Francis Weller's new book, In the Absence of the Ordinary, gives us help to face these uncertain times. On the occasion of its publication we share an interview with Francis about his first book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

Grief touches us at the outer reaches of our experience, challenging us to respond to new and unfamiliar terrain in our own souls. Finding rituals and pathways to carry us through the mysterious territory of loss encourages new ways to look at life and at ourselves. When we encounter a seasoned guide to walk with us through the unfamiliar terrain, grief can become a journey full of meaning. Francis Weller is such a guide, gently encouraging us towards new territory and integrating many Western and Indigenous traditions to help along the way. What supports us as grievers? What matters to us? What are the many ways to walk this road? And what is awaiting us when we have made room for this deepest of human experiences? These questions are the work of a lifetime. Join us to explore, to discover and to ask what we can do to love ourselves through loss.

Francis Weller is a psychotherapist (retired), writer and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. Author of the bestselling, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief; The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, (with Rashani Réa) and In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty, he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people. He founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western poetic, psychological, and spiritual traditions.  For over forty years Francis has worked as a psychotherapist and developed a style he calls soul-centered psychotherapy. As a gifted therapist and teacher, he has been described as a jazz artist, improvising and moving fluidly in and out of deep emotional territories with groups and individuals, bringing imagination and attention to places often held with judgment and shame. His offerings include a 10-session audio series on "Living a Soulful Life and Why It Matters." a 5-session series on ​"The Alchemy of Initiation: Soul Work and the Art of Ripening," and a 4-session series on "An Apprenticeship with Sorrow: Community, Ritual, and the Sacred Work of Grief."  (See the Store page for more.) Francis received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay and two Master’s Degrees from John F. Kennedy University in Clinical Psychology and Transpersonal Psychology. His writings have appeared in anthologies and journals exploring the confluence between psyche, nature and culture. His work was featured in The Sun magazine, the Utne Reader, and the Kosmos Journal. He was recently a guest on Season Two and Three of "All There Is" with Anderson Cooper. Francis is currently on staff at Commonweal Cancer Help Program, co-leading their week-long retreats with Michael Lerner. He has taught at Sonoma State University, the Sophia Center in Oakland and has been the featured teacher at the Minnesota Men's Conference. He is currently completing his fourth book, Facing the World with Soul and Why It Matters. 

How can we create an open conversation about the damages and continued disconnects which result from racism? Shakti Butler believes that “in order to manifest human rights and dignity for all, it is necessary that we seek union between the head and heart. It is the head that can recognize, analyze and strategize to overcome disparities. It is the heart that obliterates fear.” Join us while we talk about the losses we all suffer as a result of institutionalized racism and what we can each do to cultivate a deeper dialogue beyond the boundaries of misunderstanding and stereotype.

Shakti Butler, PhD, visionary, filmmaker, transformative learning educator, wife, mother, grandmother and friend - is President and Founder of World Trust Educational Services, Inc., a non-profit transformative organization. Rooted in love and justice, World Trust produces films, curricula, workshops and programs to catalyze institutional, structural and cultural change.

In 2019 I interviewwed Tembi Locke after her first book, from Scratch, was published. As she launches her second, Forever Now, we revisit our hour together!

When Tembi Locke spent a college semester in Italy, it changed the course of her life. Meeting Saro, the man she would love and marry, filled her with joy and also challenged them both to bridge the gap between his Sicilian farm family and her Houston Texas family of civil rights activists. Over time their persistence and courage began to connect their two families. But no struggle before it could have prepared them for Saro's ten years living with cancer, his death, and Tembi's grief. Who could have predicted that Tembi would find her way forward in grief at the table of her mother-in-law, in her small home in Siciliy. Join us to talk about the road Tembi took to find her future.

Tembi Locke is an actor with more than 60 sixty film and television performances to her credit. A graduate of Wesleyan and a TEDx speaker, she is the creator of TheKitchenWidow.com, an advocacy platform that inspires the art of comfort in times of illness or grief. Originally from Houston, Texas, she lives in Los Angeles with her daughter and second husband. From Scratch is her first book. Please visit her website at www.tembilocke.com.

Melanie DeMore, an outstanding and internationally recognized vocal artist, embodies her own principle that music can be a force for social and political change. Join us as we talk about how she uses her powerful voice to heal and transform. What experiences in her own life responded to music’s healing potential? What led her to dedicate her life to sharing her gifts with adults and children throughout the world? Don’t miss this mesmerizing artist as she shares with us her gifts, songs and inspirations!

As an outstanding singer and vocal activist Melanie DeMore believes in the power of voices raised together to bring social and political change. As the subject of 'Stick and Pound,’ she has helped preserve the African American folk tradition through song and Gullah stick pounding. In her 30 year career she has taught, lectured, mentored, conducted, directed and inspired both children and adults. She has presented, conducted and soloed internationally, including Festival 500 in New Foundland, Canada and Chorus America. She’s adjunct faculty at California Institute for Integral Studies, lead teaching artist for TEMPO at UC Berkeley and a featured presenter for SpeakOut! Institute for Social and Cultural Change. She has performed with Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir, Odetta, Richie Havens, Pete Seeger, the Trinity Choir, and MUSE Cincinnati Women's Chorus, among others. She truly embodies her own principle, 'A song can hold you up when there seems to be no ground beneath you”.

Singer Amikaeyla has spent her career sharing musical healing with people facing challenges around the world. Out of her own deep experiences with music as a force for healing, her work is fueled by a belief in its magic powers. So what has this last year during a pandemic, when her work was altered and sometimes unrecognizable, been like? What has kept her optimism and personal healing going? What lessons she learned over many years have come to the fore this year? Join us as we talk together about the practices, perspectives and power that have supported us each in this most unprecedented time.

Amikaeyla Gaston is a force for change. She creates environments that support people in exploring themselves and uses creativity and strategic questioning to support people in addressing their fears, developing a place where everyone has an equal voice. She has led corporations, universities, government, and nonprofit organizations through cultural competency & racial equity training. She has done extensive work in the health arena for over the past 20 years and travels the world extensively as a cultural arts ambassador for the State Department bringing together artists and healers of all forms and from all specialties to promote healing and wellness through the arts & activism. Her programming and work with refugees and at-risk children, youth, and families has been utilized and implemented by the Department of Health & Human Services, The American Psychological Association, and the US Consulate General’s Cultural Affairs office, taking her around the world to Israel, Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Palestine, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Nigeria & Sierra Leone just to name a few.

Throughout the world, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex people continue to experience oppression, including physical attack, psychological torture and rejection by family, friends and communities. In his travels as a journalist, Robin Hammond began to meet people whose very identities are still illegal in their own countries. He set out to interview and photograph them, telling their stories through beautiful images and quotes, in their own words. His project became a passion, and part of his work as a social activist. Personal stories of losses associated with lack of acceptance and understanding change hearts and minds. Robin will share what he has learned and the work he is doing to change the global landscape for LGBTQI people.

The winner of numerous awards including a World Press Photo prize, the RF Kennedy Journalism Award, the W.Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, and four Amnesty International awards for Human Rights journalism, Robin Hammond has dedicated his career to documenting human rights and development issues around the world through long term photographic projects. His latest work on homophobia and trans-phobia, Where Love Is Illegal, has become a popular social media campaign that shares stories of discrimination and supports advocacy groups in Africa.

Robin is the founder of Witness Change, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing human rights through highly visual story telling.

The war between so-called pro-choice and pro-life forces in America seem divided beyond repair. But where does that leave women who have made the often painful and important decision to have an abortion? As Kassi Underwood says, they are left with a choice between regret and relief, with few opportunities to talk about the experience and feel supported in their personal struggles. Kassi knows from personal experience that needing to hide all the sometimes complex feelings left after an abortion has a greater chance of fracturing women than the abortion itself. For even necessary losses are still losses, deserving our ear and calling for our attention. With great humor and fierce honesty, Kassi Underwood takes us along on her own search for answers and, in the process, helps us to think more deeply about this important subject.

Kassi Underwood’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic online, The Rumpus, and Refinery29.  She holds an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University, where she taught on the faculty of the Undergraduate Writing Program. In 2012, she won Exhale's Pro-Voice Storyteller Award in recognition of her personal essays on abortion; in 2013, she traveled across the United States, sharing her journey after abortion in an effort to bring peace to the abortion war. Described by audiences as “part-storyteller, part-public speaker, and part performance artist,” Kassi gives talks on the spirituality of abortion, addiction recovery, personal transformation, and social justice nationwide. She has addressed Christian churches and liberal arts colleges, shared a stage with standup comedians Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman, and appeared as a guest on MSNBC and HuffPost Live. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a student at Harvard Divinity School and cohost of the podcast, Spiritually Blonde.

Across the great divide in America, city dwellers and the nation's farmers often fail to understand each other. Marie Mutsuki Mockett set out to close the gap, going back to the place in Nebraska where her family owns a farm and listening with her whole heart to the many of the men and women who raise the food that keeps all of us alive; midwest rural America. She travelled to seven states to participate with them in harvest. In the process, her ideas, assumptions and beliefs were challenged, leaving an indelible mark on her heart and mind. When we are able to truly listen to each other, how does it affect our view of the world? Does it lead to greater understanding and tolerance? How can we be true to ourselves while truly respecting the other person? Marie comes back from the heartland with some answers and many questions, inviting us to share with her a profound lesson in acceptance. Launching as we are all facing the effects of COVID-19, the book is timely in that it also takes a look at front line workers who help keep our food supply open.

Marie Motsuki Mockett is a novelist and memoirist. Born and raised in California to a Japanese mother and American father, she graduated from Columbia University. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, explores how the Japanese cope with grief and tragedy. Her essay, Letter from a Japanese Crematorium, was anthologized in Norton’s Best Creative Nonfiction. Her first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, was was a finalist for the Paterson Prize. She’s written for many publications including The New York Times and has been a guest on The World, Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered. Her new book, “American Harvest,” is set in seven agricultural and heartland states and was a finalist for the Lukas Prize for Nonfiction. Marie received her MFA from the Bennington Writers Seminars and teaches fiction and nonfiction at the Rainier Writing Workshop, in Tacoma, Washington is a Visiting Writer in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College.

Susan Hayden experienced three sudden losses that shaped her life; her childhood best friend, her father and her husband. How did she shape these losses into the creative voice she crafted over a lifetime? How did they change her? Going forward from loss, what do we take with us and what do we leave behind? Her first published memoir, Now You Are a Missing Person, makes poetry of loss, showing us how to integrate our love into a new creation.

Susan Hayden is a poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist. Her plays have been performed live on KPFK’s Pacifica Performance Showcase and produced at the Met Theatre, Padua Playwrights, The Lost Studio and elsewhere. Her poems and stories have been published in numerous anthologies, including Beat Not Beat from Moon Tide Press, The Black Body from Seven Stories Press, and bestselling Los Angeles In the 1970s/Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine from Rare Bird Books. She was a Finalist in the Inaugural Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award with Penguin Press for her unpublished novel, Cat Stevens Saved My Life. Hayden is the creator and producer of Library Girl, a monthly words and music series now in its 14th year at Ruskin Group Theatre. In 2015, she was presented with the Artist in the Community/Bruria Finkel Award from the Santa Monica Arts Foundation for her significant contributions to the energetic discourse within Santa Monica’s arts community. You can find her at susanhayden.com.

Abbe Greenberg and Maggie Sarachek have literally written the book on supporting yourself through anxiety and panic attacks. And of course, they tried it ALL to deal with their own anxiety, because experience is the best teacher! Join us to talk about how they each experienced anxiety, what they did to address it, and what it is like to support others through the same struggle. So much is lost as a result of anxiety; our freedoms, our sense of well-being, relationships and time! But confronting anxiety is possible and, through the process, we can develop a kinder attitude towards all our struggles.