Grieving Home
Dear Friends,
In this new era of my life – post 40, post pandemic, post people-pleaser self, post Mom’s death, post heeding various calls to forgiveness and grace, post falling deeper in love and commitment to my own soul – I am so passionately curious and driven to offer myself and my work to the true reason why I believe we’re all here: to be love, to be light in this world. Those I am close to know that I have become preoccupied with listening to others’ stories of near-death experiences (NDE’s) on YouTube and podcasts…. I find it fascinating, reassuring, and thrilling that so many people who’ve come back -- even from a clinically recorded death of their body -- have the same lessons to share: that death is nothing to be afraid of, that the soul lives on, that every act of kindness we offer matters greatly, that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to become too mired in our suffering, that even challenging experiences and pain are good opportunities to elevate our capacity to love, which is, indeed, why we are here.
So… I am asking myself, if my soul will live beyond this life and this present body of Jessica, what can I hope to truly learn? How can I open my heart wider, gain wisdom, brave even deeper healing of the personal, collective and ancestral trauma that I carry, and how can I evolve so that I don’t have to endure the same challenges in the next life?
Our Grief is Not All Our Own
I recently attended a two-day communal grief retreat led by two beautiful, fearless souls from the community singing world – Laurence Cole (now 80!), and Ahlay Blakely. This experience was informed in part by the wisdom of psychotherapist Francis Weller and his concept of the Five Gates of Grief, which is outlined in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow. It was also curated with reverence towards Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé, who blessed the West with an introduction to the communal healing practices of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso. As we entered the healing room, each of us was given a ceremonial welcome with a bough of red cedar, with the heartfelt words spoken softly: “You are not alone.” That moment in itself was so powerful, initiating the creation of a shared heartspace where the simple medicine of compassionate listening, singing, drumming, and group witnessing of each others’ tears could safely flow.
In our hyper-individualistic society, a person may catch themselves feeling all alone in their pain, and believing it’s 100% personal, 100% theirs... What I am learning on my own journey of untangling the diversity of perennial aches in my heart is that, while some of that pain is unique to my soul and my life experiences, almost none of it is just about me. Some of it is ancient, belonging to my ancestors... I come from four lineages that left their ancestral homelands of Ireland, Scotland, Russia, and Germany in search of a better life… no wonder I walk around feeling deeply homesick for a home I may never know!
Some of my pain is inherited from people in my life who are/were unable to feel or carry it themselves… At the retreat, I was able to offer up a surrogate ocean of tears for my maternal grandmother, who had to keep the enormous heartache of her daughter/my mother’s birth and forced adoption hidden for over five decades. I also carry the pain of many of the men in my life, past and present, since our dear men are still sadly taught to numb and shun their feelings, to keep their tender hearts on lock down…
Furthermore, I am increasingly aware that lot of my grief emanates from the land itself… I can now discern when I am feeling into the unhealed wounds of colonial violence and the displacement of indigenous people who inhabited this continent for millenia… I feel the gravity of loss that came with the attempted annihilation of cultural intimacy with the Earth; the unchecked taking of life -- of ancient trees, plants, animals; the wasting and desecration of living soil; the ruin of clean water as the foundation of all life… I feel intensely how all this harm has accumulated to the point of extreme climate dysregulation with its myriad disastrous consequences including accelerated extinction; the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, etc.
If so much grief can come from reaches far beyond the confines of one’s own little life, why, then, do we approach healing in isolation? We have so quickly forgotten our interdependence – with each other, and with all life… And yet I believe that our healing begins with our remembrance of this. As Thomas Hübl, author of Healing Collective Trauma and Attuned states: “We only exist as relationships.”
Certainly there is a lot of collective, unhealed trauma behind the terrible, mutual violence that recently re-erupted in the Israel-Hamas war. The absolute horror that continues to unfold in these days, while I cannot claim to fathom the complexities of it, seems to be rooted in a bottomless pit of primal, ancient, heavy, rotten and festering pains that have stayed entangled in the darkness of dissociation for far too long. Hope is on the other side of remembering that behind this explosive pain is grief – so. much. grief. And not just any grief, but grief for what I think we all long for most in life – HOME… A feeling of belonging somewhere, a place to feel grounded and rooted, a place where one feels free to express their deepest soul and humanity, a place to feel safe, nurtured and held in the world.
Grieving Home
What honestly frightens me is that we are entering a time when all of humanity is facing possible imminent loss of home, given our increasingly inhospitable climate. Clearly, we humans do not handle this loss (or threat of loss) very well. It can bring out the very worst in us. It feels increasingly important that we take responsibility for processing our own personal, collective and ancestral grief, so that we can all give more presence to what we are facing. How will we handle it when the places we know and love as home are destroyed overnight? It’s already happening. Catastrophic climatic events such as wildfires, flooding, and hurricanes are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, as are social tragedies such as mass shootings, and toxic industrial/infrastructural failures. Slower-paced, insidious destruction of place is also occurring with ongoing land and water abuse, overdevelopment, species extinction, sea level rise, overtourism, and the opioid addiction epidemic, which has rendered once vibrant streets into landscapes of despair and death – and is another symptom of unprocessed trauma.
When I think about what love I want to bring to the world moving forward in my precious life, I wish, in part, to help us navigate our growing homesickness. Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to give a name to the grief we feel when our endemic sense of place is violated. When a place held dear becomes ravaged by a natural, social or industrial disaster, it can be rendered unrecognizable, unknowable, and sometimes uninhabitable.. The sense of enormous, complex and imminent loss is difficult to both describe and to feel. Such grief over our changing world and sense of home calls for proper mourning, and implores us to create place-based methods to begin to address and assuage it as individuals and in community.
Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship
I submitted a grant proposal in September entitled “Braving Solastalgia: Forging a Framework for Trauma-informed Therapeutic + Memorial Landscape Design.” I want to help us remember how to find solace with each other and with the land itself when a home place suffers sudden assault. I intend to look to the most current research in trauma therapy that extolls the benefits of somatic (embodied) experiencing, memory reprocessing, community, and ritual… I wish for us to also recover the ability to draw upon the powerful, ancient language of the wild world around us to express our hearts even as they are breaking, when home as we knew it disappears in the wake of these apocalyptic crises we keep getting hammered with worldwide. The sequoias, the ferns, every blossom that graces our earth — each embodies a unique and nuanced language more ancient and potent than our own… We can remember to embrace their “words” when ours fail.
As I was writing the proposal, the fire in Lahaina happened. The one image of hope that emerged from that severe devastation came from the big paddle-out that people engaged in. I can only imagine how that must have felt -- to come together with fellow beloveds and strangers alike in the reassuring embrace of cool ocean water, immersed in the depth and mystery of the Pacific at a time of equally deep and mysterious loss.
I’m no stranger to frightening wildfire, having had to make a fast evacuation from my ridgetop cabin the day the Soberanes Fire started. I was in a state of helpless exile for two weeks, barely eating, and not knowing if I’d have a home to return to, as a number of neighbors lost theirs. Every year I dread fire season, and quietly tow my most precious belongings somewhere into safe storage just in case. While the fire did bring me closer with community for a while, it would have helped so much to have a go-to way to acknowledge and begin to address the fright and loss together. I am so interested in how we may design interactive, therapeutic landscapes that can evolve to aid healing over time… a place to gather to assuage one anothers’ hearts, while also giving witness and empathy to the land and its open wounds as well... Our current genre of memorial design which so often consists of static, stoic and sad hardscapes feels so limiting.
If you are interested in reading the abstract and proposal, please email me at jess@jessicadune.com (it’s just three pages but beware of academic jargon!). If you would like to support this research project, I have set up a Patreon account to help collect funds which will either supplement this Landscape Architecture Fellowship grant ($25,000 for three months of work), or allow me to execute the project even if it isn’t among the awarded ones for the 2024/2025 year. I just have one tier of support to start, I will add more in time.
I will be looking at two communities in California who have suffered enormous devastation. Research and interviews with trauma experts as well as survivors of these disasters will inform the development of a suite of new principles and design templates to address place-based trauma in the landscape. Pajaro was flooded last winter here in north Monterey County when a levee broke in an “atmospheric river” storm. The town of Greenville was rapidly consumed by the massive Dixie Fire in 2021 that spanned Butte, Plumas, Lassen, Shasta, and Tehama counties.
Interwoven Healing
I believe that our heartaches are bound up with each other, with the land, water, and all other forms of life. It makes sense that our healing is tied together as well, as shared in Ahlay Blakely’s poignant Land Acknowledgment Song below. We must not let our own shame and guilt get in the way of grieving the destruction of home, place, planet – Let’s move through and past that, back to love… The Earth longs to feel our knees touching back down upon her, to feel and receive our reverence again, our imperfect love, our messy tears.
“Oh land, Upon which I stand, Holding me…
Oh land, I know, The history here is painful…
Oh land, You know, Your healing’s woven with the people’s…”