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a note on themes & engaging with this text

During the summer of 2023, I started working with an assemblage of writing and other forms associated with grief and the relationship between loss and survival. Much of this included transcribing of and sorting through texts that already existed, bringing together pieces that once seemed separate, and inviting in others whose approaches to grieving have helped me learn my own. Since We the Lake started to emerge, loss and its partners seem only to have multiplied — more premature death in the communities I am part of, the ongoing horror of multiple genocides, increasing instances of climate disaster and ecosystem loss, acute and chronic suffering in cities and rural spaces alike — and with this a growing sense that thinking and feeling around grief might be one bolstering resource for endurance through time. 

We the Lake continues to take shape, and for now has arranged itself into three primary sections. The Lake is a growing well of grief knowledge gathered from individuals who choose to share their experience. Responses to a Call for Grief are collected each month to form collages of communal reflection. Meet Me at the Center of the Bridge and the blue squares that surround it comprise a series of collaborations and conversations initiated between 2020 and the present, some as part of Sema, many still in process. Though these exchanges often originate from spaces of loss, their work is finding what comes after, what evolution can be undergone through deep engagement with difficulty. Updates and additions will be made here frequently. The final section is from my own writing, starting gestures of ongoing work that tends to themes of grief and survival, “madness” and sensitivity, suicide, the tragedy of the American west, and some failures of poetry and philosophy and care. While I imagine this early thinking one day blending together with other elements of We the Lake to make a more “formed” thing, what is there now is meant to be encountered as a very beginning, a few color samples being tested on a wall. 

Each of these sections is offered with the hope of nurturing openness, connection, and relief inside of questions that do not have answers. I hope you might find some reflection or comfort or renewal here, and space to share your own questions and understanding. Please take care when engaging with these texts, keeping in mind the themes they explore. Thank you for being here.