A Multitude of Temples Await You

Here I sit sorta dumbstruck, having navigated a week of stringing along childcare and taking shifts with Lily taking care of Juniper. This is America. The America that pays little mind to your obligations outside of work, offering you a miserable little pittance of “vacation time.” You blow through that time pretty easily with the toddler illnesses, your own doctor’s visits, biweekly visits to your therapist, and other random emergencies that pop up. So, you get to spring break with your vacation time accrual bank (lol what theft) nearly empty and you just trying to survive the time and get some breaks where you can get them with reprieves from the back-up baby sitter and the in-laws. It’s not enough though. It never is, because the system asks to much of you to secure health care and money for food, shelter, water, and heat. So, my brain feels like spaghetti-os. Shout out to the real ones who know this means my brain is full on soup with pasta bits in it.

Here’s the real question: is Spagetti-o’s the poor person’s pasta fagioli? Shit, my mom loved getting pasta fagioli at olive garden (A DARDEN FOODS BRAND lol) to compliment her middle class fancy unlimited salad and breadsticks. That was before the divorce when we had money to go to olive garden. Death, upon death, upon death, and they keep coming. It woulda been rad if I just had to navigate my parents divorce and then my mother dying from poverty. I honestly think that would been enough, but sacred death had other plans for me. I feel like Alex DeLarge eyes clamped open, strapped to a chair in “A Clockwork Orange,” but I am watching more and more loved ones die—first in horror and then in understanding.

This week we lost Peter Homorody, my assistant college tennis coach. This was the dude that I listened to 70s era jazz fusion compact discs with in the van on our annual drive down to South Carolina to play dual matches. We’re talking Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Weather Report, Al Di Meola flowing out through minivan speakers in the encroaching dark somewhere in the West Virginia Mountains. This was the dude that rebuked me when I wore a CCCP shirt to tennis practice. Peter had the Soviets crush through his house on horseback in Hungary when he was a youth. This was the dude the irreverently said to me once, “what happened to you, you got fat” when I showed back up for spring practices my freshman year. He didn’t know my struggle to acclimate to that rich, predominantly white liberal arts school I attended. He didn’t know I was ridiculed for years for my weight. He didn’t know that I, like my mom, ate our feelings. Nor did he care to try. So, yes, another typical relationship with an a white man of an older generation, full of its occasional moments of comradery and betrayal (One of the many reasons I am a gender traitor). Guy is gone now, left us in a real hurry, with cancer taking him in a matter of weeks. I have seen that horror show before. It’s still as awful as the first time, but I understand its movements.

I wish people talked about this form of grief. You know, the complex kind of losing someone that was a daily part of your life for years and then wasn’t or doesn’t deserve your grief. I grieve these loses in the quiet in my basement by black candlelight. I don’t need much ballyhoo about them. I don’t need community ceremony. That’s how a past betrayal affects the grief process for me. I feel no need to be in community with his kin. However, I will mark his passing with smoke, fire, and word, because he was a good person with his own set of mistakes he has made. I will light a candle for him and wish him safe passage. Yet, his pathway is not mine to tend, nor do I want it to be. I don’t offer that to those who have broken my trust. Nor do you owe that to those who have broken yours. I hope you can find the way to thread the needle through these complicated losses. I know it has taken me some time to get here and I still find it entirely confusing with each person I experience it with. I am just trying each day to normalize how complicated grief is and crush all the dominant stories that tell you there is a certain way to grieve, that there are stages, or whatever BS they are trying to sell you. Grief is a dark abyss that one traverses only by throwing themselves off the ledge into the chasm and finding their footing in the most unexpected of places. Always has been, always will be. CRUSH THE GRIEF METANARRATIVES. LET YOUR GRIEF BE WHAT IT HAS TO BE IN THIS MOMENT.

Mogwai is so good at grief music. All their songs feel full of sorrow, longing, and lament. This pensive little number builds into two waves of crescendos that their music, and most post rock bands for that matter, are known for. After the second crescendo crests around the 4:37 mark of the song, the track cascades down into a simple piano melody before giving way to silence. That little moment of this song mirrors the grief process I was describing above. In the complexity of a crescendo, you are thrust into the maelstrom of chaos, emotionality, and darkness, yes darkness. Yet, when you dive into the darkness, there is always something to catch you: a memory, a song, a ritual, that brings you back to simple, solid ground. For me, its lighting black candles, burning Putressence’s pyre or memoriam incense, feeling through sad music, or completing spell work. Those are my simple piano melodies. That’s where I find my footing in the chaos of grief.

I wanted to revisit a series of four short essays I wrote in the winter 2020 and spring of 2021 about my piece “A Multitude of Temples Await.” In these essays, I am finding my footing with my fiber death work practice. I am talking earnestly and romantically about what it feels like to be weaving an explicitly liminal piece that touched on a multidimensional reality (this plan and the otherworld) that I was experiencing for the first time. The way I used to share these process photos and essays on instagram on a semiregular basis would result in people losing bits of the story along the way. For my own benefit, I wanted to reunite those deathly fiber stories and pictures of the weavings. I wanted the writing to unfurl itself in its text and be whole here. Not surprisingly, there is philosophy, magic, grief—all the components of a life I identify as in touch with tapping into the essential marrow of existence.1

Movement 1

“That which we can see is the visible; that which we cannot see is the invisible. Within us and around us there is an invisible world; that is where each of us comes from. Your relationship to the invisible world influences so much of your life. When you cross over from the invisible into this physical world, you bring with you a sense of belonging to the invisible that you can never lose or finally cancel. . . . When you enter the world, you come to live on the threshold between the visible and the invisible. . . . You are both artist and pilgrim of this threshold.”

John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes

Doing fiber death work has made it readily to me the thinness of the veil between our physical world and the invisible world of our ancestors. We often forget that we are on loan from the invisible realm; that we are here to sit upon the threshold between the visible and invisible until we are called back home. Knowing how close we are the mysteries of life and death, how can we not all have a special talent for tending to the doorway between the visible and invisible realms? We have come forth from the invisible realm of the ancestors at birth and witness those cross from and back to the invisible realm during this life. Each moment in this physical realm offers us an opportunity to sit at this threshold to bare witness to and help those crossing back and forth from ancestor realm. Knowing this, it’s hard not to sit awe-struck at the sacred potential this moment holds for us. We can choose to sit at the sacred temple of this moment and embrace the ethereal glow of the doorway between these two realms or we can turn away and deaden ourselves with the 1,000 distractions of our world. Me, I choose to sit aside this threshold and do the often forgotten sacred work of easing the burdens of those crossing back to the invisible realm.

Movement 2

“There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. . . Transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.”

John O’Donohue, “Anam Ćara”

Sitting in the quiet in my ritual circle, the ghosts of the past come forth out of the fog. Long buried in the countless moon cycles and turns of the wheel that came before I was rendered in clay, the stories, the songs, the people make themselves visible in the liminality of emerging, morning light. Being with the ghosts, wrapping myself in their wisdom, has taught me this path. It has taught me that as I traverse the threshold of this plane and the eternal, otherworld that I, too, become a ghost onto myself. I become a part of that ghost realm more and more as I walk this path, sharing its wisdom, and extending it the best I can. I recede into the company of the ghosts that shaped me to shape the next generation.

Something deep is happening in this weaving. It’s a different sort of death work. It’s the work of rendering visible the magical currents that help me tend to the doorway. I am sure I will have much to say on that later, but for now I am just grateful that I get to be a part of its creation. There is an important synthesis at play that is allowing me another spin of the spiraling work at play in this practice. I am being called to bring in new symbols, the spiral and the tree of life, that will deepen my engagement with my ancestors symbolic lore. I am experiencing the emergence of a springtime in my soul, after a period of profound wintering.

Movement 3

“Holy Mary mother of god, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen,” I intoned a final, third time, recognizing the family of the departed’s wish to have the presence of Christian deities and prayers present for the crossing. I then surrounded the soul force of the young man in the threefold medicine of my ancestor, earth, and spider circles, chanting Awen as each luminous ray of light gently embraced him.

I took a deep breathe in and said, “May you be supported to let go of what binds you to this place.” as I exhaled.

I took another deep breathe and said, “May you be healed of anything that still holds you afflicted and suffering, with the exhale of the breathe.”

With a final breathe, I said, “May you be surrounded in the strength to make this threshold crossing into the other world of our ancestors.”

The doorway to the eternal realm, stood slightly ajar to my right, had radiant white light escaping in sliver of light, as it does on the winter solstice at Newgrange. I sat there with the young man, standing vigil to the crossing. Eventually, I felt a sense of a passing through and contentment that I had not felt before. I smiled and nodded in acknowledgment. I blessed my altar, myself, and the doorway; cut my tie to the ritual, and closed my sacred grove.

I had a person I knew from the past continue on recently. I had not spoken to him in nearly 15 years, but he left an impression on my life that is still quite palpable even today. Hearing the news of his passing still pierced my heart even with that distance in time. He extended a care and kindness to people that is uncommon today, offering the sort of sage counsel in my late teens that one needs to hear from someone a few years older.

I usually shrink from these sorts of deaths. I try to sweep it into the corner to forget about it and move on. I tell myself that I had not spoken to this person in years, so why feel something about it. I try to push down the pain. I feel like our society in all its fear of death encourages us to do so. Yet, would our departed want to be swept aside this way? I think not. That’s why I invited the man into my circle today on the morning of the celebration of his life. I wanted to offer him the sort of healing, support, and strength that I would offer my own family. I wanted to invite his crossing the threshold into the eternal realm into my own life to return the kindness that he offered me in this life.

Movement 4

All of my weavings have a source. Most of them come from that Awen, divine inspiration in the Druidic tradition, flowing through a ritual circle or in the throes of making. It’s a subtle unfolding how that Awen works in my design process. It’s usually a little iteration on the design I am working on that presents some little nuance to how I think about the symbolic meaning of the story I am telling In the textile. However, every so often, I am startled into a synthesis of past and present symbology into a bold new combination of different parts; a new future, or woven world if you will. This design that I currently working on combines my family’s woven language symbols of past weavings with the flows that I have been working on with my death work weavings recently.

The most interesting thing about that Awen is that often you are left to your own devices to interpret its meaning. I surely feel that way with this weaving. I have been sitting in the quiet of the liminality of morning, as my ancestors were wont to do, to let the meaning emerge from the symbols. Slowly, and surely, possible interpretations of my ancestor’s and guides’ design come out of the fog. That is the sort of joy of inviting the quiet into your life in those liminal moments. Though we may feel that magic is dead, it, that magic, is always waiting for us to slow just enough for the emerging light of morning to shine new light on the wisdom to be gained from each sacred day.

And with that, dear reader, I leave you for another week.

Best wishes until next week.

James

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