PHOTO: “Grief, Here I Am” by Van Gogh
This morning as I was gathering news for Truth to Power’s Daily News Digest, I opened Sharon Astyk’s blogspot, one of my very favorite, to find her caustic commentary on the death and funeral of Michael Jackson. As her comments distilled in my mind and body, I realized that I have even more to say about this cultural phenomenon-no desire to say it better than Sharon because who could (?), but hopefully to embellish her inimitable incisiveness.
Now before proceeding, I ask the reader to refrain from any temptation to distort my comments by calling them racist. What this white lady is addressing has nothing to do with race, particularly in a week when I have stated in the Daily News Digest that I refused to pay any attention to the deranged antics of Sarah Palin as long as Cynthia McKinney was incarcerated. So woopeee, now that Cynthia is free, I can dump on Sarah as much as I like.
Like Sharon, I have chosen to ignore, or at least avoid, all coverage of the death and funeral of Jackson for the same reasons as Sharon has: “I think that the only reasonable response to the death of Michael Jackson is ‘that’s something of a relief’ since pedophiles rarely cease molesting others.” Besides making no bones about her distaste for his vapid music, Sharon is struggling to access the core of the outpouring of “grief” around Jackson’s death. One conclusion she draws is that “The explanation is this – we love grief itself. It is so much fun to feel bad, to mourn, to grieve.”
Yet Sharon is in no way putting down the importance of grief. Even though she would roll her New York eyes at the thought of most things touchy-feely, especially as she recently wrote, anything that involves standing or sitting in a circle, and even though her East Coast perspective is much more pragmatic and less psychological, Sharon has touched on something that in my opinion, (perhaps because I’ve lived on both coasts) is exceedingly important to notice. That something, and Sharon addresses it, is the authentic expression of grief.
Thank you Sharon for mentioning all the things we aren’t allowed to grieve in this culture: The extinction of 200 species per day, oceanic dead zones the size of countries, epidemic incidences of environmentally-related illnesses like cancer that are taking people out in ghastly numbers-I don’t think I need to keep going down this road; we are all too familiar with it.
So what more can I say about grief and our aversion to grieving about things that really matter that Sharon hasn’t said?
Taking a different approach, I’d like to pursue the topic, and I’m certain she would welcome my following some very important threads that shed light on the difference between authentic funerals and pseudo-funerals. I hasten to add that on one level, Jackson’s funeral was authentic. A real human being died, and real human beings showed up to pay their respects and eulogize him. However, our indigenous ancestors had a dramatically different perspective on death and loss, and it has everything to do with the current moment.
Many readers of this article are deeply involved with the worldwide Transition Town network which has literally gone viral around the globe as individuals and communities prepare for life in a post-petroleum world. For me, it is extremely rewarding to witness the diversity of perspectives in the Transition movement and the dialog that results from it. Some people believe that we can seamlessly tiptoe into Transition without a great deal of adversity, while others, such as myself, believe that adversity must be part of, not eliminated from, the Transition.
Three fundamental underpinnings of Transition are: head, heart, and hands, meaning that in order to make the most efficient and least distressing transition to a post-industrial world, we must fortify our heads with knowledge of real-world conditions; we must prepare emotionally and spiritually for transition, and we must learn new/old skills which will facilitate survival in a powered-down, economically depleted world.
Recently, Rob Hopkins, founder of the worldwide Transition Town network responded to some of Sharon’s concerns about the movement, some of which relate to the so-called “heart and soul” aspects of the Transition movement. The dialog between Sharon and Rob is not only a rich read, but absolutely necessary to ponder for anyone who is collapse-aware. (See Sharon’s comments: Part I and Part II and Rob’s comments) Both perspectives are necessary and must be held in tandem in the transition from the world as we have known it to the one we are entering.
Rob clearly validates Sharon’s concerns regarding a pre-occupation with heart and soul, but makes a powerful assertion:
If we think that we are going to weather the Long Emergency without any form of supporting each other emotionally, without any kind of ability to share the distress it is causing, if we think that the work of the next 10-20 years will be purely external, we are deluding ourselves.
Now while my intention in this article is not to analyze the dialog between Sharon and Rob, I feel it’s necessary to notice Sharon’s concern’s about over-emphasis on heart and soul and the minimizing of real work in the world to create the safest, most humane transition-and to notice that her comments on authentic grieving, in fact, support the above statement by Rob and reveal that she is indeed making space in her perspective for “inner work.”
The work of heart and soul shows up differently for everyone, but in my opinion, grief is at the core of the fine-tuning in which we must engage emotionally in transition. I do not for one moment believe that we can seamlessly tiptoe through the tulips of transition to a just, humane, sustainable world. There will be adversity, and to quote a recent Hollywood blockbuster having to do with petroleum, “there will be blood.”
So then, what is it about grief that we should notice, beyond the fact that it is fundamental in heart and soul preparation?
First, I believe that once again, we must acknowledge the perspective on grief held by our indigenous ancestors. It was inextricably connected to their sense of meaning and purpose, which in fact, informed their grief and caused them to express it in the most authentic manner. That is to say that the idea of addressing a problem by first strategizing a solution is a relatively modern idea. When a dilemma first appeared to the ancients, they did not immediately set out to fix it, but to make sense of it-to understand why it was showing up at that particular moment and for what purpose. They understood that if they did not grasp these fundamental realities, their attempts at solution would be fatally flawed. Naturally, they desired to solve their problems, but not before reflecting deeply on them.
For them, grief was a pivotal process for making sense of the losses that they encountered. Some losses could be adapted to, some not, but all losses, they believed must be grieved.
In the Dagara tribe of West Africa, the funeral is a central and commonplace ritual. The Dagara believe that the world of the living and the world of the dead are inextricably connected and that we are the living-living whereas people in the other world are the living-dead. Their cosmology teaches that while the two worlds are separate, both are connected and that most of human experience is about loss, punctuated by moments of joy and deep, intimate community. The funeral, and the grieving process that attends it, is for the Dagara, an opportunity for profound connection with each other and with the other world which they believe provides the deeper wisdom required for navigating this one. From their perspective, grief is not only food for the soul but evaporates the barriers that stand in the way of living humanely, compassionately, and in harmony with the human and more-than-human worlds.
As I read Sharon Astyk’s comments about the pseudo-funeral of Michael Jackson, I am in awe of her observation:
Anything so that we don’t have to think about the world as it actually is. Anything to wipe the death of all green shoots off the page. Anything to harken back to less important questions than whether your kids have a future, how hot the planet will get, how poor you will be. Anything to give us outlet for our emotions so that they may be expelled pointlessly on things that do not matter. Anything to let us feel passion for things that are totally harmless, conveniently distracting, and, bluntly, make us dumber just for being near them.
This is indeed, the American way of grief. First deny, then if you must acknowledge that there is a problem, set out to fix it as quickly and non-reflectively as possible. Sadly, this guarantees that your “solutions” will be misguided, superficial, and pathetically inept. For you see, if you really tap into your grief for the litany that Sharon is reciting here, you might feel overwhelmed, powerless, and hopeless. But because you don’t get that in those very feelings lie the threads that can take you into the depths of your most profound humanity, your most exquisite sacred self, and therefore, the font of the most creative, visionary, innovative responses humanly and divinely possible, you risk missing the infinite opportunities that the collapse of civilization now presents us with, and you are therefore more likely to continue engaging in meaningless, pseudo-funerals.
As Sharon notes, “a great many things worth grieving over are truly dead, and we never even wept for them.” The pseudo-funerals will continue, and as collapse exacerbates, they will most certainly proliferate. Our challenge, however, is to engage in authentic funerals of the moment and water our transitions with tears that clear our eyes and our minds to envision and establish a new paradigm.
