Grief Tending in Changing Times

Cultivating our capacity to stay connected and respond

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to cultivate capacity for the times we’re living in.

There is so much happening in the world that can feel difficult to take in. Ecological destruction, war and violence, political division, economic uncertainty. Alongside all of this, we are also living our ordinary lives and carrying our own personal losses, responsibilities, and challenges.

I notice in myself a tendency to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it. Sometimes I shut down or turn away. Other times, I feel a sense of urgency that I should be doing more, paying closer attention, or somehow figuring out the “right” response.

But increasingly, I’ve been wondering whether part of the work is learning how to stay with what is happening without becoming completely overwhelmed by it.

This doesn’t mean we should be able to take everything in all the time. I don’t think that’s possible, or necessarily healthy. We all have limits. But I do think there is something important about understanding our own capacity and learning how to work with it.

For me, grief is connected to this.

We often think of grief as something that happens after a significant loss, particularly the death of someone we love. But grief can also arise in response to all kinds of change and loss. We grieve places that are changing, relationships that have ended, ways of life that are disappearing, futures we imagined for ourselves, and the ongoing changes happening in the natural world.

Much of this grief doesn’t have an obvious place to go. We live in a culture that is generally uncomfortable with difficult emotions, and there are few spaces where we can bring our grief without feeling that we need to explain it, fix it, or move on from it.

I think this is one reason I’ve been drawn to grief tending.

I’m interested in what happens when we have opportunities to slow down and pay attention to what we’re carrying. When grief is not treated as a problem to solve, but as something that deserves our attention and care.

This is where the idea of capacity comes in for me.

I don’t mean capacity as becoming tougher or more resilient so that we can withstand increasingly difficult circumstances. I’m more interested in developing the ability to stay connected—to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us—even when things are hard.

That capacity isn’t something we develop alone. Our nervous systems are shaped through relationship. We need places where we can be honest about our experience and be met by others. We need practices that help us notice when we’re becoming overwhelmed and support us in coming back to ourselves. And I think we need relationships with the living world that remind us that we are part of something much larger than our individual lives.

These are some of the questions that are informing my work right now.

How do we meet the realities of our time without becoming consumed by them?

How do we make space for grief without getting stuck in it?

What helps us stay connected when we want to shut down?

How do we respond to what is happening from a place of relationship rather than fear or urgency?

I don’t have simple answers to these questions. But I believe they are worth exploring together.

This is part of what I’m hoping to create in my upcoming Grief Tending program. Over twelve weeks, we’ll explore different dimensions of grief—including personal, collective, ancestral, cultural, and ecological grief—while developing practices for staying present with what we encounter.

The intention isn’t to become better at coping with an increasingly difficult world. It’s to deepen our capacity to be in relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

Because I don’t think we can know exactly what the future will ask of us.

But I do think we can practice how we want to meet it.

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Grief Tending is a 12-week online community for exploring the many forms of grief we carry and developing practices for staying connected to ourselves, each other, and the living world. We’ll explore personal, collective, cultural, ancestral, and ecological grief, with space to slow down, listen to what we’re carrying, and practice being with it together.

Learn more about Grief Tending