Transmuting Grief

“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

I woke up suddenly on Monday night filled with a deep feeling of grief. I was almost overcome by that feeling, and yet it wasn’t a personal grief. I have learned over the years, that feelings like this are usually Goddess trying to get my attention. After tossing and turning for a bit, I got up, determined to explore and to write about these intense feelings.

Obviously, the past several months have been ones of great loss for many people. I have come through this time relatively unscathed.  Although my husband and I have lost several friends to age and disease, we lost no one to Covid. The grief that we have felt has been real, but it wasn’t of the intensity that I was feeling during the night.

In fact, as a retiree, I am privileged enough to take advantage of the isolation of the past year to use it for a time of reflection and personal growth. So my thought was, “Who am I to feel grief for something I have not personally experienced?”

Yet the grief is there, it is real, it is heavy. There is so much death in the world, not just from Covid, but from fires and floods, heat waves, and deep freezes. There are wars on women, people of color, gays and transgenders, on truth – wars on everything that is deemed “other” by the patriarchy. It feels as if the world as we know it is crumbling beneath our feet, and there is nowhere safe to stand.

I am somewhat of an empath, and I can feel these deaths in the depths of my soul, in my very bones.  I feel the deep grief, and yet it is not a personal grief, but a universal grief for the threat to our very existence as a planet. I am feeling overcome with grief for all the myriad losses in this world – whales, rainforests, butterflies, honeybees, glaciers, polar bears, people, truth. The list is infinite. The world is in upheaval and there seems to be little political or collective will to take steps to mitigate the damage. Will our planet burn up because of our foolishness?

I am tempted to push this grief away. After all, I am one person with little influence. The problem is too big, and I am too small. And yet, I feel this grief for a reason. I feel that I must sit with it, not block it or deny it. In sitting with it, in allowing it to flow through me, I am a vessel for transformation. I become the crucible for transmuting this grief into hope, wisdom, love, and deep connection with all things. I am called to live fully in my corner of the world, to make a small difference where I am by radiating love and by acknowledging that we are in essence all one. In the grieving, I am called to find hope in the fluttering wings of a butterfly or the cry of a newborn baby.

I believe that, to some extent, everyone on the planet is feeling this grief. They may not recognize it as grief. It may come out as anger, depression, anxiety, or physical illness, but in reality, it is grief for the death of the old world, when the new world has not yet been born. I choose to sit with this grief in the hope of transmuting it into something that can contribute to making the new world a better place.

Barbara Garland
August, 2021