"We don't waste death"

It’s been all about quiet, next drenched moments of shifting into late summer for me this week. It’s been about finishing weavings; spinning yarn; calling people on the telephone for help; watching Despicable Me 2 with Juju on the couch in the mourning; getting a magical tattoo that symbolizes as above, so below (see above); riding bikes by myself in 130 year old cemeteries; building up bikes with friends new and old; eating heavenly ripe palisade peaches with lunch, dinner; harvesting the sticky, sweet—slightly sharp smelling—blooms of calendula; delighting in new friend Dyers chamomile finding its first blooms in my yard (see below), finding blooms behind 8ft tall mugwort plants of flowers I planted seeds for years ago. This is the sort of cutting to the marrow of life that feels so hard won for this harvest season. It’s just been so hard to be present to my life these last few years that to have this cascade of tiny beautiful moments is just so wonderful. 

I mean it’s odd to say, but it’s just such a change to have dreams and to chase them. I suppose if we want to go there and pathologize me I was likely experiencing some pretty significant anger and depression. Mental illness can be like that where you don’t really truly understand what you are experiencing until years later. I know that was true with my OCD. You mean there is a world where the things you obsess over aren’t driving your every waking moment? Well, I didn’t know that to be the case until I completed exposure therapy. There was some grief with the decade or so I lived my life running from my obsessions. It’s the same with my depression and anger I have experienced these last few years. It wasn’t until I found a significant break from them in my own mental health that I realized how much they were coloring my worldview. There is grief for this time too. It’s sad to me that we all collectively had to go through this time of illness, death, and the naked truth that we are on our own. 

I know that depression and anger makes it hard to have dreams, string together sweet moments, or even consider a future that entails more than survival. I mean, I still had sweet moments, but they were always the exception, rather than the rule. Now here, I find myself in this deeply layered harvest season just absolutely reaping the returns on all the hard work I have sowed. As I have said before, I feel like I slipped that snare by finding a way to deal with a deep pain — my masculinity wound — that has been haunting me most of my life. The question that I have been asking myself incessantly the last ten years has been: “well, who the fuck am I if I am not striving to achieve some made up bullshit in a rat race?” In short, who the fuck am I if I am not performing in accordance with male gender norms. This season I feel like I have harvested the best answer for that question: I’m a magical being that does things that bring me a sense of joy and fulfillment.

Notice that my definition of who I am does not include a gender? Well, that’s an important snare to slip if one wants out of the typical pitfalls to needing passive watching of sports ball to build stereotypical male friendships. No, I would much rather share music, a quest, learning with new friends, regardless of what gender they identify with. Those are all endeavors that bring me such joy. I would also rather move my body in play, than competition. Death to the zero-sum games that keep a score and log a winner, especially those folks in organized cycle racing that are putting super anti-trans policies in place. I hope that blatant oppression dies quickly. Long live the meandering nectar that comes with dancing, head banging, riding bikes to check out a creek, sauntering down a road with a toddler, drinking coffee and talking about future plans where everyone is included.

More importantly, I think a big part of finding joy is being delighted by yourself. Like I legit feel like my own best friend sometimes. I think I am quite clever and funny. Like I was making lunch about an hour ago and chuckling to myself about an idea I had for this fundraising project I am participating in for a new bike shop that they are opening. Like I want to write up a description of the weavings I will be making, including a piece that will be used to adorn a bike bag or front basket, and have it exude part Ultraromance Ron and gutter mutant Jim in the foothills of the rocky mountains. For some reason, thinking through what that language would look like made me so supremely happy. Like I am just so delighted that I have a brain that I can use as a particle accelerator where I ram cultural milieus into one other at high speeds and see what comes out. Like, you also have that too, so maybe go pleasure yourself (an actual thing my grandmother-in-law said to my father-in-law once—CRINGE) with your brain particle accelerator.

Fulfillment is another bigger part of my pathway. It’s not accomplishment. I have chosen very specifically to part ways with accomplishment as an orienting framework for what I produce with my hands or mind. I soured on accomplishment doing billable hours for a tour of duty in an indentured servitude gig where I logged who was gonna get billed for every 15 minutes of work I completed. A lot of project milestones were accomplished in those times, but I felt very little fulfillment with the work was complete. Nothing was ever completed to my satisfaction to give me a greater sense of fulfillment that my work was of a high quality. Contrarily, when I am working with my hands and mind to build things like stories or weavings or travel places, I have the ability to work to my hearts content on the intricate details and nuances of my craft or the surrounding environment. I can lose myself in endeavors without ever having to accomplish or complete anything because there is still intrinsic value in the crafting or traveling journey.

This is an incredibly anticapitalist way to orient one’s behavior in the world. I think it is absolutely vital to side-step the hustle culture in how I orient my own thoughts on the worthiness of my actions. I do not want to be perpetuating economic systems that spread false value systems that routinely leave people feeling deflated, small, and alone. No, ever since watching my mother die a slow, painful death to a preventable form of cancer because she was poor, I have vowed to make anticapitalism the core of my practice. There will be no bosses or managers in my action. There will be no glorification of how much is sold or working long hours to sustain life. That is all part and parcel of the value system connected to capitalism that says to you, “You must earn your living, your worth.” No, I unilaterally disagree. You are fundamentally valuable and deserving of life just by being alive. All your actions expressing the ever-changing, curious, capable hump of animate clay that you are are worthy of celebration, regardless of what some other dingbat wants to say about it. SO, like, I am just not gonna do that, end rant from SURLY SERF JIM.

Also, don’t get all purity politics about anticapitalism. If you want to sell things that you make with your hands for a fair price that compensates you for your materials, time, and expertise, do you. I think a lot of socialist/anarchists get really weird about small businesses, because they live in worlds that are highly theoretical and mediated. We are all trying to escape serfdom and carve out little niches for ourselves that don’t include having a foot on our necks.

One of the oddest realizations I had recently is how private I have made my death work practice. I had taken away any mention of being a death worker in my social media. I had not really discussed the day to day work I do with my death altar. I have not mentioned how sacred death has made his way into my grove with the rest of my guides in my Irish polytheistic spirituality. There have been little hints of that here and there. Me saying I Feel like an Echo, is an explicit mournful dirge of the grief I feel for past versions of Denver. It’s hard to underscore just how pervasive with way of viewing the world is for me.

ECCE MORTEM, I will behold death in its myriad forms in anyway I encounter it today. That’s the commitment I make to sacred death every day. I will bare witness to the literal and figurative deaths of individuals and the deaths of concepts, communities, and values that I hold dear. This is a holistic view of death work that doesn’t just pop in when an individual needs assistance. No, it’s the sort of death work that also takes seriously the sort of macro-level deaths of species, crafts, languages, and cultures, freedoms. To straddle the portal of this world and the next is the work of the death worker. To walk the tight rope recognizing the inseparability of individual and collective deaths is also the domain of the death worker. This has been the thrust of my work to highlight the importance of societal death work. I suppose its my unique lot in life as a sociologist of genocide and domination and a death worker to make this connection for folx, so I will keep screaming it from the roof tops.

With all that, I have been invited into some fiber death work projects of late as well. I literally will drop everything I am doing if you ask me to make you a death weaving. People typically want me to make them a protection or inspiration spell weaving, because, you know, we live in a society that will not talk about death, let alone work magic around it. Friend o’ the druid, Sista of Sista Luna Makes commissioned a weaving to symbolize her intention to hold a light in the darkness, like the Hermit’s lantern, that could be used to ensure she acts in accordance with her ancestral wisdom: “We do not waste death.” THIS IS WHAT I AM HERE FOR! It was my overwhelming joy to create this custom fiber oracle card for Sista that she could use in her own ancestral death work practice.

The next death-related project in the queue is a memorial cloth. I met up with my friend for a DOPPIO ESPRESSO at a local cafe and she provided me some of Zoe’s fur, who will be passing soon. After taking my first sip of the sweet espresso, I immediately demonstrated how I would be carding zoe’s fur into some Shetland wool and handspun her a sample so she could see the color. People were staring. This is why Lily doesn’t take me anywhere. Over the next few weeks, I will be carding, spinning, and weaving this death cloth for my friend to have a memorial for her sweet fur child. I AM HERE FOR THIS AS WELL! This is the sort of beautiful memorial fiber death work that I love to be invited into. Stay tuned to more videos and storytelling around this project in the coming weeks.

I visited Fairmont Cemetery as well. It was totally unplanned too. I just happened to see an article about how amazing it was in the local paper one day and realized how close it was to my house. No photos or videos were taken, because it felt appropriative to do so. Little offerings were left and time was spent familiarizing myself with the place. It’s a cemetery that’s over 130 year’s old, so you can feel its power while you are there. Everything is a little quieter inside its gates. I am excited to begin my weekly sojourn to Fairmont next week!

If you are death-curious and want to learn how to work with death spiritually, may I suggest Mourning Light Divination’s Tending Descent Program? The program is run by my friend Hannah Hadaddi, a Persian Death Witch, who has taught me everything I know about death work. I was a participant in the last cohort of Tending Descent and it changed my life. I was given all the tools I needed to create my own death work practice that merged in seemlessly with my life. I wasn’t just handed a list of dos and don’ts. I was empowered to decide for myself what my relationship with sacred death would be and how I would be a death worker every day in my life. I will be participating in the program again as a teaching aide to Hannah, giving a talk on societal death work, and doing a short conversation with Hannah about my own client work I do with my death and memorial cloths. Hannah is currently accepting applications, So if you want to be in magical space together and step into death work, this is a great opportunity to do so!

Final note! We are three weeks away from me opening up the paid version of this project. September is the one year anniversary of this weekly essay project, and I could not be happier to have almost 400 as subscribers! The format will be one free essay a month and three that are available for subscribers only. Subscriptions will be $7 a month or $70 for a full year. I just want to bet on myself after nearly 6 years of giving all my stories away for free that I am worthy of being paid to do all this work. It’s a big shift. I have to notify my primary employer. I will have to pay taxes. I will have to put myself out-there to the world in a way that I never have. I hope I am worthy of your support in these cash-strapped times. No worries if I am not. I totally get it.

Be well, dear reader,

James

Jinxies, you made it all the way to the end! Thank you for reading. I so appreciate you. If you were delighted by what I wrote, consider subscribing for free to get the next two essays for free!