Full Moon: Why I choose animism, Celtic and otherwise

Hello. Although I've sent this on Friday as planned, I started writing it the night before. Part of that is some expected disruption to my daily routine tomorrow (that is, today), and part is that tomorrow (today) is likely to be markedly difficult for me to get through in general: December 9th is the day I've always observed as the birthday of the animal whom I tend to nickname as my familiar, although for many intents and purposes my cat can suffice.

As some of you are aware, he died in August after many, many years of health challenges that culminated in a stubborn, ferociously long-lasting battle against lymphoma. I'm still experiencing periods of deep, agonizing grief over his loss, in ways I'll probably write about some other time. In any case, I don't know his biological birthday, because I adopted him as a rescue, but after getting him I played a kind of divination game and told him to react in some way as I named months and then days. He blinked at "December" and then "9," and it was his birthday ever after. Along with his death-day, I'm still working out exactly what annual observances seem right for his absence and memory, but I think the first anniversaries will be the hardest ones.

With that unrelated prelude aside, in this week's newsletter I'm going to turn to what I consider the most open, most communal, most fertile phase of the moon: the full phase. Now is the time I find best for asking the questions which, unlike during the new moon, can be answered, even if the ways of obtaining those answers still require unusual or even seemingly fictitious methodologies. Now is the time when the Otherworld reveals itself to me in all its strangeness and when the ordinary world feels pregnant with potential. The night is no longer dark, only lit by a queer mirroring of the sun.

To better lay my path for future writings in the full moon's phase, I need to talk a little more about animism — and implicitly paganism, but as I discussed two weeks ago, while I might use these terms somewhat interchangeably, I may lean harder on animism because it can be a better generalization about other people's practices, even though what I personally do is both pagan and animist. With that in mind, I think it's important for me to more completely describe the value I've found in animism, and what personal animist reclamation paths I've chosen to walk (or not).

Reviewing the eco-social crisis: colonized minds

In my introductory post and the gigantic post that followed it, I've already written in at least some detail about how the ecological and social crises we're all undergoing are derived substantially from groups of people disconnecting in successive waves, intentionally or by force, from indigenous living and then gradually robbing this from other people too. I only say substantially and not entirely because just as I can't bring myself to say exactly one influence is responsible for this disconnection — it is Capital and Empire and Whiteness and Ideological Christianity and other related things, the great dung ball, whose precise components I will probably discuss in far-future installments — I also acknowledge that nothing in human and environmental relationships is so simple as to be reduced down to just one core problem at any given time. You can never systematize the world so totally as that, no matter how satisfying the pattern recognition feels. I know the temptation very well as a pattern recognizer, but I've come to believe real wisdom lies in recognizing chaos just as often; in fact my ethos as a ritualist is not to turn chaos into order, but to follow a certain order for the sake of upholding chaos.

The point of living as a conscious being is not to impose one's will onto all things, but to be one will amongst many. I keep to the rule DO WHAT THOU WILT shall be the whole of the law, but in the sense that ideally all things should, at all times, be doing what they will. That includes not only myself and the things I can control, but also the things that are not me and that I cannot and should not control.

I've in turn found that when I read or listen to people who are still indigenous animists, they have expressed similar sentiments about what is necessary for decolonizing — not only lands, but minds. One half of what I'm figuring out about an animist mindset comes from sheer intuition as I let myself sift through the fragments of myth and lore and passion and instinct that can still be found in a whitened, colonial setting if you know exactly where to look. The other half of figuring out animism is the vitally necessary work of listening to people who already operate that way, whose traditions in that vein are still unbroken from their roots even if they're threatened.

I should state absolutely clearly that being a recognized member of an indigenous tribe, or being raised very closely to such people, is not a guarantee that someone is an animist; and in searching for wisdom from indigenous sources there's always the risk that if, like me, you're a settler or your family has at least been benefited indirectly from colonialism for generations, then you may fetishize an idea of indigeneity, rather than just respecting and appreciating what actual, living people who are indigenous have to say about something. Therefore, some specific indigenous activists and thinkers I will recommend as a starting point are Lyla June and Katrina Messenger (site currently broken but linked here in case it ever works again).

But warnings aside: in my understanding that's been helped by people like them, and by seasoned anti-colonial white animists like "my guy" Rune[1], indigeneity is a state of relationship to land. This relationship state can be damaged, and for many people it might not be realistically possible to go beyond decolonizing into "re-indigenizing," although that's a distinctly interesting question to delve into some other time. Regardless of the outcome there, however, it's at least possible to go as far as recovering animism, which is a characteristic of spirituality that is best brought about by indigeneity but is separate and must, in my view, be emphasized as spiritual first and foremost.

This spiritual characteristic is the best and broadest label I can find for what I've mentioned already about that which most effectively preserves our environment and stabilizes our lives within it — that which assigns agency and sanctity to all things, not only to humans. We can, all of us, actively choose to live that way. Why do I call such a choice spiritual?

It's my belief that homo sapiens'[2] spiritual instinct — call this also the supernatural or magical instinct if you like — serves at least two functions. The first, not relevant to a lot else I'll say here but still worth mentioning, is a kind of communal binding practice, with both positive and negative potential, i.e. the spiritual instinct manifests as a symbolic/ritualized set of actions that allow us to follow the dichotomous instincts of our closest related species, the bonobo chimp (reductively categorizable as sex communists extraordinaire) or the common chimp (reductively categorizable as vicious hordes of warmongers). What turns our communions toward building our own communities vs. destroying others' is often a matter of real or perceived resource scarcity and whatever forces are creating it.

The second (though not necesarily final) function of the spiritual instinct, the function I care most about right here, is that it channels the inquisitive nature of our consciousness toward forming a cohesive understanding of the world, so that we can then decide how to operate in the world. Our inquisitiveness also has positive and negative potential. Knowledge is not always an absolute good. Pattern-seeking, as mentioned already, can betray us. But what governs the positive potential of our inquisitiveness is the presence of animism, to which I'll append an even more refined definition: the assigning of human-like value to non-human things.

I don't see this practice as identical to pacifism. Animism doesn't inherently demand a pacifist ethical code; I can simultaneously recognize that a bear attacking me is the bear doing what's in its nature to do (whether because it's hungry or because it's been disturbed) and also be perfectly justified in defending myself against the attack. An animist world is not an automatically pretty or happy place. Its troubles, however, lie in truly inevitable clashes of purpose, wherein entities' primordial needs are utterly opposed — not in clashes of artificial design, wherein needs are invented or unjustly induced.

Animism is also not anthropomorphism. Although I often still respect people who use anthropomorphic analogies for talking about ecological issues, I try not to. On the one hand, I see immense value in rituals of symbolic shapeshifting and animal kinship, all of which I'll write about more some other time, but on the other hand, I value animals as the animals that they are. I don't think it's possible to ascribe emotions and experiences to them that are the same as a human's, because even if our levels of sentience and qualitative awareness were exactly alike, our bodies are of course very different, and the body is what shapes the mind. I also don't think it's ethical to assign animals a higher moral value than humans (or, conversely, to treat plants and other non-animal life with any less reverence than animals), for the circle of life doesn't have a ranking system; this is an especially important concept for me to revisit later.

Animism is lastly not the same as ignoring information that scientific investigation can give us. I'm not anti-science — in fact I find science wonderful when it's divorced from a capitalist context and a bigoted history. I love and am a casual explorer of many scientific disciplines. I just also believe that animism gives us the necessary tools for responsibly conducting scientific research and implementing scientific achievements. And more often than some people would like to admit, animist societies have been in step with the most accurate science for longer than science itself has been a Western discipline. Modern forestry science tells us that controlled burns are an excellent way of minimizing larger, more catastrophic wildfires; but tribes across so-called North America have been culturally practicing controlled burns for longer than white settlers have even lived here. Even the National Park Service is acknowledging this these days.

Animism is a spiritual reverence for the thing-ness of a thing. Even if you want to gloss over evolutionary examples of adaptive altruism and insist on a purely selfish evolutionary explanation for the value of animism, I'd still call animism an evolutionarily valuable adaptation, as in the grand scheme of things it can better guarantee the livability of one's own habitat. Think otherwise, and your habitat will ultimately defeat you — not by anthropomorphic "intention" but by sheer cause and effect, as you're hoisted by your own petard.

That is the situation we're living in now. I don't think everyone should believe in an authoritarian god or gods, and in fact I suggest that people not do so; but an atheist who is also not an animist will ultimately harm the world in many of the same ways as a non-animist Christian or someone belonging to the more locally relevant authoritarian religion.

Having laid out all of the above, I now turn to how the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm. As above, so below. Whatever else I could say about the ecological and social aspects of how I (and other people in my social demographic) have lost indigeneity and been repeatedly colonized/whitened/industrialized to the point of losing animist relations — in a much more personal way, I've grown certain that many (not all, but many) of my mental health issues derive from living out of sync with what I will call Real Time, the time that animism lets us observe — and living out of sync with Land That Is Mine, both as a problem for my immediate settler-self and as a buildup of prior generations' trauma. Developing an animist land/season relationship over time is not only helping me live an internalized resistance to capitalism and reclaim a birthright that can be mine without stealing from other people; animism just helps me feel more the way that my body-mind is supposed to feel. It is actively healing.

I can't dwell too long on this last point without mentioning that if you're a white-assigned/benefiting reader interested in exploring this particular angle more, especially through the lens of ending a phenomenon sometimes described as white fragility or white guilt (and turning toward genuine solidarity and useful support for racial justice), I recommend taking a course with the source by which I discovered the individuals already linked above: White Awake. I would start with either what I understand as their more entry level course called "Roots Deeper Than Whiteness," or the course I took called "Before We Were White." The organization is run by both white people and Black/indigenous/people of color, features speakers from both (and mixed) backgrounds, offers special caucus discussions for Jewish, mixed race, and/or queer/trans participants, and focuses in particular on healing generational white trauma and recovering from capitalist/colonial ideology; and their fees are on a sliding scale. I can't emphasize enough how helpful, compassionate, and appropriately challenging these folks are. Their influence clinched many of the ways I'd be thinking about animism for a while. (If you don't want a course or any particular animist focus but are still intrigued about the topic of how whiteness actually got invented, let me recommend Nell Irvin Painter's incredibly excellent book The History of White People.)

All of these thoughts might, I hope, explain why I choose animism in general. The rest of this piece is about determining which cultures' animism is relevant to me.

What is mine and what is not mine

Rather than preach to the choir, given what I know of my current readership, I'm not going to spend too much time belaboring the point that cultural appropriation is a real phenomenon and is not a great thing to do. But although I do have some bones to pick regarding exactly when something is or is not classifiable as appropriation, I at least want to be very clear that I don't think it's very "respectful" or "celebratory" of someone else's culture to 1) adopt of a symbolically potent token of that culture without permission, and 2) then make use of it in a way that ignorantly or intentionally divorces that token from its original cultural context. I think it's not easy to perfectly avoid this when you've been raised amid "cultural whiteness" i.e. a context where there is almost no culture that hasn't been imperially/colonially lifted from somewhere else and divorced from its roots; but it's also easier to unlearn such habits than people who like preserving rather than breaking down whiteness would have you think.

So given that premise: naturally there are some tokens of animist belief systems that I'm never going to just go out and adopt without an invitation. I don't make use of white sage as a ritual herb, because it's sacred to tribes I'm distinctly not part of, it doesn't hold significance for peoples to whom I do belong, and its commercial harvesting is destroying its availability for the practitioners who actually rely on it. If I ever developed a ritual that happened to superficially resemble indigenous sweat lodge or Sun Dance practices (which themselves are real but often ill-defined in settler understanding of what they involve), I wouldn't call it a sweat lodge or a Sun Dance. In more grey areas, I do practice yoga asanas for their demonstrated fitness benefit, but I wouldn't for an instant pretend that I know anything about yoga as a complete Dharmic spiritual practice, or that that's what I'm performing.

But while avoiding certain things is valuable for decolonial animism, this is only one step. Besides what I know very plainly not to do, what is it that I've decided I should do?

Others' experiences will vary in this regard, but I honestly found my path by an unconscious route that I've only more recently been able to explain. A very condensed way of phrasing it would be "ancestral connection." This requires unpacking, however, because:

• "You should stick to what your ancestors practiced" is a very, very dodgy phrase that — when poorly applied or interpreted — can lead to (best case scenario) hopelessly trying to uncover a perfectly accurate version of something that can never even be known for sure, or (worst case scenario) white nationalism.
• In some people's cases, including my own, it doesn't particularly make sense to practice certain things just because certain ancestors did.

Since delving into the nightmare world of white nationalist pagans is a topic unto itself and I'm sure everyone reading this is already not terribly supportive of those people, I'll get back to that aspect some other time.

To address the other aspect, though, is also important; and it relies on understanding something similar. Namely, as I've mentioned before, ancestral connection is a matter of cultural upbringing much more than of bloodline.

This affects me in the mode of a cultural/religious population that I'm genetically related to but would not say I'm really connected to. When I was a younger adult, I found out that my deceased paternal grandmother identified as Jewish in some way, and that her maternal family were Ashkenazim who migrated from land that was at the time known as Prussia and has since been ceded to Poland; when I was a child, I was simply told that part of the family was "German," probably not inaccurate in some respects but also obscuring the full picture. Needless to say, from the information I've since gleaned, I don't have great confidence that many of my genetic relatives from that region are still living there. Jews in that specific region didn't exactly have an easier time of it during the Holocaust. And as it happens, although by some metrics of Jewish ancestry I "don't count" as Jewish because it's only a patrilineal connection for me, if I had the same background and were alive in Nazi-controlled territory, I'd be "Jewish enough" to be eligible for severe persecution. Looking at the even bigger picture, though, I don't think it would particularly honor that ancestral memory for me to just start going around saying I was Jewish, or to incorporate Jewish mysticism into my practices.[3]

This grandmother's Jewish identity came as such a surprise to me because I wasn't raised with even an iota of awareness that I or anyone in my family "was" Jewish. We had many Jewish friends and I knew/know more about some Jewish traditions than many other goyim, but it would take serious work — work that I'm not currently doing — to meaningfully grant Jewish spirituality or cultural identity an active place in my life. I won't rule out the prospect of ever exploring these things, but I would consider myself virtually as much a newcomer to Judaism as a potential convert who had no biological family with Jewish identity at all. Similarly, I know people born to biological families that weren't Jewish, but who were adopted at a very early age by Jewish parents — it seems self-evident to me that these people are "more" Jewish than me by a fair margin.

By contrast, some of my animist-pagan practices are definitely inspired by and call upon the linguistic-cultural category of Germanic paganism (or the sometimes preferred but loaded term heathenry), without me having any "Germanic blood." I hate even saying that phrase, because strictly speaking, my Jewish ancestors ostensibly lived in a Germanic cultural region for a long time and surely experienced cultural blending of some kind. Splitting hairs about Jewish vs. Germanic bloodlines is a particularly uncomfortable route to go down, and I'd rather not. Also there are unfortunately a lot of self-described heathens who might learn a fragment of my spiritual path and say, "Oh, wonderful, you're explicitly not a Jew and you like heathen things," and I'm actively disinterested in their friendship. But I raise all of this to make the point that from the perspective of anyone (not me) who thinks that "blood" connection to one's ancestors actually matters, I freely adopt some Germanic animist tokens that are "not mine," and accordingly consider it an obligation to fight especially vocally against fascist appropriation of those tokens. I never want it to be unclear where I stand on that matter.

The thing is: even leaving aside a grotesque debate about whether I, as a descendant of Prussian/German Jews would "count" as having a Germanic background as well as a Jewish one, I consider Germanic and especially Nordic animism to be within my purview of ancestral/familial connection because of what does matter — not bloodline, not ideology, but again, cultural things I was actually raised with and that materially impact me in my life. I was raised anglophone in a culture influenced not simply by English and German settlement in the US, but by original English raiding/settlement/hegemony in Britain and subsequent Nordic raiding/settlement; therefore, like many anglophones, I've been brought up among the surviving vestiges of Anglo-Germanic animism (cloaked of course underneath a morass of colonizing garbage). More specifically in my case, I was raised doing a great deal of Scandinavian folk dance, e.g. folk dance from Norway and Sweden, and thus gradually developed a connection with other folk traditions from those places; so I feel particularly drawn to Nordic flavors of Germanic animism. To some extent, my folk dance background and some related familial factors have given me a personal affinity for several Slavic cultures, especially Russian. The affinity doesn't feel quite as strong, so I haven't pursued Slavic animism terribly far, but I wouldn't rule it out.

So all told, because I don't look to "blood connection" for what's allowed, there are some spiritual threads I don't incorporate into my building an animist practice despite a supposed birthright, because I don't yet consider myself to have fostered enough of an affinity with them; and then there are other spiritual threads I do incorporate because they have overtly influenced me for my whole life even without a "blood connection."

I offer these juxtaposed cases first, though, because I want them to both offer illustrative contrasts to the one ancestral connection I feel the most strongly by a considerable margin, which is the fact that I am a Celt. I feel strongly enough about that to say I am a Celt, not just that "I have Celtic influences." And since I do have a literal bloodline that goes along with that identification, I've wanted to provide some crystalline examples of why that bloodline is not the reason for my feelings of Celtishness being so powerful. I am "50% Welsh" in bloodline-speak, but the thing that really makes me feel Celtic and specifically Welsh is that I was raised in a partial-immigrant context with proudly culturally-Welsh family members on both sides of the proverbial pond. I was raised with a deliberately taught sense of Welsh heritage and culture as my birthright, and of having a sense of the Welsh landscape as the place where I most deeply belong. The closest I could ever personally come to "recovering" indigeneity would be through these roots.

Consequently, although it wouldn't be sufficient or categorically accurate to describe my practices as Celtic animism, Celtic paganism, Celtic reconstruction, Druidry, or whatever else you can think of along those lines, the unquestionably strongest thread of animism I adhere to is Celtic in essence. But even then, I have one more thing to unpack.

On stone circles

At the very start of this post, I used an image of a stone circle called Bryn Cader Faner. I say it's a stone circle but some would maybe just call it a strange cairn. Like Stonehenge, it dates to at least the Bronze Age, but it was clearly made in a different design. Like Stonehenge, its stones are Welsh, but these stones weren't dragged all the way to Salisbury Plain in modern England; they are, as far as I'm aware, fairly local to the north Welsh landscape where they remain, in Gwynedd near the village of Talsarnau.

I chose an image of Bryn Cader Faner to represent Celtic animism for myself, rather than Stonehenge, because although I adore Stonehenge and accept the likelihood that it was a construction of extraordinary significance to the people who made it, there is no one uniform, monolithic way that Celtic animism (or any animism) has to look. There are temporal variations, geographic variations.

There are also transparent linguistic variations, as I alluded to in my last post when I discussed ogham. The six modern Celtic nations are split linguistically and by extension culturally into two groups, academically identified as Goidelic/Gaelic (or Q-Celtic) and Brythonic (or P-Celtic). In the first group we find the Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx linguistic-cultural identities, while in the second group we find the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton identities. Between all these groups, there are rampant similarities in language, art, customs, folklore, myths, and more, presumably stemming from a common source at one point in time, but as they've diverged they have also evolved in their own directions. There are even flavors of Celtic identity that have been totally wiped out in the course of Roman or other conquest in continental Europe (Breton folks got lucky), and it's hard to fathom nowadays how they would or would not resemble any modern Celtic cultures.

In fact, the wildest part about Celtic identity for someone from Britain or Ireland is that when it comes to certain things that scream "Celtic" and did derive from the heartland of Celtic language and culture somewhere roundabout the Alps (once upon a time), those tokens were adopted by original, indigenous Britons and Irish, who actually reached the isles themselves before Celtic-anything existed. These tribes very likely came from what we now call the Iberian peninsula, and there's ample reason to believe they might have once been the inheritors of the same culture that gave rise to the modern Basque people (now speakers of a language isolate). At some point, although these people didn't lose their indigenous land relations — and, if we must look at genetic evidence, their genetic traces have remained quite consistent and predominant in Britain and Ireland not only past the point of Roman invasion but of English and Norman invasion too — these possible proto-Basques were Celticized through some unknown combination of trade and nonviolent or violent settlement. But whenever and however this exactly happened, Stonehenge and similar stone circles had already been built.

The stone circles of Britain and Ireland are so old that they aren't even Celtic themselves. They are an absolute mystery. Throughout history, millions of accumulated people have speculated on why these stone circles were built — we consider ritual purposes, astronomical purposes, Otherworldly portals, grave markers, and more. But we will almost certainly never know their exact original purpose, because not only was no written explanation given — the linguistic-cultural context in which they were built has been superseded by other prehistoric contexts.

And yet, does it not still make sense to say that as the tribes who built those stone circles became Celtic with time, those stone circles might then be inherited into Celtic tradition? For whether or not the Celticization of Britain and Ireland may have involved any violence, it was at least unquestionably a gradual process that did not take place in any programmatic, intentional way. It was not a project of extermination. The people of those isles just happened, through various processes, to move from something they had before, onto something new. We can't absolutely be sure what they lost; we can't draw clear lines between which special characteristics of the six surviving Celtic nations were developed through an existing Celtishness that had already diverged from the Celtic cultures that have now faded, as opposed to developing specifically from the contact between Celtic culture and something that came before.

At the end of the day, we come back to something I've said repeatedly in earlier writings and even right here. The thing that matters about the question of Celtic identity is not that we should get the actual answer to the question. Seeking an absolute pure heart to things is what can engender the fascist instinct. What matters is that we consider all the meanings of "Celtic" stone circles and Celtic animism at various points in archaeological records... and that includes right now.

Stone circles are mine no less than that of Britons thousands of years ago, if I do the work to occupy an animist mindset. To realize this brings a feeling of strength, stability, and peace — the knowledge that I do not have to steal from other people in order to feel like I have roots, or in order to live as harmoniously with the earth as animism permits. I have something beautiful, magnificent, and uncountably old in my ancestral past, and it is a beacon of not only ancient time but also my land. Whatever conversations I engage in and listen to around the intentional return of indigenous land as a decolonial practice, I can participate bravely because I know that I don't need to treat the occupied land I'm on as mine; I just need to remember where my land has always been. I don't think this is so easy for people whose white/Euro settler backgrounds are longer established than mine in all branches of their family — who can't simply connect with relatives in other countries — and in that regard I don't wish to insist that everyone on this continent who came here in some way as an occupier will have exactly the same route to decolonization ahead of them, nor even the same route to cultivating an animist worldview. I also know that so much of my work has only just begun, too.

But it has at least begun, and I hope now I've done my best to explain how it began.

Future writings on animism (and/or paganism) will typically move on from this philosophical foundation into direct but non-dogmatic encounters with the myths, folklore, and potential surviving customs of various animist peoples. I won't be limiting myself to that which is "mine," insofar as I like learning and thinking about everyone's frameworks for the sheer sake of enrichment and I wouldn't like to imply that those frameworks are inferior. But given everything I've discussed here today, I intend to still "stay in my lane" for the sake of not spouting a lot of uninformed opinions, and for continuously working to heal the schism between myself and my animist ancestors. If Celtic (especially Brythonic/Welsh) traditions or Germanic (especially Nordic) traditions are of particular interest to you, then I'm sure you'll get the most mileage out of these posts — but if this doesn't apply to you, I hope you'll still be interested in going on these explorations for other reasons. And there will also be plenty of posts to come about ritual, magic, and related themes that don't especially dwell on animism/paganism as much as on other things.

[1] I have linked Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen before and will do so again — I call him "my guy Rune" here because a fellow pagan-animist-occult traveler friend of mine has referred to him as "your guy Rune" around me. It's almost as if I bring him up a lot together.

[2] Is there a spiritual instinct among things which are not human? I'd be a liar if I didn't say it's entirely possible. I certainly am a believer in the hypothesis that at least humans don't have a monopoly on language or on communication systems that approach linguistic completeness; and with the symbols of language I think the symbols of spirituality must inevitably follow, if they don't lead. All that said, however, see my remarks against anthropomorphism.

[3] Jewish + pagan practices are a time-honored tradition among approximately half of the pagans I've ever known, so I don't hesitate to say anyone who thinks that Judaism and paganism are diametrically opposed concepts doesn't know a single useful thing about either concept. There are also a whole host of things to be debated about whether or not Judaism is a kind of indigenous tradition, and I am completely not the right person to get into that, although I very much welcome self-identified Jewish and/or indigenous perspectives in reply to this.

Thank you again for reading, and especially for if you've been able to pay. I got a couple of humble but welcome Stripe payouts over the past week or two. I don't know how many of you would feel ready to switch over to $1/month, but I only need a few more people to do that for me to break even here. (Or a couple people could upgrade to higher paid tiers.) But since I keep wincing at asking for money directly, let me say today that I could especially use help with word of mouth. Whether or not you can pay, I would really love people pointing to this newsletter just enough to maybe get a few more comfortably-paying subscribers that way. Linking or leaving breadcrumbs periodically would be really helpful.

In closing, though, let me emphasize that it's already been really wonderful to get so many long-simmering thoughts out in this format. In a way the newsletter is already worth my time because I was just so overdue to publish something again, and to publish more non-fiction at all; I don't think transactionally enough to feel like the work I'm doing here absolutely requires payment, because it's more fun than work. Right now I'm even fitting it in during slow periods of my day job, so thanks for helping me commit time theft. When I ask for money to make this "worth it," I really just mean that since the day job doesn't pay me enough, it would be really lovely if something as fun as this gave me supplemental income.

That's all for now. Next week: defining and encountering death work. And the week after that: my first holiday post.