There is a dark road headed out of town…
A quest where answers are no longer the holy grail and solutions are slain with evermore cunning and artful questions;
A journey away from familiarity and comfort towards mystery and unknown, away from certainty and competence to ambivalence and wonder;
A place where demons sit at the same table as angels and feast with the souls of the living and the living dead;
A sanctuary for all orphaned emotions and culturally banished rituals.
Amidst a world enchanted by explanations and spells of reason, here you will not find the next “how to” or “12 steps” to anything. That market is already cornered.
Deep within these ancestral woods echoes a cavernous cry for freedom,
Yet its call is only heard by those courageous enough to be wholly human in this time of trouble.
If this call is for you, welcome dear friend, for friends we may soon be as we walk together upon this sacred ground.
Our Vision
The skills of love, grief, and praise for the wholeness of life...
Grief is how we praise life—how we honor that which we love.
Grief is how we learn to say thank you—how we offer gratitude for that which we have been given.
Grief is how we remember—how we carry the vital memories of our old ones and our dead.
Grief is how we metabolize sorrow—how we transform brokenness into something medicinal for our hearts and those around us.
Grief shows us where our love and care are needed—how we make space in our lives to hear the voices of hurt, loss, and devastation.
Grief is how our hearts mature—how we learn to love as well-ripened humans.
“Grief is not hanging on to what you’ve got for dear life no matter what, and it is not scraping through or getting by until the hard parts of life are done with us. Grief is an ability to know certain things about life well and an ability to proceed in your life as if they are true. Grief is what you do with what comes to you. Very few people seek it out or want to get good at it, but grief is an ability as vital to our emotional and spiritual and community life as the skill of love. We may be born with the need of them, maybe even with the longing for them, but we are not born knowing how to do either. They have to be learned, and by some ordinary miracle they are both learned in the same way.
You see, grief is a maker of human being. More than a staging area for human strength or endurance, grieving conjures humanity. Grieving gives us a chance to practice unlikely gratitude for that which doesn’t seem to benefit us.”
—Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise
"Regrets" from Nights of Grief and Mystery
