Jewels from the Dark

Often, I find myself coming back to the heavier, deeper, darker emotions. Sadness, sorrow, melancholy, devastation…loss. I have been wrestling with these a lot lately and today in my Morning Pages¹ practice, I processed a bit more about what draws me to these themes. Life has not always been kind, nor has it worked out the way I had hoped. Somehow, my hope still lives, but it is tempered with reality and the deep living losses I wade through every day.

If you have read my blog much before, you know I care deeply about words and their definitions. How we use words and what we do with them matters. As I allow myself permission to sit among my Ruins, I find an insatiable need to go deeper into the heavier emotions. It is almost as if the broken stones of my life which surround me are silently screaming to be heard. By giving voice to their pain, I am finding a deeper level of healing than I have had before.

So the word of the day today is desolation². To me, it holds a stronger emotional punch than devastation³, which is the word that I have used to describe how I have felt for the past two years or so. When looking at their definitions, it makes sense – devastation is the action to get to the result of desolation. There is a violence that occurs in devastation – it creates the ruins. When the dust settles, what remains as ruins embodies desolation.

What do we do when our souls are devastated and the only thing that remains are the desolate Ruins? We keen.

Keening is a grief ritual of mourning. There are few good examples in our modern Western world, as we have lost touch with the beauty of and need to feel pain deeply and then let it out. One aspect of the definition of keening is “to make a loud and long cry of sorrow : to lament with a keen.⁴” (You can read my own lament here.)

The act of keening is a beautiful ritual of honoring and expressing the pain you feel in the core of who you are. Amanda Held Opelt provides a fantastic overview of keening in her YouTube video here⁵. Whatever you may think of the show, one of the most gut-wrenching Hollywood versions of this practice I have seen in a long time comes from Wheel of Time – you can watch a clip of it here⁶. It may make you feel uncomfortable to watch or listen to the utter depths the felt grief. Yet the older I get, the more my life fills with deep caverns of loss, the more Ruins lay scattered around, and the more I am drawn to the art of keening.

I have permission to feel deeply. I have permission to express that pain in ways that heal me – body, soul, and spirit. I have permission to learn and grow from my grief and sorrow. I have permission to sit in the shadowlands of sorrow, until I have done the work of grief and mourning. And when it is time, I will keen and I will heal. Only then will I get up and rebuild.

1. Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way Toolkit: How to Use the Creative Practices. New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024. ↩︎
2. Merriam-Webster. “Desolation.” Accessed April 29, 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/desolation. ↩︎
3. Merriam-Webster. “Devastation.” Accessed April 29, 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/devastation. ↩︎
4. Merriam-Webster. “Keening.” Accessed April 29, 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/keening. ↩︎
5. Opelt, Amanda. “Keening – Grief Ritual Explained.” Worthy Publishing, October 20, 2022. Video, 2:23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=behSNzLL4qU ↩︎
6. Wheel of Time Season 1, Episode 5. “WOT Dirge.” Meditation Sound Scapes, December 3, 2021. Video clip, 2:22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F64EC4oVnTY ↩︎

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*Disclaimer: This blog is for my own personal processing and does not offer nor replace any professional psychiatric advice or psychological therapeutic care. If you are struggling with mental health challenges, please seek medical attention, counseling, or crisis help.*