Last Quarter: The way out (a glimpse)

Hello. It's Friday.

My hiatus is not complete in a hard and fast way, but I am starting to uncover and rebuild life around the "new normal" of what emerged through the veil one month ago, out of the chthonic gateway of my interior. There was sacrifice and there was celebration. In the ritual sense I have died and been reborn; a new being was also born, too, and together we are relatively helpless. I am doing what I can, which is both a lot and nothing. I think my owner and some of my kith and kin are doing more.

On days I manage to step outdoors, I see the world as though for the first time, or as if I have returned from somewhere (somewhen) very far away. Even forgetting how I am not the same person who previously looked at that maple, those electrical lines, the sacred blue of the sky — I also lost an entire week indoors, confined in a hospital, the rhythms of autumn accelerating without my gaze bearing witness. I have had to slowly establish a new relationship with the season, with the world outside walls, as though I had been ill. In fact I have been ill. I have been sapped of iron, and the lingering hormonal traces of my placenta betrayed the rest of my body beyond the hypertension that originally necessitated early delivery; pre-eclamptic, I had to purge excess fluid from my flesh that had invaded as far as my lungs.

I am as grateful to be alive as I am grateful for the other living thing that sits beside me and their father (and for their father). I am grateful to see the maple now turning red.

Here is a message for you, O sublime sprite who came from the cauldron beside me.

The possibility of remaking

You have joined us in apocalypse, and we must be careful to understand that as it ought to be. I was reminded recently that like many I am not free of the Church-logic around apocalypse as a single and permanent ending; it's hard not to think like that when the ecological conditions could indeed snuff us out, a species level suicide inflicted through generations. It's hard not to think like that when watching other extinctions already rise, and tracking various systems' collapse. And indeed it's certain there are terrible days to come.

What we must remember at the same time is that no specific outcome is yet guaranteed, as far as anyone can know; likewise, those who may perish are not sinners "deserving" it, in fact most probably the opposite for a long while. Most importantly, real apocalypses are plural and — in the long run — regenerative, even when they are brought about by foolish causes and produce terrible results. Time does not stop, even when all observers vanish. It can only restart, perhaps with new observers.

I say this not to bestow a promise that what lies before us can or will be survived. But consider that it might be. If it won't, in turn, then we will have each still played our part in this latest cycle of What Is.

The Ragnarök is one of the most prominent and valuable stories in the Nordic tradition that informs my practice. It's a story you will learn one day. There are several versions. However, despite some allegations that the story was inscribed merely through the influence of Christian Armageddon by the time of the Viking Age, I do not think it speaks of such a permanent apocalypse. In it the gods themselves die, the world is physically destroyed, and unimaginable horrors transpire; but all is remade. New gods emerge with new land. Two humans survive to repopulate.

Of course, even with such a star shining above the clouds, the star may feel very distant, immeasurably so. And rightly, for the Ragnarök is not brought about as some kindly act; it is an ecological dissolution suggesting an underlying rupture in relations between beings. The annihilation of gods and land is the stuff of madness.

In such an apocalypse the possibility of a world remade with humans still in it may be assured in prophecy, but prophecy belongs to people who still live with land, who Know things, Knowing.

We in this dying civilization do not Know what prophecies can be foretold about this apocalypse's specific outcomes because most of us, especially in our institutions, have forgotten how.

Glimpsing the way

As I have honed my witchcraft and as I have dreamed of you, little sprite, growing you like a pearl, I have learned some wisdom from people who have known better than I, and I am going to tell it to you now so that you do not wait until your middle adult years like I did. I want you to grow up with this. I hope you will understand it before you even fully have speech.

This is the wisdom: nothing you see is separate from you. What we call nature is simply the cosmos entire, in which you are counted. Golden threads bind you to every leaf, every feather, every river, every planet. Nature had to be invented so that people like us would stop Knowing it as kin.

You are nature.

You are animal.

(Oh, when you were born how I loved to see the fine, subtle, but dark fur that still clung to your back and arms. A tiny ape.)

All animals and all other beings are written and encoded within us. In our cells we carry the legacy of all life that came before, and we are also made of water and salt like the sea, and we are made of minerals like the stony earth, and the wind flows through our lungs tens of thousands of times each day. And each part of us once came, very very long ago, from a star.

Those ancestors surpass the ones who look like us, and we must respect and heed them no less.

When they die, then, it is one of us who dies. We are honored when their lives are given (taken) for our sustenance. To let or cause any of them to go extinct, by contrast, is a selfish evil beyond any words.

I charge you to remember this. If even two of us will survive — and better far more — this will depend on how many of our kindred in other skins we have returned to despite the wayward, prodigal journey that some of us have undertaken for a few centuries. I am your mother, but so is the bear entering her den this season; so is the birch swaying by the brook; so is the ocean; so is the galaxy itself. These beings love you, in their own ways of loving.

Stewarding a steward

The best we can do next is love those beings back in the ways that they need. Each being is distinct in that regard.

I do not have anywhere near the Knowing or the skills to take custodianship fully as I ought, but I am trying. I hope that anything I manage to learn is something I will not fail at teaching you. Often it feels like you already know more than I can teach; I must learn from you. You will also learn many things on your own without me, I'm sure.

But what little I know has been this. Let us crawl, and walk, and dance together even under red, smoky sunlight, speaking the names of what beings we meet, listening to what they and those who still have the Knowing about them can tell us.

If I can spend this second half of my life stewarding a steward with even a fragment of success, it will be well spent.

Thank you for reading. For those of you who haven't given up their paid subscriptions despite my lapsed presence, thank you doubly.

I can't guarantee I'll be right back next week, but if I am, I'll have some thoughts on the mystery of entropy. And for the week after that, I hope to have a hand crafts post of a sort, namely on memories of Halloween costumes past.