SUMMARY: Documentation for an ongoing series, an album, uniting poetics of place with actions, rituals, rites, explorations, creations, heightened awarenesses. Some pretense to improvisation around an ancient genre. Doorley calls it “Locus Poetica.” Plans to add here completed rites: Circumambulations (Opening the Mountain), Walks of Phenomenal Existence and Life on Retreatland during Lockdown. Visions for: Further Collaborations around the theme. 

On Rites of Mourning

Grief’s immensity is equaled only by its inevitability. Grieving is a movement of soul, of heart and gut, an artform as much as a personal discovery, a rite as much as a thread woven in the fabric of life itself.  When grieving is embraced in culture and within a psyche as an essential process, we honor and relate without filters– in whatever way available to us–  to our emotional experience, our relationships and the reality of our existence. There is no right way to do this, no formal prescription. Yet there are many cultural forms or rites that serve to welcome us or support us through the process. These Mourning Rites are an ongoing series inspired, in part, by the death of a robin while on retreat deep in a forest. As I observed the noble death of the robin, I discovered a backlog, a hunger, within my own psyche and society– a need to grieve more fully, to open to grieving on a daily level as an essential process and to ritualize in art and adventure a process so deeply expressed in the processes of nature. I have also found inspiration in the book, “The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise” by Martin Prechtel. Thanks to RB for sharing that great text.