The Marvelous Contentment of Belonging:
Poetry, Prose, & Prompts for Navigating Grief
Writing Through Grief & Loss – A Creative Path of Transformation
Disoriented. Bereft. Numb. Untethered.
If you’ve recently lost someone you love, these words may describe your inner landscape. You may find yourself in a world that has radically changed, and wonder how to live when the life you knew has ended.
You are not alone. Through poetry, reflection, and writing prompts, somatic therapist Darci Meyers extends a gentle hand of guidance for navigating grief and living with loss. Drawing on her experience as a Buddhist chaplain and grief guide, she shares her own poetry and prose on grief after the death of her husband, while inviting you to explore the power of writing through grief to rediscover a new life of meaning and belonging.
Available on June 17th!
Inside these pages, you’ll find poetic inspiration and reflective prompts to help you:
Explore a gentle path of transforming grief and loss through creative writing
Deepen your connection to the seasons and animate world to support your grieving journey
Discover new ways to express and integrate your unique experience of grief and loss
Open into a deeper capacity for presence, tenderness, and joy in your life now
Feel hope and connection to life and love after loss
Meet The Author
Darci Meyers
Cross-cultural approaches to healing, consciousness exploration, psychology and spirituality.
Praise for Book Title
At midlife we inevitably come face-to-face with loss. In The Marvelous Contentment of Belonging, Darci Meyers offers a tender, courageous, and deeply honest view into grief, inviting readers—through poetry and creative exploration—to transform their own experience of loss. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking meaning, connection, and a wiser relationship with grief.
Darci Meyers writes from the raw center of loss with the eye of a poet and the heart of a healer. Moving through four seasons of grief following the death of her beloved husband, she offers us a tapestry of reflection that is shattering, beautiful, wise, and profoundly alive. In haiku, sonnet, and prose — spare as winter branches and radiant as desert light — she bears sacred witness to the journey of grief, inviting readers to do the same. This book is a companion for all who love deeply and therefore must one day grieve — which is to say, all of us.
In Darci Meyers’ The Marvelous Contentment of Belonging, grief is not a static state but a “rewilding” — a feral, untamed movement mirroring the shifting seasons. Meyers crafts a poetic prayer recognizing the sacred interplay between nature and the “somatic legacy of loss”. Her poems move through “patterns of four”, aligning the stages of mourning with the natural world’s cycles. The poems are a relatable, raw and emotional journey into the heart of loss.
Darci Meyers’ The Marvelous Contentment of Belonging is a tender and powerful guide for the human heart. With grace and honesty, she offers a blueprint for navigating grief—not as something to overcome, but as a sacred passage that gently leads us back home to ourselves. This beautiful book reminds us that even in our deepest loss, there is a quiet invitation to remember who we are, to soften, and to belong again—fully, deeply, and without apology.
Grief isn’t optional. We will all know it at one time or another. How we navigate it depends, in part, on how we understand it. In her poems and prose, Darci Meyers describes her grief with deep insight, fearless integrity, and great compassion—for herself, for a home in the high desert that offers hope and healing, and for her readers. Grief is wild. It has its own gravity. We can’t escape it, but we can learn to live with it. For that, it helps to have an ally who knows the territory. Read this book and you will find one.
Some books about grief try to comfort you out of your pain. This one sits beside you in it. With extraordinary tenderness and clarity, Meyers explores the bewildering terrain that follows profound loss-the sleeplessness, the longing, the feral wailing, the strange persistence of beauty.
Again and again, she reminds us that grief is not evidence of brokenness, but evidence of love.
The Marvelous Contentment of Belonging is wise, unflinching, and profoundly beautiful.
The Marvelous Contentment of Belonging is more than a book—it is medicine for those in pain. These poems and reflections slice through the cliches that so often surround grief and speak directly to the raw, holy, bewildering terrain of loss. With astonishing honesty and tenderness, these poems give voice to what many grievers feel but cannot articulate. If you know anyone in sorrow, give them this gift of companionship and help them find their way.
This is a beautiful, poignant, and unexpectedly peaceful book. From the delicate imagery of Secret Discipline of Mourning to the raw rage of Indignation, this is a powerful collection of poetry. Whether or not you are grieving a loss, this book invites you to contemplate death, loss and the meaning of life.
In this profound and beautiful book, Darci Meyers shares the interior of her soul with us and allows her experiences with death and grief to become a powerful reflective mirror into a deeper understanding of our own experiences of loss. Within these pages, we experience the tenderness, the fury, the aching, the transformation, and the divine alchemy that all occur within the grief journey. This book is a balm for the soul.
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