The Balsamic Moon Blog #7 and #8
Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia. Photo by Rhett A, Butler.
Metabolizing Despair
I began this blog last fall as a way of sharing my own personal rituals about facing fear, loss, and change. As an astrologer, I knew 2020 would be a year of dramatic change, in which we’d all be dealing with Plutonian themes (death, transformation, despair). I didn’t anticipate a global pandemic.
I published my last blog post while I was on a trip to New York and Philly in early March, but I’d written it a few days before—weeks before lockdown, weeks before we knew there was a deadly virus moving through the country. On the first day of our trip, concern about the coronavirus seemed overly paranoid. But each day the background levels of collective dread rose a little, and by the end of our trip every day brought exponentially worse news. Five days before we flew home and entered voluntary quarantine (a week ahead of the national shutdown), we were at the Natural History Museum with our sisters, touching dinosaur fossils and herding small children. I remember doing a dance with my sister, pressing our foreheads together and swaying slightly, like we’ve done since we were teenagers. My partner’s nieces were curious and tried it, too. We giggled the way people do when they’re acting oddly in a crowded place, full of families and tourists and people checking bags and buying tickets and eating lunch on the broad front steps. I’ve spent a lot of time in New York, and the joyous, chaotic throng of life there is familiar to me. A few months later, this memory of a sunny day in New York when my partner and I got to introduce our families to each other feels like a vanished world.
Until the pandemic, I was doing these grief rituals monthly. I carved out a time during the balsamic moon phase, I called in protection and beauty and boundaries as I faced the shadows. Now—as we all face unprecedented, prolonged grief and fear—I’m praying all the damn time. Like many things during a global pandemic, the format that worked before isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Moving forward, a lot of things won’t cut it anymore. We have serious work ahead of to liberate this world from the death cult known as business-as-usual. We need to push for a world where governments don’t relax pollution restrictions while people in the most polluted regions are dying faster from this virus. A world where we love and protect the most vulnerable instead of keeping them locked in cages, refusing them adequate care, and deciding it’s okay to prioritize the economy over their lives. We are not all affected by this virus equally. The people who are most vulnerable to this virus are already the most vulnerable under business-as-usual. This is why the US government is so cavalier about reopening our country while infection rates are still rising in many places. They consider the death of these people acceptable. Mere numbers numb the heart. Notice the absence of context in the phrase “3,000 deaths per day.” It’s not “3,000 people each day die painfully and alone, leaving behind children and spouses and collaborators whose lives will never feel complete without them, and traumatizing the care workers who are risking their own lives to save so many.” When we stay in numbers, we can stay numb. We can go back to normal.
Before the pandemic, in a state of slow and quite despair that might have just felt “normal,” many of us gave up on fighting the genocidal, geocidal business-as-usual way of life. Maybe in peak moments we felt outrage, then time grinds on and we return to powerless, numb. We are in a peak moment now, and they’re trying to lull us back into numbness.
And sometimes numbness is easier, because it hurts to love what’s dying—like the Amazon rainforest and those whose lives are woven through it, the indigenous protectors who are falling ill and can no longer halt the increase of logging. Humans are destroying this forest, the lungs of our planet, as a virus is destroying so many human lungs. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, lungs are associated with grief. Many of us in the US don’t have cultural grief practices, don’t know how to handle the pain of grief. We’re used to winning. Americans love a happy ending, a quick fix. We want to sign a petition or raise awareness. We like to be busy doing instead of stuck at home, feeling powerless in our grief.
But this crisis doesn’t have a tidy, clean ending. Coronavirus is one among many indicators that we are environmentally out of balance. There will be more novel viruses as more animals are displaced from their habitats. As climate changes rapidly and we are in Earth’s sixth mass extinction, there really is no normal to go back to. What has seemed normal for centuries has been killing us (though unequally, some more than others) and the many species we share our world with. If we don’t have tools to work with the truly gigantic grief and fear this raises, it’s impossible not to shut down, go numb, and retreat to despair. We sink into despair, we feel powerless to climb out of it. Maybe this is where you are, right now. Sunk into it.
Which brings me to the secret behind all these grief rituals: when we do have effective tools for experiencing grief, terror, and pain we can stave off despair. We can stay in touch with what is good and beautiful and joyous, without needing a guarantee of a happy ending. We can keep showing up for the hard work of being human. In the immortal words of James Baldwin, “I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.” Or, to paraphrase Rabbi Tarfon: the work of transforming the world is not ours to finish but neither can we turn away from it.
So, as someone who’s not currently in despair but has been familiar with it, I offer you a tool. I consider this a spiritual tool, but you might not. I’m sharing it the way it works for me, but you may need to customize it for yourself. As always, the more you practice the easier it gets.
Metabolizing Despair. An Exercise.
Despair tells us it is the only reality. In despair, our bodies lock up and refuse to be in connection with anything outside the despair story. Despair can be self-protective, though it might feel more like a nightmare.This pandemic itself feels like a nightmare, including the dream logic of life feeling strangely ordinary (for many) while something terrible has happened or is still happening or will happen. We can wake up from a nightmare, though. This is not to say the pandemic isn’t real, but rather that we are trapped in something that is only one version of reality.
So, begin by acknowledging there is more to the story than you can currently perceive. Reality is more complex than you can perceive. This may not be comforting yet, but it’s a necessary first step. Don’t jump from this to trying to cheer yourself up with visions of possibly rosy outcomes. Optimistic fantasies aren’t the antidote to nihilistic fantasies. What you’re looking for is a different orientation to time itself.
You may be stuck in a story that tells you: “What I love is dying (or has died or will die).” Maybe it’s a loved one, or an ecosystem, or your own body. Despair freezes the grief process, ricochets the pain forward and backward into infinity. What I love has always died, what I love will always die. I am caught in the tenuous center in which I love—on all sides are death (if death isn’t your fixation, repeat this exercise with oppression or cruelty as the focus). Whatever you feel hemmed in by, I want you to focus on that sliver of present tense: “I love.” The center of the phrase. “I love.” This is what your despair is trying to protect you from: the pain of loving. Loving and grieving are two aspects of the same experience. You can flip them like you flip a coin—joy and pain, pain and joy. To be able to love is what you are here for. That love might look like playing music or studying physics or raising a family or having orgies. Love is a quality of attention and engagement that ripples out in all times and dimensions and creates the conditions for healing to happen.
This is when you may need to cry. If you are able to cry, you are well on your way to getting unstuck. You might need to ugly cry for a long time. You might need to cry every day for months or years. Crying may become a practice, an exercise, like anything else you do to maintain your human life. If you are unable to cry, you will need to be gentler and slower as you ease out of despair and back into connection with what is alive in you. Remember, there is so much you can’t control—in despair, you have created a world of total tragedy because it is one in which you know what to expect. Staying in reality means staying open to uncertainty—arguably much scarier than tragedy. When you practice these exercises, you’re extending your ability to stay with what is real, even as it remains unknown and uncertain. In staying with uncertainty, you are bringing your attention and presence to what it means to be alive in a way that can only be called love. And when you practice love in this way, you feel it holding you up. This ceases to be a solo exercise. Loving and being loved cease to be separate actions. This is where it gets a little mystical, so if you’re not into the woo feel free to rewrite this part. But don’t omit it! Think about the reciprocity that exists in all encounters—Earth’s gravity pulling on me as my body pulls on it. Get as scientific as you want to, while understanding that love is the act of deeply searching to know—deeply enough to understand what all that you can never fully know.
Support this blog: I have a Patreon page for those who’d like to donate to this blog, and subscribe for all kinds of astrological insights and expanded horoscopes.
(tentative) Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
May 20: Ritual #9
June 5: Blog Post #9
June 19: Ritual #10
July 5: Blog Post #10
August 17: Ritual #11
September 2: Blog Post #11
The Balsamic Moon Blog #4 and #5
Welcome back to the Balsamic Moon Blog! This is where I report back to you on the rituals I’m working this year to face grief, loss, and transformation. I took a break from posting last month because what came up in ritual wasn't ready to be shared yet. This month’s ritual deepened into the same themes. This is the risk I take in having a public-facing project that delves into the mysteries of transformation! But here are some thoughts from the last two months, and I thank you as always for accompanying me in this process.
Balsamic Moon Ritual #4 and #5 - A Spell for Letting Go
Letting go is harder than it seems.
I talk a good game about letting go. Every week, I support clients in releasing stuck patterns and getting curious about change. My sister and I even made a painting called “A Spell for Letting Go.” I spent a full year embroidering a screen-printed patch of that image. It was the first year Trump was in power, and the last year I was in a particularly difficult partnership. Looking back now, I find it interesting that I chose sewing as a way to work a spell about release—with each stitch, I was fixing the energy of that moment into the cloth. I was preserving, mending, cocooning in silk all the vast and tiny fears, stress, and uncertainties about the future.
Sometimes you know something before you let yourself know it. I could feel my future careening away from what I thought it would be, both with my partner and in the larger world. I told everyone embroidering this spell was a way of embracing these changes, but if you’re gonna to do a releasing spell, there are far better methods I can think of. I could have burnt something, thrown something in the river, buried something, ran or sang until my lungs ran out of breath—but no, nope, I made an intensely detailed, tactile object that is really a map of how much I try to keep things together. I tried so hard to keep that world intact. And I poured the stress of that activity into this piece of fabric.
The fun thing about embroidering is you get to stab something over and over again. Perhaps you’re in a tense meeting where people have different ideas about how to plan a rally or handle an accountability process. Perhaps you’ve reached a place in your relationship where you can’t communicate clearly anymore and the silences are full of misunderstandings. The needle goes in, sharp little jabs, again and again. It leaves a beautiful trail of silk in its wake. This is what I’m good at—taking the pain in the room and transforming it into something beautiful. Actually letting go of the pain or the fear or the attachment, not so much.
What’s the big deal about letting go, anyway? My Taurus Moon really wants to know. I get strongly attached, even if a home or a lover or an identity is no longer good for me. Is attachment like this a fear of death? Because we experience so many deaths in our lifetimes—when an important relationship ends, who you were with that person goes through a kind of death. If you are able-bodied and become disabled, if you transition away from your assigned gender, if you break ties with a family member, if you leave your home country and settle far away—even if you just keep living and don’t make any conscious changes, you’ll still find parts of you have died while you weren’t paying attention. And the thing is, as sad as this may make us, it’s pretty beautiful. I don’t know about you, but I see death as part of a larger cycle that always includes a kind of rebirth. All these small deaths teach us how to transform. They let us become instead of merely being. If we can’t let go, we can’t become.
Energetically, what we can’t let go of ends up somewhere in our bodies—a pattern of lower back pain or migraines, a disruption in the endocrine system, a hyper-vigilant nervous system. I’m fascinated by how our bodies hold our stories, almost like they are dream images we need to decode to understand what’s happening in our minds. Too often, we focus on frustration and fear, we interpret our bodies’ symptoms as antagonism instead of love. We feel betrayed. We resent the pain, the incapacity, the godawful uncertainty of when or if this symptom will end. Our resentment tightens us. Fear of future pain, fear of illness, fear of any kind constricts us. To learn to let go, we need to first let go of our fear.
So this is my ritual for you, if you choose to share it with me. You can read it as a bedtime story, chant it as a lullaby, rewrite it and share it however you wish. It goes like this:
Your body loves you, an animal love.
Growling, howling, nestling, settling.
Here is the place where you stay warm.
Set a watcher so you will know
when to spring up, and when you can let go.
And when it’s time for letting go,
May each death bring you deeper
under water, into amazement, back to love.
Support this blog: I have a new Patreon page for those who’d like to donate to this blog, and subscribe for all kinds of astrological insights and expanded horoscopes.
Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
February 21: Ritual #6
March 9: Blog Post #6
March 22: Ritual #7
April 8: Blog Post #7
April 22: Ritual #8
May 7: Blog Post # 8
May 20: Ritual #9
June 5: Blog Post #9
June 19: Ritual #10
July 5: Blog Post #10
August 17: Ritual #11
September 2: Blog Post #11
The Balsamic Moon Blog #3
Tehching Hsieh, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984, New York. © 1984 Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano. Courtesy of the artists and Sean Kelly, New York.
Choosing Faith
“Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one …. ” Anne Boyer, What Resembles The Grave But Isn’t
Imagine this sentence is a rope, cast from the bottom of a dark hole up into the light. Let’s call this rope faith. Maybe there is someone up there to catch the rope, someone with strong arms and a firm foothold, someone who can hoist us up and out. Maybe not. Maybe the rope will fall back, collapsing in graceful arabesques. When faith collapses into fear, it’s not always obvious. We may feel acute panic, but most of the time we find ways of pretending‚ even to ourselves, that everything is fine. We distract ourselves, we criticize something, we try to feel a sense of control, we dig ourselves a more comfortable hole-within-a-hole and lie very still until it feels safe to emerge—however long that might take. Anne Boyer writes of “sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another.”
Faith is the act of throwing the rope up again and again and again. Faith is the hallmark of Sagittarius energy—that special buoyancy that allows us to keep rising above our present troubles and believing the future will be better. Faith can be foolish, or even dangerous, as when we keep believing an abusive relationship will get better if we just try harder, or when we have faith in governments to give us justice, or corporations to clean up the environment they polluted. But faith is also powerful medicine against despair—against staying in that hole forever and pretending this is good enough.
Today, on the Gemini Full Moon of 2019, as massive wildfires engulf Australia and protests disrupt climate talks in Madrid, as my country continues to imprison children and families using a rhetoric of fear that is strikingly similar to the rhetoric that justified the Holocaust, as we find ourselves in a period of mass extinction that forces us to ask how much longer the Earth will support life as we know it, as I recover from inhaling ambient toxins in my office after it caught fire two days ago, as I drink homemade ginger-turmeric tea and wonder if I can afford the longterm medicine I need, I can feel into the waves of fear and grief washing over our planet. I can also feel the warm bite of ginger on my sore throat and I think of my cousin who taught me this recipe, how to blend fresh ginger and turmeric root together with honey, how to sprinkle black pepper on top to help activate the curcumin. I can feel my body’s understanding of how to heal, given the proper resources it needs. And I know there will be illnesses I never heal from, given the sheer fact of aging and mortality. On a larger scale, my energetic connection to this world is responding to an onslaught of stress—what we might call systemic oppression, environmental devastation, global neoliberalism as an inexorable force of banal evil. And I still believe in the possibility of healing.
When I was in my twenties, the anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia was full of books with titles like “Another World is Possible.” Coming off the enthusiastic, colorful, puppet-filled protests of the anti-globalization movement in the 90s, the early 2000s were still by and large a time of faith. I believed we were winning, as our banners proclaimed, so much that I never learned to drive a car. Surely our reliance on fossil fuel and highways would be over any day now. I believed in the capacity of my activist community to care for each other well enough that I spent most of my time invested in these relationships and as little time as possible earning money. I placed my life in the hands of my friends, again and again, and we kept each other safe. Those years felt like a kind of magic spell, like opening a door into a fairy world where ordinary reality holds no sway. All the rules I’d been taught about how to survive were upended—it was like each of us had jumped out of a window and no one could fly on their own, but together we managed to hold each other up.
And then I got sick, and the laws of the marketplace once more imposed themselves on the rhythms of my life. I had to go back to work to afford doctors and medicine, and as I had little energy left for friends and activism, I was increasingly isolated. I spent some time crushed by the failure of my community to meet my needs—we had amateur herbalists, but no one who could get me the lab tests I need and an accurate diagnosis. We had free bagels and pizza scavenged from dumpsters, but I had to spend money on fresh, healthy foods to stay well. A bubble burst for me, and it took some time to forgive “the community”—which was who, really?—for the ways I had to leave it to seek healing. I’ve heard a similar story from so many people who age out of activism, who find that once they have emotional or physical needs that require a slower pace, they feel left behind.
In my first years of illness, I spent a long time grappling with fear and faith. I still believed in relationships as where we create revolutionary forms of healing, strength, and shared power. The more I pulled back and saw the larger perspective (a Sagittarius skill), the more I saw lines of connection between everyone I knew, the more I could forgive individual acts of carelessness or fear. Tilting my head to one side, I saw our communities as traumatized, self-righteous, and haphazard. Tilting my head to another angle, I saw us as experimenting with unprecedented ways of healing what we inherited from our parents and their parents and all the ancestors that enslaved and dominated and poisoned, and all the ancestors that suffered and resisted and became embittered and some who became free. I saw the whole damn map of us, going back generations, and I was able to love our efforts to heal what’s been broken for a long time, even if it’s still mostly broken.
What I came to was something I later found in the work of Joanna Macy—that we cannot know that we will win, but that we must believe it’s possible—this belief give us the energy to keep trying. In our current moment of uncertainty, in the long years ahead of us as we see clear evidence that things are getting worse, we need faith. Not blind faith that someone else will solve the problem and release us from responsibility, but faith that is an act of creation. It’s the act of throwing up that rope, again and again, even if we doubt anyone is up there to grab it. It’s the joy we feel in the act of throwing, and even the pleasure of hearing the rope swoosh back down into our empty hands. This kind of faith relies on feeling connected to something much larger than ourselves—whether that’s a divine energy or merely the existence of so many other humans throwing up ropes from their own holes, hoping maybe one rope will find another and we can pull ourselves out together.
Balsamic Moon Ritual #3 Summary:
Intention: To interrogate the nature of faith
Main activity: For this ritual, I lit a candle and invited my ancestors to join me as I went into a trance and did some free-writing, mostly asking questions that were impossible for me to answer and then noticing what answers came through.
What I learned: Faith is powerful medicine when it is an intentional act, less so when it encourages passivity.
Join the conversation: What is your relationship to faith and doubt?
Support this blog: I’ve just soft-launched a Patreon page for those who’d like to donate to this blog. In the new year, there will be all kinds of goodies there for subscribers—for now, it’s merely a place to offer support if you feel so moved!
Balsamic Moon Blog Schedule:
December 23: Ritual
January 10: Blog Post
January 22: Ritual
February 9: Blog Post
February 21: Ritual
March 9: Blog Post
March 22: Ritual
April 8: Blog Post
April 22: Ritual
May 7: Blog Post
May 20: Ritual
June 5: Blog Post
June 19: Ritual
July 5: Blog Post
August 17: Ritual
September 2: Blog Post