Turning Towards Grief Rahme Etai

I sit beside Birrarung, this snaking river, watching the beauty of ripples, a flowing scripture on the river’s surface. As my eyes trace these endless forms, stories morph and collapse over and over again. A grief wells up within me, intermingling and becoming a part of this dance.

I return to the inescapable awareness that all is not well, a feeling of not knowing how to make sense of the world and the structures I’ve been born into, alongside a knowing of my connection with the Land all around me. A fracture in my being forms between these two stories. A fracture so immense I am lost within it. In this place between, I grieve.

I don’t know how to even begin speaking to this grief.

As ecological tipping points are met and passed, as social collapse continues to take its toll, grief, despair and hopelessness become ever more constant companions. Amongst all of this, I am profoundly aware of the destruction I am complicit with through my everyday acts. The fuel in my car, the rare metals in the computer I’m writing this on right now. I’m sharing this to create space for grief, and yet I recognise that even this is implicated in the harm. Every act and move towards change feels somehow tainted in the messy entanglement with extractive ways of being.

And then there is a numbness, an inability to feel what is going on with my world. Why can’t I feel it when another species becomes extinct? Why can’t I feel it when trees I have loved all my life are cut down? I am left with a dead weight in my belly. Trying to move amongst this consumerist world, focusing on my ‘future,’ my ‘income,’ or a sense of where any of this is going, feels so at odds with the consuming crises of our time. It feels like a mass delusion, and below the surface I am screaming, all of us screaming silently with the impossible task of making sense of it all. Sitting in despair for our suffering planet.

Somehow you and I must find a way to live with all this. Yet as I watch the ripples of Birrarung, as they morph and dance, spiral back around, whispering answers that for a moment I understand, I think of how this ‘way’ is not a straight path, not made of cement and concrete, but perhaps of letting go. A surrender into liquidity.

Where, I cry, where can I grieve in this culture?

There has been little space for these feelings in Western culture. Grief becomes something to move past, something not to be felt beyond a socially acceptable amount of time. Grief is often the undesired house guest. We allow it in for a time, out of a sense of duty, but then it is time to move on. We are afraid of those eyes of grief. How will we get anything done when grief is sitting there watching us? It is associated usually with the loss of a loved one, of a relationship, restricted to our human connections. We hold funerals for humans close to us, we comfort a friend at the ending of a relationship. But at a certain point the world taps on our shoulder. We must return to our jobs, our commitments and ‘move on’.

Some understanding is allowed when we grieve for a pet, yet what does it mean when we despair for the cutting of an ancient tree, or when we grieve for the poisoning of our waterways and oceans? How do we make sense of this crushing sadness for the breakdown of our intricate webs of life? I long for this to be held, but in this system there is nowhere to go. Instead it seems these feelings of despair may be pathologised. The root of them believed to be solely individual trauma or a weakness in character. But this pain is not just mine. It is a pain that belongs to everyone who is embedded in Earth’s systems, therefore it is a suffering of all of ours. This is the pain we feel for our Earth’s systems, and we, as a part of these, are the Earth itself grieving. How absurd it is, that this could be reduced to personal suffering alone.

Our capitalist culture, built on stories of perpetual growth, incessantly asks us to raise ourselves up like the penetrating skyscrapers. We are coerced into constructing ourselves, to make ourselves ‘better’, to achieve ever ‘higher’. Happiness is dangled before us, with the elusive promise that if we consume, buy, own the next thing, we will procure it. To earn this ‘happiness’ we must work hard, always be producing, making more. We have forgotten that growth is a part of a cycle, a cycle where death and decay are in direct relationship with life. Grief invites us to return to this phase of the cycle. Asking us to slow down, allowing ourselves to fall apart, allowing ourselves to remember.

This is truly scary territory, and our grieving is not meant to be done alone. When we are actively in touch with our grief, it can be terrifying, fearing that we may disappear into it and be consumed by its depths. Many cultures across the world have or have had spaces to express grief collectively. Where my mother grew up in the highlands of West Papua, the community would gather to keen together with particular cadences or songs dedicated to grief. Some of these gatherings could last for weeks. I grew up hearing these stories, and yet my experience in the West has been vastly different. This culture deeply lacks communal spaces to hold the breadth of what we mourn.

There is nothing wrong with us for feeling afraid, lost, feeling pain that threatens to crack us. When we feel grief and pain for the land this is a sign of our love for Earth. We need to be in love with Land to be able to take action, to be able to take risks. We put our life on the line for that which we love. We sacrifice for that which we love. We need to remember our love for the Earth and, inevitably, this is to open ourselves to grief.

Let us crack.

Let the rugged houseguest in to break down the walls. It’s the world beyond the walls that is calling to us in the wild voice of grief.

And yet I know we can meet in this place, you and I

One of the ways that I have found for holding grief, and a web of context for my despair is the framework of Deep Ecology. Deep Ecology is a body of work, a philosophy and a way of being, that recognises humans as inseparably embedded in ecosystem and Earth, woven into a relational web. A knowing that has been at the core of existence for many Indigenous peoples across the world.

Deep Ecology targets the Western capitalist mind and the fissure, the sense of separation we have constructed between Earth and human. The term was coined by Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher. The experiential Deep Ecology processes that I have participated in were created by Joanna Macey, an activist, Buddhist scholar and practitioner, and John Seed, eco mystic and forest activist. This work takes one on a journey, a spiral, beginning at the roots with gratitude, travelling through to giving space for our ‘grief for the world’, and then from this space seeing the world anew. The grief is the central piece to this rebirth.

When we grieve in this space, we grieve together. We hold each other in circle as each of us is given space to express, to share our rage, our sorrow, our numbness and emptiness. These are all expressions of our grief. In a group we hold each other with an expanded nervous system, where our bodies together can move and metabolise this pain. The grief we feel for the world is honoured, it is no longer ours to hold in isolation. It becomes the alchemy, the crucible, necessary to coming back into relationality.

Try this for a moment. Sit before a plant. It could be as big as a tree or as small as a weed growing from a concrete crack, or a house plant. As you breathe in, know yourself to be breathing the oxygen that this plant is creating. When you breathe out, know that the carbon dioxide your body emits goes to this plant, feeding its photosynthesis. Breathe like this for a moment. We are embedded, we are in relationship with all that’s around us, the walls of separation between us and ‘other’ dissolve. You and I are intrinsically entwined into our Earth, what our ecosystems experience so too shall we feel in our bodies.

When we grieve we can come together in a knowing that we are not alone in this. Deep Ecology is one framework that offers a holding for this space. Within these practices, we create containers of mutual holding where we can share together our mourning for the world. Grief teaches us that we need our communities to journey to these places. The tears that pour simultaneously slake a deep thirst. Those tears are like drinking deeply from a clean, cool well, and the grief opens up to a deep love and presence. From this presence we are more able to meet our world as she truly is, not turn away in fear or horror of what we have done. It’s not a one-off process. We need to return and do this work again and again and again. We will disconnect and become numb, and then return and grieve and replenish.

Grief can be experienced not as something to get rid of or let go of, but as the doorway, the portal to a deeper level of intimacy with Earth, allowing ourselves to truly feel what is happening to our Earth; that which is happening to Earth is happening to us. We recognise that we are not separate, we recognise that when the trees are cut down, the rivers poisoned, that this is our body, this is our blood. By choosing to grieve we allow ourselves to know these trees and rivers as persons, as animate. We attribute to them the same recognition as we attribute to our human relations. When we truly grieve for them, we honour their sovereignty and know them as something so valuable that their loss tears us apart, breaks our hearts that our children may never know this wonder.

Can we open our arms to you, grief?

Meeting my grief has felt like a journey of decomposition, allowing myself to fall apart. Through the decomposition of self there is a greater intimacy with the world, a greater presence of truly being able to come into awareness with what is. In facing this, we are not trying to turn it into a pretty story. We are simply being with the breakdown as our ecosystems collapse, as cultures collapse, as our sense of what we thought life meant collapses. We are allowing this decomposition that is happening around us to happen inside of us, for we are embedded in our world.

To ‘decompose’ is so at odds with what I have been brought up to be. I can feel my body tense at the idea, and I can also feel a deep longing for this falling apart. Yet I know that decomposition and death are necessary to allow growth to come forth. Without the process of decay there is no new life. Part of this process of decay is in not knowing: not knowing how to figure it out, not knowing the road map to a solution. There are no roadmaps through decomposition. I am learning to surrender to this unknown process that our world is going through. The grieving and the dying are radical acts against a culture that is trying to defy death, a culture that is selling us the lie of constant growth. That which decays becomes more liquid in form, bringing an expanded range of movement. In this liquidity we find greater flexibility and capacity in our response.

Turning towards grief, towards not knowing, towards decomposing, creates the new soil that we need. There is no knowing what seeds will plant themselves in this Earth. This is a constant process. It does not end; it is the meeting of innumerable beings and endless diversity. When we look at the soil itself, its ongoing decomposition, we see the proliferation of life, microbes, mycelium. As we break down we become this multiplicity, bringing expanded diversity to our culture and communities. Death is not a movement towards less; death is fecund—within it a profusion of life emerges. Are we brave enough to let go of this needing to know? I wonder if I’m brave enough to let go. Not from a place of lack of care, but in recognition of how wildly complex this place I’m embedded in is and what a small part of it I am, how little I can possibly understand with just my human mind.

Our blood and bones break down to the same nourishment as a kangaroo’s. My body will feed the same plants as leaf and decomposing tree. We need to come together; this grief is big and we must hold each other. We can interweave ourselves back into a web with our grief. Who knows what will emerge from this complexity of interweaving beings? It is through the grief that we can rediscover our love. In our numbness and detachment, our fight for this world is hidden. Only by journeying through the layers of grief can we uncover this. This work is not safe. It is not easy. But we do it anyway, as an act of love.

As I journey with this work, my grief deepens, but so too does my joy. For the love of this Earth, let us grieve. Let us grieve for what we dreamed our lives would be, let us grieve for the screams of the trees, let us grieve for the world the children after us will not know.

Let us grieve.

Let us turn into Earth and offer up our tears, our despair.

Let our grief break down into dark rich soil.

Let the worms eat us.

Let us become the Earth for something new to grow from, let us become the Earth for something new to seed in.

Rahme Etai is an artist, writer and devotee of Land living on Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country. Her work delves into the relationship of human and Land and human as Land. She has been involved in Deep Ecology over the past few years, as both participant and co facilitator. Throw all this to the wind as Rahme knows nothing so take this as you will.