Thank you Jena for the window to your relationship with your sister, my experience with my father and mother death when I was just coming out of teen age was as different as you can imagine from your experience, and yet my body resonates vividly to your words, the detailed landscape of emotions and the colour of wondering as you move through floor changes, door codes, too sunny outsides, and that sea of mud… yes, even that mud feels shared. Thank you 🙏🏽
Thanks Inma, I'm sorry to hear that you lost both parents at such an early age. That must have been devastating. the word "stolen" comes to mind again but this time as big as someone stealing both the sun and the moon. have your written about this expererience anywhere. If so please share a link to your story. If not please feel free to shae more below. I like that "even the mud feels shared". Thank you Inma!
I remember the transformation, from feeling protected by someone who is in the realm of the tangible, to sharpening my attention toward the intangible. Years later yes, I came to wonder how would have been to see them growing older, to be grandparents… the ‘stolen’ possibilities.
Lovely that you asked me for my writings, I do write, right now finishing a book, and thinking of possibilities for sharing my practice beyond the community of artists where I hung out. I’ll keep you posted if you want to.
Jena, what a beautiful description of your sister and you together, collaborating with your lives. I love all of the language you used, and the images that you opened up for me, placing me back into my own time with my mum who lived and died with vascular dementia. "Someone has stolen her ocean" opened up something very deep for me that continues to resonate. My mother lost her own inclination to use words in conversation or to show interest in her environment. I took her for walks by the sea and remember her walking parallel to the waves that she had once loved, gripping her frame, heading somewhere else – away – with great determination. I felt a relational space between us had been stolen, which paralleled an aspect of our lives together all along. Your story felt very healing somehow.
Lesley, thanks for your sharing, it touches me deeply. I just see your mum "heading somewhere else - away - with great determination." and yes, you put your finger on it exactly, the relational space has been stolen.
I feel deeply for you your being with your sister even as the two of you often traversed different worlds. I love how you give your sister agency as a collaborator, bringing you across the world. That rings true for me in so many ways. The “stolen” relational field has just shifted, becoming more subtle and implicit. Since my mum died I have taken up pottery, which was once her craft, and notice ways that I am learning from her now.
Thanks for your further insight Lesley re the relational field shifting from "stolen" to "becoming more subtle and implicit." "Collaboration" is a tricky word as i found out during the dialogue with Steve, still to be published. It kind of implies that we are consciously doing it. Perhaps we need another word for collaborating unwittingly? Though more "suble and implicit" is a beautiful way of describing was I think goes on between us all the time.
Jun 23Liked by Julia Macintosh, Jena Griffiths, Steve Thorp
Steve, its very good that you bring the topic of death to an audience. Thank you it is necessary in the current death denying culture we inhabit
I have problem with your intro however as it appears to judge. “some deaths are…. just downright awful”. From whose perspective is that? and how is it arrived? - complex questions. If you wish to start talking of meaning making then please do, as this is the core. Readers are left in a void. Then we come to this.
"And, of course, every experience of death and bereavement is individual and subjective."
I feel you radically reduce forces of life which necessarily require death, and offer polarisation, even the despair currently and already ubiquitous. Perhaps this is the intention.
Jena’s writing is beautiful, as is her ending. In all slow discussions of death there are references to beginnings. And as here, they are felt.
Hi Peter, thanks so much for commenting. I chose the words, so there was intention in them I guess.
Am I ‘judging’? I am certainly ‘noticing’ that, in a world in which collective death can be visited on populations and groups in an arbitrary fashion - human and non-human alike – death can seem terrible, and who are we, the living, to say otherwise?
It’s probably not what you meant, but I wanted to make the point that some stark, painful, sudden deaths and long, painful, lingering deaths lack a kind of dignity and are preventable (in different cultural ways). They are awful - and yes, perhaps awe-ful.
However, I’m not sure that this takes away from the truth that, as you say, ‘there are forces of life which necessarily require death’, so how are readers are left in the void? I’d be interested to see your point expanded, because I’m not sure I grasped it…
It is, of course complex, and I join you in wanting to do more to open up the conversation about death and dying.
And Jena’s writing is beautiful. We’ve got a further piece coming next week that expands the conversation further…
Thanks for responding in this way Steve. Yes, to be sure I can be judgemental. The subject of death is vital to me - it informs the basis of most spiritual traditions and is enacted variously in other animals.
I also cared for a father with a long dementia, but my experience was quite different to those portrayed here. Yes it is a disgusting disease. And I have a dear friend who is making such beauty in it and with it as it currently progresses in her. We all live our differing capacities. Having experienced ineffably conscious death, as some have, changes perceptions from the insides out.
I was concerned when reading your intro that little space was given to these other experiences. Many older people like myself, talk of cultural collapse, so death on some collective level. I look at this and think: what attitudes are we taking into this and what behaviours, because this will inform the type of death experience. Rightly and wrongly I bear response-ability. I know others will disagree. I am not exactly a publisher so cannot comment from that perspective - but I feel social media has allowed, even fostered the diminished way people communicate with each other and the earth we are. There's more than ethics at play here. From many vantage points we see the denial and reduction of spirit into material capital, and also in the realm of death. Death is demanding work.
For me this meditation underpins all spiritual practise. And exercises major philosophical thought. In practise too it is often incredibly demanding physical work, just ask those in the field. Why wouldn't it be?
Ah perhaps now it's starting to make sense. Do you mean as in the Buddhist meditation practice maranasati? Demanding then would make sense.
I was thinking of death as the precise turning point or transition, as described at the end of my sister’s story.
Whereas you seemed to mean a much longer process. I was wondering if you meant it was "demanding" through the long slow grind of having to deal with body parts not working the way they used to. Through the normal ageing process or the trajectory of an illness.
And so was wondering, at which point, for you, does life change to death?
I'd love to know more about why you see your meditation practice as "demanding". Isn't that also a bit judgemental? ;)
I don't have a meditation practise, but an art practise, I am not buddhist, nor claim any understanding. Transitions yes, aren't they in strings, multiples, seem to offer way more than we bring, and I simply feel it may be worth the prep. What happens in us when profound 'loves die' is telling. We all have our ways.
This subject is so nuanced I find it very difficult to write anything coherent. It is way too easy to offend.
Hi Peter, I love your reply. Thanks for the broadening this out…
Like you I've been working in this space for a long time - that is, cultural and planetary collapse - so I think I get the complexity. Like you, I find myself to be an older person too, so I'm getting that perspective too, I think.
A couple of points - there wasn't much space in the intro to include a breadth of experiences, so maybe the dialogue next week will open that out a bit. Having said that, I also sometimes want to challenge the tendency in some thinking (about death, life, complexity - everything) to find 'meaning'. I've been in and out of spiritual practice and find myself in a more experiential, existential place at the moment and I find it as profound as any other places I’ve found myself… it's almost a relief not be struggling with it.
I really do appreciate the beauty that can emerge from death and loss, and I also know that this isn't always the case - even in spiritual traditions, hope can be lost towards the end. So I think my sense is that complexity must allow for the material as well as the spirit. Babies and bathwater and all that. And material is not just about capital. And spirit is often capitalised too... As you say, it's complex.
Peter, I really appreciate your commitment to the demands of the work … I hope that’s what Unpsychology is about as well… that’s what we set out to do… the opportunity is to have conversations that aren't reductionist...
Jun 24·edited Jun 24Liked by Steve Thorp, Jena Griffiths
Thank you Steve for your generous responses. Yes, we may be in furious agreement - meaning often may as well be nonsense (and I'm often too full). How to witness ourselves/others creating destruction? Is inaction a necessity, or even possible? Words can define the spaces we people inhabit - so yes to conversation, communities of difference, which appears to be exactly what you're up to! How do we hold a cup of chaos? (which might also look like death)
Hah, that's a brilliant phrase, Peter! We may indeed be in furious agreement!!
In principle, I find the idea of multiple ways of seeing attractive and necessary. But do I always accept the 'other's' perspective? Of course not! I can witness myself doing that though... holding that cup of chaos...
Jun 23·edited Jun 23Liked by Steve Thorp, Jena Griffiths
Thank you Peter and Steve for this exchange which I'm adding into my experience of reading Jena's beautiful piece just now.
I guess I see the territory of our collective conversations about death as necessarily containing all of these perspectives. Perceptions that some have of death as a terrible finality get to mix with more open-ended understandings of life as including and requiring death to continue. Life and death as a polarity as well as a continuum or interdependent whole. Can we include all of these, including when (at times) it gets uncomfortable?
That's how I read what you wrote Steve, in that more inclusive spirit. I am feeling also into what you're saying Peter too. I wonder about language itself which can seem sometimes to reduce our fullness of spirit into a reductive taking of a position. Much like life.death gets to be both continuous, layered, and harshly punctuated.
I'm going to jump into this exchange with a thought, based on my own experience of writing. I'm surprised by Peter's reaction to some of the sentences in Steve's introduction to Jena's piece. I guess what it makes me wonder about is the matter of accountability: to what extent (if any) is a writer responsible for how their writing is received by a reader? In my own experience, I write what I am thinking – not what I want someone else to think; I don't write with any intention other than to unburden myself of an idea that is resting upon my head and/or my heart, and to offer it up as my own bearing witness of my experience of being alive. I tend to think of any piece of writing as taking on its own life, beyond me, once I have hit the publish button. What anyone thinks or feels when they read it, belongs to them.
When we talk about making meaning – surely that is entirely subjective and personal? I'm thinking of the scene in the film Sophie's Choice, when the Nazi officer quotes the Gospel of Mark verse about 'suffer the little children' before tearing a small child away from their mother's arms. What a writer (or speaker) means when they use language may be extradordinarily different from how it is received and indeed then used.
Peter, thanks for initiating this lively, thought-provoking discussion with Steve, Julia and Lesley regarding our possibly imminent demise. (Fact that a 2km wide meteorite is whizzing past our ears today, followed closely by another seems quite timely.)
Your early objections to Steve’s summary perception of death made me realise how conflict avoidant I am! After the smoke cleared, a quick check round to make sure no stray bullets were still in the air then it dawned on me. You and Steve are bantering! Oh my gosh, here you two are in “furious agreement” with each other and I just love this concept and what you’re all saying and want to jump in too. But my attention gets snared elsewhere. I’d inadvertently triggered a boundary war with my neighbour . About nothing! My tree’s future shadows ....“Nachbarschaft” certainly is a “demanding business”.
These two events happening simultaneously in parallel universes made me wonder what was going on in my psyche that needed surfacing? Something pressing to be dredged up and roasted or left to propagate and grow? Or something that needs to be aired (Julia style) and brought to the consciousness of many for shared digesting?
Come to think of it, isn’t death all about “judgement” anyway? We point fingers at ourselves in a hall of mirrors? And this is what watching you two dance and insight from a dream helped me see I was doing to my poor neighbour. And what the feeling was I was avoiding by turning it around.
Steve thanks for holding "this cup of chaos" so exquisitely and generously.
Julia, thanks for your great insight into "any piece of writing having a life of its own". I like the freedom you give yourself and everyone else. I was struggling with this after receiving family feedback and what you wrote was really useful.
Lesely what you wrote is so healing and pure poetry. Thank you.
And Jena, thanks for your courage in your preparedness to put down your innermost doubts and stories about the most tender and intimate of human things...and thanks all of you for nudging my tendency to judge - myself and others... and accepting this and the shadows (tree and human alike) xxx
Thank you Jena for the window to your relationship with your sister, my experience with my father and mother death when I was just coming out of teen age was as different as you can imagine from your experience, and yet my body resonates vividly to your words, the detailed landscape of emotions and the colour of wondering as you move through floor changes, door codes, too sunny outsides, and that sea of mud… yes, even that mud feels shared. Thank you 🙏🏽
Thanks Inma, I'm sorry to hear that you lost both parents at such an early age. That must have been devastating. the word "stolen" comes to mind again but this time as big as someone stealing both the sun and the moon. have your written about this expererience anywhere. If so please share a link to your story. If not please feel free to shae more below. I like that "even the mud feels shared". Thank you Inma!
I remember the transformation, from feeling protected by someone who is in the realm of the tangible, to sharpening my attention toward the intangible. Years later yes, I came to wonder how would have been to see them growing older, to be grandparents… the ‘stolen’ possibilities.
Lovely that you asked me for my writings, I do write, right now finishing a book, and thinking of possibilities for sharing my practice beyond the community of artists where I hung out. I’ll keep you posted if you want to.
So beautiful that in hindsight you have been able to see beyond their loss, to the precious gift they/their loss helped you hone.
"sharpening your attention toward the intangible". I look forward to reading more about this Imma.
Jena, what a beautiful description of your sister and you together, collaborating with your lives. I love all of the language you used, and the images that you opened up for me, placing me back into my own time with my mum who lived and died with vascular dementia. "Someone has stolen her ocean" opened up something very deep for me that continues to resonate. My mother lost her own inclination to use words in conversation or to show interest in her environment. I took her for walks by the sea and remember her walking parallel to the waves that she had once loved, gripping her frame, heading somewhere else – away – with great determination. I felt a relational space between us had been stolen, which paralleled an aspect of our lives together all along. Your story felt very healing somehow.
Lesley, thanks for your sharing, it touches me deeply. I just see your mum "heading somewhere else - away - with great determination." and yes, you put your finger on it exactly, the relational space has been stolen.
Thank you Jena.
I feel deeply for you your being with your sister even as the two of you often traversed different worlds. I love how you give your sister agency as a collaborator, bringing you across the world. That rings true for me in so many ways. The “stolen” relational field has just shifted, becoming more subtle and implicit. Since my mum died I have taken up pottery, which was once her craft, and notice ways that I am learning from her now.
Thanks for your further insight Lesley re the relational field shifting from "stolen" to "becoming more subtle and implicit." "Collaboration" is a tricky word as i found out during the dialogue with Steve, still to be published. It kind of implies that we are consciously doing it. Perhaps we need another word for collaborating unwittingly? Though more "suble and implicit" is a beautiful way of describing was I think goes on between us all the time.
Steve, its very good that you bring the topic of death to an audience. Thank you it is necessary in the current death denying culture we inhabit
I have problem with your intro however as it appears to judge. “some deaths are…. just downright awful”. From whose perspective is that? and how is it arrived? - complex questions. If you wish to start talking of meaning making then please do, as this is the core. Readers are left in a void. Then we come to this.
"And, of course, every experience of death and bereavement is individual and subjective."
I feel you radically reduce forces of life which necessarily require death, and offer polarisation, even the despair currently and already ubiquitous. Perhaps this is the intention.
Jena’s writing is beautiful, as is her ending. In all slow discussions of death there are references to beginnings. And as here, they are felt.
Thanks and kind regards, Peter
Hi Peter, thanks so much for commenting. I chose the words, so there was intention in them I guess.
Am I ‘judging’? I am certainly ‘noticing’ that, in a world in which collective death can be visited on populations and groups in an arbitrary fashion - human and non-human alike – death can seem terrible, and who are we, the living, to say otherwise?
It’s probably not what you meant, but I wanted to make the point that some stark, painful, sudden deaths and long, painful, lingering deaths lack a kind of dignity and are preventable (in different cultural ways). They are awful - and yes, perhaps awe-ful.
However, I’m not sure that this takes away from the truth that, as you say, ‘there are forces of life which necessarily require death’, so how are readers are left in the void? I’d be interested to see your point expanded, because I’m not sure I grasped it…
It is, of course complex, and I join you in wanting to do more to open up the conversation about death and dying.
And Jena’s writing is beautiful. We’ve got a further piece coming next week that expands the conversation further…
Thanks for responding in this way Steve. Yes, to be sure I can be judgemental. The subject of death is vital to me - it informs the basis of most spiritual traditions and is enacted variously in other animals.
I also cared for a father with a long dementia, but my experience was quite different to those portrayed here. Yes it is a disgusting disease. And I have a dear friend who is making such beauty in it and with it as it currently progresses in her. We all live our differing capacities. Having experienced ineffably conscious death, as some have, changes perceptions from the insides out.
I was concerned when reading your intro that little space was given to these other experiences. Many older people like myself, talk of cultural collapse, so death on some collective level. I look at this and think: what attitudes are we taking into this and what behaviours, because this will inform the type of death experience. Rightly and wrongly I bear response-ability. I know others will disagree. I am not exactly a publisher so cannot comment from that perspective - but I feel social media has allowed, even fostered the diminished way people communicate with each other and the earth we are. There's more than ethics at play here. From many vantage points we see the denial and reduction of spirit into material capital, and also in the realm of death. Death is demanding work.
HI Peter, I’m still pondering your line “death is demanding work”.
Why should it be?
For me this meditation underpins all spiritual practise. And exercises major philosophical thought. In practise too it is often incredibly demanding physical work, just ask those in the field. Why wouldn't it be?
Ah perhaps now it's starting to make sense. Do you mean as in the Buddhist meditation practice maranasati? Demanding then would make sense.
I was thinking of death as the precise turning point or transition, as described at the end of my sister’s story.
Whereas you seemed to mean a much longer process. I was wondering if you meant it was "demanding" through the long slow grind of having to deal with body parts not working the way they used to. Through the normal ageing process or the trajectory of an illness.
And so was wondering, at which point, for you, does life change to death?
I'd love to know more about why you see your meditation practice as "demanding". Isn't that also a bit judgemental? ;)
I don't have a meditation practise, but an art practise, I am not buddhist, nor claim any understanding. Transitions yes, aren't they in strings, multiples, seem to offer way more than we bring, and I simply feel it may be worth the prep. What happens in us when profound 'loves die' is telling. We all have our ways.
This subject is so nuanced I find it very difficult to write anything coherent. It is way too easy to offend.
Hi Peter, I love your reply. Thanks for the broadening this out…
Like you I've been working in this space for a long time - that is, cultural and planetary collapse - so I think I get the complexity. Like you, I find myself to be an older person too, so I'm getting that perspective too, I think.
A couple of points - there wasn't much space in the intro to include a breadth of experiences, so maybe the dialogue next week will open that out a bit. Having said that, I also sometimes want to challenge the tendency in some thinking (about death, life, complexity - everything) to find 'meaning'. I've been in and out of spiritual practice and find myself in a more experiential, existential place at the moment and I find it as profound as any other places I’ve found myself… it's almost a relief not be struggling with it.
I really do appreciate the beauty that can emerge from death and loss, and I also know that this isn't always the case - even in spiritual traditions, hope can be lost towards the end. So I think my sense is that complexity must allow for the material as well as the spirit. Babies and bathwater and all that. And material is not just about capital. And spirit is often capitalised too... As you say, it's complex.
Peter, I really appreciate your commitment to the demands of the work … I hope that’s what Unpsychology is about as well… that’s what we set out to do… the opportunity is to have conversations that aren't reductionist...
Thank you Steve for your generous responses. Yes, we may be in furious agreement - meaning often may as well be nonsense (and I'm often too full). How to witness ourselves/others creating destruction? Is inaction a necessity, or even possible? Words can define the spaces we people inhabit - so yes to conversation, communities of difference, which appears to be exactly what you're up to! How do we hold a cup of chaos? (which might also look like death)
Hah, that's a brilliant phrase, Peter! We may indeed be in furious agreement!!
In principle, I find the idea of multiple ways of seeing attractive and necessary. But do I always accept the 'other's' perspective? Of course not! I can witness myself doing that though... holding that cup of chaos...
Thank you Peter and Steve for this exchange which I'm adding into my experience of reading Jena's beautiful piece just now.
I guess I see the territory of our collective conversations about death as necessarily containing all of these perspectives. Perceptions that some have of death as a terrible finality get to mix with more open-ended understandings of life as including and requiring death to continue. Life and death as a polarity as well as a continuum or interdependent whole. Can we include all of these, including when (at times) it gets uncomfortable?
That's how I read what you wrote Steve, in that more inclusive spirit. I am feeling also into what you're saying Peter too. I wonder about language itself which can seem sometimes to reduce our fullness of spirit into a reductive taking of a position. Much like life.death gets to be both continuous, layered, and harshly punctuated.
Hi Peter and Steve
I'm going to jump into this exchange with a thought, based on my own experience of writing. I'm surprised by Peter's reaction to some of the sentences in Steve's introduction to Jena's piece. I guess what it makes me wonder about is the matter of accountability: to what extent (if any) is a writer responsible for how their writing is received by a reader? In my own experience, I write what I am thinking – not what I want someone else to think; I don't write with any intention other than to unburden myself of an idea that is resting upon my head and/or my heart, and to offer it up as my own bearing witness of my experience of being alive. I tend to think of any piece of writing as taking on its own life, beyond me, once I have hit the publish button. What anyone thinks or feels when they read it, belongs to them.
When we talk about making meaning – surely that is entirely subjective and personal? I'm thinking of the scene in the film Sophie's Choice, when the Nazi officer quotes the Gospel of Mark verse about 'suffer the little children' before tearing a small child away from their mother's arms. What a writer (or speaker) means when they use language may be extradordinarily different from how it is received and indeed then used.
Peter, thanks for initiating this lively, thought-provoking discussion with Steve, Julia and Lesley regarding our possibly imminent demise. (Fact that a 2km wide meteorite is whizzing past our ears today, followed closely by another seems quite timely.)
Your early objections to Steve’s summary perception of death made me realise how conflict avoidant I am! After the smoke cleared, a quick check round to make sure no stray bullets were still in the air then it dawned on me. You and Steve are bantering! Oh my gosh, here you two are in “furious agreement” with each other and I just love this concept and what you’re all saying and want to jump in too. But my attention gets snared elsewhere. I’d inadvertently triggered a boundary war with my neighbour . About nothing! My tree’s future shadows ....“Nachbarschaft” certainly is a “demanding business”.
These two events happening simultaneously in parallel universes made me wonder what was going on in my psyche that needed surfacing? Something pressing to be dredged up and roasted or left to propagate and grow? Or something that needs to be aired (Julia style) and brought to the consciousness of many for shared digesting?
Come to think of it, isn’t death all about “judgement” anyway? We point fingers at ourselves in a hall of mirrors? And this is what watching you two dance and insight from a dream helped me see I was doing to my poor neighbour. And what the feeling was I was avoiding by turning it around.
Steve thanks for holding "this cup of chaos" so exquisitely and generously.
Julia, thanks for your great insight into "any piece of writing having a life of its own". I like the freedom you give yourself and everyone else. I was struggling with this after receiving family feedback and what you wrote was really useful.
Lesely what you wrote is so healing and pure poetry. Thank you.
And Jena, thanks for your courage in your preparedness to put down your innermost doubts and stories about the most tender and intimate of human things...and thanks all of you for nudging my tendency to judge - myself and others... and accepting this and the shadows (tree and human alike) xxx
Thank you for touching edges 💜
Heartbreakingly beautiful