"I Have Plants"

“I have plants”, the post said. I feverishly clicked open the message board and found that the person was willing to share a variety of plants with folx in my area. It felt like the early 00s blogspot era all over again, where freely sharing useful bits of culture and technology reigned. Though that period has left us, I am still a sucker for internet generosity, so I jumped at the person’s offer of some comfrey and St. John’s wort plants. It’s special to have a community story to accompany your plants, a plant origin story that can rival any comic book hero’s origin story. My 6 ft mugwort was sourced from a witchcraft acquaintance from about a mile and half away. These plants will have the same distinction of being rooted in the plant generosity of my own community.

I didn’t know much about the community member who was sharing, but one detail stuck out. I knew that they were a fellow member of the Missing Witches community, one of the online covens I am part of.  I knew that they were a woodworker and parent. I also saw that they were a gnostic christian and a spiritual director. “Intriguing,” I thought to myself. I have been recently very critical of christianity, publicly breaking with the need to even take it into account other than noting the harms done by the church institutions.  The universe always has interesting ways of presenting you opportunities to stretch your horizons though, doesn’t it?

I didn’t think much of the coincidence at the time, following my recent pattern of shirking my duty to contemplate what might be the significance of such a synchronicity. After last week’s essay of discussing how I resisted fully exploring what I might need to shed to support my growth, I can’t stop seeing areas where I have not given a synchronicity—it’s own form of micro spiritual call in if you notice it— it’s time for contemplation. Here was a christian who was willing to share medicinal and magic plants with me, even though he did not know me from adam.   How interesting the timing of this moment when I have been so adamant at distancing myself from christianity because of the religious trauma I experienced in my forced indoctrination into the catholic church. Truly intriguing, eh?

Well, in my typical fashion, I didn’t think about it again until the day of our planned exchange brought me a choice. Look, this time is wasn’t totally bypassing, I swear to you. I was busy the whole week taking a class on potty learning and preparing spiritually to be cleaning up pee and poop all weekend. This spiritual preparation includes a lot of mouth breathing and staring into the void of my basement wall. The day of the exchange I did my shift in our home potty learning center and then got ready to go. For some reason, I went to go change my shirt, which I never do in the morning. I always just wear the shirt I slept in. I went to grab one of my 5000 black, metal shirts and happened upon my Hell shirt. I took it out of the drawer, thinking to myself, “Hell yeah, I love this shirt.” I went to put it on and realized I was going to meet a someone who identifies in some way as a christian and is giving me a very sweet gift. I decided to change my shirt as a show of respect so as to not bring hell into his life. 

The album in question, which starts with a spoken word rendition of Emily Dickenson’s “I felt a funeral in my brain.” Its truly chef’s kiss.

That is a big deal for the part of me that has been all fire and brimstone lately regarding that religion. In that moment, I integrated a part of me from the past that was much more open to the subtleties of meeting people where they met me, regardless of their beliefs. With all the proactive boundary work I have been doing in the last year, I have been keeping my ear to the ground for any sign of potential trouble and keeping the barriers up if I get any hint that trouble is near. This would have meant that I would have avoided someone who self identifies as christian just out of the pure fact that I don’t know what part of the christian community a person is from and don’t want to take any chances. This is what it is like to live in a divided society where there are people who want to dehumanize and harm your kin. Instead, in this moment, I let a little love into the exchange by meeting his generosity with my own act of respect for him and his home. Though this seems like a simple choice to make, it shows how a small act like that can be the catalyst for bigger changes in how one confronts the world.

As someone who has been rooted in the radical (perma) culture surrounding Loam Magazine for years, it’s natural for me to describe these sorts of small, value-aligned actions as what Aeran Squires and Kate Weiner termed a micro movement in their 2018 text. In their text that shares that title, Squires and Weiner describe a micro movement as a “small practice…that affirms our inherent power” in the face of a disempowering, “toxic capitalist culture” that doesn’t want us to believe that our everyday actions in alignment with our values do not accumulate into “bigger, bolder” actions that have the capacity to provide a bridge from the personal to the political domain, from personal transformation to political, structural change. Their’s is a belief in the agency of humans to create the very reality that we inhabit; a belief which I share as a sociologist of social movements, inequality, and organizations. I really want to underscore the revolutionary power of Squires and Weiner’s micro movements, because their revolution is one where we craft a revolution that is “by us and for us” by starting at the first cornerstone of our first step and scaling up from their. This is why I have chosen to mine the mundanity of the seemingly innocuous pleasantry that I shared with my neighbor. That tiny step felt like the beginning of something more.

Dear reader, you would be justified in asking where I think this micro movement leads. Well, it’s elementary. I am blooming forth into this particularly interesting period in my life where older parts of myself are coming back to the surface to be integrated back into the whole of who I am. As someone who has been angry and dejected for the last 3+ years, it was surprising to me that on that morning I would offer kindness and generosity to someone who is affiliated with a religious group that I identify my religious trauma with. These days, I rarely offer kindness or generosity to anyone that I don’t think I can trust. That moment I described above saw me subtly embrace a much more complicated understanding of the nature of all things than the black and white thinking that I have used in our plague times. I let the us vs them dialogue that seemingly runs on an endless loop in my brain nowadays rest and I just went with the love. Now, it literally makes me cringe to say that word in this context, so I must be mining something good. Yes, so let me double down on it and state that my micro movement was one towards letting the love back in, trusting that I could build relationships of reciprocity in a broken world.

I must confess that I have experienced a dark night of the soul in the last three years.  Pretty much the only people who haven’t let me down are my handful of friends, Lily, Juniper, and Winston. There has a been a great purging of fictive kin to the point where I wondered if I was isolating myself for no good reason. My fear underlying all of this was that this micro movement back toward love would never come. I was afraid that I would be stuck in this isolation forever. Yet, here I am traversing this great ocean of my life spiraling back toward love. 

This is where the scaling from the personal to the societal comes in. It sometimes feels like these sort of micro movements with their daily repetitions build toward a fever pitch, until we complete some larger work that we are to finish at just the precise time, likely part of some larger cosmic plot line we cannot make out in the chaos, that feeds into the larger societal shifts that we all create with our behavior. I do not think it was a coincidence that I had this dark season of the soul in this time period nor do I think it’s mere happenstance that I am now turning towards others again. I certainly understand the need for collective and bureaucratic action, given my own career in the trenches of social justice. Yet, even I, who has devoted most of his waking life to the thankless and grinding work of keeping a record of the abuse of power, wants you to remember that all our words and actions echo into infinity and into the soft bodies of those around us, causing secondary ripples that will continue to radiate out into the farthest reaches of time. Sometimes the smallest action or word is all it takes to create a cascade that changes everything.

Yet, what I have gained from this period is the ability to love in small doses with a healthy skepticism toward all those who want to act in our name and marshal our energy for their cause. I think my world shrunk a lot with the atrocities of the last three years. I don’t think that is liable to change anytime soon. Hope is dead for me. I am less interested now in showing out in virtue litmus tests than I am in learning into trust with other likeminded folk who have cast off the yoke of some other person’s power-game-slash-get-rich scheme. No, I think I am done with hitching my wagon to the horses destined for the metropole and agitating at city hall. Now, I just want the honesty of working with people of common values toward self-sufficiency, trading useful plants and skills. Those are the small seeds of revolution that I want to sow everyday with this cycle of micro moving toward the world. It’s a dream of community tending that I have now—the sort of tending that takes seriously the work of building an alternate society in the cracks forming in the old.

This feels like the hard-won vision of someone who has been ritualistically flogged in the town square of neoliberal capitalism. All my grand dreams of progressive societal change, of solidarity even, have been beaten out of me. I didn’t even get a chance to take the bag of cash and become a yuppie like the hippies. The bags of cash are practically gone, and I am too lazy to go after those that still exist. Despite how many times our societal structures leaves me for dead, I just keep coming back again and again, a necromancer of the highest order. All I have left is my hands, my imagination, and my gentle, albeit guarded, heart. The naivety of my convictions has been whittled, whittled, and whittled away with each each spiraling death and rebirth until I have been left with a vision that is slow and small. 

Now, I want to describe that vision for you, my guides, and my goddesses to overcome my previous failings in this domain and get my squad on board. I’m really bad at asking for help from my spiritual team, and I want that to change starting now. I make offerings to my team each day but ask for little help. The last time I asked for help was back in February when I was so sick that I thought I would stop breathing overnight. Jaggedly breathing and terrified, I stood before my altars asking to get through that night and they brought me through it. Now, I want them to be with me in bringing my visions of my future. My squad and I need to swarm like killer bees, “forming like voltron” to live into this future. You squad up with your spiritual team while listening to Wu-Tang Clan’s “Enter the 36 Chambers?” No? Well, you should. If you don’t know, now you know.

“Wu-Tang Killa Beez, we on a swarm
Wu-Tang Killa Beez, we on a swarm
Wu-Tang Killa Beez, we on a swarm
Wu-Tang Killa Beez, we on a swarm”

Wu-Tang Clan — Clan in da Front

“I want you to think about what you are going to commit to for June, and maybe the rest of the year, but mostly right now just for the month of June,” Hannah counseled in her weekly divination for this week (Available for all members of Hannah’s Holy Coven on Patreon). That’s where this imperative to vision with my squad comes from. After listened to Hannah’s divination, I really devoted myself to thinking through its action item of making clear my vision for the future for my team. I suppose that is the genesis for all this discussion above and a fervent desire to not bypass the invitation to do this work. I spiral backward in prose, providing that which I bloom forth from last as a way to counter the forced imposition of linearity within my own electric web. Not unlike Nas in Rewind, “I spit a story backwards, it starts at the ending.”

It’s also just a reminder of the community authorship that arises from the entire squad of living breathing beings that populate your community. I don’t bloom from nothing. I bloom forth from the synthesis of my own and the sacred channelings of my own people that I lean on; Hannah Haddadi being one of them. My squad, we are all inextricable tied into an elaborate, lacelike web with those who are chosen kin in this way. Hannah, continued:

“Your spiritual team they want to know where are we putting in the most energy for you, what are we committing to as a team. They want it to be communicated to them. They need the information and it needs to be clear.” 6/5/2023 Weekly Divination

Yes, so let me clear now in this electronic web of spells what I need my squad to help me complete in this time of blooming:

• I want to wield useful skills I can do with simple tools that I can share with others that will benefit a community of people. What specific ones for this June? Well, I am leaning into further growing skills tending to my existing plants and growing others from seed still.

• I need help with my writing. In the next 3 months, I am gonna go paid on my substack by continuing my weekly essays. Three essays will be paywalled and one will be offered for free each month. I also want to collect all my words from the first year of essays into a bound book and offer it for sale.

• I want to complete my first large scale rug. The first immediate step will be to continue the hardwork of carding and spinning enough yarn. This is the daily devotional work of the fiber artist. We must walk before we run through our loom weaving.

• I want to create a druid anarchist propaganda sticker a la this record by Book of Sand (a deeply niche interest in fusing my own interest in red and anarchist black metal with my own druidry). I will sell limited numbers via my webshop on my squarespace website. This will also be the test case for actually selling stuff online.

• I want to explore doing a market with Lily. Her and I have been discussing getting back into the community with our stuff as a way to counter our disenchantment with social media.

May all this be so with harm to none.

Until next time dear reader,

James

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