"Francis brings a healers touch to a terrain often neglected and denied in Western Culture."
- Malidoma Somé
A meditation on grief...
“Where there is sorrow,” wrote Oscar
Wilde, “there is holy ground.” This book is a meditation on the sacred ground
of grief and the ways it enables us to walk in this world with its attendant
harsh realities of loss and death, how it shakes us and breaks us open to
depths of soul we could not imagine. Grief offers a wild alchemy that
transmutes suffering into fertile ground. We are made real and tangible by the experience of sorrow, adding substance and weight to our world. Beyond the crazed hunger in our culture to be exceptional and special, loss and sorrow wear away whatever masks we attempt to present to the world. Like the massive stone carvings in the jungles of Central America lying broken on the forest floor, the monuments we erect to our own importance collapse. We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. In a very real way grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women. It is the broken heart, the heart that knows sorrow that is also capable of genuine love.
- From the Introduction Dear Reader, Over the last thirty years, I have worked with grief in my practice as a psychotherapist and workshop leader. Beginning in 1997, I began to offer grief rituals as a way for communities to attend the large and small losses that touch each of our lives. What has become clear to me is how difficult it is for us to attend to our grief in the absence of community. Carried privately, sorrow lingers in the soul, slowly pulling us below the surface of life and into the terrain of death. I wrote this book to expand the conversation we need to have concerning the place of grief in our lives. Each of us must undertake an apprenticeship with loss. I hope my book can offer support for whatever grief you carry, at whatever gate you find yourself. I welcome any response you may have to my writing. And thank you for visiting this site and for reading my book. Many blessings, Francis Weller |
WisdomBridge Press offers publications that help to restore our relationship with the living earth. Our commitment is to offer works that help us recover our indigenous soul, what psychologist Carl Jung called the "unforgotten wisdom" that lies at the core of the psyche.
