Episode Nine Transcript: The Future with adrienne marie brown
Amy S. Choi:
This is a project of The Mash-Up Americans.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Welcome to Grief, Collected, where we explore how grief moves through our bodies, our families, and our communities, and why we need to feel it all in order to transform our future.
Amy S. Choi:
Today, we're talking to the writer, organizer and healer, adrienne maree brown, about emerging from our collective grief and about creating our future together.
Hey, I'm Amy S. Choi.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And I'm Rebecca Lehrer. And we are The Mash-Up Americans.
Amy S. Choi:
This is the very last episode of the series.
Very nice trumpet sounds.
Rebecca Lehrer:
You build skills over time, and that's one of them. It's been a long time in the making, this series. And also it just, that's me snapping, happened so fast.
Amy S. Choi:
It happened so fast. It's two years of work, and then all of a sudden, we're here. Okay, so also, what is time? What is time? Chronos, kairos, we learned all about it. Well, so reflecting on it, the vision of this series was that we could try and pinpoint grief, define it a little bit, this enormous, overwhelming and profound thing that happens in all of our lives, and try and capture it somehow, put some boundaries around it, because it's big. It's very, very big, and we know that it's coming for all of us.
And because we're Mash-Ups, part of our goal of the series also was just to understand how much of this came from our roots, came from our families. We want to see what the roots of grief could be in our families, in our communities, and really think about how that plays out just in our lives, in our bodies, and as we shape the next generations. Well, especially also, I think the desperate need to figure out literally what is happening to my body, our bodies.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Bodies keeping them scores. They are keeping the scores.
Amy S. Choi:
As we like to say, I would like to know who wins. I'm tired of the score keeping. I would like an end of this game.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Me versus body.
Amy S. Choi:
Yes.
Rebecca Lehrer:
We didn't really talk very specifically in this series about our own personal grief experiences and tragedies. It wasn't what we were looking for here today and through this series, but each one of our experiences have informed the questions we had and why we wanted to understand grief better and how it impacts us and how it impacts our community. And I have found this to be so transformative and so empowering. It has felt empowering to understand my experiences better now.
Amy S. Choi:
In perspective.
Rebecca Lehrer:
That is it. I think that is the theme, right? Perspective is that every one of these conversations, and then my experience with it, and I don't want to speak for you, has been about perspective, whether it's how we are a small part of larger communities, how we are only one in many generations of family and culture, about how grief is impacting so many people all the time. Each one of those gives a different layer of perspective.
Amy S. Choi:
Yeah.
Rebecca Lehrer:
It's a cubist dream.
Amy S. Choi:
Yeah. And I think... A cubist dream. Hegelian dialectics! I also think that just the perspective, each of those layers to me also adds a layer of kind of a holding of community. Because I think the thing about grief that as I have experienced it, is that it's been so and it can be so profoundly lonely. When you're really in the throws of it, it's almost impossible to imagine that anybody else has ever felt as bad as you are feeling in that moment. And I think just mathematically knowing that many, many people have is comforting. And it's not in a misery loves company kind of way, but just knowing that this grief is also a tradition, that grief, as love, is something that is deeply embedded in us, that is elemental to being a human being. And I think that that is something that has led us to this precipice. What feels like, okay, so now we have all these layers. We are gaining perspective. We can see how communities are impacted for the better as we metabolize grief and we can push for restoration.
And so I think the natural question for us becomes like, okay, well, then what's next? And for us, it feels like, okay, well, so we know. What's next is creating new waves of seeing each other in our grief and creating new rituals, like a new grief culture, and hopefully a new overall culture that is more empathetic and more just and more happy and more honest and more joyful because we've been able to metabolize grief. And we know the very best part of the whole American experiment is that we can continue to transform. So, in landing on this idea of building and future building and harnessing the power of our imaginations, we brought into this conversation the absolute best person we can think of to imagine our futures with, which is adrienne maree brown.
Rebecca Lehrer:
adrienne maree brown.
Amy S. Choi:
There's the song.
Rebecca Lehrer:
It's just there. It's there. It's in my heart, a fluttering. adrienne maree brown is a writer, musician, podcaster, organizer, healer. She's basically all the important things. She is the founder of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of several books, including Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism. She has been thinking so much about grief. And in 2021, published the Afrofuturist novella, Grievers, which is set in Detroit. It's about a young black woman, Dune, who is navigating an apocalyptic event of grief and love and the life and death of our cities and our communities. The next book in the Grievers trilogy, Maroons, will come out in January, 2023. And for many people on social media, very much us included, adrienne maree brown is also a meme lord. Her daily roundup of memes are so funny and sharp and bring us endless delight. So, more on that soon.
Amy S. Choi:
Yay, adrienne. I would love to just launch right in. I'm not going to give you warm up questions, adrienne.
adrienne maree brown:
Let's go straight to the point.
Amy S. Choi:
Get into it. But one of the things that I think is deep in your work, and also what I think we have been really pushing towards and challenging ourselves with in this project has been how does grief reveal truth, and what truths are revealed by grief? Because I think as much as we all know, grief is a part of life, grief is something that runs parallel to joy. It's also just so hard. It's incredibly painful. Even the healthiest of griefs is that. So, what do we get from it? I hate to be so American and be like, this is a trade, but-
adrienne maree brown:
But what happens? Well, I've been writing a lot about grief and thinking about it a lot. And I have landed in... Grief really shows us how we love and what we love. Grief is love in just a new form, right? It's like I loved something or someone or some place and I've lost that person, or I have to leave that place or that place no longer exists, or that structure, that organization, that relationship is done. And so it's almost like having the clear water of love, and then injecting blue paint into it, or blue coloring. It's just like it's that same thing flowing through us, but now it's tinged with this sadness, this loss, this other shape. And what I always find is there's things that I think I care about a lot, or I think I'm supposed to care about a lot, and when change comes, it doesn't impact me that much.
And I can tell, oh, that one didn't root all the way down into me. And then there's other things where I'll be like, I'm so mad at this person, I don't even care about them at all and whatever. Or family members, like, this person's so racist and I'm not going to talk to them. Just stuff like that, that I'm like, I've set a boundary, and then some loss happens or they go through something, and all of a sudden, it's like, oh, there's the grief. And the grief was... Even with your rage, you still love this person. There's still a ton of longing that you have. And I think a lot of us experience this particularly intergenerationally, where we're like, I'm differentiating myself from the lineage that came before me, but there's still such a tender, grief filled place for those people exactly as they are also.
So, I think grief gives us all of those gifts. And then I also think each time we grieve, we are strengthening a muscle of being able to be with loss and be with change, which is actually a fundamental necessity for those of us who are truly revolutionary in the sense of we want to revolve into a different society, evolve into a different society, grow into a different way of being in relationship to each other. There's so much of how we currently live that we will have to grieve if we're actually going to land in a new way of being. So, all these small griefs prepare us for this larger collective transformation that we need to go through if we're going to be compatible with this earth.
Amy S. Choi:
Oh God, I have so many questions, so many follow-ups.
adrienne maree brown:
You started hard, so I started hard [laughs].
Amy S. Choi:
Well, I know that Rebecca has been obsessing, rightfully so, over this question about the systems and how we grieve systems. But I do want to say, I so appreciate the way that you frame grief, not just as about the death of a person, which it so is, but that it's about change and it's about loss of a relationship to, and again, it doesn't have to be as a person, but to a place or to a system or to a structure. I think that was something that was so striking about Grievers. Especially later on in the book, and there will be spoilers, but as Dune is building her city, you can see the grief is seeping into Detroit and she's trying to hold on or recreate the city that she loves. But when she walks around, she's also watching not just the people die, but the whole place, the whole idea of what Detroit is and what her family was trying to create is all dying.
adrienne maree brown:
That's right.
Amy S. Choi:
And in my reading of it, that loss is the one that feels like the most insurmountable, the most tsunami of loss is just the idea of the whole thing.
adrienne maree brown:
But so there's layers of what happens, right? I think that displaced peoples understand this very deeply, that it's... If you lose someone, if your grandmother passes away, that's one immense grief, and it's something really difficult to hold and to carry, and you carry it your whole life. But if you can't go back to where you were with her, you can't sit under the tree that y'all sat under together, you can never go back into her home because it's been flooded or destroyed or someone's occupying it or something else, it compounds this grief, right? It's like, I can't go back to the place. I know I can't go back to the time. I can't go back to the person. The devastation becomes more and more complex. And with Grievers, I wanted to show something that has happened in Detroit, which is there's this ebb and flow of humans.
And so the humans are the bloodline of the city. That's what's flowing through a city that makes it what it is. And so you know this about the cities that you love. If New Orleans was empty, it wouldn't be New Orleans. If Detroit is empty, it's not Detroit, but it's something. And so as it empties out, she's like, there's still something alive. There's some presence here. And I keep trying to find ways to write about the earth itself and places and the way that I think they have a sentience too. And not to go overboard or not to try to anthropomorphize them, but just to be like Detroit also has a sensibility of wanting to be alive and wanting people and wanting to be a safe place for people to live and have their children and everything. So, I feel like that spark, Dune is available for it. I think one of the things I really like about her is she's not necessarily setting out to do stuff, but she's giving way to what grief wants to do.
And I think there's some clues in there for how I believe we should approach grief as ritual and practice. It's like when we lose something, we need to give ourselves space to drift and to follow new impulses and to follow what our grief wants to do, because it doesn't always look... It rarely is actually I'm just sitting and crying somewhere. When I'm grieving, that is part of it, but there's also like I'm obsessively cleaning my home, and I am finding old pieces of that person and looking at them and reviewing them and remembering and scrolling through my phone, trying to numb myself. There's so many layers to it, and I wanted to invite and explore and give more permission for all of that.
Amy S. Choi:
I love that. One of the things that Linda Thai had said to us about ancestral grief that relates so much to what you're saying about being displaced in the kind of levels of mourning that you might do is just that also, some of it can be so physical. I've visited, for example, my grandfather's grave in Korea with my mom, but she can't... And I didn't know him, but I can grieve more fully for him than she can. It was something that she couldn’t do.
adrienne maree brown:
What do you mean when you say that? How are you grieving more?
Amy S. Choi:
That I can feel that there is a loss, and I can see the loss that my mother has for him, but she cannot express it or allow it into her life. And Linda said something that was just like, oh, because if you have to survive, you can't leave room for grief, that grief is something that you can... It's also, in some ways... She didn't say this. I'm saying this, but it's a gift, as you say, a privilege. Sometimes you just have to completely-
adrienne maree brown:
Exactly.
Amy S. Choi:
... shut it out in order to just get through. And I think that idea of drifting to allow yourself, that seems like a new... seems very new.
adrienne maree brown:
New old, right?
Amy S. Choi:
Yes.
adrienne maree brown:
I always go look, and I'm like, oh, there's ancient cultural practices around this where people would be like, oh, now I'm just going to sit here and tear my clothes and just be in this moment for a long time. I'm going to wear black for an entire year. I'm going to do... There used to be different practices where it was held for much longer. But I ask you that about your mother, because I also think I deeply agree with that. Survival makes us push stuff down, right? But somatic study, an embodiment study is the pushing it down doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and it doesn't mean it's not felt, but it's sometimes subconscious or even kind of almost a subterranean place in us. And if we are allowed to soften, there's a melting, a softening, being held that can allow stuff to surface and move out.
But if it doesn't, it kind of becomes our shape. And so I think we have generations of people where it's like, oh, my parents are so tough, or my parents are so rigid or they're so disciplined, or there's other things. And I'm like, that's all grief too, right? And it's like the way that they process the grief is to become this exact thing. And I see it in my own family, where I'm like, oh, coming out of the conditions of black poverty, there's a commitment to discipline in my family and to rigidity and order and doing things correctly and doing things according to the law and the rule. And I'm like, yeah. That's a survival shape, but it's also like, this is how you survive a place that doesn't want you to live. You don't give anything. You don't give anything. You don't take the risk of losing anyone else. We have to keep ourselves together.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And will you talk about that in the intro to pleasure activism, just your own shape, that you're like, I could either have been a nun or-
adrienne maree brown:
Exactly. Well, and I think I'm part of this, and I think we are... I think generationally, those of us who are forties, fifties, and younger, I think there's this generational thing that's happened where there's like, okay, part of me could be a monk or a nun. And I was just talking about this with a dear friend. We were like, yeah, put me in a bear room and all I can do is meditate and write down my thoughts and just drink water. Something about that really, really works for me and there's ways that I can go into that space, but then there's also this pleasure goddess, wild creature that is reemerging, in part because of all the discipline, in part because of all the sacrifices that the generations before me made, that they're like, I want to create a space where you don't have to struggle like this.
And so having not had to struggle the way that they did, there's this wild animal that has aroused itself within me that from very young, I was like, I want pleasure. I want to feel... That feels good. I'm following that. This is interesting. I'm following this. And my life has been... I take these breaks and I'll have this more aesthetic lifestyle for a while. And now I know that it's also a part of the pleasure for me. There's a simple pleasure, and then there's a lush abundant garden.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Meme lord. Meme lord pleasure.
adrienne maree brown:
And then there's the Meme lord, pleasure, which is a third secret way. I mean, that's been really unexpected. I have to say it's... And that's kind of come out of my grief also. So, the meme practice emerged over COVID where I kept trying to figure out joy, just like, how do we just give ourselves a little respite when we know now that everyone is mourning, everyone is in some grief over either actual people that they lost to COVID or pathways that they lost to COVID, relationships. I went through a breakup this year that... There's a lot of factors to it. A part of it is that it was a COVID defined relationship, and that was a really challenging condition to try to be in and in love and newly in love in.
But then there's also... Yeah, I meet people regular who, yeah, my whole life path was truncated and diverted because of this. I am supposed to be living a different... We can grieve our parallel lives, but there's so much of that happening. And I think there's also the sadness of just watching systems that could choose to protect you and have all the resources needed to protect you say they're not going to. And as someone with disabilities and conditions, and just having to navigate the world and be like, wow, I live in this place that is so resourced and so careless and sees me as collateral damage. I knew that most of my growing up life. I've known that, but this feels like this unveiling has been so much sharper than I expected. And the memes have been kind of my way of being like, "Hey, y'all, at least can we laugh about this?" And some of them are quite edgy. So, I find I can allow the sharpest edge of my humor in that way, in a way that I might not otherwise do, and a lot of people meet me there.
Amy S. Choi:
I'm holding my body so tight right now. Do you see what I'm doing? I'm like, oh my god, she's saying it.
Rebecca Lehrer:
So, we've been talking about structural grieving, and I think you did such a beautiful description of this period of time where we're losing a certain path that you might go down that you thought you would. Or even for us, we have a sense of loss of naivete almost, like certain things... I mean, obviously the Trump era. Everything is unveiled so much, but there's loss of, as first generation Americans who model minorities, we were given a certain path or-
adrienne maree brown:
A lot of sacrifice happened in order for you to have this path.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yes. And then it looks different. And before we put judgment on what that difference is, good or bad, it's a big loss for what we understood it would be.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah. Yeah.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And I think one of the things we're asking is what does it mean to you to be grieving away of being or structures, even ones that didn't serve us? Right? You've talked about grieving capitalism because even though this is bad, it is what we know.
adrienne maree brown:
Well, you know what I say about it too. I'll be like, capitalism is a heartbreaker, right?
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah.
adrienne maree brown:
And so it's grieving something that was like first date was great. I was like, wait, I'm going to have a house and a fence and a car. And if I just work hard, I can have all the things. And I still, every time I leave the country talk to other people, and they're still like, yeah, that dream is breaking people's hearts who'll never get to come here. But they're convinced that if I only could come to the US, then I would be this success story. And I'm like, no, it's a heartbreaker. And I've been going through this grief process because I'm like, once you realize not only does it not work for the majority of people, or the dream doesn't actually manifest into all the things, but it's a dream that lives on top of a nightmare. We always talk about these systems that live on top of other systems. So, Walidah Imarisha and I, who we did Octavia's Brood together, we always talked about it as there's a utopia. If there's a utopia, it's living on top of a dystopia.
In order for utopia to exist, there's almost always someone living in a dystopia who's paying the price for that, doing the labor off offscreen, off camera, offsite. And so when you realize that about capitalism, I think there's a political grief and there's a life grief that's like, oh, there's not some path where I just have abundance and no one else... I don't have to think about... I have to worry about other people suffering. And then I think the other part of capitalism that's such a trick is the people who are extremely wealthy, where you would think that they would be happy are also severely depressed, suicidal, isolated, angry. There's a great emptiness because they've been having an abundance of something that doesn't actually nourish you, and that can be very isolating. So, I've really been thinking about grieving capitalism allows us to make way for new economic experiments.
And I think the sooner we can do that, the better. For me to be like I live inside of dying capitalist world. I am a post capitalist. I'm trying to think beyond it, and a visual that helps me a lot is... Have y'all been to the Grand Canyon? Yeah? So, in the Grand Canyon, you stand there and you can see these layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of the past. And each of those is like, oh, that was 300 years, is now a gorgeous pink line along the facade of this canyon. And I'm like, capitalism one day will be like that. It'll be a set of lines and colors, and that's what will be left of that system. And life will go on and earth will go on in the same way it survived dinosaurs, it survived asteroids, it survived other things. And my hope is that humans will have adapted. And we can look at that line and be like, huh, that was then, but we've got a ways to go.
Amy S. Choi:
I think one of our questions has been... Part the why has been we feel this impulse. We know it in our bones, that honoring our grief is essential to us as humans and to our souls, and also to our futures. And I just would love to hear from you. And I love this idea of being a post, is that, what does honoring our grief have to do with our future? Why must we go through this process rather than just, boop?
adrienne maree brown:
Well, one thing, I mean, I will say this. I'm always trying to learn from nature. I'm always looking at the earth and being like, how do you do it? Because we are earthling. So, tell us how you do stuff. And one is, I look at volcanoes, right? So, I think of grief. It's like the volcano letting out this little. Here's the lava flow, here's a lava flow. This is the overflow. There's a little too much I've got to let it go. And that's how I try to approach my grief. When the tears come, I cry them. When I remember someone, I light the candle. I let the grief be present when it comes, because if I try to bottle it up, that pressure is going to build up inside me and it'll blow, right? And I think we see this in so many of our parents and grandparents who have strokes and aneurysms and heart disease and cancers.
There's so much that's from built up repressed emotion in the individual system, the family system, the collective system. Most of us in our families, we have the person who takes the blow for the whole family. They're the one who... They basically hold the emotional content, and they either hold it quietly... Yeah, we're all raise your hand. They either hold it with quiet resentment. So, a lot of us are like, why is that person so angry all the time? Or why are they so resentful? Or why are they so passive aggressive? And it's like they're probably sitting on a mother load of repressed emotions, and they're afraid that if I truly open my mouth, I will blow up this whole thing and block out the sun. So, that's part of it. It's like to have a future, we have to actually learn how to release what we can when we can, so we don't create this necessary crisis.
But I also think that, for me, grief is something that's also a mark of survival. That's like, I'm still alive. I'm still here. I can learn from this grief, right? I'm like... The people in my family who've had heart attacks, even as I grieve for them, I also am internalizing like, oh, I need to attend to my heart. If I want to have a future that's longer than the future of my grandmother and great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother who all had heart disease that killed them, then I have to attend to my heart. That's really important data for trying to create a future. And then the patterns that create grief, collective grief. So, a moment like this COVID, COVID-19 crisis, we can look at it both for what did we learn over this period of time? Which nations actually quarantined? Which nations actually attended to their citizens? Which nations kept their people safe, which nations? Who put the economy before the people?
How did we keep ourselves alive in spite of that? How did those of us with disabilities survive this time? All of that is remarkably useful data because COVID-19 is the climate crisis. It is the capitalism crisis. It's all the crisis. It's like anything that requires us to have a collective mindfulness. We can see how we handle collective mindfulness in this moment. And we can be like, okay, currently our government doesn't make good decisions when it comes to this stuff, right?
And if it doesn't make good decisions when it comes to this stuff, we can't rely on them. So, how do we rely on each other? And the emergence of huge mutual aid networks has been really fortifying to me to watch and be like, okay. I always say community is the answer. I think community is always the answer. So to me, me grief teaches me I need to be in community, both to be held for the acute grief, and to be able to adapt together so that we can avoid unnecessary grief. I don't mind carrying the grief that's inevitable in my life. I feel a lot of resentment when I'm being given. I'm like, this is just extra. This is just bonus, unnecessary struggle that I did not need or ask for, and that none of us deserve, right? We live in a miraculous world, and I think there's supposed to be a balance between miracle and grief that is off right now.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And you just spoke about collective grief. And some of the stuff that we're learning from what we're observing about what's not happening, for example, I'd love to talk a little bit about what it does look like right now here, and then what can it look like? You are so inspiring in this idea of dreaming and imagination and not being caught in what it always what is or has been, although we have to process that, and that's part of what we're doing here. But what can it be? And so that's a big set of two questions here. But have there ever been good collective grieving experiences or not good, ones that we think served us in the US.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Or are there other places that you've seen it do really well, even in the COVID-19 crisis as an example?
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah. I mean, I think there's tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of beautiful practices of collective grief. And one that I will uplift that always moves me is the second line rituals in New Orleans. Every time I'm in New Orleans, if I see a second line going by, whoever it is that they're grieving for, I go join. I'm just like, I love this way of being with others and just being like, this life has been lived and we will dance it down to the grave and we will dance it down the street, and we will wear our finest clothing, and we will have our parasols, and the band will march and the Mardi Gras Indians will dance.
I mean, it's taking it and saying, actually, the end of a life can also be a celebration, and our grief can be laughing in the stories that we're telling about our loved one, right? That's such a different approach. And I've seen home going ceremonies like that, which were... It was like, yes, we're crying, and yes, we feel sadness. But also wasn't this person amazing and hilarious? And do you remember when they did this ridiculous thing?
Amy S. Choi:
I used to live right by the Barclay Center and the DMX homegoing
adrienne maree brown:
Yes, yes.
Amy S. Choi:
was the best thing that had the trucks!
adrienne maree brown:
Right. It's just actually, everybody come out. I remember when Biggie Smalls... There's just moments historically where in my life where I'm like, I remember this. I also want to say I was in New York right after 9/11, and at 9/11. I was on Sixth Avenue. And then I remember those weeks where there was this... Before things went to terror, right before everybody was like war. There was this quiet moment of everyone looking at each other with this softness in our eyes, and there were pictures of our dead on the walls in the subway, there were pictures of who was missing, and there was just this... It was a very different energy. There was no celebration. It was pure shock. But there was such a sense of, I know you're grieving and we're all grieving. What we thought New York was and that skyline and the people and all of it we're grieving.
And so I look at that and I'm like, I've been a part of grief that felt like collective and held and tender and beautiful and celebratory. And during COVID-19, something I was really appreciative of, which wasn't quite a grief practice, but adjacent, was there was a period of time where people would come out at seven o'clock at night and bang on pots and pans and make a great noise to honor all the doctors and nurses who were going in to these COVID wards and really holding the front line of death there. Because at that point, it was mostly people who by the time they were getting to the hospital, they weren't making it. And I was like, that is such a moving practice. And what you also saw, there was the brevity of our American attention span and the brevity of our American capacity to be in that tender hard place, right?
Part of why we've moved on, there's the economic reasons and all of that, but it's also our attention span for being able to be in common practice is too low for the circumstances we're in. So right now, the death numbers have not dropped, so there's no reason to say, "The pandemic is over. We're fine. Everybody stop wearing your mask," but the practices are changing because we don't have the sustenance to stay in the practice. And that's what I'm paying attention to. In my own life, I'm like, yeah, I also struggle with practicing something more than a few months at a time. I'm like, I got my yoga practice and it's going really well, and now I fell off. Now, I'm swimming practice. And it's going really well. Now, I fell off. So, I'm making me really attend to like, oh, how do I increase my capacity, my stamina for practice?
How do I increase my stamina for change? How do I increase my stamina for doing things that are for the collective good rather than just individual good. Those feel like some of the lessons that turn me. So, when I dream and imagine, now we go there, I would love for a second line, collective second line type practice to be a common practice for how we grieve or the home going practice, which is just like, let's cook and make a celebration and honor this person. I would also love... In my dream world, it's like every year we would sit down and be like, what have we learned from our dead in our dying this year? What have we learned? Right? What are we learning about the patterns of health and community and safety and distribution of material goods? What are we learning about ourselves from who's dying?
Because if we sat that way with COVID, it would be like, oh, here's the adjustments we need to make in our economy, in our society, how medicine gets distributed, how information gets distributed. We can't indulge people who are saying things that aren't true in the public sphere. We have to tighten up. It's so clear there's these patterns and lessons that we would be like, oh, let's learn those so that our dead become the teachers that help us avoid these patterns. So that, to me, when I think about, oh, in the future, it'd be something we honor, that we live in such a way that we're like, okay, if this death is unnatural, let's make it impossible.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah.
adrienne maree brown:
Part of what I'm writing right now is really about how death can be the way we return to nature, right? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what does that really mean? And what would it look like to get to choose. I want to be a mushroom. I want to be an oak tree. I want to go into... Where do you want to go? Which part of nature do you want to return to? And that's the dying process. That's part of your ritual. Okay, it's almost time. I'm going to go to the ocean.
Amy S. Choi:
Do you want to be a mushroom?
adrienne maree brown:
I mean, I kind of want to do all of it, so I'm cut me up, put me everywhere. I really, really, really love the idea of being fed into a mycelium network, because then I know that that's going to feed a whole area. It'll feed the tree. It'll nourish everything around. So, I love that idea, but I'm also an ocean being, a merperson. So, I think it'll at least have to be a half and half situation. But I mean, think there's also... We are kind of repelled by so much of our nature, right? We're repelled by our bodies. We want to control our bodies. We live in a society that's always trying to control our wildness. And I do feel like death, in that way, is a freedom path. While I was in this body, you could exert different kinds of control over me, and maybe I could fight back, or maybe not.
But once I'm gone, there's also freedom to that. It's just like, I live this full life in this container. Now, I'm uncontained. And whatever you believe happens after that, there's a freedom in it too. And so I always try to hold that. Grieving is for those of us who stay, but we have no idea what's happening for the person who's gone. And they might be ecstatic. They might be having a bomb time, or they might just be like, there's nothing here. It's gone. It's cool, whatever. So, my belief is that the body is an experience of separateness, and then we return to something that is much more connective. And so in that way, I'm like, yeah, liberate me back into the nature, liberate me back into this, the whole. And even the idea that I could control which nature I go to is kind of laughable in that perspective. It's like, girl, you're just going to be a part of nature. You're not in charge.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I think one of the themes I'm hearing a lot in here is in your work is about perspective and time.
adrienne maree brown:
That's right.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Where we sit in time. And also, there's so much more to time than this moment.
adrienne maree brown:
Exactly.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I think something about the American experiment makes that very challenging to wrap our heads around. This is... Oh, 250 years. And then you literally leave here and go anywhere.
adrienne maree brown:
Yes.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And you're like, this stupid store is 500 years old, or this thing is a thousand years old, or this is right 5,000 years old.
adrienne maree brown:
That piece on time, I think that's almost all of it, right? There's a way that it's like grief is a marker of time. Grief is in relationship to the life that someone lived in a certain time. And also, time for me gives me the humility to be like, I'm probably going to be forgotten. Most of us live. And then we're briefly remembered by the people who loved and knew us, and then we're forgotten. And there's very few people whose names actually last in history compared to the amount of people who live. And you don't get to control the narrative of your time. You don't get to control the narrative of the future. There's just so much that you're not in charge of other than living your life well.
And for me, that gives me a little peace. That's like, even if I seem to be so famous or having a high moment of visibility, or everyone's worried about what I'm doing or whatever, there's something about this... Mostly you're going to be forgotten. So, do work that's going to matter, contribute to ideas that are going to matter, and let that be the way that you continue in the world. I know Audrey Lord's name, but I don't know all the black feminists who flowed into her consciousness or awareness, right? And yeah, I don't know. There's just something about that idea of, oh, the grief... Even those who grief me the most intensely, that'll be relatively brief in the grand scheme of human life. And then we'll keep moving and I will have been loved,
Amy S. Choi:
So loved. Rebecca's going to cry.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I already cried.
Amy S. Choi:
So, I will share that in the two weeks of quiet after 9/11... She will appreciate this. You know what I did? I spent those two weeks rollerblading around Manhattan.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh, I can't talk about it. I just learned that... I just learned. We've been partners since 2013. I just learned that she was a big roller blader before we met. I was like, this feels like a secret I should have known.
Amy S. Choi:
It was like there was nobody on the streets. So, I just roller bladed loops, my 22 year old self, around Manhattan.
adrienne maree brown:
Oh, wow.
Amy S. Choi:
Anyway-
adrienne maree brown:
That's wild. I would never have thought.
Amy S. Choi:
Isn't it?
Rebecca Lehrer:
I just want to say one more thing. I think it's also... I want to reflect what you're saying there. It's like, what is living a good life? And then how do we build that up, all of us, to what is being a good community member and what is building a good world? And I think that's the piece that we are really wrestling with. I mean, every month Amy and I have an hour we talk about, what does success mean to us? And who needs to acknowledge us? Because we're human beings and we have ambition and envy and all of the human things, and so... But knowing that life is short and trying to tap into the kind of perspective that you bring and that this time period can inspire for us, I think that's what this series is actually. Trying to give us a little of that.
adrienne maree brown:
I mean, I think that's what it is. One of the things I think about often is I'm like, I want to live a life where I live very deeply. So, maybe I don't grieve a ton of people, but the people I grieve, it's real. And the people... When I leave and people grieve me, I want it to be a real grief. I mean, it's fine what people do on the internet, like, "Oh, I'm so... They're dead," or whatever, "RIP." You see those waves, right? And I'm like, I don't know if you actually felt-
Rebecca Lehrer:
Broken heart emoji.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah, broken heart. So sad, right? I'm so sad. And I'm like... I really tried to pull back from doing those things when I'm like, oh, when Bell Hooks died, I really was weeping and I don't need to go post that on the internet. I just need to weep and light my candle and reflect on how she changed my life and really commit myself to making sure her legacy's not forgotten because she was scared about that. And I can honor that. There's real work I can do in relationship to the real impact she had on me.
And it's made my circle of my actual lived daily life so much smaller because my goal now is for depth. I'm like I really want the critical connections, but it's also made my life so much more full. I am able to be my whole self. I'm able to feel real feelings, good and hard and beautiful, and I'm really giving life a full run here. I want to taste it all. And I feel like my mentor at, Grace Lee Boggs lived to be a hundred years old. She was Chinese-American activist in Detroit. And in the last couple years, she was in hospice. We were like, she's on her way. And she was just like, there's nothing on my mind. I've done my thinking.
I'm at ease. I'm at peace. I'm ready to go. Let me go into that good night. I'm ready. And the grief I feel for her is so different because I know that she got to taste it all and do it all and write it all and think it all, and she really felt a completion. So, that's also something I'm really focused on in my life now, both in my individual and collective experiences. Like, where is the satisfaction? Where is the completion? I love that way of orienting. It's like, I want the grief to be complete and full, and I'm trying to live a very full and complete life.
Amy S. Choi:
I have a question, and this is our big last question, which is just that I think... I'm so in awe of you in that point of view, and I think it's something that we really aim for as well. And I just wonder, for our listeners, any guidance on how, not on what it means to live a deep life, because we've heard a little bit about what that means for you, or what it means to imagine, because I think that means different things for all of us to unlock that, but any guidance towards how to do it, how do you access the deeper parts of you if you haven't before? Or how do you access your grief? How do you access your imagination for what comes next?
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah. I'm like, this is my life's work. So, I feel like a few things that I found that are like, this is definitely going to work. One is actually having an explicit embodiment practice because the body is where your life is happening, whether you like that or not. And the more you can actually feel, the more you can feel. The more you're actually able to feel, whether you like or don't the experience you're in or the job you're in and you can start to feel the other possibilities of what your life could be. And there's a group called the Embodiment Institute that my friend, Prentice Hemphill started, and they actually have a self-guided embodiment course to help you get started along that path. And then you can find embodiment and somatic practitioners who can help if there's healing and other needs that come up. But I think that's the first one, is get into your body, find your way into it. Do the work. Clear the trauma. Find your way to live in your actual body in this lifetime.
And once you're in your body, you feel a lot more. I feel so much. In a given day, I'm like I feel such a wide range of emotions. And so I have rituals inside of that. When I do hear about someone dying, or if someone's like, can you pray for this or can... I just need some energy sent here. I light a candle. I have an incredible ancestor altar. And I say, can you watch over this? Can you welcome this person in whatever way y'all do? I'm never far from a bowl of sage, and I always am burning it. When a feeling comes up that's like, this is a big one, or I'm taking a big risk or something, I really honor and have these little rituals built into my day to be like, oh, okay. And then I think the thing that I've been in lately, which I'm doing this project with Sonya Renee Taylor on radical permission, and a lot of that emerged from giving yourself permission to live a good life.
If we come from generations that have struggled and suffered, and we've been told that the revolutions only going to come from struggling and suffering, and that's just a part of life, it can feel confusing when you start to be like, I feel peace and I feel joy and I feel centered in my life, and I still feel accountable to my community. And I'm showing up for my community now as an artist and as a writer, but I'm also protective of this peace and this joy that I feel, and I have permission to feel it. I do a practice where I send it back. So, I'm like, I'm going to send this back to my grandmother. I'm going to send this back to Harriet Tubman, I'm going to send this back to Alice Coltrane, and different people in my lineage who I'm like, because of them, they sent the little tricks and little clues into my mind at various points in my life.
And I'm like, what Alice Coltrane, I need to go to a journey in Satchidananda, stuff that I'm like, okay, that's important, so let me send this in case you suffered and you didn't have this. And particularly to my ancestors who lived through periods of slavery, whose names I don't know, but I'm like, you can't imagine. I can't imagine the struggle that your life was, and you can't imagine the joy that mine is currently, and I want to send this to you. So, I don't know that that works, but I kind of imagine that time is in mycelium network too and we can send stuff along the way, but giving myself that permission. And I try to give as many people that permission. It's like we actually are among the freest people to ever live right now, and these dying systems don't want us to know that, right? But we can actually jail break ourselves out of those systems into relationships of care with each other, and we can experience freedom right here and right now. So, that's how.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh, well, with that-
Amy S. Choi:
Just buy some sage, it'll be fine. So, my strategy of being horizontal, whenever I have a big feeling, that's the most tourist thing about me, I'm just like, you know what? I'm going to go lay down.
adrienne maree brown:
As long as you know what your way is, right? And also I'll say, I don't buy the sage. People give to me sage often. But that's one thing you can also figure out. Each of our lineage just has different things that we burn. Each of our lineage just has different ways of honoring water and ways of being with the dirt. So even if you don't have it passed down directly to you from your ancestors, you can do some scholarship and some study and be like, what do my folks use? Or you can ask permission or receive the gifts. At this point in my life, people are always sending me sacred items. And so I'm like, I use them. I'm like, people send me Palo Santo. I'm like, okay, I'm burning Palo Santo this month. And just accepting all of us, we way back in our lineage, we're indigenous to some piece of land. And so everything to do with the land and the water can be used for ritual in a good way.
Rebecca Lehrer:
So, we have three wrap up questions. And I think you really did sort talk a little bit about your rituals.
adrienne maree brown:
Yes.
Rebecca Lehrer:
But what are you grieving today, adrienne?
adrienne maree brown:
My sort of top level grief is always planetary. It's never far from my heart that there are species that are going extinct, that there are wildfires burning that are not the natural order, that there are floods and droughts, that there are hurricanes that are stronger than they need to be, that there are people who are thirsty and hungry, and that we live on this abundant planet, and because of how we're treating her, she can't give us the sustenance that she means to and that she has to deal with us hurting her a lot. So, I have a lot of grief over the relationship I feel like we're supposed to have to earth and what's actually happening. I have a lot of grief for all the children in my life not getting to know the earth and the way that I have. So, that's always, always present with me.
And then I have some deaths, some people in my life who have passed away recently, and I have candles lit and a lot going for that. And then I have several mothers in my life who are having to really fight in the co-parenting work. They're having to really fight so hard to just provide the love that their babies need. And so I'm kind of grieving the vision they had of what parenting was going to look like and what they're having to do instead, just how hard it is. They all have the best kids in the world, so it's all good and it will be okay, but it's just so much harder than it needs to be because patriarchy's falling at the same time.
And then, yeah, I went through a breakup six months ago and there's still grief there. We were engaged and it was a big deal of a relationship for me. And so there's grief. It's changing all the time. And then the last thing I'll say is my friend Alana Devich Cyril died on the 27th, three, four years ago now. She taught all of us a lot about pleasure, and so she's with me today.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I love a death anniversary actually.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah.
Rebecca Lehrer:
It's one of my most important markers of time.
adrienne maree brown:
Yep. Yeah.
Rebecca Lehrer:
We'll hold her right now.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah. Thank you.
Rebecca Lehrer:
The one last question, Amy.
Amy S. Choi:
What do you hope for the conversation about grief in the future?
adrienne maree brown:
I think mostly, I just hope for more conversation about grief in the future. I'm starting to have the assumption that we're all concurrently grieving different things all the time, and so normalizing it, and then widening our scope of what requires grief time.
Amy S. Choi:
Thank you so much, adrienne.
Rebecca Lehrer:
What a joy.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah, it was really lovely to talk with y'all about this.
Amy S. Choi:
This was fantastic. I think I literally am going to have to lay flat on my back for hour.
adrienne maree brown:
I just wanted to lay you out. That was my... I was like, I can get you on the floor.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I can do it.
Amy S. Choi:
Wow. Wow. Wow.
Rebecca Lehrer:
One more time with feeling, adrienne maree brown.
Amy S. Choi:
And I don't know, we got to do a remix.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh, there's the remix. She is... What a light joy to talk about challenging things with somebody so thoughtful, so kind, so freaking smart. I wish everybody was sending me sage and Palo Santo, but I do happen to have some, so I'll be doing a little bit of saging after this.
Amy S. Choi:
A little lighting and meditating. I'm just going to float away.
Rebecca Lehrer:
The way she created context for us, the way... I'm like, when are we going to the Grand Canyon? Oh, I got to think about myself, layered, geologically layered in history and made small in the best possible way by nature.
Amy S. Choi:
When I think about adrienne, when I think about this conversation, the word for me that comes to mind is abundance and just remembering that the world is abundant, the planet is abundant. People and the love we have for each other and our own internal resources and our creativity and our compassion, they are all abundant. And that is what I will take forward with me in thinking about grief and love. Because as we know, they are the same thing.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Abundance.
Amy S. Choi:
Friends, thank you for being with us in these conversations and up and down the roller coaster of feelings and thoughts and questions. We are so grateful and happy to have been able to explore grief and really explore love with all of you, and especially with all of our guests. This has been just beyond a joy. We laughed, we cried. We got back on the mic after three years, and we are really hoping it's not going to be that long again.
Rebecca Lehrer:
No, it won't be. We're going to see you in a few months.
Amy S. Choi:
Oh my God.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Who knows?
Amy S. Choi:
There she goes. Everybody, go to griefcollected.com. We are always here for you. You can always find us @MashUpAmerican. We're here. We're doing it. We love you.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Thank you.
Amy S. Choi:
Goodbye.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Adios.
Grief, Collected is a production of The Mash-Up Americans. Executive produced by Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer, Senior Editor and producer is Sara Pellegrini, Development producer is Dupe Oyebolu, production manager, Shelby Sandlin. Original music composed by the Brothers Tang. Sound Design support by Pedro Raphael Rosado, website designed by Rebecca Parks Fernandez. Grief, Collected is supported in part by a grant from the Pop Culture Collaborative. Please make sure to follow and share this show with your friends. Ciao.