[Oe List ...] [Dialogue] Four Gates of Grief

[James Wiegel]

Saw this this morning

There is a woman across cultures, called by different names in different stories, who is weeping without being able to stop. Day and night, and for centuries now, she cries ceaselessly. In the old Mexican stories, she is La Llorona, in ancient Greece, she is Niobe. And, honestly, I’m so glad to know her: To know that in every corner of the world, there is a universal Weeping Woman who carries the grief of the world and weeps for the children and for what has been lost, and weeps over betrayal and injustice and over the madness of power.  She is a grief-bearer who won’t stop weeping even after she is turned to stone, like Niobe, by those who are tired of her tears. But now the stone weeps- it’s still there, weeping, on Mt. Sipylus! 

It is simply the Weeping Woman’s job, endlessly: To not deny the grief of the world, to not be afraid to feel it. To carry even the grief of those who have hardened their shell against feeling, beyond recognition. 

I love her even more now when we need her so badly. She gives us permission to feel the bottomless grief of our world– but also the responsibility to not drown in it: Because, like the stories tell us, grief like that flows to make rivers and oceans, but it also must flow through our bodies & hearts, and when it does– when a grief is felt and moved and loved inside us–  it’s an unstoppable force, a purifying deluge, a power that guides us to action, but from the tenderest parts of our hearts!

I recently brought up Weeping Woman in a workshop I was holding, and the first thing in the room was Resistance.  ‘No, I don’t want to go there now…I’ve been a weeping woman before, why touch that again...’  But when we moved with her, we were made new. There was an indescribable tenderness in us and in the space, from which something very precious and gentle was being born.

What I’m saying is, we need Weeping Woman right now. She tells us we all share the responsibility to carry the collective grief, to be made more deeply human by it. To turn to our ‘enemies’ and opponents with a heart rendered harmless by the love hidden in grief. To listen to the guidance of the griefs that so many of us carry.  Because, at the end, like Niobe’s tears that now flow from the rock into which she was turned and make everything green with life again, our own grief- undenied- might be the only way for us to grow something new and precious, and hopeful. 
~

If it so happens that you need a space for this, I am holding an online Weeping Woman journey in a couple of weeks- stories, movement, and the truth of the heart. Open to all, and no one turned away.

deepbody.org/mythicwoman

Jim Wiegel
“…the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come and let us talk“. 

The Sunflowers. Mary Oliver


> On Nov 3, 2023, at 5:56 AM, Mary Kurian D'Souza <marykdsouza at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>>> On 03-Nov-2023, at 5:48 PM, James Wiegel via Dialogue <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
>>> 
>> Thanks, Karen, thanks, Ellie
>> 
>> Calmly??  
>> 
>> Ellie, that whole poem was just sitting inside you and out it came?  What amazing people there are in this world!  Wasn't there a conversation on tears somewhere in our past??  And still  . . .
>> 
>> For me, a bunch of recollections came up -- I recalled being with my father when he died, and the day in Brussels when the large trees rimming the garden were trimmed way, way down -- and the looks of grief on colleagues faces watching the trimming happen and the time I facilitated a Practical Vision workshop (in Maliwada, as I recall) and it started slowly and then the visions were just bubbling forth -- a preschool, healthy food, a new well, employment, . . . And then, towards the end of the naming, and the group got very quiet and very serious and sort of sad . . . And I worried that I had done something to offend . . . So I asked -- I think it was Rukminibhai, what happened, had I done some clumsy, inappropriate thing -- and she said, "This was exciting, but it is not as though we haven't thought of and dreamed of those things before . . . So often, when we have, they haven't happened -- we were defeated, deflected, blocked . . . And that reminder is what brought up the sadness in us . . --  and I thought about contradictions . . 
>> 
>> My sister and I talk on the phone each week so I sent her your emails, and some of my reflections and said I wanted to talk a bit about grief and memories of deaths in our family.  This was interesting to me -- at the start of our call, she enumerated the artefacts she had assembled to surround her as we talked -- an opal ring from Mother, a gold chain with a cross from Grandma, remembrance of a handkerchief belonging to my sister which Mother had placed in Grandma's casket . . .  
>> 
>> Jim Wiegel
>> “We are all time travelers journeying into the future. But let us make that future a place we want to visit. “       Stephen Hawking
>> 
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