The Long Grief Journey

by Bradie Hansen

In the northern hemisphere, the darkening of the light is approaching its pinnacle. The winter solstice is on Thursday, December 21^st and that night will be the longest night of darkness of the year. Then the subtle tilt toward incremental lightening of the dark will begin on the 22^nd. The solstices are times people have been honoring and ritualizing for thousands of years and the stories, myths, and legends that express our relationship with the movement of light and dark center around death, rebirth, consciousness and wisdom, and varying aspects of the spirit world. Whatever your ancestral roots, you can most assuredly find examples of how the relationship between darkness and light was symbolized through story and observance.

Grief is part of this story and the winter solstice for me is a time of great reflection on loss and love. There have been many times in my life where I didn’t feel ready for the light to start coming back in. This was especially true after my mother died. There was this feeling I had internalized which was that I ought to feel better at the year anniversary of her death, or that I might feel a distinct difference in how I was experiencing grief. The reality was so different than that. Instead, what happened was that I went quiet with my grief- it became something that I felt like I couldn’t keep burdening people with, and frankly, I was out of words. It was just a feeling I carried around with me. No one told me to stop talking about my mom or made me feel bad; more it was some other messaging that I am still trying to understand. I believe it has to do with culture and our resistance to being changed by those things that impact us.

But going quiet can’t be the only thing I do; stuck grief calcifies and becomes stagnant and I knew that in order to engage fully in my life, I needed to harness ways to keep anguish moving and flowing in the same way love and joy do. I realized that I would do better and feel more grounded in my own reality if I had ways to honor the whole of my lived experience, not just the happy stuff. This is where tapping into the power of ritual and wisdom of nature comes in.

Honoring the rituals we have around the changes in nature have become for me ways to tend to the darkness and therefore grief in my life. They invite quiet, introspection, and reverence. As I gather and prepare those things that will in my space for the solstice, I think about our shared human experience of grief and love. I feel relief that we have these opportunities in nature to bring into consciousness all that we are working through. Tending to the darkness helps me to welcome in the incremental light, knowing that this is a cycle, and we are part of this rhythm.

If you have healing practices that align with the seasons or nature, we’d love to hear about them.