Blog Posts

Remember Today

9/30/2016

September 22, 2001

While Amber and I are in some ways astonished that we've now been together 20 years, it also feels like the most ordinary thing in the world. Our relationship is our safe harbor, the cozy cove from which we venture forth each day to ride the choppy seas of these troubled times.

That's not to say we take it for granted - we speak of our gratitude for each other, to each other, every day. But when it came to commemorating the day, in this year of big upheavals, we didn't feel the need to make a big splash.

Instead we spent the evening of our actual anniversary at a bird watching class at the Audubon Society. We played hooky for a day earlier this week to visit friends from our MichFest family as they passed through Astoria on the cruise ship they were working. And then we gathered members of our many communities for a low-key happy hour at a local restaurant.

How blessed are we? My godchildren and niece and nephew who set out our photo albums and greeted our guests. College friends who knew me as a 17 year-old. Amber's "tennis wives". Her father's best friend of more than 50 years. My cousin and brother. Former coworkers. Clients. Good people I've met through my Death Café work. Members of our Thanksgiving and 4th of July family. Social justice colleagues. A MichFest sister. Fellow Orphan Wisdom School scholars. The partner of my roommate from 20 years ago who witnessed the very first steps of this new relationship. Such a treat to see those many strands of our lives woven together for a few hours of celebration.

It brought us back to that very first time we asked for our relationship to be witnessed and blessed by our community, when we were five years in - on a day that ended up eleven days after 9/11 and eleven days before my father's death. We needed to be together as a community then, more than ever. Our low-key coming together last night was a reminder of how much we need each other, still.

For every person able to come by to wish us well there were so many more at too great a distance or otherwise occupied with families or their own good works. To know so many good people, to be connected even if only occasionally, is evidence enough of the benevolence in the universe that we feel well buoyed to sail another day.

More on how we got here:
I Now Pronounce You: Our third and final wedding.
My Big (Null & Void) Gay Wedding: Our White Salmon and Lucky Lab ceremonies.
Yes, I'll Marry You: A whirlwind tour through my 26 years of activism for LGBT equality.

80th Birthday Rite of Passage

9/28/2016

"On the occasion of my 80th birthday, please join me for a rite of passage ritual witnessing the beginning of the third stage of my life."

That was the invitation that brought together members of Don Tarbutton's many communities: the neighbors who share his cohousing ecovillage; his colleagues from hospice, chaplaincy, PDX Death Café, and his earlier career in hospital administration; Buddhist sangha and Unitarian Church members; family and long-time friends.

Rather than wait for his death for these loved ones to gather, Don chose to bring them together while alive. But this man who is counted as mentor and advisor to so many didn't want to squander the occasion of his 80th birthday with a mere party. He approached this threshold with the thoughtful discernment and seriousness of purpose for which he's known and loved.

It was time to "celebrate and set aside my life to date and transition into the beginning of a third (and last) stage of life," Don said, "and to communicate that to my family and friends."

Early in our planning process, Don described his vision for the ceremony as celebratory, an opportunity to express gratitude, a time of letting go and transition. He wanted his guests to discover aspects of him that they hadn't know about before, to feel that their contribution to his life and his to theirs had been acknowledged, and to get to meet others who were important to him.

This was a community affair, with many hands chipping in to prepare the space, harvest flowers from the ecovillage garden, and collect contributions for the food bank in Don's honor. On arrival, they wrote words of blessing on paper leaves that festooned a graceful frond of bamboo.

We began with a moving meditation practice that encouraged mindful mingling. After our welcome and an invocation by Don’s dear friend and chaplain colleague, Rick, Don introduced a 30 minute video of his life, complete with his pediatrician's nutritional plan for him, an early report card, Doonesbury cartoons that paralleled his own coming out as a gay man, and home movie footage. Don accompanied the nearly 80 years of photos with an understated narration that shared the key events and insights of his life.

After six close friends, including Don's partner Jerome, shared their perspectives on Don's gifts, we moved into the heart of the ritual. Rick asked Don to take a vow, and asked us, his community, to pledge our support. In this way, Don consecrated his intention "to let go of or allow to recede into the past, those life experiences that no longer retain active senses of meaning or purpose... and by doing so, open to new life experiences, ones that I seek out or come my way.”

After Don stepped across a threshold of sage smoke, he received a rousing ovation from his community. We moved then into another of Don's passions, Dances of Universal Peace.

As the music began, the room thrummed with appreciation for the gift Don had given everyone present, to feel the bonds of community and humanity strengthened through the act of witnessing his embrace of this place on his life's journey.

When I asked Don if I could share the experience on this blog, he said yes: "I very much want people to know about this toward-the-end-of-life option for a celebration of life with themselves present. For me, I would not have wanted to have missed it!"

Clothing that Carries a Story

8/31/2016

I've been invited to attend a ceremony at which we are expected to dress as though we came from somewhere.

To wear clothing with a story. Not from the mall. Or the internet. Or a sweatshop. From the hands of a people whose handwork keeps them tethered to those who came before them.

Stephen Jenkinson has defined craft as "where everything you know can appear in the world."

I make virtually nothing with my hands. The calligraphy skills I began to develop in college have atrophied as I've typed on tinier and tinier keypads. I was too impatient and distracted as a kid to learn the sewing, gardening, and home repair skills of my mother. She, before me, was shamed by wearing the clothes hand-sewn by her immigrant mother, especially when she arrived at an elite college where her classmates referred to their outfits by name (I think I'll wear my Christian Dior tonight).

I spent some time bewildered by this question of what to wear, bereaved by my own disassociation with the handwork of my ancestors. My mother wondered if some shreds remained in our family of a traditional Waldensian costume - the clothes worn for centuries by the Pre-Reformation Protestant sect of Italians from whom we descend. I wrote last year about my attempts to follow a trail of bread crumbs back to some connection with the people and the place left behind when my grandparents immigrated to America on the eve of WWII.

No such remnants surfaced but an internet search brought me to a bilingual blog on Waldensian culture that mentioned a seamstress located on a tiny square in a Northern Italian town, a square named in memory of my grandfather's brother, Willy Jervis, executed by the retreating Nazis for his work in the resistance. I found an Italian cousin willing to seek out this craftswoman to obtain a hand-made shawl for me.

The needlework is exquisite, you can scarcely tell the front from the back. I recognize the flowers from our two weeks in those high mountain valleys last May. The fringe is hand-knotted - how many hours of work?

This project of what to wear led me to a local designer and dressmaker here in Portland for something befitting the shawl. It led me to the depths of my linen closet for the tablecloths and napkins hand-embroidered by my great and great-great grandmothers, to study their craft and imagine what my own hands might make. And it inspired another of my American cousins to search out a Waldensian shawl for his teenaged daughter, that she might know something more of the story of our people.

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones;
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

Sonnet #18 by John Milton inspired by the April, 1655 massacre of Waldensians in Piedmont by Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy

Ribbon Cutting Reimagined

8/24/2016

Dozens of ribbons were cut at the the Wayfinding Academy's building dedication ceremony

This week I participated in two ceremonies to celebrate new spaces, each a home for innovative organizational endeavors.

I wasn't able to attend the building dedication ceremony for the Wayfinding Academy, a new college opening next week in Portland's St. Johns neighborhood - but their plan captured my imagination and inspired me to support the celebration with a donation.

After renovating an old YMCA building, the Wayfinding Academy issued an invitation to the community: "Help us make our house a home."

Rather than repeating the tired old model of having VIPs cut a ribbon over the threshold, and offering naming rights to only the highest donors, Wayfinding set out to "fill our building with the names of supporters. That way, our students will be reminded every day that there is a community of hundreds of people who believed that they are worth supporting, that this community made the Wayfinding experience possible for them. We want to envelop them with community."

Their donation program offers "rooms and doorways and appliances and toilets (yes, those too)" for donors to claim and name - I funded a light switch! At the dedication celebration, donors signified their commitment by cutting ribbons throughout the building. As they prepare to welcome their first class of students, they're still a few thousand dollars short of their fundraising goal. Check out this great opportunity to support a community-based model of learning.

The second space-warming ceremony, one I led for a friend's new workspace, was more intimate. Their social change mission requires both an external orientation - to the conditions they seek to change, to the constraints and partnerships of the communities they serve and engage - and an internal focus on their creative process and their life as a team.

As the team stood facing outwards, I asked them to identify a core condition in the external world that affected their work. Turning back to each other, they wrote these words on rocks I'd brought - from racism and poverty to naysayers and devices that distract. Then I asked them to assemble the rocks into two cairns. These cairns can function as a touchstone, a way to keep themselves always oriented to the external context for their work.

Then, turning inward, I passed around a bag of ceramic hearts made by the 18h Avenue Peace House's cottage industry Grief Watch. I invited the team to bring to mind a quality or condition they wanted to foster within their new work space. Each person named a quality they were committed to embodying as they passed their heart to the person next to them. We closed with a round of rose water lemonade toasts and a poem offered in tribute to their work.

To Be of Use
By Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
Jump into work head first
Without dallying in the shallows
And swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
The black sleek heads of seals
Bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
Who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
Who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
Who do what has to be done, again and again

I want to be with people who submerge
In the task, who go into the fields to harvest
And work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the flood must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
Has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
But you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
And a person for work that is real.

Marking Milestones: Ritual & Ceremony in Modern Life

7/31/2016

How do we make meaning out of the big milestones in our personal and community life? That's the question at the heart of a new community discussion I'm leading in partnership with Oregon Humanities.

The premise: For the many people who do not have strong ties to religious or other cultural traditions, major life events such as birth, aging, relationship changes, illness, death, and community crises are increasingly marked by no ritual at all.

Last week I had the opportunity to pilot the conversation with 18 generous colleagues, clients, and friends. It left me filled with gratitude and inspiration, tinged with the sorrow that comes every time we recognize all that's missing in our modern urban lives.

As folks arrived, I invited them to select an item from a box stuffed with flotsam and jetsam that's washed up in my life - something that reminded them of a ritual or tradition from their family or cultural heritage.

We opened with a round of largely wordless opportunities to reflect and communicate how milestones were marked in our lives, standing in response to questions such as:

Whose entrance into the world or family was marked with any kind of family or community ritual, such as baptism or a naming or adoption ceremony?
Who was raised as a child, routinely going to funerals?
Who has felt the need for a ritual or ceremony in response to a community event, where none was available?

In pairs and in the larger group, we discussed whether we related to rituals as "cairns marking the path behind us and ahead of us," as described by Robert Fulghum, who believes, "Without them we lose our way.” (From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives)' Does ritual function, in our lives, as it does for Eileen London & Belinda Recio, who write, "Ritual is the journey; the sacred is the destination. Ritual binds us to the whole of creation, and it is in this bond that we can encounter the sacred.” (Sacred Rituals: Connecting with Spirit)

From these musings, we began to share the impact of life events that have passed unobserved and creative new ways that we might mark these milestones.

Stories like those participants told - stories of longing, connection, courage, and creativity - renew my spirit. I left filled with appreciation for what happens when we converse about real stuff... the ideas we generate from each other, the insights and possibilities we might not come to on our own... the tangible experience of being part of something greater than ourselves.

Click here for more information on bringing the conversation Ritual & Ceremony in Modern Life to your organization or community setting.

* * *

Oregon Humanities' Conversation Project brings Oregonians together to talk—across differences, beliefs, and backgrounds—about important issues and ideas. Local nonprofits, community groups, or businesses apply to host a Conversation Project program on a topic relevant to their community. An Oregon Humanities facilitator - like yours truly - comes to that community to lead the conversation.

Please help spread the word to potential conversation hosts about this fantastic opportunity to foster meaningful conversation on topics from race, immigration, and international trade, to questions such as: What makes life meaningful? What does it means to be an Oregonian? How do we feel about the future?

Check out the wonderful offerings in this year's catalogue. Having met many of the other facilitators, I'd love to attend them all!

The Solace of Gratitude

7/22/2016

We sought the solace of Mt Jefferson, site of my very first backpacking trip 36 years ago, to celebrate Amber's birthday and mark her Dad's 81st, 4 months after his death

The radio, following the Republican National Convention, offered the usual recitation of the dismal: violence, division, cynicism... so many causes for despair.

Then, a lifeline: an interview titled Finding Solace in a Chaotic World. The Takeaway host John Hockenberry spoke with Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook, presidential advisor and former New York City Police chaplain, a first responder in 9/11 and mother to two black men in their early 20s.

From her years on the front lines, she offered this:

"The thing about solace: you take it without permission."

"Strengthen yourself for the struggle. You have to have those moments."

I've been seeking solace in wild places this summer, in time with the children in my life, and in the practice of gratitude.

To that end, I'm pleased to share a poem for our times, written in 1988 but especially apt for our current news cycles, presented recently by poetry-whisperer Danna Schmidt, a gifted Celebrant colleague from Washington State.

Thanks
by W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Litany of Remembrance, Revived

7/19/2016

Noah Goldstein, 21

Last month, my high school best friend got the call every parent dreads. His child, newly graduated from college and about to start his first professional theater job, killed by a hit-and-run driver.

I was able to offer a small consolation for the stricken family and friends who flew from around the country to Noah's memorial service. Over the years, I've found the call-and-response Litany of Remembrance a useful way, in a secular service, for participants to join their voices together. It both anticipates the many ways the presence of the deceased loved one will be felt, and serves as a collective pledge to keep a place for them as life goes on.

Written by Roland B. Gittelsohn, an American Rabbi who served as Jewish Marine Corps Chaplain during the WWII battle of Iwo Jima, the Litany is often used in group ceremonies, hence the standard refrain, We remember them. With my clients, I suggest the more direct, We remember you.

The most powerful part of the Litany often comes when I encourage participants to add scenarios of their own that are likely to provoke memories, following the standard recital of seasons and emotional states. Specifics range from the teary to the playful. For my friend Marcy, an uncompromising conservationist always guarding against the waste of water, after When we have joys to share, we remember you, we heard When we flush the toilet, we remember you.

Helping a family prepare to bury their 31 year-old son recently, also killed instantly in a road accident, I suggested the idea of a customized Litany. Parents, siblings, aunts and uncles spent an hour or two crying, laughing, coming up with lines associated with precious stories, favorite attributes. The result used only the structure from Gittelsohn's original; every word of tribute represented a collective act of creativity by this devastated family.

I shared their example with my old friend Rich, and he and his family did the same for Noah. He sent it to me after the service with this note: "Please feel free to share it if it can help anyone else."

In the warmth of a Noah-like hug
we remember you

At the sight of teal colored hair
we remember you

in the crazy concoction of snacks, desserts, and beverages
we remember you

when seeing an action to right social injustice
we remember you

in the sight of a theater
we remember you

When seeing true passion in action
we remember you

When hearing Ferdinand being read aloud
we remember you

When we see a Ninja
we remember you

When we have joys we yearn to share
we remember you

Noah, so long as we live, you too shall live,
for you are a part of all who have known you.

Earth Altars

6/30/2016

"...beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love." Louis Kahn, architect,1901-1974

Several years ago, Amber and I backpacked over a pass in Tucson's Catalina Mountains. Dropping into the top of a stream-carved canyon, we set up camp by a waterfall above an inaccessible pool. At the far edge of the pool, on a large flat rock, the makings of a fire had been laid. Bundles of twigs, broken into even lengths, neatly stacked. Tinder surrounded by the scaffolding of a fire that sat unlit. I could see no path to the rock; there were no signs of who had prepared the fire or why.

I've remained enchanted by this unexpected sight, returning to it often in my mind's eye when I need to connect to something bigger than the the stress of daily life and the distress of injustice and suffering.

On the first day of our recent camping trip, along the banks of Oregon's magical McKenzie River, I found myself drawn to a flat rock, inspired to pause. To take in the beauty, and to reflect it back. To notice what called to me, to bring those items into some kind of relation with each other and with myself in an act of silent devotion. As I selected bits of moss and lichen, and assembled them with cedar and pine cones around a volcanic rock, I decided to create an earth altar at some point on each day of our trip.

The next day found us southbound, stopping at the Roseburg cemetery that houses the bones of Amber's grandfather, a pilgrimage Amber had made with her own Dad just a year before. As Amber cleared the matted grass from his grave marker and washed it, I collected fallen plums and leaves from a nearby tree.

The next day, in our campsite deep in the California redwoods, I leaned into a chest-high burl to create an altar honoring my friend Marcy, at the same moment as our community was gathering around her grave back in Portland to mark the year anniversary of her death.

An altar ended up decorating each of our succession of campsites. Others, I fashioned during a pause from a hike through the woods, on a river's edge, or by the ocean.

My favorite site of all was the wild spit of sand at the mouth of the Klamath River where the salmon swim in from the Pacific, a sacred place of abundance tended since the beginning of remembered time by the Yurok People. While hundreds view this rugged place from a state park overlook everyday, we were the only ones down on the beach itself, given access by the Yurok family that operates the historic inn we'd happened upon.

Every piece of driftwood, every water-worn rock and tattered seed pod and piece of flotsam felt alive. Intertwining those moments of my life with the fingers and toes of the natural world felt like a form of praise. In each of those settings, for the minutes I spent making an altar, I felt deeply at peace, deeply at home.

For inspiration on earth altars that are true works of art, check out morningaltars and the work of Andy Goldsworthy.

24 Points of Light

6/24/2016

View from my desk: stars for my Dad, Marcy & Bill

When I arrived at the Orphan Wisdom School earlier this spring, my friend and classmate Carrie Stearns said she had something to give me.

Carrie knew that the lack of a funeral for my Dad 15 years ago was part of what had drawn me to my work as a Celebrant, and that my friend Marcy's death a year ago was still much on my mind and heavy in my heart.

In the envelope she handed me were two richly colored paper stars she'd made: one for my Dad, one for Marcy. She said she'd be making one for Bill too, my friend who lay dying back home as we gathered in the Ottawa Valley.

Carrie started making these window stars with her daughters when they were little, at the start of every winter. "We would adorn many windows in our home with these star-shaped beams of light and beauty and also give them as gifts at Christmas time," she says. "I have taught many friends young and old to make these and everyone seems to find joy and meaning in the process. Now my daughters are off to explore life away from home and my practice of star making has evolved to include making them as a way of remembering and honoring a beloved one who has died."

I brought the stars home to Bill's house and taped them to the window across from his bed. I wondered aloud whether my Dad and Marcy along with all of his ancestors might be waiting to gather him in, and told him that a star for him would adorn my window in time. Those stars watched over a beautiful procession of close friends and family sharing sacred time around his bed.

Two weeks later, Bill died. I left the stars on his windows for a few weeks more. One day it felt like time to bring them home to my house, just a block away. I took them off his windows and carried them with me through the business of my day. When I arrived home, I put the key in the door and reached into the mailbox. An envelope from Carrie. Bill's star, ready to join the other two on my window.

"It is said that we are made of star dust… stars evoke this beautiful sense of mystery," writes Carrie. "They call to me to wonder and to remember and to wonder some more. When a beloved one dies in our culture we are not strong in the skill of grieving, remembering, and carrying them. Making a star in honor of one who has died and placing it in a window where light can touch it is a way of calling forth their beauty and presence among us. The beauty of these stars has a way catching my attention and encourages me to pause and to follow the path of my remembering."

May the story of the stars Carrie crafted for my beloveds inspire others to make star beauty and to practice remembrance.

Resources for Making Window Stars
Carrie says, Sites for instructions are many. Here are a couple for a very basic star, which is a good starting place:
Wee Folk Art web-based tutorial
Duo Fiberworks web-based tutorial
Window Stars, the book Carrie most recommends

To order the kite paper (there is also a video tutorial on this page)

Read Carrie's moving account of her partner Sarah's death, The Brilliance of Dying, published on my blog in 2014.

The Thread of All Sorrows

5/31/2016

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
~ from "Kindness," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

Memorial Day with Amber's Dad

I've just taken perhaps the longest break from my blog since I committed at the start of 2013 to write 50 posts in a year's time.

The death earlier this month of my close friend/ neighbor/ former mentor Bill has caught the thread of all my sorrows.

Bill's diagnosis with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia came not 24 hours after Marcy's five-hour memorial service last August. During the six months Bill spent in a clinical trial (at a cancer center dubbed the City of Hope) in California, my father-in-law Dean Wilson suffered several health crises. In March he died less than 48 hours after entering hospice. Two days after we buried Dean, Bill returned home for what turned out to be his last six weeks of life.

On the surface, these seem clear examples of what Francis Weller calls the First Gate of Grief: the recognition that everything we love will die. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow Weller enumerates "Five Gates of Grief" (summarized here). The image of the gate implies something linear or sequential - you pass through one gate at a time, entering into what Weller calls "the communal hall of grief".

I find myself at the threshold of all five of these portals. The threads of sorrow I've got ahold of feel like they're woven into the same cloth. As Weller says, citing Nye's poem, "The cloth is immense."

I recognize intimately the Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love; the Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World; and the Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief. But the warp upon which all these threads serve as weft is Weller's Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive – the grief of not being born into a village.

Weller quotes T.S. Eliot's lament, "Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth," and writes:

We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred....This is our inheritance, our birthright,which has been lost and abandoned....This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it so hard to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.

Neighborhood candlelight walk the night after Bill's death

My studies these last two years at the Orphan Wisdom School have introduced me to the concept of dying as a village-making event. I've dedicated much of this current chapter of my life to tending relationships between the living and the dead and to strengthening community around the dying. I've glimpsed moments of the village showing up - beautiful, sacred moments.

And I've also been a faithful witness to how each of these deaths - along with the burgeoning movement that seeks to "do death differently" - bears the marks of our times.

Tugging at the thread of the sorrow of our times, a sorrow that hears the muffled but insistent sound of ancestral trauma, a sorrow that erupts as shame and self-abuse, can feel like an unraveling when there's no village to weave the larger story back together.

Seeing the size of the whole cloth is not easy. As Weller writes, "So much in this world needs our attention. So much is threatened and clinging perilously to the edge of existence. Grief is our witness to these painful realities. Grief is also our response that confirms our intimate bond with all of creation."

At the center of all my sorrows, I have felt a presence that was not mine alone.
~ Susan Griffin

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