on Sunday, “Our grief nourishes the Earth.” Speak, wail, pound, sing your anguish into Her but feed Her, too, with offerings. Gently notice: what wisdom does her beauty and resilience offer to help you meet what’s hard?
Keep checking in with your body. Where are you clenching and constricting, struggling to connect to your breath? What is the movement that would feel most soothing to you? Yes, you can turn to yoga, walking, dance and other forms of exercise. But sometimes sitting and rocking, one of the simplest, most instinctive movements available to us, can help bring our nervous system back into alignment (you can also deepen that experience by humming as you rock).
And, of course, you can take action. Jewish Voice for Peace makes it easy to contact Congress to push for an end to the violence. The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights has also put together a helpful action toolkit. I’m not here to make a political statement. I’m here to stand on the side of humanity and the world our children deserve.
For a perspective on war you won’t find in the media, I highly recommend this episode of The Emerald podcast with Joshua Michael Schrei.
As we navigate these tumultuous times, please make space to honor your feelings. Make time to cry and to laugh and to tend something beautiful. Remember to nurture yourselves so you can give what you can from a place of fortification, and to strive to understand before rushing to judge or condemn.
Remember that you, too, are a human being, worthy of deep breaths, slow moments and the gift of compassion the world so desperately needs.
This grief-writing series starts Thursday
Many of us carry our grief privately, keeping the words, memories and feelings we long to express locked up inside. Yet our grief needs a practice that allows for its movement through our bodies. In this workshop offered through Mt. Airy Learning Tree, we'll turn to writing to express our grief. Sessions will include grounding meditations and visualizations, shared poems about grief to help us access our emotions around our own losses, and invitations to write in response to guided prompts. We’ll explore poems about connecting with our loved ones, listening to our bodies, caring for and navigating our grief and grieving what breaks our heart in the world.
Classes will meet from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at Wesley Enhanced Living, 6300 Greene St., Philadelphia, on the following Thursdays: Oct. 19 and 26, Nov. 2, 16 and 30.
Investment is $79. Register here.