You're listening to the place we find ourselves podcast.

I'm Adam Young and I am joined today by my friend from just down the street, Mary Ellen Owen.

Mary Ellen, welcome.

Thank you.

I'm really happy to be here with you.

Before I explain why I've invited you on the podcast, will you tell people a little bit about kind of who you are and what you spend your time doing?

Yeah, I am a neighbor that really I live in Monument, Colorado where I have a private practice and I work for the Allen Dersenner and I am a grandmother and I spend a lot of spare time doing art and really now trying to hone all that I've been researching and teaching at the Allen Dersenner into a place where I have been working.

So one of the reasons I have been so persistent in trying to get you to come on the podcast because let's be honest, it's been like a three year request that has required much persistence on my part.

But alas, you finally said yes and the reason I wanted you to come on today is because this is the final episode in a series that I've been doing on sorrow and grief and you have become rather passionate about this topic.

And your story over the past 20 years is in part about a woman who has gone from not thinking she even had like the biological structures that produced tears, namely tear ducts to a woman who knows how to metabolize immense grief.

So let's let's start with your story regarding sorrow and grief like when did the journey of befriending your sorrow begin for you.

Oh, I love how you just said that the befriending your sorrow because the befriending was certainly not the beginning.

I didn't I couldn't be friend of my sorrow until a long battle with my sorrow and I would say the beginning of consciously knowing about it was in my young twenties and probably on my grandfather's funeral I remember sitting with my older sister in the car and I was broken hearted we had a great great grandfather and I couldn't cry.

And she said to me she's like just try just whale it out and then maybe it will just come and I was and you know I did that and it was acting I cried a little but then when I went to graduate school in my late twenties with Dan calendar it became very clear to me that healing was not going to take a deep route without the ability to cry.

I mean the ability to grieve which back then Dan used to talk about that as the intersection or the interplay of anger and sorrow and then I think intuitively I've known all along that there are deep trapped wells of sorrow in me I do have a story of when I was 12 years old and being so devastated about something which was a reaction to a lot of things.

I was a real movie I refer to it as the last time I truly cried by then I think I was too young to be in that much grief and I think I banished my tears.

I remember being in graduate school and after my first year of really learning how to do story work by doing story work I was nervous that I'm never going to just we and I remember I found it in my first year of really learning how to do story work by doing story work.

I found it in my journals of when it was so as January 12 2000 that I was sitting on my bed I had just come back to Seattle after Christmas break and I was desperate for something to take hold even if it was going to be in men's heartache and I resorted to Bible cracking you know I call it fortune cookie Christianity when you like open to a good verse and there's like something good there you're like I bet there's something to this.

I was sitting there and I opened to Jeremiah 917 I'd never heard of this I'd never read this verse and it was this is what the Lord Almighty says consider now call for the willing women to come send for the most skilled of them let them come quickly and will over us till our eyes overflow with tears and water stream from our eyelids.

Verse 20 says now all women hear the word of the Lord open your ears to the word of his mouth teach her daughters how to whale teach one another element I didn't know what a whaling woman was and I certainly didn't know what a skilled whaling woman was but everything in me was like whatever this is this is it.

So let's just be clear on January 12 2000 when you say Bible cracking in your desperation you just opened your Bible randomly and then whatever verse your eyes landed on you read yes and it happened to be this verse that you just shared with us yes and like it happened to be a verse that would come to shape the next decades and further of my life

and I don't really recommend that as a practice the Bible cracking has usually it's a it's an exercise and frustration but there was something I was very aware in that moment I don't really fully know what this is but I know this is rich and this is deep and this is what I want I still didn't know what a skilled whaling woman was so I went to Dan Allen's office and I asked him what's a whaling woman and he said he's going to say I'm going to ask you what's going to happen to you.

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