“The sun sets
and the moon sets,
but they’re not gone.”
Rumi
Oh my dear beloveds, the leaves are brilliant and the air is chill and our hearts are breaking and the Unseen Ones are whispering to us in the breeze.
The span of days between October 30th - November 3rd is one of the most hallowed times of the year for me, and for many ancestral and folk cultures. It is a time known by many different names with many different rituals - Samhain, Álflablót, All Hallows Eve, the Day of the Dead - all of which are attuned toward the Other Side, in reverence of our ancestors and the unseen world. I have a practice of tending to the Beloved Dead and devoting to the Elder Ancestors throughout the year, and I do not necessarily believe that “the veil is thinner” now more than any other time (as some practitioners teach). But I do believe there is a deep potency in these days - firstly, because our ancestors chose these as High Holy Days to specifically honor and venerate our Dead, and secondly, because the collective field of people attuned to the Other Side is heightened and sensitized. The sheer amount of people focusing on their ancestors and tending to the restless spirits raises an immense power - a power that can feed the healing and liberation of the earth, of our lineages, of our entire seen & unseen ecosystem.
And while this is a time of beautiful relationship with our ancestors, it can also raise the tide of grief for many of us. Many of us have experienced the heart-shaking experience of witnessing a Beloved of ours transition to the Other Side to become an ancestor. Death, one of the most alchemically transformative mysteries of our life, is wrapped up with love and pain and grief and wonder. And this opens us to the complex experience of feeling two seemingly conflicting experiences in our bodies - deep grief at the absence of our Beloveds, and deep love and continued intimacy with them in their unseen forms.
As an ancestral connection practitioner, I have spent years cultivating relationships with my ancestors on the Other Side - the recent dead (especially my sister Jen), the ancient lineage of Elder ancestors who carry medicine and blessings for us today, and the vast generations in between. After my sister died, within about eight months I began to speak with her on the Other Side, which blew open the doors to the ancestral realms and the Underworld for me. I have deepened in my ability to hear from and commune with the Beloved Dead, and sought apprenticeship from seasoned guides like my beloved mentor Shauna Janz and teacher Francis Weller. The ability to speak to my Beloved Dead and engage in ongoing relationship with them has forever altered and widened my experience of grief and love.
And I am held in a strange paradox in this sacred Hallows time: the mystery of how things and people can be simultaneously gone and always here. How we can grieve the absence of a loved one and tend to our relationship with them at the same time.
Sometimes I am confused by the deep pain that still lives inside of me in the wake of my sister’s death. My rational mind does not understand: my bond with her flows onward, as I speak and feel her as an ancestor with me, so how is it that I miss her? How can it be true that she is gone forever and always here? But if I acknowledge these two truths, give them both space to be, then I find that they can coexist.
My grief is nuanced: I grieve that her physical body is no longer here, that I cannot hug her, that she was unable to parent her children in an embodied way, that my mom can no longer spend days with her, that she was unable to find healing for her deep pain on this earth, that she is not just a phone call away anymore. And I have an unshakable knowing that she is experiencing deep healing - for herself and our lineage - in ways that she never could have in her physical body. Now I can speak with her whenever I choose, not limited by physical constraints, and she is walking alongside me as a collaborator in ancestral connection in ways that I never fathomed when she was embodied.
These two experiences, of never-ending grief and awe-inspiring ongoing connection, do not negate each other. I can allow myself to weep and wail, even eight years later, as the grief of her death stays with me; and I can also allow myself to dance with gratitude, as the joy of our connection is here too. She is both gone and always here.
Gone, and always here.
I can rest in this mystery of relationship. Of love and grief, of the great dance of Life and Death, of worlds seen and unseen that flow alongside each other. We can see these worlds, if we open our eyes to them. We can feel, in our bodies and spirits, that we are held and nourished and enlivened by a vast ecology of unseen beings, especially our elders, ancestors, and Beloved Dead.
I feel a similar tension, of things being gone and always here, in relationship to one of the other major griefs of my life. Francis Weller calls it the 4th Gate of Grief: What We Expected and Did Not Receive. In the past few years, I have come to articulate that the deep loneliness and yearning I have always felt is related to the loss of our ancient Village ways of community. For thousands of years, oppressive systems have deliberately wiped out and suppressed the animist, ritualist, earth-based, sacred ways of our ancestors, leaving many of us without roots, without community, without deep relationships to the land and the Dead and each other. This loss shows up in virtually every part of our lives, leaving us anxious & despairing & disconnected. We have been forced to forget the very ground of our being, our ways of tending to each other and our ecosystems, our “belonging to the world” (Shauna Janz), our identities as entangled beings.
As I learn and deepen alongside other ritualists who are reclaiming and reenvisioning the ways of our ancestors - of deep connection to Land, plants, elder ancestors, the Dead, our bodies, each other - I am also in constant mourning at just how much we’ve lost. Every little step toward reconnection also triggers the pain of the wound, as my body remembers just how deeply I need these relationships, and I can see how vast the chasm is. I especially feel this chasm in relation to human community - I long for an intertwined village of queer ritualists, tending to Land and each other in embodied ways, and I struggle deeply to feel like I belong in, or could try to build, any semblance of human community in our fragmented capitalist world.
I have so much grief for this deep loss, of our birthright to be carriers of medicine embedded in soulful communities with intact land-based lifeways, rites of passage, initiations, elder guides, and tending rituals. And, as we discussed in a beautiful Grief Portal held by Maggie Converse a few weeks ago, we cannot get so caught up in the loss that we fail to celebrate and recognize how we are rebuilding these relationships. By creating spaces to hold grief in ritual, by meeting together to engage in ancestral healing, by caring for each other with mutual aid in times of crisis, by reaching out tentatively and hopefully to others who hold the same yearning - we are re-creating the Village. No, it is not yet robust and yes, we are still learning and making mistakes and trying. But the ancient ways of belonging are always here, inside of our bodies and in the spaces between us. We are remembering and reclaiming. We are sitting amidst the shattered pieces, picking up fragments and binding them back together in a new mosaic of belonging.
So let there be yearning, as long as the wound is still here. And let there be a deep sense of belonging, as we remember that the devotional entanglement is still here too, deep in our bones and souls.
As the poem by Rumi quoted above notes, the moon teaches us this truth, that the beings we love can be both gone and always here. When the moon sets every day, disappearing from our sight, it seems that she is gone, and we may mourn her; but we know that even though we cannot see her, she is still here. She will return with the descent of night, to bless us with her brilliance. The moon also goes into shadow once every cycle. On the Dark Moon, we may despair of her loss in the deep darkness; but we can trust and know that she is only showing us her shadow face. Even though we cannot see her, she is still there. We can still relate to her with love, just as we can with our Beloveds who have died, and just as we can with our ancient practices of ritual and belonging.
Gone, and always here.
Gone, and always here.
All Souls by May Sarton
“Did someone say that there would be an end,
an end,
Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled,
not the gift ungiven.
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing.
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited--
only the strands grow richer with each loss
and memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
we who find shelter in the warmth within,
listen and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
as the lost human voices speak through us and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end.”
always here,
Summer