Grief & Solidarity
At this point in time, all our grief lives downstream from systems of supremacy, which are also systems of soul severance, so my work weaves collective grief and liberation together. We approach grief as medicine and heartbreak as holy, calling us toward wholeness, calling us toward repair in these times of personal and collective rupture. Grief is not something to fix or rush through but a sacred force that’s alchemizing us, as a people, as a planet, toward needed revelation and transformation.
I know from my own experiences of loss and devastation, as well as sitting with tens of thousands of grievers, that grief is wild and alive. It takes us into the underworld, the depths, the dark, and it will crack us open at the edge of what we think we can hold. That’s why my work, our work, is to hold it together, in relationship with land, lineage, beyond-human beings, and each other.
Grief is not pathology. It is protest, ceremony, and soul revealing itself. It’s a natural, living response to loss in a world unraveling under empire, extraction, and disconnection. It’s also what brings us to the commons of the heart, 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 harms we’ve done and been complicit in. And, the everyday ache of living in an overculture that refuses to witness, hold, and honor what is sacred.
As I shared above, all of our grief flows downstream from systems of supremacy—white supremacy, colonization, capitalism, ableism, zionism, human supremacy. Which means that tending to grief is also tending to collective 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 and queer our sorrow and soul work. To work with our Ancestors and our 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 to neurotypicality or Empire. You get to be heartbroken, confused, overwhelmed, furious, numb, grateful, lost, expressive, curious, questioning, illegible, ALIVE. You get to be exactly where you are and who are. And, we get to make mistakes, trust the ruptures, 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 is the work of our times, and it isn’t quick or easy but it is necessary and beautiful.
And I’m here for it. If you’re here for it too, welcome. Let’s remember, grieve, imagine, tend, molt, and liberate together.
*Note: I’ve created 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 always in progress and you can check it out here: A living spell of Holly’s values and commitments.