Y’all. Sacred Tears: A Witch’s Guide To Grief will be OUT IN THE WORLD this month! June 8th to be exact. But you can still pre-order, and I suggest you do as you’ll likely get it much sooner. Plus, pre-orders really REALLY help out authors. So if you were thinking you’d probably get it anyway, now is the time and you can get it, here!
You’ve heard me say before how the “stages” of grief aren’t real.
Even the doctor who first coined the phrase “Stages of Grief” said she didn’t mean for them to be a catch-all, check-list for people in the wake of loss. You’ve also surely heard me say that if grief has any sort of shape, it’s a spiral. I call it as such because if the experiences of grief are like points on a spiral, we don’t hit them once and then move on. Rather, we’ll hit them numerous times in our lives. Maybe many years will pass before we hit another one. And sometimes, grief will become part of who we are, never one stage and done, but becoming part of us, in the way that stars are part of the night sky.
Part of my story is below.
But first:
Don’t forget to register for my live, virtual conversation with Mat Auryn: The Grief Spiral – Magick and Grieving on Sunday, June 9th at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time. RECORDED! All ticket-holders will receive the replay after the event.
The Grief Spiral: Magick and Grieving
A Virtual Conversation With Mat Auryn And Courtney Weber
🗓️Date: June 9, 2024, 11am PDT- 1pm CDT – 2pm EDT
📍Location: Virtual (Live event, recorded)
💰 Admission: $24
🎟️Register Here
If you’re a paid subscriber, scroll to bottom of the post for a special discount.
A virtual conversation about Magick, Grief, and Healing
When loss happens, we may wonder many things:
– If we’re Witches, why couldn’t we prevent this loss?
– Are there any spells for closure?
– Grief can make us feel less Magickal…does that make us “bad Witches”?
Grief changes us. Magick changes us. Because grief changes us, grief is its own Magick.
Join award-winning and best-selling authors Mat Auryn (Psychic Witch, Mastering Magick, and The Psychic Art of Tarot) and Courtney Weber (The Morrigan, Hekate: Goddess of Witches, and Sacred Tears: A Witch’s Guide To Grief) for a conversation on using Magick as part of navigating grief.
Virtual Event. Closed captioning provided.
Event WILL be recorded and sent to all ticket-holders after the event.
(Can’t join us live? Purchase a ticket and check it out, later!)
There will also be giveaways and other exciting announcements.
Whether you’ve recently experienced a loss or experienced one long ago, there is something for you, here.
On our own personal grief spirals, we may not have some of the classic experiences known as the “Stages of Grief.”
We may have other experiences that are unique only to us. We may experience some so-called stages once and never again, and experience others repeatedly.
When I was seventeen, I lost two friends in a car accident.
For me, the “shock stage” of my grief over my friends’ deaths manifested in something akin to wonder. I was in awe of the pure simplicity of death. One day, Vanessa sat next to me in World History class. The next day, her chair was empty. One day, Robert’s black hat hung on a rack in the hall. The next day, it didn’t. That was it.
Loss, as it turned out, was terrifyingly simple. It was the grief that was complicated.
If I experienced the “Despair Stage,” it arrived on the tenth anniversary of their deaths, as I listened to a friend play a song on his guitar in a bar at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday night/Monday morning. I was supposed to work at 9:00 a.m., but I didn’t feel like going home. I was suddenly awash in sorrow over the fact that my friends hadn’t lived long enough to stay up too late on a work night and set themselves up for a bad next day at the job. I sat in the mostly empty theater and cried for them more than I ever had before.
If there was an “Anger Stage” of this loss, it manifested as jealousy when I was deep into my thirties. A colleague’s teenaged daughter lost a friend to a tragedy and my colleague took time off work to be with her instead of attending an important conference with the rest of our work team. I was disturbed at how jealous I was of this girl, remembering how many parents did not even attend our friends’ funerals, let alone take time off work…something my friends had desperately needed, but did not have.
If there was any sort of “Bargaining,” it was not a point on the spiral but an ever-present companion. Shaken by the cold inevitability of death, I spent much of my adult life squeezing in as many life experiences as possible. This has meant extreme choices, and more extreme mistakes, made in the name of life being terribly short. Sometimes, life got too big and wild for me, and I cocooned back into myself only to explode again later.
At the same time, it made me a fearless Witch.
The other points on this grief spiral come up again and again. Sure, it’s been over twenty years, but a certain song, or anniversary, or coming across their permanently young faces in an old photo album find me hitting shock or despair or anger or some else all over again.
And given the experience of these losses, the reality of life being sadly too short, it’s too short to pull punches with Magick.
Grief has made me a stronger Witch.
What do you think? How has grief changed your Magick?
Other events I’d love to see you at!
- LlewellynCon 2024. I’ll be presenting on The Grief Spiral on Thursday, June 6 at 3:00 p.m. Central time (1:00 p.m. Pacific, 4:00 p.m. Eastern). Free event, and registration gets you access to ten days of incredible offerings by other wonderful Llewellyn authors!
- “Sacred Tears” Book Launch at The Raven’s Wing in Portland, OR on June 15, 2024 at 6p.m. Pacific time. Free event. ASL provided. More information and RSVP, here!
