The Wild Edges of Sorrow with Francis Weller

Prentis is joined by Francis Weller - writer, therapist and soul activist. He wrote the Wild Edge of Sorrow and so eloquently shares about the collective responsibility of grief. Prentis and Francis talk about the hero's myth, the emptiness of whiteness and how grief rituals and communal ceremonies help reconnect us to the deep echo chamber of the soul.

• Check out Francis’ book the Wild Edges of Sorrow

Transcript

BTP - Francis Weller
=========================================

Prentis
00:00 - 00:21
Hi everyone, welcome back to Becoming the People. I'm Prentis Hemphill. A few months ago now, I think I was doing a Q&A and someone asked me the question of, who are the therapists that inspire me? And for some reason in that moment, I drew a complete blank.

Prentis
00:21 - 00:46
I couldn't think of anybody. But if I were to roll the tape back, I'd say a number of people, but one of those people I would say is Francis Weller. Francis is a therapist, he's a writer, but he's something else. He's someone that brings a lot of us back into the depth of the human experience and not just the individual experience, but the communal experience.

Prentis
00:47 - 01:10
If you've read his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, you know what I mean. That book was so I don't know, it was just so rich for me when I read it so many years ago. I've recommended it to many, many people. But it places grief in the collective and it places grief in the collective responsibility to create ritual that responds to our actual lives.

Prentis
01:10 - 01:51
He wrote also The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation and In the Absence of the Ordinary. Both of these books I highly recommend if you are, not only if you're a therapist, but if you're someone considering how we take some of the things that we each suffer with and are grieving over and bring it back into the communal space, all with the hopes of becoming more and more human and humane with each other. His work was shaped by his friendship, his long friendship with Maladoma Somme, who was a teacher, is a late teacher, who taught me so much, whose work is just profound.

Prentis
01:51 - 02:14
And I really feel like you can feel their conversation continue in Francis's work around ritual and holding communal space. When we sat down to have this conversation, I don't think we knew exactly where it was going to go. We hadn't met before. I was really nervous and excited, but my father had died just three weeks earlier and Francis's brother had died just two weeks before.

Prentis
02:15 - 02:53
So we met in that space of grief, but widened out from there to so much. I mean, we talked about the kind of hero's myth at the core of this culture and what that does and does not do for our ability to grow up. We talked about ritual, we talked about soul, we talked about the emptiness of whiteness, we talked about ecological collapse in an honest way. This conversation is one that I, you know, I've been anticipating talking to Francis for many, many years, and this conversation is still working on me and having been able to connect with him.

Prentis
02:54 - 03:37
For those of you who are not familiar with his work, this is such a treat to be introduced to him and his way of being and creating. For those of you who know his work, it's just so lovely to hear him speak in a way that gives us the courage, I think, or offers us the courage to really face into this moment. So this is an episode that has a lot to do with how we practice together, how we build together. For all of us, I think, who gather here on this podcast that are disoriented by this moment, Francis is illuminating something for us and asking us to continue to be the ones that will illuminate that path.

Prentis
03:37 - 03:51
So there's so much medicine in this episode. I hope and believe that you will enjoy it and would love to hear all of your feedback and all the conversation over on the Patreon. Thank you so much. See you next week.

Prentis
03:53 - 04:14
Francis, first, a lot of gratitude to you. You are someone that I have read over the years, that I've looked to over the years, and it really is a big honor. I was talking to a friend earlier, and I said, I'm interviewing Frances Weller, and she was so excited. So I want you to know there's lots of us that are grateful for your voice in this time and are excited for this conversation.

Prentis
04:14 - 04:15
So thank you.

Francis Weller
04:15 - 04:19
Thank you so much for that kind acknowledgement. I appreciate that.

Prentis
04:20 - 04:31
Of course, of course. You know, it's interesting to be talking to you. This is my first interview after my father passed. My father passed just three weeks ago.

Prentis
04:31 - 04:51
Oh my gosh. I was like, what a time to be talking to Francis Weller about grief and this time. So I feel my tenderness present, but it made me really... curious actually to know more about you and connect just on that human level.

Prentis
04:51 - 05:13
And I think I just want to start with a little bit of like, what brings you to the work that you do? I know that you're a therapist, but the specific, you know, place where you play and cultivate and deepen around grief, around ritual, how did you get here? How did you get to this part?

Francis Weller
05:16 - 05:26
A lot of tributaries to that question. First of all, just honoring your tender heart. My brother died two weeks ago. He was the fourth family member to die in the last 14 months.

Francis Weller
05:32 - 05:41
We are holding a lot of tenderness together, so I will sit there with you today, Prentis. Thank you. I'll be there with you.

Prentis
05:41 - 05:46
What was your father's name? Edward. Edward. And your brother?

Francis Weller
05:47 - 05:53
Clarence. Clarence. Yeah. OK.

Francis Weller
05:56 - 06:21
Well, speaking of fathers, my father had a very massive stroke when I was 15 or 16 years old. And that was kind of the end of his, he couldn't speak after that. And sadly, he and I never had a conversation before that. So there was a kind of a distance between us that never really got bridged.

Francis Weller
06:23 - 07:06
So there was a melancholy in my life from the very beginning and then dealing with kind of the internal sense of erosion of my own value, of my own worth. And so, you know, I wrote about the five gates of grief and that second gate has to do with the parts of us that never knew love. where there were massive parts of my life that did not know love in my family constellation and my church and education and all those things. And so I kind of grew up with this melancholic companion walking with me all the time.

Francis Weller
07:08 - 07:30
And then by choice, by soul design, by whatever, I became a therapist. And sitting with people for 43 years, the only most common denominator is that every story is carrying sorrow. Every piece of it. And for the first 10 years or so of my practice, I would work with people.

Francis Weller
07:31 - 08:04
one-on-one, but then I got introduced to ritual through a connection with Maladoma Somme, the African teacher, and he and I began to have a good friendship and worked together for five or six years teaching. But that introduction to ritual really put the community back into grief work. Because our frameworks are so individualized in our Western psychology. And so the approach is always individual.

Francis Weller
08:05 - 08:41
Or maybe you'll have a group therapy session. But when I saw the work of communal ritual, I began to see how fundamentally necessary that was to our own psychological, soulful, spiritual, communal health. And that was a real missing element in our approach to most every issue, psychologically speaking. So that's been my work over the past three decades, has been to reanimate what I call the original matrix, the primal matrix for how humans heal.

Francis Weller
08:41 - 08:53
I mean, your beautiful book, you know, How We Heal, speaks to that same thread, right? I mean, we don't do this privately. We don't do this even one-on-one. That's a good place to start.

Francis Weller
08:53 - 09:18
I used to tell many of the people I sat with, this is a good place to learn how to tolerate contact in the most vulnerable places. But ultimately, you'll need a much larger holding space for your healing to occur. Your psyche is expecting many others to be involved in your return. And so that's been, that's really been the core of my work and grief.

Francis Weller
09:19 - 09:46
That thread is not receding in our cultural story, is it? It's growing and magnifying day by day by day, whether it's ecological, social, racial, gender. Every thread of it is saturated with fear and sorrow right now, and hopefully some sense of hope attached to it as well.

Prentis
09:48 - 10:33
I want to talk about all of those things with you because I think your work presents some I think challenges to how we think about, even people like me who tend to be kind of social justice oriented or social change oriented, there's challenges that don't feel oppositional to me, but they feel like they challenge the very way I think about going about the work that I do or working with other people. So I want to drop into some of those places in a minute. There's something you mentioned that I just really related to in the kind of the companion of melancholy that you talked about as a child and I felt in my own childhood completely visited by melancholy.

Prentis
10:33 - 10:55
I felt like that was and I think in a large part it still remains to me the kind of flavor of life. It has a tinge to that around the edges and I wonder what kind of teacher melancholy has been for you. I feel the threads of it in your writing and your work, the capacity to hold that.

Francis Weller
10:56 - 11:17
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why the whole language and metaphors that arrive with soul speak most directly to me. Not so much spirit, which is, you know, in some imaginations is more of an ascension type of thing. But melancholy and soul take us down. We go into the depths.

Francis Weller
11:18 - 11:50
We say we had a deep conversation. It was a very soulful conversation. Well, because we touched into the depths, into our vulnerabilities, our wounds, our grief, our fears, our failures, all those things that culturally in this heroic society we try to avoid or bypass or rise above as fast as we can, right, to show strength and robustness. Those are beautiful things, but If they're used to cover over what is most human, how do we connect?

Francis Weller
11:51 - 12:18
How do we share the commons of the soul? The fact that all of us will know loss and sorrow and loneliness and fear. But if we have no language for that, if we have no geography for that, how do we learn to walk through that territory? And I think that's a lot of what your work and my work has been about, is giving some sense of the geography.

Francis Weller
12:19 - 12:20
Where are we walking together?

Prentis
12:23 - 12:42
What was that term you just used? The kind of heroic... Society. The heroic society, I'd like for you to say maybe a little bit more that it's connecting up to what I read in your work about the kind of culture of ascension, always needing to ascend.

Prentis
12:42 - 12:44
I wonder if you can just drop me into that.

Francis Weller
12:46 - 13:16
The heroic ideal is the dominant metaphor of the society. It's always about rising and succeeding and climbing and achieving and proving and earning and deserving. conquering and mastering our whole language, even in psychology, is about that same quality of ascent, always getting over something, succeeding. And so that becomes the dominant metaphor, the dominant imagery.

Francis Weller
13:18 - 13:39
And so when you have an experience that doesn't match that, you feel ashamed, you feel wrong, you feel like you're failing. I remember riding home from a men's conference once, and my friend asked me, so Francis, are you happy? I said, well, I have moments, and I cherish them. I'm grateful for the happy moments.

Francis Weller
13:39 - 14:01
I said, but I've stopped trying to be happy, because every time I wasn't, I felt like I was failing. Because that's, you know, that's, even in psychology, again, that's kind of the litmus right now, is happiness. And so I said, but the thing I want is to be alive. And that every one of these emotions, grief, sadness, fear, anxiety, there's vitality in them.

Francis Weller
14:02 - 14:24
And if I push them away in favor of the positive emotions, then I'm going to lack any sense of depth, any sense of compassion. Because that's how I cultivate compassion, right? It's through my own experience of suffering and being open to the suffering of others. In the heroic ideal, we learn to hide the suffering.

Francis Weller
14:25 - 14:43
to only show the strong face, the happy face, the I've got it, my shit together face. But again, that's not where intimacy comes from. That's not where friendship comes from. That comes from not letting go of the heroic, but knowing when to set it down.

Francis Weller
14:44 - 15:01
So we're not only trapped within that one archetypal imagery. And the heroic is beautiful in our youth. That's a time to celebrate the heroic, that standing up and finding your beauty and your dignity and your strength and your courage. That's gorgeous.

Francis Weller
15:02 - 15:32
But we've not set it down ever. So we have people in their 70s and 80s and 90s still trying to be that 20-year-old heroic person and the roles they're supposed to be playing of elder, of steward, of guide, of caretaker. Those are not being cultivated by and large by very many walking in this society right now. I'd say one more thing.

Francis Weller
15:32 - 15:53
I was leading initiation for men for many years and we called it the making of ordinary men. The idea is that it's beautiful to be an ordinary man. Oh, I love that, Francis. Because an ordinary man will show up for his family, for his kids, for their community, for their culture.

Francis Weller
15:53 - 16:19
So it's not trapped within just, you know. The other thing, again, that adolescent quality of the heroic, when it's persistent to our adulthood, it always remains about me. And the imagination and the engagement and the sensitivity and the attunement to the culture around us becomes almost obscured by self-absorption, right? But that's what the heroic thing does.

Francis Weller
16:19 - 16:25
I always have to keep showing you I'm good. I've got it. And I hope I said enough about the heroic.

Prentis
16:28 - 17:16
Yeah, and part of the feeling that I'm getting too from what you're sharing, that ascension, that kind of adolescent heroism, it kept feeling to me like a almost impulse to just keep, I think you said rise above, but keep popping out, keep popping up. And I'm sensing, and I know you talk about in your work a little bit about this time period and how you're thinking about it or at least languaging how it's feeling for you. The descent, but there's it there feels to be to me like a just a different energy that you're inviting us to rather than the popping out I'm thinking about how expression moves? Or what are other options for how expression can move?

Prentis
17:16 - 17:42
It almost made me feel this kind of spiraling down energy as you were talking. I was like, what would be different than popping up? It's not just falling down, but there's a kind of spiraling down sensation that I got. And I wonder if you can talk about both kind of what you think this time is, and what the invitation is to how we can move and be in it and be here?

Francis Weller
17:45 - 18:04
That's a really important question. I've spent many, many, many hours thinking about that question. How I imagine where we are right now is what I call, we've entered the long dark. that we're in this period of descent collectively as a planet.

Francis Weller
18:05 - 18:41
And no one is going to be exempt from this descent. We have been on a three or four thousand year ascension model, you know, of conquest, supremacy, colonization, you know, all of the things that came out of white European culture, basically, is now collapsing, gratefully, but that collapse is also difficult. We've become very adapted to this system of being. So economics and all the societal agreements, they're all collapsing, and that's a good thing at the same time.

Francis Weller
18:42 - 19:04
But the invitation is toward a very different mode of being. Rather than, again, stepping out and making things happen, which is that heroic model, we're being asked to get silent and to listen. to practice great humility, because we don't have a goddamn clue what's happening right now. We don't know what's happening.

Francis Weller
19:04 - 19:24
And if we keep trying to just do what we did in the past with more fervor, we're just going to accelerate the trouble. So there's something about what the invitation is. Again, soul speaks to moving slowly. My friend Bayo Akamalafi says from the Yoruba tradition that, you know, the times are urgent.

Francis Weller
19:25 - 20:01
We must slow down. You know, I just love that. And that that's really the invitation is almost a non-heroic response to get quiet, to listen, to become permeable again to the dreaming earth. The most living cultures are rooted in a deep affinity and affection for the earth and the earth itself is reciprocal and it speaks to them and gives them the myths, the stories, the rituals, the language, the practices.

Francis Weller
20:02 - 20:22
It helps to hold the community together. And when you abandon that, You have individualistic chaos, basically, is what we have now. So the invitation, like I'm saying, is one of slowing down. There's a beautiful term that comes out of the Inuit tradition, north of the Arctic Circle, called kartsaluni.

Francis Weller
20:23 - 20:47
And some of your listeners may have heard this term, but the word literally translates, sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth. That is gorgeous. And that comes out of the whaling people. They couldn't go out to hunt a whale until the whale people gave them a song.

Francis Weller
20:49 - 21:02
And so it was not an act of extraction. We need it, we'll take it. No, it's an act of reciprocity, of great humility, of mutuality. We will gratefully listen.

Francis Weller
21:03 - 21:33
You know, to receive a song, please. And we will also only take what we need to survive from your people. And we'll do that with gratitude and humility, you know. So the times are asking us to really attune to a different frequency, to come back into some alignment with watershed and community and bioregion and what we call in the old language, the Anima Mundi.

Francis Weller
21:33 - 21:50
the soul of the world. The soul of the world is dreaming this right now, and our job is to, like we do every night, try to pay attention to the dream, but also to the dreaming world. What is it saying to us right now? How do we return to her?

Francis Weller
21:51 - 22:21
How do we return to this body that is so glorious and filled with such majesty, and not just use it as a consumption bin? Can I say one more thing? In terms of the long dark, I really want to emphasize both of those words. Long meaning this isn't going to end when this administration ends.

Francis Weller
22:21 - 22:47
We're talking at least two generations. This is a long walk we're on. I'm not going to see the end of this long dark, but I still have responsibility to the long dark to plant seeds as often as I can. So saying yes to you or to others, you know, what can I do to magnify the possibility of a seed breaking forth, you know.

Francis Weller
22:48 - 23:05
And that's also the value of darkness. The seed has to be in that darkness. It has to be incubated and gestated and dreamt into being. And so the darkness is really this place of, again, not doing, but of dreaming, of listening, of getting quiet.

Francis Weller
23:07 - 23:13
So both of those words are very important in the way that we approach these next 50 years.

Prentis
23:14 - 23:43
There's a few places I want to go and see if I can elegantly put them together. I don't know if I can. But you've mentioned soul, and you've written about soul. And I think growing up in the Black South, I have a certain way of understanding soul that doesn't feel completely different from what you mean.

Prentis
23:46 - 24:43
but may have some distinctions, but I understand soul in my way and how to recognize soul, how to see if someone is moving with soul or allowing their soul to be shown, you can feel is a qualia to soul for me. But I guess I want you to talk about that a little bit more, but I guess one of the things that comes up for me when we even think about the dissent and the grief that comes up for me when we think about moving into this dissent is sort of coming from a perspective and a people where I feel like we've been both alerting to the dissent and feeling the early ramifications. I don't know if they're early, but feeling when you talk about colonization, you talk about all these things, I'm like, I still feel very much the repercussions of those catastrophes.

Prentis
24:43 - 25:11
And I know there's other peoples that have similar experiences, probably all of us if we look in a certain way. But when we talk about the dissent, of course I see the global dissent that we're in, but there's a particular sort of grief that I feel that I wonder if other folks listening feel of, I don't know that I ever felt the us scent. I don't feel the company. No, I think that's probably true.

Prentis
25:11 - 25:15
Yeah. And that feels devastating a bit, if I'm honest with you.

Francis Weller
25:18 - 25:52
Yeah, that's a powerful thing you just said, Prentis. I mean, my responsibility is to write and talk about white emptiness as much as I can. and a thread that I don't hear spoken about at all, basically, out there. But the consequences of that emptiness that arose out of white European societies has been devastating to the planet, to people, to cultures, to languages, to species, to gender.

Francis Weller
25:53 - 26:24
And there's nothing that's been untouched by white emptiness. In our desire, in our rapacious hunger for more, always wanting more, more land, more power, more wealth, more dominance, whatever it is, this is a crucial issue. I hear you, and I'm very touched by what you just said around never having experienced the ascent. And as a white man, obviously I have.

Francis Weller
26:24 - 26:43
I have benefited from this in many, many ways, the privilege of it. But my soul feels the exact opposite. It feels the deep, deep grief you just mentioned about, holy shit, what have my people done? And how do we repair this?

Francis Weller
26:43 - 27:06
How do we begin to account for it? I wrote about in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, this racism workshop that I was in some years ago in Berkeley, many years ago. And we were going around the circle, and just by the sheer design of it, I was the last one to speak. And I said, what I'm looking at is how to address this question of emptiness in my people.

Francis Weller
27:06 - 27:37
And a black man leapt out of his chair and said, that's it. Until your people address this issue, you're going to continue to kill us every fucking day. You're going to continue to steal from us every fucking day. And it hit me like that's my spiritual obligation to try to unpack this thing, to speak about it, which is almost like a heresy to write about white emptiness and the culture of abundance, of the have-it-all society of, you know, you make yourself, you build yourself up.

Francis Weller
27:37 - 27:48
And again, more of the shadow of that heroic ideal. I didn't know we were going to go here, but this is really, I'm so touched by what you shared.

Prentis
27:51 - 28:01
And I feel the real truth. I mean, I feel kind of, when you talk about the white emptiness, something familiar and chilling. I think that's the feeling I have. It's a chilling feeling.

Prentis
28:03 - 29:15
And how early I felt that I was trained into recognizing that as a state and to try to, I mean, some of it is the double consciousness stuff, you know, of like trying to manage your image in the face of white gaze, but also knowing that there was something unpredictable, grasping, haunting, something just on the other side of that gaze that could chill me as a child. I mean, some of my earliest memories, I was writing an essay of like that moment where I realized, oh, my father in particular couldn't protect me from that, from the existence of that kind of, you know, void vacuum feeling. And I'm really, Yeah, there's a perspective from which I know it, but then there's, and know how it moves and what it does and all that.

Prentis
29:15 - 29:32
I think there's a lot that I can just witness in my life and the lives of people around me. But also, I don't know what it feels like exactly. I mean, I have a sort of empathetic, I can kind of tune into it a little bit, but I don't know what it feels like. And when I think about you and others I know doing that work of...

Prentis
29:34 - 29:48
naming that and taking responsibility from that. I'm like, how do you contour that thing? What is it asking for? How does it, to me on this end, it feels almost, what's the word?

Prentis
29:50 - 29:56
Just like it doesn't have an end. So how do you shape it enough to actually transform it?

Francis Weller
29:59 - 30:02
I think the first and most important thing is for us to even just name it.

Prentis
30:03 - 30:03
Yeah.

Francis Weller
30:04 - 30:24
That behind privilege and behind consumerism is this rapacious, never-ending hunger. And we can't fill it. We've tried to fill it by what I call secondary satisfactions. Wealth, privilege, rank, status, economic...

Francis Weller
30:25 - 30:47
positioning, material goods, even addictions are forms of trying to fill the void. And we don't see these as symptoms, we see these as values in this culture. To become highly ranked and to get to the top of the ladders, that's the goal. But what if that's a symptom?

Francis Weller
30:48 - 31:03
of what arises out of the emptiness, that we don't stop and look at that. So I think the first thing is we begin to name it, we begin to identify the symptoms. It's like we're looking at a disease. You know, in the Native American culture, they call this huetico.

Francis Weller
31:03 - 31:23
That's one of the terms they call it. Huetico translates basically as a cannibalistic psychosis. That's a pretty descriptive term for white folk. You know, that we are consuming everything we can And we're even consuming the source of what would sustain us as a planet.

Francis Weller
31:24 - 31:34
And we don't see that as crazy. We don't see that as a symptom of a mass psychosis. But it is. So I think the very first thing we have to do is begin to name that.

Francis Weller
31:34 - 32:09
And my true confession is I've been trying to write this essay for years. And it's the hardest piece of writing I've ever done because I don't want to even look at it. I don't want to sit in that place of having to digest several thousand years of white supremacy and colonization, but underneath it is this mass forgetting, this profound amnesia of who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred. We've forgotten the three most important questions.

Francis Weller
32:10 - 32:40
And we've turned it completely toward economic success and power and control. So maybe the very first thing we have to do is sit together and grieve and just absolutely weep into the hole that we have never turned around to face. We've been trying to outrun that emptiness for hundreds and hundreds of years. Where was the first corporation formed?

Francis Weller
32:40 - 33:03
Well, up in the northern part of the European continent. the Dutch West Indies, you know, and out from that capitalism you have to have supply and demand, and you have to have people to fill all that supply. So slavery comes out of that. I mean, the whole litany that arises out of this emptiness is staggering.

Francis Weller
33:04 - 33:23
So the very first thing, you know, name it. And then begin to see, I gave a talk in Minnesota last October, laying out how we experience this individually, this emptiness, this chronic feeling of lack, of not enoughness. I've got to improve myself. I've got to be better.

Francis Weller
33:24 - 33:50
And then societally, how does this show up in our society? And why does the United States consume at a rate The whole planet right now takes about 1.9 Earths per year to supply everything. But if everyone lived according to the ways that we do in the United States, it would take 4.9 Earths. Why?

Francis Weller
33:50 - 34:32
What is it about? this perpetual hunger that you can never satisfy, which is the true definition of addiction, always wanting more of what you don't need. How can we understand this other than this sense of emptiness that we just feel ache in our bodies, in our souls, that I don't have enough, I'll never be enough. I worked with a lot of wealthy people in my practice over the years and Their core lament is, I don't have enough yet, I need more, I need more, I need more.

Francis Weller
34:32 - 34:41
What the heck? It makes absolutely no sense, right? No sense! But still I can understand the compulsion.

Prentis
34:41 - 34:43
Yeah, absolutely.

Francis Weller
34:43 - 34:46
This is the only way to respond to this emptiness is to gather more.

Prentis
34:48 - 35:13
and when compulsion becomes the culture. And I also don't mean, and I'm kind of saying this for listeners, that it's inherent even to white people. I mean, I think what you're talking about is so contagious and it spreads. Now, you may have a kind of cultural inoculation that makes it harder for it to spread.

Prentis
35:13 - 35:27
But that same emptiness or version of that emptiness can absolutely spread to us, to people like me too. It is very viral in that way.

Francis Weller
35:28 - 35:41
Yes, yes. I think that's a beautiful way to say that. And that's what they talk about with the huético. They see it that it is a contagion, that it doesn't stay self-contained, it spreads and it's now, you know, filtering across the planet.

Francis Weller
35:42 - 36:08
When I spent some time in Maladoma's village, you know, I'd see the young men there wearing wristwatches that sometimes didn't even work. But they had them on because that was a symbol, that was a sign of entering into that economic status and as if that's going to somehow improve their life. Well, obviously it doesn't, but the disease, it definitely is spreading. Yeah.

Prentis
36:09 - 36:52
So soul seems like, you know, if moving from that place, I don't know, what's your sense? I feel like When I, again this is my, having read you but also my kind of felt sense of what you mean, but my sense of soul, when you move with and from that place, I think you write a lot about reverence, the reverence as possible for the ordinary, the everyday, that you see how the soul exists in all, in all things. It reveals itself to you in all things.

Prentis
36:52 - 37:36
And I struggle to figure out, and maybe this already is taking me outside of actually what the work is, but wanting that to spread, wanting to say there's something here, that is immeasurable, that is, it's beyond what I can even express to you in language. And it exists in you, and it exists inside of everything, it's in all of these moments. And all the grasping you're doing to accumulate something isn't necessary. But I see in your work and your writing and the way that you offer, you're sharing, you're hoping that the seed, plant the seed that it spreads.

Prentis
37:36 - 37:42
And maybe this is my urgency of it. I'm like, isn't this should, isn't this contagious? I can't tell.

Francis Weller
37:46 - 38:09
I think the fact that we're having this conversation is saying yes, yes. When I first started talking about this in the late 90s, it was crickets. It was very, very quiet. So I am absolutely seeing a groundswell, and like I said, when I began offering grief rituals, we had to convince people to come.

Francis Weller
38:11 - 38:29
You know, why do I want to spend a weekend crying? I mean, that's not fun. Till where we are now, we've just trained over a thousand people how to lead grief work around the planet. So there's something stirring in the deep imagination, and I think it comes out of grief.

Francis Weller
38:30 - 39:07
You know, that grief itself, once we begin to crack our own denial about what's happening, grief has a way of breaking the heart open. There it becomes a receptor site for the dreaming you're talking about. It becomes a place where the seed can actually find good soil, a place where the new imagination can begin to fertilize and bring forth what it is we need now in this desperate time. How do we return back to watersheds and to each other and to friendships and the commons?

Francis Weller
39:07 - 39:15
Well, we need to be shown what the rituals look like. How do we do this? How do we do this? But that's really where we are.

Francis Weller
39:16 - 39:35
And I do feel that's contagious. Actually, let's put it a different way, maybe. It stirs what Carl Jung called the unforgotten wisdom at the core of the psyche. That we've been shaped, all of us, over 300,000 or 400,000 years now by this evolutionary process.

Francis Weller
39:36 - 40:07
The shaping of us as humans. was very common in terms of what shaped us, how did we succeed. And then this great forgetting that happened and the amnesia that settled upon us made us forget all of that. So what I see happening when the cadence and the rhythm are stirred, like when we have a grief ritual, Afterwards, somebody will say something like, you know, I've never done anything like that before, but it felt oddly familiar.

Francis Weller
40:09 - 40:34
So what is that in the deep echo chamber of the soul that says, I know that rhythm. I know that gesture. I know what it feels like to be crying side by side with 20 other people and being welcomed back to the village when you come home and be thanked for what you just did, not shamed. That echo memory in the psyche is what I have great faith in.

Francis Weller
40:34 - 40:58
And all we have to do is touch it, just stir it a little bit. Like when we're together, no one's wondering what the next cell phone's going to come out or, you know, what's the next, you know, big sale at the, you know, whatever. They're so present because they are inside of primary satisfactions. And when we're inside of primary satisfactions, that other shit doesn't matter.

Francis Weller
40:59 - 41:22
It doesn't matter, because you are primarily satisfied. You're being given what the soul craved all along. Friendship, companionship, grieving together, giving thanks together, singing songs together, dancing together, you know, private little whispered conversations, moonlit and starlit skies. This is what matters to us.

Francis Weller
41:22 - 41:35
And when we're given that, we are content. And I think the whole economic system would collapse in one day. if we focused more on primary satisfactions than on secondary, you know?

Prentis
41:36 - 41:46
I feel that in my toes, actually, Francis. My toes got a little... I like that. Yeah, the truth of that.

Prentis
41:47 - 42:17
Yeah. I'm thinking about belonging as you say that, when you describe that. I'm thinking about us together and how necessary that feels, and I want you to talk about that, but also the complexity of that. I mean, you seem to be, from what I've read, a person that is connected deeply and deep relationship to cultures other than your own, and I think about multiple cultures.

Prentis
42:17 - 42:27
You talked about Maladoma. What It feels like we're at a particular juncture where you and I are having this conversation. I'm having these conversations with so many different people. We don't share traditions.

Prentis
42:28 - 42:42
We don't share rituals. And yet, we are woven into each other's stories. What have you learned about how we build belonging given where we are and who we are to each other?

Francis Weller
42:45 - 43:06
Belonging ultimately is a consequence of being known. And in a shame-based culture, I don't want you to know me. I want you to only be in relationship to the image I'm projecting of me. Strong, competent, capable, smart, whatever, whatever the story, whatever the fiction.

Francis Weller
43:07 - 43:42
But to really belong means to become transparent to one another, to see into the ways that we have suffered and known loss and grief and closeness and love and warmth and beauty. But we have to be able to get to that place of mutual revelation. And that requires a holding space potent enough for that to happen. And the only ground I know that can do that is ritual ground.

Francis Weller
43:42 - 44:31
Otherwise we're uncontained and the uncontained spills out like the wrong trouble. It spills out as violence and as judgment and racism and, you know, hatred. But if it's contained in a ritual ground, we can go beneath the enculturated stories to find our deeper connective tissue as humans, you know. And I've seen that multiple, many times, many times at different gatherings, you know, how the ritual ground can really transmute the conditioned stories and we can actually meet in some breathtakingly beautiful places through our tears, you know.

Francis Weller
44:32 - 44:32
Yeah.

Prentis
44:35 - 45:00
That's really powerful because it's I think partly what I'm hearing is you're creating a space in which that is possible because you know it's more difficult for us to find spaces in whatever reality or dimension this is but how can ritual create the spaces in which we can actually know each other? Can't actually meet each other. Right.

Prentis
45:00 - 45:01
Exactly.

Francis Weller
45:02 - 45:02
Exactly.

Prentis
45:05 - 45:08
I've asked almost none of the questions I intended to.

Francis Weller
45:11 - 45:14
That's either a really good sign, or...

Prentis
45:17 - 45:36
I've gone purely by my own curiosity. I love it. I love it. I think there is one thing I want to just bring forward a little bit more here in this conversation, because you have this quote in your book.

Prentis
45:36 - 45:59
I think it's Jennifer Wellwood, you said, is a therapist who has this quote, to dance the wild dance of no hope. Yeah. That line kind of grabbed me. And one thing that hope can do is attach me to what has been and the, you know, the kind of nostalgia I want.

Prentis
45:59 - 46:06
I hope that this comes back. I hope that we do this. I hope what has been or what I can even understand. That's another way of saying it.

Prentis
46:07 - 46:46
But this piece around that dancing, the wild dance of no hope or finding that sitting in that place of no hope feels like a very important location to name and one that I imagine will be distressing for a lot of people to even consider to stay in that. And you talked about the long darkness, but even in that, even in saying the long darkness, I'm like, oh, well, it will end. But this place of no hope seems like a slightly different location to me of can I surrender actually in that place? I don't know, that feels very important for a lot of us.

Prentis
46:47 - 47:11
And I think I hang out in this place maybe a little too much, but I think that I know a lot of people that are... hoping things change, or hoping we get back on track, or hoping this election cycle will do something, or hoping that the strategies that we built before would just get back on track. I know a lot of people that are in that energy. And I'm wondering, what is the invitation here?

Prentis
47:12 - 47:15
What's the reason to sit in this place? What's the learning here?

Francis Weller
47:16 - 47:30
I think it has to do with maturation. There's a certain ripening that happens. I'm not against hope by any means. I think it's a beautiful thing, but I want to know who's carrying the hope.

Francis Weller
47:32 - 47:40
Is it some very young part of me that wants to somehow escape the trouble? God, I hope this doesn't happen. I hope this happens. I hope my team wins.

Francis Weller
47:43 - 48:23
Versus the adult carrying that, it's almost hope as a promotion of response. Whereas the earlier hope can be one of passivity, you know, disengagement almost, avoidance. Whereas the adult is being asked through their sense of hope to participate, to bring forth their gifts. That's part of our responsibility is to bring the gift we came here to give it away.

Francis Weller
48:25 - 48:44
The other thing to think about in terms of hope is, I remember Joanna Macy once was asked something about hope, and her third book I think it was called Active Hope. She said, you know, was Frodo hopeful or not? She said it didn't matter. He had a job to do.

Francis Weller
48:46 - 49:06
You know, and I don't want my advocacy and my choices of responding based only on whether or not I'm hopeful or not. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm living in that place of the unknown and the absolute uncertainty of these next generations. We don't know if we're going to make it.

Francis Weller
49:07 - 49:22
That's the first time we've had to ask that question. I mean, with such gravity, are we going to make this? I don't know. But knowing whether or not we are will not change how I respond to this moment.

Francis Weller
49:22 - 49:38
So I'm not depending upon hope to sit down and write or to have a conversation with you. I think we have to surrender a certain degree. That's what I think she means in that poem, that line. We still have to dance.

Francis Weller
49:40 - 49:51
And we still have to sing and we still have to do ritual. We still have to show up for the young ones. We still have to show up for the salmon and everything else that is threatened. That's our job.

Francis Weller
49:51 - 50:02
And whether or not I know it's going to work out, I hope it does. But damn, it's still good manners to show up. You know?

Prentis
50:04 - 50:16
It seems almost certain we won't make it through intact as we were. That seems almost guaranteed to me.

Francis Weller
50:16 - 50:42
We're past the point of no return for many of these systems. how we live into the consequences of that will depend upon our ripening. I wrote a preface for a book some years ago called Choosing Earth by Duane Elgin. a very hard piece to write because I didn't want to read the book because the book was all about the next five decades.

Francis Weller
50:44 - 51:07
And Duane is a social scientist who's been studying this stuff for well over 50 years and these are his forecasts for these coming decades through the 2070s. And my friend, it is not looking good. So I began writing about this as the rough initiation. It's uncontained, unheld, but still the principles of initiation are here.

Francis Weller
51:08 - 51:33
The world we lived in is being decimated. It's being harmed beyond even our capacity to acknowledge, which means the second part of the initiation is that our sense of identity, of who we are, is being radically changed. And the third realization is we cannot go back to the world that was. In a contained initiation, those are all good things.

Francis Weller
51:34 - 51:48
In a rough initiation, those are all troublesome things. It's a prescription for lostness. And maybe there's a value to being lost right now, that we don't know where we are. And we might have to find each other in the dark.

Francis Weller
51:48 - 52:01
And we might have to slow down enough to recall the intricacies of intimacy. And how do we do that? How do we come back to a sense of connection and belonging?

Prentis
52:04 - 52:24
belonging also in a time where the logic of profit, of consumption, is still active trying to squeeze every last drop out of us. It's not that that has stopped and we're in the descent. It is circling the drain with us, so to speak.

Francis Weller
52:25 - 53:05
I mean, anytime you experience a crisis situation, there is an opportunity for multiple valences. One of them we're seeing in this conversation we're having, which is a deepened imagination, an invitation towards quiet, of deep listening, and all the things we're talking about. Another valence is retraction or contraction, going back, you know, trying to get back to the 1950s. so that we can put people of color in their place, women in their place, gays and trans, you know, put everybody in their place so that we can get back to a model that was very comfortable for a very few, you know.

Francis Weller
53:06 - 53:22
So we're seeing both at the same time. And the damage done by a dying dinosaur can be immense. But there's another term I wanted to bring in, refugia. Is that a term that you've heard before?

Francis Weller
53:26 - 53:56
I came across it by a dear friend of mine, Erin Giesemann-Rapke, and she got it by reading a book by Kathleen Dean Moore, ecological philosopher, psychology professor at University of Oregon, I think it is. She went out with a group of scientists to visit Mount St. Helens 30 years after the eruption. And the expectation of almost every, I think every scientist was they were going to find nothing.

Francis Weller
53:57 - 54:25
But the blast was so deep and so dense and so hot that it basically became a sterile zone. Well, they started walking up the mountainside and finding these little leaves with a little, you know, a piece of moss or a fern or a breaking through of a pine tree or, you know, life was happening. And they called these places refugious. Small pockets of safety where life endures.

Francis Weller
54:28 - 54:55
Isn't that gorgeous? Small pockets of safety where life endures. And I think that's partly what we're trying to do is create little pockets of safety where life can endure even in this very difficult, steep descent. And maybe we will remember what it looks like to dream together, to make beauty together, to dance and do ritual together, to grieve together, to say thank you together.

Francis Weller
54:56 - 55:09
this hopefully will be a time of remembering, coming back as members together, but also of recalling the gestures that made us human. That's right. That's right.

Prentis
55:11 - 55:58
Francis, yeah, I think it is hope that I feel when I'm able to have these conversations and I feel a kinship with people who I haven't known in the physical world but I know are elsewhere cultivating refuges that are maybe related to the refugia that I'm also a part of here. Thank you for that for that image. I'm gonna really hold that I I I know that the people listening are also creating their own spaces and may those be Connected in another dimension, even if we I don't think we need to know about all of each other's spaces, but I trust that they're They're in

Prentis
55:58 - 56:42
connection and relationship and I'm I'm so grateful to you for the work that you do. You've really been I Honestly for me, I knew so much from the work that I did and then the really was you and Maladoma Sommé that had me consider ritual and engage ritual in a different way. That has been really transformative for me personally, even when I think about the grief that I'm facing now, I know that there are spaces here in my community that we've created that can hold that. So just a lot of gratitude to you, to the work that you've done, for what you've held open, the space that you've held open, what you've been willing to face.

Prentis
56:42 - 56:46
So it's a lot of gratitude and thank you for today, too.

Francis Weller
56:46 - 57:02
Such a joy. I'm very glad to meet you and appreciate all that you're doing, Prentis, you know, help shift the move of this culture and maybe we'll actually have one at some point.

Prentis
57:02 - 57:04
Maybe so, maybe so.

Francis Weller
57:04 - 57:05
Maybe so, yeah.

Prentis
57:07 - 57:23
Becoming the People is produced by devon de Leña. It's sound engineered and edited by Michael Maine. Our theme song was created by Mayyadda. And if you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially, especially leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts.

Prentis
57:24 - 57:36
And if you haven't already, please join us over at the Patreon, Prentis Hemphill. We are having a great time over there building community, learning together. Come join us. And as always, thank you for listening to Becoming the People.

Prentis
57:38 - 57:50
We're becoming the people. We're becoming the people. We're becoming the people. We're becoming the people.

Prentis
58:05 - 58:06
Doom, doom, doom.