Hi, how are you? It’s been awhile since my last post. I think it’s fair to say GRIEVER’s BALL is now one of those Substacks where the cadence is (for now at least) “occasional” rather than weekly. (Weekly!? Did I used to do this weekly???) You should know I’ve paused billing for now; paying subscribers (bless you) won’t be charged until I reconfigure what my offering and ask is. I’ll update you all with fair notice before I turn billing back on.
Yesterday was Imbolc1— a Pagan holiday marking the midway point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. Can you feel it? The days are slowly but surely getting longer and brighter, and nature’s getting ready to wake up, push forth, and unfold into color all over again.
Unpopular opinion, but … it might feel a little melancholy—particularly from a Griever’s point of view. Tied as it is to ideas of healing, new potential, rebirth, and the renewal of vital energy sources, this particular seasonal shift is reminding me of that pressure we feel to “get better.” To move on. To cheer up.
Inside what is usually a welcome change for me, I’ve noticed that lately I’ve wanted nothing more than to go out into the backyard and throw myself on the corpse of the salvia bush—the one that, once the sun gets to it, grows boisterously and grandiloquently. Shockingly, charmingly, life-affirmingly. Quieting all bad feelings in a gentle breeze.
It’s wild to feel myself feeling this resistance to Spring. I am a Summer Person through and through and through—and by that I mean I am never entirely at home with myself in wintertime. Except that I am. Except, it seems, when it’s on it’s way out.
Have I dropped that specific Kurt Cobain lyric here yet?
“I miss the comfort in being sad.”2
If you’re feeling in any way resonant with any of the above …
If you’re feeling like you might feel resonant with Kurt in the next few turns of the wheel…
If you ever or often feel the rush of time and space carrying you away from what you know you need to observe and honor and sit with toward something that is deemed more palatable, upbeat, and valuable …
Here are three things you might consider:
Go with yourself to the nearest natural setting and pay respect to all the inert things, all the fallow things, all that is for now or forever resting. Don’t favor thoughts of what any of it is becoming; don’t defer to what you know about the natural life cycle. Don’t emphasize the new life that death creates but rather, just accept and honor what is dormant and idle. Decide there is the beauty in the latency, in the suspension. Visit that beauty again. Talk to it. Keep it company.
Enact a whole-life embrace of the season. Wear all your sweaters, eat all the root vegetables. Make warming tea. Make a bonfire. Stay in bed. Stay quiet and slow. Often at the end of summer we make one more beach trip, have one last backyard barbecue. What would be your end of winter equivalents?
Call someone you really trust and ask if you can have some of their time and attention. Offer a gift or a niceness or some other equal exchange in return. Say you have things you want to say to someone you has space to hear them. Tell them about the grief you carry, the grief that can’t be boxed-in or contained in a polite, cleanly delineated container. Consider assuring them that they don’t need to do anything or know anything or fix what’s “wrong,” but that you just need a witness, a friend, a way to observe and be observed now, while the natural world matches your inner one. Say that you are grateful for the constancy of their companionship in a world that changes—sometimes too slow, and sometimes too fast.
Photos by Gemma Evans, Annie Spratt, and Tuna Ekici via Unsplash; photo illustrations by me.
(in the Northern Hemisphere at least)
“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” from In Utero, 1993