I Bloomed Right There on the Hedge

These past few weeks have been such a maelstrom of change for me. Not in a super intense way like when we had 5 child care providers in a year. No, it has been this real gentle return of all these practices that I quite enjoy that I thought I had lost to parenting. Well, at least that is what you think when you are in the blender of helping your wee one get through adjusting sleep schedules, learning to eat solids, taking those first steps, starting school, and potty learning. You really have to cut back on what is feasible for you to do in any given day, because you are just so overwhelmed all the time. A lot of stuff falls by the wayside in the overwhelming times. For me, this meant that waking up at 5 am and meditating for 45 minutes was not feasible, lest I wake up Juniper. It also meant that I was not going to be taking wieldy, long bike rides with no regard for time constraints. Then something shifts and you do have more capacity to deal with the shizza always hitting the fan. One day things that you had let go come back in all in a moment of renewal.

This shift, it’s not like a eureka moment by any means. It’s more like the plodding work of a muddy hillside trying to dry in complete shade. I festered like a bog too many times too count while I sat in front of a screen numbed out after a childcare shift. This will happen when you have big caretaking responsibilities in our cannibalistic, all-on-you-own society that is still going through an international pandemic in the chthulucene (A Haraway-ism). First, I just took little steps toward making sure I made space for my weaving and writing. Reclaiming that space from the numb-out zone was the spell of dry heat that my hillside needed to completely dry. Yet, it still took years of work to get here. For reference, little juju is almost 3 and I just feel like I am getting back to reclaiming my meditation and bicycle riding.

Since I don’t have a dad that was there and my mom has already passed,  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised it took this long. I had no one to help me through this incredibly intense period of death and rebirth with parenthood. I didn’t have the benefit of elders there to hold my hand, hold juju, and offer the sort of advice I had to learn first hand. How many times have I written that line in this project? I know I am not alone in this feeling either. I am just one of many voices, rising to a chorus that incants a spell to conjure the sort of steeled will that one develops while surviving those initial years of parenthood without any of the typical conditions for thriving. I suppose we need that will to keep going as parents as we watch social structures crumble around us.  That will to continue is certainly what helped me through the waves of grief for not having the support network I wish I had and the complete death and rebirth I went through as I became a father. I just had to wallow in the shadows under it was time to be fully reborn.

I certainly have had many talks with my therapist of getting to the point of accepting  how hard parenting is now. To each story I would tell her, she would just repeat with a even, knowing tone, “yeah, that’s what it’s like and it’s really hard and it doesn’t get easier.” Having worked with accepting the notion that I will always have to sell my time and brain power to eat, have shelter, and various forms of institutionalized robbery like health and dental insurance, I knew that tone well. It’s the same tone I use when talking about the intricate balancing act of finding the least odious and grinding form of wage labor to meet the basic material conditions my family and I need to survive. That acceptance that there is no way out but to muddle your way through is trite but true. My own acceptance of what my therapist was laying down in regards to parenting doubtless helped me turn the corner on becoming a more resilient parent. It just took me nearly 3 years to get to the point where I accept how hard parenting is and understand that all those tough moments do pass.

Honestly, it was years of exposing myself to the grief of the loss of my previous life and the lack of support that I had that led me to acceptance. When one just lets the grief rip through your chest like a tornado over and over again, it does have the power to blunt the pain to the point where the reality of your situation becomes more like a melancholic set of facts than an earth shattering chasm that feels insurmountable. You have to put some skin in the game and do your time for a season in the shadowed veil of grief. That’s what I have learned as a death work who has failed countless times in allowing myself to gracefully move through my own death and rebirths. There is no pill, though medication does help, no form of meditation, and no silver bullet that can take away that season where you must be a swamp who yearns to just be a dry hillside. And yet, even when you think you will be a swamp forever, you concerted efforts to make space for the work and the things you enjoy are what will bring you through to the otherside.

In the face of all the difficulties I have faced down in the last three years, it was my continual investment in my writing and weaving and that saved me. I talked a lot in the last three years about blinking out for months at a time in a sorta numb survival mode. During these blink outs, it was the writing and the weaving that brought me back in touch with the sacred, the universal web that ties us all together, and to the joy of creating. Those practices, even when done in their barest form, established a sort of baseline devotional discipline, a term we use a lot in the Holy Coven (one of the virtual covens I am in with buddy Hannah Haddadi of Mourning Light Divination) that I have defined in that essay as:

“A pathway of sacred actions that stir my bones that I will perform dutifully each day with reverence to keep the flame of my traditions, my goddesses, my beloved dead, and my crafts alive in this world and to receive any wisdom that might be imparted in turn.”

Even in the toughest times, my writing and weaving brought me back to a place where I could recommit to my aspiration of a day devoted to the work that stirs my bones. I wrote and wove my way through a lot of the feelings I had related to the difficulties I faced as a new father with no role models to look to. This is precisely why the essay “No Time for Man Babies” was such a cathartic, important share. I needed to literally burn as the seething, snarling conflagration on the hedge to deal with all those feelings of anger and rage. Yet, expressing my rage, making art of of my rage was not enough. As I would find, there were other feelings of pain that needed to be aired.

Brief message from your full-hearted anarchist weirdo that has had too much coffee:

Do you have a practice like that? If you do, hold on to it dearly. Cherish it. Nurture it. It will save your life from returning to the churning grind mile of 21st century life. That’s really my only goal in life anymore. I just want to keep this weird mutant flame burning just a little while longer and maybe, if I am lucky, help someone else light or keep their mutant flame lit. Maybe, just maybe, with these signals from my pirate radio station on the edge of the internet I can help someone keep swimming and prevent them from drowning from the weight of it all, the oppression, the hate, the cynicism, the corruption, the collapse.

“Don't let me drown before the workday ends

…

Please someone

Teach me how to swim

Please, don't let me drown.”

Thursday - For the Workforce Drowning.

Just find something weird to do with your hands and hang on. That’s all I have done, just hung on for dear life as more bombs are dropped, as more people’s existence is rendered illegal, as more people drown in cubicles under the thumb of middle management, as the planet’s resources are plundered, and our future is sold for cheap.

Can you tell that I was raised on Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GYBE)? The Montreal-based anarchist music collective was awarded Canada’s highest music award, the polaris prize, in 2013 and they outright rejected, gave the money to fund music programs in Quebec Prisons, and critiqued the whole notion of the award:

“so yes, we are grateful, and yes we are humble and we are shy to complain when we’ve been acknowledged thusly- BUT HOLY SHIT AND HOLY COW- we’ve been plowing our field on the margins of weird culture for almost 20 years now, and “this scene is pretty cool but what it really fucking needs is an awards show” is not a thought that’s ever crossed our minds.

3 quick bullet-points that almost anybody could agree on maybe=

-holding a gala during a time of austerity and normalized decline is a weird thing to do.

-organizing a gala just so musicians can compete against each other for a novelty-sized cheque doesn’t serve the cause of righteous music at all.

-asking the toyota motor company to help cover the tab for that gala, during a summer where the melting northern ice caps are live-streaming on the internet, IS FUCKING INSANE, and comes across as tone-deaf to the current horrifying malaise.

these are hard times for everybody. and musicians’ blues are pretty low on the list of things in need of urgent correction BUT AND BUT if the point of this prize and party is acknowledging music-labor performed in the name of something other than quick money, well then maybe the next celebration should happen in a cruddier hall, without the corporate banners and culture overlords. and maybe a party thusly is long overdue- it would be truly nice to enjoy that hang, somewhere sometime where the point wasn’t just lazy money patting itself on the back.

GYBE letter in Response to Polaris Prize

Listening to GYBE taught me how to ardently cry out for the weirdo fringe and want them to hang on. I learned from them how to fully inhabit being the person on the edge of the abyss, wanting the abyss more than anything and being that person drenched in stupid joy at the beauty of it all and what I could make with my hands. At some deep emotional level, this band and their offshoot A Silver Mt. Zion is the origin point for so many of my tendencies to want to just encourage people to “hang on to each other” so we can keep the “margins of weird culture” for the next generation. FOR THE LOVE OF GLOB, just hang on and find each other folx. We are not in this alone, not while our weird culture is still alive.

“We all got born so afraid
And still search for words
To describe that pain
And cling to each other
Like pigeons in the rain
(Hang on to each other)
And nuzzle over feathered breast
(Hang on to each other)
With beaks all worn and cracked and stained
(Hang on to each other)”

A Silver Mt. Zion “Hang on to Each Other”

The last intuitive reading I had with Hannah provided the guidance I needed to take the next step toward healing. Yes, I said healing, a word that lost all its meaning to me in the last three years mired in what felt like a never-ending death. However, something profoundly magical did happen in that reading. Hannah, drawing on guidance from my spiritual team, told me that I needed to recommit to just being still and find a way to work with the pain that still haunts me. Indeed, I am still referencing that reading a month or so later, because it was that important. In the last couple essays, I have been probing at different ways of approaching that pain, by refusing to just accept the first answer that pops in my head. I truly have embraced that any knowledge I gain of that pain will be partial and incomplete, a nod to Jessica Dore’s excellent meditations on incomplete knowledge of late. However, even my partial answers have been helpful over the past few weeks as I expressed my difficulties with belonging, learning to love and trust in broken times, finding an old version of myself by pedaling to the edge of the city, and the importance of being able to reject parts of the world that do not serve you or your kin.

A weird thing happens when you take the advice that your spiritual squad of killa bees lays down for you. Things just start to come together in the most interesting of ways. I certainly have not “healed,” because I don’t really believe in healing. Well, not after hearing David Vance explain how our brain may be masking the pain we are still currently feeling from all the injuries we have ever had:

“So we’re all in pain right now from whatever injuries we’ve ever had; it’s just that your brain has set the levels of its own endogenous opioids to a point where you don’t feel it anymore — which will mess with your head, I promise you, if you think about it long enough.” David Vance in Conversation with Krista Tippett

Emotionally, I find it is similar. I still feel everything related to what has happened, but as I talked about above, its just not as acute. The juice has been squeezed out, which has allowed me to move on with it receding more into the background of my experience. Consequently, in its place, we can fill up the space left with that pain receding with practices that we have found enriching in the past. For me, this is consistent meditation at my altars and bicycle riding. The following is a real account of what has bloomed forth from taking these practices seriously over the last month.

It was getting late, but I knew that I wanted to get in front of my altar and pull a card. I sat down, set up my pathway to my underworld, made my offerings to my folks, and asked for help pulling a card that would guide me in my work the next day. I had brought my The Way of the Wild Oracle Deck, Developed by Tonja Reichley and illustrated by Dana McGarry. into my underworld with me, which is one of my favorite divinatory tools that I use for picking up guidance from within my own Irish wisdom tradition. We all laid our hands, moss, and webs on the deck; set it aflame with the divine light of Awen (if your a druid) or Imbas (if working in the Irish wisdom tradition); and kept our question within the flame. We shuffled the deck three times, took a card at random from the deck, and there it was, our Brighid card. I turned the card over to see what Brighid represented in this deck:

“Brighid

The Sacred Three

To the sacred three she tends

Brighid, triple goddess, saint and friend

Of healing, smithcraft, and poetry

Of maiden, mother and crone, all three

Of life, death, and rebirth do flow

Of tending to the sacred fire, above and below.

Of house, hearth and household, we call in She.”

Words by Tonja Reichley

I ascended back to this plane, closed down my circle, and went to bed. I let myself simmer in this mythopoetic stew overnight, so that I would be ready to look for little omens, signs of divine wisdom, chance encounters that pass along little messages, or subtle synchronicities that help you recall important values or ideas that are embedded in the landscape, on my bike quest the next day.

Before setting out on my bike, I stood before my altar. I did my purification and my protection ritual, using my rose water and birch tree oil. I stood there for a moment and remembered the Brighid card from the night before. I invited my spiritual squad to come along the ride and offer any omens that they wanted me to consider based on the card that we pulled.

Death. Pedaling east toward the plains, it wasn’t 5 minutes before I was smacked dead in the face with death. A gentle bird lay dead right on the side of the bike lane. My heart tinged with the grief at the loss of this life. I sent a little spell its way and kept pedaling. I wished I had stopped to tend to the bird longer, but even with trying to keep the card I had pulled the night before, I did not see this as the beginning of a string of instances that I would sending me a reminder about the great cycle of life: death, life, and rebirth. But, look, we are all not perfect and we are just doing our best.

Rebirth. I kept pedaling east and sauntered my way toward my hedge. It was a hot, sunny day on the Colorado plains with nary a tree to provide shade. I was in full lizard mode. As I absorbed the suns rays and drank my nettle infusion, I spied a snake just off the trail. I stopped after I past the snake and shared a moment with my lizard kin before they sauntered back into the brush.

This was a rare occurrence on this specific trail. I have only spied a snake on this trail when I had ridden it for the first time and one other time. I couldn’t shake the feeling like this was a sign of rebirth, of the ouroboros. It was all starting to become more clear how the wisdom of the Brighid card was being revealed to me on this ride. Each omen was becoming more obvious and clear.

Life. I finally got to the gravel portion of the trail where the number of humans drops off to a trickle. I am left to the sounds of the wind blowing through the grass and the leaves of the cottonwood trees alongside the creek I was riding along. I made it out to a nature preserve and the life was just TEEMING. It felt like the universe was bursting at the seems to welcome me into its embrace. I peddled along the trail and dozens of crickets were jumping out of the way of my tire as I slowly made my way through the preserve. In the countless rides I had taken to this preserve, I had seen elk, birds, and ducks, but never had I ever been greeted by an entire community of crickets. It was like the universe and my team were holding my face, squishing my cheeks, and saying: “SEE, look how FULL of life everything is all around you. Any idea that you have that you don’t belong or aren’t woven into everything is an illusion. You are everything all at once.” I stopped and soaked in that moment of interconnection, amongst all my kin on that trail.

I finished my ride with the most wonderful glowing feeling inside. It was a sense of satisfaction for having trusted the process of listening to the advice of my guides that Hannah had channeled for me. It was not lost on me that I sat in meditation, used my divination tools, and then went on a quest to find them in the world. This is what devotional discipline is all about. Its about sticking to the discipline of performing those practices that stir those feelings of interconnection and belonging to everything inside you. What I found out there was nothing short of amazing. I re-found the joy that those two practices bring me. Through meditation and riding, I also experienced a dramatic initiation into my blooming period by being led by my guides through witnessing death, rebirth, and finally blooming life. I did not expected that to be the case when I pulled that card the night before, but that is the magic of your devotional discipline practice. After three years of death, I bloomed into a new life right there in my hedge, interconnected to all the life around me.

I hope you are well, reader. Thanks for reading this long essay. It was a joy to feel this blooming this past week and render it visible for you. I hope you too find yourself in a season of blooming.

Best,

James

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