The Initiatory Nature of Loss

The land around us (and within us) teaches with each passing season, and with each flood, drought, fire and storm, that out of change, crisis and a dying to what was, there appears a new story of form and adaptation. And that how we respond and integrate change into the fabric of our ongoing story colors the character of what comes next.

Meredith Little, co-founder, School of Lost Borders

Loss is threaded into the fabric of our living since the very beginning.   Whether it is a death of a loved one, a serious illness, a loss of trust or a moral betrayal from which we fear we may not recover, few of us escape the earthly reality of suffering loss, in one form or another, during our life time.

Loss is always sharply personal. And, at this time, it also threads unequivibly with the greater landscape of unprecedented collective loss and social/ecological collapse. Is the illness of our own body personal or is it a healthy response to the greater unwellness of our environment? Is our grief over the loss of species, habitats, and entire ecosystems any less real than the personal losses we endure? How to separate our personal work around a loss of agency, identity, or belonging from the structural injustices and the complex trauma stacked up in our bodies and bloodlines? As humans of this time, we are swimming in a sea of grief that compounds and accentuates our personal struggle.

It is on these faultlines that we intend to make sanctuary together – stalking wholeness in the face of adversity, and making beauty in unlikely places.

If you feel the call to join this conversation, read on.

The landscape of Loss

A major loss comes with an impact greater than what can be integrated in real time.  It severs us irrevocably from the life we have lived up to that point, and delivers us to a starkly liminal reality. Nothing is ’normal’ here, though we may try to go through the motions of daily necessities as best as we are able.

This is not the neatly packaged and planned Rite of Passage. It is life on life’s terms.  These initiations are not chosen, they are braved. Most of the time, there is no container that can hold our experience. No ritual or ceremony to partner and uplift the intensity of our experience and no community to lean into. Modern culture has no way to hold this space.  It leans away. We are told the only way we will survive is to ignore the darkness and density of these thresholds, and function above them, as best we can.

Navigating the Territory

Without the ability to presence where we are, without the chance to feel, to grieve, to process, and steep in the profound lostness that is so often an integral part of the liminality, we can not navigate this territory. Ritual, container, and community are indispensable to support an individual to ability to navigate the rough territory of loss. Without the space and time to die to what was, without the tears to water the seeds that may have cracked open in the charred landscape of our remains, we cannot adapt, we cannot find our way into what is next.  As a result, a part of us may linger here for a long time - sometimes years, or decades - feeling stuck, encapsulated, being neither here nor there, while doing our best to outwardly appear ‘ok’ and fulfill life’s responsibilities.

A ceremony of Integration

And yet. There comes a moment when we know in our bones that it is time to bring these parts home. That it is time to mark a change, to physically acknowledge what was and is no longer.  So that we can formally step into life with what is true now and do so witnessed by the land - our body on the body of the Earth - and by some kind of kin/community.  What that looks like is different for everyone and there are no easy answers. How we move with what is unbearable, how we meet the unknown, how we find our yes to what is next is uniquely and preciously ours to decide.

This ceremony is offering a space to do this work.