“Grief is the dark color that adds depth to the canvas, providing contrast and texture.”
I read that line this week in The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, and I had to set the book down for a minute.
As an artist and a creator, I could see it right away. My brain started painting a canvas for me. Bright in color, rich in variety, deep in texture. With each stroke, I could imagine the build up that was created. Every moment of grief in my life had added something that was not there before. Not damage, but depth.
We are taught to think of grief as the thing that ruins the painting. The mistake we would take back if we could. But the dark colors are what make the light ones visible. Without them, everything stays flat and pleasant and says almost nothing at all.
What would your canvas look like?
Grief Gives Us the Gift of Compassion
Grief gifts us the quality of compassion. We would not experience the full expansion of love, the daily joy nuggets, or the beauty of the natural world if it was not for grief. Loss is what taught me to notice. The light through the aspen tree we planted in honor of my brother-in-law, almost as if I could feel him near saying hello. The touch of my pup, Azzy, leaning against my leg. The zip of a hummingbird as I pour another cup of coffee. A swallowtail landing nearby on my hike as if it were my pup, KoKo, had come to walk with me. These beings were always there. Grief is what made me look more closely, to pay attention.
Those losses are also the story behind Evergreen Moose, if you want the longer version of how I got here.
Grief works outward too. The people who have sat with their own sorrow are almost always the people who can sit with yours. They do not rush you. They do not reach for the silver lining. They have been in that room before and they know what it asks. That is what the dark color does. It does not only add depth to your own canvas. It lets you stand in front of someone else’s without flinching.
Grief Remakes Us, One Piece at a Time
Grief remakes us. Like a puzzle being taken out of a box, put together piece by piece, and then taken apart again. Over and over we are taken apart and rebuilt. Over and over we fit the pieces back together, perhaps more softly than the last time.
I think about those moments when you cannot find the piece that fits. You know it exists. You have looked at the picture on the box. You just cannot see where it goes yet, and the harder you search, the more the pieces blur together. That is grief on its hardest days. The answer is not to force a piece into a space it was never shaped for. The answer is to take a breath, pause, and reset. When we do, clarity comes. Peace comes. The piece turns up, usually right where we had already looked.
What is the puzzle piece in your life right now?
What It Means to Approach Grief With Reverence
John O’Donohue said, “What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. When you approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.”
Isn’t that the truth? I know when I am having one of those irritable days, everything feels off and harder. One small inconvenience sets me off and it turns into a pile on effect. The person that is driving too slow, but perhaps I am meant to be noticing. The email that created doubt in my work, but perhaps it was to push me to a different path. The keys I cannot find, but perhaps the delay was to keep me safe. None of these were the problem. My approach was. I am stubborn too, which does not help me any.
Reverence offers a right-sized relationship with our sorrow. I do not think it means being solemn about it, or performing something. I think it means stopping the fight. It means treating your sorrow as a guest that has come a long way to reach you rather than an intruder you need to remove from the house. Reverence slows us down enough to actually listen to what our grief is asking for. Doing that offers us a chance to learn a new pattern of relating to our sorrow, one that does not require us to be finished with it.
How can you approach grief with reverence?
Finding a Grief Practice You Can Sustain
To build our relationship with grief, we need a practice we can sustain over time. This can be journaling, drawing, writing poetry, meditating, prayer, forest bathing, dance, or something else entirely. What it is matters far less than whether you will actually do it. It needs to be consistent. It needs to be something you can maintain on a hard week, not only an inspired one. Five minutes you keep will carry you further than an hour you abandon by next week.
This practice will hold and sustain you through the hard times. It keeps the overwhelm at bay, not by removing the grief, but by giving it a regular place to go. Grief that has nowhere to land tends to show up sideways, in the irritability, the exhaustion, the sudden tears in the grocery store parking lot. A practice gives it a door.
What practice could you start today?
I gathered the questions from this piece into a small journal. Eight questions, room to write, free and no email needed.
How Forest Bathing Became My Ritual for Grief
Forest bathing has given me a ritual for my grief. When I first started walking slowly in the woods with no destination, it felt almost uncomfortable. I was so conditioned to produce something, to get somewhere, to make the time count. Slowness felt like doing it wrong. But grief does not move at the pace our culture moves, and the forest does not either. The two of them keep the same time.
Now the practice looks simple from the outside. I walk out along a trail here in northern Colorado and I stop early, often within the first few minutes. I notice what is actually here. The smell of vanilla from the ponderosa pine bark warming in the sun. The sound of water flowing over rocks in the nearby river. The way the aspen leaves move when nothing else does and it feels like they are waving at me. I let my pace drop until my breathing changes on its own. And somewhere in there, the grief I came in with has room to sit beside me instead of on top of me.
Forest bathing has helped me step away from the deep resistance of the disconnected way our society has conditioned us to live. It has given me new hope, a deeper connection to the Earth and all the beings, and it has widened my heart to hold more love.
If you have never tried it, I wrote about how forest bathing helped me feel again, including a simple way to try twenty minutes of it on your own.
What would it feel like to walk without having a destination?
Grief Is Not Passive, It Is Life Work
Grief is not passive. It is ongoing, life work.
Grief helps you connect with yourself more deeply and listen more closely to what you need. It is work that gives your heart and your soul the love and compassion you deserve. Through practicing, you gain the ability to be more present in your life. It helps you stay steady and keeps you from regressing into that child-like state of feeling panicked, overwhelmed, hopeless, and alone.
I want to be clear that this is not the same as getting over it, or moving on, or any of the other phrases people hand us when they do not know what else to say. The work is not finishing. The work is building enough capacity to carry what will always be with you.
That shift matters. When we believe grief is something to complete, every hard day feels like proof we are doing it wrong. When we understand it as capacity, the hard days stop being failures. They are simply the days the load is heavier, and we have been building the strength to carry it all along.
What is your grief asking you to listen to?
Honoring the Debt With Small Acts of Ritual Beauty
The Maya say we all carry a spiritual debt for what we have been given, one we can never fully repay. We honor that debt with elegance and displays of ritual beauty.
That sounds large, but it doesn’t have to be. Light a candle once a week for someone you have lost and spend a moment updating them on your life. I do this myself to continue to connect with my mom. I tell her how my flowers are doing or if I picked up a new one she would have loved. I share with her stories about my amazing friends and how she would have loved them. I share something that made me laugh and would have made her laugh too. I imagine her laugh.
Ritual likes something to hold. It is part of why I make handcrafted keepsakes, small nature-inspired pieces meant to sit somewhere you will see them, and why some people ask me for a custom one made for a specific person or fur baby they miss.
We have lost our way as a culture, failing to honor this debt. The results are a world being rapidly emptied by a never-ending desire for more. Small rituals are how we start paying it back.
How can you honor your debt and build a deeper connection to yourself and the Earth?
Grief Work Is Soul Work
Grief work is soul work. It takes courage to face the world as it is. Courage not to burrow into a hole of comfort and disconnect from everything.
When we are faced with loss, we feel our own vulnerability and the plain truth of how much we need community. Grief bonds us with the Earth and all of the beings. The trees, the animals, the plants, the rocks, the water, everything. If we open our hearts to the signs we might not have seen before, we will feel more connected. Like we belong amongst everything, the way we always have. A relationship of reciprocity between us, our grief, and all the beings of the Earth.
What is one being you could connect with this week?
It Is the Broken Heart That Is Capable of Genuine Love
It is the broken heart that is capable of genuine love. Without the awareness and the willingness to be shaped by grief, we stay caught in our own strategies of avoidance and striving. When we acknowledge the layers of loss, we discover our capacity to respond, to protect, and to restore what has been damaged. When we place ourselves closer to grief, life becomes more clear, more beautiful, more real.
Your canvas is already richer than you know.
The eight questions I asked along the way are gathered into a small journal, free to download here whenever you are ready for them.
And if you would like a place to begin, I’d be honored to guide you on a forest bathing walk here in Fort Collins, Colorado. I keep the groups to ten so there is room for whatever you bring with you. No experience is needed. Just a willingness to move slowly and an open mind. If you are not sure which experience fits, just ask me.
With gratitude and love,
Kris