Gathering Grief: A community exercise in collective grief and mourning

Individualism has left us to mourn the increasing causes of grief in the modern world on our own, an inherently unsustainable and isolating norm. This event is meant to build a practice of communal grieving as a radical act of community building and group vulnerability and support. Join us for a night of discussion, education, processing, and sharing.

Topics of focus: Eco Grief, Grief for Global Losses, and Grieving the Living. Stations will be available with educational information, written reflections, collective art projects, hope building, interpersonal processing, a small ESA dog, sensory seeking and reduction, and more. Attendees are welcome to join and depart whenever is best for them. Opening statements will begin at 5:15, one facilitated group activity will take place at 6:30, and all stations will be self-led/on your own time.

Light refreshments will be available; vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free options included. Street parking available.

Accessibility information:

• Enter through the side entrance
• Front and side entrances are wheelchair accessible, ramp to front and side doors
• Gender neutral bathrooms available
• Separate quiet / lower-sensory space available
• Masks required
• 1 small ESA dog will be present

M. Scott Peck begins his book The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace with the profound declaration: "In and through community lies the salvation of the world." Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals "who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to 'rejoice together, mourn together,' and to 'delight in each other, and make other's conditions our own.'"

-bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, p.129