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!
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreHow 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.
Read MoreIn 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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