Grief House - Portals

We decided to have the theme of our first ever episode recorded with the participation of a live audience be - mistakes! It was no accident; it guaranteed no matter what went wrong we would be perfectly on theme. Gratefully it all went exactly right, in a fumbling, not totally planned a little bit jagged and loose kind of way. Take a listen and see what you think.

In this episode we invite you to the recording of our first community episode on June 24th at Leaven Community Center across from Alberta Park in Portland. We also discuss our disaster bonded friendship, shared mistakes and our ideas about the long and short term impact of things done imperfectly.

In this episode Sascha and I tell stories of our experiences of public grief. We notice how different it feels to hold grief other's than it feels to spill our own and wonder about what conditions make grief feel safe enough or wild enough to come out into the open.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about the ways we reach out from inside ourselves to meet the world.  We explore the difference between operating from our logical, thinking brains with our polished, public personalities showing vs opening from a deep and misty inner space that feels more vulnerable but also, maybe, more alive. We talk about how both methods have served us and what we think has s...

In this episode Sascha and I talk about magic as a remedy for soul-bleaching imperialism. We share our personal strategies for sniffing out old stands of magic growing in the forests of our beings and tips for how to notice and tend spots of re-emerging magic in the wider world.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about the practice of sharing abundance.  We consider how awkward and un-practiced we feel at noticing what we have in abundance, believing it is needed and delivering it to actual beings who can use it. Similarly we discuss how often we feel under-resourced and blindly grasping for help we can't find though we know (or at least suspect) they can't be mo...

In this episode Sascha and I talk about how it feels to hand things over to something we can't see, know or control to tend.  We look at moments when we've come to the end of our ability to act and understand but nowhere near the limit of our ability to care or worry.  We wonder about what it means to let something go with a belief that it will be caught - by community, by forces of natu...

In this episode Sascha and I sit together in person and talk about the wonder of loving one's self. We consider our differing aptitudes for it, its various and glorious side effects, and how we've experienced it alongside and nurtured it in each other through out our long friendship. 

Join Sascha and Hannah Rumsey of Friends Missing Friends as we talk about the beauty and joy of having very dear friends and the disenfranchised heartbreak that can come along when those friends die.  In a heteronormative world that likes to make hierarchies of our losses, I was so happy to spend time hearing about Hannah's dear friend Lauren. In Hannah's grief journey she began Friends...

In this episode Sascha and I talk about death as a balancing gesture to birth. We explore the pregnancy stages of this process, in particular; the periods where one body is held inside another as it slowly makes or unmakes itself into distinction from or integration into the bigger system. We look at the beings whose deaths needed to be held and integrated in order to birth the Grief House and won...

In this episode Sascha and I talk about the concept of refugia - protected spaces creatures can survive during periods of destructive havoc - the importance of diversity and how we might tend each other during times of flood.

Like a sack full of gifts proffered by a stranger sitting on a folding chair at a club you don't quite understand, this episode is a grab bag of random things you may or may not need or want offered without rhyme or reason. There's dreams about death, poop on a bed, mammograms, top-less fort building and, as always, Sascha's and my deep appreciation for our friendship. If you get so...

In this episode I talk with Chelsea Biagioli, host of Talk To The hand - Exploring Grief with Puppets, about how she incorporates play into her grief practice.  We share stories of childhood play - potions, spells, and waiting for the make-believe world to come into focus - and how our play changed as we grew up. We wonder about the value of spending time in imaginary worlds, what it prepares us f...

In this episode Sascha and I explore what it's like to interact with reality mediated by different kinds of brains.  We realized that one good way to describe our current experience is this: Sascha is a potion mage and I am a potion. This feels just right to me. I revel in her jars and shelves, feel grateful for my tremendous luck this time around and move off in the world more self aware and...

In this episode Laura and I talk about the importance of play and a reminder that everything ends anyway, so perhaps let's open ourselves up to play and creation.  We talk about the beautiful humming that can arise with the serious work that is play. We talk about insights gained from playing with Kate Drummond of The Energetic Heart , The Little Feminist Farm in Georgia , and Working Class A...

In this episode Sascha and I look at vigils, vigilance and hyper-vigilance. We consider how each state shows up in our lives and how they interact with each other. We offer personal stories and learn a little more about each other. 

In this episode Sascha and I throw structure to the wind and invite you into friendship chatting about vigilance and loss.  We discuss: outrage at day spas, prairie dogs, non-aquatic anemones, aikido and how it feels when we open the door to our pain and fear, and try to move and roll with it. Maybe this structure demonstrates one of the antidotes for hyper-vigilance: what comes when we feel deepl...

In this episode Sascha and I discuss forts made from: sheets, refrigerator boxes, Vanderbuilt University, teacher's desks, Jim Smith, jungle gyms and each other. We wonder about the value of a dedicated practice of fort building. What (we query) are we training for when we build realities from make-believe? What more when we built them alongside other creatures? And when we invite in guests,...

On this episode of the podcast, Sascha talks with Kate Drummond of The Energetic Heart and About Play in Atlanta to learn more about her journey and discuss reality as it relates to regulation.  They agree that emotional regulation does not equal submission, doesn't mean entering a non feeling place and doesn't require us to forfeit anger but, rather, offers stable access to deep feeling...

In this episode of the podcast Sascha and I discuss the nature of reality.  We consider the practical appeal of living inside a consensus reality, the value of remembering that real doesn't mean absolute and what it's like when truth we've relied on cracks apart to reveal who-knows-what swirling underneath. We look at examples from our lives of ways grief offered glimpses into layer...

We are thrilled to share our first community stories episode.  We look forward to weaving and sharing the experiences of our grief house community members.  Our theme this month is perspective and reality - the conversations on this episode explore how grief can change our experience of the world around us.  Today’s stories are shared by Jamie, Alex, Edith and Morgan. They were recorded at the Por...

In this special episode I talk with Serena Trexler about her experiences as a death care worker, death rights advocate and green death/human composting engineer.  We Discuss Serena's personal relationship with the dead and their bodies (curious, honored to know them, not afraid) in contrast to many people's relationship with the dead (closed off, hopeful they won't be near, quite af...

In this episode Sascha and I talk about webs.  We ponder the way they are spun from hunger and instinct. How hope weaves a web, how death works in the weaving. We consider the web from a spider's perspective - how they never see the full scope of their work. We wonder about how we might weave well, where we are. We talk about our mothers and our fathers - the webs they wove for us, the nouris...

In this episode, Sascha and I try to put our fingers on the ache inside beginnings. We wonder about the way life grows out of death, how joy grows alongside sorrow, and whether anything ever really starts for the first time. In an act of cunning metaphor, we take a while to get rolling with this episode. Eventually, inside our large meandering, we make a circle that comes round in a way that feels...

In this episode Sascha and I contemplate miracles, reality and how the two things intersect. We discuss: my father's death and the dog miracles that came in its wake,  the delusion/magic weaving Sascha's mother practiced in her life, what sky diving might teach us about the nature of reality, how one might work at miracles, whether a tendency toward miracles can me spread, caught or lear...