Grief and gravity
From Topography of Tears, by Rose-Lynn Fisher
In 1992, I went with my partner to see the Names Project quilt when it was brought to Minneapolis. This was a new-ish partner and we weren’t just going as queer people. We were going because her brother had died of AIDS and she had just made a square for him.
The quilt was already too large to be displayed indoors. Five years previously, the quilt had come to Minneapolis and been displayed in its entirety in the Metrodome, our then indoor stadium. Five years later, in 1992, it was too big and only some of it could be spread out on the stadium floor.
My partner had been working for months on her square, choosing the right colors and getting elements from her brother’s family, friends and lover to include. It was, as so many of them are, a deeply personal and important memorial honoring a much-too-early death. She had sent her piece off to the Names Project and now, as the quilt was unrolled on the stadium floor, she saw her brother’s piece for the very first time, no longer alone but part of this ocean of collective grief. It is not surprising that she fell to her knees, grabbing my arm as the weight of her loss pulled her down.
As I felt her tumble, heard the rawness of her crying, the sound of it and the space it took, everything inside me went the opposite of down. I went up up up - up with fury and indignation. I was red hot inside and my words were racing from my brain to my heart and back again. I can remember these words, spinning back and forth, clearly even to today: how dare she assume that I would be there for her, that she would have my support without even asking for it. How dare she just take up this space with her sadness and her need? There were hundreds of people surrounding us. Other people were crying or just politely moving through this exhibit. So many of them were queer and I felt panic-exposure start to lift up, to lift lift lift, we were too visible, this was not ok, and so I turned stone on the inside while the outside went through the motions of being a supportive partner.
It took awhile, like months and maybe even years, before I could see what was happening. I still cringe when I remember myself internally asserting: I have been through MUCH harder things than SHE has been through in her life and you don’t hear ME losing my shit. No one has been there for me so how DARE she assume that I would be there for her?
Over the years, I have both apologized and thanked her. Standing there in the Metrodome, witnessing the rawness of her grief as both clear and unconfused, something frozen inside of me began to shake and thaw. Thank you. And as she fell to the ground, reaching for the hand of someone who loved her, I tightened and pulled my heart away, judging her for her pain. I am sorry.
****
The word grief and the word gravity, in their most ancient of roots, are the same word: heavy.
Pause here. Don’t think of the word “heavy” but feel the word. Right this second. Feel what it is to be heavy, the slow weight of it, the down of it, the earth of it.
Can your body let you feel heavier than you were before you began reading this piece? Can you feel yourself settle more directly on the ground, maybe even sink past the surface into the soil itself? Do you feel it in your bones, your muscles, your heart? Or does your body resist, pulling back up against your invitation to go down, instead wanting to lift lift lift?
I have written about this elsewhere but I’ll say it again: our relationship to gravity is one of the gifts of our ancestors. When we are first born, emerging from the fluid world of the womb into the world of earth and air, our ancestors/evolution has given us the means to experience gravity without falling apart. This is not a small thing. For nine months, we have lived without up or down or sideways. Our heart has beaten and our blood has moved through our veins and arteries without any push or pull. Just weightlessness…. and then we are born and there is this pressure, this up and down, this heavy and light that our heart and soon-lungs and all of the fluid and movement in our body has to respond to.
The very first reflex or embodiment instinct that comes on line is the gift of falling back against gravity and letting it hold us. It’s called tonic lab, if that matters. For those of you who swim, you know when you have spent hours and hours in the water and then you get out and start moving on to dry land? For a moment, there is an awkward heaviness, like your body is lumbering and strange. It doesn’t take long for the body to reorient; for the muscles and bones to remember weight and that awkward feeling goes away. Imagine first being born: reflexes are ancestral memories that take this mix of membrane and fluid that is a physical self and shows it what it learned before it had shape and form. Fall back, whisper our ancestors, relax. This gravity is your friend. Within the overwhelm of so much space without boundary, this sudden big and uncontained outside world, there is this steadiness, they tell us, beneath and around you. Fall back, fall back and rest. Gravity.
When I was first in a yoga class after learning about this reflex and we were directed towards savasana, I started to giggle. Of course, look at me all chipmunk-excited about what I am learning about gravity and now let me be humbled, yet again, by a 5,000 year old tradition.
One of the important elements of gravity is that it is physical. This is not an energetic or spiritual property, however much all that is physical is also energetic and spiritual. Gravity is an experience that is about your body, your density, your weight. It is not a theory, it is something we feel. And what we call rest, the practice that so many of us don’t know how to do, is a moment of mutual awareness between your body and gravity. One of my teachers once told me that rest is nothing more than the physical awareness of being tired matched with feeling support and comfort. To rest means to pause, to fall more deeply into your tiredness, and to feel the support below you: a couch, a bed, a floor…. Gravity.
*****
As someone who gets to work with bodies, this is what I see: most of us are lifting up, away from the earth, most of the time. There are real reasons for this. Feel what happens inside when I describe this scenario: a loud noise takes place and you are not sure what it is. Your attention comes up to your eyes, your ears, your face and your body slowly pivots, looking left and right, lifting up to assess if the sound is a threat or just a loud noise. It is a lift that is, at its earliest, the way we protect ourselves, determine if we are safe. This lift is there in those bodies who experience or have experienced surveillance and the potential of harm in both public and private spaces: lift up, look, watch, figure out what action or street or type of body language is going to keep you safe.
This lift has also been hijacked: this using eyes/ears to assess if something is not a threat or is going to keep us safe or is a marker of getting it right. This lift is built into a body shaped by capitalism, by the experience of being body-as-object for whichever of the many reasons that turns body into object. We are what we produce and therefore we lift up, look left and right, to determine if we have been successful. We are the image or gender or culture or attitude we perform and so we lift lift lift to scan our surroundings and check that we are successful. Every single domination strategy relies on this lift and depends on keeping it lifted: popular culture, political arguments, educational systems and healthcare, anything that says you are only safe, you are only comfortable if you fit into this or that way of being, it causes a repeat of that lift….lift…..lift….
There are a lot of bodies that have never had the chance to come back down.
This lift, this ability we have, is supposed to be a temporary measure. It is something our ancestors sorted out in order to get a better scan of the environment: from finding food, turning our noses to the wind to smell for rain, and, of course, sensing danger. It’s one of the things about us that is different from our crawling and four legged relatives. Some of them can climb trees but most of them can’t get the same lift-into-height that people (whether with one or two legs) can. The poetry of evolution says this is what led us, our species straining up from all fours to come into greater height, our eyes now above prairie grasses and able to keep watch with a wider span. The older I get, the less sure I am that this is the path we took. There’s a bit too much top-of-the-food-chain exceptionalism in that western theory and…. I can still feel the pull to go up UP and to look around, is there anything there, what is out beyond my reach, are we ok?
This lift is supposed to be temporary, a way of rising above what might be happening to get a broader view, to seek the details that will help us find a tree with ripe fruit or survive a potentially dangerous situation. It is a temporary situation. On the other side, when we are done with the lift lift lift, we fall back down to the ground. Down here where the air is cooler and the world is smaller and more up close.
Down is where we rest. It is where we land when we fall.
The word grief and the word gravity, in their most ancient of roots, are the same word: heavy.
***
Grief is a wave, a surge, a demand. It rises up, reaching for something beyond fingertips, and it falls, falls down, bones and muscles unable to tolerate the things that shouldn’t be. Grief is heavy, it pulls, it demands and then it wilds itself up before tumbling back down again. A wave, a movement, even when the body is lying there, perfectly still. Grief is to sadness as terror is to fear. It is not of the mind and the thoughts or even just of the heart, it is of the whole body: the entirety of a surviving life.
There is such a thing as strong sadness, as overwhelming sadness, and this is not the same as grief. The oldest meaning behind the word “sad” is to satisfy; to be sated and full. Sadness, when we have not been raised to avoid and control it, is like a tension that is finally released, a tightness that wants to expand. Sadness is a detox and shift, the emotions moving in and out and through. Grief is the longer change, the process by which a body becomes different. It is a feeling that sometimes takes generations to hold. On one side we are who we are because of this person or land or community and then, when what was here is now forever-gone, we have to become someone else.
The word grief and the word gravity, in their most ancient of roots, are the same word: heavy.
***
Here it is, the gift of those who came before. When we are first born, emerging from the water world to this world of earth and sky, we body-remember how to rest against the ground, to feel our weight as a reminder of support. This is the first thing we instinct-learn because we can not survive without it. Nothing else can emerge or grow or change or shift if our life-bodies are struggling against the pull of gravity. I know that some of you were born into bodies that struggle like this and that is another kind of hard.
The physicality of grief, its rawness, depends on knowing the ground. Shock, overwhelm, loss, our bodies want to fall, immediately and literally, or slowly with a melting into this thing we can not bear. We become heavy, even if we are still sitting, silent and unmoving, in the chair in the corner. There is no single way a body shows or expresses this but on the deepest inside, grief, when not frozen, is a movement in and through the heavy. We fall to the ground, to the oldest place of support, because at one point we will rise again, not lift but rise, as someone not the same as we were before.
All of this is why the first part of healing is ending violence. Always. A body can not fall-heavy to ground if to survive it has to stay in the lift-lift-lift.
For dominance and oppression to set like cement, it has to begin with taking away a people’s capacity and ability to remember themselves. Ourselves. This happens by taking away language and culture, through forced assimilation and through the destruction of life. (But people remember). Without culture and practice and song and language and story, it is harder to grieve, to rage, to mourn together. We begin to fracture. (But people still manage to find each other). And then the strategy that accompanies this is for bodies to stay in lift lift lift, eyes up above the horizon line, scanning and looking for the next thing, for the potential enemy or act of destruction, for the rule that has to be followed and the punishment if it isn’t, for the candy or the promotion or the commitment to being on the side of the bully even if it means you sell a piece of your soul.
I think of this when I remember that the land is really the only thing that we have in common. The only thing, this air that we breathe, this earth that supports us and that brings us food and shelter and a thousand brilliant things; this water that is our lives. The only thing we have in common, each one of us across culture and generation and experiences of harm or denial, is this land that mineral-builds our beloveds, bone by connecting bone. And it is this land, this ground, this strange magic that is gravity connecting earth to the sky, that first holds us after birth and that calls us when what is changed is brutal and too life-confusing to bear.
***
Outside my window, the ground is frozen. It snowed today and all day I kept thinking, feeling into grief. There are so many reasons for it today, yesterday, last year and tomorrow. For so many of us, within our lives and generationally, for me, here, within the space of this single life, there is a deep freeze around some grief that was never able to fall to the ground. Some grief is too large for a single body to feel. Some grief is still hidden, buried like seeds in the ground waiting until it is warm enough, safe enough to begin to crack open. And some grief is moving and wilding, right this second, even as I write this piece, a snowplow scraping by on the street outside and my partner in another room, texting with a friend.
Sometimes what our ancestors most want for us is the grief that their lives could not safely let fall to the ground. That is a prayer all by itself.
Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses. Martín Prechtel. The Smell of Rain on Dust