On Grief, We-Space, and the Story We Must Learn to Tell.
I cry every time I watch the news.
Far away from Minnesota, in a quiet little town, in a county that is “right,” I am hurt daily.
My body feels bitten up.
My heart is grieving.
My spirit grows impatient.
Enough.
But is it enough?
Are we—the people—ready to determine who we are?
Can we stand up together for what is good, beautiful, and true?
Do we even dare to imagine the world we are longing for—or who we would need to become to live in it?
Most days, I don’t feel heroic. I feel tender. Worn. Overwhelmed by a world still governed by old reflexes of domination and separation. And yet, beneath the grief, something else stirs—a knowing that the story we’ve been living inside is no longer sustainable.
Terry Patten writes about what he calls we-space:
“What is unique to the we-space is a sensed presence of a source of interpersonal intelligence, usually sensed to be wiser than any individual… a shift from me to we… from part to wholeness.”
Many of us have tasted this space.
At sunset.
In deep conversation.
In falling in love.
In circles of genuine transformation.
And then—just as suddenly—it disappears, leaving us with only a vague memory, like a scent we cannot quite name.
Most of our lives are lived in the territory of I, me, mine. And this is not a moral failure—it is what we were taught. We were encouraged to individuate, to achieve, to realize personal potential, to succeed, even to fulfill a “soul mission.” All of it framed as a solitary journey.
But the times are calling us—urgently—to tell a new story.
We were once promised that the meek would inherit the earth.
But what earth?
And by what means?
All we seem to know is the Hero’s tale: conquest, victory, domination. Bottles won. Enemies defeated. Progress measured by force.
Recently, I returned to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Her words landed in me not as theory, but as relief—like discovering a long-forgotten truth.
She reminds us that the first cultural tool was likely not a weapon, but a container.
A basket.
A net.
A sling to carry what sustains life.
Before the tool that forces energy outward, we created the tool that brings energy home.
But that is not the story we were told.
We were given the myth of the bone, the spear, the sword—the long, hard object raised in triumph. The story of bashing, thrusting, conquering. The killer story. The Hero story.
Le Guin refuses to tell it again.
She names what that story has cost us: our humanity, our tenderness, our capacity to hold rather than destroy. And she dares to suggest that this dominant story may be nearing its end.
Yet here is the danger:
We have all, in one way or another, become part of the killer story.
And if we do not learn to tell another, we may be finished along with it.
That is why this feels so urgent to me—not as an intellectual exercise, but as a bodily necessity. I seek the words of the other story. The life story. The one that does not come easily to the lips, because it has not been rewarded, amplified, or celebrated.
It is not flashy.
It does not glorify domination.
It does not pretend we are invulnerable.
It is a story of carrying.
Of holding complexity.
Of making space for grief, for difference, for shared intelligence to arise.
This story does not promise salvation through force.
It asks something harder: presence, humility, relationship.
I don’t yet know how to tell it cleanly. I borrow words. I lean on elders. I stumble. But I know this much:
It is the story that makes the difference.
And even if my voice trembles—
even if I am tired, grieving, impatient—
I will keep trying to tell it.
Because something in me knows:
this is how we come home.
