The Collective Funeral

in the past 5 years, we have suffered a great amount of unresolved loss and mass death. The Covid-19 pandemic has + continues to kill millions and disable millions more. it has been brushed under the rug by the government and societally, pretending that deaths didn’t happen, giving us no collective place to grieve. 

the Palestinian genocide, in its next moment of unfoldment, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths we have either had personal connection to, or have watched unfold across our screens. the way that the Palestinian genocide highlighted other ongoing and severe genocides in the Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Tigray, and other locations.

The weight of the collection of these events on their own is unbearable.

Not to mention our own personal griefs and losses both connected and unconnected to these events. All the things we have lost, without a place to acknowledge them, tend them, grieve together.

in holding all of this + exploring my own personal orientation to grief, which includes deep holding and practice over the last 17 years, I’ve been moved to offer a space where we can grieve together. some things I’ve learned from grieving the mass shooting murder of my sisters + the subsequent shootings I’ve survived following (including a friend and neighbor who committed a shooting in my neighborhood) has been the gift of grief. and the gift of sharing it collectively.

somatic snacks is the love offering of Sirius Heart at Spiderweb Somatics. they are a mad, disabled, freaky animist somatic practitioner who thrives off of community support + is invested on recirculating that support to their people. to connect with the web of circulating care + support, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

my grief in these spaces has only ever digested, been composted, been validated and held and supported, when i have shared it in the company of wise dear friends and supporters who see me, know me, and love me. when they + the collective web can hold the weight of my agony.

where i can actually feel the weight of the suffering, held in the knowledge that others feel this too, i am not alone.

we are not alone.

and truly, it’s only a web that can hold that kind of agony. when i think about what we’ve experienced these past 5 years, my body feels so, so heavy. there are moments that I can’t even contain the level of exhaustion and deep grief at the repeated deaths we’ve seen either directly or through our screens. that weight hangs heavy in the air.

they hang there, unacknowledged and fully bulldozed by our white supremacist imperialist death cults, in the name of furthering capitalism and their ghastly visions of “progress”. ghosts crying for expression of their names, crying for us to remember their lives.

and now in the wake of the election in the United States, we have a new wave of exhaustion and grief as some of us reckon with the increased risk we are under in a more swift way. either result was going to deliver genocide; now we have the masks off and acting with immediacy version being served up to us within only a couple of months. underneath all our frenzied current action, there is a deep exhaustion. sadness. despair. my mentor termed it a felt sense of powerlessness.

we need, desperately, a space to feel this together.

grief, when felt, can become what lives between us and sustains us. when felt, it can be held in the web between us and open us more deeply. unacknowledged, it’s a weight. validated and held between us, it opens us to more life. it reconnects us.

it reminds us we are not alone.

it’s in this knowing, and in my own practices of approaching my grief the past few weeks (begun before the election ever really entered my consciousness, as a way for me to process the incalculable loss that Covid has brought me, that the unfolding Palestinian genocide has landed in my body) that I want to offer this group space.

The Collective Funeral, on the morning of December 1st, is a somatic deathwork rite and half-day retreat intended to offer a place to process grief collectively + have a communal funeral rite to honor what we have lost. The Collective Funeral is an explicitly mad and disabled centered + led space. 

we will have time to journal, reflect, connect, and share together, before we come together and express our grief. each participant will also receive an herbal remedy flower tincture for grief to support them in integration pre, during, and post-funeral rite, provided by my friend and colleague Avey from Wolfberry Apothecary.
 

With openness to access needs, the funeral space itself is intended to be an intercept in the “civilized” “quiet” and “hidden” ways that white supremacy forces us to tend to grief. Therefore, we will hold space for loud, colorful, expansive expression of grief. Wailing, crying, painting, drawing, dancing, moving, screaming, all will be encouraged and allowed.

Grief needs a voice. a song. a dance. Grief needs a web. Grief needs movement. Grief is like salt held in water. grief needs us to witness it. together.

come grieve together.

If you would like more information before registering, you can find it here.

Sign ups will close on the 26th to allow for time for the herbal remedies to be sent. There is one spot that has been sponsored for a member of the global majority or a disabled working class trans person; please reach out if you would like that space, via email to siriusheart@proton.me.