Coming Together to Tend Our Grief
A Weekend Community Grief Ceremony in Twisp, WA
Friday, Oct 9, 7p – Sunday Oct 11th, 12p
Amidst our personal losses and the ecological and social catastrophes of our times, we need spaces to grieve together, in community.
Join a small group of other community members, held by experienced Grief Ritual facilitators Marisa Withey Byrne and Alex Eisenberg from Port Townsend. Together, we will make space for our individual and collective losses, disappointments, and fears.
Through talking circles, singing, movement, and ritual space, we will let our grief move through each of us, watering the seeds of a community in which none of us need ever bear our sorrows alone.
“Grieving is a soul cleansing way to reclaim and to recover our spirit. When we do not grieve, we stay in an unhealthy place and lose who we are.” -Sobonfu Somé
Who is hosting this event? We are a small circle of Methow Valley community members that have been gathering monthly since Fall 2023 as a “Kinship Circle,” with the purpose of strengthening our intimacy with each other and with this place, and supporting each other to bring this outward into our relations in wider circles. We are collaborating with Rites & Responsibilities, a project of Nourishing Futures, to offer this event. Our work together has been informed by many, especially The Work That Reconnects, The Emergence Network, and Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures.
COST: There is no set cost to participate. We estimate $6,000 in total expenses for this event, including meaningful financial support for the facilitators, cost for the space, and supplies. We’ll cover all costs with 20 participants contributing an average of $300. If some are able to give more financially, it will help cover the costs of those who need to contribute less. When you register, you’ll be asked to make a pledge, and make an initial good-faith contribution. We will communicate with all registered participants about actual income and expenses for this offering.
Whether you’re able to attend or not, we welcome your support for making experiences like this available and financially accessible for our community. Contributions can be made here (please indicate your contribution is to Rites & Responsibilities and designate“grief ceremony” in the memo line).
FAQ: If you have more questions, please see our FAQ here.
REGISTRATION: We have space for up to 25 participants. Registration opens soon. Join the waitlist to be notified when registration opens.
Meet Our Facilitators
Marisa, or “Sasa,” Withey Byrne is a light bearer dedicated to healing the isolation and suffering of interpersonal violence– especially sexual trauma—to practice and sustain healthy and holistic relationship with self, other, and one’s place in the world. Her offerings reflect her experience as an advocate, sex educator, council carrier, ceremonialist, grief tender, rite of passage facilitator, and foster mama. Her Bolivian and Irish ancestry, deep connection to Pachamama, and belief in transformative justice shape how she shows up to her work and to the world.
Marisa’s grief work began with decades of tears in solitude, transforming while driving through song and wails, similar to what she later learned was Keening. She believes her ancestors guided her to that ancient form. A few years later, she studied with friends and community members, including Kari Stettler, Thérèse Charvet and Laurence Cole, who themselves had been trained by grief work leaders Joanna Macy and Sobonfu Somé. Sasa has been facilitating grief spaces since 2018 online and in person, including an online platform honoring lives lost in incarceration, a community ritual for youth who have died too soon, and grief rituals for survivors of sexual trauma.
When Alex Chana Eisenberg found communal grief tending rituals at the age of 24, she stopped feeling crazy for her depth of emotion and started feeling empowered by it. After her first Dagara-style grief retreat, Alex continued on with her apprenticeship to sorrow, but also immediately began an apprenticeship to the work of grief tending and facilitation.
Through attending many grief rituals in the Dagara lineage; participating in several grief apprenticeship/training programs under the care, guidance, and tutelage of Laurence Cole and Thérèse Charvet; and co-facilitating grief rituals in her own community and beyond over the past 12 years, Alex has cultivated her own style of grief tending while honing her sensitivities to the rhythms of grief and group energetics. She is always honored to show up in humble service to tending the raw and wild edges of human emotion, with her deep care and presence, and her ever-tender heart.
In service to this work, Alex also manages a linktree ( linktr.ee/griefsupport ) where she tracks and promotes grief rituals from around the region and beyond. If you have a link to a grief event you want added, you can email it to her at alexceberg(at)@yahoo.com.
A few words on the lineage of this Grief Ritual (see audio recording below): Many grief rituals including this one are heavily influenced by the lineage of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, which was brought to our continent by Sobonfu and Malidoma Some several decades ago in response to destruction being wrought by “the west” due to our lack of connection, lack of ritual, and lack of grief tending. The ritual has necessarily, and at the request of Sobonfu, evolved in form and content, to better suit the needs of our culture as it differs from the village. These changes also reflect the emergence and synergy that happens as those of us in the West, individually and collectively, begin to discover and embody our own authentic ways of grieving and grief tending, bringing our own innate wisdoms, our own lineages and traditions, and as we traverse the unprecedented terrain of these times.