The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

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In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller offers his readers a breath-taking and dramatic journey of inner discovery into personal pain resolution, plane-tary healing and Soul development. It is an essential publication - one that offers precious guidance and insight for those who are strong enough, as well as mature enough, to probe and ch allenge the darkness." - Spirituality Today. ​ I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive.” Francis Weller's lyrical and moving book offers us a way to remember and embrace these practices and, by so doing, renew our lives and restore the soul of the world. The Wild Edge of Sorrow reads like poetry and isboth a prayer and an invitation: a prayer of soul healing and an invitation tothe mystery of becoming fully human. May it find its way to those who need it(most of us).”- Larry Robinson, poet, former mayor Sebastopol, CA.

Home [www.francisweller.net]

Human beings, for millennia before the advent of civilization, were nurtured and supported from birth by a village, not a nuclear family. This has been a disastrous shift—yet another thing to grieve. Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to “normal” too soon.” My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief.” This book is a work of beauty: beauty in its language, its poetic sensibility, in its deepinsights intothe nature of loss and its effect on the human soul.Weller's bookis, finally, ahealing balm. It shows how our tears may be theredemptive waters we have needed for so long." -Roger Housden, author of Ten Poems to Say GoodbyeGrief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.” Amidst the plethora of books on the inner life, very rarely do I encounter one that opens my mind and heart to completely new possibilitiesessential to my deepest humanity. The Wild Edge of Sorrow , however, is brimming with sentences that take me beyond what I already know, much as a great poem can, to utterly new dimensions of whatit means to be courageously alive to myself and the world around me. Wellerworks this magic not only through the wisdom he offers about how to honor our grief — at both personal and planetary levels — but also through the warmth andmusic of his language, which is in itself a healing medicine for the soul. Thisbook is not only a map to navigate some of the most tender and difficult regionsof the psyche, but a work of literary art.”- Kim Rosen, author Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words The Wild Edge of Sorrow is extraordinary. I'm going to be giving it to a lot of people. So many of the themes explored are things I care deeply about. For example, the betrayal of our Great Expectation that life is supposed to be far more magical, authentic, intimate, and alive than what has been offered to us as normal. The ongoing pain of separation from community and nature that we all feel. And the pain of the earth. Reading Weller’s book, I've realized that we have a lot of unprocessed grief to share. This book will be a gift to many." Beginning in 1997, Ibegan to offer grief rituals as a way for communities to attend the large and small losses that touch each of our lives. What has become clear is how difficult it is for us to attend to our grief in the absence of community. Carried privately, sorrow lingers in the soul, slowly pulling us below the surface of life and into the terrain of death.

The Wild Edge Of Sorrow: A Book Review By Carolyn Baker The Wild Edge Of Sorrow: A Book Review By Carolyn Baker

In that moment, I understood powerfully the cost to a child who had to be the one to make the overture of repair. If I hadn’t gone in there, my son would have had to ingest his fear that I did not want to be his father any longer. The worst part of it, however, is that he would have felt it was his fault—if he hadn’t been so exuberant, so needy for my attention, I might still hold him in my heart. He would feel he had to restrain these parts of himself in the future if he was to receive my love once again.” Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.”Another potential obstacle is Weller’s belief that the modern world is essentially broken, and we along with it. He has a lot to say about “our entire suicidal culture––our death-dealing, nature-consuming, hell-bent-on-our-collective-demise society,” none of it good (138). At the same time, he heaps uncritical praise on indigenous ways of living and knowing, to the point where I felt like he overindulged in “ noble savage” thinking and appeals to antiquity. It’s not that the modern world is perfect and we can’t learn anything useful from other or older cultures, but Weller’s “new = bad, old = good” narrative is very consistent and overly simplistic. We register in our psyches, consciously or not, the fact of our shared sorrows. Learning to welcome, hold, and metabolize these sorrows is the work of a lifetime and the focus of this book.”

The Wild Edge of Sorrow Quotes - Goodreads The Wild Edge of Sorrow Quotes - Goodreads

Whereas our culture assumes that public grieving is somewhat childish, Francis Weller passionately asserts that “Grief is the work of mature men and women.” Moreover, it is not a private matter that we should isolate within the four walls of our home or conceal by wearing sunglasses in public. Many indigenous cultures and generations of our ancestors understood that grief is a communal event. It is, says Weller, “…an intensely interior process that can only be navigated in the presence of community.” (116) For many tribes, community grieving was a way of maintaining “soul hygiene” because the community knew that when people do not grieve, they become toxic to the rest of the community. But what more does an apprenticeship with sorrow offer us? Do we merely discharge our grief and move on? Weller is drawing on thirty years of experience in the therapy room, concisely summarizing Jung and Freud, relaying many stories that arise from clients. But he also peppers us with quotes from poets like Rilke and Rumi, Mary Oliver and David Whyte. The icing on the cake is the way he draws on indigenous wisdom and soul-tenders like Pema Chodron and John O’Donohue.Lccn 2015002333 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9667 Ocr_module_version 0.0.12 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18635 Openlibrary_edition