Sit With Me Now and Listen to my Broken, Melancholic Record

“And I feel like I've been here before

Feel like I've been here before

And you know, it makes me wonder

What's going on under the ground”

—Deja Vu - Crosby Stills Nash & Young

In arguably one of the most anthemic albums of the hippie generation, David Crosby, who passed on this week, got the super group Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young to place his song Deja Vu, a real intense death song, to open side B \of the LP. With repetition after repetition of a simple idea in this song, Crosby noted that he feels like this isn’t the only time he has ever been “here” and that it really makes him curious about death. You ever feel like you have ever been here before? Crosby sure feels like we have. “We have all been here before,” he gentle croons over a bubbling guitar lick. I can’t help but think he is laughing in the next one with all the knowledge he has of the otherworld.

His music brings up memories of my mom. She told me about this music, her generation’s music. She, like Crosby, believed in past lives. They both believed that they had been here before. Me, I think I might be too simple, too covered in moss, to discern those lives if I have lived them. It could be that my journey toward my knowledge of these mysteries is just beginning. It’s a question that still haunts me now as I approach my midlife at 36 years old. You know that average life expectancy for a white dude is like 76 years old, right? Heavy, right? Still I wonder will I ever be able to fully live into the magic that I know is around me? Will I ever be able to see through her eyes? 

If I am anything like grand mage Alan Moore, who become a ceremonial magician at 40, my journey hasn’t even started yet. There is some comfort in that thought as I sit here pouring my own musings into a notes app with Lily and Winston next to me. Maybe this is all just the fine tuning, the chiseling that must happen before the next step is taken. I have experienced those moments when everything changed and a next step had to come. I walked into a canyon once barefoot and came out different. I walked into a room and watched death enter and leave once, which shattered me in ways I would never know. I have been humiliated by the barbarity of 21st century work, as all of you I am sure have, and learned the hard lessons of choosing the least odious form of oppression to subject myself too. Right now, shoot, I am just chiseling, chiseling away, waiting for that step to arrive.

“You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another,” ole dark Mary Oliver said. This is the cackling, cunning Mary Oliver I enjoy. The one that writes about how stupid parking lots are. The one that right wing christians and Libs alike refuse to vibe with. This is just me reclaiming the parts of dark Mary I like, even though I got chippy with her in my last essay. She is not wrong though. It’s all up in the air if one will live to see that step taken. I may never get to take the step into that magic. I mean, my mom wasn’t given the chance to make all the changes she wanted to make while fighting cancer. One day we were celebrating a holiday together with her in remission and then still another day later the cancer was back. Still another day she was gone. Behold Death, Ecce Mortem, for this could be the day you die. 

This is all on my mind because my mom passed on 9 years ago this week. Are you sick of hearing about this yet, dear reader? I certainly feel like a broken record. But, if I am honest, this is my little listening corner where I can play that broken, melancholic record and let it soothe me. You can just leave this aging ole hermit in the dark with his little song if this exercise of excavating the temple of my memory has grown tiresome. I won’t mind. I mostly write this for myself anyways, because the time and occasion to talk about it at length is hard to find with a toddler and in our death phobic society.

Sometimes when I am at the coffee counter buying some ‘spro (did I age myself here? I was trying to sound like the cool jazz cats at the coffee counter.) time freezes and a potential scenario plays out in my mind. “How are you?” The barista asks. “Well, I have been reflecting on how today may be the day that I die. It makes everything ache in a beautiful and sorrowful way. Like, I am proud of myself for everything I have become but also sad that I don’t get to go farther.” I take a deep breath, sigh, and continue, “I am overwhelmed by the grinding nature of our society and happy to know I took my shots at it while I could.” The barista interjects, “excellent, a double shot it will be. Have a good one.” I snap back to reality and realize that none of it happened. But, but, but, I wish it had. How cool would it be to talk about death and how it interfaces with your everyday realty in a slow and deliberate way in such a mundane context? I would love that.

One thing that the last 9 years has taught me is that I was living too fast too see how my mom saw. I still actively remember not knowing what to do with the reality she described to me of flying in dreams, energy fields around people and trees, and knowing when someone will pass. I was too busy trying to play college tennis, then too busy getting a PhD, then too busy trying to make it in the corporate world to really see how she saw things. Fuck, I would trade all that shit to just go sit with her when her mind was clear and write everything down. I was too busy surviving and trying to not end up locked in poverty to be present for her worldview. Thanks again for that extra middle finger capitalism.

You can have qualms with my emphasis on placing blame on social structures, but remember, I am a sociologist. This is my worldview: structures like religion, capitalism, the family, government, and culture play a large role in either opening or closing opportunities for us to thrive or survive than any one person can. Too much of our wellness and mindfulness capitalism sells us on the idea that the individual is a primary mover in the universe. They sell us on the idea that the savior, typically you or some 21st century robber baron, can solve all our problems. In short, that “you are the architect of your own experience.” That’s not wrong. The creation of our reality is a relationship between these structures and the individual people that bring them to life and fight against them. Yet, I believe the inertia of structures and culture is more powerful than any one person. Capitalism is always trying to play up the power an individual has to alter their life or the world around them through their consumption or their business offering. Yet, what they are selling you is just the drapery of drudgery, the illusion that choosing your cereal is freedom. They sure as hades aren’t selling me the time I wish I still had with my mom. No, I am not going on the Oprah show and having her announce that “YOU GET TIME WITH YOUR DECEASED LOVED ONE!”

I just wish more people realized how many barriers capitalism places in the way of the death work. Here, I am not talking about the cost barriers to burial, though those are a real issue as well. I sat in the funeral home as a 28 year old and was handed an invoice for thousands of dollars for a cremation. I have experienced that con. No, I am talking about how our time with our loved ones or our capacity to be present with death as a community is stripped of us to perform a job that is likely incredibly unnecessary or could be performed in a fraction of its time. Yes, I am going off about capitalism stealing time from us again, because it’s true. This time theft places us on the defensive as death workers and grieving humans. We are always reacting to death, rather than celebrating life and preparing for a good death while someone is still here. That is the true tragedy of how capitalism robs us of space for death. Who has space to prepare for death when you feel like you are barely scraping by?

Even some of the more imaginative domains of death like imagining our ideal death are being desecrated. I would love to laid to rest naturally and taken by simple decomposition. Just let dem worms and some heat take me. Yet, recent scientific findings suggest that I may be putting out the trash bin with the compost in that plan. Indeed, microplastics, a ubiquitous form of pollution from the delivery system of our disposable, capitalist economy, were found in the blood of 17 of 22 individuals whose blood was sampled for an exploratory study of the presence of such pollutants in our bloodstream. The authors of the study note that the intake of microplastics is higher than our ability to get rid of it (i.e. poop it out) and these plastics could accumulate in our liver or spleen. Thank you, Capitalism, for stealing another one of my dreamscapes, for making me a trash heap. I look forward to a leaving behind my own little bundle of microplastics when my body returns to the clay from which it came. Please just set me on the ground when I die and I can live forever on in the little bundle of microplastics that will remain long after I am gone. What a fitting grave marker for those of us who lived during the great epoch of pollution and extinction. 

Why am I bringing all this curmudgeonly bile to your email box on a nice quiet Sunday? It’s because I believe in the emancipatory potential of telling the truth. It’s where sociology me aligns with druid me. If we are to walk the path of the hermit where we refuse to bow to any one dogma or master, we must believe in the power of our own discernment and dedicate ourselves to sharpening our sword of logic in pursuit of seeing organizations, our culture, and people clearly. We must be willing to be the person to pull back the curtain to display how manifesting one’s dreams is not equally open to every person. We must be willing to name the enemies that stand in the way of our collective liberation: racism, neocolonialism, classicism, patriarchy, white christian nationalism, homophobia, ableism, and any other of the forms of bigotry that abound today. We must offer people and institutions that embody those ideas no safe haven. Cast them out and cast out those parts of yourself where you see any of those ideas manifest. We must know that we can never return to brunch. That practicing death work will mean to take on the very cultural forces that seek to teach us to deny it until we are at its door.

“History is rife with the likes of you
History is littered with the likes of you
We'll never back down in the face of the likes of you
Never back down in the face of the likes of you

You're no better than the rest
White neo christian nationalist
Religious law, your litmus test
White neofascist supremist”

Anti-Flag “Christian Nationalist”

Instead of brunch, we can return to the ongoing work of dismantling whiteness, capitalism, patriarchy, and christian domination by rooting into where we live. This “bioregional animism” is described wonderfully in Rebecca Beyer’s recent book Wild Witchcraft, which she sums up perfectly in this delectable kernel sized bit of advice:

“We don’t have to have perfect unbroken witch-lineages, and we don’t have to speak spells that were written in the year 100 CE. We can find a new way for the the many of us who do not have access to unbroken traditions to live in this land and observe the seasonal changes that feel authentic. We can do it without appropriative spiritual picking-and-choosing that causes harm to indigenous folks and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People or Color) communities. We can find a new way to forage, to farm, and to listen. It’s both old and new….I see this as an invitation of intimacy with the animals, plants, minerals, and history that only comes with deep knowing of a particular place. This is one of the great gifts of bioregionalism to witches. What better bedrock to build a house of magic upon than one of deep knowing (of the places around me)?”

It’s here in this passage that I see so much of my own journey. In this passage, I see myself sitting in the grass in muddy boots in the shade of an oak tree, finding the pathway out of consumptive whiteness to root myself in the practices of my Irish and Scottish ancestors. I see myself in my dye garden with my spindle and loom in hand, discovering a barter economy for my hand spun, hand dyed spells that defies worthless gender conventions. By rooting myself, I found my own wildcrafted hedge Druidry that meets my spiritual needs and provides me a system to practice value aligned action toward creating a better world. Indeed, this rooting into a bioregional animism is a perfect alternative to the white, capitalist, patriarchal, christian world I was indoctrinated into as a youth. Who needs brunch when we got that?

Anyways, there will be more on that topic of crafting a value-aligned bioregional magic practice in future essays. I think the big issue I need to address is how does one develop practices that serve as the sort of restorative justice we need to perform to get right with the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute people’s land I am on. This is something that I don’t think I do a great job of at present and I want to encourage myself to get better as I write my essay next week. However, my brain is toast and my iPhone 8 bout to die. 

Be well, dear reader, until next time,

James

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