🏛 What Remains After the Ruin

Fieldnotes from our Growing Through Loss gathering — October 8, 2025

When we gathered live to explore Growing Through Loss this week, what emerged wasn’t tidy or conclusive.

It was the sound of stones shifting — grief loosening its grip just enough for something small, green, and alive to root in the cracks.

Rome, Italy (photo credit: Val Livesay)

We spoke of the ways loss reshapes us:

the friendships that drift and return changed,

the work we once tended that now asks for rest,

the children who grow past our reach — and us, still growing too,

the identities now beyond our grasp,

the dreams championed for others but not yet claimed for ourselves.

What we discovered was not how to fix loss, but how to live beside it.

How to let what’s fallen teach us about what still stands.

If you missed the session, we walked through a simple, human(e) rhythm — four questions that helped us listen differently to what was gone, and to what might yet become:

1️⃣ What is true about this loss?

2️⃣ What did it bring or teach you when it was alive?

3️⃣ What in you still feels alive—still wants your care, even after this loss?

4️⃣ How does the you reshaped by this loss wish to meet what remains?

But what felt important, in our discernment about Growing Humans last month, in this webinar this week, was that we begin by honoring ourselves and honoring the loss by naming what is true. We invite you to start there, too.

🌱 What truth is ready to be spoken—perhaps first to yourself, perhaps here among others—about what’s been lost?

You might find it easiest to let it flow from these phrases:
What I’ve lost is… or What’s changing is… or What I’m feeling is…

We would love for you to name your truth in the comments below, or simply let it find its voice in its own time. 🌱

We suspect questions will keep working on us, quietly, like time on stone.

Because even ruins reach for the light in their own way.

With care,

Val + Alis

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