Navigating personal and political grief in a time of chaos and change

For anyone dealing with personal or collective grief, and wondering where all the feelings are supposed to go.

The song and the slow glide

'I don't know if we were meant to carry so much grief in one body… Yet, we are not alone.'

These words are from a song by Alexandra/Ahlay Blakely that I have sung with others at song circles, protests, and community gatherings. Groups assemble to process sorrow that feels too vast, frightening, or unfathomable to hold in isolation. The song includes a section that is essentially a tuneful wail, created to reconnect us with the messy, loud, and physical reality of mourning.

Reclaiming ritual, authentic expression, and communal grieving can be a form of resistance to the legacy of Victorian Britain, where emotional repression and sanitised mourning rituals became the default expectation.