For many of us, sharing our vulnerability and witnessing each other in the beauty and mystery of our grief is a strong medicine that helps bring us home to what it is to be fully human, in solidarity with each other and with the natural world.

Honouring our pain can also help open the way for us to step more fully into compassionate action, enabling us to see more clearly what needs to be done to bring healing to our societies and to our planet.

As we allow our sorrows to come into the light, to be tended by the circle and by our own compassionate witnessing, this can open us to the realisation that our pain is part of a bigger wound, and that we're all in it together, drinking from the same communal cup of sorrow.

As well as giving loving attention to our wounds, we also celebrate the strong bonds of community that arise when we come together in this way, and the spontaneous joy that so often accompanies this deep work. Tending our grief together is ultimately a way of transforming pain into beauty, and grit into grace.