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The Long Dark with Francis Weller

How to Survive the End of the World

Fri Nov 14 2025

Summary

Podcast Summary: How to Survive the End of the World

Episode: The Long Dark with Francis Weller
Date: November 14, 2025
Hosts: Autumn Brown (B) & adrienne maree brown (C)
Guest: Francis Weller (A)

Main Theme & Purpose

In this episode, hosts Autumn and adrienne maree brown welcome renowned grief teacher and elder Francis Weller to explore the “long dark” – a metaphor for our current era of collective uncertainty, ecological grief, and existential loss. The trio delves deeply into the necessity of grief, ritual, and soul work as crucial tools for survival, healing, maturation, and transformation during times of profound change. The conversation weaves together personal stories, cultural observations, and invitations to community-rooted practices, speaking directly to the urgency of reanimating lost arts of communal grieving and ritual.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Need for Descent & Grief Work

Kartsoluni: Francis introduces the Inuit term kartsoluni—"sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth"—as a frame for where we are collectively. (A) [00:04, 28:24]
“We don't know. And we can't use the same models of...control and forcing things to happen. We're really being asked to approach it very, very differently.” – Francis [00:08, 28:30]
Both hosts and guest check in with honest shares:
- Autumn is working on her book by the ocean, feeling both solitude and support from family. [05:07]
- Adrienne is mourning recent high-profile and personal losses, asking “Am I clear enough on what I’m leaving behind me?” [07:32–10:47]
- Francis is “stretched tender” by recent deaths in his large family and in the collective. [04:06]

2. From Individual to Communal Healing

Francis traces his conscription into grief work to his family's age gaps and early confrontations with loss (his father’s stroke at 16). [13:47]
Major insight: Modern psychology missed the communal and ritual dimensions of healing—influenced by his work with Indigenous teacher Malidoma Somé. [16:42, 19:08]
“The psyche anticipates community—repair, recalibration, trauma, giving thanks—it was never private.” – Francis [19:54]
Story of a young woman burned by her mother whose village restored her dignity—her wound remained “skin deep, it did not penetrate to her soul.” In contrast, Western traumas fester in isolation. [21:11–22:26]

3. Soul, Psyche, and White Emptiness

Francis distinguishes soul (the dimension of depth, descent, and feeling) from spirit (uplift, ascension, clarity). [23:10]
Western culture (especially white, settler masculinity) is ascension/heroism-centric and thus “avoids what needs to be addressed—emptiness, loss, and grief.” [25:15, 26:47]
“Almost every thread we’re suffering from emerges out of our avoidance of acknowledging this emptiness...lineage, ritual, myth—all of that got silenced.” – Francis [24:15]
Describes his recent talk: “At the Heart of All Our Sorrows: An Excursion into Emptiness” – the hardest writing he’s ever done. [25:59]

4. Soul Activism and the Subversiveness of Grief

Soul Activism: Offers an alternative to heroism-focused political activism—prioritizing ritual, imagination, creativity, poetics, beauty, elderhood, and community. [28:24]
Grief work is subversive in a culture seeking to “kill everything while denying responsibility for the death of it all.” [28:24]
Kartsoluni requires “restraint, reverence, and patience”—values at odds with individualism and capitalism. [31:19]

5. The Creative Balance: Shine or Be Still?

Both hosts wrestle with their roles as public teachers: When is it time to shine, and when to “sit quietly together in the darkness”? [32:41]
Francis: “The soul has a simultaneous need for intimacy and freedom...our job is to listen: Is this a time for in-breath or exhale?” [33:45]
“Listen to that rhythm...What is soul asking from you right now?” [34:50]

6. The Core Elements of Ritual

Rituals arise from the earth (“the dreaming earth”) and are not manufactured. Deep listening is key, and rituals must be local and responsive to place. [37:21–38:28]
Story: 80-man grief ritual in Minnesota (“Renewing the World”) involved a funeral pyre for personal and collective losses, followed by gratitude rituals, culminating in renewal and “watering the seeds of the New World.” [40:08–44:38]

7. Art, Beauty & Ritual

Ritual is the original art form, blending dance, singing, poetry, altar-building—beauty evokes the open heart. [46:37]
“Beauty is the means by which the gods touch the senses, reach the heart, and attract us into life.” – Francis [47:28]

8. Personal Story: Grief, Ritual, and Guidance by the Earth

Autumn shares the story of ritualizing a miscarriage—wailing by a fire, sifting the ashes for her baby's bones, guided wholly by the earth and grief itself. [48:32–53:30]
“In my grief, I was actually available for something that was right there...” – Autumn [53:18]
Purpose of ritual: “to derange us,” shake out the “arrangement” that’s not working, and help us remember who we are. [54:11]

9. Maturation, Eldership & the Apprenticeship with Sorrow

The repeated discipline of ritual and listening to the earth is a sign of spiritual adulthood, not adolescence. [56:36]
Story: the importance of holding space for others’ grief (John at a student’s memorial—knows his “post” is to wait and hold space for the grieving teens). [56:49–58:53]
“What I call the apprenticeship with sorrow—the long fidelity ripens us, deepens us.” [60:29]

10. The Five Gates of Grief [62:27–71:43]

Francis shares his framework for the “gates of grief”:

Everything We Love, We Will Lose
- “Everything we love will disappear on us, either through our disappearance or through theirs...Grief is part of my loving them.” [62:27]
The Parts of Ourselves That Have Not Known Love
- Social systems train us to cleave off aspects of ourselves; wholeness is lost and contempt blocks grief.
- “Most of therapy is a second gate ritual: How do I make amends to the parts of me I’ve banished?” [64:57]
The Sorrows of the World
- Ecological grief, extinction, disappearance of songbirds, climate despair.
- “Earth grief...will continue to bite us and haunt us...grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future...the long dark…two generations.” [65:46]
What We Expected and Did Not Receive
- The ache of the missing village, rituals, ancestral connection.
- “That’s a hole we have to weep in for generations.” [69:43]
Ancestral Grief
- “Almost all grief is ancestral grief...I’m the current curator of this shame...we are the inheritors.”
- Many in the circle add a sixth gate: “the harms we have caused.” [70:46]

Adrienne names: “I do this grief work so I can clear my side of every channel...to experience love in this lifetime, even if I won’t necessarily experience peace or justice or the other things I long for.” [73:10]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“Soul work can't begin until the nigredo happens. We're really in a time of soulmaking.” – Francis [28:24]
“Kartsoluni: sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth.” – Francis [00:04, 28:24]
“You are beautiful, you are loved, you are ours. You belong here, you know?...her wound was skin deep. It did not penetrate to her soul.” – Francis [21:11]
“Beauty is the means by which the gods touch the senses, reach the heart, and attract us into life.” – James Hillman (quoted by Francis) [47:28]
“Ritual helps us to get deranged...that’s the purpose of ritual.” – Francis [54:11]
“The long apprenticeship with sorrow leads to elderhood. We're no longer having a fight with life. We accept life on life's terms.” – Francis [60:29]
“Grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future...the long dark—at least two generations.” – Francis [66:34]

Timestamped Highlights

00:04 – Francis introduces kartsoluni
04:06 – Francis shares personal grief; all hosts check in with how they are
16:42 – Francis discusses lack of grief in Western psychology
19:54 – The necessity of communal/ritual healing
25:15 – White emptiness, rupture, and its consequences
28:24 – On soul activism, ritual, and subversive grief work
33:45 – The oscillation between intimacy and solitude; listening to the soul
37:21 – How ritual arises from the earth; example of crafting ritual to fit place
40:08 – Story of the “Renewing the World” men’s grief ritual
46:37 – Why beauty and art are intrinsic to ritual and grief
48:32 – Autumn’s story of ritual/grief with a lost child
54:11 – “To get deranged” – ritual as dissolution and remembering
56:49 – Eldership and holding space for others’ sorrow
62:27–71:43 – The Five Gates of Grief explained
73:10 (approx) – Adrienne on grief work, love, and clearing the channel

Tone & Language

This episode is heartfelt, poetic, intimate, and spacious. The hosts and guest speak directly from personal and cultural wounds in a spirit of honesty, encouragement, and reverence—for their ancestors, for ritual, and for each other. The language is rich and often metaphorical, giving the listener permission to slow down, grieve, and seek connection to both earth and community.

Takeaways for Listeners

Grief is not a sign of weakness but is essential to wholeness and cultural renewal.
Rituals arise from the earth and should be rooted in local landscape, community, and need—not imposed as formula.
The journey through grief, supported by ritual, awakens us to beauty, gratitude, and eldership.
Soul activism is urgently needed during this long dark; it’s about deep listening, beauty-making, and mutual witnessing.
Community is the natural milieu for repair and healing—it is not meant to be endured alone.

Further Resources

Francis Weller’s books: The Wild Edge of Sorrow, The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, In the Absence of the Ordinary
More on rituals and workshops at Wisdom Bridge

Closing Words

“Grieve what you need to grieve. Stay connected.” – adrienne maree brown [77:25]

(Note: Timestamps are approximate and highlight major content sections as per full transcript.)

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Transcript

A (0:04)

There's a term in the Inuit tradition called kartsoloni, and kartsaluni translates quite literally, sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth. And that's where we are right now. I think we have to get really quiet and listen because we don't know what's happening. We don't know. And we can't use the same models of, you know, progress and push and control and forcing things to happen. We're really being asked to approach it very, very different.

B (1:01)

I'm Autumn Brown, front woman of the soul pop band Autumn, a queer science fiction writer, a theologian, a mother of dragons, and a healing justice facilitator for social movements living on Dakota and Anishinaabe land, currently known as Minneapolis.

C (1:19)

It's. And I'm Adrienne Maree Brown, a luscious black queer witch writer, auntie obsessed with love, an apocalyptic cosmic optimist, and a gardener of healing ideas. I live in the land of the Oconechee, Shikori, Skoruri, Tuscarora, Eno, and Lumbee peoples.

B (1:35)

And this is how to survive the end of the world.

C (1:39)

Our podcast about learning from apocalypse with grace, rigor and curiosity.

B (1:45)

As a reminder, we have no ads. We are fully listener supported.

C (1:52)

Patreon for exclusive content. If you're the people who've been waiting to hear what we think about Luigi Mangione, that's the place to go.

B (2:00)

That's the place to go. Find out. That was a juicy one. Okay. We are so excited and so honored and privileged and. And delighted to welcome to our show today the incredible teacher Frances Weller. We are going to have a beautiful conversation with Frances today about grief and soul work. But first, I'm going to just introduce you all to Francis. In case you're not familiar, Francis Weller is a retired psychotherapist. Is that right? You're still retired?

A (2:35)

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, I'm committed. I'm committed.

B (2:40)

Committed to retirement. Frances is a retired psychotherapist, a writer, and a soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. He's the author of several books, including the Wild Edge of Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, the Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, and most recently, in the Absence of the Ordinary. So soul work for times of uncertainty. Through his work, he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people. He founded and directs Wisdom Bridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the Wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from Western poetic, psychological, and spiritual traditions. Welcome to the show. Frances Weller.

A (16:43)

They said I, you know, but I was smart enough to know I didn't really know anything about sitting with folks. So I. I called the Jung Institute in San Francisco, and they gave me a bunch of different analysts in the area. And as I was talking to Clark, I said, this is the man I want to sit with. You know, there's something about his presence that really touched me. So first time I showed up at his door, and he opened the door, and, God, this guy was ancient. He must have been like 60 or something. It was just so old, so old. But we sat down, and the very first thing he did is he reached over and patted this big rock he had by his desk, by his chair, and said, this is my clock. I operate at geologic speed, and if you're going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves. And then he pointed to his clock and said, it hates this. You know, it hates that regimented time. So I tell everybody that story because everyone's in such a hurry to change. But when you sit with people long enough, you realize that that hurry to change is often driven by self hatred. And soul will never participate in an agenda based on hatred. So getting them to slow down and begin to attend to what soul is speaking to them through depression or addiction or loneliness or whatever it is. There's an intelligibility that comes through it, and it also includes an invitation to touch loss. And that's been a majority of my work. Then in the 90s, I happened to have the good fortune of running into this teacher from West Africa, Malodoma Somay. Ah, yeah. I spent a year studying with him and his. His wife at the time, Sabonfu. And then after that, he and I began teaching together for about five or six years. And there was something that came in that process that really opened up my mind, my imagination of the missing element in Western psychological work, which is community and ritual. Now, we had none of that. We had the hyper focus on the individual repair work. But I often now sell, I tell everybody I work with that this is a good place to learn how to tolerate contact and to meet some of the most difficult pieces, like grief. But I say you will ultimately need a much larger healing vessel, because what the psyche anticipates was communal. That was the original matrix. For repair, for healing, for restoration, for recalibration, for trauma work, whatever. For giving thanks, whatever it was. And it was never private. I remember going to many of these continuing education classes you have to do to keep your license, and several of them by Rick Hanson. I really like Rick's work. He's a neuropsychologist. And Buddha's brain, you probably are familiar with a lot of his works. As I'm sitting in the class, I'm going, well, these are wonderful interior individual practices, and we need those. But I thought. But the original matrix was much more bigger. The original matrix was communal. And part of our grief arises out of the absence of that original matrix, what I call the fourth gate of grief, what we expected and did not receive, that our psyches are anticipating this. Right. That we were evolved out of that story over 300,000 years, and suddenly it is vaporized, it's gone. And so we don't even know to name it. But that ache that we feel, that emptiness that we feel, arises out of the failure of culture, not out of our personal failures.

A (23:10)

A very important expansion of a single word that oftentimes has so many associations with it that don't lead to expansion but to contraction. So the way I use it comes out of the archetypal psychology, indigenous animistic traditions. Soul is what allows us to experience anything of depth. When we say we are having a deep conversation or a soulful conversation means we've gone into the territory of dissent, moving down, it's down into vulnerability, into tenderness, into grief, into shame, into wounds. Just the whole territory of soul, in my understanding of it, takes us down into what is most human in us. Whereas spirit in this tradition is a rising energy. It uplifts, it clarifies, it ascends. And we're very good at that in this culture. We know about spirit all the time. What we don't have is a language of descent. And that's where we are collectively right now. We're in this process of a massive descent into what I call the long dark. And this time is a necessary time of engaging all that gets neglected when you're in ascension culture. Things on the margins, things that are suffering, all the things that we neglect collectively in this country are those that take us down into soul, into that place of. I mean, where you find soul in the collective is on the margins. People of color, the gay, lesbian, trans community. This is where you find soul. Indigenous cultures. You don't find it in the straight white male community. I'm sorry to admit that, but that's the reality. That's what I've been trying to work with over these past 40 plus years, is trying to wake white men up to the trouble we're in and the trouble we're fostering by our neglect and our. Our avoidance of what we have to address. I just gave a talk last two weeks ago in Minnesota, north of Minneapolis, actually, Sturgeon Lake. I was up there for the 40, 41st Minnesota Men's Conference. And I said, today, today I'm talking about a subject I've never spoken publicly about, but I've hinted at. Wow. And that's white emptiness. And the legacy of that white emptiness and the consequences of that emptiness in terms of consumption, racism. I mean, you look at almost every single thread that we're suffering from. It emerges out of our avoidance of acknowledging this emptiness that we are carrying from the rupture and disruption of lineage, of tradition, of language, of ritual, of myth. All of that got silenced. And in its place, we develop capitalism, colonization, empire, you know, supremacy. Oh, great strategies for coping with emptiness. Right. But that's the legacy that we. That we have to deal with, I have to deal with. And so the men were very moved. I was very pleased by how they received the topic. And I'm finally going to finish this essay on at the. It's called at the Heart of All Our Sorrows, An Excursion into Emptiness. It's been the hardest piece of writing I've ever tried to do. I don't want to look at it. I mean, who wants to look at that?

A (28:24)

soul activism was a term that came many years ago to really look at the distinction between political activism, which is absolutely essential. There's no value judgments on one would be more important than the other. But what I like about soul activism is that it really gives us a way of approaching the conditions that we're in, using the methods of soul ritual, community, imagination, creativity, beauty, poetics. These are the strands that soul is most interested in, most enlivened by elders. All these things that, again, in the heroic model that we're caught in in this culture, heroism begins to almost impersonate spirit. It's strong, confident, rising, capable. But that heroic approach denigrates and avoids and neglects weakness, inferiority, tenderness, vulnerability, shadow, and shame. You don't go there in the heroic model. You're always supposed to be improving and getting stronger and getting better. But where we are collectively right now is this is not a time of rising and ease. It's not a time of confidence and building. It's a time of collapse. It's a time of decay. In the old. Excuse me, in the old alchemical traditions, this was the nigredo, the blackening. And this was a very important stage in the development of soul. James Hillman said that soul work can't begin until the negredo happens. So we're really in a time of soulmaking. And it's calling upon us to try other modes of response. And again, that's the soul activism. There's a term in the Inuit tradition called kartsaluni, and kartsaluni translates quite literally, sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth. And that's where we are right now. I think we have to get really quiet and listen because we don't know what's happening. We don't know. And we can't use the same models of progress and push and control and forcing things to happen. We're really being asked to approach it very, very differently. These were the whalers, by the way, that they couldn't go out for a whale hunt until the whales gave them a song. So within that practice of kart salooning is several values that we do not practice in this culture, which is restraint, reverence, and patience. Those are not values that we admire. Restraint? No shit. Hell no. It's 24 7.

C (31:46)

Yeah, I am really moved by this. I mean, I keep talking to other people who are doing spirit work or who have been leading prayer work or leading other things, are just writing or taking up a lot, you know, just trying to be like, hey, everyone, like, here's some tools or here's something, you know, and just so, so much of our culture has shaped so many of us to be forward facing and producing content things, you know, saying, saying, saying. But then so many of us are feeling this call into. I'm just supposed to. You know, for me, it's been like, I'm just supposed to sit on my porch, sit by the lake and be still and be quiet. And I can't really be on social media. I'm like, it's so loud and it feels so daunting. And I'm like, my mind, my soul, my spirit, everything is trying to draw away. But I'm a writer and I'm a teacher. Like, the sort of, you know, magic dust that has been thrown on my life is star energy. Right? And so I'm curious for you because you're also a writer, you're also someone who is prolific and, you know, Writing and sharing and thinking and teaching and Autumn, you are the same. Like, you are teaching. You're in the world, you're meant to shine. You're a rock star, literally. I'm just curious, like, how to balance this moment, which is about sitting in the dark, in the long dark, and being still and turning into the collective internal. Is it that our lives are shaped to shine or is it. Is that part of the trappings, right? Is it like, oh, the trapping makes me think I have to keep being bright and loud even in the dark cave of this time or something. I don't know if it's quite coming coherently together as a question, but I'm like, the part of me that is like, oh, I have to write and teach and tell is still so present and feels so grounded all the way down into that dark cave. There's also this part of me that's like, maybe I don't have to say anything. The cave, you know, maybe I need to. Maybe there's nothing else I need to say from here.

A (40:10)

So we had 80 men at this gathering up in Minnesota. And I offered a ritual that we've done since 20, since 2000 called renewing the world Ritual that I've, you know, when I studied these cultures from around the world, they, they have these rituals that recognize that the earth is wearing down, you know, and we have to regen, we have to rejuvenate, we have to re. Renew the world. This happened frequently around the winter solstice. You know, the game was getting thin, daylight was disappearing, heat was disappearing. What, what do we need to do? So this image came to me. We be, we dug a five foot deep pit in the earth about 10ft long, 8ft wide, 5ft deep and built a funeral pyre in there. And all week men were putting objects into this ark that we built, that would be processed on the day of the ritual to the funeral pyre and lit on fire. And what was going into the ark were all the things that are leaving the world. All the things from, you know, very personal, my brother, my brother in law, my you know, other family members, to democracy, to you know, all these things, languages, glaciers, you know, bluefin tuna, you know, whatever it is, you acknowledge that so when we got to the time for the ritual, we processed that over there with song and set it on the fire as these young men were starting the fire. And it was just this consuming grief that we all felt. And the. The fire was burned with earth. So everyone was kneeling around this fire, just crying over what is happening. And then we end the ritual. That first part of the ritual, I stand amongst them and say, it's over. The world is no more. This is the last night on Earth. You'll never kiss your children again. You won't inhale the fragrance of rose or the watch the sun rise or the moons come up. You won't kiss your children or your lover or your partner. You won't take a walk with your friend. You've lost it. It is over. All we have left to do tonight is to say goodbye to each other, which brought up a whole nother wave of grief of saying goodbye to these men that we've come attached to and love. And so we end in utter silence and head to bed. And then they were told to be at the bell by 6 o' clock tomorrow morning. Thankfully, Creator had mercy on us. And there was a six o' clock the next morning. We got, we met there and we were like, this is amazing. And then we processed down to Sturgeon Lake and we had a big bucket there, and we scooped out the waters of the New World, the placental waters, the tears, the tea, the lakes, the streams, the glaciers, the ponds, the lagoons, you know. And then we took that water back up to where all the ashes were. And there was a second little grotto that we all crawled through with offerings of gratitude. So we began in grief and we ended in gratitude. And we all crawled through there and made these offerings to her body. And then we by hand pushed all the earth back in and then took the water and watered the seeds of the New World. And so far it's working. We're still here. So I'm hoping that the ritual will continue to mend. But this is our responsibility. This is our. This is our spiritual obligation to acknowledge all the gifts, but also all the suffering and to say thank you and to also apologize and do whatever we can in our meager, tiny ways to feed her body. Just these little offerings of clay and carvings and, you know, gathered written pieces of appreciation and beauty. Not sure where we're going from there, but.

B (48:35)

like, entered into ritual and didn't and really had that profound experience of not of feeling like I was being guided by earth and guided by grief in the ritual, that I wasn't actively making choices. And Adrian knows the story well, but I had an experience in 2014 where I lost my fourth child in pregnancy, and we were lucky. Now, looking back, I'm like, I don't even know how we pulled this off, but we got to bring the body home with us from the hospital. Small miracle and small miracle. Literal, Small, literal, small miracle. And my husband at the time, we've since divorced, but the way that we moved through those first 24 hours was like, I've. I've never experienced anything like it. But we. We had this experience of really knowing without really even having to communicate verbally with one another or with anyone else. We just kind of knew what needed to happen, and we just kept moving through. Through this. What became this weird kind of unfolding ritual where we got back to our land. He built a pyre in the woods. We burned the body on the pyre, like, that afternoon. And it was just the two of us by the fire. And he just, like, held my body while I wailed into the fire. And then we ate food and then. But one of the things I remember is that I woke up the next morning and just, like, sat up in bed and knew that I had to go back to the ash, the site where the ashes were, and start sifting for bones. And so I remember that I, like, put on my clothes and shoes kind of like, as I was, like, as I was walking out of the house, I didn't even say anything to anybody. I just, like, went into the woods and went back to the pyre and Just started sifting for bones and collected all of the stuff, small bones that I could find. And then I just, like, held onto them for a year. And it wasn't until, like, a year later that I actually buried them at the same site as the. Where. Where the pyre had been. And at the time, it really felt like I'm just. You know, I. This is just what's happening, you know, And I look back on it, and. Well, there are two things that strike me about it. One is that I can still. Still feel the emotional tenor of that time. Like, very, very. It's not like a lot of other memories. It's very close, you know, and not in a bad way, but in the, like. Oh, I can really feel what that felt like. Like, it's right here. It's right up close. But the other thing that strikes me about it is that. Is that thing of, like, no one. No one told us what to do.

A (62:27)

Yeah. Well, these gates are what I discovered sitting with large groups of people over decades. I think that one I remember coming across an old essay I wrote on the three gates of grand grief, you know, and then. Well, then there's the four gates of grief, and then five gates. Apparently, someone's out of the six. Six. So the first gate is the one we all recognize, which is that everything we love, we will lose. Everything we love will disappear on us, either through our disappearance or through theirs. And we get to hold on to nothing. And people will often protest that. So, well, I get to hold on to the love that I had with that person. I says, only if you honor the rights of sorrow. If you push the grief away, you will lose the richness of that love. It'll be flattened and diminished and gradually turn to dust. So you have to be willing to say, this is the new relationship I have with my child, with my partner, with my friend, with my brother. That grief is part of my loving them. And so it's a fierce, fierce gate, but it's the one that every one of us will encounter. The second gate is the parts of us that have not known love. So being raised in a capitalistic system, religious systems, educational systems, employment systems, all have an idea of how we're supposed to look and be in the world. Like, you can't be sad. You can't be too exuberant. You can't be too sensual. You can't be too angry. So we learn to cleave off huge portions of our being so that we can shape a self that is at least approvable to the circles we want to be allowed into. Well, the problem with that is everything I cleave off is a loss to my wholeness, to my being. And so it's a point of grief, isn't it? The problem is you can't grieve frequently for something you're holding with contempt. Because we learn to treat these parts of Us the same ways that they were treated, being sad. I remember my first foray into therapy in my mid-20s, when I finally realized I'd better do this. The first thing I said to my therapist was, I want you to help me get rid of some parts of me. I wanted to get rid of the sad. The sad guy, the. The shame brother, the, you know, the insecure one. I wanted to get rid of all of them so I could show the strong face, you know, the competent face. That's the one the world wants. They want the competent, strong guy. They don't want this other. And fortunately, you know, my therapist failed at his assignment, and I had to keep all those parts of me. And they have become, obviously, the cornerstone for my humanity. Right. That's what it is. So.

A (65:26)

So most of therapy is a second gate ritual. How do I make amends to the parts of me that I have treated with contempt, that I've banished, that I've maintained a sense of exile to these parts of me? So that's what therapy is really about. The third gate is the sorrows of the world. And this. When I first started doing grief rituals late 90s, we might have one or two people in the circle that were there because of Earth grief. The last ones were almost two thirds. Three fourths were there because of what's happening to our world. And so that grief, and that's also what I was seeing in my private practice, was that, in a sense, the patient was now the world. They were talking about economics, they were talking about politics. They were talking about the destruction of our ecosystems, the disappearances of species, the fact that we can't catch salmon in our own creek anymore for the last three years because there's too few. The fact that I walk up in the morning and I walk out and I can't for the life of me frequently hear a single songbird. I mean, that breaks my heart because the insects have disappeared, you know, so this cascade of losses, the third gate is one that's going to keep growing in immensity. And the thing about the third gate grief is that they are all unresolvable. It's a grief you cannot resolve. Those first two gates, there's a chance to not in a sense of having a day finished, but knowing that I can carry them in a way that is okay in my soul. Earth grief, yeah, that one's going to continue to bite us and haunt us for the rest of our lives. I wrote the preface for a book called Choosing Earth by Duane Elgin a few years ago. And Dwayne's been studying this material for over 50 years. He's, you know, this true senior elder in our community, and he want me to write this forward. I didn't want to write it because I had to read the book. And the book was Dwayne's forecast of the next five decades and what probably will happen in each of these decades. And my friends, it's not pretty. And so I ended up writing about rough initiations and about the long dark and just saying that grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future. And when I'm talking the long dark, I'm talking at least two generations. And so most of us won't make it to the end of the long dark. But we have work to do to plant those seeds like we did in that ritual in Minnesota, for what might. Might just come about. So the fourth gate is what we expected and did not receive. And this is the one that slowly emerged because people started talking towards the end of the weekends together. This felt like village. This felt like we were inside a village. But now we have to go, you know, we have to leave again. And so there'd be this, you know, bittersweet melancholy of having found this, but now we have to leave it. So I just really began thinking about all the things that we expected and did not receive. Whether it's starlit nights with stories being told or the elders being visible in the community, or the rituals of thanksgiving or grief or initiation or renewing the world or reconstituting the village after a trauma or almost none of that. It's like when I was in this village in Africa, I was probably the most envy I ever felt in my whole life. Because every day at dusk, the common area would just swell with people. Millet beer and food and stories and laughter and arguments and the kids running all over. And if any child was nursing, they would go to any mother with milk, because these are our children. And I'm thinking, oh, God, this is when we have happy hour back home.

C (71:43)

It's so beautiful to hear you speak about these gates. And they're so clear. Like, they feel so distinct, so clear, so necessary, so part of our maturation. And like, and anytime we create these system where it's like these five things or these six, this or these whatever, you know, it's like there's a. You know, it's like, we know it's sort of an amorphous thing. Right. We're talking in some ways about one big thing. In some ways we're making these distinctions that are their lenses. And I feel like these are such useful lenses that you're offering us. And for this time, where it really is like, I think for so much of my. The early part of my time as an organizer and activist, I really was like, we can fix this. We can save this. We can turn it around. Like, it's. We're gonna. We're. We have to, because it's. We've got to, because that's, you know, and. And just having this like, oh, we're not going to fix it, and it's not going to radically turn around, and we're not going to become a different people in some massive way in time to stop this harm from coming. And it has been so useful to have your work and other people's work to say, there's this other piece. And it's actually what we have to do in order to truly reckon with what our ancestors have done and what we have done. And what we have allowed and. And what we need and who are meant to be. We have to go through this whole process and with our eyes open, with our. With our. With our connections, you know, clearing our channels. I keep thinking about that. That I'm like, I do this grief work so I can clear my side of every channel so that I can be connected to another person or that I can experience love in this lifetime, even if I won't necessarily experience peace or justice or the other things that I so long for. And. And I just wanted to say thank you and sort of give you the flowers for your lifetime of study, your journeying, the teachers you have accumulated, the way you have answered the call for your channel to be used in this particular way, the healing that you have done in your ancestral lineage by not just taking the work on for yourself, but then turning and being like, how do I bring. You know, that you're the Harriet Tubman, a white man. Let's call it what it is. You are really breaking people out of their traumatic. Yes. Somebody's got to go and be like, I made it. There's a way out of this. There's a way out of this, Autumn, about this. But, you know, this, this. That feeling of, I just want to say thank you to you because actually, so much of the healing that we have to do is being able to. For some of us to be able to see someone like you and say, thank goodness you're doing your work. Right. It means that I don't have to come try to do your work or keep telling you and your folks to do your work. I'm like, you're handling that, and I can really attend even more deeply to what I need to attend to, and we can stay connected and then our connection, the channel is clear, you know, because you're doing what you're meant to do and I'm meant to do, and it's just really beautiful to get to have a moment like this in this lifetime. I hope we someday get to do it in person. But it's such a gift. I know, for. For Autumn, you know, I'm like, the tenderness present for all of us here in this conversation is such a gift. And, yeah, I just want to say thank you.