{"id":5084,"date":"2016-03-17T16:33:01","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T20:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5084"},"modified":"2019-09-18T15:32:56","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T19:32:56","slug":"the-five-gates-of-grief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5084","title":{"rendered":"The Five Gates of Grief"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Five Gates of Grief are listed by Francis Weller in The Wild Edge of Sorrow<\/a>. \u00a0Quotes from the book are given in italics.<\/p>\n

The First Gate: Everything We Love, We will Lose<\/strong><\/p>\n

I remember when Shenanigan died, and Bella, knowing that grief is the price of love.\u00a0 I chose to get Mocha, knowing that someday I will grieve her death.\u00a0 I have lost very little that I love to death.\u00a0 The people I loved who died, Ron and Evvie, had not been part of my life for years, so I didn\u2019t feel the loss as much as I would have, if they had been a part of my daily life.\u00a0 Older women who were important to me: Mama Greene, Aunt Betty, Aunt Carolyn, I lost to senility before they died.\u00a0 I lost my parents to alcohol before I was born.\u00a0 When they died, I felt relief.\u00a0 I have lost a lot of things to depression, friendships I was unable to keep up, work I loved \u2014 showing Sacred Sites<\/a>, Dancing the Sacred Calendar<\/a> \u2014 that I was unable to promote.\u00a0 Actually I guess I lost my marriage to depression and also to PTSD.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy 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.\u201d \u00a0 p25<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love<\/strong><\/p>\n

What we learn from our parents: \u201cthe slow insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world of adults.\u00a0 We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability … that these pieces of who we are … are, in fact, shameful…\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0 p 34<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the things that has confused me is that everything<\/span> I was, was not OK for my mother at some time.\u00a0 My joy, my sorrow, my enthusiasm, my curiosity, my creativity, my sensitivity, my needs, all would bring a reprimand from my mother.\u00a0 This didn\u2019t leave very much.\u00a0 Thank God I went to a good school, where my creativity and intelligence were supported.\u00a0 But I still find it difficult to be creative without support.\u00a0 I bought myself paper and paints after going to Aviva Gold\u2019s Painting from the Source<\/a>, but I was never able to do very much with them until I started seeing an art therapist.\u00a0 One creative outlet I do have active in my life is writing, but writing is mostly intellectual.\u00a0 My other creative outlet is teaching circle dance, and it\u2019s the group support that makes that possible.\u00a0 Something I only noticed on rereading Weller is the presence of needs on the list of things not loved.\u00a0 I realize that my needs have totally disappeared, I have a very hard time recognizing and owning them, and as for loving them!\u00a0 My needs are a nuisance that I should just ignore \u2014 I\u2019m rarely able to become aware of when I\u2019m tired or hungry \u2014 taking care of my own needs only became important when I had to do it in order not to become a nuisance to those around me.\u00a0 My needs for comfort, support, to be part of a group working together on a project, have never been acknowledged or allowed.\u00a0 I\u2019m beginning to allow myself to feel my grief for the fully creative life I never got to live.<\/p>\n

There is too much here, too many quotes I want to write down, especially on trauma.\u00a0 I think I have to go on, and then come back.<\/p>\n

The Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World<\/strong><\/p>\n

From where I sit, I can see trees, rocks, grass, bird feeders.\u00a0 The trees are second growth, they are spindly and crowded, this lot was clear-cut before it was sold.\u00a0 The rocks were put in place by a bulldozer.\u00a0 Grass is grass, it always returns.\u00a0 The bird feeders are put out there by me, and I watch chickadees, nuthatches, blue jays, juncos, siskins, redpolls, gold finches, red squirrels, chipmunks.\u00a0 I have seen a fox out there and a pair of cardinals.\u00a0 I watch the seasonal changes: green trees, colorful fall trees, bare winter trees, white snow, and then the twigs growing red in the spring.\u00a0 I can only hang the feeders in the winter.\u00a0 In the spring, as soon as the bears come out of hibernation, my feeders are stolen away.\u00a0 I have lost a large number of feeders, and now am wiser and bring them in as soon as the weather gets warm.\u00a0 I have seen bear, moose and deer, and their tracks in the snow.<\/p>\n

When I was a child, there was a big woods behind our house.\u00a0 I spent a lot of time out there.\u00a0 I was able to roam over three hillsides separated by three streams.\u00a0 The first one was what I later learned was second growth, spindly crowded trees, lots of undergrowth.\u00a0 The second hill had bigger trees with more space between them.\u00a0 The third hill had huge beech trees, with a lot of space between and the ground was covered with only mayapples.\u00a0 Later, when I learned about forest succession, I understood the difference.<\/p>\n

Now I understand how lucky I was to grow up with so much access to nature. \u00a0But it means I have a lot of pain as well.\u00a0 It hurts every time I see a dead animal on the road.\u00a0 It hurts that I no longer see snakes and toads and frogs on a trail I hike regularly.\u00a0 It hurts to know that the wood thrush, with its incredible song, is on the endangered list because its winter habitat is being destroyed.\u00a0 I used to push my grief down, criticizing myself for being \u201ctoo sensitive.\u201d\u00a0 But I have also found myself unable to love\u00a0human beings, but feeling a great love for trees and birds, the mountains and the ocean.\u00a0 It\u2019s good to know that I am not alone in my grief, and that many other people share my sadness.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuman biologist Paul Shepard said \u2018The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.\u2019\u201d \u00a0 p50<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is another gate to grief, one difficult to identify, yet it is very present in each of our lives.\u00a0 This threshold into sorrow calls forward the things that we may not even realize we have lost.\u00a0 I have written elsewhere about the expectations coded into our physical and psychic lives.\u00a0 When we are born, and as we pass through childhood, adolescence, and the stages of adulthood, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do we even know that we miss these experiences?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how to answer that question.\u00a0 What I do know is that when these things are finally granted to us, a wave of recognition rises that we have lived without this love, this acknowledgement, and the support of this village all our lives.\u00a0 This realization calls forth grief.\u201d \u00a0 p54<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I felt this wave of recognition when Erica started giving me constant positive feedback, telling me I was brave, telling me of the loving look on my face, pointing out the comforting position of my hands.\u00a0 I had never had anyone notice those sorts of things about me, and tell me about them.\u00a0 This is what is called \u201cmirroring\u201d and it\u2019s what the mother does with her baby to give her a sense of who she is.\u00a0 Whatever my mother did failed to give me a correct sense of who I am.\u00a0 When Erica started telling me good things about myself, I felt like a starving person presented with a feast.\u00a0 I felt a sense of delighted joy: THIS is what I was suppose to get and have been hungry for all my life.\u00a0 As the weeks went on I began to find it difficult to take in, I would put my hands up as if to say \u201cStop!\u00a0 Too much!\u201d\u00a0 I don\u2019t know why I am so resistant.\u00a0 Possibly because it turned my life upside down.\u00a0 The sense of \u201cme\u201d that I had had all my life was at least familiar if not exactly comfortable, and now it was being destroyed.\u00a0 But if I let myself believe I was the exuberant, creative, courageous person Erica was describing, I would have been guilty of the worst possible sin according to my mother.\u00a0 Over and over she had said to me \u201cDon\u2019t think you\u2019re so great.\u201d\u00a0 So I did my best to be small enough for her.<\/p>\n

I have found this extremely difficult to write.\u00a0 I\u2019m feeling so much pain.\u00a0 I have to keep stopping and watch the birds coming to the feeder, be aware of the flames in the fireplace, and of the warmth of my dog next to me.<\/p>\n

Stuck to my refrigerator with a magnet is a print out of a blog post<\/a> on Mary Oliver\u2019s line \u201cWhat will you do with your one wild and precious life?\u201d\u00a0 I say \u201cIf my life has been narrow, if I\u2019ve failed to live as wide and wild and courageous and generous and creative a life as I would have liked to, and as I think I had the talent and capacity for, it\u2019s not because I was weak and cowardly but because I was up against major damage I couldn\u2019t even see.\u201d\u00a0 The loss of that life is another reason to grieve.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering out ears that soothe and comfort.\u00a0 We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings.\u00a0 Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0 p55<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother facet of loss at this gate concerns the expectation of purpose in our lives.\u00a0 Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community.\u00a0 Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need.\u00a0 To feel valued for the gifts with which we are born affirms our worth and dignity.\u00a0 In a sense it is a form of spiritual employment<\/i> \u2014 simply being who we are confirms our place in the village.\u00a0 That is one of the fundamental understandings about gifts: we can only offer them by being ourselves fully.\u00a0 Gifts are a consequence of authenticity; when we are being true to our natures, the gifts can emerge.\u201d p57<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the most painful things in my life is having trouble finding people who want what I have to give, and when I find people who do value what I have to give, I don\u2019t believe them.\u00a0 I don\u2019t begin to know how to \u201cmarket\u201d myself.\u00a0 That\u2019s just too hard, most likely because of Mom\u2019s injunction to not think I\u2019m so great.\u00a0 My gifts are: teaching traditional dances, creating special rituals for seasonal celebrations and other occasions, dancing the Sacred Calendar, the Sacred Sites presentation, teaching archeoastronomy, teaching Observational Astronomy.<\/p>\n

The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors.\u00a0 Much of this grief lingers in a layer of silence, unacknowledged.\u00a0 Many of our ancestors arrived in the Americas after leaving their homes, family members, and communities behind.\u00a0 Some arrived here after being abducted and forced into slavery.\u00a0 These generations often survived without a feeling of home, living with only marginal connections with the Old Ways to guide them.\u00a0 The traditions that had nourished and held their people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years were difficult to sustain on the new continent.\u201d\u00a0 p63<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Remembering the movie about the Irish immigrant (Brooklyn<\/a>) I think about my Scots and Irish ancestors, and the ones who left their families behind to come to America.\u00a0 They knew at the time that they would probably never see each other again.\u00a0 I can feel the sadness of those left behind, and of those who went to a new country.\u00a0 \u201cI never knew what happened to them.\u201d\u00a0 This sentence made me practically cry, and it resonated with me for quite a while, and I couldn\u2019t remember any incident in my life that would account for it.\u00a0 I also feel pain for the Indigenous people of this continent, how they were driven out, massacred, forced to make a living in a habitat they do not know… \u00a0 I\u2019ve watched Dakota 38<\/a> many times, heard their history, watched with gladness as they reclaim their pride in a ritual of reconciliation and forgiveness.<\/p>\n

There were also the family losses: of my Uncle Jesse who died at age 19 from leukemia.\u00a0 I remember Mother saying he was her boy, that she dressed him and took care of him.\u00a0 She must have felt his loss, as did Granny & Gramp and Aunt Carolyn.\u00a0 But I\u2019m sure he was never adequately mourned.\u00a0 Those were the days of the stiff upper lip, of \u201ccarrying on with head held high,\u201d of never showing your emotions.\u00a0 When I cried I was sent to my room.\u00a0 Aunt Carolyn\u2019s first husband died in the war, we assumed in combat, but I heard from someone, don\u2019t remember who, can\u2019t assess its truth, that he killed himself.\u00a0 Another family secret never told.<\/p>\n

I think of my delight and sense of connection to my Celtic ancestors, to their music and dance, to the history written in the neolithic stones, and to the \u201cold nature religion of Western Europe.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0 The books that spoke of ley-lines and cosmic energies<\/a>, my own travels through Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany.\u00a0 Somehow that made up for the rupture with my ancient heritage caused by workaholic and crazy grandparents and alcoholic parents.<\/p>\n

When we dance the old traditional folk dances I often feel a sense of all the circles of people who\u2019ve\u00a0danced that dance, way into the past.\u00a0 When I was first teaching folk dance in Franconia, we met in the gym of the elementary school.\u00a0 When the weather was right, we danced outside.\u00a0 One spring Equinox, we had been dancing inside all winter, but it was sunny, though there was still considerable snow, especially on the mountains.\u00a0 We found a paved patch near one of the doors which was clear of snow, we were in the sun and could see the mountains, and we began to dance.\u00a0 Suddenly a bird flew by.\u00a0 I had the oddest feeling, I saw us all wearing print skirts over many petticoats and many colored kerchiefs on our heads.\u00a0 The words that came were \u201cWe\u2019ve been doing this for thousands of years.\u201d\u00a0 Later, after we had built Neskaya, Laura Shannon<\/a> came to teach a training in \u201cWomen\u2019s Ritual Dance,\u201d dances she had learned in Greece, Armenia, Bulgaria and Romania.\u00a0 At one point she taught us a song, sung by two sets of women singing alternate lines, holding the last note so that they overlapped.\u00a0 We were outside in the stone circle with tall trees looking down.\u00a0 She started beating a drum and sang the verses while we sang the chorus, and danced.\u00a0 Again I had that feeling of being part of a continuum who have danced this dance to the sound of their own voices for millennia.\u00a0 I feel hugely fortunate to have connected with this much of my ancestral heritage and honored to be among\u00a0the people who are trying to keep it alive.<\/p>\n

A friend told me about Francis Weller. \u00a0This man is amazing. \u00a0Here he is talking about the five gates and more.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Five Gates of Grief are listed by Francis Weller in The Wild Edge of Sorrow. \u00a0Quotes from the book are given in italics. The First Gate: Everything We Love, We will Lose I remember when Shenanigan died, and Bella, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-present-day","category-spirit","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}