The Long Dark with Francis Weller

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)

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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.

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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”:

1. 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]

2. 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]

3. 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]

4. 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]

5. 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]

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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]

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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Closing Words

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

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

Transcript

[A]

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]

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]

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]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

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]

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]

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

[B]

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]

What an honor and a pleasure to be here with the two of you. So I'm very curious where our conversation will take us.

[C]

Me, too.

[B]

Where will we go?

[C]

Wherever will we go?

[B]

Let's start by checking in.

[C]

Yeah, let's do it, Sister.

[B]

We like to always check in with a. How are you right now today, Francis? Do you want to go first?

[A]

Stretched tender. There are a number of deaths in my family in the past few months and a few more lining up. I'm the youngest of eight, so there's a lot of anticipation and watching them board the train to that other world. And so it's been a tender time and watching what's happening to this country and our planet. It's a very tender time. And yet there's so much beauty and grateful for this fog this morning and the end of fire season here in California. And so mostly, I'm upright and glad to be here.

[C]

What about you, my sister? How are you doing?

[B]

Well, I like the word upright.

[C]

I am.

[B]

I'm feeling really wide open, as I shared with both of you. I'm by the ocean right now, working on. I'm in the process, the final steps of finishing my book. And I had an intuition many months ago that I would need to be by the ocean to do the final stage of the process. And it has been really powerful experience to be here and to just. My sweetheart was here for the first two days, and then the rest of the time, I have been completely alone. And so I feel. I feel alone in that way. That aloneness can feel so crowded. I feel, like, alone, but, like. But surrounded. Really surrounded. And I'm tired. My brain has been working really, really hard. My heart is working really, really hard. But it feels really. It's like really, really good work. I'm feeling so much gratitude right now because the thing that's making it possible to be here is Adrian, and I's mom is in Minneapolis right now taking care of my children so that I could be here. So I'm also feeling just really held and connected. Connected. What about you, Sister?

[C]

Well, I love hearing from both of you the sort of intersection points that we're meeting at. I feel grateful to be here, grateful to be with y' all in this conversation. And I've been. I've had a couple of conversations with mom while she's out there taking care of the kids. I just keep calling and, like, getting downloads of, you know, Vicarious auntie experience. And last night, one of my nibblings locally came over and we had, like, a Moana pajama party, Moana 2, where we, like, all wore pajamas and played Moana 2 and sang the top of our lungs. Which is funny, because I don't know the songs from Moana 2 that well, but I still, like. I went at it with gusto, and I think that made up for it.

[B]

Harmonies.

[C]

Harmonies.

[B]

I was like, oh, yeah, girl. So.

[C]

But I think under all that, there's a. Yeah, I've been grieving. I'm feeling sad like this. In the past couple weeks, you know, there's been so much death in Gaza, but one of the journalists that I really loved and really, like, felt connected to Saleh was killed. And I. It's just really sitting with me, like, to make it this far into a journey like this, and.

[B]

And.

[C]

And to make it this far of, like, you know, watching from afar and being like, wow, I really love you and I'm rooting for you. And it looks like, you know, there's just this moment where it's like, oh, maybe there's a real ceasefire. Maybe we made it. And, like, there's a sense of celebration in his face. And then he's gone, and that's hit me. And then Ms. Major passed is a trans icon and, like, someone who I've looked up to, you know, as long as I've been doing this work. And then d' Angelo died, which is, like a musician that I. I can't even speak about how beautiful and important his work is to me. And so. And, you know, and then it was like. It's just been these sweeps of, like, groupings and clusters of people that seem to all go up at once. And I keep imagining. And maybe we'll talk about this a little bit, but I keep imagining this. This thing of, like, I'm both feeling the sadness of it. And I'm also so curious about these spirits that go at the same time, you know, like, that cross over at the same time. And is there a significance to it? Is it. You know, is it just something that's helping comfort me that I'm like, oh, I do love the idea of D' Angelo and Ms. Major and Saleh, like, coming together. You know, there's certain. You know, like, when Mang Khan, our friend, passed away a couple weeks ago, and it was like, the same day as Jane Goodall, and I was like, oh, that's a beautiful transcendent crew.

[B]

What an elevator to ride.

[C]

What an elevator to ride. Another friend of mine just sat in the hospice, a very quick hospice moment with a friend of hers and lost her. And we were just talking about, yeah, just the ancestors are really gathering such strong spirits to be hopefully of service or help in helping us. But, yeah, I'm missing people and feeling like, dang, you know, I know we're supposed to be grateful for everything we get. And I also have always had this feeling like I wanted more. I just. I wanted more. I wanted another moment. I want another conversation. I wanted, you know, more people in the world to know you exist. So all that swimming around in me, and I noticed that it brings an insecurity up in me about just aliveness, you know, and just sort of feeling like, oh, God, this whole thing is so tender. And, like, how much of it are we spending being misguided? You know, I think these lives that are lived with a lot of clarity are really. It's really landing with me that I'm like, oh, I really want to be living my life with a lot of clarity because it goes so quick and then. And then it's gone. And it's so interesting to watch how people memorialize and be like, oh, it's so clear what people receive from d'. Angelo. It's so clear what people receive from Major. It's so clear what people receive from Saleh. And I'm like, oh, yeah, Am I clear enough on what I'm creating and leaving behind me? So I've been reflecting on that. It's a long check in, but this is what is happening.

[B]

Thank you, sister, and thank you, Frances, for your shares.

[A]

Thank you both.

[C]

So I like to pull a tarot card for us because however we are, I find it does help to seek that wisdom beyond ourselves and, like, let that ground our day a little bit. So I pulled from the Lineages of Change tarot deck, and the card that I got was the star, which is a card that I really love. And I think, yeah, it's interesting for us today. So the reading says, oh, star, you have traversed such an unimaginable distance, and now you are here to light the way for others. You know how to be part of a constellation with stars much older and younger than yourself. Near and far, you have learned to shine. Without self consciousness. There's nothing to do now it is time to simply be. What is unique in you is undeniable, and those who need to follow you are blessed by your existence in reverse. You may still believe you can control how others perceive your guidance. You are only responsible for being your whole self. Shining honestly. Trust that you will be misunderstood. And trust even the power of perception to shape the reality of those who witness you. How does it feel like when you shine? What does it feel like?

[B]

How does it feel?

[C]

How does it feel?

[B]

That card felt like it was like directly answering the question that you asked at the end of your check in. Sister,

[C]

this is the tarot is always like that. It's just like, just be, girl. Can you just be. Just stop troubling yourself and just be yourself and keep going. So that is our wisdom. That's the wisdom for everyone here today. And so let's. Yeah, let's shine as brightly as we can now. Here we are.

[B]

Let's do it. Wow.

[C]

Let's do it.

[B]

I'm just taking in the star. I'm taking in just the depth of what everyone has shared and the. The threshold crossing that is happening in all of our lives.

[C]

Time is.

[B]

Yeah. So I'm so excited that we get to be talking to you today, Francis, about. Because it's like, oh, threshold crossing. Like, that is. My sense is that you've devoted your whole life to the study of how we cross thresholds. So I think it would be great for us to begin with this first question that we had for you, which, you know, you. You really publicly are doing grief work, and I was wondering if you could talk about what provoked you into grief work. Like, how did you find your way into doing this work both inside your own life, but then also in public with others?

[A]

Thank you again. Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here. And I often respond to that question, which I'm asked frequently. And I just said, you know, I never volunteered for the position. It's. I was conscripted very early on in my life in my family. I remember growing up with a prayer on my lips every night. Please let my parents live till I'm at least 20, because they were so much older than I was, and there was this kind of foreboding sense of early departure.

[C]

How old were you when they were? I mean, how old were they when you were born?

[A]

My mom was 46 and my dad was 48, so.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

Yeah, so they're more like grandparents to most of my friends, you know. So.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Anyway, at 16, when I was 16, my dad had a massive stroke and never spoke again. And so it's like childhood kind of crashed very quickly, and I was now the last one home. Everyone else had moved on, so I was, you know, pushed into a position of having to care for A very weakened man, which, you know, actually amplified the feeling that he and I, in our lifetime, never had a single conversation. So there was this kind of emptiness between us. And now I was caring for him. And ultimately, you know, I went on to. To college and graduate school and became pretty interested in the depths of human experience. That's kind of where I was pulled very, very early so that I carried a certain quality of melancholy into graduate school. And then you begin doing therapy with people, and there is nothing that comes in the door that's not saturated with sorrow. Whether it's childhood wounds, end of a relationship, death of someone close. There's always grief. There's always grief. And grief was never talked about in graduate school. It just wasn't addressed. It was all about strengthening, improving, rallying, fortifying, mastering. But the quality of attention to what's happening in the depths was not there. And so I was fortunate enough to have two, three very, very good mentors. My first time with a mentor, I was licensed at 27 years old. I mean, just to weep up. And they gave me a license to sit with people. Wow, don't blame. Don't blame me. But I was.

[C]

They said I could.

[A]

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.

[C]

Right.

[A]

We are so quick to blame ourselves for feeling empty, like, what did I do wrong? Well, underneath that, what did I do wrong? Was the expectation that something else was going to manifest. Right, right. That I wasn't going to be all alone with facing my sadness or my grief or my trauma or my pain. Yeah. I remember being in Maledoma's village, and there was a young woman there with a burn scar across her face. And partly I noticed her because she was so ebullient. She was so joyful. And I asked Maladama once what happened to her. She said, oh, it was terrible. She said her mother, in a fit of rage, threw boiling water on her. I said, what happened then? Well, she said, the whole village got around. This young woman said, this had nothing to do with you. You are beautiful, you are loved, you are ours. You belong here, you know? And I realized in that moment that her wound was skin deep. It did not penetrate to her soul and become part of the narrative. What did I do wrong? How come I deserve that? Most of us encounter traumas in isolation, and we're left to a very young part of us, typically to interpret why we're so alone with this situation. She didn't have to do that. The village immediately filled in that space. So her psyche was back in that original matrix and the healing occurred. Now all she was dealing with was grief. It was sad that this happened, but it did not become part of a definition of who I am, you know, deserving this or being not what she wanted or whatever. So that was again, one of those moments where you see amplified how important it is for us to have community around us for these difficult encounters with life.

[B]

Can I ask you one quick follow up question, Francis?

[A]

Sure, sure.

[B]

I want to make sure for myself and also for our listeners that I understand the way you're using some of this language. I noticed that you're saying that when you say soul, you say soul. Does this soul? Does that not my soul? Your soul, One soul. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about soul and psyche and like, how. How do you understand. Yeah, just how. How do you use those words? And particularly, can you help us make sense of the expansive way that you're using the word soul?

[A]

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?

[C]

Yeah, I like that. I really appreciate this, the distinction between spirit and soul and this idea of like, trying to move up and trying to move down and that like, we. We have to do both in order to be a balanced being in this place in the middle. That is the brief and the material experience of, of aliveness and the Long, dark, you know, just that reminder of like, this framing of, like, where are we? You know, my mentor, Grace Lee Boggs, always used to talk about, what time is it on the clock of the world? And she was always asking that, like, do we understand where we collectively are? And I. I'm not sure if she would have used the word soul or what. What. What that conversation would have been like. I'm sure it had been dynamic, but I know that it really resonates with me. And so we were going to ask you about your teachers, and of course you went straight there and started telling us about teachers. And if there's more that you want to uplift and raise, please do. But we wanted to then move into talking about soul activism. Right. So this activism that is rooted in and around this work of going in, of the descent, of turning and deepening into that collective, and you speak about it in a way that makes it feel like this work is subversive, that to pay attention to grief is subversive. And so we wanted you to tell us a little bit about how grief is subversive, particularly in our current culture, once, which wants to kill everything while denying any responsibility for the death of it all. So, yeah,

[A]

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]

Go for it. Just do it.

[A]

I can have whatever I want, whenever I want. So restraint becomes a very important value for us to cultivate. Not knowing and deep listening and patience. That's such a. I don't want to say unheroic, but it's not following the heroic model. It's following a different model. It's following a soul model into the depths, into the darkness.

[C]

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]

Thank you. What you're bringing up, Adrian, is that exact thing of deep listening. My mentor, Bob Stein, whom I loved and missed terribly, said, the soul has a simultaneous need for intimacy and freedom. So simultaneously, it wants connection, belonging, participation, and sovereignty and solitude. Our job right now is to listen, to see at what point on this helix am I. Is this a time for in breath of silence and going inward, or is this a time for an exhale and participation and engagement? And you might go through that on any given day, multiple cadences, right? You might feel, oh, God, I need a couple hours just to sit on that porch, to sit by the ocean and just listen. Or, God, I absolutely must be with other people today. I know it's the no Kings march. I have to get out there. Whatever it is, the soul has its oscillation. And the more we attend to soul rather than self. You know, Jung said that at some point in our life, we have this reordination from the self focused life, which is important, right? To get in the world and establish ourselves. He said about midlife soul moves to the foreground. And we're living now according to how do I serve soul? So part of that question you're bringing up is, what is soul asking from you right now? And it might be asking you to pick up your pen, you've got things to say. You know, the world is hungry. You know, they're suffering, they're starving people. So, yeah, listening to that rhythm, well.

[C]

And I often feel the balance too, of like Sometimes it's like, time to pick up the pen, but that doesn't mean I have to share that or share it yet or, you know, I've been doing a lot of ritual, and we'll get to ritual a little bit later. But I've been doing so much ritual by myself, and just being like, this is enough to do this by myself with no witness. It's like, I did it on behalf of the collective, and that's enough. And then there's other stuff that's like, oh, that wants to be written and shared right away. And both Autumn and I are in a book writing process, so, like, practicing the patience of being like, I'm writing this, but it's not going to come out for a year, maybe a year and a half or something. And I have to trust that it's coming to me at the right time and it'll come into the world at the right time. And, you know, it's all there. Anyway, thank you. That was really helpful for me. Good.

[B]

I've been thinking a lot about and writing a lot about ritual for my own work, and I would just, you know, hearing, hearing. And I've been thinking a lot also about, like, what's the difference between a ritual and a ceremony, you know, and to. And that there's something, to me about, like, the. Yeah. The role of witness as, like, something that differentiates when a ritual becomes a ceremony. So all that is to say, I've been kind of nerding out about this question anyway, so I'm excited to talk to you about it, Frances, but I was wondering if you could talk to us about, you know, so you do so much ritual work in community, and I was wondering if you could talk about the core elements of ritual.

[C]

Like what, what.

[B]

What are sort of the component parts of. Of how you bring together something and then can call it a ritual. And also, how does. How does soul know when a ritual is needed?

[A]

I love that last question. Because in a sense, we are troubled. And whether that's because someone in the community is ill or died, or there's been violence in the community or we want to give thanks. So whatever it is, it calls to our attention. What I've tried to do in my life is really become permeable to the dreaming earth that I think rituals arise from the earth. Yeah, we don't. We don't make them up.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Just like we don't make up myth. Myth is dreamt into us, and rituals are dreamt into us. For instance, you know, like the San people in Southern Africa have these powerful healing rituals. Well, so did the dine in Nevada. Same focus which is on healing. But the expressions of it are profoundly different.

[C]

Yeah, and localized.

[A]

It's localized. So there are these shared values that almost all traditional cultures hold. But the articulation of those things through in ritual space is particular to the space they're in. And I actually experienced that very literally. I was leading a men's initiation project for 17 years and it was a year long process to basically help cook these men into people who would serve community. And we did them all up and down the whole west coast of the United States. And this exact same rituals done in Southern California versus Northern California versus Ashland versus Washington. The dreaming of the earth was particular to that place. From deep loamy images in Ashland to rocky stoney stories coming out of, out of, out of Southern California. Just seeing how the earth was a dreamy being and that it was humans jobs to become quiet enough. That's part of what I feel is possible in the long dark is darkness is the territory of gestation and imagination. Right. So if we could get quiet enough and gestate and receive these rituals that would help repair human, to place wounds, wounds between cultures, there'd be something we could begin to feel that had the potency. May I share a ritual we just did with you? Would that be helpful?

[B]

Yes, please.

[A]

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.

[C]

Well, that was beautiful to hear about, to witness, to feel in your body as you were expressing it to us. Like, I can see it all. I can feel it. And I love this idea that the rituals come from the earth, that they, yes, are dreamt into us or felt in, you know, like, flow into us through the earth. And that really resonates. And, you know, I did a ritual a couple years ago that was really rooted in song. And a lot of my rituals are rooted in song and art making. And, like, even I was. As you were talking through the ritual, I was. I was thinking, like, oh, I did some ritual last night. I did one of my ritual songs where I'll just get lost in a song and let myself learn what the emotions are as I go through the song. And I started out in a lot of grief and a sense of, like, existential loneliness and am I lovable and will my work ever matter? And, you know, all the things that, you know, for me, I cycle through. And by the end of the song, it was like, all you have to do is love and be grateful. You get to love all you need to do. All you need to do. And it was just in the song, moving through that. And I'm like, I see that some people do it through poems, some people do it through songs, some people do it through these ritual. You know, to me, I'm like, oh, the building of the pyre, the building of the altar, are also these forms of making beauty from what the earth has given to us. And so we had this question for you, which is like, what is the role of art in ritual and particularly in. In grief rituals and moving to gratitude. And if you have witnessed, you know, like you said, you're making, you know, you wake up the next day and it's like, oh, there's something to make, you know, anyway, so maybe that's the answer. But if there's anything else you want to share there, we'd love to hear it.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think ritual was the original art form. There's. There's choreography to it. There's dance, there's singing frequently, there's the making of beauty shrines. So there's something that evokes. It's like beauty becomes one of the cornerstones of ritual experience. You know, it's what invites the open heart. Right. And beauty. James Hillman, one of my primary teachers, said that beauty is the means by which the gods touch the senses, reach the heart, and attract us into life. So it makes perfect sense, doesn't it, in any ritual endeavor, that one of the first things we do is we create beauty, Whether it's through song or whether it's through poetry or the actual creation of spaces, beauty Is. Is an essential element to attract us into life. I was talking to my friend Miguel Rivera at the this conference. Miguel's from Guatemala and works in la. Do you know Miguel?

[C]

I don't think so. Not yet, anyway.

[A]

You would love. Miguel works a lot with inner city kids and doing sweats and helping them find ways through the chaos. And just how many suicides have happened in that community? And that question of what is it that attracts us into life, life. And so many of us are surrounded by ugliness, you know, not by beauty. And so, you know, that is part of soul activism, is the generation of beauty absolutely indispensable. Part of. Part of our work that really resonates with me. Thank you.

[B]

I'm thinking about. What has been provoked in me is thinking about moments in my life where

[C]

I,

[B]

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.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And we didn't have any model. Model in our. In our lives for it.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We just did it. And. And so I'm hearing what you're saying about, like, the dreaming earth and the. The way that the earth actually kind of. And so it's helping me find language now for the. This thing of, like, oh, in my grief, I was actually available for something that was right there. Yes, yes. And so. So anyway, so this is my. My long way of getting us to. But I think important. Important for me to have spoken all that well.

[C]

And also, Sister, I just want to thank you for the vulnerability of sharing that, like, just to take a moment, especially for those who are listening and maybe have not heard the whole story. Thank you for that reveal. And, yeah, it. It always moves me deeply to hear you talk about it.

[B]

Well, and, yeah, I mean, what a grateful. And Adrienne knows. And Frances, I'm sure this is familiar to you, too, from sitting with grief. But I'm so. I just feel so grateful that I got to go through that experience. Not that I. Not for the loss, but I'm so grateful for the way that it unfolded. And. And. And it's really. It's really landing with me in this moment, in this conversation, how the. My ability to feel grateful has everything to do with the ritual that happened, and the ritual that happened happened because of the way that my grief had opened me to the guidance of Earth. I think.

[A]

Yeah, I think you said that beautifully. That's exactly right, Autumn. We in these extreme states, somehow become more permeable to that impression, to the dreaming. It's like you didn't make that up. It happened. You participated in what happened. Yes. You were being pushed. One of the things I talk about and the value, one of the core values of ritual is that it helps us to be. Get deranged. It knocks us out of our current arrangement. That. I mean, that's the purpose of ritual. That's the purpose of ritual is to derange us.

[C]

Oh, I love that.

[A]

Because the current arrangement is not working.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

And that's why, you know, in many, many cultures, rituals happening all the time.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

It's like this constant recalibration. Come back to what is. You come back to who you are. Not to the constructs, not to the strategies, not to the conditioned mind, but come back to who you are. And ritual has that capacity to shake off all the dust of forgetting, all the ways that we've been shaped by energies and structures that are not supportive of soul and life. And ritual is that mechanism by which foundations can be shaken and we can be remembered.

[C]

Yeah. There's something as we're speaking that's also landing, like, once I started to be disciplined about ritual. Once I started to be like, I'm disciplined to the rhythm of the earth. I'm disciplined to the rhythm of relationship. I'm moving at the speed of trust. I'm moving at the speed of love. And then all the rituals actually have become so clear. Right. And Autumn, that formative experience with you, that was a core experience for me as well, you know, as the person being like, I'm in the house with the kids while y' all are wailing out in the woods. And that's my job, and I know my job is not to come bother you. It's to. To stay here and hold this space or whatever. It's just like the ritual, you know, there is something so clear happens where it's like, oh, you're in the middle of this, and we're all holding it.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

I think I want to hear you speak. You know, I feel like Autumn and I are speaking about, like, the discipline of learning to surrender to ritual and learning to surrender to the rhythm of the earth and the way the earth is like, I'm here to comfort you. You know, like when death happens, it's like we go to a forest because the forest can hold it and the ocean can hold it. We go write books with the ocean because the ocean's like, I've got the whole world swimming in me, and I can hold. Anything you bring here is going to be a drop in my bucket. It's Fine, I've got it. But then, as you said earlier, then how are we also giving back to the earth? You know, like, I'm like, oh. After the earth guides me through these rituals, I take all the flowers and lay them down around the tree in my backyard, and I just don't know why. I just know that that's what I'm supposed to do. And the tree loves it, and I feel complete.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think there's a true element of maturation involved in this as well. This is not something we do in an adolescent state.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

It is really a demanding quality of the adult to see that that is, again, part of our sole responsibility, part of our spiritual obligations is to keep the dreaming happening, to keep the imagination of the earth circulating through these rituals, to keep the process of repair and restoration moving through. But you're sharing just reminded me of a story some years ago. John, My dear friend John, who was. He was one of the first men to go through the initiation work. Then he became part of the team that carried it on for the next 17 years. And he was sharing that there was a suicide in the high school where his daughter was a student, and she was so heartsick about this young man taking his life. And so, you know, there was a memorial. It was under one of those big outdoor tents, and hundreds of people showed up. And a friend asked John if he could come along to the memorial. And John said, of course. And after it was over, the guy said, okay, let's go. And John said, I can't. My position is right here. Do you see what's happening down there? There was a whole cluster of young teenage kids hugging each other and sobbing together. And John said, this is my post. I can't move until they're done. Just like you couldn't move, Adrian, until Autumn was done. You knew what you had to do. That was as much a part of the ritual as the wailing out in the woods. That's what helped make that happen. She didn't have to have a split consciousness about, are my kids okay? That was covered. These kids were covered by John. You know, just holding that ground until it was done. No big newspaper clippings, no television report on. But that's what an adult human being does. They know where to show up.

[C]

Yeah. I love this so much. Francis, too, because this is what we're in in the world right now is I'm like, this is the. This is the role of being like, oh, like, I'm impacted by what's happening, but I'm Closer to death than I've ever been. And there are people so much younger than me who are just coming into the sense of aliveness and, like, this is my world. And it's grief striking for them because they're like, oh, crap, you know, whatever my parents did to protect me, like, here I am, and you all have brought us to the brink of darkness and death and destruction. And I'm like, oh, my job is not to try to tell you how to navigate this. I don't know. I know how to navigate a different time. I'm still figuring this out. But I do know that I can love you. I do know that I can. You know, my job is to stand here and be what you need me to be. Not only of service, but I do think there's something around, like, what it means to be older or elder at this time and how it's like, I've got enough grief in my system to understand that we survive losing until we don't. You know, we lose. You know, most of life is losing disappointment, not getting things, you know, like a lot of life is that experience. And you learn to be like, oh, I can survive heartbreak. I can survive what seems like, you know, I could never get. I could never live without this person, but I am living without them. You know, I could never handle it if my friend committed suicide, but I am. They did. I could never do this. But it is happening. And then that matures. And you're just like, oh, I'm supposed to just be here as. As we all experience all this grief, and the older I am, the more of it I can kind of hold.

[A]

Well, I think that's part of the. What I call the apprenticeship with sorrow. Is that that long fidelity, the long vigil with sorrow ripens us, deepens us. You know, it's not a pleasant process, but it is what, in a sense, invites us into the depth of our own encounter with life. And that's the shaping of an elder in the apprenticeship. The old apprenticeship would lead to mastery, A painter, stonemason, whatever. But in soul work, that long apprenticeship with sorrow leads to elderhood. We're no longer having a fight with life. We accept life on life's terms. We're not trying to bend it to our will. We recognize it. That's futile. Life will have out on us. But I think also what you just said was very important, that the young ones can see in our faces the grief and the love. There was a large group of 20 year olds at this gathering in Minnesota, and I did go down heavily during that grief ritual we did. I was unexpected. I was going to hold space. You know, I'm one of the elders here. And as soon as we were done with the invocation, I was on the ground for almost two hours, just grieving all of what I have to grieve, you know? And we never emptied that cup anyway.

[C]

No.

[B]

We only have about 10 minutes left, but I think it would be good just to give our listeners a taste of. A taste of grief.

[A]

Yeah, a taste of grief. I don't know. Amouz bouche.

[C]

Just a sprinkle of grief. Yeah.

[A]

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.

[C]

Right.

[A]

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]

Oh, boy. Yeah.

[A]

You know, and. And we're right back into the emptiness, right when what we expected and did not receive, that's a hole that we have to weep in for generations. Generations. And hopefully in that process of attention to these depths, we might again be remembered and re informed about how to live here decently in a caring way. And the last gate is ancestral grief. And the more I've sat with people over many, many years, decades, the more I began to see that almost all grief is ancestral grief. Like my Grief. My wound was shame. From that second gate, I had carried a lot of shame, feeling worthless. And then finally I began to realize, no, this did not begin with me. This began generations ago. This began, as Rumi would say, in some other tavern. So my job is to be. I'm the current curator of this shame.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And I don't want to pass it on to my children or my grandchildren, so I have to work with it. But beginning to understand how much we are the inheritors, the current inheritors of so much wounding and trauma and shame and grief that has not been processed and held in any sense of a meaningful way. And then also to look in terms of our ancestral. My ancestral inheritance from white European culture. Holy shit. What happened to the indigenous populations, to slavery? Everything that we. Again, going back to the emptiness. Grief is going to be the keynote for the coming generations, as I say. And, yeah, so those are the five gates. I know people have added the six gate, which is the harms we have caused, which I think is a notable gate we should be paying attention to as well.

[C]

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.

[A]

That was a very generous thank you. I really appreciate that. You know, that means.

[C]

Means one of my gifts.

[A]

Well, you're good at it. You're good at it, Adrian.

[C]

Like, I'm an abundant gratitude practitioner.

[B]

Francis, thank you so much for joining us and for. And for your new work that has come out this year in the absence of the ordinary and your work, the Wild Edge of Sorrow. And just. I just want to close on a note of really encouraging folks to go and avail themselves of these texts.

[A]

Thank you. Well, thank you both for what you're doing to keep it as an alchemy. We talk about the necessity of keeping the material in the vessel warm. If we don't keep it warm, it will harden and congeal and there will be no movement. So I want to honor both of you for how much you're putting into the collective field to keep it warm and moving towards something that's alive and generous and beautiful.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

Thank you. Thank you both.

[B]

Thank you.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Shake these bones. Shake these bones. Shake these bones. Shake these bones. Shake these bones. Shake these bones. Shake these bones. Shake these bones. Thanks for listening to our show. We're on Instagram @antotheworld PC.

[C]

You can make a sustaining donation to our show by visiting our [e-mail] into

[B]

the WorldShow another incredible thing you can do to help our show sustain itself is to write us a review. You can write reviews on Apple Podcasts if you're an iPhone person. This helps people looking for good new

[C]

content to find us. You can also write one on Tumblr. So how to Survive the End of the World is produced and edited, edited by the incomparable Zach Rosen. Transcripts are in our show notes and on our website. Into the worldshow.org literally.

[B]

Who is on Tumblr? Music for today's Show Music for today's show comes from Autumn, the Band Tunde, Alani, Ron, Mother, Cyborg and the Banksons.

[C]

We love you all. Grieve what you need to grieve. Stay connected.

[B]

Connected.

[C]

We'll see you next time.