Ruth Allen

Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet - gradually eroding, dissolving, recycling, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also evolving and changing as we're transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?In a stunning exploration of our own connection to these enduring forms, outdoor psychotherapist and geologist Ruth Allen takes us on a journey through deep time and ancient landscapes, showing how geology - which has formed the bedrock of her own adult life and approach to therapy - can offer us a new way of thinking about our own grief, change and boundaries.In a world shaken by physical, political, and medical disasters, Weathering argues for a deeper understanding of the ground beneath our feet to better serve ourselves and the world we live in.

Weathering

Laura Mei

The things that we push down within ourselves, bury, and ignore for as long as possible also become a leaky window if left unattended. The problem is not so much that we bury things deeply, but that they tend to come back when we have no capacity to hold them. We are ever at the mercy of our own surface things, demanding to be noticed. Most of us live outside the truth of our bodies in traumatizing ways – which is to say, we live in such a style of fullness that we often risk going over our capacity and overspilling our limits. All the information we could ever want or need is available to us now, and we have unprecedented access into the lives of others. We use this to demand ever more of ourselves in exchange for wealth to buy ourselves more stuff and more time. Modern, more affluent humans are mostly busy creatures – frequently overcommitted and indentured to a story of more. We have created high-demand lives that are always hungry and can be difficult to continuously fuel from our one mind and body, even with the outsourcings we arrange – an outsourcing that often exacerbates the problem as we give away the work that supports us, for example, varied movement, in exchange for a level of convenience that doesn't, such as more hours at the desk.

On top of this, there is a lot to worry about that translates day-to-day as sickness, costs that can't be covered, and many other legitimate needs that can't be met. Our lives are a travelling story at the edge between avoidable and unavoidable; it takes wisdom and honesty to know the difference. 

Am I really unable to step out of this system, or am I afraid of what people will think if I do

? While we may not have any control over many of the awful things that can happen to us over the course of a life, taking care of our minds and bodies against the toll we exert on ourselves, and do have some control over, helps to expand our embodied capacity, as well as making for a generally more balanced and enjoyable life – a life that is alive in all our senses and depths.

Geological history, like human memory, is complex and incomplete. Both require, at times, interpretive reasoning, a sense of intuition, the ability to work with only fragments of data, and a desire to put words to what needs to be understood. Therapy, like geology, requires you to piece things together: to see into the gaps of the story, to help put stories into order, and to build a picture from fragments that helps the person you're working with understand how they arrived where they are and where they might be going.

What we choose to pay attention to — what we give our time, patterns, habitual routines, and thoughts to — ultimately shapes our reality. I am surrounded every day by the ways the landscape — the rock beneath our feet — can shape, guide, and teach us.

In grief, we are made nomads in our most familiar places, strangers to our friends, unfamiliar to ourselves. There is no going back to a landscape you knew before grief, because you are now irrevocably in a different place. The valleys will not infill and flatten out; there will always be the specter of shadow on the lee side of the sunlit uplands — a shadow that was always there but never seen in the young days before things started to disappear.

In journeying the terrain of losses, we don't know where we will end up. It's not a quest for redemption or deliverance, but eventually, you will find your place in this new world, and grief and her terrains will find integration in you. Movement through the terrain will become possible again in ways you could never imagine when you were lost in the depths of this new, fearful world. Life will be restored in the most desolate of places, but they won't look the same as they once did. Sometimes, fault lines remain, and there will always be the potential for water to seep in and out through vulnerabilities you might not have known existed until the exact moment they begin leaking. This is the unknown land that has become yours to know now, but you will build fluency in it. Grief has its own time and, with it, its own ontology — that is, its own essence and nature of being that runs outside the usual parameters and conveniences and takes root exactly as it deems necessary. It won't pass because you need it to — that’s not the way of loss.

The very deepest hurts — those that are happening, those that are anticipated, or those that are ambiguous — pull us out of time, causing a rupture in the normal running of things. All we can do is attend, witness, and journey with. Grief troubles our quick tendencies, slowing us down and bringing projects to a halt in the way the discovery of bones so often does. Mourning anything, but especially our most keenly felt losses, requires a different time scale that cares little for getting things done. It is not a friend of productivity, and this is exactly its radical proposition.

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