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This is the audio version of the Offering for November 2025, “All reality is iconoclastic” & a field recording workshop announcement!”

Attending: A Four-Week Field Recording Workshop (hybrid, with one in-person field trip to Plum Island, MA and the rest meeting virtually on Zoom)

We are immersed in sound at all times. Traffic, birds, fellow commuters on the train, breeze blowing through the leaves, air conditioners, buzzing electronic devices, raindrops. To attend is more than to hear; it is to be affected and to build relationships and associations in our lives with what we’ve encountered. In this four-week class, we will learn how to build our capacities to attend to the sounds around us. We will practice attending in two contexts: through making field recordings, and interviewing one another about what it was like. Space is limited to six.

The devices we’ll use to make recordings operate like sonic microscopes, helping us to ‘focus’ our ears and our perception. Asking one another questions about what we’ve encountered in ourselves and the world serves a similar function; bringing into sharper relief whatever is up for disclosure. Participants will leave with the field recordings they’ve made, knowledge on the technical practices of sound recording and, we hope, a closer relationship to and curiosity about how you attend to the sounds in your life. This workshop will be facilitated by composer and sound artist, Seán Ó Dálaigh and writer, social worker, and amateur field recordist Jessica Dore.

The class will take place over the course of four Saturdays from November 22 (and beginning on November 29 in case of rain) through December 13 (or December 20 with rain date). The first session will be a half-day, in-person field trip to Sandy Point State Park on Plum Island, Massachusetts and the remaining three sessions will be held virtually, via Zoom. For the duration of the month, participants will be invited to make recordings between meetings in their home places that they will share with and discuss with the group when we meet virtually. Zoom sessions will also include basic editing instruction, listening to the works of notable field recordists, artists and composers, and discussion.

Fee:

$225 if you bring your own equipment*

$365 if you would like us to provide equipment for you (which you will take home to keep)

*A handheld recorder and headphones are required for participation. We will be using TASCAM DR-05XP portable handheld recorders & Behringer headphones, both which are available used and new, and go for about $140 new including tax & shipping. If you have other equipment that you are interested in using, please reach out with those details so that we can be sure it will work for what we’re planning to do.

Dates & Locations:

November 22 from 9am - 1pm, first at Sandy Point State Park on Plum Island, MA & then at a second in-person, indoor location for listening & discussion

November 29 from 10am-11:30pm, on Zoom

December 6 from 10am - 11:30pm, on Zoom

December 13 from 10am - 11:30pm on Zoom

Accessibility:

Sandy Point State Park is about a fifteen minute drive from the Newburyport MBTA train stop, likely not accessible via rideshare apps but we are glad to offer ride support to and from the Newburyport train stop if needed.

The in-person field trip will be held on a terrain that is mixed; packed dirt path, beach sand and possibly some boardwalk. Sandy Point is a beach park and it will likely be pretty cold, do dress accordingly.

We will meet from 9-1 which we imagine as between major meal times, but please feel free to bring whatever you need, snacking, eating and sipping on things during the field trip is welcome. In other words: Please do bring any snacks and hydration that you anticipate needing.

There are portable restrooms at Sandy Point, and rustic permanent restrooms a little but up the road at Hellcat Swamp.

As we are meeting three times on Zoom you will need a device in order to do so. All of the software we’ll use to learn how to edit recording will be free and open source but may not be compatible with all kinds of devices. If you don’t have access to a computer, please reach out to us so we can explore possibilities.

To register, send me an email at [email protected].

Offerings is part of a reader- and listener-supported research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. Offerings are accessible in full for paying subscribers and in part for for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get priority access to live events with limited space, including workshops, and one-on-one sessions. To support this project by becoming a paying subscriber, hit the “subscribe now” button below.

Hi All,

A few weeks ago I spoke with psychotherapist Francis Weller whose new book In the Absence of the Ordinary—a collection of “essays on grief, change and sacred transitions”—came out in August. We recorded the conversation and I’m happy to be sharing it with you all today.

I first encountered Weller through his bestselling grief book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and was enticed by something he wrote early in it, which is that “we are remade in times of grief, broken apart and reassembled.” He goes on to describe his own “lasting faith in grief,” which was forged through the recognition that there is “some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.”

When I heard he had a new book coming out, I was curious. Here in Offerings, I’ve shared bits from the essays these last weeks; on Weller’s notion of “becoming immense,” and his use of alchemy metaphors which is exemplified in his essay on “the art of vesseling.”

Here’s one thing he said during our conversation that I found very beautiful:

“What I like about the idea of the vessel is it gives us a way of approaching the material without it becoming heroic, or turning our work into a project. In alchemy the idea is that whatever’s in the vessel, it's our job not to figure out what it's going to become…[but] to keep it warm….my job is not so much to figure out [or] determine what's going to become of that material, but to help it become what it wants to become. The alchemist was not trying to make the object become himself or themselves, the intention was to help the material become itself.”

I hope you will enjoy listening to (and/or reading the transcript of, which is below) the conversation we had. The recording was produced and edited by composer and sound artist Seán Ó Dálaigh, whose work you can (and should) check out at the link. Special thanks to Julia Sadowski and Bevin Donahue at North Atlantic Books for their support through the interview process.

As always, if you like the interview or Offerings overall, hitting the like button is a great way to support. <3 You can also support by sharing this interview with someone you think might appreciate it, or becoming a paying subscriber for as little as $5 a month of $50 a year.

Transcript

JD:

We're going to be talking about your newest book, which came out in August with North Atlantic, a collection of essays on grief, change, and sacred transitions that's titled In the Absence of the Ordinary. I think this title is a perfect description of what it can feel like in the wake of significant loss, and I would love to hear how you arrived to the title and what, “in the absence of the ordinary” means to you.

FW:

I think it really solidified as a title during COVID. There was obviously a tremendous rupture in the continuum of what we just lived as ordinary day-by-day life. Suddenly we were asked to stay home, to limit all contact, avoid touch. The whole reality of our assumed circulation of life just became very different, and suddenly we weren't in the ordinary anymore.

It seemed to me like the COVID was like the warm-up band for where we're heading. We are in a period of tremendous descent down into the underworld, in terms of mythological language. In that sense, we've left the ordinary world. The basic assumptions about economics, social, communal, political, even the stability of our environmental ground is so shaky right now that the ambient field is saturated with grief and fear, uncertainty, anxiety. That's telling me we've left the ordinary world. The world that we had assumed was familiar, and now we're on this kind of collective journey into the absolute unknown.

We don't know this territory very well, and we don't really have a language for it, nor do we have a way of approaching it that doesn't kind of lean back into the old strategies of domination, control, effort, muscle. But when we're in this territory, the requirements are very different. That's what I've been trying to write about and track, is what is a response to a prolonged season of descent, that we're going down. This is not a heroic time. It's not a time of confidence or ease or success. We are being taken down into places where we don't even know how to understand them, because we've been so disconnected from descent and darkness as a vital necessary territory.

JD:

Thank you so much. Beautiful, beautiful, and so resonant with the beauty of your book, really, the language was so moving and astonishing. I read a lot of philosophy, so I appreciate the poetic way that you write, and I'll ask you a little bit more about that as we move through some of these questions. But I want to ask you a sort of straightforward question about grief. One of the things I've come to understand through reading about grief and studying grief and especially philosophies of grief is that there are a lot of different ways that people conceive of what is and sort of what counts as grief.

In your essay about apprenticeship with sorrow, you describe some of the different kinds of experiences that can occasion grief. I feel like your work broadly is so inclusive in that even if you're not grieving the death of a loved one, you might feel welcomed in to this way of thinking about grief that you offer. I'd love to hear you speak to what grief is and what are the kinds of losses that might involve a grieving process in your experience.

FW:

My understanding of grief is how entangled it is with a sense of love, a sense of connection, a sense of intimacy that's been ruptured, whether, again, speaking of a death or a divorce, there's an alteration in the landscape of connection. That's the one we're most familiar with. But there's other kinds of grief that I write about. There's the grief of erosion when our own sense of integrity or our sense of wholeness is met with cultural, religious, educational, economic demands that we don't show this part of ourselves. We can't show weakness. We can't show vulnerability. We can't show enthusiasm. We can't show our sorrow. We learn how to cut off huge parts of ourselves to fit in. But every one of those aspects of our lives is a loss. The problem with that one is that we typically begin to adapt a relationship to those very things that reflects the attitude of the culture. So weakness is bad. Vulnerability is bad, especially for men. Enthusiasm, we've got to be in control. So we begin to judge these parts of ourselves.

And what should be acknowledged as a loss to our wholeness and our integrity, we barely can even register because now I also adapt that same judgment about these parts. And you cannot grieve for something you're holding with contempt. So that's a lot of part what psychotherapy is about, isn't it, is how do we approach these wounded aspects of ourselves, not with contempt, but with compassion? How do we move towards them with some type of warmth rather than a kind of a cold glare that just wants to get rid of them?

I mean, I don't know if I mentioned that in the book or not, but my first time seriously going into therapy in my mid 20s, I said to my therapist at the time, I want you to help me get rid of some parts of me. That was my opening line to him. And of course, he smiled and didn't really, you know, entertain my proposal, thankfully. But that's the attitude. How do we get rid of this, you know? And then there are so many other forms of grief. I mean, the sorrows of the world right now are just impinging upon us every day. The news that's coming out is terrifyingly sad about the ruptures of, you know, the Atlantic current is breaking down. You know, as they, the headline I saw today, but there's headlines every day about coral reefs or calving glaciers or ice melt or, you know, this is a grief that's so hard for us to hold, in part because we're often asked to carry this grief privately. And I don't know about you, but I cannot hold the sorrows of the world privately. It's so much, it's too much.

The other part about earth grief is what I call it, is that it's unsolvable. So most of our griefs have a lifespan, in a sense, that we go through them, not that they ever disappear, but the urgency of them, the inflammation of them, goes down, even if you lost a child, even if you lost, you know, a partner. Over time, that begins to become a bittersweet that you live with. Earth grief, not so much. That's going to be an ongoing sorrow that for as long as I can imagine forward, several generations, this grief will be with us every day. And we don't know how, we're not equipped to engage that grief, for the most part. So we either ignore it, or we get crushed by it. And so we need skill. We need to come to this place of working with this sorrow. That is the apprenticeship. So we can stay present.

And the biggest part about working with grief is that it has a lot to do with my capacity to keep loving this world. Much of the grief we're carrying is not ours. It's inherited sorrow. It's ancestral sorrow, which is another form of grief that we have to be aware of.

And the only one I haven't spoken about is the grief we carry that we don't even really know how to name. I didn't know how to name this one until I sat with many, many circles of grieving folks. And you begin to get a sense that what they're partly grieving is what they didn't receive, what they expected and did not receive, which I call the fourth gate of grief, that we're wired, we're designed genetically and psychologically, and I think even spiritually, to expect a robust relationship to the world, to community, to the animal kingdom, to plants and out to stone and to cloud banks. And for most of us, we didn't get that. We got, you know, if we're lucky, two parents, if we're really lucky, two parents who actually cared about us, but no village, and no ritual. I'm exaggerating to some degree because I was raised Catholic and there were quasi ritual behaviors in there, more ceremonial than ritual, but none of that stuff really materialized. And then we are left with this kind of aching sorrow, this aching feeling of emptiness in us, which is actually a form of grief, to feel bereft, to feel at a loss.

And part of the problems we don't even know how to name that, so it's hard to see it as anything other than a personal reflection, that I'm empty. There's something wrong with me that I feel this way, rather than saying there's something here that should have been fed by my culture that did not.

JD:

Yes, thank you. Wow. I would say an expectedly robust response to that question, having read your work and again really appreciating the way in which you're writing about grief does feel very inclusive without collapsing the meaning of the word, so that someone who might be experiencing the grief over the death of a child or a partner won't feel left out or that their experience is being erased. It seems like that can be the challenge of trying to offer a way of thinking about grief that is as inclusive as your way of thinking about it feels to me.

FW:

Well, when we gather for a grief ritual, the first thing we do, well, the first thing we do is sing and move the body so that body's a little bit warmer, so it's hard to grieve when it's cold. So we try to warm up the body, warm up the space, but we begin by asking people to share one thread of grief, just one. Usually everyone's got a basket full, but just one thread of grief and then we go around and then at the end I say, did anybody hear a grief they couldn't relate to? Of course not. I might not have had a child die in my life or a suicide of a friend or a partner, but I could relate to it because walking in those gates we come into the communal hall of grief and now we're in the commons which we all share.

Everyone walking on the street is part of that commons, but collectively in this country in particular our heroic ideologies make it very hard to approach and to commit or to confess the vulnerability that we all carry. So we take on this attitude of bravado and toughness and you know, which is in the long run such an offense to the soul because the soul truly wants to participate and part of the way we participate is in the ritual spaces of grieving or gratitude or initiation. You know, these were the commons of the soul and we don't know them anymore.

JD:

So thank you for bringing us so perfectly to my next question which is that you use this word soul throughout your work which is a word that I think I came to be familiar with through Carl Jung and James Hillman, [Hillman] who was notoriously critical of the psychotherapy field and the sort of individualizing discourses that are really dominant in the field and in the larger culture and the way that psychotherapy kind of works in tandem with the powers that be to kind of reinforce that belief of the self as bounded and individual. And so I really appreciate your use of the word soul and the way that you use it sort of points to a kind of self hood beyond the individual.

And you also say that we're being invited toward “radical change that nourishes the life force of the commons” which you were speaking to a moment ago in terms of grief as you know existing in this communal hall and this shared experience of grief as something resembling the commons even in the absence of the physical commons. So what do you mean by soul and why is this more expansive notion of self—and forgive me if I'm using self and soul interchangeably in a way that you wouldn't—but why is this expansive view of the person especially meaningful when we're talking about grief and even just more broadly?

FW:

Well I spent 10 weeks doing a series called living a soulful life and 10 weeks didn't even get close to answering that question you're asking me what is soul. I think what I can say about it is more a quality of perception and how we see things and the territory that we're taken into when we're talking about soul again that's the territory of depth you know we say I had a really deep conversation with that person right where we go to depth therapy you know there's a way that we imagine directionality as being related to quality. So down takes us into grief, vulnerability, tenderness, silence, intimacy, all of the ways in which our wounds are manifested that's the territory of soul.

The other territory, not self but spirit, is an ascension quality beautiful we need that we're not giving insight uplift transcendence we can think of like Handel's Messiah the Hallelujah chorus right, very transcendent, we are ecstatic when we hear that. But then we turn the table and we play Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, the broken Hallelujah, and now we're in the depth. Same territory right, but the qualitative difference between spirit and soul is absolutely felt in our bodies.

We know when we have a soulful moment, there's often tears there's often whispers there's a different quality of how we approach that space than the ecstatic expansive, you know “we're all one” space…there are many of us but we're all included you know, everything is welcome, soul has no problem with anything because as Hillman would say all events are psychic events in a sense all events are soulful events.

So when we see it through that lens the the right way or the not the right way but the most meaningful way to respond to our experience I think includes the soul response. Self is not antagonistic to soul, self knows when there's that kind of dialogue going on, who is that yeah it's the dialogue of self and soul you know when that dialogue is happening there's a richness to our life there's a sense of again depth and meaning that is drawn from a soulful approach self all on its own it's much more attuned to trying to convince the world that we're okay.

I mean, psychotherapy evolved in a context where the village was decimated, and so when the village is gone our sense of belonging is disrupted. And so every imperfection in our identity becomes something I have to perfect, I have to improve, I have to fix, I have to either get rid of it or you know remold it back into an appropriate expression.

Again, soul does not cotton to that approach at all because oftentimes you know, people came in—I've also recently retired from my practice so I'm still speaking in present tense—people would come into my office and wanting this urgent, with this urgent need to change, but underneath the urgency was hatred. They would, you know, hating parts of themselves. So, so the agenda was always, change was the agenda, but the subtext was you gotta help me fix this part of me so I don't show any weakness, all I show is strength you know. So the self is very much a part of the construct of the heroic ideology, and there's not a lot of room for what soul carries for us.

So that's where the antagonism can come about is the self doesn't like the confessional territory that soul takes us into. Well we have to admit…There was a passage by by Jung, he said “there appears to be a conscience in mankind that severely punishes the man who does not somehow and in some way at whatever cost to his pride cease to defend and assert himself and instead confess himself fallible and human, until he can do this an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of being a man among men.”

So that's, that's a true invitation to revelation, to confession, you know in the old language of letting somebody know the wounds you carry, the shame that lingers, the feelings of insecurity. Now we treat these outcasts with such contempt, but they are really what redeems us back into the felt sense of our common life. We all know those territories. And we're all going to know loss and grief, so it's best if we find some way of being able to have that be part of the currency of our exchange. You know, the freedom to confess that is quite beautiful. I mean I've seen it thousands of times and how much life comes back to us when we're able to bring that into the into the field. We spend so much of our psychic juice trying to keep that stuff hidden but what if you didn't have to do that?

JD:

I don't know, great question. I'll be sitting with that one. Thank you so much and again a really beautiful lead into the next thing that I want to ask you about, which is “becoming immense,” and this language is so beautiful that you use and I'm going to read a little passage from the essay which says “to become immense means to recall how embedded we are in an animate world a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty.” But your last response really made me think of becoming immense also as including this ability to not have to be perfect all the time, to not have to be the hero all the time, to not have to be the the the lone, you know, brave soldier or whatever. And I had meant to ask you what is becoming immense and how is it different from this hero narrative that a lot of us have inherited and taken up without maybe knowing that we could be critical of it or should be critical of it, in which we sort of internalize this idea that the lone individual overcomes great odds and saves the day. And that's not what becoming immense is to you, and at least I don't get the sense that it is, and I would love to hear you speak to becoming immense, what that is and why it matters.

FW:

The language for that first came to me some years back when I was working at the cancer health program and we were in one of our group sessions and someone was sharing a story. This woman was sharing, she had been in this kind of loveless marriage for years and and she had always carried this longing to go to the Grand Canyon and she finally says hell with it, I'm going by myself. So she got in her car and drove to the Grand Canyon. She said, well I was there had this mystical experience. I'm standing there looking into this deep gorge and I had this profound feeling that that's me.

Then she kind of hung her head down and said, well then I came home and was diagnosed with stage four, you know, cervical cancer. And I said wait wait wait stop stop stop. What happened to the woman standing on the lip of the canyon? What do you mean?…That's how immense you have to be now. We have to get our arms around everything. See [with] a heroic ideology, we only put our arms around hope, positivity, you know, good stuff, growth, improvement. But what immensity means is I also have to get my arms around fear around loss around death around grief around shame we have to get our arms around everything to become immense means nothing is excluded from our embrace.

That means we say that whatever is here is part of psyche's territory. May not be the easiest guest in the house as Rumi would say, but they come anyway right, they're there. So I either have a perpetual war for my entire lifetime with these parts of me which keeps me small, or do I risk that sense of immensity and welcome all of that and in a sense occupy this incarnation in a much fuller and more complete way.

JD:

You actually say as well that in the work that you've done over the years listening to individuals lamenting over various things personal and collective, that strangely this gives you hope. This is something that you write in the book and it fits with what you're saying around kind of with the hero narrative we have, we put our arms around hope and positivity and you know these things in this category, and then…but here you're making this connection between loss and limitation and also hope that in hearing people speak to their losses, strangely that gives you hope. Why did you say that?

FW

Well it means that the strategies of imperviousness the strategies of insulation are collapsing. When I first, I actually first wrote this book in 2011 and no one wanted to publish it. Grief wasn't a big ticket item back then, and so when I would go out and give book readings there you know frequently very few, very few people there. But over the years something has radically changed. Now, you know, when we were offering grief rituals they would fill like within a few hours. So I think the breakdown of our denial means to me that the heart is willing to register what is happening in our neighborhoods, in our watersheds, in our country, in our collective, in our culture. That to me is perhaps the only thing that will save our asses is a broken heart.

I sometimes call us the clan of the broken hearted, and it's the growing clan who are willing to be touched by the sorrows of the world which then in turn invites, as Wendell Berry would say, “it all turns on affection.” So if my heart is still willing to be touched, if I'm still willing to register her rips and tears and sorrows and pain as well as her extraordinary beauty, then the world stands a chance, you know. It's the heart numbed to the world, it's the heart turned away and focusing solely on distractions and anesthesia that is not going to respond to the needs of the world. And so what gives me hope is this growing sense of shared brokenness that we're sad. Our hearts are breaking, because of what we're witnessing.

I mean you only have to look out the door these days, so what's happening to this country in terms of its political agendas and, yeah, we don't know if we're going to have a democracy in a very short time. I was asked to write the forward for a book a couple years ago called Choosing Earth by Dwayne Elgin, and it was the hardest piece of writing I've ever had to do because what he did in this book, he looks at the next five decades. And he's been gathering this data for over 50 or 60 years. Dwayne is in his mid 80s now, and he does a forecast model for each of these decades coming up and Jessica the news looks pretty bleak.

And he's saying there's three possibilities here, the one is business as usual which is basically guaranteed species extinction, authoritarianism which we're certainly seeing the upsurge of that across many countries not just here, and the third one is planetary breakthrough. That's the one that our broken hearts could feed. That first one is the consequence of our hearts refusing to register what's happening in our collective body. Second one is kind of an abdication, kind of a child's dance; somebody else be the authority. And the third one is a heart aroused, a soul inflamed by love and devotion to the world.

JD

Yeah, I mean it makes me think about you know I said earlier how like struck I was in reading your book by the poetic quality of your writing and the attention to beauty and you use this word affection, and you said love and devotion, and you're using this language that is…it does arouse something, and it is different. My entry into the mental health field was through book publishing, and through the world of behavioral therapies which I'm sure I don't need to tell you about like ACT and DBT and CBT and so forth.

And later, I started studying narrative therapy and I mean I've been a lifelong you know reader, and lover of myths and stories and theology, and so I started to pay a lot closer attention through narrative therapy to like the metaphors that get used in different mental health spaces. Especially because that's where I was and I was noticing words like regulation and management and effectiveness and they have this sort of like industrial, economic feel to them. And you choose a very different set of metaphors in your work, to articulate the work that you do, to articulate what you encounter in the work that you do: alchemy, initiation, apprenticeship…And from the narrative world view this is like an editorial decision. And I would love to hear you speak about why you went and continue to go in this direction, why this is the language that you choose to speak and these are the metaphors that you choose to use, and what's important to you in these choices that you make.

FW:

I think for as long, well let me let me back up. I do tell a story in the acknowledgments piece, but when I was it was 1992—however long, that's 30, what, 33 years ago?—so in my mid 30s. I had a dream where I'm sitting at a kitchen table talking to James Hillman and we're talking about furniture refinishing, you know something very soulful. And he gets up from his chair and walks over to a closet, opens the door and there's a chest of drawers in there. But the drawers are very narrow, and he opens every drawer and pulls out a piece of paper and on them is the bibliography starting with Jung and going back in time to Vico and Ficino and all the way down to Heraclitus. And he looks at me and says, this is your family tree. So I was claimed very young by this lineage, my soul lineage. And so they have become the means by which I understand the world. How did they appreciate, how did they take in the world.

And it wasn't through a clinical lens, it was through a subjective lens, a soulful lens. And they and those metaphors from alchemy and other systems had actually a much more sensual, erotic intimate relationship to what was happening within me and the people I was seeing than clinical language was giving me. The clinical language was kind of cold and separating. But when you start talking about, you know the prima materia or vesseling or initiation…

Rough initiations, when I'm doing the cancer program, when I bring this in on the first night it's a week long retreat with eight cancer patients and I bring in this metaphor “rough initiation,” suddenly they have a different ground from which to approach what looked like a cold clinical illness and suddenly it has this depth to it that's asking them for radical alterations in their sense of who they are. See, that to me is more powerful than trying to approach it clinically or medically not to say those are not necessary of course they are. But what brings meaning to this experience, what brings depth to this experience has to evoke imagination, has to include beauty, has to include mystery, you know, and has to include the full range of our emotional encounter with those things. And again to me that's much closer to the language of soul and psyche.

I mean there's so little psyche in psychology today, it should be called self-ology rather than psychology. Because we're studying the self we're not studying soul. If we were studying soul, we'd have a very different response to what's happening around depression or addiction or anxiety or you know, relationship troubles. To approach it from the depth of soul your approach is very different. We're not trying to fix the person in the room, we're trying to deepen their intimacy with their own soulful life. And what is soul asking of them in this depression or this addiction you know, rather than trying to figure it out or fix it we're actually inviting them to a deepened connection to themselves.

And for me in my whole work life, that language and those images and metaphors they're the ones that bring me alive when I'm sitting in a room with somebody, and they're the ones that have helped me hold what at times felt you know overwhelming or unbearable in terms of my own suffering and grief so yeah, yeah did we get there?

JD:

Yeah, yeah. Thank you, thank you. And I'm gonna actually ask you to take it even a step further, because I want to ask you about the art of wrestling and maybe for those who might be listening who haven't had a chance to read the book yet, really to show specifically what I'm asking you in that question about the metaphors that you use even though I think this way of speaking and thinking about soul has been evident throughout this conversation. But you have an essay in the book called the art of vessling, and I find the vessel metaphor so interesting and so beautiful. I'm a big lover of the grail legend, I've been reading it, doing tellings of it over the years, talking about it with people, I read tarot cards, I love the story, I love various versions of it. So the art of vesseling I read with great interest. And I know that not all people think that the grail was a vessel, but anyway.

There's something paradoxical about the vessel as a metaphor, because on one hand there's a need for what you call “holding space, secure container” and then on the other hand a need for that container to be held in friendship and community. So vesseling is not only a private interior process that one undergoes alone as the vessel imagery might suggest, the bounded individual self kind of inside the container that's walled off, like it's not only that but it does ask something of us as individuals it sounds like. So I would love to ask you to speak more to the vessel metaphor and the art of vesseling and how it's useful for you and been useful for you, and how it is created as you say “by work that takes place both within and without.”

FW:

Good question. What I like about the idea of the vessel is it gives us a way of approaching the material without it becoming heroic or turning our work into a project. In alchemy, the idea is that whatever’s in the vessel it's our job not to figure out what it's going to become, it's our job to keep it warm. I like that so much because it takes it out of the industrial approach to to change and takes it much more into a place of inner revelation.

If I bring warmth to the material that's in the vessel, whether that's depression or anxiety or addiction or chaos and confusion, loneliness, shame, whatever’s in the vessel, if I can keep it warm through my affection, my attention, my interest, my curiosity, my efforts like writing or dancing or drawing, my job is not so much to figure out determine what's going to become of that material, but to help it become what it wants to become. The alchemist was not trying to make the object become himself or themselves, the intention was to help the material become itself.

Can you hear how different that is than our psychological approach? Our approach is oh it's so, in a sense, uh demanding. And there's very little room for patience and for allowing. Jung said that consciousness is forever interfering in the ways of psyche. You know, we're always trying to figure it out, always trying to analyze it, and again usually with that background idea of I have to change myself in order to be acceptable. Alchemy says our work is patience. They had a phrase in your patience is your soul. What are you willing to sit with day after day, to just notice it, to bring again your affection and attention to it, and your efforts. But I'm not determining what's happening inside the vessel. So that's one one part of it, is to keep it warm.

Then you also realize at some point, “I need to be in a vessel.” So I need to be in a holding space of community strong enough to take all of the raw materials that I'm dealing with and give me space to have that expressed in a a good way, in a ritual way. So when people come to the grief gatherings we provide the vessel, you know, because I wrote about in The Wild Edge of Sorrow that grief requires two things: containment and release. And if I'm doing it all by myself I can't do both jobs at the same time.

So I become a continuous recycle process around my grief, I'm chewing the same material over and over again. What we're waiting for is the signal frequency from the community that you've got one job to do today, which is to release. Just let go, let it fall to the ground, let yourself be pulled by the weight of your sorrows to your knees and weep alongside 10, 15, 20, 30 others who are in the same place as you are. This is so healing to our psyches, to be given a vessel, to be offered a containment field where I don't have to keep watching everything and I don't have to be the one responsible for, you know, making something happen. The community is doing that.

I did, as you I'm sure have to as well, these continuing education classes you know just to keep our license current. Well for years I would go to a place called Spirit Rock in Marin County and Rick Hanson was somebody I really enjoyed his teachings, neuropsychology, who wrote the Neurodharma and Resilience and Buddha’s Brain. And I'm taking these classes and they're wonderful but they're all individual practices. How can I, in these mindfulness practices and God bless them they're beautiful and necessary, but I'm sitting in one of them I'm going you know the original healing context was the village. When there was a trauma an injury a death, the village responded to help modulate the current of trauma, the current of grief so that it was held and contained by the village…We need both obviously, but what we're lacking are these communal practices that really activate the psyche.

I can't tell you how many times at the end of the ritual somebody will say something like, you know, I've never done anything like this before in my life but it felt oddly familiar. So what is that in the psyche that recognizes this cadence, well that's how we evolved as a species for 300,000 years, we've been doing this work continually. And suddenly, really in the last wisp of a moment, we've been asked to do this all alone. And we go to private practice to address it right, you know “I'm going to go see my therapist and talk about my grief.” It's wonderful, and I tell almost everybody I've worked with this is a wonderful place for you to learn how to tolerate touching into this very difficult territory and learning to tolerate being witnessed in this territory by another human being. But ultimately you're going to develop a much larger holding space for this energy to fully move and be able to be fully expressed, so we're doing this individual work learning to approach what's in the vessel with compassion, with kindness, with warmth, and once we do that we begin to feel the necessity of coming into a larger communal ground. So they complement, they're not oppositional at all, they really are what supports the other.

My mentor Bob Stein said the soul has a simultaneous need for intimacy and freedom, for community and sovereignty, and it lives in this wonderful helix dancing back and forth, sometimes in the same day sometimes in the same hour between needing solitude and needing connection. So in my solitude I work with my vesseling, in my communal times I am held within the vessel.

JD:

Thank you so much that was really, really beautiful I'm so glad I had the opportunity to ask you that question because the essay was beautiful but hearing you speak to it further just really brought home some important things for me as a person who thinks about becoming a lot, and also this kind of two-sided part of the process. And actually you speak to the loss of kind of that holding space as one of the losses that we grapple with as people among the many different kinds of losses that you address in the book, and you say that we've lost certain ways of being human and one of these ways is this ability to hold one another in times of grief and trauma and in your speaking to vesseling just now you're kind of speaking of the the way that we hold ourselves but also that we allow ourselves to be held in in community and in space with others.

But I also really wanted to ask you about kind of what it means to be a person that's a part of that village or that holding space, holding others. Because um you know I think it's obvious that we sort of don't have adequate rituals and capacities to support one another through harrowing times, through you know, so many people that I know who've gone through significant bereavements or other kinds of losses noticed that kind of phenomenon of the checking in happens in the immediate aftermath of the loss, and then it kind of dwindles over time. And I just would love to ask you specifically because this is work that you've done for so long, what are these skills and capacities that we need in order to be able to hold others in these harrowing spaces of grief and trauma and I don't expect you to be able to teach us how to do that in a short period of time, I just would love to hear you speak to it like kind of what are some of the capacities for like rekindling our ability to be with others in acute grief, or grief of all kinds.

FW:

Well that's really what my life is about right now. We've trained over a thousand people now in 31 countries how to hold ritual space for people who are grieving, could be just in your own family or your neighborhood or your friends, doesn't have to be a big formal ritual process. So one of the first things we have to do is come into again that apprenticeship, so we're not trying to push grief far away nor are we in a position where we're going to get steamrolled by grief. But we learn to create this companionship, so learning how to hold that ongoing relational ground with grief is imperative.

Then we need to have some kind of grounding practice, again whether that's writing or yoga or prayer or meditation, the biggest thing I think what you're asking Jessica is the necessity of showing up in our adult presence. And what I mean by that is that frequently and I've seen there's so many times in ritual spaces and also my practice when we get close to that grief, suddenly there's this panicked five-year-old face that pops to the foreground. That's the last time grief was ever touched in their lives and so there's this panic that comes into the room, and people have said I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here.

What's happening says that this is not safe, it's not safe. And I’ve said well can you just pause for a second, take a breath and turn toward the part that doesn't feel safe and say I'm here. And the moment they do that, they've done something that Jung said, that we cannot heal what we cannot separate from. So when that terrified child part comes up and takes over, they become the default mode and it's all about survival and hiding or rage and pushing everybody away. But what we need is an adult presence that can stay in relationship to the surrounding field of friends and community, being willing to bring what's needed to those people rather than again either trying to push everybody away.

So this movement into, the migration of the grief into the adult's hands, is like one of the most important things. I spend a lot of time in The Wild Edge of Sorrow writing about complexes, and the value and the necessity of working with the complex is if you're wanting to hold spaces for people you have to be in a position where you're not easily triggered by the material that's coming up in the room. So to know the geography of your own sorrow, to know how it lays out in the land around you, internally where are the traumas, where are the pockets of shame, where are the places that could easily cause me to contract and run away when grief arrives in the room. So if you want to hold spaces, you've got to know your own internal ground and then just being able to learn how to tolerate, I don't know if that's the right word, or increase your capacity to be around the messiness of grief.

So one thing I recommend for people to do is just invite three or four people over to your home and just say tonight the topic is loss, but let's make some agreements. The first agreement is no advice giving, we somehow have gotten to the point of treating grief as a problem to be solved you know, something to get over and get beyond and as quickly as possible. But from soul's perspective we're not here to get over grief we're here to accompany it you know. And so that move of being able to just come into a more inviting relationship to the sorrow, this is very very important.

JD

Thank you, thank you that was very generous and useful one of my favorite essays in the book is called approaching geologic speed and something that attracts me to thinking about and working with grief is the temporal aspect that, you know, the philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe talks about how grief is—and I'm paraphrasing—not something that can unfold over time but something that must. And if this is true then it seems like the fast pace of modern society is in at least some sense sort of antithetical to grieving.

And you describe geologic time and the values associated with it as patience, restraint and reciprocity, and I would love to hear you speak more to the importance of geologic speed, those values that you mentioned and why embracing geologic speed is important both for grief work and maybe what you might call soul work.

FW:

I tell the story in that I was licensed at 27 years old just a pup you know I don't know why they gave me a license but they did. But I was smart enough to know I didn't know anything about sitting with people and so I did call the Jung Institute in San Francisco and got a list of names of someone I could apprentice with. And I called them all and when I talked to this one guy Clark Barry I said this is the guy I want to sit with. And I showed up dutifully to his door on an appointed day and we sat down and the very first thing Clark said to me basically, rather than hello, was he reached over and padded this big rock he had by his chair. He said this is my clock, I operate at geologic speed and if you're going to work with the soul you need to learn this rhythm because this is how the soul moves and he pointed to his clock and he said it hates this.

Now that was the single most important clinical guidance I've ever received about therapy, how do we slow people down because again that urgency for change driven often by self-hatred, the soul absolutely and utterly refused to cooperate with such an agenda. So my job initially is to get people to slow down to see if we could hear the pace of soul, to see if we can hear the rhythms of soul as expressed in the ways that they're suffering, as if the depression is a lament from soul for them to slow down. Hillman once said that depression is the soul's refusal to match the speed of a manic culture. Now think about that, so we love speed, we're addicted to speed, we want the fastest cell phone, the fastest car, the fastest everything. But soul also has a cadence that requires walking and sitting and singing and dreaming and sharing food together and a good long conversation. You know those things require time to slowing downward so they can actually meet in soul space in the soul, a soulful way.

So it's not that speed is wrong or bad, but it's the dominant cadence for this collective. I have a friend, I’m sorry, I had a friend, I miss him, Malidoma Somé, an African teacher and writer and he once said to me you know you have to be careful what you associate with because over time you'll begin to match its rhythm. And you watch how many people, their whole energetic pulse is cast into this little device, or you know, we watch our grandchildren and how much time is spent on the iPads and meanwhile the flowered world the scented world gets left. And we have a two dimensional world now, you know, yeah slowing downward.

There was a beautiful essay or a book by Robert McFarland called Landmarks which I think is one of the essays in there, where he is gathering these place words from all over Great Britain that reveal a deep intimacy between people and place, and then he said but then I noticed that the Oxford Children's Dictionary was taking words out of the dictionary like acorn, alder, and you know, buttercup and fern. And as if that world doesn't even matter anymore. And it doesn't elicit our imaginations or our curiosities or our intimacies and instead broadband and chat room and those are the words coming into the dictionary that speak to the mechanical, the technological, and of course it's, you know, it's there. But at what cost, and at what loss to our sense of wholeness you know.

I'm sorry to be dropping so many quotes on you but there's another one that Paul Shepard who was a human biologist, he died in the mid 90s, love his work, he was asked once in a conversation, you know, what happened between the human and the more than human world, the animal world. And what's the consequence of this rupture, and he said the grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. So when we lose the world, when we lose the stories of mouse and raven and fox, you know, and we lose the actual sighting of them or the mark of the fox in the woods which we hear all the time, when we lose that our world diminishes. We become less animated, less full of anima, so you know, so that sense of loss that we feel it's also about losing call of the loon, or the you know the swirl of a swift, or the sound of a, you know, magpie. All of those things that when they're silenced and our attention goes into electronic devices, the world is diminished. Our world is diminished,

JD:

Thank you for that language, I have recently gotten really into field recording and making recordings of birds and water and wonderful and uh it it you know I've, yeah I've wondered for a long time kind of how to rekindle and reestablish some of those connections that I don't think I've ever had necessarily in this lifetime, maybe, but that immediately upon putting the headphones on and holding the microphone to you know a bunch of trees to see what's…to hear more loudly what's going on, it's such a rich experience and it's so gratifying. So thank you for giving some additional language to help me make sense of why that experience is so beautiful, and something I want to continue to do.

You refer often to ancestral work and you were speaking in your last response around imagination and curiosity and I think about the dilemma in bereavement in particular but also in other kinds of loss around trying to remain in a sort of living and surprising relationship with the dead, or with the lost, and so your writing and your work on ancestral work was really interesting to me because it feels like something that does require imagination and curiosity and some of these qualities that you were describing a moment ago, as well, as something that feels really important in a grief context where there is a physical absence to contend with that maybe makes it difficult to find oneself in living relationship with either the dead or something that's lost. And so I'd love to hear you just speak to ancestral work a little bit, particularly in a context of grief and how that sort of work as you understand it might support us incultivating and maintaining a relationship with those who are no longer physically here, whether they are human others or more than human others or maybe those I guess that's what ancestral work would involve but I’m not sure. I would love to hear you speak to it.

FW:

Well it involves all of that, and uh we're one of the only cultures that I know of that just basically abandoned the ancestors, you know, our obsession is with progress it's this forward marching ideology that the next world, the better world is always just beyond. And so our fixation is always on progress even in psychotherapy it's all about progress i have to keep improving.

Well psyche doesn't work that way, you know, it's a meandering animal that goes in alldirections you know so the same thing with ancestors, I feel like when we stop and really listen to what we're carrying individually, like I said my wound has been shame in my lifetime. And for most of my life I felt very identified and personalized around that wound like it was my wound. Well when I began working with grief, you begin to sense wait a minute this did not begin with me. I'm not the…I'm the current curator of this shame, but it began as Rumi would say in some other tavern.

It began a long time ago, generations and generations ago, and it had to do with ruptures of continuity, of connection and belonging and place and language and all the ways that you began to feel somehow different and wrong in your differentness. So that came into my body and now when I'm working with that, whether through grief or through my own internal process or in my friendships, I'm doing ancestral work. I'm helping them as well, as my friend Malidoma would say, unkink the hose. You know, the hose got kinked back then.

Jung wrote a whole, his Red Book—which I'm sure you're familiar with the Red Book—much of that is what he calls the lament of the dead, the dead kept coming to him while he was writing these passages basically crying to him saying we have been forgotten we have been abandoned. And it's partly our job to come back into some kind of relationship with them so that they can also support us but we can also begin to do the work of, you know straightening out the hose. So that that flow of blessing and so much of the ancestral grief we have to deal with is the collective mess we're in.

JD:

Thank you so much for bearing with the geologic speed of the many many questions that I had, and the time that I wanted to take with you. I feel very fortunate, thank you Francis.

FW:

Absolutely, you know the depth of the conversation can only go as far as the one who's preparing the questions and you were very well prepared and I appreciate where we went and how we went there, and excellent questions. There was a rich conversation for me as well.

If you enjoy this, consider hitting the like button. It feels good for me when you do, like seeing a smile or a head nod when you’re telling someone something, and it lets me know you’re here.

This is the audio version of the Offering for September 8, 2025, “Sinking in.”

Offerings is part of a reader- and listener-supported research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. Offerings are accessible in full for paying subscribers and in part for for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get priority access to live events with limited space, including workshops, and one-on-one sessions. To support this project by becoming a paying subscriber, hit the “subscribe now” button below.

If you enjoy this, consider hitting the like button. It feels good for me when you do, like seeing a smile or a head nod when you’re telling someone something, and it lets me know you’re here.

This is the audio version of the Offering for September 2025, “Water & ‘the art of vesseling.’”

Offerings is part of a reader- and listener-supported research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. Offerings are accessible in full for paying subscribers and in part for for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get priority access to live events with limited space, including workshops, and one-on-one sessions. To support this project by becoming a paying subscriber, hit the “subscribe now” button below.

If you enjoy this, consider hitting the like button. It feels good for me when you do and lets me know you’re here.

This is the audio version of the Offering for August 2025, “Disorienting evil.”

Offerings is part of a reader- and listener-supported research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. Offerings are accessible in full for paying subscribers and in part for for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get priority access to live events with limited space, including workshops, and one-on-one sessions. To support this project by becoming a paying subscriber, hit the “subscribe now” button below.

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This is the audio version of the Offering for July 13, 2025, “You are tormented out of passion for what matters to you.”

Offerings is part of a reader- and listener-supported research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. Offerings are accessible in full for paying subscribers and in part for for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get priority access to live events with limited space, including workshops, and one-on-one sessions. To support this project by becoming a paying subscriber, hit the “subscribe now” button below.

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This is the audio version of the Offering for June 2025, “The mourning magician / “Now I see them—now I do not!”

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Hi All,

I am so excited to be sharing the conversation I had several weeks ago with philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe, whose book Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience has been an incredible source of inspiration and influence on both the Offerings project and me as a human.

In this conversation we dwell in what it is to experience grief—which is the primary concern of Grief Worlds—as well as what grief can reveal more generally about human experience. We talk about grief as an experience of lost possibilities, grief's two-sided structure, how loss can destabilize identity and values, the bodily nature of profound grief, and much, much more.

We briefly discuss the grief survey that Ratcliffe and colleagues at University of York conducted, including the publicly available, searchable database of 265 survey participants’ responses. Their aim with the project was to investigate difficult to understand and explain aspects of grief experience, “identify differences and commonalities between people’s experiences, and thus facilitate detailed, wide-ranging philosophical analyses of what is involved in experiencing grief.”

I’ve included the full transcript of our conversation below if you prefer to read or would like to follow along. If you like to skim, I’ve put in bold some of what I take to be key takeaways from the conversation. Special thanks to Dave Coustan for creative and technical support with this interview project.

As always, if you like the interview or this project more broadly, hitting the like button is a great way to support. <3

I hope you enjoy it, and if you do and want to support this project, please hit the like button, share with someone you know who might be interested, or consider becoming a paying subscriber for as little as $5 a month or $50 a year.

Matthew Ratcliffe is professor of philosophy at the University of York, UK. He is the author of Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience and Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World, both which are from MIT Press.

Transcript:

JD: I'm Jessica Dore, and you're listening to Offerings. This audio is a continuation into a series of conversations with people doing interesting work in the areas that this project is most concerned with, including grief, loss, morning, and other adjacent topics.

In today's conversation, I'm speaking with philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe, who is the author of a book called Grief Worlds, which has really shaped my thinking and fed my fascination with grief experiences. Matthew Ratcliffe is professor of philosophy at the University of York, UK. He is the author of Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience and Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World, both which are from MIT Press.

I encountered Matthew's book through a Google Scholar search in the summer of 2023, while seeking philosophical accounts of grief experience that I hoped would offer some kind of toehold during an interpersonal loss of my own. I was immediately struck by his claim that grief is not something that can unfold over time, but something that must.

In this conversation, we dwell in what it is to experience grief, which is the primary concern of grief worlds, as well as what grief experience can reveal more generally about human experience. We talk about grief as an experience of lost possibilities, grief's two-sided structure that involves recognition and negotiation, how loss can destabilize identity and values, the bodily nature of profound grief, and much, much more.

After spending so much time with the book, it was really exciting to have the opportunity to ask Matthew questions about it, so I hope you'll enjoy listening to the conversation we had.

JD: Matthew, thank you so much for being here, I'm really looking forward to talking to you about your book, Grief Worlds.

MR: Thank you.

JD: So, as I understand it, Grief Worlds is part of a larger project that you conducted with some of your colleagues at University of York. How did you arrive to this place of looking so intently at grief and what did you hope to achieve in doing so?

MR: Well, the topic of grief related in several ways to my earlier work, for example, I published a book on depression back in 2015. And one of the questions that concerned me then, which has concerned a lot of other people, is how do you distinguish grief from depression? And do they differ phenomenologically, that is, experientially?

So I'd already looked at grief then. And then as you've noted, my subsequent book was on the theme of hallucination. And One of the things I considered was so-called bereavement hallucinations, where those who've suffered a bereavement sometimes have vivid experiences, where the person who's died seems strangely present. So I'd asked myself how we understand experiences like that. And other research I'd done had addressed the theme of trauma, which of course overlaps.

More generally, my work for a number of years now has addressed the nature of poorly understood emotional experiences and feelings. And the other central theme is interpersonal experience and how our experience of self and world is intertwined with our experience of other people.

So all of this pointed towards the topic of grief and something I'd already noted from, well, talking with those who had suffered bereavements, but also reading memoirs and the like, is that people will say time and time again that bereavement involves this profound transformation of self and world. Everything seems strange, familiar, sometimes detached and distant, in ways that people struggle to comprehend.

And indeed the experience itself is unsettling, and can exacerbate the distress of bereavement. And in conjunction with this, it's a stumbling block to understanding in many cases, where somebody might be saying something like, "Don't worry, it'll get better," as if you're within the same shared social context, but one person is distressed and the other isn't. Whereas the person who's grieving is living in what seems like a profoundly different universe, and just the utter profundity of the disturbance to one's life is very difficult to comprehend. So I wanted to address that.

JD: Yeah, thank you so much for that description. And I think it does actually bring us into the next question, which is about both the title and the subtitle, which the book we're talking about is called Grief Worlds, A Study of Emotional Experience. And so two things, it seems like you're referring to something specific when you use that word world, maybe something different than I might think about when I say the word world in a regular context, possibly in my regular context. So I'm curious about the book's title, sort of what the word world means in this context, but also the subtitle, why you would call the book a study of emotional experience as opposed to a study of grief specifically.

MR: Okay. Well, let me try and respond to both aspects of that question. And I think that the word 'world' is quite slippery anyway. I'm not sure we do use 'world' in a singular way, but the way I'm using it is to refer to an experiential world, so that the world in which we find ourselves when we're thinking about things, perceiving things, having various feelings, we tend to take a world for granted in which all of our more localised specific experiences are situated. And one reason for emphasising this experiential world is it's a persistent theme in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy in which my own work is anchored.

So phenomenological philosophers explore what it is to experience, relate to and find oneself in a world. So in the context of grief, my choice of the term 'world' reflects the fact that people refer to their experiential world as radically altered. Everything looks different. It's like I'm in a different world. It's like I'm on an alien planet or something. Everything that was familiar is no longer familiar. So the two seem to relate to one another.

I was going to call it the world of grief, and then I changed my mind, and that's partly because grief is so variable for a particular person over time, and grief also varies a lot between people. So what I don't want to suggest is that there's a singular world of grief, one characterisation of the experience of grief that will capture all people's grief experiences, or indeed a particular person's experience.

So you also asked about why the subtitle is a study of emotional experience. Well I take it as to many people that grief is a kind of emotional experience and what I think we can do is learn a lot about emotional life more generally by studying grief. One aspect of this, is that grief isn't a prolonged mood. It's not as if a grief experience stays constant over a long period of time, such as being in a sad mood, for example, that would be a poor characterization.

But neither is grief just a brief emotional episode, or indeed a disconnected sequence of episodes. Rather, grief is a dynamic process. It involves movement and is experienced in terms of movement. So there's a need, I think, to think of grief in different terms from a long-term mood or a short-term emotion. We need to think about dynamic emotional processes.

Why a study of emotional experience more generally? Because I think the same point applies to a great deal of human emotional life. And my thinking in this regard was heavily influenced by conversations with the philosopher Peter Goldie, who was a good friend of mine who was working on grief. This was back in 2010, 2011, I think, he'd written about grief. And we were sharing ideas because I was thinking about grief in the context of depression.

And Peter was wondering, what if instead of starting with examples like Bob is afraid of the dog or Sue is happy that it's her birthday. What if philosophers started thinking about human emotional life in terms of grief? Why not take grief as a paradigm of emotion as an exemplar for study rather than these short -term episodes? And Peter couldn't really, well he wasn't able to pursue this work. I'm very sad that he died not long after that.

And so it's a challenge I kind of took up. What happens when we think of emotions in general, using grief as our example? And I think we get something that is much richer, more interconnected, holistic, dynamic, and temporarily extended.

JD: Thank you so much for sharing that. That was really such a, as I would expect, a really rich response to my question and also thank you for sharing about your relationship with Peter Goldie and the kind of the continuation of those conversations that you were having and questions that he was asking, I feel like that is reflective of some of the ideas that you discuss in the book around continuing relationships with people who've died in certain ways. So that's really beautiful. Thank you.

So you've touched a little bit on this already around sort of a phenomenological aspect of this project and your work more broadly. And because I think for myself, I'm still wrapping my head around what that refers to, phenomenological issues or phenomenological inquiry. I think some who will be listening to this will also be wondering what that is referring to. And so I'm curious, how would you describe what phenomenological inquiry is referring to, what makes it distinct from other kinds of philosophical inquiries.

MR: It's not the catchiest term, is it? And I think that the term phenomenology can be used in three distinct ways. This is setting aside a fourth use in physics. It can be used simply as a synonym for experience. So you can talk about the phenomenology of this instead of the experience of this. It's also used to refer broadly to the study of experience, so you can say I'm doing phenomenology, I'm inquiring into the nature of experience. I use it in a more specific way, where phenomenology is something done by philosophers in the phenomenological tradition.

And this was a tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl at the turn of the 20th century. And it includes thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean -Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and various others whom I mentioned in that book. And it's difficult to get to grips with for various reasons. One is a lot of the language is obscure. It's also obscure in different ways, and if you come across it for the first time, you might wonder what these thinkers have all got in common.

But I think a unifying theme is the need to acknowledge, acknowledge the world as a phenomenological achievement. And one way to explain this is to say, look, let's suppose you're starting to reflect on experience, you might say. Well, I can reflect on the taste of the cup of tea I'm drinking. I can see the colour red. I'm experiencing that. I'm looking at a cup over there. I can describe what the cup looks like. Maybe I can also describe my experience of the cup. I've got a slight pain in my leg. Maybe my experience is encompassed by what I anticipate, what I imagine, what I remember.

So you come up with this localized list of different things. But what phenomenologists all emphasize in different ways is all of these experiences arise in the context of a pre-given world. And that itself is a phenomenological achievement. It's part of our experience. We already find ourselves immersed in a world in the midst of things before any particular object shows up or before we remember what we have to do today and so on. And finding oneself in the world isn't like looking upon a big object. It's more a matter of being preposively, practically immersed in a realm that is essentially interpersonal and social.

So phenomenologists all ask us to dig a bit deeper to try and get back to this, to at least acknowledge the very nature of world experience and begin to try and study and articulate the structure of world experience. And there are so many different ways of doing this, but what I've tended to do in my work on grief and elsewhere is illuminate this phenomenological achievement of finding oneself in the world at all, by looking at contexts where it's disrupted and profoundly altered. By looking at experiences that don't involve localised anomalies, a little blurring of vision here, or something looking a bit strange. Rather, everything can look strange and familiar. The world as a whole can appear unreal. We can see it be curiously detached from it. It can be as though the world of others drifts along as we watch it from some kind of strange outside.

So it's when you actually look at the diversity of human experience, that you start to realise that the challenge of describing something that we ordinarily take for granted. And this is what phenomenology is really about. It's getting us to make explicit and interrogate something that is ordinarily taken for granted, overlooked, something that's so familiar to us, it's removed from our explicit thoughts.

JD: Thank you for that last bit of this explanation. It really, I think, illuminates what you said also about, and you say this in the book as well, that these worlds can be so taken for granted that it's sometimes an experience of rupture that we can start to understand those things that were harder to see, habits and patterns and the things we expect and and assume and anticipate and the sort of it's like the thwarting of those things or the experience of being disoriented from those norms that can be very illuminating.

MR: Exactly. And that's right. I mean, just the everyday remark that you don't know what you had till you've lost it has something to be said for it. So it's when our world is disrupted that we come to see what was previously taken for granted.

JD: Thank you for adding that. That is really, really an effective saying, isn't it?

MR: Yeah.

JD: I would love to ask you a question more specifically about grief, and it's a three-part question. The first part is how do you define grief? The second part, which is part of that question, I think is what you propose is the object of grief, what it is that we grieve when we're grieving. And then the third part of the question is what if anything that you've identified as sort of structural similarities that different kinds of grief experiences share? And I don't know if you'd put it that way as structural similarities, but I know you've looked also at non-death losses such as involuntary childlessness as well as bereavement. So yeah, I would love to hear you speak to that a bit.

MR: Yes, one could define grief as the emotional response to the death of a person. However, then one might start to wonder, do we only grieve over the death of people? What about the death of non-human animals? Also, what about tragedies that befall those we love, where they remain alive? And then there are a host of other circumstances where people will talk about grieving. People sometimes talk about grieving the loss of their former selves following upheaval, grieving the loss of jobs, friendships, relationships. So it's debatable whether we should think of grief as specific to bereavement, to the death of a person.

And indeed when we think about emotions more generally it seems quite odd that we do that. So we might talk about fear or happiness, but we wouldn't talk about lottery win happiness or wild animal fear or fast approaching car fear. We don't tend to identify types of emotion in terms of quite specific circumstances in which they occur. So we might wonder with grief as well, should we think about it just in terms of bereavement?

And I kind of sit on the fence over this. I don't want to police how people speak. And I think the term grief in everyday life is used in more or less specific ways in different situations. What I maintain is that a variety of different circumstances can involve experiences that are importantly similar. So suffering from long-term chronic illness can involve experiences of grief or loss that are comparable in certain respects to grief or loss over the death of a person. At the same time, though, I think there's something very distinctive about interpersonal grief. There are aspects of it that are specific to the personal. So I kind of want to have both. I want to remain open to both.

When it comes to the objects of grief, philosophers tend to distinguish between the causes of an experience and the object of an experience. So the object is what it's about or what it's directed at. So my annoyance with someone might be caused by my drinking a really strong coffee, but the object of my annoyance is that person or what they've done, and in that case my emotional response is misplaced.

So what is our grief directed at? Let's focus on interpersonal grief. You might say, well, it's directed at the death of a person. It's directed at the fact that they're dead. Maybe it's directed at the loss of a relationship, or maybe it's directed at what we've lost. And we could get into lots of nitpicking philosophical quarrels about whether the object of grief is one or the other. And I think it's all of them.

And I think they are united by a much more enveloping sense of lost possibilities where they are possibilities for the other person, possibilities for me, possibilities for us. So I think of grief as involving a temporarily extended experience of an engagement with a loss of possibilities that were central to one's life, to who one is or who one was. And these include possibilities for the other person.

Now, there was a third part to your question, but I can't recall whether I've answered that.

JD: The third part was about structural similarities that diverse experiences share, which I do feel like you've touched on a little bit, but if there's you'd want to say about that I'd welcome it.

MR: That's right, again I think we can understand a lot of the similarities here if we emphasis how grief experiences or also that certain experiences we refer to as loss involve experiencing and engaging with a loss of possibilities and crucially those possibilities are central to who we are to what we might even refer to a sense of self or identity to our lives, to an envisaged future, to our biographies.

So something that my colleague Louise Richardson and I looked at was grief over involuntary childlessness. And in that context people sometimes identify more specific circumstances, miscarriage, the disclosure of infertility, and a host of other circumstances, but often they'll say, you know, what they're grieving is that the fact that they will never be a parent, that these possibilities are gone, the loss of a self that they envisaged, the loss of a life course, the loss of a trajectory that was integral to who they are, and everything, you know, that the way their lives were organised, the way their lives unfolded over time, and also the way they're related to other people and were embedded in a shared social world. And I think that that's a common theme.

And in so many circumstances, it involves this vivid awareness of possibilities precisely as gone. Those possibilities are very much at the forefront of your awareness a lot of the time, but precisely as negated, as foreclosed, as lost, and you can look at a diversity of different circumstances that people refer to in terms of grief, and that's the common theme across a variety of cases, a loss of possibilities where people will say, "It's the loss of me, it's the loss of part of myself, it's the loss of who I thought I'd be, it's the loss of who I was meant to be." And there's a real struggle to describe this, I think.

JD: Yeah, thank you, thank you. I think what I appreciate about the lost possibilities perspective or account of the object of grief is that it seems like it's spacious and inclusive while at the same time not collapsing the wide range of kinds of grief experiences where someone might be experiencing the loss of a child or the loss of a job or a pet where there can be some some sort of structural similarities in terms of the loss of identity relevant possibilities without taking anything away from anybody about what they're going through that is unique, that might feel erased in an effort to sort of put all grief experiences under one umbrella.

MR: That's right. It is quite abstract, and it identifies a theme that is common across many experiences. But as you say, it's important to continue to recognize the enormous diversity of people's experiences, the many, many different ways in which we experience grief at any given time, but also over time. And some experiences are more historically oriented than others. Some involve more emphasis on the future that we anticipated and that we'll never have. So, a loss of possibilities encompasses who we were, who we are now, who we expected to be, and what we anticipate from our future. But it allows for a great deal of variation, yes.

JD: Yeah, and just as a quick note for listeners, the grief survey that you conducted with Louise and other colleagues which you have made publicly available and the the database of responses to these surveys that you conducted with grievers really reflects that vast diversity of the ways that people experience grief and just plugging that in there for anybody who's listening I'll include a link to the to the database so that folks can go check that out if they're interested It's really such a rich resource. So thank you for doing that.

MR: Yeah. So and it really sort of broadened our thinking when you actually engage with so many different testimonies, you look at all these perspectives and really become alert to all the differences among these experiences.

JD: You touched on in your response to this last question around grief and the object of grief and lost possibilities, the temporarily extended nature of a grief process and lost possibilities around who one is, and I think that idea of losing possibilities that are relevant to who one knows oneself to be, to me, that does sort of maybe scratch the surface of why grief is something that doesn't just sometimes unfold over time, as you say, like it's something that must unfold over time.

And that was one of the ideas that really grabbed me when I first looked at the book. I was scanning it, I remember, in 2023, and I must have read a sentence where you said, "Grief is not something that can unfold over time, but something that must." And I thought that was so compelling and interesting, and you describe the two-sided structure of grief, and this is your words here, “that it can be about something very specific and yet at the same time encompass everything,” and that seems to hint also at why grief is a process that would necessarily take time, and just to quote you a little bit more, you write, "It is not that one first acknowledges a loss of possibilities and then grieves. Rather, it is through a grief process that we recognize and negotiate loss."

And you also write that, quote, "A grief process involves negotiating tensions between the explicit acknowledgement that someone has died and an experiential world that continues to implicate the person. So I noticed the two-sidedness is a complicated thing. It was for me to try to wrap my head around, but I'd love to ask you what feels most important about the two-sidedness of grief, specifically when it comes to understanding why grief is a process that must unfold over time.

MR: Right. There's quite a lot there. And as you say, it's philosophically fairly difficult as well. So let me have a first go at it. And then maybe if you come back and push me on some of this, if it's not clear. So I think we have to go back to this notion of a world, first of all, and to say something more specific about what it is to find oneself in a world. And you might say, well, I just look out on this neutral realm of objects all organised together in Euclidean space. But that isn't the case at all.

Right now, during this interview, I'm looking at a screen where the most pertinent thing going on is the interview itself, but I have a configuration of stuff around me involving a keyboard with a diary thrown underneath it, a few scraps of paper, a stapler, a big pile of books, a laptop next to a docking monitor, a copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time and various other things. And this isn't just a disparate collection of objects. It hangs together in a way that reflects my projects. So these things matter to me in various ways. They're significant to me in ways that reflect what I care about, what I value, what my current projects are, what my current situation is.

So our surroundings appear to us as significant in interconnected, patterned ways. And this applies more generally. You walk out the house as you're crossing the road. What's significant isn't the color of piece of gravel. It's the car that's approaching you at high speed. When you're going to a shop and you're buying your dinner, things appear significant in light of that project.

But let's look at the organisation of our lives. It's not just a certain project like doing an interview or trying to write an academic paper afterwards. It's not just going to the shop. There are so many interconnected projects which presuppose other projects and other projects on top. And of course, not everything takes the form of a goal-directed project. There are pastimes, things that just fascinate us for whatever reason, all these ingrained habits and expectations and familiar things and familiar paths through life. So the experienced world has this intricate, organised structure that reflects the structure of one's life. And now we can ask, when somebody dies, what does that do to the structure of one's life?

Well, in so many different ways, depending on the nature of the relationship and other aspects of one's circumstances, it disrupts that structure. Certain projects will no longer make sense, as when you were doing something for that person or we did it together for the future that we anticipated for ourselves. All those projects that involve caring for someone no longer make sense. Pastimes no longer make sense. Other people as well, we can't relate to them in the same way. We did so perhaps, you know, in the case of a spouse or bereavement, we related to all these people as a couple. That's where we went together and met other people. That's where we walked. So the whole structure of one's world is transformed.

And this is where we get to the duality. You can recognize the death of a person as something that arises within your world. So you encounter the fact of the death from within that world. It's in the context of a world that I look at the glass of water in front of me now. It's an object in the context of a pre-established reality at the same time though. This is the crucial point: That person has a duality in one's life. They weren't just an object in one's world. They were a condition for one's world. They were integral to the perspective through which one encountered everything. And in that way, your sense of being with that person is quite diffuse. All these circumstances point to their possible presence. All these significant things point to one's relationship with them.

And this applies, as I said, in different ways to different kinds of relationship. Even when a relationship is largely historical, one's biography, the significance of one's biography can be bound up with that person. So when someone dies then, one's emotional response isn't just occupied with the loss of something or rather someone within one's world, but with the profound disturbance of that world, the impossibility of going on in a certain way, and what can't be grasped in an instant is this radical transformation of one's world. It doesn't just encompass one's explicit thoughts, it encompasses all of one's habits, it encompasses the way one's house is arranged, one's diaries arranged, every aspect of one's life, stuff that we explicitly think about, stuff that we do in a bodily and thinking way. Because it spans so much, you couldn't take it all in in an instant.

And it's partly because we can't take it all in in an instant that there are these so many different experiences of tension and strangeness in grief. You know that they're dead, you're not in denial. You know you're 100% sure that they're dead. And yet at the same time you say those words and it just seems impossible because the world hasn't changed yet. It still looks like the same world where they could walk through the door. It's the same world where five minutes ago you were doing all these things that involved that person. So one can't accommodate the death in an instant. One's whole world has to change and that's something that takes place over an extended period of time and really has to, and it's something that can take place in a number of different ways.

Sorry, that was a very long answer to your question, but it was quite a big question.

JD: Thank you so much. No it was a beautiful answer. I have nothing to push on only just to say that I always think of this Freud's essay, Mourning in Melancholia, in which he describes the significance of the object that's been lost as one whose significance is reinforced by a thousand links. It makes me think of that what you're describing just sort of everywhere you look around you and and to Merleau-Ponty the language of like I weave dreams around the things, the extent to which the things around us are imbued with meaning and charged and you really do realize that after, for instance, losing somebody very important to you.

MR: So it's particularly striking, for example, when you walk into the house, the home or the office, the place of someone who's just died and how the objects around you are alive with a certain kind of significance. Moreover, that significance can be conflicted and contested. So aspects of your experience were acknowledged that this person has died. And yet other parts of your surroundings retain the kind of significance they had when that person was alive. So I think Simone de Beauvoir talks about the power of objects, just how so much can be embodied in a thing as it's immediately experienced.

JD: Thank you. I'd love to not totally switch gears, I think it seems so related to what you're talking about, although I wouldn't be the one to flesh out the connection but I want to ask you about something that you pay a lot of attention to in the book, which is the bodily nature of profound grief and this idea that significant losses take time to, as you're talking about, specifically to sink in, and that that sinking in is more than an experience of knowing something intellectually.

And as you've just been describing, it's not something that can happen instantaneously, which that phrase of something sinking in seems to imply that there's a temporal extension of it. It takes time to happen. And I think many people listening or people who have experienced grief would resonate with these points of the bodily nature of profound grief, as well the the sinking in aspect that things take time even though as you said someone can be not in denial they know with 100% certainty that someone is dead for example but there's for some reason that takes time to know in a bodily way. So why is it important to involve the body when we think about grief and more specifically the body as that through which we experience possibilities?

MR: Yes, I think there's a great deal to say about the body in grief, and I won't be able to say all of it in response to your question. But I think from my own philosophical perspective, the body is always integral to our experience of the surrounding world. So the way my surroundings appear significant to me now reflect my bodily capacities and my dispositions. Sometimes my experience of something as mattering in a certain way is inseparable from the felt pull of that object, it draws me in.

More generally, I think, and I've argued this over a number of years now, it's really important not to think of the feeling body in terms of feelings of the body, rather it's through the feeling body that we perceive, that we experience, that we engage with the world. And where grief is concerned and where emotion more generally is concerned, how we experience our surroundings, how we experience the significance of loss is inseparable from how we experience our bodies.

Something else I really noticed in relation to grief though is how people will talk about bereavement as akin to bodily mutilation or amputation, you know, it's as if I've lost a physical part of me. And you might say, well, that's just a metaphor to emphasize how painful this is emotionally. But I think other people shape our experiences of the world and shape our possibilities in ways that are very similar to our own bodies and indeed inseparable from the contributions of our own bodies. So, I mean, there's a lot more to be said, but I'll stop there because I think that gives you the gist of it.

JD: Yeah, thank you. And obviously, you deal with this quite a bit in the book through referencing Merleau-Ponty’s work on phantom limbs. And one of the things that you say in the book is sort of the way that those who've died or gone can remain present in an indeterminate, diffuse way.

And that actually does bring me to a couple of other things that I wanted to ask you, because you do this really interesting thing with indeterminacy, which is a word that I just love and feel so excited by. And you describe these two kinds of indeterminacy. And the first involves the erosion of life structure and quote, “a sense of lacking something that more usually shapes and guides one's experiences, thoughts and activities.”

Then you also describe indeterminacy in this other way as part of an enduring sense of connection with the deceased or the possibility of connection with the deceased. And that brings up this dilemma that I think, at least just anecdotally, I've heard people describe as experiencing when someone has died specifically around sort of how to remain in relationship with that person when they're no longer physically present in a way that could allow them to sort of surprise the bereaved or challenge or to allow the bereaved to be affected in the unique ways that they can be affected by someone who is alive.

And you share this really amazing passage from C.S. Lewis’ grief journals from the period following his wife Joy Davidman's death, and I'm going to read that now, and then I'll ask you a question about it. Um, so the quote from C .S. Lewis:

"Already less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Won't the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer here to check me to pull me up short as the real H. so often did so unexpectedly by being so thoroughly herself and not me. The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate, and yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant, in a word, real.”

And that's the end of that passage and so you really flesh this out in great detail, this idea of like the possibility of retaining a sense of indeterminacy in relationship with the dead, and you describe the possibilities of experiencing a person's presence and style in their physical absence.

And so I'd love it if you could speak a little bit to what you mean by that, and how it can shift the experience of continuing bonds after death, or how we think about continuing bonds after death if we're thinking about specifically the experiencing a person's presence and style and the indeterminacy that that involves.

MR: Yeah, and I agree with you that that's a beautiful passage from Lewis and it's incredibly rich and identifies exactly the themes that I try to address. So, could maybe start by just pointing out what an experience of continuing presence often isn't. The label bereavement hallucination is sometimes used to refer to experiences of the presence of someone who's died. And this makes it seem as if they tend to take the form of you see them. It's as if they're standing there in the room. You hear their voice as if they were speaking to you.

And I'm sure there are experiences that approximate that to varying degrees, but a lot of other experiences that people talk of in terms of the presence of someone who's died are much more diffuse in nature and as I say indeterminate, you have a feeling of relating to someone but you can't pin it down to something specific. It's as if they're sitting there wearing exactly the clothes they would have worn and so on. There's rather this non-localised sense of presence and we can get a grip of this, I think, by focusing on some much more familiar experiences.

So think of how, you know, going for a walk with someone they are very close to can enrich your surroundings and make a scene seem so much more interesting and engaging than it might otherwise be. And also conversely how being with certain people with whom you feel uncomfortable can sap the surrounding world of its significance and make everything seem drained and almost monochromatic.

So just think of, you know, if there's a walk that you tend to take with a particular person, the sense of being with them can actually involve enriching the possibilities offered by one's surroundings in ways that are spontaneous, in ways that you can't anticipate yourself. There are a source of possibility for you. They have a distinctive effect on your world in opening up and reshaping the possibilities that you experience unfolding in your surroundings. So your sense of the other person is inextricable from how they affect in this ongoing way, your own world.

And, you know, Lewis talks about the possibility of others to surprise you. So if we think in that way anyway, we could see how we could have a sense of being with someone, even though it doesn't physically appear as though they're there, even though that person has died. We have that distinctive unfolding of possibilities that characterizes being with them, the style of that person and the style of relating to that person. And, you know, even now I sort of struggle a bit to describe this. It's something that's quite hard to pick up on, just because you can't pin it down to anything concrete, anything physical. You can't blame it on hallucination in some conventional sense of the term.

And what Lewis describes at different points in that memoir is losing the sense of his wife's presence, of her distinctiveness, of what it is to be with her, to be affected by her. And so he tries to retain this, to etch her into memory in a deterministic manner. But of course, when he does that, she loses her spontaneity, she loses her ability to affect him, she just becomes his construct. And it's only when he ceases in this that she to him in a way in her spontaneity. So I don't, I'm not sure I put that very clearly. So if you want to come back on any of that, please do.

JD: I think it was a good response. I appreciate the, and I think I appreciate this throughout your work, that there's reverence for those aspects that are difficult to nail down or maybe difficult to say in a very explicit or direct way necessarily.

MR: One way of just trying to pin it down a bit would just be it is like something to be with a particular person. That can't be captured by appealing to anything more specific. And this is partly why the concept of a style, I think, is quite useful. You can just talk about a person's style and you can come up with a really long inventory of characteristics, but you won't capture it by trying to reduce it to something more specific.

JD: Yeah, and actually there was another thing that I wanted to ask you about narrative and I think this ties in a bit and I know Kathleen Higgins has written a lot about this and her work on aesthetics and art and artworks and stories and narrative and one of the sort of practical ways that it sounds like this style or what it's like to be with someone can possibly sometimes be accessed is through narrative and through talking to others about someone who's died maybe not necessarily, at least in my understanding, not necessarily in saying, like, repeating the same story over and over again about someone that, you know, the story that never changes that you hear told again and again, which we all know those and have them. But, like, the co-construction of narrative with other people in remembering the dead in a way and so that was something that you touched on a bit in the book and I don't know if I'm quite doing it justice exactly to what you were trying to get at but I thought that was useful.

MR: Yeah and I think Kathleen Higgins is really good on this in an article called “Love and Death” and also in her book Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning. So something she describes at one point is as you say co-constructing narratives with other people and you kind of get their perspectives on a relationship and you come to learn something new about the person, maybe not new facts, but new revelations about what it was like to be with that person. So you can recover something of their spontaneity, they're still generating new possibilities for you. And there are various ways in which I think that can happen, but certainly sharing with others is a really poignant example.

JD: Yeah, thank you for that, that's helpful. I don't think I was fully understanding that aspect of kind of being able to be surprised through hearing others' narrations of what it was like for them to be with that person. And I wanna ask you about narration and narrative, but before I do, I want to ask you about emotion regulation. And you make this argument that grief poses a distinctive challenge for emotion regulation.

And I'm curious, how does thinking about grief experience expand or shift how we think about emotion regulation, and how do you make sense of the unique difficulty of emotion regulation in the case of profound grief? I found your treatment of emotion regulation in the book to be very expansive in terms of what I thought emotion regulation was and what constitutes an experience of regulating my emotions. For example, I'm going to do yoga or I'm going to take some deep breaths when I'm angry. You described it as this much vaster thing than that.

MR: Yes, I think it is going to turn out to be a vast domain. And one of the tricky things about emotion regulation is it's understood in different ways. The notion of regulation is understood differently and emotion is understood in more or less permissive ways. One of the points I make is that the burden of structuring and regulating our emotions, well, to a large extent we don't need to actively regulate our emotions because they take care of themselves. One of the reasons they can do that is because our life is nice and organised and structured and things unfold in fairly predictable ways.

Our emotions reflect the ways in which things matter to us and these ways of mattering are structured and so on. So one of the things that makes grief challenging is that you've got to varying degrees a disruption of the world or the organisation of your life that ordinarily serves to regulate emotions, or allows them to take care of themselves so you don't need to regulate them, to take your pick on which story you want to endorse. So the normal context in which you have more mundane emotions is disrupted.

So grief involves engaging with the profound disturbance of one's world, but precisely because of that, you can't fall back on that world to regulate your grief. And often, although not in all instances, what you would otherwise do is turn perhaps to a particular person for support in those circumstances. Other people play a huge role in regulating our emotions.

We may elicit this regulation or we may not, but sometimes grief involves losing the very person who you would otherwise turn to, to regulate your emotions during times of disorientation and turmoil. So you lose the structure of your world, you're navigating this upheaval without the structure of your world to regulate the process of navigating it, and you can't fall back on external supports or scaffolding because they may be identical to or implicate in some way the person who's died.

JD: Yeah, thank you. That was great. I was really struck too by just the, I think you gave an example of like taking a bike ride and even that, like we tend to overlook the, I don't know if you would call it this, but like the relational entanglement of so many of the things that we might like. I would go take a bike ride, but if I don't have some degree of trust that the drivers on the road are going to watch out for me, maybe I'm not going to take a bike ride actually.

But that example was so striking to me in this different way of thinking about emotions more broadly, but more particularly emotion regulation and how the much greater extent than I think we tend to give credit, those of us who don't spend our time thinking about these things so rigorously, like how much we are taking into account relationships with others and assuming things of others.

MR: Yeah, and what you've just said, actually, adds another important point to the topic of emotion regulation, where if you've lost the person who you'd ordinarily turned to, suppose that perhaps because of the circumstances of the bereavement, because of others' behavior, or a wider situation, your trust in people more generally is eroded. You can be faced with a profoundly difficult task of trying to make sense of this loss and this disturbance of your world without the person who's died, but also without being able to fall back on others. So that's when one is, I think, quite profoundly lost.

JD: Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Two more questions for you. One is you talk about narrative as a regulating resource, so in continuing this theme of regulation, which makes intuitive sense to me, but you flesh it out in this really useful way and suggest that both the narratives one constructs and the act of narration can be supportive for regulating emotions during a grief process.

And you also say that cultural narratives about grief can contribute to these regulatory processes, which I think speaks to the importance of books like yours, that offer ways of thinking about and articulating grief experience that can help people better understand and sort of condition the experiences that they have in a way that might be expansive or make way for something maybe more eclectic or different than those narratives that people have inherited.

For example, something like the five stages of grief, you know, is something that a lot of people kind of turn to and hold on to, which can provide that scaffolding and be incredibly useful. But I would love to hear more from you about this idea of narrative as regulating and the differences that you parse out between the different forms of narrative, the narrative and the narration and then sort of the cultural narrative aspect, if that question makes sense.

MR: Yes, I mean, I don't think I covered that in so much detail in the book. I actually do a little bit more in a co -authored article with Eleanor Byrne called Grief Self and Narrative, which was published in Philosophical Explorations a while back. So one of the difficulties with narrative is it remains a very fashionable topic, but people understand narrative in different ways and there are various different kinds of narrative to discover and different roles for narrative and then there are different roles for narration and there's individual narration and shared narration.

So I think we can of course in the case of grief look at the narratives of a culture. So it's sometimes quite hard to find a film that doesn't involve somebody, at least one person dying in it, and at least one display of grief. Narratives of grief are all over the place. And there are lots of shared narratives which we may use to interpret our own grief and to interpret others' grief. And some of these narratives are associated with performances and rituals and practices. So, a positive angle here would be that when your own world is in turmoil, structured practices, rituals and narratives can facilitate ways of connecting with others and retaining and recovering some sense of world through them. At the same time, though, culturally established narratives can exclude, they can marginalise, they can trivialise, and they can stand in the way of expressing one's own grief.

When it comes to the narratives that we ourselves construct, again, there are distinctions here. We can tell stories that endure. We can have a story that gets elaborated upon, it gets refined, it gets related to others, they relate it to others, and there are other narratives that are much more ephemeral than they can play different roles. And I think one thing we're doing with narration and re-narration is trying to make sense of a biography that now has to be rewritten. And this isn't all done through narrative, but it's done in part through narrative.

So all of those events involving a particular person, all of those exchanges you might remember with them, all of those wider situations, the significance may now be changed in the wake of that person's death. So there's this process of reorganization of the structure of a life, and constant narration or re-narration can play a role there.

And it needn't, again, I think there's a lot of variety here. People do this in different ways. And that's just one thing that narrative can do. That's just part of this process of making sense of things. Something else you mentioned earlier, though, was the role of narration in keeping a sense of that person alive and how the construction of narratives with other people, the activity of changing, revising narratives, rendering things significant in new ways that can help sustain a sense of connection with them, what it was to be with them, and perhaps help with a sense of enduring connection. But those are really just a few things. I think there's a great deal more to say there, actually.

JD: Yeah, thank you. And I loved that paper that you published with Eleanor Byrne. And yeah, I think something that really struck me was kind of this idea of the significance of the past remaining open to revision. I just think that's a really deep insight that I gathered from your discussions of indeterminacy in the book and continuing bonds, as well as what you're speaking to now. And I just think that's a really powerful and helpful idea.

MR: Yeah. So when we were talking earlier about losses of possibilities, these concern the past as well, you know, the significance of one's past, the way in which it was organized and hang together, what appeared salient and how it appeared salient, what seemed like an achievement or a disappointment. All of this can relate to where we're heading, to a sense of the possibilities offered by the future. So a change in our sense of future possibilities is also a change in our sense of the past. All of this is renegotiated over time.

JD: Yeah, Thank you. Well, Matthew, there's about 10,000 other things that I would love to ask you and talk to you about, but I for now will say thank you so much for your generosity. And I'm gonna ask you one last question because I heard through the grapevine that you were working on another book and would love to hear about it if you have anything to share that feels exciting to you or that might be relevant to me or anyone listening.

MR: It's, it's at an early stage, but I'll share I'll share a little bit. So something those who are grieving will sometimes report is feeling haunted by loss and haunted in various other ways. So partly through the project on grief. I started to pick up on just how pervasive this talk of feeling haunted is. Not specifically with reference to ghostly matters, rather it's the feeling of being haunted by something.

So we could be haunted by our past, haunted by places, haunted by what we did, haunted by what others did to us, haunted even by what we expect from our future and haunted by loss. So what I'm hoping to do is develop a detailed philosophical study of what it is to feel haunted, which at the same time will advocate a certain perspective on emotional experience that emphasises dynamism, anticipation and indeterminacy, rather than neatly defined episodes that belong to categories like fear, joy, anger and sadness.

And I also want to reflect on what this tells us about the sense of self. When we feel haunted this relates somehow to our sense of self. So what might the possibility of our feeling haunted tell us about the nature of self experience? So as you might sort of figure based on that that it's called Feeling Haunted, a Phenomenological Study of the Emotional Self. And I've no idea when I'll get that done. It just depends how difficult it's gonna turn out to be.

JD: It sounds fascinating. I can't wait to read it. I can't wait also to read your other book, which I didn't read yet, but I appreciate, yeah. There's all of your applications and your incredible rigorous thinking about grief and creative thinking, and thank you again so much for your time, and it's just been such a delight to talk to you. -

MR: Well, thanks, it's been a pleasure talking with you.

JD: You're listening to Offerings, which is part of a reader and listener-supported processional research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can check out Matthew's book, Grief Worlds, which is available through MIT Press. For more on Matthew and his colleagues' work on grief at University of York, visit griefyork.com.

This interview and recording were produced by myself, Jessica Dore and Dave Coustan, who I want to extend an extra thanks to for both creative and technical support. If you appreciate this project and want to support it, There are a few ways you can do so. You can subscribe to Offerings at the free or paid level by clicking the subscribe button in the body of this post.

At the free level, you'll receive Offerings in your inbox which include robust previews of weekly-ish newsletters as well as full access to audio conversations like these. For as little as $5 a month, $50 a year, or a higher amount of your choosing, you'll receive the newsletters in full in both text and audio formats, access to the archives and priority and sometimes exclusive access to live events including Sunday meetings and workshops. Hitting the like button and /or sharing this conversation with someone you think would appreciate it are great ways to support the project as well. In any case, thank you so much for being here and we'll see you next time.

Just a reminder that hitting the like button is a great way to support this project. <3

Hi All,

I’m so excited to be sharing the first in a series of interviews with people who are thinking creatively and carefully about some of the topics I try to make sense of in Offerings. Today’s interview is with philosopher Ami Harbin, whose book Disorientation and Moral Life explores what she describes as “temporally extended, major life experiences that make it difficult for individuals to know how to go on.”

The way she thinks about moral life is also important to note here, I think. Far from involving only committed, decisive actions or clear ethical dilemmas, Harbin’s notion of moral life includes “a very broad set of things that we do, things that we intend, ways that we interact, ways that we behave and remember and feel…everything from how we cultivate relationships to how we think of ourselves, to how we remember our pasts, how we spend money…”

Disorientations “often involve feeling deeply out of place, unfamiliar, or not at home,” and can sometimes have what she describes as “tenderizing effects” on those who experience them. These experiences, though often extraordinarily difficult, can change how we understand and move through the world.

What first drew me into Disorientation and Moral Life was Harbin’s suggestion that experiences of disorientation can sometimes—with caveats, which she takes care to parse in the book—be morally beneficial. Thinking through this lens of disorientation has become really useful for me in part because, as Harbin argues, disorientations are common, they can and do have an impact on how we live, and in some cases may help us learn to live responsibly in unpredictable circumstances. Even when we don’t know how to go on.

Special thank you to Dave Coustan, who’s been a friend to both me and the Offerings project, offering creative and technical support with these interviews plus ongoing encouragement. Thank you to the frozen tide of southern Maine, whose beautiful sounds made their way in here as well.

Ami Harbin is an associate professor of philosophy and women and gender studies at Oakland University near Detroit, Michigan. Originally from Canada, she moved to the U.S. in 2012 and is the author of two books, Disorientation and Moral Life published by Oxford University Press in 2016, and Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity published by Oxford in 2023. She teaches classes in ethics, healthcare ethics, and feminist theory and her main research interests are in philosophy of emotion, moral psychology, and psychiatric ethics.

I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Offerings is part of a reader- and listener-supported research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. Offerings are accessible in full for paying subscribers and in part for for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get priority access to live events with limited space, including Sunday Meetings, workshops, and one-on-one sessions. To support this project by becoming a paying subscriber, hit the “subscribe now” button below.

Jessica

Hi, hitting the like button is a great way to support this project. <3

This is the audio version of the Offering for February 2025, “Lost possibilities.”

Offerings is part of a reader- and listener-supported research project examining grief, loss, and mourning. Offerings are accessible in full for paying subscribers and in part for for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get priority access to live events with limited space, including workshops, and one-on-one sessions. To support this project by becoming a paying subscriber, hit the “subscribe now” button below.