What if we learnt to grieve together?

In the systems we live in, we have grown up learning damaging narratives of overwork, control and human-centrality. They are tightly knotted stories of who and what matters, and what it means to be a productive, valuable member of society. These stories suppress both joy and grief; they ask us to get on with it, to stop wasting time, to disregard our own and each other’s limits. They are narratives of oppression, erasure and distraction. 

One such story tells us who has permission to have grief, and what about. That grief is linear, with an endpoint, and we must go it alone. That grieving is for others, and to be avoided – it’s too loud, too messy, something to be cleaned up, fixed, hidden. 

Stories like this do everything to us and nothing for us, and nothing for the more-than-human world around us. They are singular and rigid, and like all rigid things, they eventually form cracks. In those cracks, new stories can take root and sprout when spring comes. 

Building on the work of elders, poets and practitioners such as Sophy Banks, Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé, Francis Weller, Joanna Macy, Vanessa Andreotti, adrienne maree brown, Bayo Akomolafe, Andrea Gibson and many others, we believe, instead, that our grief, when acknowledged and tended to together, can be a space in between – a way of being in the world, that can widen our capacity for compassion and for love.

In collaboration with the wonderful Christina Watson, host of the recent Death x Life Huddle, we invite you to ‘grow ivy into the cracks’ with us in this hopeful and grief-ful action inquiry. We’ll come together to co-explore how living and working in a grief/death-phobic culture has affected the way we move and feel in the world, and imagine and practise more creative, ritualised and communal ways of tending to grief, loss and endings. Together, we’ll have space to be fallow, existential and messy, and sit with the tensions and questions that come up when we do. We offer a space for slowing down enough to feel, and for opening up enough to imagine alternatives. Our hope is for you to leave with a sense of what’s needed and what’s possible, and to bring fresh ways of thinking, being and doing into the way that you live and work.

The details

We’re offering this action inquiry as a hybrid experience, with in-person gatherings at the beginning and end, and online sessions in between. Over the course of 10 sessions, across 11 weeks with one midway pause, we’ll explore the expansiveness of grief, what it means to grieve as a practice, the potential of grief as a portal for imagining and world building, and be invited to play with ideas in creative, experimental and thought/feel-provoking ways.

• We’ll begin with an in-person gathering on Saturday 20th April 2024 at a cosy venue in London (likely 10.30-4.30PM, full details TBC)

• Following this, we’ll meet eight times online on Tuesdays for 2 hours weekly (either 1-3PM or 7-9PM UK time, TBC)

• The online sessions will be on Zoom and will be recorded, and we’ll use other methods of capture to record our journey, such as Google Docs and/or Mural

• To close, we’ll gather for a final in-person gathering on Saturday 6th of July, in London or Brighton (likely 10.30-4.30PM, full details TBC)

We’ll aim to finalise dates, times and in-person locations as we gather participants, and will be asking about needs and preferences along with your expression of interest.

Click the button below to express interest in joining us, and we’ll be in touch!