Honouring grief as a sacred act
How sorrow transforms us and brings us closer to ourselves, humanity and life.
In the early months of 1897, from a solitary cell in Reading Goal, Oscar Wilde penned some of the most tender words ever written about suffering. He was nearing the end of a two-year sentence in solitary confinement for ‘gross indecency’, a charge that stripped him of his freedom, reputation, wealth, home, and children. He had been publicly ridiculed and jeered by mobs, excommunicated by his friends and the establishment he had courted. A year into his incarceration his mother died. Wilde descended into despair. The most lauded playwright and author of his generation was debased and broken.
As he reckoned with himself, Wilde accepted that despite an œuvre of work exploring the human condition, he had himself shunned sorrow, believing it a ‘mode of imperfection’. It was only after a year in wretched despair, he conceded, ‘[T]he only thing for me was to accept everything’, and determined to seek meaning from it.
Thus, Wilde allowed himself to surrender, to collapse willingly into the reality of his situation and come to a place of ‘complete humility’. It was from this point he was liberated, not from, but into his suffering, and where he was to discover the intrinsic beauty of sorrow. He found at the heart of his pain an essential truth and a new way of perceiving the world. Writing from this state of humility he declared, ‘where there is sorrow, there is holy ground’.
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground
—Oscar Wilde—
I think many of us who’ve experienced deep sorrow, will be familiar with this husking back of our ego and a deliverance into something wholly beautiful. I recall the bewildering months following the death of my parents and brother, when my whole being quivered with incomprehensible pain. Everything I was and had been, everything I knew and believed was swept away to reveal something infinitely tender, indefinable, yet essential. I felt my self attune with the world beyond me, like I had disappeared into humanity itself, into the womb or essence of life.
My first experience of this was on the morning of my parents’ and brother’s deaths. Friends picked me up from the police station where my sisters and I had spent the night following the search mission. On the drive back to Melbourne, none of us certain what we were supposed to do, we stopped off at a beach. My friends gathered on the sand near the beach track, but I wandered onward. My friends now lived in another life, where I too had lived a day earlier; a life I no longer knew or had any attachment to.
I chose to sit on the beach near an outcrop of red rocks, just above the shoreline and looked up to the sky. Clouds drifted above. I recall feeling every cell in my body vibrating with an energy that seemed to fuse with the environment—the swirling clouds, the breath of the waves, the distant call of gulls. The environment seemed more aware of who and where I was than my friends. It was the most exquisitely beautiful and painful moment I had ever experienced.
It was my first foray onto holy ground. The feeling stayed with me until a few months later I buried my grief so as to be accepted back into the world. Still, fragments of the power and beauty of loss stayed with me and informed how I loved, how I related to others’ sorrow, how I sought to be in the world. A way of being that seemed wholly at odds with the world I actually lived in.
There is a humility you have to step into, where you where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief …
—Elizabeth Gilbert—
I was in my early 50s, when I next entered this holy ground. Our fifties seem to be a time of reckoning for many of us who were not granted the chance to live our sorrows when we were young. For me it was precipitated by a heartbreak that stripped me of all the pretences, self-deceptions and defences I’d built to ‘survive’. I was compelled to face who I really was—a fragile woman cowering under decades of untended sorrow.
And just as Wilde recounted, it required me to accept everything. With neither the power or will to resist, I found myself bowing down to my heartbreak, and in doing so, to my original sorrow. At times literally bowing to the ground in a state of complete humility.
Author, Elizabeth Gilbert, experienced the same power of grief to bow us toward the earth. Soon after the death of her wife Rayya she said in an interview with TED, ‘It's bigger than you. There's a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself… it's a bow down, a carve out...’
Humility is what grants us entry to holy ground, holding true to its Latin root humus, meaning “earth” and humilis, meaning “on the ground”. It’s a literal and metaphorical coming back to earth. It connects us with what is true and essential in ourselves, in life, and in nature. Wilde perceived this connection between humility and life’s essence writing: ‘… hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility… It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life.’
My body ached for the exquisiteness of the world, the fragility of it and of each of us—the tenderness of our love, the immensity of our sorrow.
Through surrendering to grief, allowing it to embody me, I again experienced the vastness of love and sorrow in a way that expanded both within and beyond me. I felt myself in communion with life, with incomprehensible beauty. My body ached for the exquisiteness of the world, the fragility of it, and of each of us—the tenderness of our love and the immensity of our sorrow. Everything felt interconnected and interdependent. It brought me into a deep presence and infinite stillness within myself.
As Rilke wrote in a letter to his friend Adelheid von der Marwitz, following the loss of her brother in WW1, ‘Death…somehow has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life, so that we grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile.’
We learn that loss and love are intertwined. It is love that brings us to grief, it is grief that brings us to a deeper sense of ourselves and of life. Oscar Wilde’s epiphany as he contemplated his sorrow and its inherent beauty was to also acknowledge how it returns us to the world transformed, writing, ‘[T]o become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.’ And he saw it through the lens of love.
‘Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.’
This realisation, of the immensity of our capacity for love, and the depth of our sorrow, brings us very much into life, into a sense of meaning and purpose. The sense that love is what weaves this all together. As Laurie Anderson said of the death of her partner Lou Reed, ‘I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life—so beautiful, painful and dazzling—does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.’
This is what we learn—love is the holy ground upon which we walk with our sorrow. It is the fertile soil that connects us to the earth, to sorrow, to beauty, to joy, to each other. When we surrender to our loss, allow it to embody us, allow ourselves to be carried by it to its infinite depths we connect with the essence of life. It deepens our love, our connection to others, our relationship with nature, and with ourselves. It returns us to the world, transformed.
The purpose of death is the release of love.
—Laurie Anderson—
The Stillness Room
The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I’ll explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.
A space created, where you can attend quietly to your story.
I’ll launch the Stillness Writers Room retreat, a 2-day virtual writing program for people who wish to put words to their grief. See below for more details and a link to register an EOI. Maximum 15 attendees.
I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.
If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space.
Thank you for being here. And welcome.
Robynne x
Community Question on Beauty
Have you felt yourself on holy ground with your grief? Have you experienced grief’s beauty? I’d love you to share your experience here and start the conversation.
De Profundis
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde’s quote ‘where there is sorrow, there is holy ground’ inspired today’s post and has long been one that spoke deeply to me. It both validates and honours grief. However I only recently read the letter from which it was gleaned. He wrote the letter to his former lover and betrayer Lord Arthur ‘Bosie’ Douglas over several months prior to his release from gaol, where he served two years of hard labour in solitary confinement (prisoners were not permitted to communicate with each other). On his release, Wilde handed the letter totalling 55,000 words to his friend Robert Ross to pass it on to Lord Douglas, who apparently never read it. Ross arranged the letter’s publication after Wilde’s death a few years later.
In a wide-ranging communication—traversing sorrow, beauty, the treatment of prisoners, the solace of small gestures, society’s ‘supreme vice of shallowness’ and refusal to acknowledge the damage caused by its actions, and a contemplation of the scriptures—Wilde explores the meaning of sorrow. He comes to appreciate his suffering as a gift that grants him a deep and prolific insight into himself and the world around him.
For the reader contemplating or working through their own sorrow there is much inspiration and solace to find here. It invites us to contemplate our own sorrows and the beauty residing within grief and consider how we live our grief in an unreceptive world. Wilde’s appraisal of the judicial system and how society treats those who suffer is compelling and as pertinent today as when he wrote it. His meditation on the story of Christ was unexpectedly and particularly illuminating for the agnostic reader.
De Profundis is available free from here.
Or purchase a copyrighted copy with additional information here.
Contemplating sorrow’s beauty
Each of us experience grief and sorrow in our own unique way. For many of us there can be an opening to something beautiful within ourselves, and within the world. It’s because where there is grief there is love.
Spend some time reflecting on what grief has taught you. How have you seen or experienced things differently? Have you ever felt a sense of beauty, or a connection to nature when in the midst of grief? How did it feel, how did it inform your and how you look at life?
Take 15-20 minutes reflecting on those moments and what they meant to you at the time, and what they mean now when reflecting on them. Take some time to write or draw the experience and what it has meant to you.
If you would like to share your experience or what you’ve learned please leave a comment here. I would love to learn about your experience and people often find great solace learning of other people’s experience.
The Stillness Writers Room is a retreat for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.
The Stillness Writers Room retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.
The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.
Expressions of interest are currently open for the following dates.
Friday 20 June - Sunday 22 June, 2025
Friday 22 August - Sunday 24 August, 2025
(NB: discounts for paid subscribers).