Weaving My Way Back from the Brink

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I did it! I finished the final ritual for Destiny’s memorial cloth for her sweet departed doggo Luigi! Remember when I told you I was going to use the reposting of my enchanted fiber arts series essay on binding and endings to jumpstart my way into finishing the final blessing? Well, I followed through magnificently with the help of my friends. Specifically, I enlisted the assistance of my friend Hannah Haddadi of Mourning Light Divination to help me identify an offering for sacred death to ensure that my approach to the final blessing would be done in reciprocity. Yes, as a fibrous magic worker, I firmly believe in a reciprocal relationship with my spirit guides and don’t just take, take, take from them. Hannah channeled that dried chrysanthemum, orange peel, and elder flower placed in three distinct tiny bowls and given as an offering to sacred death would be perfect. I let that offering marinate on my death altar for a few days until it felt right to approach the final blessing for the cloth.

The cloth itself is the result of weeks of painstaking hand labor. I blended white and brown Shetland fiber on hand carders, spun the resulting rolags on my drop spindle, and used the custom blended yarn to create an ombre effect on the tiny cloth between the poles of white and chocolate brown. The ombre effect takes the viewed from the darkness of the margins in brown through the undulation of the blended light brown to the white center. This passage between these poles prepares the viewer for the true spectacle of this piece: Luigi’s fur protruding right out of the center in a backdrop of white light. It was a happy accident that all the colors that I chose to set up the drama of Luigi’s fur are perfectly in tune with the drama and show-dog-ship of Luigi’s fur.

The handcrafting of this piece has been done for months. However, after my bike crash, I hesitated on approaching the final spell work for this piece. In my experience, it’s always important to heed one’s intuition on whether the time is right for important magic rites. Having my own bout with a multitude of tests to determine whether something was seriously wrong with me after my bike crash, I did not think it wise to approach honoring the life of another being. Death work of this sort is very important to conduct from a position of balance and reciprocity. Seeing as I was in a very explicitly different place of begging for help from my guides in the aftermath of my crash, this spell work just had to wait. In my experience, this patience is always awarded.

In the interim, I let the cloth sit on my death altar. Each night when I did my own personal blessings, prayers, clearing, and acknowledgements, I would spray the cloth with a custom herbal spray called “In Memoriam,” developed by Hannah, and utter a simple spell over the piece. The spell differed each day, but it called for recognition and ease of Luigi’s journey and his loved one’s grief. Writing this now, I see how special this spell-aging process was. Like a fine wine, I let the handwoven cloth sit on my altar and accumulate months of herbal and spoken spells. Yes, this process was embarked upon due to my own discernment about my inability to complete more substantial rites with the cloth at the time, but it does not negate how special the resulting cloth felt energetically. The cloth absolutely glowed when viewed through a magical lens. This was mostly Luigi’s work, since the energy he imbued the piece with was nothing short of amazing, but I like to think my spell work helped as well.

Eventually, I felt like the time was right to complete the final ritual. I didn’t over plan my ritual. Most times, I am very explicit with what I want to accomplish and the exact wording I want to use in my spells. I like to control the minute minutiae of my ceremonies, because the designing of ornate rites is quite fun. With this ritual being a return to magic for me after my crash, I did not want to overcomplicate it. Yes, I wanted it to be special, but I wanted to keep it simple to allow the spontaneity of the moment guide the magic. This ended up being exactly what was needed for this piece. As is typical, I cleared away any of my energy that attached to the cloth that wasn’t meant for the piece with spritzes of lavender water. This was especially germane given my crash. I did not want Luigi’s loved one’s saddled with a cloth that still had some of my own baggage attached to it. Then, I journeyed to my own personal underworld with the cloth and presented it to sacred death at our community table for blessing. The final blessing was given to this piece, “May this weaving be a vessel for Luigi’s memory and be a safe place for his loved ones to experience grief and remember him. We say this all with harm to none.” With this final blessing given, the cloth was anointed with rose water. I closed the ritual circle in my customary way and looked upon my recently completed weaving with satisfaction.

There have been many times when I feel like enchanted weaving has brought me back to life. This is just another chapter in that incredible story. Prior to completing this ritual, I felt tangentially connected to my life. I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and I would receive terrible news about my own health. In short, I was far away from my own body and spirit caught up in the potential doomsday scenarios that I was terrorizing myself with in my imagination. Yes, the most imaginative people do have a deliriously awful capacity to haunt themselves! With this ritual complete, I felt like I re-inhabited my own body and spirit. Through the embodied practice of making enchanted textiles, I was able to re-establish that link between the mind, body, and spirit. I was able to exit the doomsday film running in my head and get back to the everyday work of serving my friends and community with my weaving, storytelling, and magic. Huzzah for magic and textiles!

This is where we come full circle; I always end up just as served by the person who has asked me for my services as I hope they are by the enchanted textile that I have provided them. Without fail, the great web that connects us all always has each chance meeting set up as a reciprocal exchange that is sure to alter the future of each person. Little did I know when I agreed to this trade with Destiny that this little piece would help me return to my life as I knew it before my bike crash. However, this is what is so damn compelling about being alive, on this planet, at this moment. You just never know what will happen and how your life will be changed by your community. The only thing you really have to do is guide the rudder of your life towards those people, ideas, and practices that you believe in most. The great web, through which we are all interconnected, will do the rest! It is always there to catch us when we have fallen down and provide the exact remedy we need to return to living.

If you want a memorial cloth, let me know. I love making these so much as a death worker. The two times I have been invited into this work have been so affirming and life changing for me. I live for this work and would love to be in community with you helping you make a handwoven vessel for a loved one.

The city is always changing, churning and responding to what is going on outside its confines. If you set out to really see the place where you live, you will see people use public (and daringly private) space as an art gallery to express their views about our contemporary, corporate-controlled reality. They, in the spirit of Banksy’s manifesto, are pushing back against a world full of corporations constantly, “ taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.” Those moments where one’s everyday life and familiar spaces become an incubator for dissent are when we see a portal to new possibilities open up. That’s where I think changes to everyday life are possible.

Folks are always seeking to revolutionize the experience of the city for their neighbors. That is the goal, isn’t it? Lotsa folx try to leave their mark on the places they live. They problem is that corporate goals are typically aimed at fleecing money out of people’s pockets (aka dominating in a capitalist market place), not serving or educating their neighbors. I’m not for that sort of revolution. I have already lived through most of the great retrenchment of corporate power over my 38 years of life. (No, corporations are not people.) The revolution I seek is the same one articulated by French marxist Henri Lefebrve back in 1947: “to change life, lucidly to recreate everyday life.” YES! Henro I, too, want to vividly recreate everyday life by pushing back against the corporate oligopoly that tries to limit my dreams of the future. I want to reclaim my visual space around me from advertisements so that my neighbors to express their frustrations and joys and tell their stories.

Much of my omen bike questing now is built on trying to hone my eyes to notice these moments when people are taking back the definition of their everyday life and their space. This is praxis in a nutshell. I am taking what I am learning from Henri Lefebrve’s “The Critique of Everyday Life” and making it a set of marching orders for how I engage with the world. The result has been a dramatic expanse to how I understand riding a bike. Rather than being obsessed with decay (OK, I STILL LOVE DECAY), I am using Lefebrve’s revolutionary aim to look for those spontaneous moments where a new everyday life is poking its head out in a new space or is being covered over with beige paint. Documenting those moments and talking about them is a real exercise in hope for me, because its built on the idea that people’s small actions to express themselves and take back their space matter. Nothing could be more revolutionary in a society that tells you to shut up about genocide and go ahead and sit back and enjoy the next corporate-sponsored spectacle (Yes, this is a nod to SHARON!) Action in urban space is an essential ingredient to a vibrant, community-led future.

Below are a selection of stickers, tags, and wheat paste posters that show how much the city is churning and burning to be engaged with the world at large. Whenever I need to be reminded that another world is inevitable, I return to my little wanders around the city and see the artifacts of people striving to raise awareness, express themselves, and defiantly fight the powers that be. It’s those moments that give me life, because I realize that my neighbors are constantly engaged in redefining everyday life away from the corporate-fueled ad-scape that is foisted upon us toward something that is community-driven.

Often, the music I am listening to is a reflection of my mental state. For years after becoming a father in the pandemic, I listened to angry, dark, and loud music, because I felt caught in a world where I was unable to keep my family safe or effect larger changes in the world in alignment with my values. Life felt like a cascading series of opportunities for people and social structures to let me down. What occurred to me while riding this week was that I am having trouble listening to that same angry, loud, dark music that was such a balm years ago. Something has shifted in me of late. Its possible that the bike crash knocked some sense into me. Tehehe. In it’s place, I have returned to the progressive rock and experimental music of the 1970s and 1980s. There has been a steady stream of Eloy, King Crimson, Rush, Robert Fripp & Brian Eno. This all seems appropriate to me. I need complicated, poly-rhymic music for complicated, poly-rhythmic times. Perhaps this shift and my return to reading theory, signals a return of philosopher James, an alter-ego that you see poking out here in this and last weeks essays. Maybe there is still hope for me to be a philosopher. That’s what I wanted to do with my Sociology PHD. I wanted to be the next Foucault, Baudriallard, or Marx and settled into being a cubicle-dwelling analyst. Hehe. To celebrate this possibility, please listen to Brian Eno & Robert Fripp’s album, “The Equitorial Stars”

I hope you are well dear reader! Thank you for your attention and care. You are what makes this whole project go round!

Best,

James