33. The entanglement of grief and gift | with Inma & Matthew

All the times when I’ve forgotten to bring a cassette or find out there’s nothing in the machine, or I forget a push record, it’s always like, oh, that was the most precious thing that you could ever have recorded.

And I think of it like libations, like the original Greek notion of libations of this sacrificial offering. We use libations in terms of drinking, but that’s just an adulteration of the original meaning, where you’d pour wine into the ocean or onto the sand just as you would sacrifice the thigh bones and stuff. I always think of it like libations to the recording gods. ~Matthew

Yeah, don’t I ever know it. And I am sure you do too. Perhaps for recording, perhaps in not managing to take a photograph of a perfect moment, or…

The quality of conversation I had with Alison and Gary of season one, before this pod-series was in the process, had me thinking more than once that I so wished we’d been recording. The wisdom, love and respect and insights shared… libations to the recording gods, for sure.

After me, Matthew and Inma finished talking about not recording the best conversations, we meandered around grief and gifts for the better part of the rest of the conversation.

The embodiment reaction of them both. The similarity of sensation in the body as they engulf you. The gift of memories arising again through grieving. How grief and gift, or sorrow and joy, go hand in hand, in harmony with one another, like two sides to a coin, rather than opposites.

Can you feel the mass of unresolved grief carried both individually and collectively in our society, a mass that’s only ever growing that Matthew speaks to? And what if… if we, if I, learn to grieve, to be with grief, perhaps there’s an opportunity there? What might open up for us all in learning to grieve on a culture-wide basis? Like the release of disharmony of two notes sung, two notes just next to each other, causing tension, before, at long last, being released into a more harmonious coupling? Might that release be experienced on a more collective level? Who knows.

I invite you to step into the world of grief and gifts, and be assured there’s some tankespjärn for you here, this time around too.