Passing Through Portals: Navigating Grief, Life, and Love

The Eel is one of the great six rivers of the Emerald Triangle in California. One of the largest watersheds in the state, it runs through rugged terrain which isolates the area with weather and landslides a portion of the year. My mother grew up on a branch of the South Fork. Old Timers I’d sometimes meet would talk about catching eels at night by lamplight, and even she recalled watching the giant old growth Redwood trees - exceeding 300 feet in height and 20 in diameter - float by the family house when the river was high, like twigs in a stream. The Eel River was great and prehistoric like its flood debris.

My grandparents’ river house was a mainstay feature in my childhood summers. There was an island that would rise with the inland temperatures as the water got low. Smooth, large river rocks, gray and red and green and white, spread out at the bottom of the shelf the house was built on, and they would burn your feet when the sun was high. An evergreen forest, struck through with the red of Manzanitas, grew atop the veined cliff face across the water where my older cousins would climb up and drop into the deeper current below from a dubious rope swing that endured the winter thrall. It was a second growth forest, since most of the area had been logged long before I was around. As the river spread out just downstream, a sandy bar extended like a finger. If the water was low enough, kids my size could wade across to the more still water just on the other side, protected by that finger of land, where the shade and mud housed frogs and water dogs.

My grandparents’ river house was a mainstay feature in my childhood summers.

Water dogs were prolific in my childhood summers: rough backed salamanders, about seven inches long, that looked like dark wood on top with delicate and soft flaming orange underbellies the color of September skies at golden hour. They were stunning, delightful, seemingly intelligent with their broad noses and predatory eyes, magical with their tiny hands and thick tails used to swim. They would scatter where you stepped, so we’d track their S-shaped motion to where they stopped, invisible in their perfect camouflage, and we’d fill buckets or the folded bottom of oversized tee-shirts with their stocky forms. These would go into the moats of our “sand castles”, which were really rudimentary troughs around rock structures since sand on the six rivers is mostly small rocks that don't quite stick together.

When I was a young mother and my son was just beginning to walk, there was talk of the family house being sold - which it eventually was - and I longed to share the splendor of these summers with my child. I wanted him to be formed by them in the way that I was, so he’d know the intelligence of living things and the adventure of rock castles in summer. It was an intimate inheritance I could feel slipping through my fingers like wet silt, though I wouldn’t have time to identify the sensation until later. I knew the river had been changing. No old growth tree could possibly float down the floods of my lifetime without becoming stuck. It was the unfindable water dogs that should have been there who illustrated the deep changes to these places I loved, places that were and continue to be part of me, my external landscape that shaped my internal world with magic and majesty and magnitude. It was a loss that echoed not only the difficult changes in my family, but the trajectory of all the world’s ecology, like a river branch in the riparian fractal of what is or has been alive.

I don’t know if the way I experience things is because of the places and things that formed me, or if I was formed in the way that I have been because of the material I am being so responsive to my unique contexts. My whole life, it’s been hard to hold everything in such a small body and such a small window in the social framework I often feel trapped within. I want to break the glass in the frame, splinter the box, scream and wake everyone up! Tidal waves crash at my interior. Water dogs are the whales and the birds and the polar bears, and I hunger to learn more since sometimes that gives us the ability to act. But I’ve found that as I learn more about the situations of things I love the most in this world, the things that make me want to live and remind me of the magic of this, the best planet, I come into contact with the humanness, the humanly driven and collectively shaped nature of a mass extinction event unique and specific to us.

It was an intimate inheritance I could feel slipping through my fingers like wet silt...

My father and I are cut from the same cloth. We have the unspoken ability to communicate through some psychic connection, underpinning a parallel perspective and shared wit shaped by lucid pattern recognition and cultural commonality. We’re curious, expansive, creative, kind, and chronically ill. My parents founded a church when my brother and I were children. We set up every Sunday in school auditoriums and went with our parents to play with other children as they engaged with domestic violence incidents, or hosted Bible study in living rooms, or found ways to clothe and feed us and our greater community. As I approached my teens, my dad’s health was beginning to fail, and I experienced the dual loss of an invincible father as a heavenly idea and as a very real and tangible person.

In Western culture we often talk about loss as a sudden and final event. A death, a tragedy, a moment you can point to where there is a change. As I write this, I have a grandparent passing, and it’s natural and lovely and hard and sad, and still makes sense. Over my teens I experienced the loss of the person most able to access the way that I am in this world in incremental progression. As I’ve aged and my dad has continued to live: he’s nearly died and has recovered in a variety of somewhat miraculous ways that I am grateful for. But his illness is neurological, psychiatric, and while he’s still him, and while he’s still changed and grown and always becoming, it’s like watching him gradually disappear. There’s just a little more of him not there… and a little more of me he can’t access.

Over my teens I experienced the loss of the person most able to access the way that I am in this world in incremental progression.

It reflects the way the natural world, so vibrant and mapped onto myself, is there and beautiful and still so ALIVE… but also fading and less than it was. It’s Starbucks cups on Machupichu and invasive grass in my native estuaries. It’s me wondering if the ducks fishing like old-world wooden toys are more resilient than I am to the microplastics and pesticide run off preventing me from foraging. I’ve got more exposure in my humanly constructed world, so maybe they’re ok? It’s strange to be so enamored, or so comfortable, and also so aware of the insidious side effects and the erosion of recognizable, sustained life.

I had a hysterectomy a few weeks ago, a certain flavor of loss tied to an arc of joys and pains and heritage, and so I’ve been walking to help my body heal. The surgery will help me be healthier in the long run, after all. Halloween is here in the stormy Pacific Northwest, and plastic skeletons are creating scenes in the neighbors’ yards. Yesterday, a single one was hanged from the corner of a front porch, near an apple tree dropping old red fruit. A giant kneeled with four man-sized others in an implied ceremony for a fallen comrade across the street. The Northerlies are blowing, and after last night’s storm, the hanging man is a torso. His legs were jumbled below, but they’ve since gotten up to lean crossed against the stair’s handrail. He is very cool. The giant has fallen next to the plastic blue kiddie pool, his companions a heap on that house’s porch.

I am thinking about Gaza and the real bones that are the family and neighbors of real people - possibly related even to me over the course of centuries and the human habit of migration turned diaspora in my Jewish lineage. The connections to histories, terror, to the unnecessary, strike my intellect and my heart. The Halloween decor and haunted houses that seem so frivolous among my friends, the ironic corpses that are props in our horror fantasies and B film projects, they take a more fervent and morbid symbolic meaning for me with this genocide following so closely to the refrigeration trucks of American corpses at hospitals during the early sweep of SARS-19. I’m aware this is a continuation of a pattern, that these aren’t isolated events, that this is a legacy over time and I’m some small piece of it. The stories of the plastic skeletons lose their levity. I don’t understand how everyone is just moving along. I don’t understand why things aren’t changing in a direction toward life, through a shift powerful enough for me to see it in my daily lived experience.

As I’ve grappled with confusion, anger, even betrayal, I’ve had many a would-be mentor coach me on non-attachment or how to look at the positive parts of “It’s not so bad.” That always played like a cheap response to the value of what is lost. An easy bypass, diminishing some essential quality of myself. There is no technology in this advice, no skill to help me navigate a process, a reality. It is bad. It is hard. I don’t want to be detached from the things I know are sacred. I don’t want to deny or turn away from the witnessing of it.

I don’t want to be detached from the things I know are sacred.

Humans are meaning-making things. We are our stories, and I think there is an honoring in the accounting. I also don’t want to be debilitated by the enormity of these things. I believe we belong to one another, that we heal in community. Because the things in me are so vast and interconnected, it’s been difficult for me to find people and places to be held by. It’s been easy for me to find people and places that want me to hold them.

Francis Weller teaches us that “all we love will be lost”, the first gate of grief. For a long time, I struggled with this thing, grief. My grief is ongoing, accumulative, nuanced. I love so much. I see so much. I am so intensely filled up by what I come into contact with. I moved away from my parents' house wondering what to do with grief like this, where there isn’t just one thing to grieve after one event that ended. I often miss the Pacific Ocean because at least I felt seen by that vast and overwhelming force slamming against the continental shelf. I yearn for easy sailing upon strong currents, not this tumbling beneath the undertow, a constant drowning.

As I meet and love my grief, as I slowly find those who have taken the time to grow their sailor skills, it is a journey where everything is present at once. When I come into contact with joy, there is the exact and opposite side of the coin also felt. They are the same object. I’ve grown my capacity for complexity, for paradox, but I’ve also become more sensitive to my tolerance and yielding to my limits. This stretching of my capacity ironically comes with a contraction in my community and the scope of my engagements. With more expansive horizons, the need for skill, care, and discernment have become life-sustaining necessities. There is weather. Sailors love weather. And I need the right crew to live the stories that happen in the depths.

When I come into contact with joy, there is the exact and opposite side of the coin also felt. They are the same object.

Working the earth is a great salve to my heart. It brings me close to myself, lets me metabolize things in a way that transcends small-minded “logical” ruminations, and tunes my body to earth-speed, which isn’t linear and is only intuitive. Often slow - trees and maturation cycles and the building of soil - and sometimes intense and electric - floods and rot and bolting to seed. It draws me out of the modern, man-made world of construct and gives me access to a lineage that’s even deeper than bloodline, asking me to notice and attend.

I’ve also learned that creating relationship with land can sometimes mean more loss. A cherished ecosystem in a neighborhood lot - the one with the young birds in the fallen Ponderosa Pine - comes underfoot of the excavator. A new road blazes a path through the forest behind my home, where I’ve watched two trees fall, just sitting there with them and looking. However, I trust the resilience of growing things. They’ll be ok - we just need to cultivate conditions so that life can live. And, though time as measured in my lifespan seems futile and full of frivolous pursuits, a flash in the frying pan we’re all cooking in, I know to continue my work and to pass on my technologies as much as I can, like they have been passed on to me.

Stewardship doesn’t control, but it does work always toward resourcing and creating a container for life to occur. As one thing is uprooted it creates a space, a birth portal, a possibility. There is an appropriate use for the vacancy, probably several, something that wants to be there in accordance with what surrounds it. There is a lesson each time you do this, building our skill-craft, so we can create an appropriate container for something specific we desire to come forth. Look at the lands of our towns and cities and popular trails; learn your plants to see the stories we’ve traced. If you don’t cultivate disturbed soil, you wind up with something noxious taking advantage of the opportune vulnerability.

It’s a kind of midwifery, to allow something to pass along, then to hold well the container of what is coming next, and nurture that thing despite knowing it may never arrive, knowing life is vulnerable - which is why it is resilient at all. Resilience occurs in circumstances of adversity or threat, the unknowable of death and birth and living. We do it anyway. We do it because life demands it. We do it because it is our honored position to witness and attend. We are called and cultivated to this.

It’s a kind of midwifery, to allow something to pass along, then to hold well the container of what is coming next...

There is grief in the loss of what was uprooted, and there is a sorrow inherent in change, even when what arrives is wanted and celebrated. Heidi Priebe wrote, “To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.” I felt this as my children grew into the people they are becoming and becoming and always changing into. I miss those babies. A lot of things didn’t happen how I wanted them to. I felt this with myself as I’ve metamorphosed into the many versions of me I’ve been and can sense I will be. On a grander scale, I’m living in a country whose institutions are rapidly collapsing… and our future is scary and unknown.

In the passing of this time, I see folks clinging to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I think it really went away in the States when Covid hit, and ever since we’ve been living in the shell of what was already here. I suspect a lot of the global north is living a parallel lie. So many places in the world have already changed through the violent history of the USA, the spread of empires, and now the churn of capitalism gnawing through people and natural resources. Swaths of the natural world are gone. Species are failing. The oceans will continue to warm and we’re beyond the ability to stop it. While I don’t understand how people can just go on with their lives like nothing has changed, I do understand the magic in our mundane interactions and small comforts. I understand how resistant we are to the dissonance in our minds and bodies - what is known coming up against the unknowable.

At the same time, I can detect this tidal wave of grief just under the surface, driving the anger and the unrest we are starting to see. People will die. People have died. People suffer - far beyond the Buddhist dukkha as our power systems have scaled and changed. Perhaps the chaotic storms and geological events becoming more normal are a planetary grief. At minimum, they reflect the raging scale inside those of us impacted and grappling with what is occurring. 

I recognize that laying the era we are ending to rest is necessary to creating a container for what is to come. How can this be a graceful dying, rather than the violent thrashing of desperation and denial we seem to be in now? How can people come into contact with the gravity and scale of what is happening - without fragmenting into an ever-expanding dissociation barring us from the recovery and the work that must be done? As more and more is lost, how do we grapple with the grief generated and still celebrate what might feel strange or unfamiliar, when things don’t happen how we wanted them to? How do we breathe when we are caught in the undertow of our emotions, with no way up above the crush and the churn? How do we let go? What do you do with accumulated grief?

I recognize that laying the era we are ending to rest is necessary to creating a container for what is to come.

And so, I look for technologies of navigation, so our ships can sail the superstorms no longer on our horizon but clashing upon our bows, our rocks, our shores. I look to the old ways in our histories, both recorded and being reclaimed, the patterns I feel and see and trust, and the innovation of people who are born to this container that I am called to clear and nurture and hold with them. We belong to this moment in all our complexity, paradox, despair, and desire to live. We are sailors, and the sea is our tears and our birth blood.