Hello dear hearts, I’m transmitting this from cycle day 22 and the ambiguity of wanting to be seen, whilst also wanting to hide. Such is the paradox of these early luteal days in my cycle.
I’d tried to write this all of last week, but something was stuck in me. I find myself feeling ossified so often at the moment. Words will not come, not even with gentle coaxing. Not even with every writer’s trick to get the juices flowing again. I sense that, really, silence is what is needed right now, but I also know that as a freelancer I have to keep speaking up and getting my work ‘out there’. It’s a conundrum that I’m struggling with, for sure.
This post is mainly my way of letting you into some of the things that I’ve been stirring into my cauldron over this past season.
Within it you will find:
- An invitation to pause by way of something I read by Cindy Milstein.
- Some recollections from my recent We Are Interstellar workshop.
- Tangled thoughts from the becoming MONSTER conference on menstruation’s role in death, decay, failure and change.
- An update on my funeral celebrant work.
In These Dissenting Times
To acknowledge our ancestors means
we are aware that we did not make
ourselves, that the line stretches
all the way back, perhaps, to God; or
to Gods. We remember them because it
is an easy thing to forget: that we
are not the first to suffer, rebel,
fight, love and die. The grace with
which we embrace life, in spite of
the pain, the sorrows, is always a
measure of what has gone before.—Alice Walker
I know we’ve had a heavy post-US-election couple of weeks and that many of you will be sitting-with all of that against the backdrop of the multiplicity of other horrors. I know I am.
I’ve seen a hell of a lot of hot takes and finger pointing and urgent calls to action in the last two weeks since the election, but I read a post from Cindy Milstein last week that really stuck with me.
Milstein wrote about how they’d been sitting shiva all week with other Jewish anarchist comrades after the result came in.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, ‘shiva’ means ‘seven’ and refers to the seven day mourning period that Jewish folks traditionally observe after a loved one dies. The bereaved usually don’t leave the house for the week and friends visit with offerings of food for everyone. Mirrors are covered. It is an insular time. A time for quiet reflection, reminiscing and being fully immersed in the grief together.
I like how this custom makes room for the shock, dismay and sadness that can arise when someone dies and invites everyone to simply be with what comes up at this liminal moment between death and the funeral. It just makes sense to me as a way of honouring both the bereaved and the dead and I also think there is something powerful about ritually pausing, stripping back life to the bare essentials in the wake of anything life altering; allowing ourselves to collectively feel the impact before we move on, dust ourselves off and continue.
Fully stopping and taking stock after something major has occurred can feel like a luxury we can’t afford.
I often see this with the folks I’m crafting funerals for. Someone has died and the fabric of life has been torn irrevocably, but their boss is not-so-subtly asking them when they might come back to the office. Or folks involved in campaigning, resistance, organising or movement building feel like they can’t step away from the momentum of the work even for one moment lest things fall apart without them.
We all have our own version of this sense of duty and urgency, but I really think we could all take a leaf out of Milstein’s book, especially given these current times of crisis.
I hope you all know me well enough to trust that I’m not saying stop entirely and run from it all. But a ritual pause, especially when taken with others can be seriously balm-like for our weary souls.
I’ve never been a give-you-a-top-tip, tell-you-what-to-do kind of educator, but I am gonna invite you now to consider how you might build in some pause time over this Winter. Or how you might make this possible on a micro-scale in your days or weeks?
As we descend towards the Solstice (Midwinter) – when our ancestors believed that the sun stood still for the three days – I’m starting to dream-into what a day or two of pause might look like there. This year Solstice falls on a Saturday, so I feel like I have no excuse! I hope you’ll find myriad ways to join me.
It felt like a good alignment to run We Are Interstellar in the wake of all this US election misery. The day took us through an arc of practices that felt like a tonic for these times; creating a pause from the news onslaught in a similar vein to the ways I’ve been waxing about just earlier.
Much of what we circled round as a group was about cultivating our sense of interdependence and interconnectedness with each other, the more-than-human and the ones who have gone before us. We ventured out amongst the site’s wild gardens and orchards to greet the season, lit candles for our ancestors and imagined what it might be like to be ancestors ourselves.
We asked one another, what wisdom would we share with the future ones? What joys could we tell them that we had the pleasure of immersing ourselves in? And Boiling Wells’ indoor/outdoor set up meant that we got to get cosy inside when we felt the November chill, but also had the joy of exploring outside for other parts of the day.
We went in with the intention to not try to solve anything or to fix our tender hearts, but purely to make sanctuary. In all honesty, I worried that these practices would be too simple. But it was in their gentle simplicity that room was made for so much vibrant conversation and new solidarities. I was so grateful to everyone that participated. If you’re reading this folks – you know who you are: THANK YOU.
I think it’s very likely we’ll run this again in the near(ish) future, so if you’d like advance notice of the next one let me know in the comments and I’ll make a note to tell you nearer the time.
Over the Samhain weekend I attended the becoming MONSTER festival, a multi-site on and off-line convergence instigated by The Emergence Network (ten).
I’d probably be here all day trying to explain what the festival was about, so I’ll just share this little passage with you from the website:
Welcome to Becoming Monster, an ecology of spaces to feel, share, experiment and practice opening ourselves to the unknown, the unthinkable and unsayable. The aim of the festival is not to identify or name monsters, nor to redraw hard lines around the right and the good. Becoming Monster isn’t a prescription to cure the world’s ills. It is an exploration into a different materiality of grief and care in a time of loss, a celebration of our failures to become, an invitation to reimagine, re-feel and re-intuit what else it might mean to be human beyond the carceral narratives of white modernity.
I didn’t attend anything that was specifically about the menstrual cycle, but all the ideas that erupted from this festival felt like they could wonderfully tangle with my thinking about the cycle.
I came away brimming with ideas about how menstruation and peri/menopause are each terrains of the monstrous. Under capitalism/coloniality/modernity, our cycling bodies are considered sites of failure. They bleed, leak and bloat, demanding times of slowness and introversion that are wholly at odds with the constant hurry we are expected to move at. And these micro cycles of death and rebirth that we inhabit over and over in the menstrual cycle provide us with ample practice for how to come apart; how to dissolve and release, for that is exactly what we do each cycle as we shed our womb’s lining.
What if these embodied experiences hold the clues for how to hospice this world and bring in another? It’s this question that I find myself experimenting with at the moment and I hope to explore this more with you all in the future.
My final quick piece of news is that I’m starting to promote my funeral work a bit more than just this newsletter and word-of-mouth. I’ve set up another Instagram account just purely for this work. Given what I said earlier about silence being what I need/want, I know it’s hypocritical (and daft) to be creating more noise for myself… but I’m just treating it as an experiment and seeing what happens. And in the long term, I may regret having another account to tend to, but so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the new connections I’ve already made within the sector.
If you’re on IG, I’d love it if you followed me there (or share it with your beloveds who might need someone to guide them through a funeral).
In case you’re wondering: I work predominantly in the South West, but I’ve also supported families remotely to craft their own farewell without an officiant there… and I’ll also travel further afield for a ceremony if we can both make it work.
Okay, I should go. This was longer than I planned!
Wishing you all every opportunity to go at the pace your body needs during these wild, dissenting times.
Love, Lottie X