Last Quarter: Thoughts outside of an afterlife

Hello. It's Friday. And although there has been no drastically negative shift in my own life past what I was already coping with — and although I've had some recent small health victories and continue to feel more solidly supported by community and family — I will admit that in sitting down to write about my chosen topic for the week I'm struggling to find the psychological stamina. Very little else in the realm of death work feels comfortable for me, either, despite how I'm "due" to come back to it after having last written about it in March.

The obvious explanation for why I don't wish to think or speak about death just now is probably that the good parts of my life, while very real and very important, only give me the energy to press ahead through a quagmire of personal and global stressors, my mood at some level above burnout but still very capable of collapse into desperate sobs of fear, guilt, or grief. On the one hand, I'm buoyed by carrying new life, loving my owner and knowing I am loved, caring in related ways for other people and knowing they also reciprocate, and having various joyful, ritual projects or responsibilities like writing, homemaking, tending and listening to the land, and making further headway into my new daytime career field. On the other hand, after almost seventeen months of unemployment I continue facing nihilism around what my career realignment is ever actually going to become — when such precarity is the very last thing that a new life needs, and when my owner very, very much needs the chance for a break from working in order to take care of himself. And even though I have successfully gone back to tuning out most elements of the 24 hour news cycle, the elements that I still follow as a precautionary measure are of course the kind of thing that lends an increasingly visceral quality to my ponderings about how to protect children from what would harm them without leaving them wholly ignorant or dependent. That's my own way of asking, "What kind of world are we bringing the next generation into?"

I am stretched quite thin. I am close with people who are stretched even thinner, so I am lucky to have some (renewed) reserves I can pull from for their sakes. But hormonally I'm in a perpetually labile state, and I know some voices that would gently warn me not to overextend myself emotionally or physically in my condition; they're almost certainly right. This is going to be one of those exceptionally long, hot summers. Under such circumstances, how can I think too heavily on death or afterlife?

Be all of that is it may, I know some other factors are weighing on me today, and they may sound paradoxically contradictory but I assure that they can be true at once.

• My mind barely feels capable of reflecting on what comes after life, dwelling instead on the mystery of what comes before it, as I wonder about the consciousness of this decidedly living, mobile thing inside of me.
• As I have lately learned is a common view in numerous traditional cultures, but as I had also intuited on my own ever since the first time I took this journey, gestation involves passing where the veil is thin, both in terms of one's own lifemaking capacity and in terms of the shadowy being who has yet to emerge; thus death is always very near to me now, even leaving aside the losses I've previously experienced, and it feels right to proceed warily with all veil-thinning matters. Many old prohibitions make sense.

Perhaps now is not the time to speak of death too openly. Not with my hands and not with my tongue. Yet this remains the week of the Last Quarter, and death work remains a crucial piece of my rites, so should I let silence say the rest for me today — or not?

I think the compromise I want to make is that instead of speaking, I will simply listen. Consider this post an open call for all fellow ritualists to comment here in the newsletter or on the social media crosspost with your own perspective on what the afterlife (if any) is like. As usual, by ritualist I mean anyone who practices something they might call the occult, the esoteric, ceremonial magic, animism, (neo)paganism, heathenry, witchcraft, and so on.

Let me know what you think of the whole affair. Thank you for bearing with my liminal status.

And thank you for reading this exceptionally abbreviated post. Next week I'll be back in full force with a Litha holiday missive focused on complexity theory, and the week afterward I'll be engaging with the sacred domestic as I finally examine some more kitchen witchery that matters to me.