Full Moon: Strange shadows

It's Friday. Hello. I took note of this in last week's paywalled post as well, but the lunar schedule here is a little skewed insofar as the Last Quarter will occur later tonight but timing on past weeks was such I would have missed either a First Quarter or a Full Moon post if I went by general dates instead of specific times for phase changes.

So here I am, still technically in the week of the Full Moon — the Full Moon after Calan Gaeaf. The veil between this world and the Otherworld has been thin for a little while, and it will stay thin for a while longer. Other ritualists' opinions inevitably vary on when it is thinnest; in my case, I feel as though it thins on every holiday of the Wheel of the Year, but it is thinnest from what I dub the fire holidays (November 1 and May 1) through the water holidays (the solstices), during the final solar push toward culminating darkness or culminating light. Between these two seasonal poles, November-December and May-June, I have also been drawn to a framework where on the colder, darker pole the kinds of entities who pass through the veil the most are ancestral, dead figures, whereas the kinds who tend to pass through on the warmer, brighter pole are not so much dead as existing beyond life or death — Fair Folk, pixies, elves, and their kindred.

But even to write these loose speculations still feels somewhat odd for me. I have never seen any of the entities that I describe. For several decades of my life, I would have claimed not to believe in ghosts, fairies, hauntings, possessions, or anything else along those lines, not even after I named myself a witch. Now, saying I "believe" can be a misleading phrase and so I don't use it without a lot of surrounding qualifiers; nor do I yet feel as though an angle of my witchcraft genuinely includes what many people call "spirit work," mediumship, channeling, etc. My avoidance of that work is twofold: I do not know how to work with the entities that I think really exist by certain criteria, and then I also find it unethical to speak for these entities in a colonial-capitalist setting like the one I live in, wherein it's virtually impossible to distinguish profit-motivated charlatan mediumship from meaningful, ritual relation-making with the dead. Similar logic accounts for my hesitancy to ever try making money from the ritual practices I do feel versed in (including other kinds of divination), but while I occasionally see room for exceptions there, when dealing directly with the Otherworld I think the powers at play are too vast, too volatile, too psychologically overwhelming to trust even a well-intentioned paid spirit worker unless they're able to substantiate their practices with something that really has centuries of traditional animist knowledge behind it. Unverified personal gnosis does not cut it here.

So I am a skeptic still, of a kind. But I speak of the veil, the Otherworld, hauntings, and related concepts for my own reasons. First, I find this an evocative language for describing material occurrences that are not yet explained (and maybe cannot be explained) with hard-and-fast science. Second, building on this and based on personal experiences I've had, I'm increasingly convinced that the realm of the "spirit" is a psychological realm equated with storytelling and dreams, but also such a realm is inseparable from material space. It's the relational glue between ourselves and everything else; it's what fills the negative space between/within atoms. As such, it's something we know usually not through extraordinary weird phenomena. Simultaneously, when those phenomena arise we can often credit drugs or madness, only the key is to recognize that this does not make the phenomena any less meaningful. Meanwhile we usually encounter this realm through strong emotions cultivated by various means like entering distinctive places, encountering uncanny environmental conditions (e.g. the Full Moon's un-light), creating or witnessing art, engaging in high-energy activities like sex or violence, nurturing ritual devotion, or (more negatively) being subject to grief and trauma.

The veil is all around us. This is the meaning of "stepping sideways" when entering the Otherworld. And lately, I've found myself in a position not to speak with all of the shadow-beings of the Otherworld, but I have still spoken with one of them.

Please note that the rest of this post will heavily touch on sources of profound grief, including miscarriage, violent death, and the death of pets.

Recent events

I do not yet feel comfortable using this space to process what's happened in a detailed blow-by-blow — partly because some of my grief is simply too personal even for this newsletter's purposes, and then partly because I have other things I want to write about here week by week while I'm otherwise maintaining a completely private diary to work through some of this grief on a routine basis.

But for some transparency, and for the sake of not glossing over why there's been a major development in my relationship to the Otherworld, I will mention recent events today, and they may recur occasionally in future posts if relevant to their themes. On the 15th of October, I found out that the latest, heavily-assisted attempt to become pregnant had been successful. I then spent several weeks guarding myself against too much excitement, knowing the risks in the first trimester (especially at my age), but I also welcomed the onset of initial symptoms and took joy in the knowledge that I was — finally, after more than a decade of wanting it — pregnant at all. On the 6th of November, overlapping with election news, I found out that the developmental process was nowhere near where it ought to be, and that I would thus probably miscarry if that hadn't already (silently) happened.

It took two followup ultrasounds to really make certain, so the miscarriage wasn't confirmed until about forty-eight hours ago. In those interim, limbo weeks where my symptoms also started to evaporate, I assumed the worst and therefore already went through a good deal of anticipatory grief, but now I am confronting all the grief I couldn't simply prepare for. In another forty-eight hours, I will also be starting the abortion process through medication, because with the miscarriage indeed silent this means my body could take weeks or months to decide to clear the unnecessary tissue. To use medication for this is to invite the pain and blood of a less-silent miscarriage, but I have chosen this over surgery because I wish to be ritually present for the experience. That lies ahead of me, not yet behind me. So in addition to grief, I also feel fear.

I will say nothing here at this time of how this personal nightmare aligns with the current sociopolitical situation or my years of terror that my potential infertility is somehow linked with the increasing barrenness of the very Earth. It is all too much.

But whether or not I can become pregnant again, and whether or not I can bring a living child to term, those questions concern children of the future. How have I been coping with the loss of a prior child, with the fleeting motherhood they imbued? Can I even call it a child when developmentally it only went so far as a yolk sac? What is motherhood if I never even held anything in my arms, and if what I deliver in a few days will be too small to see?

Knowing a tiny handful[1] of friends who are parents and who have also faced miscarriage, this was how I first encountered the degree of grief that miscarriage causes, in addition to how common it really is.[2] I came to understand that even when a pregnancy hasn't progressed very far, if it's a desired pregnancy at all then it's very likely the carrying parent (in addition to any partner(s)) develops a natural investment in the potential of whoever they envision emerging into the world, months down the line. How much this feeling is cemented through floods of hormones vs. more deliberate reasoning, who can say, but when that pregnancy ends without a live birth this destroys the relation that was forming between the parent(s) and their idea of the child. It may not be the same in quality as the death of a living child, but it's also impossible to measure whether there is any less pain. On a case by case basis it may all work out rather comparably.

Now that I have also miscarried, I find myself reading many writings and discussions by other people in this indescribably hollow position, and I feel as if I know these things to be true:

• Life arguably does begin at conception, but this does not mean personhood does.[3]
• Before birth, personhood is imbued by the carrying parent at their own will, and independently from their right to end that person in self-defense. But thus, ending a truly undesired pregnancy is not a tragedy; ending a desired but unsafe one is, while also being necessary; and then the miscarriage of a desired pregnancy is a tragedy unmitigated on all fronts.
• And thus, a desired child is as real in utero as the parent perceives them.
• And thus, the parent is well within their rights to feel like a parent, even if this is the only child they've yet had.

I have been a mother now; my common ground with other mothers is limited but real. My owner has been a father if he chooses to use the term. And we have been the parents to an idea.

Unlike some miscarriage survivors, I do not see this loss as the loss of a fully-formed concept of a child who may one day occupy an equal place in my heart to any living child I do bear. I already have a name for that child in my head, and they must emerge from me in order to receive it. The child I've lost is not that one. The child I'm waiting for is still, I suppose, sitting half within one of my ovaries and half — well, elsewhere. Divided, pending resolution of the necessary flesh for that idea to finally occupy.

But I did lose something this month, nonetheless. And I have been engaged in a inner search for what I ought to learn from that thing, how I ought to relate to it. To them. What is the way I can think of a being who was never much different than a phantom, without having died?

Psychic detritus & fungal possessions

Even as a former skeptic about very literal ghosts, and still doubting most descriptions of paranormal activity, I know that at some point in my early adulthood I came to accept that spaces could be symbolically haunted. Suppose that someone is violently murdered in their home and this is found out; or consider all the locations where we know mass murders have occurred and mass graves remain. Even without the dead remaining spiritually in those spaces as some sort of conscious force affecting the premises, the collective memory of that event remains with those of us who know, and we cannot enter the spaces without thinking of it, grappling with it.

Despite knowing this much, for a while longer I was unsure whether hauntings could apply when something traumatic occurs in a space but nobody knows about it. Could you really enter a room or step onto a field with a terrible past and then simply feel the wrongness of it, the eeriness, lacking any specific evidence? I have yet to experience this myself, but having at least now found spaces where the veil feels thin in general — that is, where on a material level the space feels imbued with features and atmosphere that make for potent psychological effects — I suppose that at least some death sites could be prone to carrying the weight of those deaths if they already have features that are likely to draw on the Otherworld in turn.

I'm not really certain of that, of course. I could only know if I suspected that an awful thing happened somewhere and later found out the truth of it.

With much more certainty, though, I do also know that some spaces can be wrong in a profound way, regardless of what's transpired there. They can be conducive to violence in the future. I will not call the nature of these spaces "evil"; rather, the intrusion of the Otherworld there is not in a form that our minds can easily handle. Another way to frame it is that there is mold.

I mean this not at all metaphorically. Mold. Though still an under-researched problem and sometimes an exaggerated one, mold spores are not healthy to constantly inhale, and living in buildings with mold tends to at least result in a variety of physical ailments, chiefly respiratory illnesses but not exclusively. Prolonged mold inhalation leads to inflammation — rarely setting off outright autoimmune disorders, but mimicking many such symptoms that may only resolve after spending a while living outside that space. And chronic inflammation can also exacerbate mental illnesses. For people with mold allergies, this is worse still.

I've alluded several times in this newsletter to my experience living in a water-damaged, mold-infested home before this one; and at least anecdotally I can corroborate all the research that does currently exist. I went mad there. My owner nearly did as well. And that's one way we think of it. But also, by the time we left that home we were saying to ourselves that this must be what living in a haunted house is like. The atmosphere was wrong, the building's quirks were more than quirks. My madness was also like possession by those microcscopic fungal sprites.

Ghost of the familiar

Between leaving that home and settling in to this one, we also lived through certain deaths. One of my owner's cats developed bladder cancer less than a year before we moved; we saved him a painful death by bringing a euthanasia specialist over and putting our dear friend to rest out on the back patio during a beautiful late summer day. Almost exactly two years later, my own cat had been suffering from lymphoma for at least six months and then finally took a critical downturn which we likewise addressed through the same doctor, albeit indoors because that cat was so taken with sleeping in one particular basket.

The first cat's death was wretched for its suddenness; it came only a day after the diagnosis because bladder cancer progresses so quickly but agonizingly. We had to get ahead of it. And though this wasn't "my" cat, we had bonded significantly over the years. He had begun to feel very close to being mine as well. Such a gentle soul he was, sweet and gregarious, less than clever but never destructive either. And not long after he passed, we began to notice what we could only describe as his ghost. If we went out back onto the patio, surrounded by our two little garden beds that were all we could fit back then, we felt this cat's presence. When we did move, we had to ritually collect him so that he wasn't left behind. I will not share the details here, but it was an important and emotional little rite.

The second cat's death was harder for me in particular because he was indeed "my" cat, and we had bonded so closely in the 14 years I cared for him that I knew him as my familiar. Though affectionate toward all people and very fond of my owner, on certain occasions he made it clear that no human attention was enough if it didn't come from me; he would often follow me throughout the day, wherever I was, and if I was having a difficult time he might sense it from across multiple rooms, seeking me out to give me the medicine of his purrs and soft black fur. I readied myself much better for his passing, knowing well in advance that he would not win against the lymphoma even as his quality of life stayed tolerable for months longer than it should have; he was a small, stubborn warrior. But to lose him, him, it still ravaged me. And his own ghost has persisted. He lives in our dining room, in the same basket that had become his favorite bed and where he took his last breath. I cannot move that basket. He is there.

Those who live beyond

In this post I've mostly focused on the dead, somewhat because as mentioned this veil-thinning is the most death-related for me — and somewhat because I am actively mourning a death, such as the original life ever was.

Nonetheless, other denizens of the Otherworld have also become known to me. Not through the the direct, traditional five senses, but through different ways of sensing, sometimes only raw intuition. I name them the Fair Folk because that is what my ancestors named them, although I would also like to know their names that belong to this particular landscape.

I have come to know the Fair Folk through their mushroom emissaries, not simply the mold I once inhaled to the point of illness but also more consensually by last May's psilocybin ordeal. These same beings of the wood also from an abstract presence along the edge of the trees bordering our backyard. I do not know why I've felt compelled to offer them food and drink on occasion — and usually these things are simply leftovers that might otherwise go to waste and for some reason can't be composted — but I do make these offerings. I've been contemplating setting up a shrine to enhance this.

And I have come to know them through other presences sensed in my home that are more than mold — this home is relatively dry and safe in that regard, but there is still a spirit-of-the-house. The Cymric word is bwbach. Other names might be the brownies, or the Roman lares. I had a somewhat tenuous relationship to this entity when we first moved in, and this endured for a little while, but in addition to helping myself making better relations through starting my buspirone prescription over a year ago, I think somehow it also helped to intentionally move my ritual altar out of the basement where I initially set it up — in fact in the one room where mold could, and did, grow — and into the south-facing dining room. That feels like more of the correct way. The house likes it.

What happens if I snub the Fair Folk? I don't know. Why am I sensing them now when I didn't sense them before, and when I otherwise perceive consensus-reality fairly equally with other people? I don't know. But those beings are here. There-and-here. Everywhere, waiting beyond the veil.

A hand reached out and other hands reached to pull it back

I think that the Otherworld is full of the past, and the un-present, and presumably also the future. This is where the ideas of children dwell before they are made flesh. When I was pregnant with a truly living thing, flashbacks recurred from my psilocybin trip, brief and harmless hallucinations as if not only the mushrooms and the Fair Folk spoke to me again, but perhaps also this was the one voice the child could have, so small and voidlike.

I suppose there was some danger in undergoing that unstable, risk-laden first trimester during the season of death. I do not blame myself because I do not really know this is the reason for everything, and there could be dozens of reasons — material and immaterial — why a pregnancy is perfectly safe in this time. But as I struggle to find a narrative for why this child I longed for so much, so very much, has slipped away from me, all I can picture is the veil. In the weeks leading up to Calan Gaeaf, as the veil thinned a shadow began to reach from the other side, to permeate my womb from within; but then with the veil now at its thinnest, the shadow was taken back, swallowed and returned to the primordial possibilities from which it had been fashioned. Not long before all my standard pregnancy symptoms began to vanish, the flashback hallucinations had also ended.

I am going to tell myself that whatever the shadow-child's purpose could have been, staying in the Otherworld, somehow it was even more important than the purpose they could have had here.

But I hope that in days and years to come, when the veil is thin, they will reach out again and whisper to me, in the same way that my familiar's purr is sometimes still felt on my shoulder. I will pass the last of your meager flesh, shadow-child, in just a few more days, but let us not be wholly done.

[1] There being so few of us in our age group who have even bothered to try, whether that's been through intentional childfree stances or through wanting children but feeling even less ready than I was for a while.

[2] The crudest estimate is a 20% chance for any pregnancy although the chances can become considerably higher after bringing other factors into account. Possibly as many as 60% of total human pregnancies miscarry in actual fact; the numbers are just unevenly distributed across various demographics.

[3] And how could I suddenly oppose abortion rights when the very same methods used to end an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy are going to be used to help my miscarriage finish? There is no way to illegalize or criminalize abortion without jeopardizing miscarriage survivors' own rights.

Thank you for reading and bearing with me during what has been, without exaggeration, among the very worst months of my entire life. The main reason I have kept writing here throughout has been that in times of great hardship it's generally more healing for me to write something on any consistent basis than to take a break. Nonetheless, given the pragmatic consequences of what I will be physically enduring at the start of next week, I cannot promise I will be cogent or functional enough for next Friday (and especially not for Tuesday's monthly music mailing owed to Occult subscribers).

This is unfortunate because of how I expected to center next Friday's post on death work to engage with settler-colonialism's blood crimes against indigenous peoples on this continent, given the week in question. If I'm not able to manage this on schedule, it's possible I will write it outside the usual Friday timing, save it for a later date, or at least produce a "link drop" post with some reading and activism recommendations focused on indigenous writers/speakers themselves. Either way, with any luck I will have healed enough by the following week that I can still promise a post I've planned on music-as-ritual.