As Donald Trump is being sworn in this morning, I am thinking about the annual Weaving ritual we hold here in Maine. This is a ritual of community vision. What came out of the rite this past October was the immense grief people are experiencing from seeing the destruction of the Earth and the mass extinction of her children in all their wondrous forms. I read a quote from Stephen Jenkinson that gives clarity to what I have been trying to express in my local Pagan community. Stephen’s quote was in response to a question about climate change. It applies to any situation though. Here it is:
“Grief requires of us that we know what time we’re in. And the great enemy of grief is hope. The basic proposition of hope is: you hope for something that ain’t. You don’t hope for something that is. It’s always future oriented, which means, hope is inherently intolerable of the present. The present is never good enough. Our time requires of us to be hope free. To burn through the false choice between hopeful and hopeless… it’s the same con job. We don’t require hope to proceed. We require grief to proceed.”
Our communities needs to become very adept at holding space for and processing the pain emanating from the death, destruction, and desecration of our home. The consequences of climate change and Geo-political destabilization is crashing down hard. The Earth is in crisis. While it is necessary to hold a vision, to begin to dream a better future, it is vital we learn to deal with the immediate. This situation is no different than dealing with the gods, for they are one in the same. We have to first honor the gods beneath our feet and all around us, honor the spirits of place, before we work with those from away or work with abstraction. We need to deal with immediate before we look to the future.
Indeed, we have to “know what time we’re in”. This is the gift of working with our ancestors. They ground us in time. And this is our time, our moment, our heritage writ large.
During the last half of the 20th Century, Paganism experienced a rebirth. There were daring and visionary people who realized the divine feminine had to be given voice, honored, and listened to, people who recognized Nature as sacred. Patriarchy was killing us and destroying the planet. A new paradigm needed to come forward. This rebirth was the beginning.
Now we begin to witness the backlash. With the election of an unstable misogynistic reality TV star as President, consequence will escalate. Destruction will escalate. Does anyone doubt this? Climate change deniers heading the EPA; people heading departments they vowed to destroy; a cabinet whose net worth is more than the budgets of many States (this is literally true). With Capitalism and exploitation as our modus operandi, this destruction was a matter of course. As with all structures, collapse is inevitable. The more complex and energetic that structure, the more catastrophic the collapse. So the question for me is, “how do we respond?”
What comes to me is, the need to express my own grief and hold space for those who need to grieve. Death is coming. And we have better honor the gods of death, become intimate with them. If we don’t have ourselves grounded in the Earth, if we don’t approach death with a wholeness of being, we will be overcome with the power of grief the collapse will bring. We need to stop looking towards the future and deal with the present.
To that end, I have made my preparations for my own death so it minimizes the stress when it comes. Outwardly, I am offering regular circles for moving grief, for making magic, for rituals honoring all those who die due to the harm brought on by our culture of desire and disconnection – the wild creatures going extinct, the coral reefs, the starving children, the women being subjected and discarded, the poor being exploited, those who die in war, those who die from drugs because the pain of reality is too much to handle, and on and on. I want to hold space for those who feel the pain of these deaths in their bones. These voices need to be heard. And I ask that others step up and do the same.
My teacher once said to me, “Peace is the lack of need”. We have to meet the needs of everyone in our ecosystem, all the spirits of place, or there will never be true peace. Holding space for grief, honoring the gods of Death, honoring the dead and the dying, these are places with great demand for those willing to be in service. We need people in our Pagan communities willing to be in service to gods of Death. This will plant the seeds for peace.
To be perfectly honest with you, I am filled with doubt. My instinct is to stop caring, to be in denial, to go shopping and to get drunk. Fight or Flight. I want to flee but I know there’s nowhere else to go. So that leaves fighting. To bring sanctity and honor to our participation in this bigger story, that is fighting the good fight. Giving the choice, I choose honor. I choose seeing the sacred in the whole of this catastrophe.
Some thoughts to share with you on this dark day.
Peace and more peace,
Snowhawke /|\
Thank you Kevin. You’re absolutely right…there needs to be room for grief. Without feeling those feelings, and acknowledging the events that created them, then there’s no room for hope and no momentum forward.
[…] Freaked out by the state of the world, and politics? Yeah, many of us are. Here are some tips for change-making, and my recent post on avoiding media overwhelm. Also, a unique perspective on dealing with environmental devastation. […]
Thank you. I’m drowning. I’ve been trying to resist, letter after letter, comment after comment to our republican congresswoman, former speech writer for the undertaker Paul Ryan. Each day it’s like shock and awe, dominate and humiliate. I thank you for helping me feel less alone while I’m drowning. The only thing I think helps is that there are a lot of us in this together. The bombing has done me in, more killing, better ways of killing, more profits for the exploiters. I’m in grief, total consuming grief and thanks for letting me hang it out there.
Thank you for your comment. This world is filled with horror and it is filled with beauty and inspiration. As we work to craft a sacred relationship to our world, we have to acknowledge both. It is exhausting to dwell only in the horror. It is essentially we take breaks from our resistance. The most important relationships we have are those which are immediate. So I recommend you take a break from the news and from the fight, and find your feet on the Earth, find the bigger flow of your ancestors to you, recognizing this is your moment. And take the time to honor the spirits of place, and recognize that you’re immersed in the sacred. Reweave your connection to place and let that feed you. If you don’t, your grief can consume you. Put your energies into relationships that bring you inspiration. My two cents :>)
Hi Kevin,
I’ve been taking a break from the news and wastebook. I’m leaving tomorrow for a camping trip at the ocean. Ocracoke. I’ve never been there and actually haven’t been to a warm ocean in years. Thank you for your advice. Permission granted and taken. I’ve become a junkie on following one bad thing after another and the hits keep coming and it’s so frustrating with another incoming without any resolution. Our congresswoman votes with them and is not too afraid as she’s backed by big big money at election time. She’s protected and that’s added frustration as we’ve had really good candidates run against her.
I’ve been enjoying the spring bird arrivals and trying to remember the sounds before seeing the bird which always delights me when I know by ear. I write down the first of season dates for all the birds that land in my yard. Today was the beautiful tinkling of the winter wren in the yard though I had a good look at one down the road a week ago. Yesterday morning sapsucker was rapping on something metal outside. I haven’t seen the barred owl since it warmed up. I fed him raw chicken when he came during the really sub zero weather and wouldn’t leave the feeder. I usually get one hunting the feeder every year but this year was different as he was starving and would let me walk up to six feet from him. There was a heavy crust on the snow due to rain, thaw, snow, freeze and lots of owls were suffering, the drought in the fall led to a low small mammal population. I’ve never fed an owl before but I was in touch with expert naturalists and was advised to. Some people were finding them dropped dead near their feeders. I started with a whole chicken and he’d incubate it all night and I next went to chicken pieces tied down to a platform with a shoestring. I’d bring the pieces in to thaw out during the day and he’d really ravage them. Also I bought some different seeds and corn and spread around on ground trying to attract small mammals and I had some voles show up and the big surprise. A pine martin! Thanks for the inspiration to find some inspiration. When I return I plan on starting a new course on welsh mythology although I don’t want to leave the Irish world I just spent studying rigorously for the past year. I just joined the ADF but I’m not sure it’s the right choice for me as I’m pretty sure I won’t do formal rites. I’ve learned to do things on my own and I might not be able to relate. Looking forward to some serious birding and to see some shorebirds. Thanks, yvette
Nice very well put a very true