A Time of Ashes.

We are all living with grief. Wisdom and beauty are trickling through are fingers and into the unknown, but grieving is a taboo in our society, and so it has retreated into the shadow.

"The onset of grief following a significant loss initiates a shift in our daily rhythm. We enter into what some cultures refer to as a time of 'living in ashes'. This is also related to the term cinder biter, 'cinder-ella', a period of grief or wilderness time, seen in most fairy tales and myths. The Hindu texts describe the God Shiva as “clothed with ashes” this symbolising his permanence, destruction and new life that is born from a life destroyed. “Ash is a symbol of the immortal soul, which is released when the matter is destroyed.”

Among the ancient Scandinavia cultures, it was a common practice for those dealing with loss to spend their days alongside fires that were aligned down the centre of a longhouse. They would occupy this physical and psychic terrain until they felt they had moved through the underworld where grief had taken them. Ash speaks to what remains...As James Hillman wrote "Ash is the ultimate reduction, the bare soul, the last truth, all else dissolved."

Grief opens us up, it is alive and wild. "In truth without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women. It is the broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of a genuine love. The heart familiar with loss is able to recognise "a still deeper grief ... a sadness at the very heart of things that binds us with the world. Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies if avoidance and heroic striving."

Emerson said the wisest know nothing when faced with grief, it renders us children again, but hopefully grief will "dare us to love once more".

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Quotes from The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals for Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller

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Art: Kimon Loghi