Companionship With Grief + Kids Table

Hey folks – as the second part of our exploration of the wider topic of grief, this Sunday we will get to listen in on / watch a conversation between Francis Weller and Anderson Cooper. I expect most of us are more likely to recognize the second name and not the first, so a quick word about Francis Weller. In their blurb accompanying his newest book (In The Absence of the Ordinary – Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty), Google Books describes Weller and his work this way: Francis Weller is a psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures, and poetic traditions. He has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people.

To paraphrase a well-known movie line, “You had me from ‘master of synthesizing’…”.  As is always the case at The Table, this is not an instance of “here’s a person whose perspective you must share”, but rather “here’s an interesting person whose perspective and practice might help us all keep exploring what we believe”.

The conversation we’ll watch is captured from a segment of Cooper’s podcast, “All There Is“. He describes it, in part, this way:  “The grief which I buried as a child and ran from most of my life, has risen and I can’t run from it anymore. I need help. I’ve rarely said those words to anyone, but I wrote them several months ago to my guest on the podcast today, Francis Weller. We’ve been talking by Zoom once a week ever since. He’s helped me start to turn toward my grief, to try and touch it. And perhaps even more importantly, he’s helped me begin to see the strategies I’ve used since I was a kid to keep it and all kinds of feelings buried.These strategies, which I use every hour of every day, they helped me as a child and as a young adult, but they aren’t helping me any longer.  They’re hurting me, and I need to figure out a new way to live.”