I’ve been trying to write, but I haven’t been able to. There are either no words or far too many. There seems to be a turning towards grief workers - a collective searching for someone who knows “how do we handle this (witnessing a genocide)?” 

This season reminds us that staying soft and feeling our grief for the world is a radical act. There is much unraveling of oppressive systems that this grief can do. This season invites us to be transformed by our grief, together, even and especially if we don’t know how. We get to reach for each other.

This liminal season invites us to straddle both realms: to do both the sacred and mundane magic necessary to create sanctuary along our shorelines, edges, and ruptures, to bring softness into those places and moments where we feel impossibly stretched and lost, in those spaces between breaths, when the next isn’t always certain– when we remember that the unknown is an essential part of ourselves and the universe.

Welcome the risky and disruptive, collaborative gravity of leo season. Welcome artists, performers, and those who remind us that all of life is meant to be lived as art. Welcome those juicy friendships who invite us back into aliveness again and again. Welcome this hot and fiery, glittering, galactic mess of life and death, tears and sweat.

Together, Tammuz, Cancer season, and the Summer Solstice invite us as grievers to see this as a season not only of being held, but of spilling over that which cannot hold us, of becoming libations, and of embracing messier, dynamic and fluid, ecological understandings of ourselves.

Across cultures, this time of year is brimming with themes of abundance, fertility, and “beauty the brave, the exemplary, blazing open.”  Grief, far from being out of place in this season of vibrancy (when there is so much collective loss), “is the sound of being alive.”

This Spring, in the context of our ever growing political shit storm, ecological collapse, snow-collapsed roofs throughout the country, repeated falls in the mud, reminds me of the Tower card.

The longest night of the year is behind us. The days slowly grow longer. The morning chorus of birds begins to swell. In the Northern hemisphere, we dwell in the in between of winter and spring’s promise, in the belly of the earth’s creative yearning.

Grief can make us into magicians. Pull us down onto the earth, collapse us into the soil. Lift our faces to the stars and the mystery of our breath. Push us into intuitive ritual and metamorphosis and an expanded sense of self.

How can winter and grief, times in which we are pushed towards rituals of mass consumption, become times when we create rituals of collective nourishment?

Grief reveals to us the ways we are water: it draws it out of us, it draws us to it, it reveals to us our shared shapeshifting and multidimensional nature.

Like the coming of winter, grief slows us down, stretches out the night, plays with time, reveals the ephemerality and liminality of the landscapes we find ourselves in, and of ourselves.