Give Your Grief to the Earth
A few days ago, I was feeling really heavy with grief.
Grief over Palestine.
Grief over systemic harm.
Capitalism.
Ecological destruction.
All of the above and more.
And I started remembering an experience from 2013, when I was working on a project that took me across the country filming for a nonprofit. I visited 15 cities in just a few months and conducted 8 to 10 interviews per day.
It was one of the most intense and potent experiences of my life. I’ll always be grateful for it. I got to hear incredible stories and meet beautiful people.
Near the end of the trip, I was in New Orleans. I had probably already been to 13 cities. That day, I interviewed a sweet 9-year-old girl in a humid but quiet classroom. She opened up slowly and eventually, in the sacred space of that room, she told me about her sister who had died during an asthma attack due to racist medical neglect. She shared how her school community had helped her grieve and honor her sister through art and ritual.
I listened with reverence and spaciousness. The air vibrated with the truth of her love and pain. When she was done speaking, we honored her sister together with tears in our eyes.
The next day, I couldn't stop thinking about her. Existence felt surreal. I felt like all the stories I had heard were rising up inside me, crescendoing into a wave that needed release.
I went with my collaborator, Andre Lambertson, to a patch of grass on a waterfront. We talked. (As a filmmaker, Andre also knows what it was like to bear witness to stories of heartbreak born from systemic harm.) We shared what was echoing in our hearts. The truth of how deadly racism is. How much it steals, especially from children. How that precious little girl's sister should still be here.
I remember lying with my back on the grass and hearing a whisper to open the back door of my heart. To pour all the grief from my heart into the earth.
And I heard this message from the earth:
Give it to me. I’m so much bigger than you. Let me hold this. Let me hold this with and for you. You don't have to carry it alone. Give it to me.
So I did. I let it pour out. I let it go. I cried.
I gave my grief to the earth.
Waves of release moved through me.
It felt like the whole earth was enveloping me in love.
I remember feeling nourished, held, and strong enough to keep turning toward the sacred stories that had been shared with me.
Storytelling is a ceremony. As a filmmaker, I’ve had to learn how to witness heavy stories while tending to my own well-being. There is an art to the energetics of witnessing people's hard and heavy stories.
It is very rare that the most painful details of people's stories make it into the videos I create. I don't want to share people's pain publicly in ways that don't hold space and sacredness for the rawness and depth of their hearts. The story can often be told publicly powerfully without exposing people's vulnerability in that way. But when people share, in the safety of an interview, the truth of what they've endured, I feel honored to be a witness.
Last year, I conducted and edited an interview with a trauma psychologist who said he receives trauma stories like a tuning fork instead of a sponge. He lets them move through him, rather than absorbing and carrying them stagnantly.
It reminded me.
We can give our stories to the earth.
We can give our grief to the earth.
Let it be held by something alive and ancient. The place that we come from and the place we belong to.
The earth is incredibly loving and powerful. If we allow it to, it can nourish us so we can keep turning toward and tending to the wounds of the world and the wounds that live in us from systemic and interpersonal harm.
The genocide in Palestine has invited me back to this over and over again.
When the rage and grief are too much, I find my way to the soil.
I open the back door of my heart.
I let love hold me.
The earth is waiting for your grief. Will you let it be held?
