Grief & Gratitude Part 2

Available to anyone who's already taken my orginal Grief & Gratitude workshop, this Sunday afternoon gathering in my spacious and sunlit Hudson, New York living room will offer an opportunity for contining support in your ongoing separation or divorce, wherever you might currently be in your process. We'll engage in all new writing experiments, an early-summer guided ritual, and (as always) will immerse ourselves in the precious sanctity of bearing witness to one another.

Tea and snacks will be provided. And at the end of our afternoon together, we'll emerge with new insights, wisdom, gentleness and spaciousness. (To borrow from the poet T.S. Eliot, even in some small sense, "we'll arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.")

To nourish and preserve intimacy, this workshop will be limited to eight attendees.

Talking to Grief
Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

Denise Levertov

Cover drawing by Nicole Skibola.

A year after experiencing her own divorce back in 2008, Jenny Douglas sat down in her Brooklyn living room to map out a workshop that could offer others both the lessons she'd learned, along with the opportunity to connect with a kind of "noble community" she wished she'd had access to (but didn't) when it was most needed.

Jenny was not a therapist of any kind but she knew how to gather people. She called this workshop "Grief & Gratitude," and has led them several times a year to intimate groups of people ever since.

As Director of Host Experience of the national women's social and events platform Revel from 2021 to 2023, Jenny created--and guided others to create--some 600+ member-led events per month in communities around the country. She continues to offer and host one-of-a-kind experiences as the founder and curator of the Brooklyn Cottage. Her mission is to offer, in her words, “a space for the unleashing of our most radically creative, textured, generous and unafraid selves.”