Wild Grievers, 2025
Scrimshaw, 2015
This month we offer a powerful and heartfelt welcome to all you Wild Grievers. It’s possible that the act of grieving is our strongest proof that time exists. You help us grieve both the worlds we’ve lost and the worlds that could have been. We mourn with you the ongoing and tremendous loss of life this year, the loss of humans trapped in prisons and sheltering from bombs, of coral reefs going pale and quiet, of insect and bird species disappearing, of every tree whose lungs no longer breathe into our own. We mourn the love, care, and creativity that might have flowed from the lives and worlds now lost. We mourn the ways the living have been blocked and diminished—we mourn debt, precarious housing, inaccessible education, and the looming shadow of state violence. We mourn the relationships that languish while we give the best of ourselves to our jobs and hustles. We offer gratitude for you, Wild Grievers, as those who hold the multi-dimensionality of grief—its many phases and sudden returns, its heart opening and connective properties. We recognize that being able to grieve always means having accessed enough safety to fall apart, let go, and be held. We welcome you, Wild Grievers, as those who keep us honest and in contact with the wildness that fuels our living hearts. Thank you for showing us that to love is to grieve.
About the creative process:
We updated a painting from one of our earlier (and perhaps least successful) calendars, 2016’s homage to Moby Dick, “Asleep in the Body’s Boat.” This dreamlike image of a whale’s cervical vertebra, etched with sailor’s scrimshaw, has haunted us ever since we first made it. Jo has played in sludge metal bands over the years and they remade this image with that heavy, confrontational vibe—I (Corina) can hear the intensity of the music as I look at this. When I saw that Jo was choosing such deep and violent colors for the sea and sky this time, I initially protested—I was thinking of a more soothing palette for an image about grief. But my very wise mother-in-law was staying with me at the time and when I suggested this she said something like, “Really? I feel like these colors show how grief actually feels.” So I dropped my case, and I’m glad I did. And I (Jo) appreciate that in Corina’s telling of this, they are telling on themselves for how little faith they have in me sometimes!
