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THE LAKE

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The Lake is an expanding assemblage of communal knowledge gathered from a public call for grief. Each month, responses to this call are woven together to form a reflection of endurance & embodiment in time. Please add your own experience here. 














Please describe your grief(s). What is its shape? Quality? Color? Language? Where is it located in your body or outside of your body? How else does it want to communicate itself?

How do you show up to the process of grieving? What forms has grieving taken for you? What has helped you work with grief? What has surprised you?

How has your relationship to your grief &/or to grief as a concept shifted over time? How has it changed you? What has been released & what has returned? What has been the trajectory of your relationship to the dead or to what has been lost?

How do your individual experiences of grief inform your experiences of collective grief & vice versa? How do you respond to/process events of collective loss & how is this different from or similar to how you work with personal loss? What happens when these intertwine?

What has the process of grieving revealed to you about living? About joy and survival? How do you stay actively engaged with embodied experience and how does grief inform this process? What keeps you here?



NOVEMBER LAKE

2024




The shape of grief is the shape of the being gone, its lack of shape / shadow / umbra that is left behind.


















Grieving has been

contorting the body
and mind around
this shape
lack of shape
its shadow

moving the body
despite the missing
shape, living
despite its absence

a wall / encasement put up






It shows up in dreams
as memories and past lives,
desperation to relive
the memory of the shape,
texture and sounds.






















There was a gathering of people and sharing of images of proof of life.





















I have let grief become a barrier to joy; I disallow joy as the world is crumbling, or let my world be a single thing that is now gone.









I found a quote about how grief is our final act of love as it is forever.


But I have been feeeling shame around grief because I always feel like I am grieving over lots of things.
















Personal loss and grieving is part of a whole.




Events of collective loss remind me that my own sorrow in reaction to mass loss, the dying planet, mass genocide should not become despair  

it should be used to create an alternative reality.







November Contributors


Cyan




OCTOBER LAKE

2024



i'm disconnected from grief
but through the small tools
i have made
to crystallize it into view




i have a rock that is michael; it is a black lava rock. the grief has holes, is a black rock, is heavier than it looks. sometimes i tie a thread around the middle of it so he knows i'm thinking of him. i used to keep the rock in a planter with the avocado tree. when i was on the honeymoon the tree died because it is sensitive and can't do without water for a few days. when i got home, i dug up the tree, and removed the michael rock. it was the first time the rock had been out of the avocado for a long time. i washed it, held it, and put it on the shelf above the sink next to a party glitter that reminds me of you and a ceramic pot with a face painted on one side and another face painted on the other. when you turn around the pot it can be smiling (bashful) or staring (incredulous). why those two faces? why just two? 



































i don't associate my grief with sadness anymore.






 
















I love charcoal gray, but I hate grief because it won’t be over, already.

I use ashes in my ritual to work thro it, so I would say grief is gray.

grief has been very demonstrative — I mentioned my ritual above. I never used to get drunk and now I do.








michael has been dead for a long time. i associate his particular grief with my only self-created spiritual practice that i have ever done faithfully for years. when i began grieving him after i found his body dead i turned into a ritualmaker and made rites for him that i carried with me for months. all of it was on my own because there was no community support besides people getting too drunk and being chaotic. what i'm saying is, i learned how to have a connection to him, a spiritual connection, because i needed it and i had to make it up myself. now i have the rock that is michael with me, and i refresh our connection from time to time, but i am starting to forget how, as the wound gets farther into the skin and out of sight. the rock keeps me in it.











i wash the lava rock instead.









too big for me to answer right now



the world ringing with infinite pain,
i am basically numb. i try to be active
and respond to the devastation
that brings about grief, by trying
to "do something" about it-
one of my many narcissisms.



i think i am in "survival mode" - the ecological grief that i have felt over the years has been enormous, and yet, i pass through places filled with living earthly beings as they are torn to bits by earth movers every day. i can't respond to everything or i would be overwhelmed. environmental activism points grief in a direction that is "doing something about it." but there isn't that certain acceptance, condensation of the grief in the same way that i have felt it with the loss of people.




i find the larger the catastrophe,
the more enormous the losses,
the larger the grief, the more
difficult to place it in ritual
and therefore to metabolize it
or to bring it to a scale
that i can actually begin
to wrap my own grieving around.





i think of the daily, unbelievable horrors of the killing of Palestinian people, and have dry dust in my throat and chest.




a "cutoffness" i feel
from my own sense
of grief, and my fear
that my lack
of "global level grief"
is monstrous.




i feel that i should mirror within myself the pain of earth and its sufferers; and that i don't just burst into particles from the pressure of that pain makes me feel doomed.
















i think i used to be able to be more raw; and yet- these years i have not had many die. i have been aware that it may happen soon.









grief in an acute sense is far from me right now, or maybe it is sifting away in my body, looking for ritual to hone it into something sharp. i have avoided the sharpness. what am i losing in myself as i avoid the sharpness? i have been feeling very dull in spirit, probably from all that shuttered grief.





i think that relationship with grief has a shame and guilt component. the lack of being "rent with grief" or unable to function amid the nightmare makes me feel monstrous.







i have this notion that someday it will start to happen and then it will be what is happening over and over again until i also die.







I’ve never been happier or more tormented. it’s a very strange place to be.




October Contributors


christy
Teal




SEPTEMBER LAKE

2024



Did you know that a placenta is an organ that a fetus grows in order to steal additional nourishment and energy from the mother it’s growing in? A whole organ devoted to depleting life force in order to grow something new—not necessarily better or worse—but new.  


Right below the heart I picture it as a small fire heating up the cauldron of the heart, and it is red orange. In the third eye region I picture it as a beam of light, and it’s yellow like an egg yolk.


Compressed carbon is how it feels to me. Not a diamond, but incredibly dense; packed down. Matte black.


Mine has pushed me closer to the veil, closer to some source of light beyond myself.


It was easier to act it out then explain. I was there though, because it was me. I was it.


I wondered if I’d just absorbed it into my body.


When my son grew up and left my home, I broke wide open. The gift of giving life is also the pain of having it outgrow you.


That’s where a new version of me began.




I shape the calamity of it all into a bouquet, a crystal ball, a contraption.











It used to be avoidance, even though it felt like I was wallowing in it. What it looks like to me now in hindsight is a refusal to do any real work on myself, and instead I chose to remain in the despair. Though there was something that compelled me to keep crawling forward. It would almost be like trying to keep myself from breathing but reflexively taking deep gasps of breath.












In my early grief, I was suicidal.

I had an affair.

I blew up my whole life and was caught in the arms of my community.





I enrolled in grad school and brought home another big dog and shopped (and shopped and shopped) and ate (and ate and ate gaining back 50 lbs I lost a couple of years back) and sequestered myself to my couch.





I’ve been quiet and more private this time. I think a couple of friends have left me over it.









I think when it changed was when I began to take agency with the parts of it I could make a determination about. Which isn’t to say I could will it away; I could however choose not to drink a bottle of bourbon knowing it would heighten my anxiety. I could cook healthy food at home instead of eating terrible chemical infused fast food that inflamed my body, etc. That coupled with deep self-reflection and self-assessment and openly discussing my issues with combat veterans has diminished the scale of its presence in my life, while still having great weight.







I’ve found that my grieving is best approached in solitude. Yes, communal grieving is necessary, among family and friends, though the real process of accepting loss (in my experience) requires long stretches of calm, quiet reflection.





I can say with utmost certainty that songwriting and art making have been my saving grace.

Without these channels I would flail considerably, anchorless and unmoored.






Many personal rituals are performed, though mostly I require a visceral falling apart and gently piecing myself together again, over and over.  Often this will occur several times in one week, with long stretches of relief and deep optimism in between.





My grief has been bittersweet, and a reminder that we have little control over much of anything beyond ourselves.




I found that I have a responsibility to it, as well as to those that I love. I found that energy continues, and that I am able to connect and commune with those I’ve lost all of the time.

I’ve felt my intuition strengthen. I’m sensitive to the shifts in energy, the mystical small nudges and whispers of the universe.

I talk with my baby, my best friend, my ancestors.

I’ve come to understand that there’s far more mystery than there are answers, and I’ve come to trust the ambiguity of having limited scope and vision when it comes to the big picture of the universe.




It changed everything. I exist mostly in a state of empathy and gratitude from a wholistic point of view.

I’ve made my world much smaller on the day to day, while also embracing adventure and calculated risks again.

I’ve found myself much more spiritual in a deeply agnostic manner. I’m more convinced that there is some strong connecting energy, probability, and consciousness but most likely in a way best explained by some quantum mechanism which I lack the conceptual framework to understand. The very nature of the mind, and the “theory of the mind,” continues to confound science and it fascinates me. No one can explain how the gray matter and electrical signals created identity and a rich interior life; a sense of self. I feel like all of these disparate concepts are somehow linked and somewhere in that I believe I’d find my dead friends.




Grief has changed me, insomuch as it’s given me ultimate permission to lean into the gentlest parts of myself.

They’re still here with me — not through delusion or denial about reality, but through a confluence of energy. I know I’m a more spiritual, less jaded human because I know grief.



September Contributors


Heather Plummer
C. Hunt
Elijah Jensen-Lindsey