GRIEF WORK: A Group Project
Hey, GBF community! My name is Bea (she/they). I’m a humxn in this life and I’m this week’s teacher on feature. I’ve been given the chance to share something via this blog post, and here’s what has been percolating in my mind this past week. I hope something lands for you here, and maybe we can even discuss it sometime.
It has been a week since eight lives were taken, since six women of Asian descent were senselessly murdered in Atlanta, Georgia. Their names are: Soon Chung Park (74), Hyun Jung Grant (51), Sun Cha Kim (69), Yong Ae Yue (63), Delaina Ashley Yaun (33), Paul Andre Michels (54), Xiaojie Tan (49), and Daoyou Feng (44). I hope you can go back a few lines and read the names one more time, pausing at each comma to send a good thought for a fellow humxn.
Finding words to honour the human lives lost seems a bit futile one year into a pandemic whose curves can’t seem to be flattened no matter how many lockdowns we undertake in the province of Ontario. It has been a year of grave losses and exponential grief over people, places, things, events--what more now with multiple communities mourning and reckoning with an Anti-Asian crime? For some folx, maybe for the first time in their lives processing collective grief alongside intergenerational trauma (and and and…).
As you read this and feelings begin to surface, I invite you to identify a few colours in your peripheral vision, or/and to sense for your breath into your side ribs. Notice the air leaving through your nostrils as you breathe out, or/and the texture under your hands and feet. Re-grounding into the present while taking in information helps us to know where our body stores new and old knowledge.
I understand the immense amount of information streaming through device screens can lead to reading the loss of lives as mere numbers on devices, but for me, losing folx of Asian descent means losing Ancestors. Losing connections to culture, story, medicine, tradition, cutting short the branch of a flourishing tree. Losing them again to racism, to violence, to ignorance, and, when you boil it down, to horsefeathers. You’d think we’d have left that behind in the twentieth century, with all our humxn technological advances and breakthroughs. But there is work yet to be done.
While we work through our grief, our resilience as humans leaves us capable of doing a few things (for you that may be three things, for another it may be eight, for others it may be the big task of feeding oneself while grieving), hopefully with the right kind of support. Last week, one of the best choices I made while in the early stages of grieving the Atlanta hate crime was to agree to hold virtual space with my pal Dee de Lara for Asian-Canadian and Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders via WHAT_TIME (an online hub of which I am co-founder along with Dee).
We were able to make space for those big exhales, to coax our nervous systems into a parasympathetic mode while in a grid full of supportive people of Asian descent.
As we continue our grief work in community (this is the secret ingredient, trust me on this one) we are (eventually) able to check in on ourselves (how am i? what anti-racist steps am i taking today?), to check in on our kin (where are they: mentally, emotionally, energetically? how are they in their unlearning of racist constructs and oppressive systems [a different conversation, however have you checked out Robin Lacambra’s Sharing Privilege course?]?). The latter may feel a bit ambitious or out of reach, especially if you are processing your own grief, nonetheless I believe our responsibilities as humxns on this Earth is to take care of each other, be stewards of the land and waters, be caregivers of the creatures who cohabitate the planet with us, to leave the Earth better than we found it, and be good ancestors (read more Layla F. Saad for ways on how!).
Yes, we have homework in this school of life. We have a plethora of group projects and multiple group mates. We also have myriad reminders of how to get the right kind of support. “What do you need right now?” is one of the best prompts a young ancestor taught me, that I can apply to any facet of my life. If you’re reading this, you’ve got access to the community that is goodbodyfeel—one of the best gifts of COVID-19, for me, I’d say--a community open to working together to ameliorate what is already here through equitable choices and diverse practices.
And if connecting with a fellow humxn is not in your scope of ‘can do’ right now, I am leaving you with a poem. May you be reminded of what it is to which you are connected, what it is that uplifts you, what it is that grounds you and what it is that lets you be. Much peace in your walk.
3000 Ancestors
By Bea Palanca
There is the sadness I carry
that belongs not to me
but to the 3000 ancestors walking behind me
There is the immense pride
in my step
when I’m wrapped in a breeze in the sunshine
With my 3000 ancestors behind me
There is the intense longing for
and the pursuit of happiness
in a world where contentment
and satisfaction change definition
everyday
I hear the whispers around me
my 3000 ancestors inform me
That they will bind me with love
and eternal guidance
That they are my home away from the motherland
That they understand the language
I never learnt but still speak,
The truths with which I was born
that they inked into my hair
so dark there must be so much to share
My 3000 ancestors remember
the walks I cannot
and they tickle my feet
as a reminder
of the paths I must take
and those which I should avoid
My 3000 ancestors with names in
my dreams
and songs in my visions
are the oceans and the stars
the palms and the sand
the cliff edge and the horizon
My 3000 ancestors who walk behind me
and the 3000 more who walk
in front of me, who cast light
daily, align frequencies hourly,
mend bridges nightly
so I may cross safely
leap freely
journey happily
To meet the 3000 more