Lament as Resistance: A Meditation on Demeter's Grief

When I think of the story of Demeter and Persephone, Hades and the pomegranate, I find myself seeing most clearly the grief of a mother who was willing to starve the world in her sorrow. Her lament was resistance to what she'd lost, and withholding what she offered the world in terms of comfort and survival was protest of the highest order. I think about this now, as we are asked by the systems we endure to grieve in isolation, quietly and with restraint, so that the systems my continue pushing forward unhindered.

Lament is resistance when the systems would prefer we'd stay quiet. Keep your grief to yourselves, out of the wind and the trees. Hold it tight against your heart until your heart breaks under the weight is what they want. That is what they want.

Instead, resist. Hold your grief in the light. See the shadows it casts and the rainbows that dance through its faceted edges. Your heart will break in the shadows and will be sewn back together by the rainbows again and again and again.

Other grievers will see you there, holding your grief in the light. Invite them to join you and the resistance grows. What if they take out their grief and hold it in the light? Can we imagine the shadows? The rainbows? The hearts breaking wildly and stitching back together gently again and again and again in community?

Let your lament fly in the wind. Hang your grief in the trees like ornaments, clay handprints that mark the time, shadows that glitter when the light hits just so.

That's what the systems are afraid of when we lament out loud. They fear that we find each other, hold hands as we travel down the dark hallways of despair and then back up to the light. That we hang our ornaments of grief in every branch and marvel at how not-alone we are.

What comes next, then, in our collective grief? Can you see the world we build? Just over that hill? Where there is a space for everyone and we are all free? Can you see it? Where grief glitters in the trees and no one is alone.