Listen here.
“Let us not push forward so decidedly that we do not stop to mourn. It is not merely OK to grieve. It is wholly necessary if we are to remain connected to our collective power, truly invested in our liberation, and whole enough to sustain ourselves in struggle….For movement building is emotional labor, and it rises and swells and crashes in unison with our hearts.” (Hart, 2017)
As I’m writing this essay on the necropolitics of Israel as they’re exerted on Palestine while Rafah is under attack, I’m finding myself in a heightened state of grief that I know so many of you can relate to. The scale of destruction and loss is horrific and unflinching, and I don’t know about you, but I need some grief exercises to bring myself back to the world so that I can get back to doing the work of witnessing and standing with Palestine. In order to do this it’s vital that we give ourselves the time to mourn. I wasn’t going to post anything until I finished with the essay about grief in Palestine, but we need to pause to mourn so that we can move forward in our activism. Benji Hart writes at length about the vitality of mourning as part of activism in his essay, “Feeling is Not Weakness.” One such example is his assertion, “Let us not push forward so decidedly that we do not stop to mourn. It is not merely OK to grieve. It is wholly necessary if we are to remain connected to our collective power, truly invested in our liberation, and whole enough to sustain ourselves in struggle….For movement building is emotional labor, and it rises and swells and crashes in unison with our hearts.” (Hart, 2017)
I’d like to offer a handful of grief exercises that you may find helpful. Some can be done right now, some you may save for later, some can be done in minutes, some may take upwards of an hour. All are somewhat creative in nature, but don’t let your perceived lack of creativity stand between you and processing your grief. If you create something ugly, that’s perfectly fine. You are here to alchemize your grief, not to create a commission for the Louvre.
That being said, you may find that part of your mourning ritual includes burning the paper you’ve written or drawn on, or burying it, or just throwing it away. Or maybe you want to tuck it away and look back at it. No matter what you do with it in the end, resolve to make something to burn. Put the pen to paper. You have my permission for ugliness.
Take out something to write on and something to write with to start.
If you have crayons, colored pencils, or markers, feel free to take those out too.
First, take a deep breath. In through the nose, out through you mouth. And again. And one more.
Are you feeling your grief in your body? When I focus on my body (which I do very rarely, but will do now to set a good example), I’m finding that there’s some unnamable tightness around my throat. My joints ache, and that’s probably the chronic pain, but I’ll still acknowledge it as a potential site of emotional distress. My shoulders feel something. Maybe that means they’re tense. I don’t know. You don’t need to know what your body is telling you or ascribe perfect adjectives to each muscle. Just acknowledge where there are feelings in your body.
Great. Now try to release some tension. Drop your shoulders. Unclench your jaw. Slouch a little, sit comfortably.
What does your grief look like?
You can draw the shape of it - don’t think about it, just let your hand show you.
You can describe it in words–is it sharp? Is it angular? Is it huge? Three-dimensional?
What color is your grief?
If you’d like a multiple choice option, take a look at the color chart on this website and pick one that feels right. Let the color of your grief reveal itself to you when you see the right color.
If you have something to color with, color the shape you made with the color of your grief.
An alternative way to do this prompt is to go to a hardware store and choose from the paint cards for the color(s) of your grief. Take the paint chips home with you. You can do this every so often and watch as your grief morphs and changes.
Sometimes it helps to have a container for our grief. Having a safe, controlled space, a beginning, middle, and end can allow us to actually feel our grief, because sometimes we may be afraid that if we allow ourselves to begin grieving, it will never end. If we open the levee, it will become a flood. But this container with prearranged and agreed upon boundaries may quell that fear.
For this exercise, you will need a candle, something to light it with, a timer, and a comfy place to sit, lay, stand.
Settle yourself into a comfortable position, grab a warm drink or a blanket if you’d like it, whatever you need to feel safe in feeling, then light your candle and set a timer for five minutes. In these five minutes, feel whatever comes up for you. If you weep, weep. If you laugh, laugh. If you think about what you’ll eat for dinner, acknowledge that. There is no right or wrong thing to be feeling, just so long as you are feeling it at all. The feelings and sensations don’t need to be named. Your grief matters. When the timer goes off, blow out the candle. Take a deep breath. Give yourself a gentle re-entry (which I outline at the end of this prompt list).
(This exercise was taken from Aleah Black’s grief workshop)
This next prompt will take a bit more time, and requires more spoons (energy/physical ability) and may need to be scheduled accordingly. Morning Altars is a ritual by artist Day Schildkret. His versions of this ritual are all very symmetrical and aesthetically beautiful, but you don’t need to recreate his art for this to be a meaningful exercise. Schildkret takes a walk through nature, collecting found nature objects (stones, pinecones, leaves, flowers, mushrooms, etc.) and arranges them at the end of his walk into visually pleasing mandala-like layouts that will then get taken apart by wind or animals. When I did this exercise, I picked up human ephemera (okay, it was trash…) like a nerf bullet, lost glasses, wrappers, petrified orange peel, concrete–along with things like a large root system (already uprooted), pine needles, feathers, etc. (carried them in a dog poop bag my friend had in her pocket). I arranged these in a questionably pleasing array. But the point was that I had taken a walk with a friend with intentionality and slowness, looking at the ground before and around me, and collected pieces of the world I found that reminded me that the world is full of bustling movement, full of children playing and dogs running and clementines shared.
Watch Day Schildkret’s video about morning altars here: youtube
Here is my creation:
Objects: found reading glasses, a nerf bullet, a yellow golf ball, a hoop earring, a dog tag for "GUS", a petrified orange peel, a chunk of concrete, a slice of branch, a tile, two shards of glass, a deconstructed tennis ball, a plant marker, a red branch, dead grasses, bark, a feather, a cluster of pine needles, a vast root system.
Another writing exercise: ‘First Thoughts’. For this one you’ll again need something to write on and with and a timer.
Set a timer for 10 minutes, and in those 10 minutes, you will free-write. You’ll write down anything that comes to mind without judgment. Be raw and honest. Express rage, embarrassing thoughts, things that feel taboo to talk about, thoughts you’re afraid of letting out. If you can’t think of anything to write, write that down. You can throw away, bury, burn this after if you don’t want to keep it. You can make blackout poetry from it.
(This activity is from Natalie Goldberg’s book ‘Writing Down the Bones’)
Any activity can be a mourning ritual or grief exercise if it’s done with intentionality. Garden, and acknowledge your body and sensations and feelings as you do it. Cook a meal and do the same. You can even cook a meal to share, and do these activities around the table with your friends. As Cindy Milstein says, “we can better bear our manifold unnecessary losses when they are worked through in common” (Milstein, 2017)
When you’ve completed one or any of these activities, ease yourself back into the day. Take another deep breath. May yourself a cup of tea, or coffee, or whatever you want, and mindfully sip it until it’s gone. Turn on a favorite song and listen to the entire thing without doing anything else. When the song fades out and when the drink is drunk, you can go back to your emails, turn back to the world.
The grief you are feeling is real, even if you are not directly impacted by the atrocities happening around the world, and the grief won’t go away just because you pretend it’s not there because you don’t think you deserve to feel it. Rather than continuously disenfranchising yourself from your vicarious grief, try one of these methods of nurturing it. Only then can the work continue.
Love,
Alekz