Francis Weller | Grief, Ritual and Holding Space for Sorrow

It's through grief that we enter the commons of the soul. I mean, every human being that you meet on the street is carrying a casket full of grief. Every one of us. I mean, how could you possibly not feel sorrow these days for what is happening in Gaza or in Ukraine or Congo or any place on the planet right now in our own neighborhoods? It's the ambient field is saturated with sorrow right now and fear. And so to not speak it, to not have that witness, we're basically becoming a self-contained unit for that feeling state. And we can't tolerate that. There's no way on earth any one of us can stay open to the sorrows of the world if we don't have places to take them. Welcome to the Passing Through Podcast. A show dedicated to exploring those spaces not just within, but also between and around us. The cracks in the walls. The moments between the moments. I speak with thinkers, authors, artists, teachers, and everyday humans who have touched the edge of the ordinary and found something to bring back. I've got an exciting episode for you this week, and I am itching to jump into it, so let me just burn through this introduction as quickly as humanly possible. This is going to be a continuation on a theme which we introduced last week about grief. Except this week, I am honored to have passed through this space with someone who's been a teacher and an inspiration to me, Francis Weller. Francis is a retired psychotherapist, he's a renowned author, and a grief worker who has opened up his life to an apprenticeship with sorrow. He's written extensively on the topic in a book that I have named on this podcast numerous times called The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and most recently in a book called In the Absence of the Ordinary, and we're going to talk about both of those. We are going to go into the darkness armed with some tissues and a few moments of silence to interrogate questions like, how do we work with grief? Why is it important to metabolize our sorrow in a group setting? How does grief work and grief ritual differ from group therapy or support groups, and what is it that grief is asking of us? We're going to explore sorrow as an animate force and darkness as friend, not foe. We're going to discuss a lot of things ranging from ritual to grief work and space holding. And while I'm sure some listeners of this show are involved directly with grief work, maybe death doulas or hospice workers or people who facilitate restorative circles or other group processes, some of us aren't in these spaces. But I want to note that space holding isn't only applicable to facilitators of group work. Space holding is something that is happening every day. We're doing it all day, every day. We can space hold for ourselves to permit ourselves to feel feelings and connect with what's going on in our inner world. We can hold space for family and friends who may be grieving or going through a tough time. Or we could be holding space for groups doing facilitation work. But no matter who you are, space holding is an important capacity during these times of darkness, uncertainty, despair, and pain. And space holding can teach us how to be there, not just for ourselves, but for others. And so we're going to talk about this. We're going to explore a whole bunch of fascinating stuff that I am truly grateful to have had the opportunity to speak with Francis about because he has decades of experience in this work. So I was truly grateful to hear his perspectives and sit down with him for a conversation. It was an important one for me and I hope that you can find something valuable to take away from it. If you want to learn more about Francis, you can find him at FrancisWeller.net. I will have links to his website and his books in the show notes for this episode and also on thepassingthroughpodcast.com. So as always, be good to one another and let's wade together into these deep, deep waters of grief. So welcome to the Passing Through Podcast, Francis. It's great to have you. Thanks for inviting me, Danny. Before we get into the thick of it, I just wanted to start with a little bit of gratitude and say that it's a real honor to sit down with you today because when I read The Wild Edge of Sorrow, I was really powerfully pulled to your work and I remember thinking, yeah, this guy really gets it. Like it was really beautiful writing and so much heart and I'd say that your book and Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass, are two of maybe the most important books I've read in a long time. So I recommend them to anyone and everyone like in an annoying way. And I even printed a gigantic decal of your head then put it on the outside of my van to spread the good word around Europe. So it's honestly, it's really great to be in conversation with you here. Well, thank you. I'm very touched by that. And so for my first question, have you ever wondered what effect the presence of tissues has on a grief circle? Well, they are the receiving devices, right? They're the receptor places for all the fluids that need to move. And we treat them like holy artifacts after the ritual. They're gathered ritually and taken care of. When we are at the grief shrine, we tell people, don't bring them back to the village. Just let them fall. That the grief ritual area should look like a disaster area when we're done, you know? We've just set down generations of sorrow and leave it there. We've got a team of people who will clean this up, gather these sacred artifacts and take care of them. So they're a very important piece of the ritual and we address it very directly. So I like the question. Never been asked that one before. And you just gave some interesting insights there. I almost heard the reverse of that famous Thich Nhat Hanh quote where he talks about seeing the cloud and the piece of paper. Here you're kind of getting the tear into the tree and connecting with our larger ecological self through the grief and through the shrine. So that's really interesting. I didn't even know that you did that. Did you do grief rituals? No, that you leave the tissues at the shrine. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I mean, we've experimented with Thich Nhat for years and finding the best way to, in a sense, practice good hygiene as well. You know, soul hygiene, communal hygiene. And when you're expressing this, I mean, in many cultures, grief is considered a toxin. You want to move it out of your body. You don't want to become a warehouse for your sorrow. You don't want to have a U-Haul behind you dragging decades and generations of sorrow. So keeping it current, keeping it moving is very important. And so that's a kind of soul hygiene. And then there's the communal hygiene of how do we take care of one another and how do we take care of what we've just expressed? And so that's what we've really come to is let's honor this, let's care for it, but let's not bring it back to the village. And I guess I want to explore some of those things about community, about good hygiene, about why society and our culture, not all societies, but dominant Western culture, sees grief in this way. Why is it something that's like almost carcinogenic? You know, it's, we want to relegate it to some other place and not talk about it and press it down. And so all of these things are like fertile soil for conversational topics, but I, and I'm sure we'll get there, but I wanted to step back a little bit and start with a quote that I found important. And maybe it's something that could anchor us in this conversation, because through the conversation, I'm curious about leaning into animacy a bit because along with ecology and spirituality and ritual, these topics are ones that I'm excited to explore with you. And there's a quote from your most recent book in the absence of the ordinary that I really loved. And I want to read it here because, um, I think for listeners to help give them some context, this could be useful. So you wrote, we can't force things in the darkness, the legitimacy of our heroic efforts feels empty in the shadowed terrain of the long dark. This is a place of waiting, silence, vigil, and alert witnessing. Something is here. A vital and animating presence is here in the darkness. Patience encourages us to become receptor sites for the emerging dream of the earth. This is holy work. And I'm really interested in talking about this work, but before we do, I think it's important to, to ask, what's the something that's in the darkness? Well, it's a hard thing to name, isn't it? I mean, it's mystery. It's in, the old language would be the anima mundi, the soul of the world. There's some animating presence, energetic, that connects everything together and that infuses each thing with its own suchness, its own presence. And when we're receptive to that, when the heart and the soul are not encumbered by conditioning, we are in conversation with that otherness, right? We are in conversation with that essential quality of the earth, of life. you know, and I'm referencing the long dark there. I'm talking about where we are as a species and as a planet, that we've entered into this territory of descent, into this darkness. And the heroic pursuits, that goes back to your earlier comments about why we have a hard time with grief. this heroic ideal is really collapsing. It's crashing. Thank goodness. There's beauty in the heroic ideal in our youth, but we never get out of it. We keep, you know, marshalling onward, muscularly trying to force things and determine outcomes rather than participating in collaborations and in communion with the surrounding biosphere. I'll stop there. Go ahead. Yeah, I like that a lot. There's so many threads in there to touch on. But I guess I'll touch on the last one, the being in communion with our biosphere. And I guess this goes back to the tissues again. So I like how we're getting in kind of spiraling circular spaces. Because one form of grief that you talk about is this kind of like ecological grief. And I would venture to say that a lot of the grief that we feel is inspired by this. It has this as its source or as its origin. The literal energies of waves, some kind of energetic wave pattern coming up out of the earth because of the place that we're in right now, because of the extractive, destructive way that we've objectified and mistreated the earth. Do you feel that ecological grief kind of travels through us? It uses us as antennas or radio towers to kind of use us to feel? Absolutely. I think I wrote about that quite a bit in the third gate of grief, which is the sorrows of the world. How could we possibly be separate from what is happening to our watersheds, to our glaciers, to our creatures, our fellow kin? How could we possibly be separate from that? We're the same body, we're the same tissue, we're the same breath. Yes. So, I mean, I wrote about how when there was the Gulf oil spill, I think it's 2010, how I'd wake up in the middle of the night sobbing, and I'd be hearing in my inner ear the sound of dolphins dying and shorebirds suffocating, and I was 2,000 miles away from my physical body, but psychically, it was me. There's no separation. That is really the outcome of a maturation process. That was the design of most traditional cultures, was to ripen their people, and part of that ripening was to make them porous, permeable, to the intimacies of exchange between the human and the more-than-human world. So, it wasn't seen as an objective thing out there. It was seen as a continuation of relationship, of kinship, and I think that's part of what's kind of coming back into reality through our grief work, is most of what we grieve is not personal. It is communal. It is collective. You know, it is not mine, but I'm intimate with it. Because it's part of who I am. And I think that's the place that gives me some measure of hope right now, is that more and more people are recognizing the communal aspect of grief. And when I first started doing grief rituals back in the late 90s, maybe one or two of the people in the circle were there because of what we call earth grief. But towards the end, when we were passing this on and doing more training around this, two-thirds of the people in the room were there because of earth grief. And that gave me some small measure of hope that it might be the broken heart that saves our ass. It might be the broken heart that can once again let in the beauty of this world. Because if we're sheltered, if we're, you know, refusing to feel that grief, the heart then can't be a receptor site also for the beauty of this world. We become in a sense almost immune to the world or mute to the world. We don't speak to it anymore. We don't listen to it anymore. And that's part of our earth grief too. It's not just what's happened to the world, it's that we have forgotten the world. We've left the world in favor of economics and progress and development and growth. These have become our obsessions, not a daffodil, not the song of a lark. Those things, you know, they're cute, but they don't, you know, enamor us like they used to. That's part of our grief too, is what we have forgotten in terms of that intimacy with the world. Just letting that sit for a moment because I like to give space to those kind of observations because I think space is needed to digest that and move through it. Fortunately, we're on a podcast, so I have to compress some of that down. But there's something I wanted to touch on because you mentioned the maturation process and that over time you've seen people move closer to this idea of communal grief. and would I be correct in saying that part of what causes this forgetting, this fracture, this separation is the fact that we have lost a sense of cultural initiation that would facilitate this maturation process and connect us to the natural world? 100%. I mean, there's a couple factors we could say before that is that in a society, again, particularly white Western society, where our threads of belonging are so threadbare that we become very insecure in our own sense of belonging. So our attention, when that's iffy, our attention turns inward. and we begin to become self-absorbed, self-obsessed. And psychology has colluded with that terribly, in the sense that we're focused so much on individual growth and development. Those are not bad things, by the way. but by this inward gaze, we have left the world. So as the soul is without world, the world is without soul, we kind of forget that that's a case, a truth, that there's a soulfulness both inside and outside. But when I'm focused on the self, which is very different than the soul, we become distant, abstracted from the world. And so initiation, the purpose of initiation was never about personal growth. It had nothing to do with the individual. It was a preparation. It was invitation towards a certain degree of participation in that maintenance of the commons. So you are being prepared not for your own self, but for the work of maintaining living culture, maintaining relationship to the ancestors, to everything that's around you. And in that case, we are so far behind many, many traditional cultures. I look at cultures that have survived a minimum of 10,000 years and ask myself, how did they do that? How did they do that? What values, what practices, what did they do that allowed them to get past, I mean, we've been on this continent, white folks, for 500 years, and we're almost exhausted on what we can do here. So those cultures that have lived 20, 30, 75, 100,000 years, what were their basic values and how did they do that? So reciprocity, mutuality, restraint, which is a word you don't even use in white Western culture. Restraint, oh my God, no, this is the have it all society. Whatever you want, you can get it. There's no hesitation. So those values of gratitude and patience, deep listening, those are not the values that we espouse. We like growth and power and progress and privilege and rank and material goods. We don't see those as symptoms, we see those as values. But to me, they're symptoms. they're symptoms of this great amnesia, that what we have forgotten, you know, the primary satisfaction, the things that shaped us over three or four hundred thousand years as a species, we are here because of success. They figured out what we need in order to not just survive, but to actually ripen. And over the last 500 to 2,000 years, that knowing, particularly in northern European cultures, has basically been forgotten. And we've become economic units, we've become psychological units rather than mythological beings participating in a mythological display. So yes, the answer to your question is yes. Initiation plays a big, big role in whether or not we can show up for these times. And I do feel that we are in, I wrote a preference for a book called Choosing Earth a few years ago, and it was a difficult preface to write because what Dwayne Elgin does in this book is he lays out the next seven decades with a kind of a prescriptive expectation for each decade, and it was bleak. It was heavy as hell. And he wanted me to write a preface for this book, you know, and say, what do you say? And part of what I said was that we are in a rough initiation as a species. And if we make it through this, there's a possibility of establishing possibility of living culture again. If we don't, that'll be an enormous sorrow for the Earth. Yeah. just giving that some more silence. I'll stop saying that too, because I'm sure you know that's what I'm doing. I wonder if that could be a segue for ritual and grief, because I think that is a sort of initiation when you go through those processes. I've heard Michael Mead describe it as you die before you die. You have these little deaths. You go through these challenging processes. A grief ritual is not an easy undertaking at all. Maybe it could be useful to talk about what a grief ritual actually looks like, because for many people, they've never even participated in something like this, and it might sound obscure, it might sound strange or scary. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what a grief ritual actually is and what makes it different from a group therapy session or a support group, because to me they're very different things. They are quite different. And to try to describe grief ritual, there's a wide range, right? There's very simple grief rituals of a circle of three or four people just saying, tonight what we're going to do is speak about loss, and we're not going to try to fix each other, we're not going to try to make it better, we're going to witness. Grief wants witnessing. It's not trying to take us hostage, it's a presence awaiting ! awaiting witnessing. So that could be very simple, light a candle, say a prayer, or a poem, and listen. That could be a very simple ritual. The ones we have done over the last, oh God, almost 30 years now, is a little bit more complex. It's designed to use the potency of ritual to loosen up what we typically carry so tightly. We do three-day grief rituals, and it usually takes the full three days to get to the place, particularly for white folk, to risk expressing and exposing all that they're carrying. I mean, when you live in a heroic culture like we do, the primary message is self-control. Be in control. because, again, if your belonging is tentative and uncertain, you don't want to do anything that might jeopardize the belonging. So you always have to look like you got it together. You know? But we don't. You know? Internally, we're screaming, we're weeping, we're lost, we're scared. And we have no place to take that. So when I was first exposed to ritual, I go, my God, this is an element that we have completely abandoned. We have a lot of what I call ceremonial events, marriages and graduations, and they're wonderful. I mean, I was raised Catholic and going to church was fine, it was lovely, but it didn't come out changed. I came out the same. I was socially more connected to the people around me after the mass is over. But what ritual does, I call that the horizontal axis, what ritual does is it touches the vertical axis. And that's where there's a lot of fear because we know intuitively, instinctively, that ritual can shake us loose. Ritual can break us open. So we avoid it. you know, and getting people into a space over three days is very gradual. We call it composting. We're just kind of loosening the soil, turning it over, seeing what's underneath through writing practices and through singing and dancing and softening the body, softening the voice. And by the time we get to the ritual, we're ready. And the ritual is beautiful. I mean, there's something about a grief ritual that is probably one of the most exquisite things I've ever seen because there's so much authenticity in the room. No one's pretending down there at the shrine. You know, you can't pretend grief, you know. So the ritual is basically, there's a village area with usually, you know, the whole village is up there to start, 30, 40 people. There are drummers, there's a song that we're singing, there's a central shrine that they're standing behind, then there's the main grief shrine that has been what we call potentiated by bringing all of the objects down there, the photographs, the flowers, the candles, the greens. It's lush and beautiful. It's there to receive what it is we're there to offer. See, in many cultures, our grief is food for the ancestors. It feeds the other world. That's why when we refuse to cry, when we refuse to grieve, we're in a sense withholding nourishment to the ancestors. So this is very important what we're trying to remember here. So when you're ready to go down to the shrine, you leave and immediately someone follows you down there. So you're never alone at the shrine, which already is a radical alteration in our typical way of being with grief. We typically cry alone. But that person, what we call the container, is not there to interact with you. there to do therapy. They're there just to support you. And if you want their hands on your back, you can ask for that. You can ask for what you need down there. But the conversation is not between humans at the shrine. The conversation is between this world and the other world. And the pitch, our grief is being pitched across this threshold into the invisible world where they will digest it and metabolize and have a party. They're going to have a good feast after this ritual is over. They will eat well tonight. And we will come away feeling joyful. We will feel joyful. So I can tell you that when you're down at the shrine and there's 10, 15 other people side by side grieving with you, that is so healing all by itself. All by itself. And there's some part of our psyche that says, this is what I've been waiting for. This is the frequency. This is the cadence. This is the rhythm that my soul has been waiting for. I can't do this alone. I can't even do this fully in a therapy office. I mean, I've done that for 43 years I was a therapist. And people would come in and say, you know, this is really scary. well, this is a good place to learn how to tolerate contact with your sorrow and to have another human being witnessing you there. But ultimately you'll need a much larger healing containment field because that's what your psyche is waiting for. That's what it expected when it got here. You have something to say there. I've been holding in the whole time because this is so, everything in me is getting activated and alive right now. But the question that I have for you is why? Why does grief and sorrow need to be witnessed by the eyes of a community? What is that? Because I felt that myself. I know exactly what you're talking about. But if I had to describe it to somebody, I couldn't. Well, I would say that the reason why it needs that is because grief from our whole story has always been communal. It's never been private. Never. In our long story until very, very recent. Like a fingertip time, that's how long we've been privatizing our grief. And we can feel it, right? That this doesn't feel right to cloister this, to separate it from the world. But we live in a, you know, have a nice day culture. We live in a smiley face culture. We have it. So there's no permission. And that's what I think these rituals do, is they offer a quality of permission. And I can tell you, Danny, that many times after the ritual is over, somebody will say something like, you never done anything like this before in my life. But it felt oddly familiar. So Carl Jung talked about that there's what he called an unforgotten wisdom at the core of the psyche. And I think that's what we touch into when we get into those ritual spaces. Some unforgotten memory goes, wait a minute, that's in my body. That's in my ancestral psyche. That's in my archaic psyche. I know this place. I know this feeling. So even if we've never done it before rationally, physically, some part of us knows, yeah, this is the cadence. This is what I've been waiting for. So the psyche needs witnessing. It's not... The other thing I would say to your question is that it's through grief that we enter the commons of the soul. I mean, every human being that you meet on the street is carrying a casket full of grief. Every one of us. I mean, how could you possibly not feel sorrow? These days. For what is happening in Gaza or Ukraine or Congo or any place on the planet right now, in our own neighborhoods. We are living in... The ambient field is saturated with sorrow right now and fear. And so to not speak it, to not have that witness, we're basically becoming a self-contained unit for that feeling state. And we can't tolerate that. There's no way on earth any one of us can stay open to the sorrows of the world if we don't have places to take that. And without that, we will shut down the heart. And that's what's happening, is that if the heart closes, there's a... You probably know of Wendell Berry, that wonderful farmer, poet. He said, it all turns on affection. It all turns on affection. But if my heart is closed out of self-preservation, because I can't bear to feel this alone, then my affection doesn't fall into the world. It might not even fall into my children or my friends. It'll, again, cloistered internally. So, to keep it moving, to keep it flowing, is very, very important. There's a good line, it's more of a passage, from a great essay by Oscar Wilde. It's called De Profundis. And in this essay, he's imprisoned for gross indecency. And he's writing about what it's like to live in sorrow in a jail cell, separated from his lover, and all of this stuff. And what you just said reminded me of this line, and I'm paraphrasing, but he says something like, it's a bad day in prison when you don't cry. Because it means your heart is hard. And so it's so important to keep a soft heart and let those tears out, especially in situations where there's good reason to cry. You know, let that move through you, give it, feed it to the ancestors. Why they want to eat tears, I don't know. Maybe you have some insights. I do not. I do not. Beyond my pay grade, I'm just relating the message. Yeah. But yeah, thanks for sharing all that. That was really resonant with me. And it links to another question that I wanted to ask, which is kind of what you alluded to when you were talking about this field and how the field is saturated with dread and anxiety and pain. I'm always curious when I'm in these circles because I help facilitate community building workshops, which aren't explicitly grief rituals, but to me often tons of grief pour out in these circles. So when I'm in them as a participant or as a facilitator, I'm always wondering what's happening on an energetic level, like maybe even from an animist perspective, because these wounds are spoken aloud in front of others. And then like you said, sometimes people are in a circle and they're saying something for the first time, pain that they may have been holding onto for decades. And you can sense when someone says something, the texture in the room changes, like not necessarily in the person, sometimes in the person too, but in the literal physical space, there's something that changes in the field. And have you had that experience? probably every grief ritual. You know, you're waiting, there's a certain thing when you're facilitating, you're waiting for that one person, you don't know who it is, that will say that thing that opens the trap door, that allows us all to go down. Yes. you know, so there's something, again, we're so hesitant and cautious with revelation. we don't want, we want to, we're desperate to be seen, and we're afraid to be seen. So, both are true. And depending on who's showing up for that moment, whether it's the wounded part of us, the child part of us, that says, ah, too dangerous, or the yearning adult who says, I have to join the world. So, depending upon who's there, but you're hoping and you're waiting for that one comment, that the door opens and we are all now going down. That's a moment of grace, absolute grace. And you know that, right? You know that feeling in the community building gatherings that something just opened here, and we're all now invited in to the depths. Yeah. Yeah, beautiful, again, beautiful articulation, and for sure, grace is the word. That's what it is. Another question I have about that is, when it happens, there's an ability to touch that grace, and it feels like accessing something that is the kind of things I've accessed, maybe on a psychedelic experience, or in a dream state, or a fever, you know, or an ecstatic dance session. It's something that is otherworldly, it seems. And have you ever thought about what it is that we're touching there? Like, what's actually happening in that moment? I think we're stepping outside of the confines of our conditioned mind. You know, we're entering into non-consensual realities, you know, where it's not the ordinary. That's part of what the power of ritual is, is that the invitation is to step outside of conventions. You know, like we don't cry typically at the grocery store. you know, you can, but it's not typical. So there's something about ritual space that activates unspoken dimensions of our being. so we can cry together, we can be side by side, we can hold each other, we can thank each other for grieving, we can do things in ritual space that we cannot do at the hardware store. We just don't do that. So that's the power of ritual. is that it's the signal frequency, as I mentioned before, activates something in our psyche that says I can set this down now. I can actually become transparent to you. You can actually see who I am and what I carry. And in that there is release, there's freedom. And again, one of the things I love about grief work is that we finally get to get current. Because much of our life we're kind of backing toward the grave. we're chewing on old bones and also generational bones that haven't been metabolized, haven't been honored, haven't been grieved thoroughly. So we're kind of backing our way into the grave. So when we get to really practice grief regularly, you know, it's not a weekend event and then, you know, done. It's a return. That's what you find in traditional culture is the repetition of ritual. it isn't a one-time thing. It's happening all the time. That's why, in a sense, they are current. In both senses of that word, like I'm here now, but I'm also in the electricity of life. I'm in the current of life and I'm in the flow of life. That's beautiful. and I see that happening. The people who come back to grief gatherings over and over again, they're not dragging around a long sack of untouched sorrow. They're here, and they're much more joyful and alive, and the heart is soft. The soft heart is so gorgeous, you know, to love this world. And that's an interesting thing, because I've experienced that too personally, and I've seen it in groups that I've facilitated, so I exactly understand what you're talking about. and it's this weird paradoxical thing that you kind of traverse the depths of your own and the collective darkness in order to kind of open something in the heart, put something down, let in more light, make you lighter and more buoyant, and it kind of conjoins you with whatever that animating presence that we were talking about earlier is that's in the dark, right? that maybe is connected to that source of aliveness and enthusiasm and that animating quality. Yeah, as long as we don't split those two things, light, good, dark, bad, you know, light, up, good, down, bad. No, we absolutely cannot, and we must repair that split collectively for so many reasons, which we can all imagine what happens when you make dark bad. Well, what if you're not light-skinned? What if you're, I mean, there's so many outcomes of that split. So when we talk about darkness and soul, that is holy ground. That is as holy as the light. So I'm not doing this so I can get enlightened. I'm doing it so I can learn how to see in the dark. You know, as Susan Murphy, the Australian Zen teacher said, we do this to develop a dark adapted eye, you know, so we can see differently because we are in a time of the long dark and we need people who can see what's happening there. You know, they can help articulate that emergent dream of the earth. You know, there's a term, I don't I think I mentioned it in the book, the last one, Karsaluni. Karsaluni is a term that comes out of the Inuit people north of the Arctic Circle. And the word literally translates, sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth. Isn't that gorgeous? These were the whaling people And they couldn't go out to hunt a whale until the whale people gave them a song. There's all the values right there. Reverence, restraint, reciprocity, mutuality, patience, deep listening. All of those values are right there in that dark room, in the dark long house, while they're waiting expectantly for one of the whale people to say, here's the song for you, and you may take one of our people, because we know that you depend on us to survive, and we appreciate you holding ritual ground. You don't just come out and take it because you can get it. You know, that extractive thing you mentioned earlier, Danny, this is not extractive, this is reciprocal, this is relational process. But this is where we are right now. I think this idea of a cartelunny is so beautiful that we have to learn how to sit quietly in the dark. And wait. We're not going to get out of the long dark by pushing new policy agendas. Those come out of the same place that caused the problem. We need a whole different approach to how we reconnect and recalibrate to the living earth. And that's going to take us becoming a much more humble people. The arrogance that comes with the heroic is not very kind to the living fabric of the world. It's quite brutal. Yeah. Yeah, that reminds me, it just inspired a thought. Earlier, were talking about ritual and these axes, the vertical axis up to the sacred and the divine and the cosmos, the horizontal axis across to other humans, this reminds me of the importance of this diagonal axis out to the wider non-human community and all these other people that are persons that aren't human and how that kind of hubris and heroism and that kind of just gallant cavalier attitude doesn't put any value in anything except the self. Right. Right. Yeah. And that, you know, there was a wonderful line that I shared in the Wild Edge of Sorrow quote by Paul Shepard. And Paul Shepard was a, he called himself a human biologist. and what he was tracking was the long story, the deep Paleolithic roots of our humanity and where we are, what happened with agriculture and now what happened with technology. But he was asked a question once by Jonathan White. I don't remember the question, but his response was the grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness was meant to be encountered. You could weep for that sentence for a thousand years. The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality, there's the psychological framework, it's all about me. But what if it's not about me? What if it's about the absence of Raven? What if it's the silencing of Fox? What if it's the disappearance of Salmon? What if that's what I'm craving? What if that's what I'm feeling empty about? Where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. And if I extrapolate on Shepard's thought there, I think we're also supposed to see that in each other's eyes. You know, that beautiful and strange otherness. We've been so domesticated, so stripped of our own feral and wild exuberance. Again, that's why I love grief, because it is feral. You cannot control grief. It is wild. It's an energy that just moves us and shakes us and drops us to our knees, and we're in that space. So when we see each other at grief rituals, there's that recognition, this is the beautiful and strange otherness I see in you, and it's beautiful and strange, and we need it. you know? Yes, a million times. I appreciate the pauses, Danny. I appreciate the pauses. I'm at a crossroads here where I'm still curious to investigate a little bit more about group work and ritual, but we're flirting with the edge of facilitation here, which is something that I'm also curious to pick your brain about. And the thing that inspired that was the word control that you just used, can't control grief. And there's this interesting thing that I've experienced, and I've only been doing this a few years, so I'm a complete novice facilitator, but this paradox, this tension between not controlling the group, not trying to control what is an emergent, uncontrollable process, but also being present, trying to guide, trying to hold space, trying to defend and respect the container. This type of thing is very curious and interesting to me, because it's a delicate line. You have to surrender and know that you don't control anything, but at the same time, you have influence. And I wonder, you've been doing that for decades. I wonder what your reflections on that stuff are. It feels like one of the most important things to do in that chair is to make sure that everyone else in the chair is in their adult presence. And what I mean by that is that grief by and large was basically unheld for most of us in our youth, in our childhoods. And what doesn't get held or caught by those that we look to hold them requires us in a sense to feel like that space is dangerous to go into and that we don't. So whenever it comes up, we're in a sense put in a regressive state. We go back to that childhood moment of feeling alone, unsupported, afraid. become, and I'll just decide there, it's almost rare to see a pure grief moment. We often see a grief panic moment. That when grief comes up, there's that simultaneous anxiety about, is this okay? Is this safe? Am I going to get shamed? Am I going to be rejected, kicked out? All that panic comes up alongside of the grief. And when that happens, there is a movement into a child state. So one of my main jobs in that chair is to watch the room to see when does someone leave. You know, I remember doing a workshop up in Canada, and a woman just said, I have to get out of it's not safe. You know, what's happening? it's just not safe, this is dangerous. I said, well, can you just for a moment acknowledge that part of you that feels afraid? And she paused, and she did that. And that moment was a moment of separation. She was able to separate from the child state, return to her adult state, and then look at this part that was so afraid, because she was never held in that state. So it was terrifying. But Jung said something that has been kind of a lifelong anchor, for me. we can't heal what we can't separate from. So if that child state had persisted and taken over, she would have left the room. But what we did in that moment, that little intervention, was get her to separate out so there was enough adult presence to say, oh, I see, I can be with this. You know, I can hold that part. And she came back, her face changed back into an adult, because you can just almost see the panic. I'm sure you've seen that in group situations. Suddenly, there's this look of absolute terror on someone's face, like, I'm about to get killed. So one of the main jobs, again, is to try to help them come back to adult presence. Because as an adult, we can process most anything. But in those child states, we can almost process nothing. We can just try to survive. Yeah. So that's just one thread about the facilitation, you know. There's a lot into that question. Yeah, of course. That could be an entire podcast discussion. That could be a whole podcast, yeah. I did a five-month training based on that one question, basically. How do you do this? Okay. I would love to find that training somewhere, because that could be a great resource for me, but maybe we could talk about that after. And that also touches on another thing that I wanted to touch on, which is when you're creating a safe space for all emotions, all feelings, when everything is okay and welcome, you don't only get grief. Sometimes you get terror, sometimes you get crippling, debilitating fear, sometimes you get rage. I'm wondering in your work, if you have any stories or examples or experiences where something happened, something arrived in the space, and you didn't know how to deal with it, you were unsure, maybe it was frightening or challenging, is there anything that springs to mind as a teaching example? I feel it's very important when we're working with groups to make room for all of that. You know, that everything's welcome here. But, at the same time, particularly around rage, so many people have been terrified by rage. And that's when they'll also flip back into a very young state, right? It's like, this is scary. This is threatening. So we try to contextualize it a lot, keep bringing them back into the adult state, but also saying, for many of you, where rage was seen and experienced as dangerous, we want the adult to begin to see that someone expressing that outrage right now is actually healing. That that's a gesture of their own protest. See, grief isn't just about tears, is it? It's also about outrage. It's about protesting, what's harming the things that we love. You know, and we need to protest. We need, we actually have a whole section in our grief ritual around creating, writing protests. you know, enough. You know, how dare you? I say it matters. This is not all right with me. And getting people to begin to touch that protest is very helpful and very necessary. So we try to make room for the entire range of emotional experiences to come along with grief. And fear is often very much tangled up with grief. And so is, you know, shame. talk about the obstacle, when we talk about the obstacles to grieving, self-consciousness is huge. am I doing this right? Well, that person's crying much better than I am. You know, you know, so all of these comparisons that come out about performance come up. And then, of course, just the anxiety and terror around the feeling state. And part of what that arises from is that when we come close to those feelings of grief, it often feels like it has no bottom. That if I go into that, I'm going to be in free fall forever. So again, that's part of the learning process is how does the adult put a bottom underneath their grief? And how do you build faith in grief again? You know, a lot of our terror is that we don't have faith. We feel like this is a hostage situation, like I said before. This is going to take me over. I've heard in my office many, many times, if I go there, I'm never coming back. And I end up saying to if you don't go there, you're never coming back. Because so much of our vitality is locked up in shunting this to the farthest edges of our awareness, so we don't have to deal with it. that requires a great deal of psychic energy to numb ourselves down. So there's always a cost to that. So welcoming fear, welcoming shame, welcoming all these outcasts, which ties us back into the second gate of grief, right? The parts of us that have not known love, the unacceptable parts of me that we have to get rid of, neediness, sadness, anger, sensuality, exuberance. I mean, so many things don't fit into the collective norms of white western society. And consequently, we're diminished beings, domesticated. It's a hard thing to work through those feelings in a circle, in the presence of whether they're strangers or people you know, because we're not equipped, our educational system doesn't equip us with how to sit with difficult emotions, how to hold space. It teaches us the opposite. And even myself, sometimes I'm in a circle as a participant, and I know the process, and I know intellectually what might be happening. I could say, okay, I have some obstacle, I'm feeling something, but I can't quite touch it. And there's that same fear that you're talking about. If I touch this, I don't know how deep it's going to go. When I let this door open, this could be an avalanche that just drowns the whole space. And do I want to do that? Do I want to put my bullshit out on everybody right now? And it's so counterintuitive because usually in doing that, that is how you connect most deeply to others because they really see you and they see what you're holding. So this stuff is so interesting because it's not an intellectual exercise. It's so felt and somatic. And I hate that we aren't taught how to do this. Me too. Yeah, it's a profound loss, isn't it? You know, and it goes back to what we were saying earlier about the uncertainty of our belonging. We become performers of our lives rather than livers of our life. we're performing throughout the day to try to make sure we don't get caught, that we don't get seen as inadequate or inappropriate, or we're monitoring, monitoring, monitoring all the time, and certain that those feeling states, if I let them out, will be the ruin of me. You know, and people will all move away from me, and it will confirm our solitude, our isolation, not solitude, but our isolation. see, I was right. You know, should never have done that, should never have expressed it. But I've never seen that happen. I've never seen grief just swallow a person. I could see, there's been times at the grief shrine when someone gets lost down there, when the grief is really strong, and, see, even in the midst of your most intense grief, you're still aware that you're grieving, right? There's still a part of you witnessing, damn, this is intense, wow, holy shit, hang on, and once in a while, like maybe half a dozen times, and I've led over a hundred grief rituals, maybe half a dozen times, I'll notice someone not moving down there, and you can feel that they've got lost in their grief. And when there's no longer a witness to it, I call it grief, grieving, grief. unproductive. It's not moving. It's not being processed. It's just avalanching. So we send one of our team down there to slowly bring them back, to check in, are you with us, are you, what's happening, and sometimes we'll put water to cool on the back of their hands to cool them down or on their forehead or back of their neck, just to cool it down. And ritual is designed to create heat and intensity, right? You're trying to activate something, right? And sometimes you have to do the opposite. You have to cool and soothe, get them to sit up to make eye contact and then come back to the circle. And they can still keep grieving but stay in the village, you know, and just modulate. So part of again, the work of the facilitator is modulation. How do you modulate heat? How do you modulate cooling? How do you modulate, you know, presence? So you don't get lost down there. I forgot your question. But I think we're in a liminal space, so I like the direction that you went there, so I'm happy for what you said there because that's insightful for me. And I like the elemental component of heat and cold and using water and temperature to invite them into the space and have them be a part of that. I guess naturally, I guess it happens, Because water, tears are just streaming down people's faces, so you already have this kind of offering of water and salt and stuff from inside of ourselves, but also using water. Do you use other elements? Do you prefer to do this work in spaces where let's say wind can move through and fire can be lit, or does that depend on the event? It depends. most of the times we're working indoors just for containment's sake, but it's a water ritual. Grief rituals are water rituals. We have water in the central shrine. We have bowls of water down there at the grief shrine so people can put their hands in there and wash their face or whatever they want to do. It's evocative. I remember there's one woman in our community, she oftentimes couldn't find her tears, couldn't find her tears, and we just said, go down to the shrine, put your hand in the water. She did that and her tears just started to flow. There's a correspondence, there's a relationship between those elements. We have done water and fire grief rituals. I remember after 9-11, after the trade towers collapsed, we had a grief ritual scheduled a few weeks after that and there was so much outrage in the room. We happened to be working in this beautiful lodge and had this gigantic fireplace, one of those you can basically walk into. So we built a big fire in there and we had our water shrine and we started the ritual and it was like watching O'Hare Airport. somebody would go down to the water shrine and cry and touch into this rage and run down to the fire shrine and throw some kindling into the fire and people down there at the fire shrine expressing their rage and then suddenly the wave of grief and they would run down to the water shrine. It was dynamic. It was powerful. But we've done fire rituals and different elemental rituals during our work with different communities. But this is typically a water ritual. Yeah. Yeah, that's also a brilliant insight for me. I had never made the connection, but yeah, of course, of course it is. You know, water is pouring out of your eyes, snot, drooling on your soul. ugly crying in front of a group of people. It's also interesting because something happens that the body knows that the intellect doesn't in those moments. Like you the body is doing something that how does it know how to do that? It's some ancient knowledge. Maybe this goes back to what you were saying about what Jung had said about, forget the term that you used to describe it, but this Unforgotten wisdom. Yes. Yeah. So is it that? I imagine that just instinctively this is the body's approach to sorrow. It doesn't want to hold it back. We hold it back through intellect, through self-consciousness, through uncertainties. When you're in the space where it's permitted and you're open to it, yeah, we call ritual embodied process. You don't think your way through ritual. Yes. You can't. If you're thinking your way through ritual, you're not in ritual. You're in some abstraction, some conceptualization. I love the mind. I love thoughts and thinking and ideas, but when you get into ritual, give it something to do. That's why we sing a song. We give the mind something to do, but it is certainly not the main actor in this process. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because the body goes into crisis when, like I've been in situations before where in community building we use this term like moved to speak. You literally feel something moving through you. There have been times where I've been holding it. I was in a facilitation role, so it didn't feel appropriate to share my thing with the group because I'm space holding and it got so powerful, like the movement was so profound that I felt physically ill. Like I started to feel like deep fear that if I don't speak right now, if I don't let this grief out, like I might die, right? It literally felt like I might die right now if I don't speak. My heart was pounding. It was like my heart was just going to rupture out of my body. So I know what you mean where like you have to let it move and you can't think your way through it and if you hold it back, this has really harmful consequences, I think, on your organism. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that kind of self-contained, self-restrained ideology deprives us of the things that we need in those moments. We need the witnessing, we need the touch, we need the holding, but that self-control thing deprives us over and over again of what it is that we need in order to let it move. So one of the axioms I work with comes out of alchemy, which is that what's ever in the vessel, you have to keep it warm. So if we don't approach our grief with warmth, but more with suspicion, with judgment, with contempt, and we push it away, that's cold. And then what happens in the heart is that our grief congeals and hardens and doesn't move. So ritual spaces, writing, dancing, singing, poetry, art, these are all ways that we can keep it warm. And if we keep the grief warm, movement is possible. Again, we don't want this to become sediment. I often say that people came into my office complaining of depression and really what it was was oppression. The undigested grief had settled on them like sediment. And it was weighing them down. I mean, I could put myself in that same sentence, weighed me down, because I couldn't express it. I had to be in charge, be in control. So getting that permission to express it again and keep it warm, that becomes a primary responsibility of every individual. How do I keep my grief warm? How do I talk about it, share it, write about it? All the things to keep feeding the fire. That's actually a really good point, because I could imagine there may be some listeners who hear this and maybe they are gripped by grief right now, some difficult circumstance is happening in their life, and they hear this and they go, okay, how can I keep that grief warm? Would you recommend it is by writing, it is by speaking about it, it is by singing it out? What are some practical things people can do to try to get in contact with it? All of the above. I mean, whatever you're drawn to, if you're a dancer, if you like movement, dance your grief, put on some really melancholy, beautiful, deep, soulful music, and just dance. Let your grief pull you to the ground, let it roll you around, let it get on your knees. If you're an artist, a painter, what colors would you grab to express this sorrow right now? If you're a writer, there's so many prompts that we use to express, you know, I did not get to, I miss, I long, now that you're gone, goodbye. I mean, there's so many things that you can use to prompt all of the underground material. Friendship, just talking about your grief with a friend. I mean, all of it, the little caveat on that one, choose a wise friend. You know, there's a part of us that's so skillful at choosing the wrong people at the wrong time to share the wrong things, you know. And we get convinced again, see, it's not safe to talk about this. I have to keep it private. So find the right people that will say, I hear you, I hear you, and that's all welcome here, and that's hard. You know, just someone who can just acknowledge the fact that what you're carrying in your heart is heavy, and sometimes all too much. And we need companionship, we need friendship. So very simple things to keep it warm, just noticing, paying attention. You know, when the moods come, the sad blue moods come, be a good host. Sit with it. Ask it what it wants. What do you need from me? Rather than, how do I get out of here? You know, our first move is frequently, where's the exit? I don't like this room. But again, that's building that faith again, right? Can I have faith that this is not a pathology. This is actually my heart's registering, my soul's acknowledgement of loss, of suffering, you know, of disappearance. You know? Yeah. Thank you for those. And I have a couple more questions on the general ritual and facilitation stuff, and then we could transition out of that. One thing that's always been interesting to me, because I find myself drawn to these more spiritual, sort of animist ideas that, like, you know, where does the grief go when you release it? Before you said, you know, you pitch it over and it goes somewhere. Like, I have this sense that it is moving somewhere. But that's not my question for you, because I know it's unanswerable. Where does the grief go? I don't know. But more practical. A more practical question is, like, how do you, maybe you, maybe you've identified some things that you do, how do you cleanse energetically after a ritual? Because, you know, you're holding things, you're absorbing things, you're in the presence of things, and I feel sometimes it is necessary to find a way to cleanse those. And I don't know if I hear people talk about this often enough. It's a good question. Yes. A couple of thoughts crashed into each other there. The role of the facilitator is a role. It's not who I am. It's not my identity. It's a, Jung talked about the value and necessity of personas. Personas are masks that we put on, but that doesn't mean artificial. It doesn't mean not genuine. It doesn't mean not authentic. It means, in this moment, the role I'm putting on, I mean, if you look at a lot of traditional cultures, they use masks a lot in ritual spaces. Because I'm not being me in this moment, I'm being this. I'm carrying the energy of this. And so, as well as a facilitator, to put on the mask of the facilitator means I'm in this role for you now. And this is all I'm doing right now, is bringing this medicine to you that comes through this identity of facilitator. Leaving that space, take off the mask. You know, it's very important to take off the mask and become an ordinary human being again, who has your own grief and your own foolishness and your own mistakes and your own shame and, you know, all the crap we carry around. But then, back to the water. The first thing we do when we get home is shower. Minimally wash hands and face. It isn't to say that what we experienced is negative, but that it's not mine. And I don't want to carry this around. I want to thank the water spirit for cleansing, for washing, for caring for these people over these last three days, but this is over. And I'm not carrying this around, you know. When I first was a therapist back in the late 70s, early 80s, I was working at a community mental health agency for with schizophrenics and I'd go home and go to bed at five o'clock. I was trying, I was carrying their craziness. I was carrying their, you know, mind states. And one of my teachers says, you do that, you're going to die. And you're going to become completely useless. So she said, imagine yourself like a net. You know, the water comes through, things touch the fabric of the net, but they don't get caught there. So compassion, my compassion is right there. Oh, God, that story you just shared, whoa. But I can't pick that up. I can't pick that up. If I do, I'll be useless to you. But I'm here right now, holding you in this moment, fully, wholeheartedly. But yeah, letting it go, letting it go. I've done rituals with stones where sometimes when the weight has been so big, I'll take a large stone and just get a marker and just start writing all of the stories, all of the things that are weighing me down, and I'll take it out into nature and dig a hole and ask the earth to take this now. Take this for me. I can't do this. It's too much. You can make beauty out of this. You can grow green stuff out of this. You can compost this into microbes and mycelia and magic and I can't. That's not in my capacity, so please lift this from me. So small rituals of maintenance again. Soul hygiene. Take care of yourself. Don't carry this shit around. It's not yours. You know, you got your enough by yourself. Thank you. Those are all useful, particularly the mask and realizing that this is a role and underneath that mask you are a human being with all your own shit. Yeah. That also, it wasn't a question that I had for you, but an inspired one. I'm sure you're familiar with this phenomenon where in community building we call it killing the facilitator, where someone just doesn't want to sit with that grief or there's so much rage and instead of directing it in a productive place, you become the recipient of that. And sometimes it's interesting because it can be hard as a facilitator to have that mask in place when you're being attacked as a human. And so, you know, do you have any guidance for a situation like that of how to separate that and keep your sense of distance between, you know, seeing someone who is in a compromised situation, they don't mean to cause you harm, so you know this. Yeah, I mean, it's hard not to take it personally, but that's kind of what the invitation is, just to not take it personally, right? It's, you become the stand-in for what it is that they're carrying, whatever rage or hurt or shame or, you know, trauma that they're carrying. And if they're steady enough, if I can work with them, I'll work with them, you know, to get them back into the adult presence and, you know, what's stirring right now for you? The other thing is that when I get home or when I am finished and taking this mask off, you know, I can share how it, what did it touch in me? my own insecurities with the people that I trust. I've done this ritual with a lot of my mentees where I ask them to literally make a mask, to craft a mask, you know, on the outside of the mask is what medicine are you bringing to the world? On the inside of the mask, they write what they want, what I call the trustees of their ordinary self to help them carry. My insecurities, my fears, my loneliness, my, you know, shame, my history, whatever it is, that doesn't belong out in the world. that belongs to the trustees of your ordinary self, the closest people around you. And when they're there to help you hold those things, it makes it, those encounters that sometimes happen in group dynamics, a lot less painful and a lot less penetrating. You know, they can stay on the outside of the mask a little bit better. If you have a place to take the inside, what James Hillman called your secret inside flesh, to take that to places of great refuge, you know. Yeah. Beautiful wisdom. Thank you for that. You're welcome. And then, this will be my final question here because it's a personal question. Not my final question of the interview, but of this segment. And it's, what does this work ask of you personally? not what you offer others, but what the work asks or demands or the moves inside Francis Weller. Well, as I've said, the most important is to stay current. And that's hard these days. There are many days I wake up in despair. What's happening in this country of the United States is just heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking. I remember going to bed, I think I tell this story in the absence of the ordinary. In 2020, on the night of the election, I thought the same results were going to happen. And I was heading to bed and something literally pivoted me and took me over to one of my bookshelves over here and reached up and selected a very particular volume by Linda Hogan, the Chickasaw poet and writer, opened the book to the chapter All My Relations. And I realized in that moment I had forgotten all my relations. My despair was a consequence of my isolation. So I began to send out filaments to the moon and to the star clusters and to the redwoods and the oak and the fir trees and the ferns and the otters and salmon and all the little crawly people. And my despair lifted greatly in that moment. So part of what I have to do is sustain my intimacies with the surrounding field. I'm not doing this work alone. I never am. I'm always surrounded by ancestors. I'm surrounded by allies, compatriots of the wider green world, the wider wild world. And if I can remember them and stay connected to all my relations, that's where my authority arises. See, power for a facilitator is not personal. It's not mine. I want to be authorized by both the community that I'm sitting with, but also by the surrounding community that I'm part of. When that authorization comes in, then my authority, in a sense, can't be challenged because you're not challenging me. That's part of that role, again, as a facilitator, as a leader. I'm being authorized by all of this to sit here in this chair with you. It's not an ego thing at all. It's a soul thing, you know? This is what I'm supposed to be doing. And I can only do that in good relationship to the rest of the world. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you again. I have a couple more questions that are personal because, you know, in reading your book and knowing that you do this work, there is a desire to connect personally and get some insights. And so I'm curious about these things. And one of these questions is that after all of these years of doing this work, sitting with people in their deepest sorrows, is there something that you still find really hard about it? Like what hasn't gotten easier about it? I would say now it's the magnitude of it. It's in every breath. It's persistence is increasing, not decreasing. And knowing that we're in, now we're in the long dark, as I call it, this is not a time of confidence or ease or rising or growth. It's, we're, as I say, hunkered down. And so that's not an easy place to be in. So we need things. We need friendship, we need imagination, we need creativity, we need beauty, we need to touch into that deep time ancestral ground, you know, we need patience, we need resilience. It's a hard time. I'm not kidding anybody, you know, I feel it every day. I just need to keep remembering that I can be held by something larger. And that gives me a sense of being able to keep facing what's coming, facing the world of soul, as I say. That word soul that you just used there, what is the relationship between that and grief? Grief is one of the primary expressions of soul. You know, when we talk about an intimate exchange, a soulful exchange, it's usually when we touch into what's vulnerable, right? We come into the deep parts of ourselves. So soul, that's its home in the depths, in the dark, you know. And so whenever we express something that deep, we are in the territory of soul. And grief is that is one of its primary expressions, you know. Because if we don't separate grief and love, you know, we see them as a continuum, that's as soulful as it gets. You know, we love and we lose, and that's the deep part of the pool, you know. So okay, Francis, I usually leave the last minute here for you. If there's something you have going on that you want to let people know about, or where they could find you if they want to learn more about you. Well, they're welcome to visit my site, FrancisWeller.net. But I'm really in a phase of quiet right now, and writing is what I'm primarily doing, and trying to finish an essay on white emptiness, which has been a challenging piece to write. and then a much larger book on facing the world with soul and why it matters. Those are my next projects. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Danny. Yeah, I mean, thank you for spending time with me here. If it is your quiet time, I'm privileged to have spent that with you for a big chunk of it, so I'm very grateful. I'm grateful for your work, for everything that you shared here, for venturing into this space with me, and everything about this was a gift for me, so really, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the work you do and for passing through with me today. Well, thank you, Danny. I think you did a beautiful job today of keeping the flow and also opening up new territories, some places I have never even talked about before, so I appreciate that. It was good. It was good. And thank you for all you're doing with your community-building work, permaculture work, and all the things that you're trying to seed and feed in the long dark. Yeah. Thank you. And you're getting pretty dark over there right now. I can barely see your face. Yeah. Yeah, it's a natural ending to our conversation. Yes, I think so. I think so. Thank you for passing through today. Yeah, you, dear listener, thank you for your support, for your attention, for spending some time with me and this episode's guest. If you're enjoying this content, please subscribe, rate it, like it, tell your friends about it, buy a billboard somewhere next to a highway promoting it. I mean, I'm kidding, of course, but your support really does mean a lot to me. So, thank you for listening, and I will talk to you next time. อกอกอก