For Everything a Season: 75 Blessings for Life's Milestones by The Nilsen Family
---
"We must couple grief and gratitude in a way that encourages us to stay open to life.... Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and imcomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain. Instead, both are true, and it requires a familiarity with both sorrow and joy to fully encompass the full range of being human." -- Francis Weller, The Wide Edge of Sorrow
As we approach the year anniversary of the first shelter-in-place orders, and as we look back on a year that altered most of our lives in ways we could never have imagined, many of us are wondering how to mark this strange, unbidden anniversary. How do we make space to honor not only our grief over the suffering and losses, big and small, but also the gifts that have emerged from this painful year, for which we may even feel deep gratitude? In this session, Rev. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin invited us into a simple ritual that can be shared with others, to honor both the grief and the gratitude that may arise as we look back on this year.
Reflections from this session:
I have lost…
I am grateful for…
What I have learned about myself, others, etc., and the wisdom I gained is...
Given everything I have experienced, lost and gained from this year, how I want to live differently now, is...
---
