Living Wild Creativity Practice: The Language of Grief

Creativity Practice

Like the rest of you,
I thought of escape

—— “A Road for Loss” by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

Again the gods put their large hands in me,
move me, break my heart like a clay jar of wine,
loosen a beast from some darklong depth—

—”Grief Work” by Natalie Diaz

“When language can lift the veil, we can see each other”

—Ocean Vuong

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild.

Welcome to my bi-monthly Living Wild Prompt, that where I meditate on craft and living wild and offer exercises in writing and creativity, published on Wednesdays. If you are a paid subscriber, you can check out this and other Living Wild Prompts in the archive by looking for posts with fox pictures.

Also for paid subscribers, in case you missed it, click this link to listen the most recent audio version of my weekly Meditation on All Things Wild.

Also, please check out my events page for an upcoming memoir workshop and a chance to work on a year-long book project with me.

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—-With special thanks to reader Evelyn Jackson for the reminder and inspiration.

After a week of watching storms sweep in—on the mountain and across the country—I settle into winter. Nearly two feet of snow falls and the slick conditions have me cancelling classes. Cars skitter and slide off roads and I spend hours chipping ice from the driveway because I can’t get my car backed in without a graceless, slow-motion pitch toward an embankment.

The reliable Rocky Mountain sun goes missing.

I’ll be honest: these have been days of grief. I hide it in my body which has gone numb with the holding, along with the heavy weight of shock, the longing for anything but this deep cataclysm inside.

Grief is more than sorrow, more than sadness. It is the sound lightning makes as ions rush to expand (boom) then contract (clap). It is a shock to the body, the terrible knowledge of the difference of days, the calving of glaciers that have held for centuries, the end of a species (say the names), the empty dog crate in the living room, the silence after passing, the absence you carry with you through the web of days.

Today I grieve for the future which suddenly seems darker than I could ever have imagined or believed. But this grief is existential, a basket of what ifs that I can’t even begin to untangle. Instead, I rest my heart on that empty dog crate, the one I unearthed from the crawl space last weekend in preparation for Petunia whom we hoped to call Tulip, the Dutch Shepherd mix, Greg and I would bring home, the one I filled with the hope of the particular joy a dog brings to a family and a home.

This morning, the crate padded with blankets and strewn with treats, along with my office, rearranged to fit a dog bed alongside my ThermaRest for the nights I would spend with our new family member while the 23 year-old cat acclimated to her presence, are most of what remains of Petunia/Tulip who was with us for just 17 hours.

Shall I tell you this story of grief? The terrible tale of a dog so fearful and