"How Many Multitudes Can I Hold?"

In this season of crisis, I leaned into my community . This was honestly the best tonic that I could have asked for. Being with, serving, and making things for my existing and new kin is one of the greatest opportunities in a human life. This moment we are in is bad and terrifying, and it presents the opportunity to weave ourselves together into an even tighter web of trust and care is there for us to take. I know that sounds like a silver lining. It’s not. I do not like those. Things are bad and the possibility of weaving ourselves together doesn’t alleviate it.

I am sure there are folx out there trying to silence the grief and fear that they feel through action. You won’t find that here, Hoss. I have already done that enough times to notice it. The most famous example of this in my life is when I taught a college-level course the day after my mom died. Because I lost the person who would have held my hand and taught me how to grieve, I was left adrift in trying to work my way through grief. It was only years later while in therapy that I learned to grieve. Now, after doing that work in therapy, I can say I am well acquainted with the sludgy black mass that envelops my chest when I am in grief. However, like all people, I have the ability to fall into old patterns and go right to the actions to avoid the feeling. I know the day after the election I was immediately in the space of: “I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!" It was only about 4 hours into this spiraling that I checked in with my body and recognized my old friend grief there in my chest.

I have to attribute this blessing of remembering to do this body scan in that moment to Tayla Shanae, another Loam compatriot.1 I took her recent “Somatics as Liberation” Course through Herban Cura. Tayla taught us this delightfully simple toolkit of finding ways to root back into our body moving through space and feeling our own touch on the interior of our body. Having not meditated for months, this class was the first moment in a long time where I felt that I had arrived back in my body in a specific space and time. So what did I do? I didn’t return to the meditation cushion to pursue buddhism again. No, I do what any druid does, I started practicing my little somatic exercises with my grove of trees. Not surprisingly, the minute that I rooted back into my body on a consistent basis in the natural world my magic started flowing down and out of my heart space and through my hand more vividly and I had a much better understanding of how my body was feeling. As my buddy Glenn Newcomer of Be Your Own Drum Circle often reminds me, meditation is a spiritual technology. If not for Tayla, I probably would be planning some wild set of actions to act as a wall against rising fascism in the United States. Luckily, I listened to Tayla and was present with my grief before I set a wild course of action.

Holding Multitudes

PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN

Loam

I say all this not to downplay the difficulty of the moment. As Lily and I always tell our daughter, “It’s ok to have bid feelings and sometimes you may have more than one at a time.” This moment O we are sharing is a classic both/and circumstance where we are all asking ourselves like Kailea Lofton did in a Loam essay the night after the election:

“How many multitudes can I hold?”

I think my first response to this question, as many parents trying to navigate tantrums and world politics will attest to, is the sort of short, exasperated yalp of a response that screams out, “how much more can I hold?” It might come out as a sigh of resignation or a gentle little yell that I offer to my basement walls in a moment of frustration. I know I have often felt that way since becoming a parent in the pandemic. Once this moment subsides, I can open up in a deeper way to how many multitudes I can hold as a vessel for complexity. This is about the time where I see how much I can already hold as a parent, teacher, writer, weaver, friend, druid. In that next moment, I am able to encourage myself to see how I can grieve this moment and also continue the work of weaving myself into a web around me. This work of embracing the multitudes that Kailea invites us into is the work of this time. We simultaneously must feel all that there is to feel about the epoch defining moments of the Anthropocene, dramatic income inequality, multiple concurrent genocides, and far right hate groups and continue the work of imagining and co-creating different worlds for our children to live into. It’s this work of simultaneously acting as a comfort, a blockade, and a visionary and switching between those roles seemlessly that makes my time on this planet now.

I am not one for hope, even the muscular hope that folx have been throwing around. I am not gonna say that those who have hope for a better tomorrow are wrong. Nope, I don’t much care about telling people what to think. I am just gonna carry on with my feeling and work instead. When I am saying work, I am not talking about my wage labor in policy work though that work will be important to carry on the work that won’t be happening at a federal level. No, I am talking about returning to what Beat Poet Gary Snyder called the “real work, to what is to be done,” which is the sort of work that knits you into relationship with others around you.2 With this work, I don’t need to invest anytime in hoping for any future, because I am in too busy building the world that I inhabit inside my cranium and co-creating the world within the four walls that make up the home that Lily, Winston, J, and I live in. I am too busy trying to put healing and protection spells out into the world. I am too busy trying to remind people of their own power to create their reality and the world they inhabit. I am too busy trying to enchant the world with my fiber spells. I am too busy continuing to feel my way into the heartbreak I feel as an American that we don’t lmake policy that respects that all people are created equal, deserve the freedom to be who they want to be, and should, as FDR hoped, be protected by an Economic Bill of Rights. So, no, I do not entertain any notions of hope. I just get back to the real work in believing in the world I am co-creating with my kin.

This “no hope, just real work” logic is such a dusty, midwestern logic that has a tremendous materialist bent. I won’t fight it though. I am still just this guy raised in relative poverty in the rust belt under earth and fire alignments by a single mom who wished that he had the indulgence of romanticizing about the future. Hope has really never been something I have been able to hold onto, given that I had a parent who repeatedly crushed the hopes that he set up for me. So, at some molecular level, I let go of ever hoping for things a long time ago. Instead, I just carry on by continually adapting through acting in whatever manner is available to me in alignment with my egalitarian and liberatory values in response to whatever crisis that is knocking at my door. For someone like me, the return of ole Darth Chee-toh-head is only the latest in a long line of white men who have tried to harm me and my kinsfolk. Regardless of what plague afflicts me, I’m still just gonna be assessing what possible actions I have available to me and acting on them in the interest of making the world more equitable and free, ya dig?

During my continued devotional reading of Risa Dickens and Amy Torok’s New Moon Magic this week, I found the perfect passage from their chapter the New Moon in Gemini to accompany this week’s meditation. Specifically, Amy notes eloquently how we all have our own unique role to play in the real work:

Reading this perfectly captured what I was thinking this week. What if there is not just one solution to this moment. What if we need 100 million solutions all headed in the same general direction of tending, repair, and imagining egalitarian, liberatory futures? I think that’s what Amy perfectly captures here in this statement for the new moon in gemini. As someone who was raised to buy into a war under the false pretense of “weapons of mass destruction,” I just really can’t get down with trusting any party’s plan for how we solve this problem. No, I would much rather us all do our thing that uniquely speaks to us and then sit around and talk about how we can weave those aims all together at a local level.4 That’s the sort of work that gets me jazzed to wake up in the morning.

I am also really grateful for Amy getting me to think about how it is my praxis how I approach my textiles as gifts that I can offer the community. For some reason, I did not directly think of my protection and bike weavings that I have been gifting friends as parts of my praxis. However, they certainly are. One easy look to the comfort I derive from my mom’s crocheted blankets provides ample evidence of the anti-capitalistic tending that a textile can provide. Textiles are tending rendered visible. While gifting or trading weavings with folx, I am also creating little bonds of trust in the great web that unites us all. Making the great web real in this way is one of the most important things I can accomplish in my lifetime. If I am able to show even a small handful of people that a different world where trust and tending is real is possible then I will have accomplished a great deal.

That’s why this season I will be focused on tending to those relations with my community and bringing about as much resource re-distribution, tending, and liberation that we can muster. I will be buying resources for my Fiber Club community and raffling them off to whoever shows up. Our next meeting on Tuesday December 3 we will be raffling off a Leodrune Press Occult Needlecraft stitching kit! I will be diverting more of my bike rides away from pure omen questing and into food distribution questing to help stock no cost grocery stories in my community. I am particularly interested in the omens that will pop up when I am moving food to feed people. I will be giving weavings away to my kinfolk, all of which will be embued with protection, healing, or abundance magic. Specifically, I will not stop bothering my people and asking them if I can make them a weaving so that I can render my care for them visible. I will continue to divest from the idea that I need to make money from this practice to make it real. No, this art practice will become more real the more it exists outside of commodification.

All this is how I will hold those multitudes. I won’t throw my head into the sand and dissociate. No, I will just continue to be this wild vessel for all these ideas, practices, and magics flowing through me. I will continue to have my heart broken in these death-drenched times. I will re-build the world each day with Lily that I want my daughter to grow up in, only to watch it dissipate into embers each night. I won’t stop trying. I won’t stop feeling. I won’t stop tending to the people around me. That’s how I am gonna hold these multitudes.

Photo Essay

This week’s photo essay includes six polaroids from my meanderings around the city after our snow melted. They include my trip to this months fiber club in the cargo bike with my cupcakes, trips to check in on my tree kin after the snowstorm, and little omen quests around adjacent neighborhoods. All the shots are scanned and are presented without digital editing in chronological order.

Listening

I just put on Jeff Conklin’s radioshow The Trailhead, episode number 152, and it’s so good. It was perfect accompaniment as I transitioned out of dense discussion of what it is I am to do in this moment and into chronicling the little artistic choices I made with my wee little photographs. Listen to the show here, for fans of ambient, jazz, drug bands. The big highlight for me was hearing “Body Meπa - Adnan - Prayer In Dub” for the first time. HOLY SMOKES. This carried me away to another place. Jeff also has a substack as well!

#40: I Hear the Mountains Are Doin' Fine

Welcome to the Ambient Audiophile—where burning a CD for a friend is celebrated and encouraged.

Ambient Audiophile

Alright, dear reader, I need to go on a bike ride and eat my lunch before I am back on for toddler time. UGH, I love being a dad. It’s the best transformation I have ever undertaken. 10/10 would recommend. So, that means the updates on the yarn art I have been posting over on the evil empire (IG) will have to wait until next week. Go check out my reel and yarn posts if you ae curious.

Best,

JAH-MES