Advertise on podcast: Grief House - Portals

In this episode Sascha and I discuss the space between grief and disappointment, poetry and instruction, learning and discovering.

We decided to have the theme of our first ever episode recorded with the participation of a live audience be - mistakes! It was no accident; it guaranteed no matter what went wrong we would be perfectly on theme. Gratefully it all went exactly right, in a fumbling, not totally planned a little bit jagged and loose kind of way. Take a listen and see what you think.

In this episode we invite you to the recording of our first community episode on June 24th at Leaven Community Center across from Alberta Park in Portland. We also discuss our disaster bonded friendship, shared mistakes and our ideas about the long and short term impact of things done imperfectly.

In this episode Sascha and I tell stories of our experiences of public grief. We notice how different it feels to hold grief other's than it feels to spill our own and wonder about what conditions make grief feel safe enough or wild enough to come out into the open.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about the ways we reach out from inside ourselves to meet the world.  We explore the difference between operating from our logical, thinking brains with our polished, public personalities showing vs opening from a deep and misty inner space that feels more vulnerable but also, maybe, more alive. We talk about how both methods have served us and what we think has shaped our access to our deep knowing and revealing.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about magic as a remedy for soul-bleaching imperialism. We share our personal strategies for sniffing out old stands of magic growing in the forests of our beings and tips for how to notice and tend spots of re-emerging magic in the wider world.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about the practice of sharing abundance.  We consider how awkward and un-practiced we feel at noticing what we have in abundance, believing it is needed and delivering it to actual beings who can use it. Similarly we discuss how often we feel under-resourced and blindly grasping for help we can't find though we know (or at least suspect) they can't be more than a few connections away. We experiment with an abundance practice wherein we make short lists of what we, personally, need and have to give in this moment and also what we as a project have abundantly and need desperately, and notice that it feels good and useful right away. Before any actual help is exchanged.  We wonder at how we can build more structures for this kind of resource sharing, talk about some of our current efforts toward this end and feel a little hopeful about what might come next.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about how it feels to hand things over to something we can't see, know or control to tend.  We look at moments when we've come to the end of our ability to act and understand but nowhere near the limit of our ability to care or worry.  We wonder about what it means to let something go with a belief that it will be caught - by community, by forces of nature, by things we can't define - and how that compares to letting go with a feeling of dread and insufficiency.  We note how useful it is for imperial materialism and our constantly adored cell phones to have us feel like we are letting people down when we let thing go unfinished, and hope for ways we might practice new ways to whole-heartedly doing our part - including periods of work and periods of rest - for ourselves, each other and the big unknowable everything we live with.

In this episode Sascha and I sit together in person and talk about the wonder of loving one's self. We consider our differing aptitudes for it, its various and glorious side effects, and how we've experienced it alongside and nurtured it in each other through out our long friendship.

Join Sascha and Hannah Rumsey of Friends Missing Friends as we talk about the beauty and joy of having very dear friends and the disenfranchised heartbreak that can come along when those friends die.  In a heteronormative world that likes to make hierarchies of our losses, I was so happy to spend time hearing about Hannah's dear friend Lauren. In Hannah's grief journey she began Friends Missing Friends (a podcast, a community and a collective) where she helps folks find community while working through this particular note of loss.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about death as a balancing gesture to birth. We explore the pregnancy stages of this process, in particular; the periods where one body is held inside another as it slowly makes or unmakes itself into distinction from or integration into the bigger system. We look at the beings whose deaths needed to be held and integrated in order to birth the Grief House and wonder, more generally, what happens when we create new life without allowing death to fully gestate.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about the concept of refugia - protected spaces creatures can survive during periods of destructive havoc - the importance of diversity and how we might tend each other during times of flood.

Like a sack full of gifts proffered by a stranger sitting on a folding chair at a club you don't quite understand, this episode is a grab bag of random things you may or may not need or want offered without rhyme or reason. There's dreams about death, poop on a bed, mammograms, top-less fort building and, as always, Sascha's and my deep appreciation for our friendship. If you get something you don't like, you can always re-gift it. We won't mind one bit.

In this episode I talk with Chelsea Biagioli, host of Talk To The hand - Exploring Grief with Puppets, about how she incorporates play into her grief practice.  We share stories of childhood play - potions, spells, and waiting for the make-believe world to come into focus - and how our play changed as we grew up. We wonder about the value of spending time in imaginary worlds, what it prepares us for, what we lose when we think of it as frivolous and how colonial capitalism benefits from a world that leaves make believe behind. We decide to stay devoted to play and to invite as many beings as we can into our fort.  Want to join us? Want to come out and play?

In this episode Sascha and I explore what it's like to interact with reality mediated by different kinds of brains.  We realized that one good way to describe our current experience is this: Sascha is a potion mage and I am a potion. This feels just right to me. I revel in her jars and shelves, feel grateful for my tremendous luck this time around and move off in the world more self aware and oriented. Along the way we discuss lions and panthers, spiders and iguanas, orb creatures, horses and Melon bank. We hope you find some expansiveness in this romp through a few of the endless ways to be consciously incarnate.