grief

Painting by Sanford Robinson Gifford, Ruins of the Parthenon 1880

Grief has been tumbling down like rocks from a holy high place.

For a hundreds, even thousands of years, it has been thundering and clacking and wailing out as it breaks off like limestone chunks crumbling from the once majestic infrastructure of a still imperfect world — but one which knew reverence. The world of temples and stepwells and humble grandeur has fallen. Is falling still, there is perhaps lower to go. Even dust to collapse to.

The grief is real, multiplied with every blow. Grief, cascading down through the nervous systems of our ancestors for generations.

The deterioration of culture is a felt and bodied experience. Culture lives in us as well as us in it.

And as much as we have been initiated to reject and distaste such aching emotions, it is our turn, our opportunity, our responsibility to grieve.

As Martin Prechtel explains in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, the unexpressed grief prevalent in our society today is the reason for many of the social, cultural, and individual maladies that we are currently experiencing.

Prechtel says, “Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”