Between the Sea & ME: A Grief Ritual for Modern Humans

We are honored to welcome Hogfish arts company to the Wells Reserve to lead this special community event. There is a lot of grief working its way through the world at large right now as well as right here in our own little community - grief as well as anger, fear, anxiety, exhaustion, and numbness, to name a few other feelings. Division in our discourse mirrors division in our news sources, in our own minds and bodies, in our families and friendships, and in our experience of the very land that supports all of us.

So we do something new that is actually very old - we call for a grief ritual to help our community process what it is experiencing and re-connect to what is important and life-giving. We come together so we can re-connect with each other. We re-connect with our breath and our bodies, with our emotions. We reconnect with our voices by journaling and sharing, by singing and dancing. And we re-connect to the land we are blessed to call home with a final ritual on the beach at beautiful Wells Reserve.

This event will include:

• the chance for you to share a place that is important to you through a photo or story
• poetry and song
• an invocation to the unseen world through spoken word and drumming
• time to grieve and have that grieving witnessed and held
• grounding somatic movement practices to help us find deep support as we unwind and soften the bracing in our bodies
• the creation of a beautiful shrine
• micro-rituals of guided writing practices that include an opportunity to share and witness in small groups
• culminating in a powerful community grief ritual on the beach by the ocean
• dancing together to let our feelings move through us and back into the world

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.’"

Who is this event for:

• People who are deeply concerned for the current state of the world and what can be done in our community
• People who are experiencing feelings of loneliness and disconnect from community
• People who are experiencing feelings of disconnect from the land and all the support the physical world has to offer
• People who are experiencing feelings of sadness, grief, anger, anxiety, fear, numbness, pain, or overall disconnect
• People who are looking for ways to process their feelings
• People who are looking to build community with others who share similar feelings
• People who work in ecology and/or well-being and would like support in their work and the interconnections between ecology and well-being

What do we hope you will take away from this experience?

• Awareness of the power and importance of gathering as a community to witness and express deep feelings
• Respect and gratitude for grief and other deep feelings and the important role they plays in our lives
• Approaches for navigating and comfort with processing grief and other deep feelings individually and as a community
• Recognition that we are not alone in bearing these feelings

This event, and the sliding scale ticket pricing to make it accessible to our community, is made possible by a generous grant from the Onion Foundation. Support for grief, compassion, and healing programs at the Wells Reserve comes from the Hospice Fund of the Maine Community Foundation.

About Hogfish

The climate is changing. Temperatures and tensions are rising in our environment, our communities, and ourselves. Industrialization and the digital world have lifted billions out of poverty, and yet, with the rise of wealth has also come the rise of inequality, toxic carbon levels, fraught public discourse, and sedentary lifestyles. Hogfish is inspired by heroes, sung and unsung, working to restore wellness to global, social, and personal realms. Hogfish believes that applying the principles of regenerative agriculture to the arts provides a unique opportunity to holistically restore every layer of the human experience. We are on a quest to build an artistic sanctuary and body of work to restore a healthier dynamic balance between our planet, the stories we tell, and the way we live.