"Apprentices Needed, Not Disciples"

The song Black Sabbath as performed by Black Sabbath on their 1970 album Black Sabbath is the mood this week. That iconic, haunting limmi guitar riff places us in the abyss of darkness that we are excavating this week. We are smack dab in the throes of death work over here as Lughnasadh continues to turn toward the Autumn Equinox. Do you feel it? Do you feel the pull away from growth and back to decay? I feel it strongly. The strength of light and growth during the spring and into part of summer always loosens the hold that the decay and darkness has on me. Yet, without fail sometime in August or September, the figure in black starts to take a more prominent place in my day to day affairs.

“What is this that stands before me?Figure in black which points at me
Turn 'round quick and start to runFind out I'm the chosen oneOh, no!”

—Black Sabbath “Black Sabbath”

Yet, instead of saying, “Oh no,” I am saying “I accept.” Yes, I have chosen this path for myself. I gladly make offerings before my altar to sacred death each day. I gladly put fresh flowers and rose water on my altar. I gladly put the photos and knick knacks of my beloved dead on my altar. I gladly offer plumes of smoke to sacred death. I have chosen this shrouded path as a direct response to the toxic positivity and death avoidance that our society extols. I snarl at their willingness to delude themselves into thinking they are immortal. I snarl in their duplicity in creating a death illiterate society. It was this ignorance that left me a young man of 28 with no support in traversing the deathscape that was left in the wake of my mom’s death. I wear my hard won lessons in understanding death to that time when I had to pick up the pieces on my own. It’s almost as if this path chose me. It feels that way sometimes. Yet, even I have lessons to learn still.

It’s just too easy to spiritually bypass on the cosmic weight of the certainty of your own death. You could be like me, exclaiming with fervor each day, “ECCE MORTEM,” before your altar to sacred death, and still be bypassing the raw, shudder-inducing emotionality of the fact that you could die at any moment. It’s not even like a conscious thing for me to bypass this pure fact. At some level, it’s this subconscious mechanism in my brain that kicks in that protects me from the skull shattering difficulty that this simple fact can evoke. Even your daily attempts to immerse yourself in your mortality can become banal parts of a routine like brushing your teeth or eating enough fiber. You might even think that because you are a death worker that you aren’t bypassing, and then it hits you how you distance yourself from it. 

I was sitting on the steps of a 100 year old mausoleum in the searing august sun. Still sweating from the bike ride over, I looked out on a scene of overwatered green grass and standing grave markers. It was a weekend and the cemetary was empty. Only death workers or mourners were at this most sacred of altars.   I closed my eyes and sensed two distinct spirits hanging above two different sets of graves on either side of a street about 50 or so yards from me. They were each a willowy wisp of whitish light in my mind’s eye. I reached out to them, offering some supportive energy. I felt this naive need to let them know they were not alone. I stumbled through the whole process. I did not check in to ensure they were benevolent or wanted anything to do with me. I am still a noob in the cemetery visiting, like a novice monk fumbling around a sanctuary trying to tap into the divine conduit. The interaction was short, just the magical equivalent of a spiritual hello with a smile. Yet, I was struck by the sadness of one’s spirit still being here. Then the door to the mausoleum opened behind me with the characteristic creak of an old, ornately-designed-metal door. I gathered my things to ride off.

The enormity of that one feeling cut through the armor that I had unknowingly put on to shield me from this deep chasm. On some deep, nonverbal level, I knew that this was confirmation that one will die, and it’s a cocky person that believes they will know what will happen. I, you, none of us know for sure. One day, we too could be hanging out in a cemetery or a beach (as a spirit), just waiting for some weird, bearded guy on a bike to come by and spiritually say, “what’s up?” Once you embrace the liminal veil of not being sure, you step into that unstable ground of not knowing, the potential for a plethora of outcomes cracking you right open. In such a vulnerable state, you are able to truly engage with the enormity of your own mortality, free from the warm embrace of your preferred afterlife narrative. 

This isn’t a very pleasant freedom. This is the freedom I shrunk from when my mom died in hospice. The loss was so enormous that my mind would rather find refuge in endlessly looping OCD obsessions than confront the void of knowing that we all die, that my mom was going to die. This is the great abyss of death, a wide, slimy expanse that is as mysterious as it is certain. That is why the language of magic and alchemy will always be more at home in the shrouded secrecy of death. It’s an experience so secretive that we even try to hide its true unknowable nature with our own haughty certainty about what is to become of us. We animate meat sacks with our large craniums do well using that brain to avoid sudden impending doom but are paralyzed before the slow motion fall to repose. That’s why this form of freedom has always brought me more anguish and melancholy than any sort of calm acceptance. 

I only noticed that I had truly touched the great mystery because my OCD tried to kick me up into some loop. After looping around for a minute or two in circles about some imagined scenario, it dawned on me in a moment, “Eureka!” Ok, I didn’t say Eureka like some 18th century inventor, but the resulting realization was in effect a eureka moment. Close enough I say! As I rode away from the stairs, I told myself, “dig deeper. What are the feelings under this loop.” It was fear. The short of fear that sends you through spiral staircases of regret and second-guessing. “Yes, I really am afraid to die,” I thought to myself as I rolled out of the cemetery on its main road. 

I felt shaken, in the best possible way, by the experience. I had asked for the ability to behold death in all its forms at my altar. Well, I was gifted my own rather dramatic memento mori by the experience. The funny thing is that when I explicitly go to a cemetery to do spiritual work there is a nagging fear that nothing will happen. That I am not magic. That I have no connection to the veil or what lies beyond it. Then, all of a sudden, I was experiencing the veil thinning and so shaken to my core that I caste off all my illusions about the certainty with which I can approach my thoughts about my own mortality and the afterlife. This is the gift of beholding death. Rather than place too much foolhardy confidence in the illusions of an absolute truth, I want to stay in the restless space of faith where I place belief in the stories of my own people without holding them to certainties. I want to trust my people’s stories without feeling the need to regurgitate them as a set of immutable facts.

I learned to lean into belief and trust during my time in tending descent, a spiritual death worker training with my friend Hannah of Mourning Light Divination I completed last year. We were discussing our conceptions of the afterlife as a group and I played the role of the dogmatic person who knew what was going to happen. I shared my beliefs on the Irish Otherworld and left no space for uncertainty. Hannah, in their characteristic disarming manner, mentioned that the afterlife was something that they could never be sure about until they experienced it first hand. In Hannah sharing that uncertainty, I was invited to just let go of the regurgitation and just be in the liminality of the veil. In the face of our own mortality, all we can ever have is trust and belief that our little collection of values, beliefs, and stories will help us to live this life as the full embodiment of the magic that we are while constantly exploring the ever-unfolding unknown. 

That ride in the cemetery would be my last bike ride for a short while. On my way back home, I felt something straining in my right hamstring. In very typical fashion, I overdid it by riding too much in the last week without rest. I was forced to adapt. In the last four years, my typical adaptation to injury has been to rest and use other forms of body movement to fill in for the activity I hurt myself doing. Longtime friends of your good ole hermetic druid will remember that recurring calf injuries that left me unable to walk and led me to give up tennis. Well, I have dealt with this round of injury by walking with Winston more and doing body weight exercises. I also went back to my chiropractor/physical therapist for some body work to speed up my recovery and get some exercises to strengthen my hamstrings to prevent reinjury. 

My big difficulty is not blowing this injury out of proportion, which is easier said than done. I don’t know if I really have completely processed the grief of my body not letting me play tennis like I used to. It certainly feels like that unprocessed grief is showing up in my fears related to this injury. I’m afraid that I will lose the dream of riding up waterton canyon before the snows come. I am afraid I won’t be able to chase other dreams of long distance bike riding like riding Paris-Brest-Paris, a 1200km bike ride that happens in France every four years. I’m afraid I won’t get to experience the camaraderie of making more bicycling friends and going on rides with them. I’m afraid I will be stuck back in my basement. I’m afraid I won’t be able to feel myself flying under the power of my own two legs. Yeah, that’s a lot of fears for someone who is just trying to pedal a bike. Yet, these are the fears at the heart of a death. The fears of a person who fears not having enough time.

If you haven’t noticed, I am sort of an intense person. I don’t do things half way. I have this tendency to follow the rabbit hole all the way till the end. I have been known to go all the way until my body or mind gives out. I wouldn’t say it’s my most endearing quality. I am sure many of you are like, “why is this guy talking about his legs giving out in a collapse!” Well, it’s simple. I still need joy amidst the decay. There is no simpler joy than riding around town and being in it all, seeing it all. There is no simpler joy than propelling yourself through space under your own power. So, here I am talking about the difficulty of not being able to ride, because it’s sad to not be able to do something that brings me joy again. 

While I am worried about my legs, sweet doggo Zoe passed away this past week. So, I feel a sense of urgency to finish blending her fur into this Shetland so I can get back to spinning and then on to weaving it up for Vanessa. I didn’t even know Zoe and there is a loss there. You can just feel the rift from this sweet, innocent little creature passing. You sorta get those feelings when doing a bit of death work. It’s the grief that comes from having known loss and creating a memorial that honors that spirit that has left this plane. 

I felt it coming the day or two before, but you always second guessing that stuff. You only say that sorta stuff to the people you trust. But, hey, there’s a guy who gets paid a buncha money at some fancy university that wrote a book saying we don’t live in a disenchanted society. He said that it was all just a narrative that was popularized and spread. And yet, we turn the screws on each other and ourselves in the most inhumane ways and don’t believe we are enchanted. We expect perfection, the thing that can only come from an automated process. And yet, we are nothing but these animate assemblages of clay with the breathe of spirit blown into us for a minuscule speck of time. We are but tiny flickers of light playing at the divine. Seems a waste of our time to play at economic games when we could be doing so many other things.

I am just grateful to be invited into this work now. I would say for the last year I have been so craving the ability to do this sort of woven work for people. Yes, I just want to bring people sacred objects that help them through their grieving process. I know how important my photos, keepsakes, and my mom’s ashes are to me. It’s my hope that my little memorial cloths can be a sacred keepsake that helps one commune with their lost loved one. I know how important my daily practice of anointing the small box that I keep my mom’s ashes in with rose water is for my own death work with my mom. I hope my cloths can play a similar role for folx looking to develop a devotional practice around those human and for kin they have lost. 

Honestly, my death work practice would not be where it is if it were not for my completing Tending Descent with Hannah. There is no way, no how. The essential parts of my daily routine that were forged in the three months I took to learn with Hannah set a foundation from which I could explore my own answer to the death work I wanted to provide the world. That’s what I did in the period after my initial spiritual death worker training was done. I did the daily work and allowed my own articulation of death work to emerge naturally as my relationship with sacred death strengthened at my altar. Fiber death work and societal death work emerged from that daily devotional practice, and I could not be happier that they did. It feels like I allowed myself the time and space to completely transform, a rare gift in these speed-obsessed times. I emerged from my apprenticeship a new person ready to share my own unique gifts.

The focus on creating apprentices is important in death work. If we truly want to push back on a light and love focused culture, we need as many articulations and definitions for what death work is and what it offers society as their are people that want to engage with it. This means that death work training needs to empower and encourage people, not just teach them a set of rules, a set of dos and don’ts. It needs to pose more questions than answers and provide the safe space for a person to find their own informed answers to those questions. Death work as a vocation is about radically altering your relationship with living. It’s about developing a spiritual calling not just in serving those at the liminal portal from this world and the next but out of the pure fact that you could cross that portal yourself at any time. Consequently, we are best served in thinking about our training as death worker as embarking on an apprenticeship, not being a disciple before the feet of some charismatic death worker. As my oft cited spiritual advisor Wm. S. Coperthwaite counsels in “A Handmade Life: A Search for Simplicity:”

So, as the window closes to apply to participate in this year’s Tending Descent cohort (Applications are due on Sept 1), I urge you to consider heeding your own call to death work. Will you take the “figure in black’s” hand and enter the domain of the veil, of the portal between this world and the next? I hope you do. I will be a support for this cohort as a teaching assistant and will be teaching a section on societal death work that will cover what societal deaths are, what are tools we use to practice societal death work, and why such work is important. It would be an honor to have you in the cohort. So, please do look into the program and all its details on the tending descent website.

It’s kinds incredible that we are here on the precipice of making this essay series a community-supported publication. Next week will be the first anniversary of this project. We will be celebrating by kicking off our subscription service, which will give you access to 4 essays a month and the entire back catalog of essays (a whopping 50+ essays the explore being a mutant in a fading empire.) In that essay next week, I will make the argument for why you should support me. I will do my darnedest to reach the level of the most fervent NPR fundraising drive. Then I will try and dispense with the theatrics of marketing and sales, so that we can get back to talking about fiber, magic, and death.

The logistics of the essay series will remain simple. There will always be one free essay a month that will appear in the first Sunday of each month. Yes, the first Black Sabbath of the month will always be a community endeavor. Then the remaining essays for the month will be available to subscribers of our black sabbath. There will be more on that next week though. F

or now, I must say, dear reader, that I am just thankful that you have stayed with me across these III distinct acts of death work, over 3000 words of my raw experience distilled for you into these stories. I hope you are well.

All my best,

James

GREAT SCOTTS! I can’t believe you read the whole thing! Thanks for that. You are too kind to visit my corner of the interwebz. You can Subscribe for free below to receive new posts and support my work.