Good Grief (9)
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The Familiar Ache of What We Never Knew (Revised)
"A visitor's witnessing"
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Someone tried sage-cleansing their apartment today from a WikiHow article. Set off smoke alarms. Cried harder. This is reconnection in the time of Google - sacred meets frantic searching.
Strange recognition when people try rituals they've never done. Like bodies remembering passwords minds forgot. Standing in circles feels right. Speaking to fire makes sense. Even though you learned it from Instagram, not grandmothers. This rhythm allowed ancestors to endure. Now you're trying to endure with apps and anxiety medication.
Witnessing particular grief - feeling how much heritage got lost. Like hard drives failing but for entire cultures. Not grief you process once but return to repeatedly. Each time discovering more absence, more empty spaces where stories should be.
Can't mend what you haven't mourned. Can't mourn what you don't know you lost. People keep encountering emptiness. Different shapes in different peoples, same hollow sound when knocked.
Europeans, Middle Easterners, North Africans had earth-connected traditions too. Before concrete, before conquest, before capitalism. Songs for planting. Ceremonies for seasons. Now they have Black Friday and seasonal depression. Lost what connected them to land, to each other. Replaced with LinkedIn connections and loneliness.
500 years ago, people arrived already hollow. Already disconnected from their own songs. Maybe they hollowed others because emptiness was all they knew? Hurt people hurt people, but on continental scale. When you've forgotten your own music, you don't recognize what you're destroying.
Hard to hold how hurt travels through generations. Trauma frequent flyer miles, automatically renewed. The wounded wound others. The silenced silence. The forgotten make others forget.
Under innocent spiritual goodness, even this pattern might meet mercy. Not forgiveness - that's not mine to give. But understanding the wound goes through everyone differently. Some bleeding, some scarred, some numb, all damaged.
People approach these truths carefully. Delete their 23andMe results. Redownload them. Delete again. Some grieve what was taken. Some grieve what ancestors took. Some grieve both in the same body, at the same time.
Strange recognition of ceremonies never performed - inherited grief? Body knowing rituals it never witnessed? Heart recognizing songs never heard? Nostalgia for experiences that weren't yours but somehow are?
Maybe repair begins in honest emptiness. In admitting what's missing without pretending to fill it. Grieving what's gone while sensing something available. Not the same but new. TikTok medicine dances. Zoom healing circles. Sacred happening in comment sections.
Still wondering if what we never knew can still heal us. Still discovering everyone's making altars without calling them that. Still witnessing return happening in unexpected places.
