Untangling grief

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson

A black and white scientific drawing of a 6 plant root system, showing the plants above ground and their tangled roots below the surface.
Root system from the research archives

remembering

making sense of the pieces

“Because it was happening under the earth, it was undetectable. If the encircling roots are not found in time, they start putting pressure on the tree, and it just becomes too much to bear.”

black and white drawing, consisting of thousands of dots, of driftwood roots
My drawing of tangled driftwood

unearthing the silences

“It is about being willing to stay vulnerable and brave long enough to ask hard questions of ourselves and others, listen to and be in dialogue around the answers, and make peace with where those conversations take us. It is not something that many of us know how to do well, if at all, but it is a necessary step for healing.”

(re)growth

Black and white drawing of a Peyote cactus plant with a very intense tangled root system –– crated entirely with thousands of dots to make up the plant.
My drawing of the tangled roots of a peyote plant
Covers of the books listed below
Image of a few of the resources listed below

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Writing about the intersection between design, technology, and impact.

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Aly Blenkin

Writing about the intersection between design, technology, and impact.