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

Michael Lerner is president and founder of Commonweal in Bolinas, California. Founded in 1976, Commonweal has programs in health and healing, education and the arts, and the environment and justice. Lerner is cofounder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal.

Survive love and loss, the great French essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne advised. His maxim for life compresses the essence of the human dilemma into four words.

Easier said than done, for loss is the other side of the coin of love. The greater the love, the greater the loss. And yet different people respond to loss very differently. When it comes to loss, there are hard-earned skills that can help you survive the unknown terrain in which you find yourself. There are survival skills, there are maps, and there are guides.

Francis Weller is a well-travelled guide to the country of loss. He can teach you the survival skills. He can show you the maps. He carries his knowing of sorrow in his bones. He writes as someone who has been unmade in the way loss unmakes us.

He is not afraid to tell us so.

Im not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life.... There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.

Weller coleads weeklong retreats with me in the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. We sit together many evenings in these retreats and hear stories of love and loss.

We know that listening and honoring these stories makes a difference. He also leads his own retreats on grief and loss. I know some of those who have attended his retreats. I know from their accounts that these retreats too make a difference.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief brings together Wellers wisdom from decades of work with grief and loss.

Every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. We must learn the art and craft of grief, discover the profound ways it ripens and deepens us. While grief is an intense emotion, it is also a skill we develop through a prolonged walk with loss. Facing grief is hard work.... It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. This is precisely what we are being called to do.