The Smell of Rain on Dust

1. Modern Culture Suppresses Deep Human Nature and the Art of Grief

These small-minded cowardly trends of certain national cultures, political institutions, big business, and people have lost the plot of what it has to mean to be a human.

Lost connection. Modern civilization, driven by business and fear, often suppresses the deeper, nobler aspects of human nature. Like water-polished pebbles hidden at the river bottom, profound individuals obscure their spiritual majesty to avoid trivialization, inadvertently subsidizing the oppressive mentality. This culture panders to the lowest common denominator, fearing vulnerability and prioritizing predictable existence over the wildness of real life.

Mediocrity reigns. The infatuation with endless mediocrity, managed by those who profit from fear and scarcity, stifles the innate human capacity for love, grief, generosity, and wonder. These essential qualities do not serve a system built on constant desperation and urgency. The result is a society of eternally dissatisfied individuals, consuming without fulfillment, incapable of tasting the full deliciousness of being alive.

Personal revolution. Changing this madness requires a personal revolution to become real human beings, indigenous to our own deeper spiritual landscape. This little book is an encouragement for those who feel too small or unseen to make this motion out loud. The path begins by reclaiming the diminished arts of Grief and Praise, two instinctual talents strangely married, essential for any real peace on earth.

2. Grief is Natural, Necessary, and an Obligation to Life Itself

Grief is natural; to grieve the loss of what we love is as natural as peeing, eating, singing, dreaming, running, or looking under rocks for bugs to feed your frog.

Essential function. Grieving the loss of what we love is not a preference or a weakness, but a fundamental, necessary human function. Avoiding or postponing grief burdens others and sickens the world. It is an obligation to the life we have been given, a requirement to make more life in the face of loss.

Active process. Grief is not sorrow or stagnation, but an active, moving phenomenon that requires time and motion. It is a sacred art, the backbone of real peace, and the art behind all real art. When shunned, necessary grief hides in the collective psyche, manifesting later, even in future generations who did not experience the original loss.

Shameless dreamer. Grief is a powerful force, a "shameless dreamer" unafraid to heal impossible despair and reionize impossible situations. It doesn't care about being misunderstood or forgotten because it has a best friend: Praise. Without both Grief and Praise, life devolves into hate and mediocrity.

3. Our First Song is Grief: The Primal Loss of Birth

Our very lives start out from the very beginning by us crying out as hard as we can in a newly found voice, not in a complaining squeal of rage for not having things stay the same, but in a sorrowful musical wail, tiny and beautiful, that says, “Mama, where are you?

Womb existence. For nine months, we live as underwater creatures, dependent on our mother's heartbeat and breath, experiencing time as a non-linear, mythic "pool." This is our first lifetime, a gigantic, immeasurably ecstatic reality. Our mother's pulse and our developing heartbeat create our first song, a syncopated opposition that supports life's dance.

Birth trauma. Birth is a monumental change, a dramatic shift from the warm, watery womb to a cold, noisy, gravity-bound world. We lose the constant comfort of our mother's heartbeat, our primary audial signpost. This loss, coupled with the shock of air breathing and hunger, is deeply traumatic.

First cry. The first breath we take burns our lungs, yet instinctually, we use the first exhale to cry out in grief. This newborn wail is a sorrowful, musical poem for the lost world of the womb and the mother's drumming heart. It is the most profound form of praise for being alive, demonstrating that humans are born masters of this hopeful, life-giving sound.

4. Young Infatuation is Grief for the Divine, Not Just a Person

Young infatuation means you have seen and felt God mistaking the Divine for a person.

Seeing the Divine. The intense, all-consuming experience of young infatuation is not merely about another person, but a precious brush with seeing and wanting the Divine for the first time. This ecstatic tailspin is an essential stage, propelling us towards a bigger life. The object of infatuation, like Aeyla, appears as a tangible foreign presence of the Divine on earth.

Must not succeed. This first "love affair" must not succeed because the young person is not yet fully formed. If the beloved becomes accessible, they shrink into a regular, complicated person, and the spirit seen in them flees. Mistaking the human "pot" for the Divine "water" leads to confusion, rage, and a feeling of betrayal when the person inevitably falls short of the projection.

Grief's poetry. The sweet, real grief of unattainable longing forces the pre-person into the adolescent subterfuge of grief's poetry. This heartbreak, if guided by the wise, becomes the driving force to metabolize the grief of primal losses (like the mother's heartbeat) into seeing magic in another human and expressing it through creative praise (poems, songs, art). This is the first step towards becoming a whole person capable of loving another regular person.

5. Grief is Praise: Love's Way of Honoring What is Missed

Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.

Honoring the lost. Expressing grief out loud, honestly and unchoreographed, is the greatest praise we can give to someone or something lost. It is love's inherent way of honoring what is no longer present. To not grieve is a violence to the Divine, our own hearts, and especially to the dead.

Praising life. Uncontrolled grief, wail, and rap simultaneously praise the life we have been awarded. It honors the health and opportunity that allowed us to love deeply enough to feel the loss. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love or the life given to us to love. Grief and praise together make us alive.

Cultural repression. Despite its vital importance, open grieving is often suppressed in modern culture, viewed as barbaric or undignified. The Third Council of Toledo in 589 AD, for example, forbade burial songs and breast-beating, favoring divine canticles. This historical repression contributes to the modern inability to grieve, leading to emotional flatness and a spiritual vacuum defended with surprising energy.

6. Community (or Nature) is Essential for Real Grieving

A tribe is necessary even if it’s just to be a kind of resilient nonjudgmental human basket, against which the griever is able to thrash.

Shared burden. Real grieving, even for individual loss, requires the support of a community or tribe. This collective presence acts as a resilient, nonjudgmental container, allowing the griever to express their pain fully without fear of lasting judgment. In traditional cultures, grief was a communal event, converting loss into ritual beauty and culture-supporting continuity.

Village example. In the Tzutujil village, grieving was a public, communal process. A person returning from a burial would process through the town, yelling, weeping, singing, and cursing, while the entire village listened respectfully. This open expression was seen not as a sickness or disgrace, but as a pain-filled testament of courageous praise, a tribal asset that helped the griever live and the dead get "home."

Nature's tribe. For modern people lacking such a human community, the natural world, especially the Ocean, offers a powerful alternative. The Ocean, the salty womb of the earth made of tears, is a capable healer, pulling down grief and converting pain into life. Approaching nature humbly and speaking grief aloud to the sea, a lake, or a river can provide the necessary listening presence for healing.

7. Ungrieved Loss Becomes Toxic, Causing Addiction and Generational Haunting

When suppressed, grief can easily jump into alcohol, “spirits,” and if left in that form too long will become anesthetized into a nonmoving form of chronic resentment and vicious sorrow.

Deferred burden. In families or cultures where grief is not metabolized, it can be deferred onto future generations. The "tenderest" or most vulnerable member of the next generation may unconsciously carry this burden, becoming disturbed, addicted, or unable to live a full life. This person becomes the family's "jesus," sacrificing their well-being for the rest.

Ghostly return. When a person dies unloved, feared, or ungrieved, their soul cannot cross to the "Beach of Stars" to become a helpful ancestor. Instead, it turns back, becoming a ghost that seeks refuge in the living, often the most vulnerable relative. This ghost, living only in the past, consumes the host's energy, hindering their ability to live forward and causing chronic conditions like "Fright" (xibanel).

Generational cycle. Housing a ghost leads to a life of internal conflict and often addiction (alcohol/drugs), as the host tries to calm the hungry entity. If this person dies ungrieved, the original ghost may merge with the host's unmourned soul, creating a larger, more problematic ghost for the next generation. This cycle of ungrieved loss, addiction, and haunting can escalate through generations, eventually becoming a tribal or even national problem.

8. Revenge is Frozen Grief, Manipulated for Power and Gain

Instead of grief’s poetry of survival through beauty, they would dismiss such sanity as a weakness and choose instead to find relief from grief’s demands when a terrible calamity happens by seeking eternal revenge.

Avoiding grief. Some people or groups refuse the grace of grief, preferring to petrify their pain into a cultural identity based on hate and revenge. This avoids the diligence required to transform loss into a fresher culture dedicated to well-being. Revenge is an easier, initial reaction to pain than the messy eloquence of grief.

Manipulative tool. The instant urge for revenge after collective loss is easily manipulated by unscrupulous leaders. They swear vengeance (often disguised as "justice") to gain popular endorsement for paranoid policies serving hidden business or political motives. This manipulation prevents deep grief from fermenting, freezing the moment into toxic stone instead of melting into praise for being alive.

Non-binding oaths. In the Tzutujil village, calls for vengeance during wakes were heard and corroborated but never acted upon as tribal policy. Agreements for violent revenge were considered non-binding because they were not for life. Elders would stay with the grievers, herding them into deeper tears until the hate dissolved into poetry and blessing, ensuring the life flow of the village was not compromised by eternal feuds.

9. Ungrieved War Creates a Black Hole of Loss, Demanding More Violence

War is an enormity of sorrow looking for new blood to pay the overwhelming debt of ungrieved blood from the previous war.

Unmetabolized sorrow. War inflicts terrible, man-made losses that are rarely grieved at the time due to urgency and the prioritization of winning. These ungrieved sorrows become a psychological and spiritual burden passed down through generations, manifesting as chronic depression, illness, or incapacity, often without conscious recognition of their origin.

Soldier's loss. The greatest loss in war is the intact soul of the soldier who kills. Without grief for the killed, the soldier is haunted by their ghost and the loss of their former self. This ungrieved state can lead to more killing to feed the hunger of past losses, creating a collective phenomenon in warring cultures. Adulation for killing does not repair the soul; therapy is often just triage.

Black hole effect. When war losses go ungrieved collectively, they form a spiritual black hole in the cultural mind. This immense, heavy entity constantly consumes, needing to be fed through more violent war. It is the unspoken urge underlying rationales for conflict, ensuring that one war always demands another to pay the debt of ungrieved blood, preventing a return to peace.

10. Money Carries the Weight of Ungrieved Loss and Drives Consumption

Money then is loss, not gain.

Wetzak's story. The Yurok story of Wetzak (Little Money) and Thunder illustrates how money originated from ungrieved loss and frustrated anger. Wetzak, an overlooked small god, ate half the world when Thunder, a powerful god raging over his son's loss, refused to listen to Wetzak's story of what happened. Wetzak became money by consuming the world, carrying the weight of this loss.

Deferred grief. Money, particularly shell money in the Yurok tradition, became a form of "blood money" paid as compensation for loss to avoid feuds. It represented the value of the lost person or property, allowing the living to convert the dead into tangible support. However, the Yurok also hid the money, knowing that seeing it would evoke grief and the story of the lost relative.

Modern burden. In the modern world, money carries the weight of centuries of ungrieved sorrow and wreckage. Business uses this weight as currency, a war deferred, where people burdened by unheard stories and inherited grief shuffle concentrated loss in stock markets and banking. Wealth becomes piled-up deferred grief, driving consumption in a ravaged world, a monetized war against time fueled by the refusal to listen and grieve.

11. Animals are Doctors for Grief, Absorbing or Metabolizing Our Pain

Animals. They are the most profound doctors for loss, mostly because animals are practically a molecular presence in our psyches and souls, but also because in a sense animals are the grief of the world’s losses.

Primordial healers. Animals are powerful doctors for the wounds of our souls, deeply connected to our psyches. They embody the grief of the world's losses, their existence a praise of life. As cultures become more "advanced," animals diminish in size and presence in human lives, yet their innate aptitude for grief remains.

Grief orphans. Modern house pets are vestiges of an ancient custom where hunting or farming tribes raised the orphaned young of animals they killed. These "grief relatives" lived with humans, a constant reminder of the life taken to sustain their own. This bittersweet relationship created companionship and a tangible service to the wild world that fed them.

Absorbing toxicity. Today's pets often absorb their owners' unmetabolized grief, taking the toxicity into their own bodies. While some animals can metabolize this into vitality, many sicken and die, bravely absorbing the poison their owners cannot process. This is not true healing, but a deferral of toxicity, where another being suffers for the human's inability to grieve.

Wild doctors. The most powerful healers are wild animals, untamed and uninterrupted by humans. They possess a magic that can doctor our losses without absorbing our poison. By bringing our broken hearts to nature and becoming like a flower or moss, we invite wild creatures to drink the nectar of our grief, metabolizing our sorrow into wonder and beauty, feeding the Holy in nature with our tears.

12. Personal Loss (Like Losing a Limb) is an Initiation Requiring Grief

The loss of a friend, a relative, a lover, a home, or a country is very, very, very hard and needs to be grieved. But the loss of a limb, or any other major piece of ourselves, is no different than losing a friend or a beloved companion.

Profound impact. Losing a limb or a major part of oneself is a loss as profound as losing a loved one. It requires relearning everything and brings tremendous grief. Like any deep loss, it demands to be grieved out loud, turning the sorrow into life and beauty.

Initiation through loss. Those who courageously relearn how to live after such a loss undergo a powerful initiation. They must work harder, become more generous with what they learn, and develop abilities that go beyond their perceived disabilities. This process transforms the event of loss into something whose cure benefits not just the individual but others.

Blessings from loss. People who have suffered great loss and found the courage to live again become our blessers. Their blessings are the most potent kind. We must seek them out respectfully, not pitying them but recognizing the wisdom gained through their struggle. Refusing their blessings is like endorsing war – a way to forget our debt to life and defer grief onto future generations.

Last updated: May 4, 2025