Regardless of whether or not these penguins are grieving, we can still learn something important about grief from this striking image.
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Will turns to the Ancient Greeks to find some help navigating the uncomfortable experience of repetition.
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In a relatively limited number of steps, Will maneuvers from a dictionary of Ancient Greek words to a theory of political revolution embedded within a jazz musician’s sound. The Loeb Classical Library sends him back to A Love Supreme. The keyword here is nomos.
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A guest blog from our friends Sam Butler and David Harradine of UK-based Fevered Sleep. Here, Sam and David reflect on their ongoing project, “This Grief Thing,” which opens up space for grief through pop-up shops in cities around England. In these spaces, the typical silence around grief gives way to stories, intimate moments between strangers, and the many kinds of expression made possible by bodies gathered together in solidarity. This post links back to our episode with Fevered Sleep on the To Grieve podcast. Please listen to that after reading Sam and David’s reflections.
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Recent news reports have revealed the decimation of one of the world’s largest Emperor Penguin colonies. Deciding not to ignore this situation but, rather, to open to the pain of this scope of loss, Will finds himself wading deeper into the process of active grieving that he has undertaken since the deaths of his father, son, and step-father.
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Will’s reflections on our four-week community grief event that engaged with David Grossman’s astonishing book Falling Out of Time. Will shares some of our activities and insights and discusses some of the powerful ideas and questions provoked by Grossman’s text. We encourage everyone, especially those of you interested in grief and death literacy, communal mourning, and creative approaches to loss, to read this book!
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There are multiple benefits to thinking of death often, not least of which is the overcoming of fear and the ability to sense new threads connecting me with my loved ones who have died. Similarly, to think of nothingness is to press the mind to its limit and expand our cognitive maps of the universe. If welcoming thoughts of death into our daily consciousness can demystify the great equalizer that so many people work feverishly to avoid, then coming to grips with nothing can throw the wild variety of our being into relief and perhaps help us to engage with the Great Mystery.
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In this parallel post to “The Task of Nothing,” Will combines the grief work and educational insights that we at Inviting Abundance work with clients to cultivate. Specifically, Will is interested in figuring out what “Everything” is all about, and how the analysis of this idea helps him to process the death of his son.
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How we think of death, how often we think of it, and the desire held by so many to ignore it altogether culminates in the multifaceted notion of Death Literacy. Forwarded as the main theme of the 3rd Annual Death Faire, Death Literacy helps us cultivate community resilience and individual creative grief practices. In this post, Will reflects on these themes and the artistic elements of the Faire, held November 3, 2018, in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
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True thinking has nothing to do with Fox News or CNN and it only occasionally appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Instead, true thinking happens to us, and it happens when we learn to see the world anew through the embodied and self-conscious exploration of everyday life. Do you want to know more? Do you want to feel the vibrancy of Independent Thinking?
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Joanne discusses why and how cultivating a creative grief work could help us to attend to our own personal healing and to extend this healing outward through connection. Grief can move us in so many surprising ways if we invite in the learning, healing, and growing that can accompany it.
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Learning gardens are inspiring places - living laboratories, multi-faceted habitats, outdoor classrooms, magical settings for thinking, observing, exploring, and getting one’s hands dirty! Here are Joanne’s reflections on some of the projects and publications that are worth looking into if you are interested in joining this exciting movement.
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Will recently had the opportunity to write about STEM curricula in higher education and, more specifically, the importance of adding art into the mix. In acronyms, this topic is understood as the move from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math). I’m sharing my thoughts on this blog in order to make my language available to anyone who finds themselves in need of advocating for the arts in education.
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What do we learn from George Yancy, his interlocutors, and, hopefully, my online class? We learn that philosophy matters more dearly than we could possibly expect and that its efficacy stretches from the realm of the abstract to the skin wrapped round our flesh, to the blood that courses through our veins.
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Halloween was the first big holiday that Will and I (Joanne) had to face after our first son Finlay’s inexplicable death during childbirth in June 2014. Other people’s kids coming to our front door wearing costumes, smiling, laughing, and being so… well… alive seemed like the worst possible thing that we could endure at that time.
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Permaculture design aims to generate and harvest abundance throughout the year. I completed my Permaculture Design Certificate in February 2016, when I was beginning my 2nd trimester of pregnancy with Phalen. It was an emotional time for me as I felt guided to permaculture by my first son Finlay, whose death threw my entire life into question, and I was now physically sharing this learning space with his brother.
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In order to live and thrive while grieving for the deaths of my son, father, stepfather, and friends, I have to reckon with death: How do these people’s deaths affect my ability to navigate through the social world? How do their deaths change my relation to life, generally? Is death really an end, or is it more like a threshold that opens onto a new beginning? By asking these philosophical questions, I feel that I am arranging the deaths of my family members into an order, one that acts like a trail capable of leading me in a specific direction.
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