January 2023: griefstep
“Heal yourself and move.”
Theo Parrish
Where in your body does the grief reside? Has it turned your bone marrow to lead, dragging your gait with its heaviness? Is it a boiling belly that violently scorches with rage? Has it stretched your skin so thin that there’s nothing but a fragile membrane between your nerves and the outside world? Perhaps it folds over you, subsuming you, until you’re abruptly ejected, gasping for air. Maybe it’s rendered you hollow, leaving you in perpetual peril of being crushed.
Nobody has escaped being impacted by the last three years, but there was something about that ‘22 vintage that felt especially diminishing and regrettable. In 2020 we swore that we wouldn’t end up back here again, but last summer we screwed our eyes shut and pinched our noses anyway, then blamed muscle memory for bringing us back to where we started. Once we opened our eyes we encountered a view even uglier than what we remembered. The disorientation of that journey hung around for too long, mutating into a vertiginous nausea. The same abuses, toxicities and exploitations remained steadfastly in place, but now they’re openly fuelling villain era narratives. It’s only in hushed, private conversation—hushed in case anyone else might be listening, but no one ever is, because they’re too preoccupied with their own grief— that we even dare reveal a common desire to not want to do this any more.
Grief is shitty, immobilising, inconvenient. It’s selfish, it walls you off, lies to you that nobody understands your internal world; it is unhinged with its hair-triggers and hauntings and miscalculations. But grief can also rebuild you at a cellular level, if you let it. The weighted down sensation can reveal a new perspective of the world that’s lower to the ground. Volcanic eruptions expel things that have been aching to be dislodged. While the thin-skinned risk being bruised, they also risk getting closer and more tactile with others.
bell hooks, of course, knew all of this deeply. In A Woman's Mourning Song she wrote that actively expressing grief is “essential to any experience of spiritual ecstasy.” In the devastation left behind by previous traumas and pandemics, there are clues to illuminate the path forward. In 1988, as the incidence of HIV diagnoses was gathering at a horrifying pace, Gwen Guthrie’s “Can't Love You Tonight” was unequivocal about its loss and lamentation:
“Your body, so appealing (baby),
But I've lost that lovin' feeling
Surgeon General says
We've got to use our heads,
Tonight (got no time for passion)
I can’t love you tonight,
Love is no longer free.”
The existential threats being levelled at us are many. We are at risk as corporeal, biological, ecological, psychological, political, societal beings. Our habitual grasping towards scarcity paradigms, wealth and growth fetishism, the exploitation of art and workers, libertarianism, the over-indexing of fame … all of this only condemns us to this queasy reality.
We need time to heal out loud, then move.
In the chapter titled “Healing: Redemptive Love” in All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks again invites us into her tender truth. “After we have made the choice to be healed in love,” she writes, “faith that transformation will come gives us the peace of mind and heart that is necessary when the soul seeks revolution. It is difficult to wait…when we surrender to the "wait" we allow changes to emerge within us without anticipation or struggle. When we do this, we are stepping out on faith.”
References:
hooks, b. (1993) A Woman's Mourning Song. Writers & Readers.
hooks, b. (2001) All about love: New visions. William Morrow, New York.
DOWNLOAD FLYER Translation by Thilo Schneider / Artwork by RM