Grief & Solidarity
All my work weaves grief and liberation together. Because our heartbreak is holy, because all grief is political, and because we belong to each other.
I approach grief as both soul work and solidarity work. Not something to fix or rush through but an alchemical, sacred force that reshapes us from the inside out. Grief is wild and alive. It will take you to the underworld of everything you once believed to be true. It will crack you open at the edge of what you thought you could hold. That’s why we hold it together, in relationship with land, lineage, beyond-human beings, and each other.
Grief is not pathology. It is protest. It is ceremony. It is soul. It’s a natural, holy response to loss in a world unraveling under empire, extraction, and disconnection. It’s also what brings us to the commons of the heart and where we can feel the mutuality of our suffering and sorrow, where we take action toward what we love and want to protect.
In the spaces I co-shape, we welcome grief in all its forms. The personal losses: deaths, breakups, identity shifts, illness. The ancestral wounds: colonization, displacement, domination. The collective heartbreak: mass extinction, ecocide, genocide, the disappearance of village. The everyday ache of living in an overculture that refuses to witness, hold, or honor what is sacred.
Most of our grief flows downstream from systems of supremacy—white supremacy, colonization, capitalism, ableism, human supremacy. Which means that tending to grief is also tending to liberation. Grief shows us where, who and what we love. What we long for and where the overculture has betrayed us. And it can also show us the way back into relationship, into reverence, into repair.
So this is an invitation: to grieve together. To un-domesticate our sorrow and soul work. To call in the Ancestors and the beyond-human kin. To reclaim grief as a communal, politicized, animist act of defiance and devotion.
You don’t have to act okay when you’re in spaces I co-tend. You don’t have to pretend, perform, or conform. You get to be heartbroken, confused, overwhelmed, furious, numb, grateful, lost, ALIVE. You get to be exactly where you are. And, we get to make mistakes and work toward repair.
Author and activist bell hooks wrote, “To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.” This work isn’t quick or easy but it is necessary. And I’m here for it. If you’re here for it too, welcome. Let’s remember, grieve, imagine, and liberate together.
*Note: I’m working on a values and commitment statement that says more about how I hold community spaces and what my body of work is all about. It’s a piece in progress and you can check it out here: A living spell of Holly’s values and commitments.