To Know The Dark

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/13/2025
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Location
Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship


A Community Grief Ritual For Collective Healing

Join us for an open, accessible, and donation-based Community Grief Ritual, a sacred space where we can come together to honor, express, and transform the grief we carry — both personally and collectively. Inspired by the work of Francis Weller and his Five Gates of Grief , this gathering offers a place for our hearts to be held and witnessed in community.

Through land-based altars, we will root ourselves in the beauty and presence of the Earth, offering our tears, prayers, songs and gratitude back to the land. A song circle will invite us to voice our sorrow and longing, metabolizing grief through sound and harmony. Gentle movement and guided meditation will help us enter the body’s wisdom, accessing the layers of grief that words cannot reach.

This work is nourished by the tender truth that “grief is love that has nowhere to go.” Together, we will give that love somewhere to go — into the hands, hearts, and presence of our community — where it can be honored, held, and transformed.

All are welcome. Whether you come with a specific loss, a quiet ache, or simply a wish to tend the sorrows of the world, you will find a place here. No prior experience is needed — only your open heart.

$10-$40 suggested donation. NOTAFLOF

*Join us for part or all of this open offering. Schedule listed below:

1 pm: Tea & Anointing in the Fellowship foyer. Followed by Opening Song Circle, led by Maggie McKnight in the Sanctuary. Journey through the Memorial Garden and the 5 Gates of Grief, guided by your own pace and needs.

  1. Everything We Love We Will Lose
  2. The Places That Have Not Known Love
  3. The Sorrows of the World
  4. What We Expected and Did Not Receive
  5. Ancestral Grief

2 pm: Guided Meditation & Movement, offered by Hanna Nielsen & Amy Day in the Field.
3 pm: Composting Our Grief Closing Workshop with Alissa Pattison in the Grove

 

Your Guides along this Journey:

Vida Hofweber is the founder and originator of this ongoing, annual Community Grief Ritual.  She is a therapist and holistic guide who weaves together depth psychology, somatic practice, and earth-based wisdom. She supports individuals and communities in navigating grief, transformation, and renewal with compassion and grounding.

 

 

1 pm – Singing Our Grief

As we sing and breathe together, we blend our voices to create a communal sound and to hold one another’s vulnerabilities. We will do a stone ritual that involves optional personal sharing, as well as singing simple songs to open our hearts and connect with each other in the language of music.
Maggie McKnight is the Community Song Leader at HUUF, where she leads general community song circles as well as grief song circles. She was the musical director of the Arcata Threshold Choir for 8 years, singing for people on the threshold of life and death, as well as their families and caregivers. She continues to be moved by the ways bringing our voices together in song opens rich channels of emotion and connection beyond spoken language.
2 pm – Movement & Meditation
In this circle, we gather to engage in mindful, strategic movement practices that help the body process, metabolize, and shed some delicate layers of our grief. From there, we’ll weave in a gentle Earth-centered meditation, inviting the grounding presence of Nature to help us hold, release, and transform what we carry. This practice offers a compassionate space to reconnect with ourselves, one another, and the vast living world as sources of healing and renewal.
Amy Day serves as the Lay Minister at the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, bringing over 15 years of experience as a somatic educator and ritual holder. She views grief work as one of the essential callings of our time and feels deeply honored to help co-hold spaces of healing, transformation, and sacred connection.

 

3 pm – Composting Grief

In this ritual circle, we will explore together how our connection with the Earth can support us through times of grieving. Supporting our sensory experience, we will ritualize natural objects which we will make into a compost tea and do an Earth-connection somatic practice together, along with a deeply penetrative gong sound bath offered by Terra Pearson to conclude our time.
Alissa Pattison is currently a Master’s student of Counseling Psychology at Meridian University, steward of the land at Artio Flower Farm, and a parent. She honors grief as an essential piece of the seasons and cycles of our lives and our collective wellbeing.