"I Don't Think I Am Going to Make It"

“I don’t think I am going to make it,” I uttered to myself to the umpteen time this week. Lily and I were spinning all the f’in plates once again. The bomb dropped Tuesday night while Juniper and I were watching Garfield and vibrating at thee olde highest frequencies possible. My phone dinged, and I checked my text message. “Please check your email for an extremely important message,” the text instructed. Doing the bidding of this anonymous harbinger of doom, I opened my email and watched the video, learning that a developer handed the owner of our school’s building a BAG of cashola. SO, wah-lah, our school is now closing at the end of the year, even after said building owner promised our school director that he would never sell. Well, turns out every white dude has his price, doesn’t he? What a surprise.

So, once again due to the failings of our neoliberal hellscape, Lily and I back on the school tour circuit, expending what little energy we have left in our year of our viral overlord 2023. We are shaking hands, filling out forms, and smiling with complete strangers. I hate smiling with complete strangers, unless they are fellow members of the weirdo clan. We are on text message threads, facebook mom groups, and waitlists. It’s all such a performance. It’s all such an exercise in spinning the 1,000 plates of late capitalism in a society that provides no support. Instead of the thousands of dollars that we pay in taxes each year going to pay folx student loan debt off, provide health care, and assist with child care, it goes to bombs, guns, and corporate subsidies.

You want a real trip? go look at the deals that companies like Boeing, Ford, Apple, And Alphabet have gotten from federal and state governments. In 2021, Apple received a 846 million dollar sweet heart deal (valuation over the 39 year period of the deal) from the State of North Carolina to secure their state as the location for Apple’s new corporate campus. Boeing, a defense contractor that provides fighter jets and weapons technology for the federal government, currently holds a multitude of federal contracts with the U.S. government that are worth in excess of 10 billion dollars. Universal welfare for corporations, grinding drudgery and suffering for the people.

“And this just feels like spinning plates
I'm living in cloud cuckoo land
And this just feels like spinning plates
My body is floating down the muddy river.”

Radiohead - Like Spinning Plates

You’ll have to excuse my existential rage at the state of the system when I am barely hanging on as a parent, worker, and spiritual being. It’s wild to me that we all just have to accept this the way it is, even though its just indicative of the supreme rot at the center of our systems. We will march in the millions for our basic human rights and to end war over and over again and we are left with performative displays by politicians. Yes, a prime example of this was when leading democratic lawmakers took a knee with a kente cloth on but could not pass basic federal legislation that barred the police practices that led to George Floyd’s death (As of writing, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is still stalled in congress). Yes, I am making the entirely beaten-to-death point that I want real policy change and a budget that reflects real human needs for food, shelter, education, and reparations. But, alas, here we are again, in this year of our viral overlord 2023, and I am getting pummeled to death by run away capitalism with no reprieve from the politicians who are supposed to be helping me. Again, big thank you to the owner of my school’s building. I hope you enjoy your bag by compromising your values.

So, given these circumstances, I found myself muttering to myself that I wasn’t going to make it. It’s this sort of guttural response to a situation of hyper-overwhelm that I have found myself in repeatedly after becoming a parent in a failed state—the proverbial straw that breaks the camels back occurring every six weeks without fail. Somehow, it calms me to just say it out loud, to acknowledge how hard things are to do just basic things like finding child care help. How’s that for a mantra? Let’s dispense with the “I am the master of my own experience” mantras and delve head first into the “I submit to the almighty void of a system that feasts on my suffering." Too much? Yeah, maybe, but that is sorta my style, right? I find refuge in the fire and darkness, not watching videos of waterfalls in South America set to a loop of the universal healing frequency 528 HZ on youtube. Look, I already tried it and it didn’t work for me, so don’t @ me. If you are also a mutant, take a big deep breath with me and let it out. Breathe in, and now with me say, “I am not going to make it.” See, don’t you already feel better? There is power in accepting the difficulty of these times so that we may move forward doing what it is we can do to make things better.

If that was me as fire, this is me as the earth.

And yet, the work continues even with the fire at our doorsteps, even with the omnipresence of a mournful dirge bellowing through the pipes of an ancient organ that one cannot see but still soaks the landscape in its ethereal chords. Prompted by listening to Missing Witches excellent discussion with Asha Frost, I worked on integration this week (Link to full interview). Specifically, I was particularly taken by this part of what Asha shared:

“I think that we have been colonized, all of us, to live from our minds and we have been broken from our connection to our hearts, bodies, spirits…I know that’s the way our society loves to gather information is like “how much information can I soak up right now?” But, what do we do with it? How do we integrate it? How do we give space for integration? Because, we never do, right? It’s always just like onto the next, take the next course, take the next training, read the next book. No, no, we need that space. As I speak (in my work) about that winter phase, that phase where we are just allowing things to deepen. That’s where wisdom, true wisdom comes from.”

This whole message of deepening into crafts, messages, or teachings is just such a balm today where there is some sort of subconscious capitalist maxim that one must immediately absorb whatever they are trying to learn and move on. No, please don’t. Go ahead and struggle around in the dark of the process of becoming that which you are moving toward. Grasp through the thick shrouds of fog by candlelight to make sense of the messages and teachings that you are working with. Deploy all your esoteric ciphers. Call in all your trusted guides and beloved dead. Make it Victorian. Make it as romantic and slow a period as you want and reject this deadening capitalist impulse that tells you to consume, consume, consume more skills, more teachings, more messages. You are already enough in your process of becoming, learning.

When imagining yourself searching for truths in the fog, put on headphones and listen to Tim Hecker’s track “In the Fog” from the album Ravedeath, 1972. Ahh, yes, that’s the trick, isn’t it?

This is mostly a reminder for myself to stick with my process of becoming a spiritual death worker. Even with my completion of the class sessions for Tending Descent some 3 and half months ago, I am still wandering around the mist of what it all means for me. I am in that deep winter of integration that takes some time if one wants to grow into such a figure. I am not in a hurry to add on to the mental load of what other skills or lessons I can learn. In fact, I have delayed taking my Ogham class with the Irish Pagan School for months, because I am not ready for any more information. I suspect that I will likely also delay taking the seminar series Decolonization in Ireland: Unravelling Whiteness & Remembering the Land as well. Asha’s thoughts were the perfect thing for me to hear to quiet that nagging capitalist impulse to “move on, already, and get back to work.” No, I think not. I am quiet comfortable in the midst of it all right now.

This brings me back to the work that is to be done with my spiritual death work. I think two big things loom large on the horizon of important work to be done. First, I need to complete my initiation ritual that got postponed because of the never ending viral story I lived through in December through February. I just need to set a time on the calendar and do it. I have pushed it off for too long. I am sure that the reasons for this delay are tied to this whole process of being in the process of becoming. Initiations feel so final, but maybe they are just an invitation to more. Second, I must weave something large that depicts my grief. I want to bring it to life for myself and sacred death in large format on my 6ft by 6ft loom. I want my grief to be an embodied, visible experience in the world, so it cannot be bypassed, ignored, or told its healed. It’s all to often that the world tries to disembody me from my experience of grief, so I want to make as visceral of a reminder as I can muster with my two grubby little paws. Then I will hang it above my altar to sacred death and let myself and sacred death deepen even further into our own beholding of death.

As always, dear reader, thank you for being here.

Thanks for reading A Quiet Practice! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.