Grief's Landscape

Grief’s landscape is as much a wilderness as the one in nature. To understand, we have to walk with them and listen.     - Mark Liebenow

Grief Is a Wild Place

    

         Grief is a wild place.

 

            We like the idea of the wilderness because it’s unknown, and because what we know isn’t enough to calm our monkey minds. We need to believe that there is more to life than what we perceive on the surface, and the wilderness spurs our imagination—of primal fears, yes, but also of beauty, hope, and transcendence.

 

Grief is a wilderness. An ocean. A desert. A dark forest.

 

Courage in the Wilderness

 Brené Brown writes: “The wilderness is an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.”

                                    

For me, the wilderness of grief was paired with the wilderness of Yosemite because I went there to hike after my wife died. There, in the solitude of nature, as the noise and rush of city life faded away, I listened to the sounds of nature and heard what grief was trying to tell me.

 

Podcast on Grief and Hope

 

Podcast on Grief and Hope

Christina Rasmussen and I spent an invigorating hour talking about the landscape of grief and how we found our way through its wilderness and put our lives back together after our spouses died.

 

You can listen to the Dear Life Podcast here: http://www.dearlifepodcast.com/episodes/ep78

Death of a Hawk

The Great Black Hawk saga.

A short essay of mine about a rare hawk was published by Entropy Magazine today. It’s also about curiosity, death, grief, compassion, wilderness, healing, kinship with nature, ecological warning, hope, and what it means to live in community with the earth. 

I worry about what I would have done if I hadn’t had nature in the months after Evelyn’s death. I often went to Yosemite to hike alone in the wilderness because I needed to figure out how I was going to survive grief. The long days on the trail gave me the time and the solitude I needed to listen for what I could not hear at home. The beauty and awe of natural world reminded me that I was not alone, and that I always had a place where I could go and renew my spirit.

You can read the essay online:

https://entropymag.org/the-birds-the-great-black-hawk/

(Yes, that's an owl in the photo because I don't have my own photo of a hawk, but the journal has a good one.)

100 Miles Beyond Where Jesus Lost His Sandals

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the Lenten journey for Christians. It’s when they look to see how far they have strayed from the path of faith, and if they need a refresher course in humility.

The title of this post struck me as fitting both the journey of faith and the journey of grief when we have to be brave and travel far beyond everything we’ve known, trusting that we will somehow make it through. 

Solace of Nature

Whenever grief knotted me up, I headed for nature. Breathing the fresh air of the mountains, wandering through the woods, or sauntering along a river, uncluttered my mind and reopened my heart.

Nature asked little of me. It accepted me as I was, and invited me to share its community.

I could sit beside a river for hours and let the sounds of the undulating water soothe my struggles. I could wander in the forest’s shadows when the brightness of the day became too much. As I hiked over the mountains, I could physically work out my anger, frustrations, and find moments of happiness that pushed back against despair.