Francis Weller: The Wild Edge of Sorrow

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Like many of you, sorrow has entered my life in a myriad of ways - and it wasn't until I read Francis Weller's book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, that I began a soulful relationship with grief.

Francis Weller is a psychotherapist, author and wise elder who extends an invitation for us to remember what it means to be a Human Being.

During this rich conversation, Francis offers beautiful perspectives on sorrow, shame, vitality, beauty making, depression and the “Five Gates of Grief”. 

May we all undertake an “apprenticeship with sorrow” and come closer to living and loving more fully. 

Love, Jono

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• Transcription of Episode

  Jono [Intro]: Thanks for joining me today, and welcome to the second episode in the Medicine of Grief Podcast season. Like many of you, sorrow has entered my life in a myriad of ways, and to be honest, it wasn't until I read Francis Weller's book about 10 years ago entitled The Wild Edge of Sorrow that I began a healthier and more importantly, a more soulful relationship with grief.
  
  Francis Weller is a psychotherapist, author, soul activist and a true elder in our culture. Someone who extends a deep invitation for us to remember what it means to be a human being again. And during this rich conversation Francis offers beautiful perspectives on sorrow, shame, vitality, beauty making, depression and the five gates of grief.
  
  So after 10 years since first reading Francis's book, here we are in conversation together. And to be honest, there's no one I'd rather listen to about grief than Francis Weller.
  
  Unfortunately, due to some wifi difficulties, the quality of the audio is lower than usual. However, trust me, this conversation is well worth the listen. And in some ways this audio reminds me of listening to a recording on a cassette tape, a time, you know, 20 to 30 years ago when it was a treat to even hear a recorded talk. And so in that spirit, I'd invite you to come in close, really lean in and listen to the words of one of the true elders in our world.
  
  And I hope you really enjoy this conversation. And if you're interested in participating in our online grief tending rituals, be sure to come on over and visit. jonofishernow.com. Thanks again for listening and being here today.
  
  [Interview Commences] Jono: Well, Francis, welcome to the conversation. Before we begin, just want to say how thrilled I am to be able to introduce you to this community. There are probably many who already know of your work, and yet for myself, it's been probably 10 years traveling with you, from afar and probably the last five years more so in depth. And I think I just want to begin the conversation by just honoring your devotion and your fidelity to your lineage.
  
  Francis: Yeah.
  
  Jono: Yeah, as I was in the shower this morning, reflecting on this relationship that I've had with you from afar, I was reflecting on being in different “industries” in my life. I've been in the mindfulness industry, the kind of positive psychology world, and I've always felt something very different when I've encountered your work, a different kind of satisfaction.
  
  And yeah, I'm just curious to know what arises for you when I talk about the differences in the world of kind of psychology and mindfulness and the path of soul that you so beautifully occupy?
  
  Francis: Hmm, thank you. That's a good question. What I've tried to track this month, I celebrate 40 years as a therapist. So in that span of time, what has really drawn my attention has been the ways that soul manifests in the individual and the community, in the culture on the planet. And trying not to get too caught up in the dynamics of self, but how does self, what is the self's relationship to the soul?
  
  Soul is kind of the orphaned child in, western psychological frameworks. There's a lot of focus on self-development, self-growth, mastery's a big word, agency, and these are all wonderful things. I have nothing against them.
  
  But what gets excluded almost entirely is the dimensions of soul, which is the territory of dissent, of depth, of grief, of vulnerability. It brings in territories of weakness and insecurity of dependency, of the inferiors, the ones that don't match the heroic imagery that were given over and over and over again in our focus on self and development.
  
  So that's kind of what I've been called to. It's not like I chose that, you know, I have always been taken into the territories of shame, grief, weakness, defeat. I'm the fun guy at the party. Those are, those are my topic. So, you know, and I can't get away from it. I always said that that's what's claimed to me, and I, I like the words you use. I have tried to carry a fidelity to this thread, and to speak on behalf of soul and the culture and to write on behalf of soul.
  
  I try to find language and imagery and the poetic imagination to speak on behalf of what is for the most part, neglected in our psychological frames. Very little psyche and psychology, very little soul in psychology these days. So I'm trying to give voice to that.
  
  I think when in my preface to my book of The Wild Edge of Sorrow. I say that, one of my intentions is to bring grief back to soul work and soul back to grief work, because even the work of grief has become clinical.
  
  And you know, how do we resolve this? How do we solve.. well, grief isn't a problem to solve. It's an encounter with soul and soul's deep affection and love for another. Whether that's a watershed or a tree, a beloved animal friend, a partner, a child, or the earth itself.
  
  We grieve because we love, not because somehow there's something wrong. It goes wrong when the needs of the soul are not being provided for community ritual, the sacred , imagination, witnessing. That's when we get into trouble. And in our highly individualistic culture and highly self-centered culture, we've been asked to carry grief all by ourselves.
  
  That's when it becomes problematic. That's when it becomes overwhelming to the psyche, to the soul, and we lead. And then we have to go in the directions of drugs or, alcohol or distractions, numbness, the two primary sins of the culture as I've described them, are amnesia and anesthesia. That we have forgotten what it means to be a communal creature and to track the ways that soul has forever processed the material of grief, which has been communal, and the anesthesia arises out of our amnesia. We can't tolerate the degrees of isolation and privatization that we've been asked to carry our suffering within. So we have to anesthetize, we have to find ways to distract and numb and distance ourself from our grief.
  
  Jono: When you talk about soul Francis, and grief as a doorway for reclaiming soul, could you share with our listeners what you actually mean by soul? Coz I think in the same way of psychology, there's so many different ways people perceive different words.
  
  Francis: It's a loaded word, no doubt. How I'm using it is more in the dimension of what you could say would be an indigenous quality not a, not a religious, mystical or metaphysical quality, but, a way of experiencing ourselves as creatures of death is a beautiful little poem by, Juan Ramon Jimenez.
  
  He says, “I am not I, I am this one walking beside me, whom at times I manage to remember and at others, I forget. The one who remains silent when I speak, the one who forgives sweet, when I hate the one who walks outdoors when I remain inside, the one who remains standing when I die.”
  
  So, I'm interested in this other, that walks beside us. See, soul doesn't want to fit in. Soul wants to be fully articulated and it wants full participation. And what I love about how I understand soul from like the romantic traditions, the poetic traditions, the indigenous traditions, my teachers are young and Hillman's my primary teacher around soul, James Hillman, is that soul has no qualms with any encounter of the human experience. So it's perfectly at home with weakness or inadequacy, shame, grief, those are all simply the materials of a life. Whereas the heroic ideal of the ego self is trying to get rid of huge portions of ourselves to try to fit into the ideal of the culture. Strong, competent, basically not needing much of anything from anybody, self-reliant. Again, those are not bad qualities. But what happens when I'm not feeling that way? What happens when my child has died or what happens when I see what's happening to the world around me? And the fact that there are no saving come up, shame that makes me wanna weep right now. Where do I take that if I have to be strong, you know, capable, always in control.
  
  So that's what I love about the permission of soul, is it says this is a true expression of being human just as much as joy is and happiness. Now to grieve together, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've led close to 100 grief rituals over the last many decades, and there's something so reparative to our Western, particularly our white, western, industrialized technological society.
  
  To gather together and circle, to sing together, to weave together side by side as we've always done it, to see tears weeping, you know, in the person next to, to hear the lament coming out of another heart. It is so healing.
  
  So when I talk about soul, I'm talking about that dimension of experience, that kind of encounter that is deeply archetypally, soulfully human. And at the end of these rituals, frequently someone will say something like, you know, I've never done anything like that before in my life, but this felt oddly familiar. It's as if we are remembering what Carl Yung called the “unforgotten wisdom at the core of the soul”, that we are wired for this kind of encounter to be with others when we're dealing with our grief, no matter what the source of that grief is.
  
  We all know a loss. I mean, everybody we meet on the street is a carrier of sorrow, but where do we take that in a heroic culture? I don't know if I answered your question at all, but that's how I'm carrying it. So..
  
  Jono: And when you feel into these times that we're in, times when it sometimes feels like we're in a constant state of grief in a way with the exposure that we have to so much loss and so much sadness, I'm curious to know why it's more important than ever, I guess, to be returning to soul, to be returning to grief at, in these particular times, you referred earlier to this long dark. Could you speak a little more about that?
  
  Francis: What I mean by the long dark, first of all is that we have entered a time period of dissent. We are not in a period of rising. This is not a time of ascension and growth. We are in a time of decay, a time of going down into the underworld collectively. And I don't mean that negatively. I think there's profound things that happen only in the dark.
  
  So by necessity, I think the Anima Mundi - the soul of the world, we are entering into this time of dissent by it's almost like a requirement. In the alchemical traditions, they would call this time of the negredo, the blackening, and the negredo was called the subtle dissolver. Well, this isn't so subtle now, but we're in a process of dissolution, old structures like patriarchy, white supremacy, sexism, domination, consumption. These are not sustainable structures. They have to fall apart. And so this time of dissent is a time where the old structures, the old paradigms, the old patterns of living have to be undone. And we're going into this time, not necessarily by choice, but by circumstance, when you know we're watching the climate catastrophe unfold in front of our eyes.
  
  These things are, at this point, almost unstoppable. We don't know what's gonna happen, but much of this will happen beyond our ability to think our way through it, to figure it out, to have some technological fix. We're gonna have to rely on a more soul approach, which is this thing. Humility.

  You know, there's a term out of the Inuit tradition called Qarrtsiluni, and it has to do with the, in the depths of the winter, the whale hunters would gather and sit in absolute darkness. So the word Qarrtsiluni means sitting quietly together in the dark, waiting expectedly for something to occur. And what they're waiting for is the song of the whale to come to someone in that circle, cuz they can't go to the hunt until they are gifted with the Song of the Whale, one of them saying, you may take me for your people. We don't know how to listen much. We march through every circumstance. We march into it with our arrogance.
  
  And so right now, what grief is doing and what soul is doing is taking us to our knees and putting us in that place of humility and listening. We had to enter the long dark. I wrote the preface for a powerful book by Duane Elgin called Choosing Earth. And Duane looks at the next five decades through the 2070’s and what most likely will occur. And it is scary. And I wrote in that preface that grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future. And the long dark implies that it's not gonna be a matter of months or years. But most likely decades and possibly generations before we even get a clue that something might germinate in this darkness. That's the prayer, right? That in this dark time in the underworld, that the seeds that are there are given enough warmth and enough attention through our tears and through our prayers that they germinate into something for the generations to come. And this is the first time we've talked about the possibility that there won't be generations to come. How heartbreaking is that?
  
  The other thing I would say about the necessity of this work right now is that if we don't do this grief work, our hearts will close, because the amount of what's coming at us is just too overwhelming. We're not wired for 24 hour a day trauma. You know, incursions from around the world are getting inundated by this information.
  
  What grief work does is it allows the grief to keep moving again from alchemy. There's this idea that the material in the vessel must be kept warm so that it can continue to move and change and mutate into what it wants to become. But if we ignore our grief, if we do not touch it with the warmth of our attention and the warmth of communal gatherings, that grief will turn cold and harden and congeal, and it will not move, and our hearts will become frozen. And then who will respond to the world?
  
  So I call this soul activism, that this is really a soul responsibility. This is our responsibility to register the sorrows of the world. To drink the tears of the world and to keep loving this world as a consequence found myself saying many times that it may be grief that saves our ass and maybe the broken heart that once again falls in love with the world. We're not gonna do this out of moralism like we should. We should help the Earth, tried that. It's gonna happen out of information. We got all the information we need. What's gonna happen?
  
  What's gonna help possibly is the broken heart, the heart that remembers its fidelity to the world, to the local watershed, to the generations to come. Then we might stand a chance of living into something emerging out of the long dark, and we can't do this without grief work.
  
  Jono: Hmm. I can so relate to that kind of hardening experience that you refer to when grief isn't tended to. I, for many years, nearly in a semi kind of disturbing way to myself. I used to cry easily as a young, as a younger person, even up into my, I'm, I'm 50 now, but up to early forties.
  
  And then there came a time when tears weren't easily easy to come by and I can probably trace, you know, this distancing that began to happen within myself toward pain, toward what I was witnessing. And I could feel it, particularly in retrospect, like a drying up inside, you know, feeling like the moisture had kind of left my system.
  
  And I think that's why your work has meant so much to me, because I haven't have very rarely seen work presented in such a beautiful way that encourages and coaxes, the softening, you know, and the returning to difficulty and pain in communal settings. And yeah, I'm just, I'm just reflecting as you talk of just that difference that has occurred inside my system.
  
  And I think I might have mentioned to you that I have a dear friend who, we've been reading your book for a number of years, and often, we'll we, we've been away on, on a vacation or something and, you know, at a, at breakfast and we say, should we bring Francis to the, to breakfast? You know, and, we'll bring your book and we'll quote pieces. But the reason I bring that up is that he, there are many times when I've been able to share with him how I am doing, and you know what I'm actually saying? The content of what I'm saying isn't that great? You know, it's often indicative of maybe things falling apart or things really not going great. But his comments are so much is, you sound so well.
  
  Francis: Mm-hmm.
  
  Jono: You sound so well.
  
  Francis: Mm-hmm.
  
  Jono: And, and I, and I know I can trace that comment back to your work that he can see that I'm just touching what I need to touch. And so I, yeah, I thank you even for the identifying of the hardening that occurs when we are distant.
  
  Francis: Yeah. Yeah. I'm very touched by that. Thank you, Jono. I like knowing that we've been in a long conversation. Yeah.

  Jono: Francis, I'm curious too about your personal relationship. You know, I know a little about you, but for people to know, how did you come to this, how did your relationship with grief begin personally? But I also know you've had encounters with people and places that have also activated this within you. Would you mind sharing a little of your story as to how you've come to this place and been claimed in the way that you refer?

  Francis: Yeah. It's been a difficult claiming. It's like you don't volunteer for the job. You know, you, you get drafted. And, so really, the grief has been around me and circulating around me for almost my entire life.
  
  My father had a massive stroke in my early teens, and I was the youngest of eight kids. And there was such a quality of just surviving, just dealing with the details of the world, you know, but that shattered something for me, but I had no place to take that. And then he never spoke again and died some years later but the biggest loss that I dealt with was the loss of me. I felt like my sense of being was so diminished by the time I left my home and came to California at 22 that I had no idea how to be human anymore.
  
  I had scraped apart so many parts of me to try to fit in that I was told were not acceptable. My joy, my grief, my sadness, my anger, my sensuality, my exuberance. So many pieces of me had to be cleaved out in order to be appropriate, to be approvable by church, by schools, by family, you know, the whole systems of, you know, enculturation.

  I remember an event that happened some years ago. I was at a continuing education class , and I saw two people that I had lived with, for a little while along with my, my first wife and I saw them and I thought, should I talk to them? You know, such a messy breakup between the four of us.
  
  And so I went up and said hello. And we sat down, she said, let's have lunch together. So we sat down and she started talking to me. She said, Francis, why did you leave us? We loved you so much. You were our brother, you were our family. And she started listing off all these events that happened. And then she looked at me and says, do you have anything to say, and I say, “Marilyn, I don't remember the single event that you mentioned. I wasn't there.”
  
  I was performing Francis. I was being the good husband. I was being the good boy. I was just trying to not get killed.
  
  And that abandonment, that moment of just sitting with that truth that I wasn't there. I remember saying to my wife, now that, You know, when I turned 40, that's when we met and began to be in relationship, just the amount of grief I carry, that I lost four decades, I lost 40 years of my life to be something that was expected of me. So that grief, just, I can't, I can't tell this story without just feeling the amount of loss that is there for me and then beginning to be a therapist.
  
  Another thread of that grief work, is when you sit with people for any length of time, you realize that the vast majority of what you're doing is acknowledging loss, loss of childhoods, loss of families, loss of marriages, loss of jobs, loss of, you know, everything circulates somewhat around loss and if the agenda is always of improvement, then you keep bypassing the law.

  And then something happened in the early 1990s. I was introduced to some work that really profoundly affected me, ritual work. And I began to see the possibility of offering a different context to address what had always been a communal process. You know, you go, you know, I, I often jokingly say, well, we go to private practice to talk about our grief, and you go to see your therapist about your grief, which is fine. You know, I hope you keep going. I encourage people to go, and what I say to the people who come in my office, I say, this is a good place to begin, tolerate contact around your sorrow, but at some point, You will need a bigger holding vessel for your grief work. You will need community around you, cuz that's what the soul expects.
  
  We are shaped by thousands, hundreds of thousands of years to expect many pairs of eyes holding us in times of loss. And we get one set of eyes looking back at us across the chair and oftentimes a kind of a detached way. So that third, spoke on that wheel of bringing grief into communal work was a profound impact on my life and I've been doing grief rituals since 1997.

  Jono: And you went to Africa at some point?

  Francis: I did. I did. I spent some time in my friend's Village. And they, there's grief work happening. Not grief. It's not grief work, it's just grief. You know? It's just when you're living in a culture that can't insulate you from loss, you have to deal with it. We have entire industries in this culture to keep us away from the possibility of confronting loss. We put our elderly on reservations, we call them, you know, retirement communities.
  
  But, there's no death in the public eye that happens, you know, in a sanitized situation in the hospital, we have no direct connection to death, to loss. So when it comes near us, it terrifies the s**t out of us. But in the village in Africa where I spent some time, there was a grief ritual happening almost every day someplace. And I remember walking up to one woman and saying, you have so much joy. I was just like, wow, you have so much joy. And her immediate response was, and “that's because I grieved a lot”. I mean, how amazing is that?
  
  It's not because I keep myself busy. It's not because I shop a lot, not because I just bought a new car, or no, almost because there's a direct correlation between grief and joy. I describe our culture as kind of a flat line culture where we have, we're, we're given a very narrow band of emotions that we're allowed to occupy. So we've abandoned the lower register of sorrow, vulnerability, tenderness, grief, and so the upper register of Joy has collapsed. And so her response was that in the absolute embodiment of what I was thinking, that the upper register of sorrow is there, the upper register is absolutely accessible. They have more joy in a day than I think we do in a year.

  We substitute excitement for joy, stimulation for joy. We don't know much about joy in this picture, but we know a lot about stimulation, whether that's through drugs or high risk behavior, or bungee jumping or roller coasters. It's like we need stimulation to see if we have a pulse. But that was the happiest I've ever been, in a sense in the most envious I think I've ever been, was watching what happened daily in the rounds of the village. How every night at dusk, the common area would swell with 60 to 80 people. There were multiple compounds around there. About 60 or 80 people would gather to share millet beer and food and laughter, and there'd be arguments and, you know, watching the children, I didn't know who belonged to whom until at the very end they'd probably fall asleep on the ground and they'd be picked up. And any child that was nursing would go to any mother with milk. It's not like, that's not my child. These are our children.
  
  And what that would do to the soul of an individual in this culture to know that I will be cared for. You wouldn't have to try to fabricate yourself like I did if you knew that you were always welcome, that you, you belonged. The grief we carry around what I call the fourth gate of grief, what we expected and did not receive. We expected that. That's why I was so in, that's what we expected. And almost none of that is materialized in this, again, rugged individual culture that you're basically on your own, good luck, you know?

  So yeah, that time there was profoundly impactful on my psyche to see what it looked like to be reasonably intact. I mean, western culture's still impacting on them as well as most every tribal community on the planet, but they still carry the remnants of what it means to live communally and to live around ritual as their primary language and their primary means of dealing with the inevitable encounters of loss, death, injury, conflict, initiation.
  
  Those things, the rounds of being human, were still being addressed in a shared, communal way. And those are the things that we have completely, almost entirely abandoned. And the consequence of that is a profound emptiness that we should be weeping into other than trying to fill it with wealth and power and rank and privilege. These false substitutes, when they call secondary satisfactions, can never make up for what the soul primarily wants, which is connection, belonging, participation, vulnerability, intimacy, shared rituals of grieving, shared rituals of gratitude in thanksgiving, times, you know, to tend to the whitewater of initiation for adolescence. All the things that we should be tending communally has created a ravenous hole etched in most of us, and that really I think it is at the heart of all of us, I believe.

  Jono: I remember being actually in Colorado and I was invited to a grief ritual with people who have actually been very influenced by your work. And it was such a moment for me of coming back to something, coming back to what you would refer to as these primary satisfactions and to be in the room of people weeping, holding one another, wailing and dancing and singing, and there was a electricity, I would probably say kind of going through my body and an aliveness that stayed with me for so long. That was a real turning point for me in recognizing what was missing in this solo world of learning.

  Francis: Mm-hmm.

  Jono: And once again, I don't wanna diminish that, but it was like, here I am sitting in the midst of wisdom coming at me from every direction and everything at my fingertips. And yet it was all being done alone and I never got to know anyone really. I never really got to feel and experience what was happening, and people never really got to experience the depth of what was happening for me. And yet in this, these, this two or three hour ceremony, this ritual, I felt closer to these people than I'd felt with, you know, with probably anyone in a very long time. And, and I knew nothing of them, you know, of their biographies and, you know, and I it just, you know, that was my Africa

  Francis: Yeah.

  Jono: In a way, you know, that that introduction to, gosh, this is, this is so foreign, so familiar and so restorative that, yeah, I just wanna share that, that, that that's what comes up for me when you share your Africa story.

  Francis: Hmm. Thank you. I like that. We talked about feeling the current. Because I think that's one of the beauties that comes out of grief work is it gets us current, in many senses of that word, most of our lives are felt. We feel like we're kind of just digesting the past. You know, we don't get to get current. We're always chewing on old bones, sometimes bones of our ancestors, generations of undigested material. And that has to happen. But part of why, you know, the persistent working with grief is that we begin to become current actually in this moment and also in the current of life, the electricity of life, and also in the flow of life. So that word has multiple meanings.
  
  So to do grief work gets you current and it also plugs you into the current electricity of life. I felt more joy in these past many years than I did in my first 40 for sure. Absolutely. Because the heart just keeps being emptied of the sorrow. And when you say, you know, we become close of our original, what's usually last three days, but we do this not just for ourselves.
  
  We do this so we can love this world more ardently so we can show up on the streets. We can look into the eyes of the young ones who are carrying so much fear and despair and grief and say, I see you and not turn away. We do this for all of that. And we know that tomorrow when we leave here, our hearts emptied and free, that we will begin to gather more. Cuz that is the way of saying, every day we will encounter loss and grief and sorrow from all around us, whether it's roadkill or the news of Turkey and Syria or whatever it is, we will be witnesses to grief.

  And so that's the beauty and the wisdom of Indigenous culture is the repetition of ritual they know they don't just do it once. And so what we did that, you know, we're done, we're good with that. It's the repetition to know in your bones that in a week's time, we will be gathering again, like the San-Bushmen. Every week, four times a month, they gather for a healing ritual to touch into what is happening in the community, who's not well, what's troubling somebody. They're always being tinted to imagine knowing that you won't be isolated and alone when trouble finds you because it will find you.

  So when we do our grief work, I often talk about the idea of thinking like a village, rather than a collective of individuals in the room. You know, 40 individual, solitary individuals. We are going to begin to dream into the possibility of, for this short amount of time, like you just said, in that few hours you felt some, some coherence between you and the others without all that narrative. But the transparency that comes when you show yourself so clearly to another human being.
  
  There's no question to ask about, well, how are you feeling? You know, you can witness it. And in that moment, you, you are known and seen in that moment. So this idea of thinking like a village means that, well, when we start this ritual on Saturday afternoon or whatever, it's hard to grieve on demand. You know, it's hard to say, well, it's now, you know, it's time. Let's, let's go. But somebody in the circle might grieve today. And if I'm there to support them, I know full well that the next time we gather, I might be the one down there on my knees and you'll be there for me because every one of us will know all roles in the ritual singing the welcome back for holding the grieving.
  
  We all know all these roles from time to time, and it's wonderful to see how even those who didn't grieve at a particular grief ritual, they feel different at the end of it. Because we wept, the village wept, and when the village weeps, all of us go home feeling different. We go home feeling reassured that next time I will.

  I needed three grief rituals before I share my first here. I was a packed white male. I, I just, you know, I knew I needed to be there, but I just couldn't get over that threshold. And at the third ritual, I go, here we go again. You know, nothing. And someone came up and put their hand on my shoulder. And said, are you all right? Instantaneously for hours, I was on my knees. That's all I needed was the invitation, the permission, the encouragement to fall, to fall, to go down.
  
  So, yeah, that's, that's a lot of what we need to get our minds around is how do we think like a village, how do we reimagine our mutual dependency, our entanglement with one another, and rely upon that to hold each other in times of inevitable trouble, as we're saying in this long dark. There's gonna be no way to avoid this. Whether it's climate refugees, or the coastlines disappearing, or glaciers disappearing or species disappearing. This is not gonna be an easy season that we're entering. And we want to know how to approach this. This is what I call taking up our apprenticeship with sorrow because it's, there's no way around this, at this point. No amount of TV or apps or anything is gonna insulate us from the collective grief that's coming that's already here.

  And that's not to say that there won't be an abundance of joy and beauty. Those are, those are what help us stay open to grief. You know, I tell people all the time, and that's why when we gather for rituals, one of the core focuses is on the generation of beauty. We sing a lot with our rituals all weekend long. We're singing, singing, singing, singing, singing. And we generate these beautiful shrines. I mean, they're exquisite shrines because it pleases the soul, it invokes the soul. And it's also one of those beautiful medicinal tonics that allow us to stay in the fierce heat of grief. You know, beauty is a necessary help.

  Jono: Yeah. I was speaking with someone just recently and the image of the storm cycle came to my mind of the clouds gathering, of the rain falling. And that feeling, that and that smell after the rain, which I'm sure you are probably going to be feeling and smelling in days to come.
  
  But it reminds me of that quality of post tears, there is a nearly a smell, nearly a feeling, an atmosphere that's, you know, the soil's darker, the plants are greener and more vital. The air has got more moisture in it. And, yeah. And I love that you can always connect this grief or sorrow with joy and vitality and yeah, there's nothing depressing for me about grief. Like it's the complete opposite. And you've often spoken about that depression. Can you, can you talk a little bit of it, because it's so prevalent in our culture, you know, anxiety, depression, and, and not wanting to minimize that in any way, but you have a certain perspective on that.

  Francis: Yeah, I, I think depression arises out of that feeling of that absence of what it is we expected. You know, and it also arises out of a very reduced experience and encounter of participation with life.
  
  We're basically conditioned to earn a living, you know, make a paycheck, you know, pay a mortgage possibly, or a rent or and then, you know, blow it off on the weekends. And that's supposed to somehow comprise a meaningful life. Meaningful workers are really important. But the soul came for a much grander sense of participation and the great round of life to feel that it was invited to give its gift away.
  
  So the question rarely is, well, the question is usually what do you do for a living, which is a job question, rather than what do you do to sustain life, which is a soul question. What is it that your soul came here to give away? You know, what's the gift you arrived with? And that question is almost never asked. And consequently, we feel chronologically insignificant. We don't feel like we matter. And that's a lot of what our depression is. We just feel superfluous. You know, we're just part of a machinery.

  The other part of that depression, I understand from, again, James Hillman had this brilliant thought. He said, “depression is often the soul's refusal to match the manic pace of culture.” We live in a manic culture driven by speed, and speed is lethal to the soul. And so it's the soul's way of saying, I'm not gonna go another step, I'm stopping right here. I'm gonna take you to your needs until you can begin to live in a rhythm that is much more hospitable to soul, to community, to beauty, to creativity, to imagination. All those things I passed and this rapid fire. And I watch sometimes my grandchildren, you know, they're well conditioned already by school systems to rely heavily upon the device. And it's as if the imagination has been replaced by the product, the picture of the image for you. And I, I'm very leery of the impact long term. What this means for the welfare of the souls of our children and our grandchildren who are, this is just like breathing to them now, is to be on the devices. And I know I have judgements about that. I have fear about that and great concern.

  So another thing that Hillman says about symptoms and like depression and anxiety said in your symptoms are your soul's deepest desires. So psychology's there to try to get rid of symptoms like depression, you know, addiction or anxiety. And I understand I, I've seen the hardship that these things cause absolutely. What, what if in the getting rid of them we've also silenced the soul's deepest desires and we're no longer hearing what the soul wants from our lives, which would be the thing that adds depth, meaning a sense of the sacred, you know, a sense of belonging and participation come through that lens of experience. And so I tell people when they come into my office, and I'm careful with this, I often say, you know, I don't have a lot of interest in making you feel better, but I have a deep interest in is listening to hear what your soul is saying to you and the symptoms that brought you in the room. If we can listen carefully enough to what your depression is saying to you, we might catch a scent of what it is that your soul is saying this way, let's go this way. This is what's missing. This is what we have to tend to. We have neglected so much of our soulful lives. You know, so many elements of the soul have been basically just abandoned almost entirely. I trust the center.

  Jono: I underlined before our conversation, a piece from your book. That I hear you really referring to now. Can I read this to you? And get your thoughts because it really, when I read this, it, struck me so deeply, and even as I read it now, I wonder if this is kind of happening in our world, “seen from an indigenous perspective, the grief we experience at this gate, which I believe was the second gate, the places that have not known love is a form of soul loss, a condition that occurs when the desire for life, the feeling of being alive, becomes so blunted that death becomes appealing and depression a way of life. Every day in my practice, I encounter individuals struggling with isolation, despair, and meaninglessness to traditional people. Soul loss was without doubt, the most dangerous condition a human being could face. It compromises our vital energy, decreases joy and passion, diminishes our aliveness and our capacity for wonder and awe,saps our voice and courage, and ultimately erodes our desire to live. We become disenchanted and despondent.”

  When I read that, I see so much of it everywhere and this notion of soul loss is one of my kind of deepest sadness, you know, to, you know, I've, I've often even recently been looking at early photography of indigenous, the aborigines of this country. And as I look in these photos and I look into the eyes of these people, you know, there's so much aliveness there and a completely different look on the face than what I see on the faces of people today.
  
  I just wanted to bring it into the conversation, this idea of soul loss and also the connection to grief being an opportunity to reclaim soul. And, it's, it's also really why I wanted to speak to you, Francis, because although there are others in this series talking about different perspectives on grief, I feel like what you have to offer when it comes to soul is really the center of it all. Mm-hmm.

  Francis: Well, we can tie in the piece around depression with this thought about soul loss. To traditional people, depression was not the problem. Depression is the symptom, the problem is soul loss. That when you lose connection to the vital essence of your being, the thing that animates anima, what's the Latin word for soul? The thing that animates you, if you're disconnected with that, you're left with a shell, with a husk, with a feeling of emptiness and depression, that's just symptomology.
  
  We treat the depression, but we don't go further than the depression to ask what is it that has been lost in this person's life? Or why is it that collectively, again, I'm talking about this culture, but again, white Western culture, which I know also falls over into Australia. What is it about the ways that we live that create that feeling of despondency, of emptiness that fragment us so much that we suffer from soul loss?

  There's a term out of the Tibetan tradition called soklung, s o k l u n g, and I got this from a man named Rob Preece who wrote a book called Feeling Wisdom. And he was sharing a story about bringing his, he was a psychotherapist about also Tibetan meditation teacher. And he brought some of his teachers over from Tibet to live here and teach. And over time, what these monks saw was something they called, which they called soklung, which they said was a blockage or damage to the primary energy winds of the heart chakra.
  
  And I love that image that implied in that is there's supposed to be a current of exchange, the primary energy winds of the heart chakra for what is most interior, what is most deeply me is meant to engage in the breath of the world and the breath of the world is, is meant to enter me. But they said there was this blockage and damage to this primary energy wind, and it was caused by premature separation from the mother. An often absent father, premature focus on independence, with the idea of basically self-sufficiency and self dependency and there's other conditions that brought this about. But when what we expect doesn't take shape, there's almost a traumatic impact to the soul on that.

  And trauma is really oftentimes is what gives rise to soul loss, soul fragmentation when there's so much pain, so much, neglect. It's what I call slow trauma when there's that absence of touch and, welcoming and affection and warmth and holding in times of trouble. And so many of us have carried that trauma into our adulthoods. That creates a condition in which the soul begins to distance itself.
  
  So one of the rituals that has come to me over the years is this extraordinary reclaiming ritual that we've done many times now, and it arises out of an experience I have, which I think is too long to probably tell right now. But, at some point in the experience that I had, I was told by these ancestral beings that you must gather together all that has been made non sacred, that was their injunction to me. You must gather together all that has been made non sacred. And so I thought in that moment, God, all these parts of my life that have been not sacred, my, like I said before, my anger, my joy, my sadness, my exuberance, my sin, all those things have been made not sacred, but how do I gather them together? And then there was another event that happened that showed me how to do it. And I thought I had done it. But then about six months or a year later, I have this dream. And in the dream the voices are saying to me, you, that was not meant for you alone. This is the work of your people. You must all gather together what's been made not sacred. And I was shown this reclaiming ritual. And the intention of the reclaiming ritual is that since we don't have the shamans anymore, we don't have those, you know, those intranets and go into these other worlds and gather fragmented pieces of soul back that we have become the healer going off … saying that the next Buddha would not come as an individual, but as a community. Well, the next healers I think are going to be communities, not individuals.

  So this ritual, we have a place called the Wasteland, where people bring an object to speak to one part of their soul life that's been lost to them. Could be their voice, their power, their sense of, value, whatever it is, and they're filling the wasteland with these objects.
  
  And then the ritual is you go down there and you've been preparing for this ritual over many weeks, and you're basically imploring this piece to come home. It's a grief ritual in form. You are displaying your longing for this piece to come home. But again, you've been cooking this for weeks, so this isn't just a drop by and do this, and they'll come home with you. You've been looking for this for a long time. So when this piece comes back, you come through another threshold and you put this piece on a shrine of beauty where it has belonged all along. And there's another bunch of weeping that happens there for this homecoming.
  
  But then you realize that every piece that's coming home is for you too. So it's a communal soul retrieval and it is damn beautiful to gather together. To begin, you know, you must gather together. All has been made, non sacred. You know, it's just, it's so healing to begin to, oh yeah, I missed that piece too and that piece. Thank you for bringing that home. I need that too, to be a whole human being, you know? And we support one another and the embodiment of this. Return, return, return..

  Jono: Francis, I'm imagining, and I have experienced myself, when I first heard of grief, I immediately went to, maybe death or sickness. And it really wasn't until I encountered your work that I began to see the many ways that grief arrives in our lives.
  
  And I think your great gift is this articulation of these gates, these five gates of grief. And I was wondering if we could spend a little bit of time you just running us through these gates. Because I think in themselves, they provide an invitation that a one-dimensional idea of grief maybe doesn't

  Francis: Hmm.

  Jono: You know, no one's died, so why should I be grieving? You know?

  Francis: Right, right, right. That's, that's, you said that very well, Jono, that now these slowly emerged from sitting with circles of people over time, over many years. You began to see. What's showing up in the circle isn't always about the death of someone you loved or the loss of something you love, like a home or a pet.
  
  There are many other articulations of loss, so, these gates became a way to give people an appreciation for, you may not have lost somebody, but why am I feeling so heavy? I mean, the word grief comes from that Latin word gravis, which being heavy. So there's a certain quality of density, of heaviness, of gravity, that's pulling on many of us because all of the four forms of grief that are circulating around us constantly, and if we don't recognize them or express them and begin to accrete and accumulate heart, and that's when that congestion can happen, that that hardening of the heart.

  So the first gate is, the one we're most familiar with is that, everything we love, we will lose. It's, you know, a fierce gate that everything we love, we will lose. You get to keep nothing. And this is at the heart of the best idea of imminence that everything, everything you love will slip through your hands.
  
  And people often argue, well, I get to keep the memories, I get to keep that love. I said, only if you are faithful to the rights of grief, do you get to do that. Which means keeping the heart soft. Keeping the heart fluid to keep that memory intact in a heart that still knows its affection and the absence to live into the bittersweet is the old term, right? to miss, to ache, to feel their absence, and to still love them. That's a courageous thing, to stay open to them. And this is the only eight out of all five of them where someone will acknowledge your loss. They say, I'm so sorry for your loss, for your wife, your child, your whatever it is. Someone might offer you a condolence. From there on out, you're on your own. Until we can gather now and honor them.

  The second gate has to do with the parts of us that have not known love, and we've already alluded to that. You know, in my own experience that so many pieces of my life were not allowed to be there, we're shamed out of being and pushed to the farthest edges of my life. I call them the outcast brothers. The parts of myself that I just, I learned to hate as well, cuz they must have been wrong. There must have been something wrong with them. That they weren't welcomed into the family, into the church, into the schools. There must be something essentially defective about these parts of me. So you learn to hate them. So any experience of loss or integrity requires grief work, but you can't grieve for what you hold contempt for, that often walks in the door of my office is the unredeemed grief for having lost so much of our essential nature.
  
  So learning how to grieve for the loss of your voice or the loss of your sensuality or your body, or to lose those things requires that we honor them and in the honoring of them, perhaps coax them back home. But that's a long process.
  
  My therapy oftentimes takes a long time cuz these pieces have been treated like in my own life with so much contempt, so much judgment that, oh geez, I shouldn't do that anymore. Well come on home. You know, they don't trust me. So I have to do what I call Jane Goodall. I have to go and sit out there in the wasteland and say, I am here and I have to make amends. I am so sorry I blamed you for my feelings of not being worthy of welcome in the world. I am so sorry that I held contempt for you. And sometimes that takes many, many visitations to the wasteland. I found out later that Jane Goodall spent five years sitting out there on the jungle floor before the chimps came close to her. I thought it was months, you know, take a few months for them to - five years! Talk about a long vigil, but she was committed to that. And can we hold the same vigil for our own outcast pieces and can we coax them back home through our amends and our affection? We could say a lot more about that.

  The third gate is the sorrows of the world, and this one is impinging greater and greater upon our psyches day by day. It's rare that we go through a day without hearing some news about the CO2 levels, the ocean rising, the, you know, the salt lake is drying up, you know, all of the crises that are happening around the planet with the condition of the world. When I first started doing grief rituals, there might be two, three people in the community that were there because of earth grief.
  
  Now it's almost always over half are there because of that grief. It's becoming the most dominant form of grief. I just did a series for the Rose Center in Massachusetts called, facing the World with Soul. And I began by saying, this is the most important series of talks I've ever given. And this is the first time the subject is not you. This is not about you. This is about the world.
  
  The patient is now the world, and that's the subjectivity of the world is coming into us. Even in my office frequently. The topic is not intrapsychic. It isn't about my history. It's about what's going on in the world that's impinging on our psyches, as if we're separate from the world, right? That's the fantasy. That's the terrible fiction that we've lived with, that we're separate from what's happening, our watersheds to our salmons, to the quality of the soil, you know? This is, this is my body, is that body. And this grief work helps us to remember that.

  The fourth gate is what we expected and did not receive. It's a wonderful line by Artie Lange said, “we arrive here as Stone Age children”. So we arrive here carrying the full expectations of what our deep time ancestors knew, which is basically an immersion into village life. That's what I felt in the village in Africa, immersion into village life.
  
  And for most of us, again, particularly for white culture, none of that took place. We arrived into a single family house separated from all other houses, frequently in dysfunctional family settings, frequently with one parent, not two. And where the hell is the village? Where, when are we gathering to acknowledge what's going on? That expectation was woven into our psychic DNA to expect that. And when it doesn't materialize, like I said before, we end up with this profound sense of emptiness.
  
  And the worst part about that emptiness is that we blame ourselves for that feeling of emptiness. What did I do wrong? That I feel outside of what I anticipated, even if I can't articulate what I expected or what I anticipated, I know something is supposed to be different than what I've gotten. This isn't the whole picture. And so much of that discontent we feel is speaking to that absence, to that silencing of the richness that we expected. So when we gather in ritual space to do this work together, we've just kind of coalesced what it is that we expected and part of the grief of that weekend comes about on Sunday morning when we're about to say goodbye. Saturday afternoon, people are going, I just got here. I just got that feeling of being inside of something alive and you're telling us that we have to go.
  
  And I say, yes, that is the bittersweet again. But having tasted this now, do not settle for anything less than this. Let this be the homing beacon in your life, which you make all your decisions around. How will I make this a part of my existence? How will I gather my friends together regularly to be encircled together to say thank you, or to weep, or to heal, or to touch, or just to share a meal together? Then we begin to break apart the artifice of individualism and cloistered family units that we begin to remember the original design of how we've always been living communally and collaboratively.

  And then the last gate of grief is ancestral grief. And the more I sit with this gate, the more I feel that almost all grief is ancestral. That's what I'm feeling today. You know, when I talk about that second gate with shame and so forth, that didn't begin with me. I'm the current curator of this.
  
  But this wound began generations ago, maybe 500 or a thousand years ago, something began to be ruptured in the continuum of belonging. And it's landed in my body. And rather than taking it personally, I have to begin to see that the healing, that work that I have to do is many generations long, especially if I want the generations to come to have something better than what I inherited.
  
  And that ancestral grief obviously carries in this continent the violence and abuse to the indigenous cultures here, the genocide of millions and millions of traditional people, first nations people, and then the importation of slavery for a hundred years, you know, of colonial behavior and indoctrination and domination and violation. So this is all part of that that says ancestral grief and we haven't touched that and we wonder why there's still race issues in this country while there's still, you know, feelings of distrust between traditional people and white culture.
  
  But we haven't begun to say. This is what has happened. We acknowledge the violation and the destruction of homelands and languages and rituals and traditions, and that's a lot of what we have to do. If we have any chance again, to repair this, this culture is to begin to, with humility, acknowledge the violence of white culture, the domination of white culture. And again, that, but that doesn't mean, let me say that differently. What that also has to include is that the white culture, white European culture carries a profound feeling of emptiness because of its own experiences and encounters with domination and colonization from Roman cultures, from Christianity, all these various things that disrupted and dislodged traditional indigenous culture.
  
  We all come from indigenous culture. Every one of us, if we go back far enough, we came from some intact local indigenous people. And for many of the European cultures, those were just wiped out and colonized by forces of domination. And that is trauma. And that trauma is locked in our bodies and still is affecting how we conduct our lives. So those are the five gates.

  And again, most of those are never acknowledged, but they're in every one of our bodies, we are all carrying those five gates. And that's why we need ritual ground. That's why we need spaces that we can gather and begin to acknowledge what each one of us is carrying and free us from the solitary confinement and the pernicious idea of individual healing and individual salvation.
  
  That's such b******t. The only way out is through. The only way through is gonna be together. And that's, that's gotta be what we do.

  Jono: I, the reason I so appreciate those five gates Francis, that you've articulated is that I, you know, I've noticed so much, you know, as we all are probably noticing, you know, there’s so much division, so much separation, so much, so many camps, so much canceling of one another. And yet it seems like it's just all happening on the surface. And it's all happening in the realm of conversation. It's all happening in the realm of words.
  
  And it, and I just have a sense that none of that will ever resolve. It may make some progress, but it won't make the kind of progress required when these other, all these gates and all this ability to drop down closer to the earth, drop down closer to our sorrows, will never, will never get there, you know, without this kind of map that is provided through what you are providing and what indigenous cultures have provided, what many wisdom traditions have provided.

  And, I just really encourage the listeners to check out Francis's book, you know, The Wild Edge of Sorrow where he articulates this, even more so. And it also reminds me of, I think I heard the other day, I think it might have been, I can't remember where I heard it, but someone said, you know, is it about the journey or the destination? And he said, it's about the company. Mm. Yeah. You know, it's about who we, who we, who we do it with, you know? And I love that. And that in so many ways for me, sums up your work.
  
  You know, that your work really keeps pointing back to who we are in relationship with here. The two-legged, the four-legged, the trees, everything that is alive. And even before I came on the call this morning, Francis, I'm surrounded by probably 12, ancient gum trees. And I just went and put my hand on each one and asked that I might in some way show them some respect, you know, by having this conversation with you. And yeah. I just, I just can't begin to express how thankful I am for what you offer the world and how important I believe your work is.

  And I think it's so important because it keeps pointing back to communal relationship interdependence, as opposed to a model that I feel is so also part of the problem, which is this kind of top-down kind of, it's gonna come from the fount of wisdom of someone else.

  Francis: Mm-hmm.

  Jono: And I think that's such a trap we're in, you know, that we somehow feel like someone out there is gonna give it to us. And yet some of the most potent practices. I remember being in actually one of your workshops and we, where we did the writing practice and your, your request was, to share what we had written with only one request that the respondent or the witnesser to just say thank you. And once again, counter what I've experienced so much in my life.
  
  It was just the witnessing of the deepest parts of myself or what's actually going on for me by another. That was the great gift, and it didn't require any more information. It didn't require any more commentary. It just required me to be with and others to be with. And yeah, just, just, I feel just so much appreciation at the moment, just hearing you and just being with you today and not in any projecting kind of like, Francis, you're so amazing. It's just a, I, you know, you've, you're bringing something to the world that I think is. It's, it's long, long, long overdue.

  Francis: Well, I, I think that's true. I mean, I, gave a talk at the Young Center in San Francisco a few months back, and after it's over, there's, you know, the conversation and questions and I said, you know, ultimately I'm not saying anything that is new. My task is to try to remember. So all I'm trying to do is remember and bring back from the wasteland and the, and the amnesia what it might look like to be human beings again. We've been doing this stuff for hundreds of thousands of years, so that ain't it, but trying to just bring that back into the heartbeat of what I call living culture. We don't have living culture, we have society, we have civilization, but we don't have living culture.
  
  Living culture is something that maintains and sustains the vitality, not only of its people, but also of the, of its surrounding watersheds and so forth. Living culture is embedded in the entanglement of all of life, and that's what I think grief work helps us to do is to remember how wildly entangled we are with everything. Yeah. Well, thank you for your lovely words.

  Jono: Well, it's my pleasure and it's, just what's in my heart. I, as we wrap up, Francis, I am just curious to know, as people may go, may think to themselves after listening to this conversation, how do I begin to reclaim my humanity, you know, all these parts of myself.
  
  How do I begin relating to community? I'm curious as to how, what have you created in your life, in your community that actually could serve as some kind of inspiration for people who that might be ordinary as well? Ordinary in regards to, cuz you spoke even there about gathering friends together and, you know, this isn't, there's nothing special, you know, about what you're talking about. But just on a, on the ground kind of way, have you, what do you have in your life that helps you with this?

  Francis: Well, 26, 27 years ago, I did a training with a group of people called the Ritual Village Training. And I said to them at the beginning of this ritual training that I will teach you what I've been taught, but at the end of it, I'm gonna leave for three months and you will figure out how, how to bring me in as a member.
  
  I'm doing this for me. So it was a subversive act of great selfishness, but I did the training. I left, they brought me in and we've been together meeting twice a month for 26 or 27 years. We're meeting tomorrow night to watch a documentary about Leonard Cohen to, you know, to share another little poet. But we gather twice a month if one is just to share a meal together and check in about what's moving in our lives, what has found us joys, what sorrows are there. And then we spend a Saturday together, and that's usually our ritual day if rituals are needed. If not, we'll just be together. You know, and just share what the, what the commitment is isn't so much to live here because we don't, but it is to have soul entanglement.
  
  So we've had children born into this village that still come, you know, one of 'em is 21 years old and hates missing a meeting. You know, she just hates it when her job now gets in the way of coming to sit with the old folks and share her life. And she feels like she has many, many uncles and aunts and, you know, these kids were raised in a village and this, you know, ragtag village, but it still shows in their being that they were held by many.

  So yeah, that's something that's so precious to me is that I have a village and I needed that. So I tried to create that. It doesn't have to be that elaborate, but you know, if you have two or three friends, see if you can get together with some regularity. No, don't just settle for TV at night, but at least once or twice a month, gather with other families or other groups and talk about the unspoken longing, which is everyone's heart, to create some spaces to belong. And so once you begin to speak to that belonging, it naturally unfolds into, well, how are we gonna do that? And, how will we tend to what arises in the course of our lives like loss, illness, death, marriage, children. But that's an imitation for the wild imagination to begin to come into play. And we're all born within a certain ritual knowledge.
  
  If you watch children, they're doing ritual all the time. You know, and we just kind of drumming out of them, all of us. So to get back into that place where we can once again bring ritual back into our life, singing together is ecstatically fun. You know? Building shrines together is very healing. We do this gratitude ritual.

  We did this gratitude ritual for 22 years in a row before COVID hit, and then we had to stop by people coming from all over the country to be together to say thank you together over three days of absolute ecstatic beauty making. And the ritual that we created or that came to me, well, I'll share at some point, where we make offerings and the children are crawling into these grottos that we build out of leaves and tree twigs and branches, and they go under and they make their offerings.
  
  On the next morning, on Sunday morning, we go on process out into the woods. And three or four of the elders have gone out and opened an opening into the earth. And then the children put all of these offerings into the belly of the earth and for one day of the year, we're feeding her rather than taking from her. And it is so utterly breathtakingly beautiful to do that simple gesture to feed the earth and say, thank you small, that this is, please hear it from the bottom of our hearts that we are grateful. That we are grateful. You know?

  So we do that in the fall. We do our grief work. And so we, we, we do this cycle of rituals, and I often say that the mark of a mature human being is to carry grief in one head, and gratitude in the other. So we try to embody that. In the community that we are in, we begin grief and we end in gratitude or maybe we begin in gratitude and end in grief, whatever the cycles are. So we try to hold the complexity of what it means to be human. And at every gratitude ritual, there's grief. And every grief ritual, there's gratitude. They are so entangled with each other. I can go on, but I'm gonna stop.

  Jono: Well, Francis, you have been so generous with your time. I've loved every minute with you, and I hope it's the beginning of many other conversations together. Is there anything you'd like to say as we close to the audience or to yeah is there anything that's on your heart that you want to close with?

  Francis: What comes to mind is the poem that I share at the end of our grief ritual gatherings. It's a little plot train of roomies where he said, “Those tender words we shared with one another are stored in the secret heart of heaven. One day like rain, they will fall and spread and our mystery will grow green across the earth.” So I hope these words green across the earth together. Thank you, Jono.

  Jono: Thank you, Francis.

  Jono [Episode Wrap up]: Thank you so much for listening. It means the world to have your support, and if you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on Apple or Spotify. That way you'll be notified when a new episode is ready. It would also mean a lot if you would take the time to write a review about this podcast. This way more people can discover and participate in this work, and if you feel like this episode could benefit someone else, please share it with them, whether that's a friend or family member, or even on your social channels. Finally, if you are interested in participating in grief rituals or any other of my programs, feel free to head on over to jonofishernow.com where you can sign up to my newsletter and you'll receive seasonal invitations and episodes as they are released. And please always remember that although the hour is late, we can always make beauty. We can always make beauty. Sending love to you and your loved ones.

About the Guest

Francis Weller

Website // Books

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