Nature Knows Grief

and She is our guide

We are a grieving people. Loss isn’t rare anymore, to some degree it’s the atmosphere we live within.

From global wars and climate collapse to private heartbreaks like miscarriages, divorces, and wounds from childhood that never seem to heal. Grief surrounds us. We scroll through suffering, carrying stories we don’t know how to name, and wonder why everything feels so heavy.

Whatever it is that we’ve lost in our own story or in the collective suffering, it hurts. Loss always hurts. And when we hurt, we do what humans do: We try to ease the pain.

The cycle often looks like this: loss → pain → relieve or replace

We experience loss. It hurts. The pain demands attention, so we reach for something, anything, to make it stop.

Sometimes that looks like relief: alcohol, food, porn, gaming, and distractions of all kinds.
Other times, we try to replace what was lost. A new partner, job, hobby or obsession to fill the gap.

Replacement in this way never works. A miscarriage cannot be replaced like a missing puzzle piece. The ache of a broken friendship or the death of a parent cannot be rushed into resolution. The ways we numb out via relief doesn’t last, as I'm sure you’ve experienced. When relief or replacement doesn't satisfy, we’re left with the one thing we were trying to avoid all along: the ache.

The question becomes for all of us: What do we do with this communal ache? What do we do with our grief?

As I’ve asked myself this question many times on behalf of myself and my clients. As the constant longing to learn how to hold grief persists in this world, there is one thing that continuously helps my reorientation on the journey of grief.

Nature knows grief and she is our guide.

She does not rush to replace what’s been lost. She does not numb out. She rests. She waits. She decays and transforms in her own time. The tree does not resist winter. The field does not rush to bloom. In a world that demands we move on quickly, nature teaches us to grieve slowly. Gently. With reverence.

REDEEM > RELIEVE

I’d suggest God does not want to simply relieve or replace our grief, but They long to redeem it.

Replacement denies the reality of what was lost. No new thing can account for the life that never was. And as we all know, grief ignored does not disappear, it waits. It will surface, eventually.

Redemption, on the other hand, makes space for our grief to be part of the story while still offering hope. Paul writes in Romans 8:18:

“Our present pain is nothing compared to the coming glory.”

Here, Paul does not ask us to bypass our grief and pain. “Our present pain” is an acute awareness of the current suffering. Yet, he invites us to hold both pain and promise together. To live in the tension. Not blind optimism, but to hold onto the courage to believe that even here, in the ache, the story is not finished.

CREATIONS PARABLE

Paul goes further still, turning our gaze toward our oldest and wisest teacher: Creation Herself.

Genesis tells us creation began in Eden, whole, radiant, unbroken. But the fracture came. Not by nature’s doing, but by wounds inflicted within and onto it. Creation, innocent and alive, did nothing wrong, and yet its life was forever changed. Pain and death entered the story. And with them, grief.

In this way, we find ourselves mirrored in the story of creation. Like nature, much of the grief we experience, whether through death, abuse, or other heartbreak, often comes outside of our control. We didn’t choose the wounding, but we live in the aftermath. Just as Eden was scarred, so too are we.

Now the earth groans. We hear it in the sighing wind, the cracking ice, the hunger of scorched land. As if the earth itself remembers what it once was and aches to be whole again. Paul writes in Romans 8 that “creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth,” longing for the day when it will be set free from its bondage to decay and share in the glory of a new creation. Creation, he says, is waiting for us, for humanity, to remember who we are.

It seems to me that in this groaning creation waits open handed. It does not forget Eden, but it does not cling to what was. It hopes for what is coming. Not a replacement but a redemption. A new heaven. A new earth.

Picture a forest after a fire. Charred. Ashen. Silent. And yet beneath the surface, seeds wait. Quiet. Patient. Alive.

This is the story nature tells us again and again: loss is real and we can recognise it, but so is resurrection and we too can hope for it.

IT STILL SUCKS

And still, hope doesn’t erase the sting.

Creation knows this ache. Each year, the trees release their leaves and stand bare beneath the grey sky. The ground falls silent. Still. Cold. It is a season that cannot be rushed. Longing for spring will not bring it early.

Again, Romans 8:22 says creation groans as if in labor pains, waiting for renewal.

Nature becomes our teacher in this sacred groaning. She lets go. She surrenders. She sinks into darkness not in defeat, but in wisdom. She trusts the long winter. She believes something new will come, but only through the groaning.

This is what grief invites: not escape, not repair, but surrender. Grief is not a problem to solve. It is the season to live.

Beneath the frozen ground, life is gathering strength. Quietly. Slowly.

Until the thaw, it is okay to groan for spring, the new Eden.

To grieve like nature is to honor the rhythm of loss and renewal. Not rushing. Not numbing. But staying. Bearing the weight with reverence. And trusting that, like the earth herself, we too will rise again.

FINDING SELF IN THE RIVER

Richard Rohr puts it this way:

“In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process.”

Grief is like a river. It carves canyons through us. It changes our shape. It washes away all that was once secure. And it invites us to surrender.

Until we reach the end of our coping strategies, our distractions, our fixes, we will never seek the deeper source. Grief invites us to plunge beneath the surface. To trust the current. To find the water that truly sustains.

A FINAL INVITATION

We live in a world where things have happened to us we did not choose. Like the trees battered by storms they never summoned, we bear the impact of pain we never asked for.

Creation did nothing wrong and yet, because of what was done to it and within it, its life was forever changed. Eden as it was is no longer. Still, the earth does not pretend all is well. Each year, the trees release. The soil goes still. The sky turns grey. And beneath it all, a deep groan rises not of despair, but of labor.

They wait through winter with hope for spring.

Each year, nature ritualizes grief. She shows us how to do the same.

This is the sacred rhythm of grief: to feel it all, and still hold hope. To ache for Eden even as we plant seeds for what’s to come.

You don’t have to choose between sorrow or hope. You are allowed to hold both. To groan in pain like a mother in labor, trusting that new life is near. To weep for what was lost and still stretch toward redemption.

Grief is not a detour from the spiritual path. It is the path. And groaning, as nature teaches us, might just be one of the holiest things we can do.

So may this be your invitation in your grief:

To join creation in its ache and anticipation.
To become a people who do not rush to fix what is sacredly broken.
To live fully in the tension. Rooted in love, open to transformation.
To groan for the Eden we remember, and the wholeness that is yet to come.