Bali Grief Trip: June 2025

Every photo in this camera roll was captured by Danielle, who joined our Bali Grief Trip with her camera always somewhere nearby, quietly documenting a week that none of us expected to feel so full.

Bali has a way of holding grief that is hard to describe until you have felt it. Offerings appear on doorsteps every morning. Incense drifts through the streets. Death and loss are not hidden away here the way they often are at home, and being somewhere that treats grief as part of the ordinary texture of life, rather than something to manage quietly, changed the whole tone of the week.

We spent our days moving between grief workshops and long, unhurried conversations. One of the most vulnerable was the letter writing workshop, where everyone wrote to the person they had lost, or to whoever they were before the loss, and read fragments aloud if they wanted to. In a small group of people who all understood exactly what that kind of letter costs to write, it did not feel exposing. It felt like relief.

There was laughter too, plenty of it, the kind that surprises people who did not expect to laugh this hard on a trip built around grief. Sharing circles gave everyone room to say the true answer to "how are you," even when the true answer was "tired," or "today is heavy." Nobody had to perform being okay for the length of an entire week, and that alone was its own kind of holiday.

Midweek, a few of us wandered through Ubud and found a gelato shop with hand-painted signs in the window, reminders about self-compassion and rest that felt like they had been placed there specifically for a group of exhausted grievers to find. That is Bali in a sentence: the ordinary and the meaningful sitting right next to each other, if you are paying attention.

The week built toward the Agni Hotra fire ceremony, led by a Balinese priest, where each of us offered something we had been carrying, quietly, into the flames. Grief, like fire, does not disappear. It changes form. Watching something you wrote become smoke, and then nothing you could hold onto anymore, was one of the most quietly powerful moments of the entire trip.

Thank you, Danielle, for capturing all of it so beautifully. These twenty photos are the closest thing we have to being back there, in that small group, in that particular week, together.