Enough to pull a heart apart
On grief, governance and stretching to meet these times.
Hello dear Kate,
I’m so pleased to be getting back to you, some months after your last letter. Reading back on it just now it feels somehow so fitting - your letter circled so much around grief.
In the time since I last wrote to you my dad died. It was not completely unexpected but certainly it was sooner than expected. So grief has been very alive for me in these months and, to be honest, because of this I’ve probably avoided responding to your last letter. I didn’t have the tools. I felt pretty lost in the swirling eddies, certainly with nothing to say that felt actually connected to my experiences. Grief is a complex beast, a permanent fixture and an ephemeral one. A “hum in the background of our lives” as you quoted Amber Jeffrey in your last letter, and in unpredictable waves an all consuming roar.
What I’m noticing most, in the micro of my personal grief and the macro of the grief in these times, is the invitation to stretch myself, to stretch my inner world. It’s enough to pull a heart apart. The intensity of knowing how love can feel and how it can be so fleeting. The intensity of the beauty and literal paradise of this Earth, and the devastation of her oh-so-well documented destruction. The centuries of campaigning, protesting and organising toward social justice that seemingly can be swept away with an incoherent speech or flippant pen stroke. How can I hold love and loss? How can I hold beauty and devastation? How can I hold life and extinction in the same heartbeat. It’s enough to pull a heart apart.
And yet, what I am alive for if not to feel all of this? To swim and dance and cry with humans and birds and rainforests. What am I alive for if not to cultivate this beauty and this paradise, to pour my care, attention and intention into building and creating. The more I allow myself to feel and experience the grief and the loss, the more human I become. The more I can allow myself to trust in my joy as a signpost toward my fullest expression of my gifts.
It almost feels like a necessary part of maturing, of stepping out of my younger, perhaps more adolescent self, striving to fit in, finding identity in a clan of likeminded individuals. My heart belongs to me. Only my heart has been ripped apart in this way. And because I know this, I can see you, and I can see the unique, magical ways your heart is ripped apart. Because we can recognise this in each other we can find unity not in fickle shared identities, fragmented political positions of the left or right, or even the deeper identities in race, trauma, sexuality. That’s not to say these aren’t vital identities. It is to say that beyond all of them, in each of us, are our hearts, ripped apart and stitched back together, stretched out of all recognisable shape and yet somehow beating our shared rhythm.
Our grief is our love.
And this is all very poetic. But such a critical part of this stretching is still holding the everyday reality around us. Our work is not the place to bring our grief, I agree. But I also remember this being exactly what made organisations feel so hollow when I was younger. As a middle aged person exploring what it means to begin to step into elderhood I want to honour the younger me that needed to feel seen in this way, even as I now hold the responsibility of ensuring that projects are completed and budgets are met.
My admittedly premature sense is that this is exactly what elderhood might be. This ability can only be gained through experience - the ability to hold the responsibility of the mundane in the same moment as Earth-shattering grief and a jaw dropping awe of the majesty of the divine. Good structures and good governance will recognise that all of these human experiences are important, all must be welcomed in the right amount to help us express, flow, release and function. If the web of structures that we humans are involved in do not create sufficient capacities for this, then the grief and awe will spill over into places that aren’t equipped to hold them - as many small organisations experience.
Something that has changed since I was younger, and certainly since the generations before me were young, is the myriad ways we can access resources to support the parts of human experience that are difficult to fit into the workplace. There are circles, therapies, retreats, gatherings and ceremonies for helping us to move through all this in held settings. An earth centric holistic organisation with a personal development budget for their team members might allow these to be included. They might even mandate that a portion of the personal development budget must be spent on tending the inner realms, rather than just textbook career development.
Because, as you say, organisations need to end too. As good as their intentions may be, organisations that struggle along taking movement funding and delivering sub-optimal services for longer than their shelf life hold us all back. It is, often, our inability to reflect objectively, our subjective assumptions and ego-driven aspirations that often keep an organisation clunking along for longer than it should. Investing in our inner worlds might help prevent that and help ideas to pivot sooner, help change to happen faster.
As would stronger social safety nets that allow people down time while they tend to this work. But one step at a time.
With care and love,
Lynne