Riding the Rupture of this Season

This is an essay that first appeared during this settler colonial holiday season last year. Personally, I am baking my first pie to be with my mom, taking advantage of hearing my friend Hannah of mourning light divination speak on grief, and hang out with my daughter and wife. I am lowering the price for subscriptions to the paid portion of my essays to $5 a month and $50 a year. For Sunday and Monday, new subscriptions will also be $4 dollars a month. If you are a subscriber and want to take advantage of the new pricing, just cancel your subscription and re-subscribe for the lower cost.

Bourdieu taught me this. Pierre was at his best when talking about how social class was an embodied phenomena. It’s not just about what you got and how much of it you have hoarded, B counseled in his tome Distinction. Social class, or the cultural environment in which you are raised, literally encodes how you talk, walk, and gesture. It dictates a set of tastes and preferences, a lifestyle if you will. Pierre illustrated this beautifully in talking about how different the game of tennis is played by someone from different class positions. He noted one could see distinct differences in how the public park tennis player carried themselves, moved their bodies, and emotionally responded to the game versus the country club player. You see this agony before the mirror referenced above is nothing more than a crisis of class when I am forced to fit into a group of people that will easily recognize where I come from, that will see me for the proverbial public park tennis player I am.

So, I decided this week to say: “F* it, I don’t belong in those spaces and that’s ok.” I stood before my altar, as I do each morning, and performed my protection magic. I added an extra layer of cloaking, calling on my orb weaver guides to wrap me in their webs and render me invisible to the gaze. That simple mundane magic gave me the courage to go into that space as one of the most authentic versions of myself. I didn’t wear a blazer. I didn’t wear a dress shirt. I couldn’t if I wanted to, because my plague body wouldn’t fit into any of them anyways. I didn’t try at all, because I just don’t care to try to play that game anymore. I showed up in the jeans and flannel I wore all day and took care of my family. I endured the surface levels conversations and made it home in one piece. I had my jaw clenched most of the time and I felt really uncomfortable. And yet, I survived. 

And I had to do this work, because my family needed me. Being a father, a partner is real messy and complicated. It’s the tough path of holding my boundaries to protect my own fragile rebirthing process while also trying to honor the wishes of my beloved. If it were just me, I woulda held my boundary to not attend any function that I did not feel truly, whole-heartedly invited to. But being in a relationship and being a father means that I have to consider broader concerns than just my own rebirth. Yes, sometimes I have to soften my own rather harsh boundary making practice to help my partner build a life for my child that includes healthy family relationships and pushes back on the actions of my beloved’s brother who suffers from alcoholism. And so, I went through momentary discomfort and this whirlwind class rupture for my partner and child.

This is the difficulty of this endless cascade of holidays that mean nothing to me. I do not celebrate thanksgiving. There is nothing to celebrate with this day. My mother me taught that the first thanksgiving was a massacre of indigenous people. All it meant for me was having to endure two meals: one I wanted and one I wanted nothing to do with. Lucky me, the person I want to celebrate is dead. F***. So here I am dragging my meat sack to the blazer parade in the hopes that I can build something better for Juniper and keep Lily’s connections to her family alive in the face of her brother’s alcoholism.

So, that’s how I end up in such a vexed position on days like our recent settler colonial holiday. These days that are such happy celebrations for some are portals to grief for me.  I play out how things coulda been different. I go through the rather uncomfortable motions of family gatherings. Shit, I even try to get my mom and grandma involved in my celebrations from beyond. Yet, the absence is still there, vivid and alive, prodding at me. Yes, dear reader, not all death work is triumph. In fact, most of my death work is just like this, pouring feelings into a notes app in the dark while listening to black metal hoping to feel the whole experience thoroughly. Because I have already been down that road of bypassing these portals of grief, I don’t wish to return to the inescapable labyrinth of the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder my previous bypassing led me to. I just let myself burn in the discomfort of the worst of my grief until it burns off. I let my anger surface and burn away. I let light into the hole that still exists inside me excavate the dark radiance deep inside me. Then, after a spell, I get tired enough to go to sleep.

And yet, if one takes seriously John O’Donohue’s guidance (as I do) that we should traverse that portal of grief down into the “temple of our memory,” there is a warm sustenance there. Those meals with mom and her family were so good. Like, freakishly good. It’s prolly why food is still such a big deal to me. Those were such good times. The whole thing feels so far away now. It really feels like a whole life that has died away. The memories are a warm cocoon, surrounded with my 20 some cousins in a house with my mom’s siblings. Nobody had to wear a blazer. Nobody had to wear a blazer. Nobody had to wear a f****in’ blazer or pretend they were anything they weren’t. My uncle Ron, who had a shot at playing college football, would always stride in with his tattoos on display. Look, it wasn’t perfect, but at least I was loved and accepted for who I was. Those were the people who showed up in my mom’s last days. I sometimes wish the whole thing, the time between my parents’ divorce and my mom’s death woulda gone down differently and I could be mushroom hunting with Uncle Ron. There is a soothing in walking the melancholia of those memories. It’s a balm to know that I experienced good times before my own personal dark age of my parent’s divorce occurred and the veil of compounding darkness dropped.

But now, having walked the hermit path to its logical conclusion where one is satiated with inner conversations with oneself amidst the great dualities of our age, I find I am a mutant on the edge that does not fit into any one place. Walking down the portal of my own grief a bit farther, I find that getting a PhD in sociology brought me to this place where I am lost in the throes of analysis and philosophizing to such an extent that it makes it hard for me to connect to other people. I feel like a mutant, on the edge, codeswitching as best I can to look like I belong somewhere. And yet, the belonging is elusive, but the longing to belong is persistent (Again, a nod to O’Donohue.) I genuinely believe that I cannot de-educate (Gary Snyder’s terminology here) myself back into connection with most people. I really only get along with self-professed weirdos, witches, wizards, artists; you know, other hedge walkers of varying degrees. I have spent too much time traversing my own brain and the wreckage of my relatively young life to be any use to a large group of people interested in convention, even if they are my blood or relation via marriage. 

Rest assured, dear reader, I have brought you here across this lyrical, bleeding prose for some purpose. Yes, some of my prose is purely for my own benefit, working way way through the puzzle of how I might better understand myself and how I must relate to the world around me. This is one of the nuggets I have found while meeting my date with you each week dear reader and setting the intention, which Jessica Dore suggested in her own work, to write what I was going through. Sometimes the prose you get is like raw black metal recorded to a vintage 4 track recorder: a blown out, hissing and snarling affair full of the first emotions that come from the experience of being human. Sometimes I let those stories loose into the world, because that’s what feels best and a triumph in a society that tells me that as a man I must remain stoic and in control. Other times, I am gifted little distillations of what I learned from the experience that I can share in the hopes you might find it useful, dear reader. Sometimes, I am allowed the indulgence of being like the great storytellers of old who were allows able to pull out the pertinent threads that could be useful to their communities.

Be prepared to let this holiday season be a rupture that invites you down portals of grief. Yes, dear reader, resist the alluring siren call of our culture telling you to feel “thankful” and “merry” in this time. This time of year is difficult as the death cult of our “endless summer” culture is imposing itself on you and your value system very harshly. Push back in this time of great challenge! I invite you to show up to this colonizer holiday season in as dark and foreboding mood as you can muster. If you want to grab a sword, place your family’s tofurkey as a head on a pike, and dance around your family gathering snarling in corpse paint, I invite you to, “Do you, Hoss!” If you want to completely skip all gatherings and turn to the woods, I know that the gnome queen Galendra would be glad to have you. You can also just sit in place, let yourself walk down that portal of grief, and travel the temple of your memories. You might be surprised, like I was, to find warm sustaining memories of times of yore that can be better company than any forced interaction is.

Let the silence envelope you. Much of the way my generalized anxiety and trauma response shows up in this season is being forced into interactions with people who do not hold the same values and beliefs as me. The Hermit me particularly hates this as it feels like a good waste of solitude and retreat in the dark season. If you feel some obligation to attend such events as I do, I invite you to utter as few words as might be possible. I invite you to offer one word answers. As the heretic druid of the foothills of the rocky mountains, I absolve you of any need for pleasantries or polite conversation. May you embody the moss and be in a deep cyclical time that has no need for the grinding imperialism of these created holidays that we are forced into. May you find no need to correct the backwards views of people who are only your kin in legal documents and blood. No matter how much people tell you on the internet, you are not responsible for them and do not need to drown yourself in attempts to reform them. Let that bridge burn down to a match stick that only the thinnest and surface level discourse can wade across. Some people are too far gone.

Practice your boundary magic. If you must relax some boundaries related to the places and people you will be around, be sure to bring some extra support for yourself. Clear your energy before and after. You could wear an amulet of stinging nettle, which encourages people to respect our boundaries if they want to be in a nourishing relationship with us. You could call on the ogham symbol Beith, which helps with purification and protection. In our Irish stories regarding the origins of the Ogham divination, Ogma carved seven Beith symbols into birch wood for the god Lugh to protect his wife from being taken to the underworld. Consequently, one could surround themselves in the purifying and protective energy of Beith, one vertical line and one horizontal line on the right side, by drawing its symbol in the air and letting it permeate your body. One could call in their guides and request assistance. I called in my orb weaver spider guides and asked them to cloak me so as to not arouse any interest. Whatever your divination practices are for protecting yourself, be sure to remember to do them. Its easy to get wrapped up in ones feelings, anxiety for me, and not do the appropriate magic before one attends such a function.

Ultimately, I will let you be the judge of the usefulness of any suggestions I have, dear reader. This was written in a flash of emotion in the quiet moments of a settler colonial holiday in the heart of a decaying empire. I am nothing, if not, a privileged white dude doing his best to stop the cycle of ancestral trauma that exists in my own families I am connected to. So, feel free to throw me our with the bathwater. I actively question the utility of my own words and work daily. It’s not self deprecating. It’s just the active mental work of someone interrogating if the world needs to hear from another overeducated white dude that is getting high on his own spiritual supply. I just want you to be free for a moment from all the bullshit we have to deal with, this accumulated, ossified structure of inequality that doles out golden eggs to some and f***ing rags to others. Glob, f* that noise. We may not have the ability to change our life chances, but we can try our best to unshackle our minds. Honestly, like TSMZ state, I am just trying to: “F*** off, get free, we pour light on everything we see.”

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