nostalgia/grief
Care Message 03
Today I am bleeding. A time to stop making sense and let intuition lead the way. A time to let go of control. I am nurturing the urge to be imperfect and free. Honoring roots of resistance. Low to the ground. Dug in deep. Offering offerings that go in and out of me like heat. And letting this body be enough. Ease. Starlight between toes. Salt on skin.
CRACKLE - FUZZ - RADIO TUNING
HOST: Nostalgia has returned for the summer.
nostalgia is everywhere right now—lorde’s new song, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, and this pit in my stomach…
the one that followed me back and forth from mom’s house to my dad’s in childhood.
i guess nostalgia reminds me of grief or my grief is just nostalgic.
either way, i wonder if both nostalgia and grief are only so powerful because of how much they can feel like love/life being ripped away from us? to another dimension in time.
A friend recently posed the question of where to even start with their grief—like many of us do, they seemed to have this fear that once they allowed themselves to feel, their grief would be all consuming.
I told them, simply: the body. The body is where we begin. There’s no other site of change for us, no other place to be, no external knowledge beyond us that we need to seek or secret language to learn before we allow ourselves to grieve, before we allow ourselves to feel.
Everything I need is here—this body. I am a student of politicized somatics. My body is a channel. This is what I have to offer you.
early in the morning when i got the call, i went outside and wept. my mom said she would call me back. she had to figure out how to tell her mom, my grandma, that her son, my uncle, had ended his life. that he was already gone.
my mom and i texted mostly instead. i kept writing, “what about his body” over and over again. it felt like she wasn’t answering my question. or maybe the words were echoing in my head and i fell into an internal dialogue with myself. about how this question would always define this moment. how can he be gone if we don’t even have a body. how can death be so logistical. we don’t realize that part until its happening, and when it’s happening it feels totally normal to say things we never thought we would say, like “what about his body” over and over again.
What is care? Care is a state of being with our own and others’ aliveness. Sometimes this aliveness contains grief. Aliveness is all of the sensations, feelings and thoughts in our bodies, and beyond. Therefore care starts in the body. Care for our own grief, care for those suffering, care for a collective re-imagining of what’s to come.
I am a body and beyond
hereafter there is no end
only a chance of infinite beginnings
my body is a vessel of the future
to hold myself is to hold past, present, and future at once
i cannot merely touch the surface to know the depth of this
i must wait, watch, listen, feel, rest
in intent
on honoring a lesson unfinished
this time is mine
this time is ours.
Only when I slow down enough to feel my body am I able to access a deep sense of care. At the same time, during these moments where I am open to the sensations, feelings and movements in my body, I feel the most possibility for healing.
Coming out of numbness is a practice for me. I am still working to understand how and for what reasons I’ve felt numb to the sensations of my body throughout my life. But I know that this physical numbness has made it difficult to pinpoint my emotions, opinions and desires, and ultimately my aliveness.
As an adult, I also have more awareness of the way that I tend to pendulum back and forth between feeling too much and numbing. This pendulum shows up in other ways too, in black and white thinking and cultural scripts of good vs bad, right vs wrong.
Though we name sensations, emotions, and thoughts as separate entities, there isn’t actually a separation between them, but rather there is a deep connection. When I lose access to one, I lose access to the full picture of my soma (aliveness). Equally so, when I tap into one, the rest may come trickling in.
music often holds me like nothing else. i wonder if it is because music helps me to feel my body, my heart and my head all as one.
The reason I am always drawn to music and art spaces is because those spaces often bring me closer to my aliveness, my spirit and my community. Even in the times when i felt farthest from my aliveness, dissociated and numb, I would still dance.
I’m not sure I even ever wanted to make art for the sake of art. I think I was always drawn to the way that it brought people together and made me feel more.
I am bleeding now. Perhaps if I was born in another time (is this the past or future?) I would be composting my blood. I would be planting seeds on the new moon. I would harvest them on the full. I would read by candle light and make soap with tallow.
I am bleeding now. I am diving into the past to understand the future. I am the daughter of a Mercury retrograde. I am starlight between toes.
How do I understand myself now in the context of a struggle that my immigrant ancestors left behind? When they turned white, did they notice the generations of life before and after them grew dull? Is this the moment that our bellies began to ache? With the memory of what fullness we had lost.
Whiteness weaved the violence of assimilation into a cover of ease and safety we chose to wear. Tapestries of blood and fear. Fear of never belonging in someone else’s home. To mask pain and loss. The neurons fire, but never release. We keep slipping into the trenches that have already been dug. Never dedicating our time to fill them in. But the war is never over unless we say it is. Where there is no victory, only death. We only find belonging in death. At least there is belonging in death. Whiteness is a war machine, destroying all of the life in its path.
if you want to make the world a better place, here’s your invitation to let your tears flow today… here’s your invitation to pause and release the curse, instead of carrying all of the struggle you can pile on your bones, over and over, to avoid simply feeling the weight of your ancestral grief.
generations of life have been waiting for you to pause and feel yourself.
in my grief i find the beauty of my aliveness despite it all.
the body is where we begin and where we end.
we don’t need to buy anything, or do anything the “right” way.
the tears you cry will nourish you in a way nothing else can.
everything is sacred, everyday is new. we have an opportunity.
the biggest challenge is simply putting away distractions and allowing some space for yourself—for your breath to enter the chat. for your bones to remember. for your limbs and your belly, your head and your neck and your feet.
if, like me, you have begun to unfurl, and that feels good, then allow it.
i think part of why we try to hold back the floodgates of grief is because we have a very wise sense that this grief is actually so big. it is so so so big, so long and wide that we can hardly comprehend. it goes back generations and many of us feel it’s collective weight. we may sense the grandness of grief and feel (rightly so) an intuitive fear—that we cannot hold all of it alone.
And we can’t.
But in our individualistic culture we are told that we must. So, we are ashamed that we can’t. And though we suffer greatly in going it alone, the fear that we do not belong in a culture of un-belonging is so strong, that being an individualist is less scary than admitting we need each other.
So some of us stop ourselves from feeling any of it at all to avoid the massive tsunami of grief we imagine we are solely responsible for feeling.
this is awful. it has been detrimental to our lives and our ancestors lives. to countless lives, victims of our neglected grief. and it will continue to be to our children and kin. to our families, and those we love. if we don’t stop the buck with us.
this time is ours.
we do not have to drown in this alone. so many of us are experiencing this and the way we all hold this together, is first by acknowledging it, together.
you may not have a large community to turn to. you may not have a partner or a friend right now. but you have yourself. and you and your body that is full of aliveness and connected to the aliveness around you is enough.
allow the time and space and your body will know where to begin. light a candle, say a prayer. practice being in your body and feeling. early and often.
once some of the water-pressure releases you will find that the river is majestic, flowing, and free, connecting us to one another all at once.
it is a river which we can each drink from whenever we are ready. it will satiate us and we can follow the path beside it to other grievers.
be at ease my loves. ill see you by the river.
xo
renee