By mid-July 2019 the bodies of 170 gray whales had washed up onto California’s beaches. That number, large and alarming as it was, probably represented only about 10% of all the whales who had died that year, since the bodies of most sink down to the ocean floor. Most of the whales died of starvation, some from collisions with ships.

Gray whales grow up to be 49 feet long and weigh about 90,000 pounds. In the summers they feed in Alaska’s Bering and Chukchi Seas. Then, in the fall, they set off on a 10,000-mile round trip to the lagoons off the coast of Baja Mexico, where they bear their young before returning once more to Arctic waters.

To honor both the one gray whale who had washed up onto the shore at Point Reyes, California and the uncountable number whose bodies had been tossed out of the sea between Mexico and Alaska, a ceremony took place on the beach of Point Reyes, California on July 20, 2019. The event was co-hosted by poet Elizabeth Herron and poet and former mayor of Sebastopol Larry Robinson, and it included a ritual facilitated by Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow and noted leader of grief rituals.

The event offered participants the opportunity both to grieve the whales and to express gratitude for lives of these great animals. Everyone was invited to bring a stone, representing the heaviness of their grief, and to place it on a central altar. At the conclusion of the ceremony, they released that grief as they released the whale onto its final journey.

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Weller describes what he calls five “portals” of grief, one of which is “the sorrows of the world.” In an interview with Catalyst Magazine, Weller explained that the sorrows of the world “touch us every day. For a long time we saw them as something outside of ourselves. But now we’re really beginning to feel how inseparable our experience of psyche is from what’s happening in the world. There’s a collective anxiety about what is happening to the fabric of not just society and culture, but to the very fabric of the environment.”

All over the planet, many beings, many animals and insects, rivers and birds and trees, are becoming endangered because of industry, toxic waste, and climate change. Let us take time to identify them and honor them and their kind before they disappear entirely.