Moving by Stone and Candlelight
Do We Deserve to Grieve?
This essay was originally published January 2024 and has been modified here to include more of my learning lineage.
“I don’t know if the answer is to just push through this…obviously losing my friend is nothing compared to what’s going on in the world.”
This is what a friend was saying to me as she pushed back her tears, telling me about the recent death of a friend. She was distraught and not sure how to show up in this moment in her organizing or how to show up online — and was asking for advice.
I often find myself providing grief support to people in my community. This is not a service I charge for — just one that has naturally found shape in my life and has led me to participating in a five month training with Francis Weller. I consider this support a way of giving to the world what I wish I had received and passing on the care and presence I have received. Through these conversations about grief, the topic of worthiness and deserving have come up a lot. People are asking themselves: do I deserve to grieve?
This is what I've learned.
This question usually doesn’t shape itself so directly. I often hear it couched in statements about what’s “real grief” and what’s not, and questions like: does centering our grief imitate white supremacy and settler-colonialism? Does anyone have a right to grief during a genocide? Or as my friend was asking, how do we push through it all in order to do the real work?
Underneath these statements and questions, I hear suspicion around grief: is it worth it or even necessary to address it? Is it self-indulgent? Do we deserve to feel so deeply, especially living in the heart of the American Empire?
These questions belie the fact that American living is a stark reality many people haven’t fully woken up to. Our labor is grossly exploited to fund warmongering across the world. Our tax dollars are used to fund genocides and settler-colonial expansion. The U.S. military is the leading cause of climate disaster. While our quality of living is superficially laced with luxury and privilege, the reality is that every aspect of our life has been commodified and most of us do not have sustainable access to quality food, shelter, education, or healthcare.
The reality is that we live under a dictatorship of capitalism and the ruling class.
The reality is that settler-colonialism erodes our ancestral memories of community and village living.
And all of this — all of this — to the backdrop of genocide of the Native Americans whose land we still occupy.
Those of us who have woken up to this stark reality are overwhelmed by it. We feel hopeless, helpless, depressed, anxious, and afraid. Our awareness of the intimate loss of village living and the alienation of capitalism expands every day. Community connection to living and dying now comes at a price — and what doesn’t survive under capitalism is replaced in our imaginations with hollow luxury and fleeting fame as we acclimate our psyches to the dominate culture’s “representation” of what living and dying are really about.
Under the weight of these realities, we are easily caught in the contradictions of binary thinking. Organizers on the left often feel this weight so intensely that we don’t feel like it’s appropriate to grieve “lesser” losses. People ask: are we allowed to grieve? As settlers? As Americans? As leftists?
What would happen if you didn’t?
What would happen if you “pushed past” your grief? Became numb and indifferent to it? Would it make you a better organizer? A better friend? Would you be relieved of grief, or would it build inside of you until you became flooded by it?
Do we even have to imagine? We see the answer all around us — the violence and devastation that grows from a system that fundamentally goes against life itself.
How could our world be different if our ancestors had been able to meet their grief?
The fear people have when it comes to grief is this: if I allow myself to ‘go there’ I won’t come back. But as my teachers say, if you don’t go there, you won’t come back. Capitalism relies on our dissociation and numbing to create mass complacency towards horror, emptiness, and violence and in turn, unawareness of our complicity in systems of violence. This is the same cycle of complacency we’ve witnessed after the 2020 uprisings — the societal push to “go back to normal” during a world-wide pandemic — and now, the movement to normalize Israel by white-washing history and seeking liberal two-state solutions to the genocide of Palestinians.
The truth about grief work is that it awakens us to reality — to knowing what’s actually important and what we value. Our work is to keep that knowing warm and active in our life. Our work is to keep that memory alive and thriving in our life’s work because capitalism erodes our imagination for revolution. Avoiding our grief erodes truth and story.
The most important lesson I’ve learned in organizing is how to understand my own story. I’ve been to trainings and had multiple conversations with mentors where I’ve been asked questions like, how has white supremacy affected your family? How does white supremacy privilege you? These questions are two sides of the same coin, because while we have various privileges through these systems, we are also deeply affected by them in ways that are both traumatizing and normalized. We need to answer both questions to actualize our stake in the game. This is how we fulfill the call by Murri artist and activist Lilla Watson: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Our work is to keep that material warm for building solidarity.
Believing sentiments such as if Palestinians don’t have time to grieve then neither should I creates a false martyrdom that often serves as virtue signaling. Palestinians are grieving, and our griefs are connected. When we stay numb to our own grief in the name of solidarity, white settlers often show up as false saviors — clumsy, unskilled, and self-serving because we haven’t connected with the deeper work to build solidarity, which requires authenticity, solitude, and decentering ourselves.
Authentic grief work is rare to witness not only because it requires solitude and a healthy community, but because we often mistake the spectacle for the real in the age of virtual reality.
Irish poet and author John O’Donohue writes, “When the spiritual search is too intense and hungry, the soul stays hidden. The soul was never meant to be seen completely. It is more at home in a light more hospitable to shadow… Candlelight perception has the finesse and reverence appropriate to the mystery and autonomy of soul.”
If soul work moves by candlelight, social media moves by interrogation light — shining a harsh, hyper-visible light on our souls and calling it connection and community. Social media is synthetic, sanitized, and structured around the ontology of corporate media. Our daily activity is centered around appearance, popularity, speed, visibility, and ego. It’s a world without privacy or intimacy. Public profiles are accessible to anyone with an account and private profiles are often filled with people we don’t talk to regularly anymore. And our living and grieving are documented through 4x4 picture posts and displayed for consumption.
This is not to imply that our grief should be a secret, but grief work requires intimate connection to the sacred, to community, and the humming of the dreaming earth. The sacred is nurtured through the dark. The sacred is met through frequencies that structures like social media cannot capture or register. And as Francis Weller’s mentor Clarke Berry describes, grief moves by stone, by geological time. Returning to the ancestral memories that lie dormant in us — the strength of the village and the work of soul — requires connection to the authentic, which requires connection to stillness. Building solidarity requires commitment to our greatest strength as leftists: our relationships with each other.
In this way, the work of the soul is a portal to the web of life: it keeps our humanity alive as settler-colonial structures erode the sacred, our relationships to each other, and the living earth.
The truth is our grief is not disconnected from the grief of the world. The soul does not register more important and less important. Weaving our stories and our grief to the stories and grief of the world creates what Carl Jung describes as the raw prima materia — the primitive base of all matter — for authentic community, grief work, and building solidarity.
The soul is inherently shy and moves at the pace of stone. Authentic grief work moves by candlelight — by the moon and stars. To reclaim memory and reality, we need to recognize social media as the finger pointing to the moon and not the moon itself. Because the longer we give our time and attention to spectacle and performance while avoiding what is speaking through the soul — the more social media replaces reality itself.
Yes, we do deserve to grieve. In fact, it’s required for the future and the global fight for liberation. To avoid our grief is to fundamentally go against life itself.
Grief is not a luxury, it’s a path. It’s not an emotion, it’s a force of nature. Grief is life itself. And whatever happens next will depend on how intimately we can meet our grief, together.