Last day today of Grief Encounters for a few months.
I’m not sure I can attempt to place language to something wordless.
But I have learnt a lot this week, and been changed by the people I met.
Going into this I didn’t know much of what it could be, or needed to be.
But today I felt carried and cared for by the work and the people who stepped into the space to witness. Their eyes and hearts drew out something that without them would not exist.
The day began with a long embrace with a stranger. With no language exchanged, we stood together in the middle of the space holding each other. Both dressed in black.
Then the dance unfolded. She stayed for hours. Her late partner loved dancing. “He would have loved it.”
The work becomes a nameless dedication. It’s all a dedication.
And in that joy pours out in such an unexpected way… a kind of quiet joy… and thankfulness…
An aliveness — paradoxically — so much aliveness in being with this.
A teenage boy and his sister walk in. He told me about his grandad. He had just recently died.
He knew nothing of what I was doing this week, but felt called into the space.
He sat for a while with his sister, his legs swinging on the chair as she saw me carry a chair up high into the light.
I imagined him sitting in it.
The teenage boy said he had a beard and made the sign with his hands.
I waved to them on the way out…
“Thank you”… “thank you”… back.
One woman said, “It’s kind of like a chapel, but not. If you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
In our culture perhaps there are very few spaces of contemplation.
The word in Latin com — together — and contemplation… to gaze at together.
Some people walk in and walk straight back out. Some people ask where the art is, and I kind of point at myself awkwardly. They look bemused and a bit disappointed. Slowly I move again so I don’t lose my nerve. It’s easily done.
The work… it’s all a game of losing it and finding it.
Failing a little and finding something in the debris.
Something of the place of the arts this week seems to be here: to remind us of beauty at the point we need reminding perhaps, just at the time we need it.
A woman said the work, the poetic things in life, the ordinary and the extraordinary, live side by side, like the dead and the living. The arts help us remember.
It had this week become a little shelter of sorts, but not one that hides you, but opens you out.
This week was so much about time…
Being in time, being in time together…
Passing time together… remembering… recognising the transience of it all.
Dancing…
