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All Grief Loss Community Sorrow Silence Solitude Adulthood Connection Dignity Disconnection Gifts Growing Up Letting Go Longing Love Spiritual Gifts Worth

Famous Francis Weller Quotes

“Silence and solitude allow us to move beyond thought and into our embodied experience. Grief is felt, sensed in the viscera of our bellies, the inner walls of our chests, the curve of our shoulders, the heaviness in our thighs. Grief is registered in our sinews and muscles. It feels laboured, as though a great weight has settled on our chest or a heaviness has entered our bones. We know grief by its felt experience; it is tangible. It is here, in our sighing and sensing body, that we encounter the terrain of sorrow.”

Loss Grief Silence Sorrow Solitude

Book:The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Source: The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”

Community Loss Grief Sorrow Longing Connection Disconnection

Book:The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Source: The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“We will, in truth, spend many of our hours alone with our grief. In the cover of our solitude, we encounter another layer in our apprenticeship with sorrow. Here we are asked to hold an extended vigil with loss in the well of silence, slowly ripening our sorrow into something dense and gifting to the world. Our ability to drop into this interior world and do the difficult work of metabolizing sorrow is dependent on the community that surrounds us. Even when we are alone, it is necessary to feel the tethers of concern and kindness holding us as we step off into the unknown and encounter the wild edge of sorrow.”

Community Loss Grief Sorrow Solitude

Book:The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Source: The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief