To and Of
This is our Mission Statement:
“Bright Shadow creates spaces for community, healing, and reconnection for those grieving losses to and of the natural world.”
Our offerings integrate shared story, somatic practice, outdoor play, and ceremony. We welcome all parts of self - light and shadow - exploring connection through collective grief and expanding our capacity for love, purpose, and awe.”
We understand the double take in the first sentence... there is a lot happening in those three words.
Our origin story is rooted in the “to.” Nature gives with one hand and, at times, takes with the other. For those of us shaped by rivers, mountains, and ocean swells, this is not theoretical. We have lost people to the landscapes that formed them (and us). We call her Mother Nature, which only sharpens the confusion. What kind of mother takes those we love? There is no clean reconciliation to be had, and the same headwaters that teach courage and humility can bring irreversible loss.
Our first retreat gathered people inside that tension. We were not trying to solve the paradox. We wanted to sit with it together. Grief to the natural world is intimate and specific. It carries names, faces, unfinished conversations… a vibrant laugh or a smile.
Then a few short weeks later, the “of” arrived with force.
Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, and the community of loss expanded. Beyond the unspeakable human toll, entire landscapes were rearranged or erased. Forests were flattened, rivers rewrote themselves, and trails disappeared. Places many relied on for regulation, orientation, and meaning were suddenly unrecognizable. We learned what it meant to grieve not only people taken by Nature, but Nature herself. And there was no obituary or memorial service… just the realization that we will return only in our memories.
This form of grief is often carried in silence because it feels illegitimate. How dare I mourn a river when others have lost lives? Who am I to lament a forest when homes have turned to debris? The mind tries to rank suffering, creating a false binary in which caring for place appears to compete with caring for people. The result is not clarity but compression, and emotion has nowhere to go.
One evening at a recent retreat shifted that current.
During a candlelight ceremony, participants were invited to honor whom or what they had lost. Stories were told about loved ones. Photos were placed on a bulletin board, ashes put in front of it, and candles were lit and set into a bowl with river rock and water… the “pool of souls.”
Then someone stood, placed a photograph on the board, and lit a candle. “This one is for the Green River.”
The reaction was immediate and resonant. A collective exhale, closed eyes, and candlelit nods. No one corrected the gesture, or needed clarification. One person’s vulnerability legitimized what many had been holding but not naming. As the evening continued, others spoke about the disorientation of returning to a place that had shaped them and finding it altered beyond recognition. Many hadn’t been able to bring themselves to return.
That evening, the distinction between “to” and “of” stopped being conceptual. A friend lost and a landscape lost were acknowledged in the same circle, without comparison... because both belonged.
“To and of” is not poetic hyperbole. It names the full arc of loving the natural world - enough to be shaped by it, sustained by it, and sometimes broken by it. And it rejects the idea that grief must justify itself.
Bright Shadow exists to hold that complexity without hierarchy. No one has to apologize for what their heart is carrying - whether it is a name, a place, or both.
Photo by John Rathwell Photography
