On this episode of Grief and Gratitude, we’re delighted to host Jen Violi: author, facilitator, divine human with an oceanic heart. CW: there’s a bit of spicy language around the 15th minute, and it fits right in as Jen shares about her hands that didn’t work like they used to, as she shares loving ways people supported her along with one suggestion that she said “No, absolutely not,” to.
Jen starts by reading her gorgeous essay “Who doesn’t need a cradle?” recently curated by Jenny Forrester and published in Mountain Bluebird.
She beautifully writes about the grief of hands that don’t work as they used to. Friends and her beloved buckled her seatbelt, tied shoes, cut veggies because she couldn’t do those things and so much more. Jen asked this question: What did she have to offer from empty, open hands? “Receptivity. . . . She held the question in her open hands. In the empty space. The cradle." She found that receptivity is a gift.
Jen goes on to talk about how grief is part of the life cycle that is on-going. The cycle of seasons. It’s what happens in life in a body.
She’s had huge losses. Lost her dad when she was 14. Divorce. Moving. She lost her mom shortly before the pandemic. Then the loss of the use of her hands. She adds, plus there’s collective grief: “It’s what we’re breathing. . . . Let’s have a moment to acknowledge that we’re all grieving.”
She further shares how “forced receptivity is a rough one. Different from the vulnerability we choose. It’s great when I can choose it. To have it forced upon you is a lot. Maybe all grief forces us into a place of receptivity.”
Come listen to this kind human tell you how she’s learning to be gracious, learning to be honest, learning to give grief room. In grief now, she’s learned to say, “I have to give myself some space.”
Jen Violi is a writer, mentor, and facilitator of Elemental Writing courses. Elemental Writing means remembering writing as a wholly embodied act of a wholly embodied being, and that we humans belong to and are in relationship with the animate world. Jen’s spiral of identities includes but is not limited to: late-bloomer, witch, water baby, fool, and mystic, whatever that means. Also: Scorpio sun, Aries rising, and Leo moon, a.k.a. two fires and a big dark water. Jen is the author of the novel Putting Makeup on Dead People, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, as well as
numerous published essays, short stories, prose-poems, and other form-defying feats of word magic. You can find her at www.jenvioli.com, on IG @jenvioli, or join her at Initiation Station on www.patreon.com/jenvioli. You can find her book here: Putting Makeup on Dead People.
