a note on themes & engaging with this text

During the summer of 2023, from inside the ripple of a series of painfully repetitious deaths, I started working with an assemblage of writing and other forms called We the Lake. Much of this has 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 this project started to emerge, loss and its partners seem only to have multiplied — more early death in the communities I am part of, the ongoing horror of multiple genocides, acute and chronic suffering in cities and rural spaces alike, all of it rendered in greater and greater detail each day — and I feel a deep and quickening concern for those around me. I don’t have answers to this, but I do have questions and a desire to hold space for thinking into them and finding new ones, hopefully with you.

We the Lake continues to take shape, but for now it has arranged itself into three primary sections. The Lake is a growing assemblage of grief knowledge gathered from individuals who choose to share their experience and updated monthly. Please add to it here. 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 in spaces of loss, their work is finding what comes after, what evolution can be found through deep engagement with difficulty. Updates and additions will be made here frequently. The final section is an excerpt from my own writing, early pages from ongoing workwith themes of “madness” and sensitivity, suicide, the failures of poetry and philosophy and care, the particular tragedy of the American west, and the relationship between grief and survival.  I offer it here with the hope that it might engender the openness of others in sharing their own experience.

I hope you find some reflection or comfort or renewal here, some space to share your own questions and understanding. Please read with care & thank you for being here.