Trapping grief is a terrible way to tame our humanness.

Trapping grief is a terrible way to tame our humanness / / The richness of rotting

Isn’t it interesting how grief drops us, pulls us to the ground. Enveloped by gravity to sink back into the earth for a while. Feeling like you can’t take the weight of it all? The earth can, drop all that weight into the earth. It can take it. You can’t break it. 

A mother’s heart.

A father’s hold.

Pound the earth, throw it, scream. 

Get muddy. 

Paint yourself. 

Become unrecognisable for a moment. 

Be an animal. 

Roar. Roar!! 

Until the wails turn to whimpers. Then tuck yourself up like a small animal under a tree. Soothe your little animal body. Be held by the tree. Whimpers soon turn to whispers… “It’ll be okay …. It’ll be okay”, says the fungi, it all goes around. 

But humans have halted the cyclical nature of life. 

We take and take. Like The Kaonashi in Spirited Away. 

We purge but we do not decompose. 

There is no new life without the richness of rotting! 

Once upon a Dreamtime our blood, sweat and tears would soak back into the earth. 

Giving back what no longer serves us to be transformed. 

Even our hair would be utilised by small birds to build nests. 

But now there is no portal to channel our deaths, no gateways for our grief. 

Flush it down the drain, stuff it in the trash, hide it in your home. 

Nature always turns death into something beautiful, but we try to sterilise this process. Ironically this sterilisation creates disease. 

Intentionally tossed food scraps to an opportunistic possum in the forest is now a feast for a friend. 

But watch those same scraps waste away and fester in bin we throw on the street. 

Interesting how we put our garbage bins out in the street yet we do not grieve on the street. It’s somewhat “unacceptable” to cry and scream in the “real world”. Best to hide that in your home until you’re better they say … 

But we don’t get better confided in four walls. 

We must air our grief out.

Gift it to nature.

Cry into the creek.

Bleed onto the earth. 

Scream into the ether. 

Trapping grief is a terrible way to tame our humanness.