The Seed of Rebirth

The headline jumped of the page, “Spotify Owner Daniel Elk invests $133 Million in artificial intelligence defense technology company.” I laughed a cynical little laugh to to myself, thinking how fitting it is that a guy who has taken million of dollars from artists plans to invest in means of coercion and domination. I sat in my chair, feeling jaded, powerless, and disenchanted. In a moment of emboldened dissent, I thought to myself, “I gotta take my money out of this dude’s pocket. I have to cancel my subscription.” It was my beating heart; It was my small little act of defiance against a system that seeks to suck me dry.

My moment of resolve vanished in an instant. A rush of doubt set in. “What am I to do in the face of all these powerful companies?” I thought to myself. “How will I listen to all the music I love if I do not have Spotify? My train of thought continued, “Will me canceling my subscription even matter?” I was starting to spiral a bit.

I took a deep breath and sat back in my chair. My eyes caught my assembled cassettes, records, and cds. The tactile memories and smells of stacks of cds and vinyl in record stores flooded into the space where doubt once lied. Allied Record Exchange, Wax Trax, Culture Clash: safe spaces to be with music, unencumbered by an algorithm. I felt a sense of ease wash over me, closed my eyes, and floated to another space, another time.

Time, like the continuum it is, stretched and looped back on itself. I was transported back to my bedroom on Railroad Street in Toledo. It was the house we lived in with my mom that shook when trains would pass by on the tracks across the street. It was dark, and the first notes of Radiohead’s Kid A started to play. I experienced a moment of restlessness on the precipice of sleep, soaked in the feelings of adolescence. Thom croons,

“Everything, everything, everything..
In its right place
In its right place
Right place.”

Duh-duh-duh-de-duh-de-duh, the base line repeated. I was far from any of the attention economy vultures attempting to mine my listens for future advertisements. I sighed deeply, knowing that this moment of listening to Kid A would never be logged in a database only to be spit back out at me in an end of the year review. No, It was just me and that piece of plastic looping around in the early 00s, experiencing the difficulty of growing up in post 9/11 America.

I snapped back to the present in a startle. I reached for that 15 year old Radiohead cd, the same one I listened to then. “I will be alright without Spotify,” I told myself and smiled. I slotted the cd into the boombox and pressed play. It wasn’t much later that I was able to cancel my subscription.

Staying true to my internal value system and living out my values in little ways like this has been a refuge in this tremendously perilous, disenchanting, and hopeless time. I have tried to keep little flames of my practice lit while I traverse this difficult time. In the last year, I started taking on commission work and wrote pieces that were accepted into magazines in the last year. I have had these little bursts of moving toward a new way of working, growing bigger and grander dreams of what I am capable of as a human. In this moments of presence, I dreamed of doing this work of writing, weaving, and teaching full time. Yet, with every step forward, I have felt doors close in on me on all sides, leaving me grasping in the darkness for my dreams. I have felt all but broken, holding out hope that I will become whole again. Alas, It has become evident that like the world we are seeing dying around us I too have been dying away to be reborn in a new way.

It started with having a child in an international pandemic. I became a father, something that I had spent years of therapy preparing for, in the moment the world was turned upside down and societal collapse seemed less theoretical and more real.

Becoming a father was always going to be one of the hardest things I did in my life. One of the highest priorities in my life has always been not making the same mistakes my father made. He and his bloodline may be the greatest teachers I have ever had in teaching me how I don’t want to show up in the world. To be frank, this work has been as hard as grieving my mom. I was and still am haunted by the possibility that I could hurt Juniper as my father has hurt me and my mom. To become the father that I want to be, I have been doing the intense death work of rearticulating every way that my family and my culture has taught me to be a father to be reborn into the father I want to be.

Yet, I have been not given a safe space to go through that fatherhood death process. I had to advocate for the right to work from home to keep my family safe when the pandemic started. Having no paternity leave, I had to save up vacation days for a year by not taking a day off in a pandemic and take leave without pay to take a modest ten week paternity leave when Juniper was born. With my mother passed on some eight years ago, I have had no one, besides my therapist and Lily, I felt safe to talk to about the difficulties about becoming a father. To make matters worse, I had little space to process the transition I was experiencing. In the first six months of Juniper’s life during the winter of 2021, Lily and I only had the help of three safe people. During this process, I have never felt more let down by the institutions and society that I was a part of.

All this would have already been enough, but our difficulties were compounded by the trauma we faced during the birthing process. Lily experienced prodromal labor, laboring for over two days before Juniper was born. In the birthing process, Lily experienced one of the worst tears one can get. To top that off, we had to watch in agony as Juniper had wasn’t breathing as she entered the world into my hands. As the neonatal intensive care nurses helped her breathe manually, we repeatedly asked the nurses, the doctors, and any of the 12 or so people in the room who would listen, “is she ok?” Those first moments stretched on for what seemed like an eternity as our little bean sat between this world and the eternal. This is why I scowl when people start to tell me of their magical birthing process. I am happy for you, but I don’t want to hear it. I am still grieving that we didn’t get that. I am still grieving that we have had to fight tooth and nail to get Juniper here safe and sound, going to hell and back.

With all the difficulties of mourning my own death process and the trauma associated with our far from ideal birth, I have had little space or energy to grieve the societal collapse that is occurring outside our doors. We have movements for black lives whose calls for change have only been addressed at the most rudimentary level. We have neoliberal democrats willing to throw us back into workplaces too soon to placate corporate interests. We have over 800,000 people dead from COVID while people still claim religious exemptions to vaccine mandates under the rationale that they are a “mark of the beast.” We had far right extremists storm the capital in an attempt to take power from a democratically-elected president. Locally, we have had multiple mass shootings and a recent wildfire wiped out over 1,000 homes. I do not think I have ever felt like my day job as a sociologist was more pointless than in the last two years. What good is it to diagnose problems when elected officials are more interested in putting our lives at risk then solving these problems? Yes, there have been innumerable times in the last two years that I felt hopeless, disenchanted, and lost swimming in these difficulties.

What did I do in the face of these difficulties? If I am honest, I just dropped out as much as I could. I hide out in my basement and played video games. It felt like I was not even present to my life, getting lost in some semiconscious state where I was pretty angry and miserable a lot. I sought some sense of self worth by winning in a video game that is just another means a corporation tries to milk money from its consumers. I try to not beat myself up about it, because everything Lily and I were going through was all too much at the time. I try to remind myself that at least I was feeling my feelings this time and not pushing them down, resulting in another OCD episode. Yet, still, I was just avoiding the weight of all these difficulties. I neglected my writing goals. I neglected my weaving goals. I neglected my magic. Hell, my only goal was to just get through each day. I understand the role this time played in my wintering, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it.

With this context in mind, you can start to see the real power of my introductory vignette. Even with all that I have been through, I recently have found some way to not give up my attempts at praxis, or practicing what I preach and living in accordance with my values to create a better world for my daughter. My mom may be dead. I may answer other people’s questions for money. I may be struggling to be the father I want to be in these turbulent times. I may be incredibly angry at the state of the world. Yet, I am still here. I still can act. I can still dream. I will not give up hope that I can accomplish my dreams.

I planted a seed to a new life by unsubscribing from Spotify that day. Small acts only appear as such from the outside. Just as a seed looks fairly insignificant upon cursory examination so to does the small act of defiance. However, the small act, like the seed, contains the entire cosmos. It holds the hope of rebirth and growth of a new life. The moment I started to organize my music listening a different way, in alignment with my values, I gave myself permission to plant the seed of a new life in the fertile soil made from my own death. I gave myself permission to let go and allow myself to die and be reborn. Now, I feel that I have the ability to start chasing dreams that I only whispered about to a few close friends. I feel like I can chase the dream of writing a book chronicling my experience discovering fiber death work and magick.

However, I need to make some changes in how I write to get there. Writing for Instagram will not allow me the possibility to write the book I want to write. It is not a platform that is conducive to long form writing for a number of reasons.

First, as James Williams notes, our goals when using social media are not in alignment with those platforms’ goals for us. Reflecting on my own goals, a couple come easily to mind. I want to write a book inspiring people to weave their own fiber magick. I want to weave beautiful tapestries that help those travel to the otherworld or heal from their own death work. I want to rekindle the magick of my Celtic ancestors to re-enchant this world. Instagram’s goals are very different for me, as James Williams notes in his excellent Stand Out of Our Light:

“success from their perspective is usually defined in the form of low-level ‘engagement’ goals, as they’re often called. These include things like maximizing the amount of time you spend with their product, keeping you clicking or tapping or scrolling as much as possible, or showing you as many pages or ads as they can.”

Instagram doesn’t care about my goals. They designed an experience that attempts to keep me on the platform as much as possible, which takes away precious time from the actual goals I want to accomplish. We are nothing more to them than little nodes of energy that they can mine data from and serve advertisements to. In such a system, me bearing the deepest corners of my struggles and triumphs is only useful to them as a way to increase engagement and the number of ads it can serve folks interacting with my work.

Second, the design of Instagram limits the depth, context, and exploration you can provide in your writing. Captions are capped at about 2,220 characters, about 290 to 500 words. The limits this places on one’s imagination are real. Sure, you can add additional writing in comments on your post, but the platform is designed to not encourage that. I have felt this design limitation colonize my own writing and estimation of my abilities. Before committing to writing this piece on Substack, there were multiple times I questioned if I could write more than 500 words for a piece. This doubt is only rendered absurd when considering I have written dozens of academic and technical reports that range from roughly 20 to 200 pages. The flurry of joy that I have gotten by giving myself the space to write this piece reaffirmed my decision to jettison Instagram for my writing. I just can’t put those limits on my storytelling anymore.

Third, social media is designed to encourage speedy, shallow interactions. I know this because I endlessly scroll and check the app every day. We all do it. We slide our index finger down our screens, pause to glance every now and then, and repeat ad infinitum. There are people pouring their heart out on that platform, and we are so saturated with information that we cannot even begin to engage in a meaningful manner on a consistent basis. If we did have the space to read the caption, we might throw some emojis up or offer a few encouraging words. More often than not, however, we are speeding our way through information and interacting with each other at a very surface level. I have been on the giving and receiving end of that and it all just feels deflating.

The consequences of keeping my writing on Instagram are real. I am concerned that the longer I spending creating on that platform and submit my writing to these limitations the more of my life I will give up to creating by a set of rules that don’t align with my values. All these gripes might seem mundane and minor, but James Williams explains the very real stakes of the attention economy of social media clearly:

“We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe the with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live or even worse, undermine or capacities for reflection and self regulation.” Jenny Odell quoting James Williams’ post on Oxford’s Practical Ethics Blog.

Yes, to this point, I have just kept quietly saying I would like to write a book, while I spend my precious writing time developing captions for IG. Not any more. I want to live the life I have dreamed for myself, not the life that keeps people engaged with an app that is just a promotional tool. I want to write books and engage in my craft: Relevance on a promotional tool be damned.

Rather than step out of the digital sphere altogether, I want to take a lateral step into the email newsletter, which encourages a slower pace of conversational engagement.

I want to hold out the possibility that the email newsletter format I am exploring on Substack can be a possible contemplative digital space for all of us to explore. Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” may be the most important book I have read in the last five years. In that book, she calls us to not abandon the attention economy embodied in social media but fight to rearticulate the role it plays in our lives through a sort of refusal to play by the rules of the game as they are articulated by social media corporations. I think platforms like Substack, which encourage deep engagement with writing, are a possible tool for such refusal. As Odell states:

“The artist creates a structure…that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it. . . . I find myself gravitating toward these kind of spaces—libraries, small museums, gardens, columbaria—because of the way they unfold secret and multifarious perspectives even within a fairly small area. But of course, this infolding of attention doesn’t need to be spatialized or visual.” pg. 6-7 Jenny Odell “How to Do Nothing”

I think that the humble email newsletter is a beautiful structure for folx to answer a call to attention to unfold the sort of “secret and multifarious perspectives” that Odell speaks of. It encourages us to set aside a moment to engage with a person’s writing as we would a book. It encourages us to stop scrolling and start tuning into the diverse perspectives that are available in the world. I hope that my newsletter can offer you that moment’s reprieve from the speed of our modern world.

My experience interacting with Ani Lee’s excellent Close Knit patreon email newsletter showed me this shift is possible. Every month I get this lovely newsletter of Ani talking to me about what she has been working on and what she has been thinking about. Whenever I get the email, I make a date with myself for later when I am free later to gobble up what she has to say. After reading, I send her a little note back with how her email stirred things in me. Inevitably, we end up chatting about this and that and it keeps our friendship a moving along. That’s what I want with this Substack. I want folx to have the opportunity to make a date with my writing and start a conversation with me about it. That sort of engagement might be the most radical refusal in place one can have to the current attention economy. You don’t have to leave the attention economy; You can just start engaging differently with the people whose voices you value.

Finally, one last word, I would love to write this sort of work full time. I have been giving away my writing for free for four years on a platform that has made money off of the engagement they get from my most personal stories. I think my writing, like my woven work and teaching, is worthy of financial remuneration, and I want to use Substack to eventually open up paid subscriptions to folx who are interested in supporting my work. All the details of how that paid tiers will play out are still up in the air, but I want to bet on myself here. I want to believe that I can write a book on a scheduled basis on this platform and get support from y’all to write it. It’s what I have always dreamed of, and I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t give it my best shot.

Thanks for reading! Did you enjoy the piece? Subscribe for free to receive reflections straight to your email box and support my work.