30. Grief, Song and Ceremonies of Mourning

Written By alexa firmenich

“I like to believe that Mystery — who for me is God, Mystery, the Great Unknown — has tucked these practices, these communal ways of grieving, deep into the earth. Buried them strategically, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Ready to sprout and rise when the world needs them the most.”

- Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely

 

SYNOPSIS:

Today we’re joined by artist, musician and communal grief ritual facilitator Alexandra “ahlay” Blakey to speak about the cultural forgetting of communal mourning, the sacred role of professional mourners, and the re-emergence of grief ceremonies as necessary spaces of remembrance, healing and repair. 

“ahlay” brings her experience weaving song, body, and ritual into collective spaces where grief is given breath and movement, and we explore the history of grief practices across cultures, the political power of public mourning, and how grief can soften the heart and stitch community back together. We explore what to expect in a communal grief ceremony, and “ahlay” shares the story behind her 200-voice album WAILS: Songs for Grief, inspired by whales, ancestral sorrow, and Francis Weller’s work. Within the episode is woven tracks of her haunting songs, so tune up your headphones, and sink in…

Cover image (Earth Altering)

 

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GUEST BIO:

Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely is a descendent of Ashkenazi, Scandinavian and British folk. She is an artist, singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, community organizer, facilitator and ceramicist walking the path of ancestral healing and the reclaiming of lost cultural memories. Her community singing album, Spells from the Unknown encapsulates songs for the community to transform, ask questions, and seek to lead lives in service to the future ones. Her newest community singing album, WAILS: Songs for Grief was recorded with a choir of 200 voices. The album is completely dedicated to grief, inspired by the Whales of the Sea, the wails of our times, and Francis Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow and more specifically “the five gates of grief.”

QUOTES:

  • Resmaa Menakem: Long before Black and brown bodies suffered harm from white bodies, white bodies were inflicting harm on white bodies for centuries. So if we’re looking back to the origins of this wound, the separation that began long before European colonizers set sail, there was already a rupture.

  • I see her today as an archetype. But she was a professional mourner. Through wailing and song and lament she would bridge the liminal spaces between the living and the dead. She would probably do something like what we might recognize as ritual theater, serving as a catalyst for metabolization.

  • The facilitator — or, if we want to say, the professional mourner in this case — acts as a door, but is not the doer, because the doing is done by the will of the collective or the individual.

  • I kind of see this ritual as a remapping of neural pathways in our brain, of the ways that we have been conditioned to cry alone or grieve alone or do it alone.

  • When we’re talking about these systems of oppression or unmetabolized collective grief, like genocides, that’s not something one person can do on their own, nor is it one person’s responsibility.

  • It’s profoundly moving, and honestly, it’s often what keeps me going in this particular work. The lived experience that grief can be the glue of the community is what fuels me. As Sobonfu Somé says, “Grief is the glue of community”.

  • Francis Weller calls it soul hygeine. It’s a commitment to return again and again, because grief isn’t something that we get over, right?

  • It is a practice of continuing to do it, especially within the conditions that we live in today, where there’s just bad news everywhere all the time, and it is an act of cleansing the body.

  • Ideally, the goal is that grief becomes a part of our daily life. I can move through a wave of grief ten or fifteen times in a day. But that’s the thing: it doesn’t knock me out anymore. I’m not afraid of it. I’ve created a relationship with it.

  • I’ll often hear people channeling the land’s grief, or the grief of the ancestors of a place, myself included. And I hear it often described as vast and bottomless, like a depth that feels too immense to carry alone.

  • Whales have always been these dwellers of the unseen realms. They’re like guides of the unknown or of the underworld. And yet, as deep as they go, they have to come back up for air. And so it reminds me that in order to sustainably navigate the depths, I have to find a balance of coming back up for air and going back down into the depths.

  • That’s what the song is for. It’s for the places in ourselves that have yet to know love, and it’s for the places in the collective that have yet to know love. It’s an offering to my perceived enemy. It’s like the way honey can move into the tiniest cracks. It’s such a benevolent force. And so I envision, as I’m looking at this perceived enemy: may all the places in you that have yet to know love, may they know love. May it bring you to your knees in humility, and may it melt you into compassion.

  • I like to believe that Mystery — who for me is God, Mystery, the Great Unknown — has tucked these practices, these communal ways of grieving, deep into the earth. Buried them strategically, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Ready to sprout and rise when the world needs them the most. And I believe that moment is now.

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