Grief Encounters

Very excited about the development of this work for 2026 and beyond I hope. The work begun five years ago with realisation of the necessity of grief as a generative force for living. How beautifully folded in and around each other is our immense capacity for loss, and our immense capacity for love. Our living is somehow a swinging between these polarites in our daily lives. Like any creative endeavour, I have to approach it sideways, as much as possible allowing the unconscious to do what It does.

In 2026 I will begin working more formally on the creation of something, I began gathering stories testimonials about the varieties of grief that people live with. Already I have been touched by not only the longing for the things and the people who were lost, but also the longing for the imagined. How wonderfully complex we are as humans that we can long for an imagined life, maybe several imaginary lives, that are always out of our reach, is such a curious and perhaps necessary juggling act of trying to find what it is we’re supposed to be doing while we’re here, and that the imagined lives may be offering clues like breadcrumbs to what may be missing in this one.

When I was sharing the most recent iteration of grief encounters in Norway, this woman came and sat in the chair. It was just her and me.

she sat there patiently watching what felt like each breath each gesture each movement I was doing, and she had a look in her eye like her eyes were full of stories. Like she was looking from such a far away place, but physically we were so close together. The only word we exchanged was thank you at the end.

I still think about her, how she sat there drying her tears, how what we exchanged would really never be put into language, only here my small attempt, but even that feels far away from this body to body heart to heart not knowing being together thing , that we shared.

As part of this project, I will be doing a series of grief walks, don’t entirely know what they are, I probably don’t need to know- but there is something about the rhythm and the shared rhythm of being together in movement that allows grief a kind of container that it can be recognised and then in some way be seen in this larger mystery. My experience this year of my own grief of losing my father is that you’re given something, it’s a kind of nebulous gift like being handed a kind of cloud that lives with you or inside you, it goes with you everywhere and you kind of live with each other, and are changed by each other, it shape shifts depending on the day, but it’s presence is there. In my experience it’s been a huge gift, in the recognition of the disappearance of everything, and how that gives birth to another way of seeing.

Like your eyes been dunked in the clear water and placed back into your skull , whereby that everything you see is glowing in this disappearance and is hugely present.

So I guess grief cuts a hole in the fabric of your life or your reality, and in that hole there’s a kind of breathing , where life seeps through in a new kind of way and offers a newness in the seeing. This takes the time it takes. Mabye years, decades or beyond that even.The recognition of loss brings a different kind of importance to the ordinary so that the ordinary becomes somewhat extraordinary again, and that can only happen within the glow of its eventual disappearance. In my research I stumbled upon this again a powerful text and interview of Dennis Potter.

Edited version of Melvyn Bragg’s interview of Dennis Potter on March 15 1994. It was broadcast by Channel 4 on April 5 1994: below

We all, we’re the one animal that knows that we’re going to die, and yet we carry on paying our mortgages, doing our jobs, moving about, behaving as though there’s eternity in a sense. And we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is is, and it is now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can’t. It’s in us, but we can’t actually; it’s not there in front of us. However predictable tomorrow is, and unfortunately for most people, most of the time, it’s too predictable, they’re locked into whatever situation they’re locked into … Even so, no matter how predictable it is, there’s the element of the unpredictable, of the you don’t know. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.

Below my window in Ross, when I’m working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people – bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.