Our Invitation (from the 2024 Grief & Death Festival)
We are living through times when wars and extinctions have become part of daily life—and where the scale of collective pain and loss often escapes our personal grasp. In these days when loss and death knock on our doors in many forms, we extended an invitation to the 2024 Grief & Death Festival—to come together in solidarity, to honor our griefs, and to become one another’s eyes, ears, mirrors, and witnesses.
With the wish to keep our hearts open and present to the world and to our lives…
Our Intentions
- To look into one another’s eyes—and into life itself—and say: “There is death, there is grief.”
- To both normalize grief and death, and at the same time remember their sacredness and the gifts they carry.
- To take a step toward discovering spaces where we can experience community support—especially in the places we most often feel desolate, isolated, constricted, or avoidant.
- To remember the wisdom of death and grief, their inevitable place in our lives, and their initiatory role in our journey of becoming human.
- To awaken collective memory and foster a more compassionate, inclusive, and holistic approach to grief and death.
Why a Festival?
Because we long to embrace grief and death as integral parts of life—and to welcome them with presence and awareness.
We felt drawn to engage this space through poetry, story, conversation, ritual, music, literature, and film.
We call this gathering a “festival” to remind ourselves that grief and death are not inherently ugly or frightening—and that when approached with art, ritual, community, reverence, and grace, they can open doors to meaning, inspiration, and courage.
Below you’ll find a selection of English-language video recordings from past festivals.
Apprenticing to Grief
Francis Weller & Filiz Telek | October 30th, 2021
In this conversation with Francis Weller, we explore the notion of apprenticeship to grief. Through grief rituals, we are ripened and deepened as human beings. Grief brings a sense of gravity and depth to our lives.
Our work is to understand grief not merely as a passing emotion, but as one of the essential faculties of being human—a profound skill that enables us to metabolize sorrow in ways that can nourish the community.
This apprenticeship is, in essence, about cultivating wise elders—those who can stand with dignity and steadiness in the face of the world’s pain and sorrow. It is a form of soul activism, carried with the intention of fostering deep cultural transformation.
In this interview by Filiz Telek, Francis Weller speaks about what grief is, why grieving matters, what it means to apprentice to grief, and the gateways of grief.
About Francis Weller
Francis Weller is a psychotherapist (retired), writer and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. Author of the bestselling, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief; The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, (with Rashani Réa) and In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty, he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people. He founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western poetic, psychological, and spiritual traditions.
Grief, Celebration, and Ritual: Remembering Our Hidden Connections
Charles Eisenstein, October 29th, 2022
As systems built on power and control collapse, how can awareness of grief and death help us remember that we are interconnected, and that life flourishes within the healthy web of relationships? What kind of storytelling can shake us out of our cultural denial of death and our struggle against it?
This conversation is a compassionate reminder to recognize the grief felt within our own being, and to allow it to guide and transform us in difficult times.
In this dialogue, Charles Eisenstein is joined by Filiz Telek.
The Road of Life and Death
Michael Meade, November 4th, 2023
The German word weltschmerz means “world pain” or “world weariness.” It conveys the sense that our individual sorrows are connected to the world’s sorrows, especially when we feel inadequate in the face of global problems. What troubles the world troubles us too, and we don’t need to be in personally tragic circumstances to feel how others suffer. We can be deeply affected by the grief and pain in the world, because fundamental empathic qualities are part of being human.
When we see a loved one in pain, we feel heightened stress and anxiety; yet even when we see a stranger suffering or afraid, we experience a measure of the same feelings. We not only understand this, but also recognize that all human beings are inseparably interconnected, and that the suffering of each person can easily become our own.
Ultimately, grief emerges as a vital element of life—a form of inner healing that not only shapes the heart but also opens it, drawing forth the human essence within us. We are all on this path together, not in ignorance, but with the ancient understanding that on the road of life and death we walk side by side, and each of us is in need of care and blessing.
Intervening in Meaning: Working with Grief for Traumatic Loss
Robert Neimeyer, November 5th, 2023
Viewed from a meaning-focused perspective, a central process in grieving is the attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss. Whether we encounter such loss in the form of bereavement or in the wake of non-death losses, such as those arising from loss of health or home, traumatic transitions of all kinds can leave grievers struggling to process the event story of what happened, to make sense of their changed identity in its wake, and to realign their relationship with relevant others in a way that restores their sense of secure attachment or resolves unfinished business. In this session, we summarize the Tripartite Model of Meaning Reconstruction and its application to complex losses of people, projects, professions and protections that our clients had once counted on to navigate life. Brief clinical videos illustrate how such losses violate the core beliefs that sustain survivors’ assumptive world, prompting anguishing but essential review and revision of their life stories. We conclude by sketching diverse meaning-oriented practices that help people find growth through grief, providing a conceptual frame for therapeutic practice.
Learning Objectives:
• Describe a meaning-focused roadmap to identify obstacles to adaptive grieving;
• Distinguish defining features of traumatic losses that complicate adaptation;
• Summarize evidence that struggles in sense-making and violation of core beliefs mediate the impact of traumatic loss; and
• Identify three practices to facilitate meaning reconstruction in the context of working with grief.
Grief, A Path to Wholeness
Frank Ostaseski, November 5th, 2023
In grief we access parts of ourselves that were somehow unavailable to us in the past. With awareness, the journey through grief becomes a path to wholeness. Grief can lead us to a profound understanding that reaches beyond our individual loss. Frank will review a model of the progression of grief used at the Zen Hospice Project that he refers to as Loss, Loosing and Loosening.
The Echoes of Death and the Death Letter Project
Tina Fiveash
We will talk to Australian photographer Tina Fiveash about her Death Letter Project, inspired by the evocations of death, death and near-death experiences.
The practice of Tina Fiveash Ph.D spans more than three decades. A master of visual storytelling and conjuring illusion, FiveAsh is known for her powerful, cinematic still images and animated lenticular works that transform fiction into otherworldly realism.
Fiveash is the recipient of multiple awards including the Blake Art prize (Finalist 2022, 2016), Olive Cotton Award (Highly Commended 2017, Winner People’s Choice 2013), National Photographic Portrait Prize (Finalist 2016), and the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award (Finalist 2016, Highly commended 2007). She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally including at the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art in Greece (a collaboration with artist Deborah Kelly). FiveAsh’s previous international exhibitions include: the 13th Pingyao International Photography Festival in China in 2013; Terra Nullius: Contemporary Art from Australia and Die Ideale Ausstellung [Kunstfest Weimar] in Germany in 2009. Additionally, FiveAsh’s work has appeared throughout the world on billboards, illuminated public advertising spaces, film, television and book and magazine covers.
In 2021, Tina was awarded a PhD from The Australian National University, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Majoring in Visual Arts. Investigating intersections between art, science, and spirituality, Tina’s research engaged with experimental photographic approaches to the visual representation of death and imagined conceptions of an afterlife, based on scientific studies into near-death experience. An offshoot of this research was the ambitious undertaking of an online socially-engaged research project titled: The Death Letter Project. Exploring contemporary perspectives of death in Australia, the project invited fifty diverse Australians to handwrite a letter responding to: “what is death; and what happens when we die?”. The fascinating content of the letters, combined with striking photographic portraits of each contributor, form the focus of a website: www.deathletterprojects.com, which has received international attention and recognition for its unique approach to helping people contemplate death, whether it’s their own or their loved ones.
Tina’s work is held in the Australian Artbank Collection, The Art Gallery of Ballarat, Whitford Fine Art Gallery (London) and several private collections around the world.
Grief As A Rite
Lotan Sapir
In this gathering, Lotan Sapir will speak about her personal journey of encountering grief, the teachings grief has offered her, and how this mighty force has guided her path in life. Lotan will share traditional perspectives on grief as well as ceremonies that help us be with grief, and how these can inspire us today. Most importantly, she will speak about the wondrous gifts of grief: its nature of stripping us bare before what we love most, of expanding us enough to welcome the sacred, of reminding us that we belong to something greater than ourselves, and of its initiatory potential to connect us more deeply with life. She is joined in this conversation by Filiz Telek.
Lotan Sapir
Lotan is the mother of Elaya Be’er, a dancer, a performance artist, and a guide for rites of passage with individuals and groups. She weaves together these tools to explore questions of what it means to be human today—particularly in the Middle East, in Israel-Palestine—while exploring connections with nature, identity, peace, and reconciliation processes.
Born in Haifa and raised in South Africa until her teenage years, Lotan lived in London for nine years. There she created and directed numerous interdisciplinary art collectives and performances centered on social justice, many of which invited audiences to actively participate in the stories being witnessed. These works led her into the transformational practices of Brazilian Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Theatre of the Living Communities, which hold space for processes of social justice and ecological change.
She has studied Deep Ecology with Joanna Macy and trained in nature-based rites of passage with the School of Lost Borders in California.
Seven years ago, devoted to her own healing and with the intention of facing her connection to the land of her origins and its divisions, Lotan returned to Israel-Palestine. There she created The Human Theatre, a program that provides safe spaces across the West Bank, Palestine, and Israel for people to explore their questions through performance art.
Her inquiries have taken her into the depths of pain, anger, and the recurring cycles of violence, where she began to deepen her relationship with grief.
Her passion for movement and her questions around gender led her to found Onot (Hebrew for “Seasons”), a women’s dance group. She also founded and directs WomenTongue, a project that holds space for women to explore themselves through performance art and to create rites of passage.
With a deep belief that art, imagination, and earth-based practices are essential for shaping contemporary society, Lotan initiates and joins projects that hold safe spaces for diverse communities in the Middle East to gather through creative arts and nature-based ritual.
