Will DADDARIO
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​(writings, classes, and thoughts in process)

5/23/2019 0 Comments

The Task of Nothing


In Second Grade, I (Will) remember having an afternoon class with a teacher I had never seen before. Even though it was 30 years ago, the experience of that day sticks with me. I can think of three reasons for this. First, the teacher guided us through a hands-on exercise intended to engage our senses. We passed spices and various liquids (like vanilla extract) around a circle and tried to guess what they were by smelling, tasting, and touching them. I volunteered to taste what turned out to be garlic powder, and the teacher was impressed that I could name what it was. I was less impressed with the taste in my mouth, but quite interested in the exercise. The engagement of all of my senses left an indelible mark on my memory.
Second, this was the first male teacher I had ever seen. Not only had all my previous teachers been women (in school, swim lessons, gymnastics, and other venues), but I had never even seen a male teacher in our school. Men could be teachers! Clearly, this realization stuck with me and informed, to some degree, my path in life.

Third, I remember vividly a meditation that ended the class. Our teacher asked us to close our eyes and visualize various things. The final thing was “nothing.” “Now think of nothing,” he said. “Try as hard as you can. Can you do it?” I opened my eyes and looked directly at him from my place in the back of the room. I said quietly, “It’s not possible. You can’t think of nothing.” But as I looked around the class, all the other students seemed immersed in the task. They nodded their heads in assent of his question: they were all picturing nothing. When I looked back to the teacher, he met my gaze and smiled. Can you think about nothing? I’ve thought about that question since that day in 1988.
This post is about nothing.  

While not strictly equal with death, “nothingness” provides a commensurate challenge. Nothing and death are equally gigantic in scale. How do we think of it? Why would we think of it? To think of one’s death is to prepare for and to become more intimate with one’s own finitude. There are multiple benefits to thinking of death often, not least of which is the overcoming of fear and the ability to sense new threads connecting me with my loved ones who have died. Similarly, to think of nothingness is to press the mind to its limit and expand our cognitive maps of the universe. If welcoming thoughts of death into our daily consciousness can demystify the great equalizer that so many people work feverishly to avoid, then coming to grips with nothing can throw the wild variety of our being into relief and perhaps help us to engage with the Great Mystery.

This kind of activity might seem abstract and unnecessary. My hope, however, is that I can reveal some of the mind-expanding potential bound up with the task of thinking nothing, and, furthermore, to demonstrate how thinking nothingness is helpful for imagining new forms of connection with dead friends and family. I emphasize the word “task” because, like so many words, it carries a fascinating history that, once unpacked, makes the word available for new uses. After tarrying with “nothing,” I’ll move on to “task” so as to end this reflection with some specific suggestions about how the task of (thinking) nothing deepens our relations with our dead friends and loved ones.

I’ve thought about nothing a lot, and I can easily summarize my findings. Nothing cannot be. There can be no nothing. Nothing, were it to have qualities (which it can’t), would need to be free from anything that has ever been. Thus, even if the universe was extinguished this very moment, it still would once have been, and therefore the remaining absence would flummox nothingness. You can’t have an absence because an absence is something, so even an absent universe is not quite nothing. Amusingly, the only way to get close to nothingness is to say that it doesn’t exist. There is no nothing. But even here, the laugh echoes back upon us since attributing any kind of is­-ness to nothing ends up undoing nothing (by giving it something, a weird kind of is-ness). Nothing, it seems to me, is a relative construct, something we rely upon to distinguish between the presence and absence of things. When it comes to the grand Nothing, however, we are bound always to find something posing as nothing. 

French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia wrestles with this problem in his carefully crafted book Form et objet. He concludes:

“Therefore, there is no nothing except from one of these three angles: a nothing which is in fact something; a nothing which is in fact the opposite of something [which for him means something’s form]; or a nothing which is in fact an absence of something (an emptiness or an exile). Each way leads to something, with none of them leading to a nothing” (Garcia, Form and Object 49).

His point, which is also my point, a point that deserves repeating, is that nothing is something, and, therefore, it has the potential to generate ideas, affections, activities, and events. We can make something with nothing.
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(To read about nothing’s counterpart—Everything—click through to the parallel post, “What about Everything?”)

I have had the opportunity to make something out of that which first appeared to be nothing. When Joanne and I left the hospital after Finlay’s inexplicable death during childbirth, we were overwhelmingly aware of the wrongness that was unfolding. You simply don’t leave the maternity wing with nothing. You leave with a child, as was demonstrated by all the other happy parents around us. Or not. We had, or so it seemed, discovered a loophole in the order of things. We left with nothing and commenced our life as parents whose child was dead.

Except we didn’t leave with nothing. Though it would take me several months to understand, and years to put into words, I eventually realized that we left the hospital that day with something. It wasn’t the thing we wanted. In fact, it was something we absolutely didn’t want. But it was something nonetheless. We left with an unbreakable connection between the land of the living and the land of the dead. We had forged a connection with all that lay beyond the realm of the visible and knowable.

 In a recent podcast episode, I interviewed David Harradine and Sam Butler, the artistic directors of the English art group Fevered Sleep (Episode 6 of “To Grieve”). At the end of the interview, I asked David and Sam what it meant “to grieve.” David’s answer was precisely aligned with my thoughts on nothing (which is really something). He said (I’m paraphrasing): To grieve means to build relationships with people who are no longer here. It may seem quite difficult, since the living party is going to put in 100% of the work, but the relationship with your deceased loved one continues. Grieving is the activity of nurturing this new, non-traditional, painful/praise-worthy/depressing/joyous connection with the dead.

My connection with Finlay is forged through my daily grief for his absence. What appeared at first as his nothingness when we left the hospital without him, his sheer lack of existing upon the “sterile promontory” (as Hamlet says) of my daily terrain, turned out to be his invitation to me to think beyond the limits of the ordinary. His nothing is really quite something.

But the burden of it. The tax Finlay’s absence withdraws from me. To ignore the difficulty of this relationship with the dead is to gloss over a major aspect of the grief-nothingness equation. And this brings me to the task of nothingness.

The history of the word reveals a connection with the Modern French word tâche, which means “duty, tax,” and this leads back into the Latin vernacular where we find tasca, “a duty, assessment.” By the late 16th century, the word (in English and French) acquires the general meaning of “any piece of work that has to be done.”  

This brief etymological foray provides me with a few insights. I might think of the effort required to establish an intimate bond with my dead son as a kind of tax that comes hand in hand with the wider work of conscious expansion. Among the death, dying, and grief community here in Asheville (and I suspect elsewhere in the United States), the work of reckoning with death is considered a privilege held by those for whom grief has bestowed a more nuanced understanding of death and dying. To die, I aver, is to change into a state of which we know quite little. We do know, however, that it is not an end. Death cannot lead to nothing, since, as I’ve already mentioned, there is no nothing. If death becomes, in this way of thinking, a portal to some unknown territory, then the living may find ways to communicate across the portal. To do so may mean risking one’s appearance of sanity or one’s lazy harmony with the status quo, but this risk is simply another word for the tax, or task, of making something of what first appears to be the nothing of the dead.

More profound is the general meaning assigned to “task” of “any piece of work that has to be done.” In this formulation, the task of nothingness, of forging meaningful and tangible relationships with the dead, joins the ranks of our daily chores. Wake up, brush my teeth, bond with my dead son, throw my two-year-old son’s Phalen’s cloth diapers in the laundry, make coffee, imagine Finlay’s favorite breakfast food, make breakfast, etc., etc., etc. As complex as this discussion of “nothingness” and grief may seem, the result of all this philosophical labor is merely another handful of moments in the day. One of the biggest challenges faced by grief workers is to spread the wisdom that grief and death and dying ought to be as banal as buying coffee, shopping for groceries, and getting gas. Grief, and the task of nothingness, is and should be a common occurrence into which we invest as much energy as is stored in our love for those who have died. We come back to this work whenever we can, each day, and then we do the laundry.
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Can you think about nothing? Of course. And if you experience a profound loss—either of a person or a version of reality that you hold dear—then you’ll likely experience the visceral feeling of a gigantic hole right in the center of your universe. But this hole is not nothing. It may in fact turn out to be the Whole. Whatever it is, it is certainly something, and I think it is worth the effort to consider what we might make with this peculiar entity.
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5/23/2019 0 Comments

What about Everything?

If you clicked here from my post “The Task of Nothing,” then it might make sense to jump right in: What’s the deal with Nothing’s counterpart, Everything? We’ll get there soon, I promise.

First, however, if you arrived here without first encountering my post on Nothing, then what you need to know is that I’ve thought about Nothing since I was seven years old. By the time I was 18, I had stumbled onto the realization that, in casual conversation and philosophical texts alike, Nothing tends to travel alongside Everything. I was so taken with the Zen Buddhist contemplation of Mu (Japanese for “not have; without,” written as 無) and its travelling partner Yu (“to exist; to have,” written as 有) that I got the symbols tattooed on my lower back (i.e., my center, but a place that I can’t see; an invisible everything). Traveling with Everything and Nothing has convinced me that the latter is in fact quite something.

But in this post, my consideration is Everything. Specifically, it seems reasonable to suggest that if Nothing is in fact something, then something must be amiss with Everything. How are we to think of Everything? Is it one thing? Do all things retain their collective multiplicity when collected into this one Everything? If not, then was there ever a multiplicity of things to begin with, or is the appearance of multiplicity actually an illusion behind which throbs the One (whatever that might be)?

I think it makes sense to provide two opposing viewpoints in order to glimpse the continuum of possible answers to these questions. One viewpoint comes from popular culture and the other from advanced mathematics. Any apparent disparity between pop culture and complex math fades away alongside the promise of Everything, which, after all, should accommodate the comparison of each thing residing in the great One (again, whatever that may be).

The first viewpoint—which, I admit, I find refreshing but ultimately misleading—comes from the musical group They Might be Giants. On their 2008 children’s album, Here Come the 123s, the band sings the following words on the song “One Everything” (which, funnily enough, is song number 2 on the album. Zero comes first…that’s a different story altogether):

There’s only one everything
Remember these words
There’s only one everything
And if you go out and count up everything
It all adds up to one
There’s only one everything
The last time I checked
There’s only one everything
It kinda makes sense that there would only be
Just one, not ten, not three
If you get all the stuff together
And you have not left something out
Then could there still be anything left over?
I'm pretty sure that means there could not

The claim here—presented as a humorous but also philosophically rich introduction to the number 1—is that Everything = 1. The great 1 of the universe shows itself if we try to imagine all things gathered together. Fascinatingly, then, Everything is not infinite or another word for infinity; it is, rather, a unity. The unity. 
While the band doesn’t delve into particulars, their lyrics do hint at answers to some of the big questions I asked at the beginning of this post. For example: What happens to multiplicity within this unity? They Might Be Giants suggests that the two—multiplicity and unity—co-exist in an unresolved mystery. This mystery is similar to the one that children likely feel when they ask their parents a question and receive the answer, “Because I said so.” Is that really an answer? There must be more to it. Will I ever find out??? 
(In their characteristic, self-reflexive lyrics, the band even acknowledges this: “There’s only one Omniverse. Go clean your room. There’s only one Omniverse.” Here, the lead singer, a father, creates a joke by juxtaposing a deep thought about the Universe/Multiverse/Omniverse and the most mundane and tedious of all parental commands, thereby underlining the co-existence of multiple strata of being within the unity of Being.)

I both agree and disagree with They Might Be Giants. I quite like their tacit insistence that the One everything contains multiplicity (audible in the command to go and remove the many toys from your room’s floor, preferably while thinking about the Oneness of Everything). The wiggle room made available to the listener allows for “One” to mean something different than it usually does. Something mysterious resides in the quantity of the One. But I disagree with the quick take-away message made possible by the pithy title “One Everything.” The disagreement comes from my belief that there are many everythings, which, in turn, comes from years thinking about the work of the mathematician Georg Cantor who developed what we now call Set Theory.

With this turn, I highly recommend the book Everything and More: a compact history of ∞, by David Foster Wallace, which provides a fantastic primer to the work of Cantor. Without delving into the details here, however, I can summarize one of Cantor’s main ideas in this way: There are many infinities, and thus there are many everythings. Now, it is possible to grasp this idea through a simple experiment:
  • I will sit here in my apartment and think of everything.
  • Next, wherever you are, think of everything.
  • Imagine, next, that there are five other people reading this and each of those people is thinking of everything.
  • Summary: All in all, then, we have seven everythings.
Cantor’s fame in the history of mathematics came in his ability to demonstrate the possibility of these multiple everythings in mathematical language, thereby satisfying thinkers who see math’s logical language as superlative (i.e., more fundamental to the nature of existence) than our everyday language (which introduces too many question marks, as in (the pronouns) “you,” “I,” and (the verb) “think”—what, after all, do those words mean??).

I am not a mathematician (to say the least), but I still feel the heat of Cantor’s realizations. His work demonstrated a logical explanation to some discoveries that poets had made before him, thereby extending the poetic discoveries to the study of mathematics and the (albeit Sisyphean) ordering of chaos. Think, for example, of William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Note the indefinite articles: “a World;” “a Heaven.” With this construction, we can picture a thousand of us scattered across the beaches of the planet, absorbed with the granules in our palms, each seeing a different world and a different heaven in our hands. How many worlds are there? At least as many as there are grains of sand. How many hours are in the day? Not 24, as we like to say; rather, there are infinite hours. It depends on how we look at it (to evoke a phrase that will also find mathematical justification in the eventual work of the profoundly bored patent clerk, Albert Einstein).

Why does any of this matter for you? If, like me, you have experienced the devastating loss of loved ones and sunk to your knees with a single thought—Everything is ruined. All is lost—then the material, non-metaphorical existence of multiple everythings is, well, Everything. Personally, I experience multiple everythings (i.e., complete, disparate realities) at each moment of every day. In one reality, my two-year-old son Phalen runs around the apartment by himself and plays with blocks, and magnets, and balls, and books, and chalk, et. al. In another reality, my would/should-be-four-and-a-half-year-old son Finlay is here with him, functioning as an older brother to both enhance and obstruct Phalen’s fun. In another reality, Finlay isn’t here bodily but he is here as pure energy and infuses all matter with a buzz. In another reality, Finlay isn’t in this apartment at all because he has work to do elsewhere, and I feel this to be true in my bones. In another reality, I feel “nothing” and read this as a sign of his absence that hangs over my cavernous internal emptiness. All of these realities—and more—coincide in each moment of every day.

When I allow the multiple everythings to develop in the darkroom of my mind, the words “Everything is Ruined” and “All is lost” lose their illusory power. Only one everything is ruined. In another everything, the ruins left behind in the shape of Finlay’s absence vibrate love into the universe like a beacon transmitting pure electricity. Only one all is lost. In another all, Finlay’s absence transmutes into a strange something that improves and empowers my parenting of his brother. This is not psychosis or derangement or poetic imagining. These alls all collaborate in the multiplicity of my Being.
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Returning to the starting point of these reflections (as a way of concluding), we notice that we have embarked on quite a journey. Nothing turns out to be a powerful something. Everything turns out to be the starting point of the many alls in which we participate at each moment of the day. Paired side by side, Everything and Nothing author an invitation to see beyond the surface of appearance and to journey into the Great Mystery.

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12/1/2018 1 Comment

New Podcast Episode: Ceremonial Grief Concert

This episode brings us to the Raga Room, nestled in the highly charged environment of Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Will interviews Aditi Sethi, Jojo Silverman, and Greg Lathrop. Once each season, these musicians host a Ceremonial Grief Concert that harnesses the powers of collective grieving and music to hold space for the work of spiritual transformation in the wake of grief.
Listen Here:
https://invitingabundance.net/to-grieve-podcast#Episode8
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10/12/2018 0 Comments

Write Brightly

Write Brightly is now available!! I am extremely excited about this class. I've wanted to make something like this for years. I have stepped up my video-editing game and created a deep dive into the world of academic writing. I think you'll learn a lot.

​Udemy is hosting the course online, and you can find a direct link to the course as well as a detailed overview here: https://invitingabundance.net/write-brightly/

The course is $49.99. For a limited time, I am offering promotional discounts. If you are a former student of mine or if the course price is a little steep for you at the moment, send me an email me at grow@invitingabundance.net.

​This is the third online class that Joanne and I have made as part of our business, Inviting Abundance. You can find information about my Race & Philosophy class and Joanne's Grief Mapping class on our website: invitingabundance.net.

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9/5/2018 0 Comments

Podcast from Inviting Abundance

Linked to my work at Inviting Abundance, Joanne and I have started publishing a podcast series call To Grieve. As of September 2018, we have 5 episodes. You can find the episodes in one of three ways:
  1. Check them out on our website. 
  2. Download from iTunes
  3. Download from Spotify

To whet your appetite, here's the first episode:

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7/17/2018 0 Comments

Full STEAM Ahead

I recently had the opportunity to write about the importance of adding art into STEM curricula in higher education. In acronyms, this topic is understood as the move from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math). I'm sharing my thoughts on this blog in order to make my language available to anyone who finds themselves in need of advocating for the arts in education.

The STEM to STEAM movement, championed by the Rhode Island School of Design and many institutions around the country, advocates for the necessary inclusion of Art and Design in curricula dedicated primarily to science, technology, engineering, and math. The resources and case studies compiled by these advocates demonstrate how exposure to the arts leads to more STEM patents, cultivates creativity in the design thinking behind today’s technology, and helps students from underrepresented cultural groups find footholds in the fields of science and engineering. I agree with all these findings and count myself among the STEM to STEAM advocates, but I also see a bigger reason for institutions of higher education to support and grow its arts offerings.

Adding the “A” to STEM does more than expand the minds of students and professionals. Art, and the Humanities more broadly, help to enhance STEM students’ awareness of the ethical complexities they will face in their careers after college. Pointing to the proliferation of algorithmic software applications, biotechnological advances in the treatment of fatal diseases, and technological solutions to the problem of climate change, Richard Lachman of Ryerson University argues that STEM students need arts education and exposure to the fine arts precisely in order to conceptualize the human lives affected by the technology they will help to build. Computer user interfaces, medical interventions, and renewable energy, he argues, aren’t fundamentally problems of technology. They are, rather, ethical problems that require the flexible and creative kind of ingenuity stimulated by artistic thinking. The arts, not the sciences, provide this ethical dimension and thus arts education in primary, secondary, and higher education must be a necessary component of twenty-first century education in the United States.

By teaching individuals about empathy, the nuances of interpersonal communication, and the stories too often forgotten by dominant historical narratives, the arts and arts-based education prepare students to participate in the larger socio-political questions surrounding the big issues of our times. I argue that educational institutions that foreground their offerings in science, technology, engineering, and math education have a responsibility to engage in and with the arts for the simple reason that without it the degrees being offered are entirely incomplete. To provide a college degree that is more than a slip of paper, colleges must create the conditions for on-campus experiences that challenge students to think about the local and global worlds in which they take part. That is, if arts education leads students to engage in the ethical dimension of STEM applications, then universities have an ethical imperative for supporting the arts on their campuses.

I do, however, recognize the challenges in implementing the vision that I am elaborating here.  One reason that colleges and universities have a hard time fully understanding the ethical impact of arts education is that artistic thinking focuses not primarily on results but on process. The qualitative value of art making, furthermore, is extremely hard to measure, and thus the quantitative proof of art’s impact on STEM students is difficult to see in the short term. I believe, nonetheless, that the road to achieving the ethical enrichment sought by STEAM advocates such as Lachman and myself begins with a shift in perspective, one that touts process, play, and experimentation as much as concrete and easily repeatable learning outcomes. Universities will need to hire administrators with backgrounds in the arts and in arts education capable of translating the language of art-making into terms that all faculty and students at the university can understand. Likewise, I think that universities would do well to promote faculty members into administrative positions so as to promote unity among all university employees as the institution as a whole moves forward with large-scale projects such as those in the areas of art outreach and engagement.

​While it might seem that STEAM curricula should first arise at the primary and secondary education levels in order to create a foundation for the type of change advocated by arts activists and educators like myself, I actually believe that colleges and universities should take the lead role. By demonstrating that the arts and the sciences can collaborate together in the transformative education of our nation’s young adults, universities will send the message that similar curricula are needed at the earlier stages of learning.
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7/4/2018 0 Comments

Ritual and Everyday Life

I recently came upon this video that I made a few years ago for former students of mine who were putting together a devised theatre piece. I was asked to make "something about ritual," and so that's precisely what I did. 
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10/1/2017 0 Comments

“DEAD RECKONING”: FINDING ONE’S WAY AMID LIFE’S CHALLENGES

One of our primary offerings at Inviting Abundance is something we call “wayfinding.” In its most general sense, wayfinding is the system by which all living beings orientate themselves in space and navigate their surroundings. When linked to the processes of grieving and education, wayfinding names the methods we use to thrive amid life’s challenges, from living with the death of loved ones to encountering the bewildering complexity of being human. In this post, I (Will) want to analyze and reflect upon a strange phrase that first drew me to the concept of wayfinding. This phrase is “dead reckoning.”

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​In order to live and thrive while grieving for the deaths of my son, father, stepfather, and friends, I have to reckon with death: How do these people’s deaths affect my ability to navigate through the social world? How do their deaths change my relation to life, generally? Is death really an end, or is it more like a threshold that opens onto a new beginning? By asking these philosophical questions, I feel that I am arranging the deaths of my family members into an order, one that acts like a trail capable of leading me in a specific direction. Here, the histories of the word “reckon” come into view: “to explain, relate, recount, arrange in order” as well as “to settle accounts.” Dead reckoning is a helpful term to know when facing life’s ultimate limit.
The term, however, is more common in the world of nautical navigation. Historically, sailors would determine their current position by calculating their previous position (such as port of embarkation) and their ships’ speed over a specific duration. With the knowledge of their current location, sailors could then adjust their heading and navigate around known obstacles. The process of finding one’s location at sea was called dead reckoning.
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As a philosopher, I’m drawn to the function of the “present position” in this nautical wayfinding practice. Sailors and grievers alike need to understand their present place in order to know where they’re going. But knowledge of “where one is” comes about only after making some analytical/mathematical calculations. We can’t know where we are unless we know where we’ve been and where we want to go. On the sea, past and future position is a matter of course; on the open seas of grief, by distinction, past and future locations aren’t so easy to ascertain, and thus knowledge of “where one is” in the world requires more intuitive calculations. Applied to the more philosophical kind of wayfinding, dead reckoning becomes a useful but extraordinarily difficult process for healing.
In this task of healing, we come upon a specific dimension of the word “dead”: “of water, ‘still, standing,’ from Proto-Germanic *daudaz.” Grief drops us in the still waters of the deep ocean of the soul. Without wind or current, these waters keep us in place and force us to comprehend the depth and expanse of the waters in which we are floating. I think of this dead water as the doldrums, a word that surfaces in Book IV of Homer’s Odyssey and refers to windless ocean travel, the worst kind of situation for a sailor trying to make his way home. The only way to summon the wind is to make an offering to the right spirit (Proteus) and/or god (Poseidon). Without faith in such spirits, people are left to float until chance intervenes. Even with faith and certainty in the spirit world, helping hands from beyond arrive on their own schedule, and waiting for help can be just as painful as the original traumatic experience that left us stranded in the first place.
But in that still water where no wind blows, an opportunity also presents itself. It is there that we have cause to think and talk to ourselves. The gnawing boredom we feel during the incessant waiting amid grief actually sparks the imagination and forces a necessary encounter with the self. Nietzsche referred to this “boredom” as “that disagreeable ‘lull’ of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.” It is a disposition common among artists who actually need this boredom brought on by still waters in order to ruminate, connive, and create. Most importantly, the doldrums bring about a stillness of soul that helps us individually to reckon with ourselves, as if to say, “Ok. Fine. What is this all about then? What am I doing here? What is here?”
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Philosophical wayfinding starts “here,” in the dead reckoning compelled by the trials of grief and sorrow. This “here” is also the “now” that Buddhists speak of when challenging us to remain present. Pema Chödrön helpfully reminds us that there is no escape from this now because there is nothing other than right now. The wisdom of no escape leads to sharper vision of one’s current circumstance, and it is this vision that Joanne and I have discovered over the last several years. We now see in the present moment a faint channel leading off to the horizon, and we set our compass to its heading everyday. Our son Finlay acts as our guide to keep us on course. We think of him as our wind spirit who fills our sails. The agony of impatience and the length of the journey still lead to despair and moments of anguish, but we know we’re not lost. We are, to the contrary, on the path to what we call “living grieving,” which is a mode of living life open to the elements, receptive to whomever we meet along the journey, and directed by the strengths we’ve honed over our many years on this planet.
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9/28/2017 0 Comments

​HOLDING SPACE & SITTING WITH GRIEF

Written by Joanne Zerdy for Inviting Abundance

I (Joanne) attended a 6-hour training workshop on the topic of Holding Space for Pregnancy Loss, specifically intended for those who support women and couples during pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and in the aftermath of pregnancy loss and infant death. Amy Wright Glenn, founder of the Institute for the Study of Birth, Breath, and Death and a former doula and hospital chaplain, led the workshop. Amy brought with her a great deal of compassionate attention to both the ideas and case studies that we discussed and to the bodies and experiences of the 14 women in the room.

On a beautiful Saturday morning we met in the home of a workshop attendee (herself a palliative care doctor) and dove into the material. Deeply impacted by the influential work of Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt, Amy brought our focus to three main related areas of discussion: companioning the bereaved, strengthening support networks, and the place/purpose of ritual. To me, undergirding all of this material was the issue and process of meaning-making. How, for example, does a mother make meaning of the death of her child and integrate this loss into daily life? In what ways can a parent generate a meaningful relationship with his deceased child that will help to sustain him in the coming days, weeks, and years? How does a ritual provide a physical space and/or activity to mark the ongoing influence of and attention to those who have left this world, and how do we impart such rituals with meaning? What does it mean to be a care-giver or support person? What meaningful (i.e. effective and purposeful) support structures can we build and maintain to meet and assist a bereaved person at various times during her grief journey?

For those unfamiliar with Wolfelt’s work, I encourage you to visit the website for the Center for Loss and Life Transition, an organization that he founded and directs. Wolfelt has been doing important work with those who are bereaved and with those who work with those who are mourning. The website contains many helpful resources as well as Wolfelt’s authored & co-authored books, aimed at varied audiences.

It is unfortunate – if not surprising – that, for the most part, medical discourse (and those who operate within it) continues to view grief as either some kind of illness/pathological condition to be fixed or cured OR as something to be passed through according to defined (neat & tidy) stages and timelines. Those of us who identify as bereaved know on an intimate level that grief can move in many directions at once, surging forth and quieting down, bringing up contradictory emotions, reintroducing memories or fears, circling around repeated narratives or anxieties, and so on, again and again. Many counselors and grief educators know this, of course, and it is useful to remind ourselves of those doing the vital work of challenging and changing institutional language and behaviors from within, say, medical and legal systems as well as those operating outside of such parameters. Jizo Statues. Jizo is a bodhisattva who helps to shepherd children to the spirit world.


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​In her book, Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief, Dr. Joanne Cacciatore – founder of the MISS Foundation, researcher, and bereaved mother – relays stories from her work as an educator and counselor alongside accounts of her personal journey of grieving her daughter Cheyenne. As with Wolfelt’s and Glenn’s work, Cacciatore’s writing underscores the multi-dimensionality of grief and its many contours that change shape and intensity over time. Her discussion of “the practice of being with” resonates with Wolfelt’s “companioning” in terms of the bereaved accompanying (sitting, walking, talking with) her emotions & thoughts as the grief ebbs and flows. Cacciatore too believes in the power of ritual and “microritual” to help us remember and, indeed, enact our ongoing love for our loved ones who have died. One such ritual that has traveled from Japan to the United States is mizuko kuyo, which stars Jizo, a helpful bodhisattva in Japanese Mahayana Buddhism who acts as a guardian and guide for children who have died before their parents. In our workshop, we briefly reflected on how we might begin to create communal grief rituals that align with our specific populations and belief systems. Garden of Hope & Healing at Hatcher Garden in Spartanburg, SC. Friends of ours made a donation in Finlay's memory to Hatcher Garden, so it's a special place for us.

Undoubtedly influenced by her work as a Zen priest, Cacciatore sees grief as an ongoing invitation to learn, to grow, and to open into a more conscious and conscientious way of living. She writes, “Those who have deeply suffered understand life in ways others cannot: they know the only way to attain authentic and lasting contentment is to turn their hearts outward in service to those who are suffering as we have suffered. I am present with life because I am present with death. I know joy and peace because I am present with grief and suffering” (176-177).

The women who took part in Amy Wright Glenn’s workshop – doulas, nurses, midwives, counselors, and facilitators – are all clearly committed to providing support and comfort to those who grieve and to those who are dying. In her own way, each is answering a call to serve. Some are mothers to living children; some (like me) parent both living and dead children; and some may have no child of her own yet she comforts or teaches like a mother. The ever-growing circle of mothers and fathers who are grieving for their children require an equally growing number of compassionate, patient, skillful, and resourceful care givers if we are – as a society – to find healthy and heartful ways of overcoming the alienation that can result from death, dying, and grieving. In actively participating in this dynamic network of love and compassion, we act as meaning-makers in holding space for healing individual sorrow and suffering as well as for processing communal and societal grief.

​This is the kind of work that Inviting Abundance cares about deeply. As grieving parents and as educators, we feel the need to help those who are suffering to find ways to develop a sustaining and sustainable grief practice and to navigate obstacles to emotional wellbeing in society. 
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9/22/2017 0 Comments

"Pedagogy": What's in a word?

[Click here for pronunciation of “pedagogy”]

In preparation for launching Inviting Abundance, we asked friends to test our website and offer feedback on the language we used to present our services. Two of these friends commented that they had to look up the word “pedagogy,” and, because of that feedback, we decided to swap out that word for “education” or “teaching” wherever it appeared on the site.

This got me (Will) thinking. The word “pedagogy,” which refers today to both the study of teaching and methods for teaching well, is not one that students regularly learn. Does this mean that teachers hide something crucial from their students, namely the very methods they use to impart information? Is there anything special about this word, or is it beneficial to swap it out for something more common? What’s in a word, after all? My answer is that “pedagogy” is an important word, and that knowing what it means opens the door to more exciting and student-driven learning.

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    Will Daddario is a historiographer, philosopher, and teacher. He currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

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