Grief House - Portals

In this special episode Sascha, Jana DeCristopharo of the Dougy Center and I search out and approach our wild grief creatures. Some of them are lava monsters, some are trapped behind sliding doors. They are vaporous, shocked, frozen and misunderstood.  They grieve death, separation, abandonment and things unknown. They are adrift and anchored and swimming strongly in their own and a big communal river of loss.  

We make contact and start up conversations and then wonder about how this work might work in the bigger world.

Featured: The Dougy Center and The Grief House. 
Mysteriously Alluded To: Jana's snake haired dream baby. 

In this episode Sasha and I tell our love stories with the universe. 

When she first caught our eye, our courtship, the rough parts, the different ways we made up and how we feel about each other now. It's a lot like the movie when Harry me Sally but less funny and no scenes in diners. 

We'd love you to send us clips from your love stories with the Universe! If you can film yourself sitting on a couch with her, even better.

In this episode (which I accidentally posted unedited the other day, and 14 of you listened to, likely with a feeling of confusion, before Sascha realized what I'd done and fixed it) Sascha and I say I love you to each other, again and again.  It makes me feel squirmy joyful and fed and so so so so lucky.

It's a brave experiment - asking someone you know loves to tell you why they love you. 

It's not for everyone, but if you ever want to try it, come on over the The House for a grief spill. I've never left one without strong love pooled up inside me for each person there. If you're one of the people, and you want to practice with me, I'm game. Come ask me, after, what I love about you. I'll be more than happy to tell you.

xox,
Laura

In this episode Sascha and I talk about our old strategies for self-protection when faced with the threat of uncharted love. We allow that they may be doing us more harm than good but we'll probably stick with them anyway. 

Featuring: fathers, fire escapes, dreams, Greek Salad, some murder, tenacity, ice castles, and a mention of the Rat Stove (which will be better, though never fully, explained in an upcoming episode).

Love! Who can understand it? Certainly neither of us.

In this episode of the podcast Sascha and I consider our fear of forever. Given our upbringing in a world that rarely acknowledges or even perceives things' natural edges, is it possible to feel into the cadence of experiences as they unfold? If we don't schedule the unfolding of our experiences, will they naturally evolve into new things? Or stall? Will we be stuck, eternally, in one place? We don't know. We're interested in finding out.

Sascha talks with her husband Peter about the effect of unprocessed and intergenerational grief - how and where it  hangs around. They talk about how Peter went about even noticing it and what it is to reconcile a painful past of genocide and suicide, especially when it lives in our bodies and in the shadows. 

At the Grief House we're interested in building a rich, loamy soil in which our lost and fallen bits can be met as nourishment, broken down and taken in and made available, in a new form, to support new growth.

We've decided to take this metaphor and  turn it into matter. And then back to metaphor and on and on. Cycles and cycles - just like everything.

We start here with beetles, earthworms a particular mushroom who may herself be a community and a festive, scary, beautiful bacterial. We're going to keep at this, these are just the first few notes of our decomposer praise song. Take a listen. See what you think.

In this episode Sascha and I try to see the unseeable wind of grief, fail, and instead call out the names of all the swirling solid grief bodies we see as they whip past in the gust. Alphabetically.

For a grief activity - so fun. Take a listen, won't you?

NOTE: Extra points and gratitude for anyone who illustrated any portion of this, the start to our ABC book of sadness. 

In this episode Sascha and I attempt to address grief head on. We do our best to gaze right at the huge swirling everything of her, and more or less fail. We do manage to talk about pooping in the woods, burying my mother, FedEx-ed cremains and how it feels to want help that isn't readily for sale. 

In the end we realize our work is to be afraid, small, and together; neither conquered nor conqueror. 

In this episode Sascha and I talked about our dread vessels; the space inside our hearts and minds that is reserved for dread and fear. 

We wondered about the nature of the vessel and if it can be shrunk. We thought of strategies by which we might understand it more, how things come pouring in, how they pour out, what things never leave, what could never be inside it. It was really helpful and I felt glad and more stable.

Then I forgot our conversation and trotted off into my life dreading just like before. But then I listened again today and - it helped me again. I like talking to Sascha about all the things. Maybe you'll like listening?