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I’ve been working too much and feel I have little to share that’s cohesive. I read a little bit here and a little bit there, which is part of the problem. I start to think that I might be depressed. When I call what I’m experiencing depression, I know it’s an interpretive choice. It helps me to see what I’m feeling as normal. If I place it inside of a larger grief context, I won’t panic.
In Grief Worlds, Matthew Ratcliffe makes a distinction between grief and depression which is that depression “lacks the dynamism, perspective-shifting and openness to new possibilities that characterize most grief experiences.” One of the ways this difference manifests, he says, is in how we relate to other people.
While depression tends to involve a “pervasive sense of estrangement from others,” in typical grief the capacity to feel connected to others is retained, “even when one feels isolated from the majority of people” who don’t seem to understand that the world has irrevocably changed. Through Ratcliffe I become less inclined to call whatever this is depression. I do feel isolated, but not from everyone.
There’s no shortage of people who will say grieving looks different for everyone, and yet there are so many compelling ideas about the distinction between typical and atypical grief. Ratcliffe suggests that one difference between the two is that, with the latter—often qualified with words like prolonged or complex—there’s a lack of dynamic engagement with one’s loss of possibilities.
Whereas in “typical” grief one has taken the world-building kernel and is responding to loss ongoingly1, with a more complicated grief one has a hard time letting go of those structures which no longer work after loss. One might take on new pursuits without taking time to revise post-loss structures. And in this sense, disorientation and confusion are actually hopeful. Even if exhausting. Maybe that’s what this is. Exhaustion.
One thing I did manage to read this week was the very beginning of Catherine Keller’s Political Theology of Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She is dealing with time and with a favorite verse of the Christian right from Corinthians which says that “the appointed time is short.” Arguing that the popular translation’s misleading she writes:
“The Greek word translated ‘short’ is far more complicated, more inviting, indeed more political: sunestalemnos means ‘gathered together,’ contracted”…the phrase may be more accurately translated simply as ‘the time is contracted.’”
When I’m very tired I often think about philosopher Brian Massumi’s idea of hope, which is not about projecting a fantasy onto an imaginary future but “being right where you are—more intensely.2” When I think about being where I am more intensely, I think about who I’m in touch with. I attune to contracted time through a cross-species roll call: The two sleeping dogs—one orange, one black—doing satin exhales on my legs as I write; the shedding garlic I pressed in the ground as the days became short, dark, and cold; the horse I ride, stretching out in a sustained canter for the first time since June.
One of the central themes of Grief Worlds is that there is an inherent relational dimension to grieving, which involves some discussion of resilience. Resilience is often talked about as an individual trait which one either has or does not have but that seems inherently relational, itself. Trauma theorist Judith Herman has noted, for instance, that supportive and witnessing relationships post-trauma are a key factor in resilience against the development of disordered post-traumatic stress3.
What I've less often seen discussed in the resilience discourse—and became hyper aware of during my own acute grief—is the complicating factor of trust. For Ratcliffe, “the extent to which one remains able to trust other people” is crucial to the unfolding of a typical grief process. Of course, even beyond grief lack of trust makes relationships tough.
It took me a long time to canter comfortably on Ret in the first place. We built trust slowly, and after a couple of years could move fast through tall grass and up hills. But then one day, we couldn’t. I stopped getting on altogether. When I did get on, I would typically cry. There was always some reason I could see that he’d buck. The day was too crispy, the sun was too warm. Surely he’d feel the thick rage on my flayed heart and kick out.
I consider contracted time and being in the moment more intensely and what it takes to go fast on a horse without losing your seat. Through a series of subtle gestures I am just barely learning, there’s a way to press forward without giving free rein. There is a gait that goes but stays grounded, and is grounded only through trust. It all happens by being in the moment more intensely, engaging as fully as possible with what the body can do and what truths bodies tell, when together. Not hopes or aspirations or what we want to think we have done or can do. Real things that are visible to God.
I try to constantly and as honestly as possible confront myself with the very simple question of “who cares?” when I write. What am I saying and why does it matter. In Corinthians an apostle Paul is writing to a community of early Christians. He is not saying that the world will end soon, but that “the present schema of this world is passing away.”
For Keller this is a crucial point because “what was to end is a human construction of the world, not “the world” itself.” And this is why the idea of contracted time is significant. It is an invitation to be in the moment more intensely, to grapple with what has been lost, to revise the schemas and structures, to press into difference in a way that far exceeds the creative limitations of domination.
It is a time that gathers, which resonates with performance artist and writer Fargo Tbakhi’s call for writing that can “gather others up with us…generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement…to act, to participate in a creative struggle, to envision and embody alternatives.” And his idea of liberation as “a soil and not an hour…the location by which we orient our movement.4”
In acute grief, time actually feels contracted. Every relation butts up against and bleeds into that tender space left by who and what have been lost. Depending on the nature of the loss itself, trust may be hard to come by. The once-trusted tapestries of space and time themselves are shown to be full of black holes. Once familiar others are revealed as liable to buck and tear off.
But there is a richness that is available through being more intensely in a moment. Slowing down enough to notice the intense, polyphonic experience of relationship where no one has to dominate or submit. Each second ripe with potential, for the hope of trust across difference, negotiating what’s precious, and world-building in response to what’s lost.
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Sunday Meeting next week will be on The Emperor. Sunday Meetings are weekly gatherings to engage with the major arcana in a living, practical way that are inspired by the Anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot’s idea of the major arcana as “a complete, entire, invaluable school of meditation, study, and spiritual effort—a masterly school in the art of learning.”
Each meeting will center around one card and include a brief reading and commentary before participants are invited to share reflections. This is not a processing space nor is it a discussion space, it is a meeting for the spiritually-inclined to consider ideas and images, give testimony, and bear witness among others who are doing the same. Sunday meetings are currently open to paying subscribers only, the link to register is below.
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