Separation Station

In September I went out of town to do some deep and beautiful work with people I love a lot around the delicate and intricate and often unspoken grief of estrangement. Some things to note:

Estrangement from a family of origin creates a complicated emotional landscape.

It requires a great deal of faith in yourself and your decision.

You have to be sure what you’re protecting is worth the disconnection (if you’ve gone that far it probably is).

It’s a path where you often take the first step and can’t see the bottom of the staircase.

There isn’t a guarantee that the estrangement is better than fractured connection, so you really have to trust yourself.

It’s isolating. It’s scary.

It can be expansive and beautiful and full of connection in found or distant family.

Estrangement is a lot.

There’s only so much you can say in an casual post.

By the end of the week we’d landed in the most beautiful space we could have imagined. We turned a curve on that staircase and found only beauty and depth of love we couldn’t see before.

I am so grateful for grief work and and the courage of grievers. I am so dedicated to the idea that grief work is liberation work. It leads to freedom for us individually and as a collective.

I came home with a pile of treasures from the Salish Sea. I came home changed and grateful. What a time. What a life.

Head to my Substack if you'd like to read more about grief and estrangement and also love and joy and magic and living.