I’m offering some one-on-one tarot sessions in October, a tarot class, and the winter session of Sunday Meetings kicks off today. For details and links to book, scroll all the way down!
There is no audio for the rest of this month as I’m on the road until October and don’t have the bandwidth to set up my audio stuff. Sound will be back at the start of next month. I hope to record audio later for this one & will let you know if I do!
If you read these Offerings regularly, hitting the heart button is a tiny but great & free way to support them. <3
Between cleaning my house top to bottom, packing my worldly belongings, and setting off on a long trip up north, I got a bit lost in the Offering this week. When a piece of writing gets away from me like that, I like to practice writing a summary of what the essay’s about so that I might remember, or even locate, the point.
Writing an essay for me is sort of like solving a problem. I’m trying to see how and if certain things hang together. The more able I am to summarize it, the more it feels like I’ve done what I’d hoped. What you’re reading is my attempt to do that. And as you will see, the summary sometimes takes on a life of it’s own.
I began with the ideas that grief can be seen as the loss of a world, and that mourning can be something different. Mourning may be an “ongoing imaginative engagement that keeps the absence alive yet renews a sense of hope as one goes forward.1” So if grief is world loss, mourning may be more like world making. People have done thorough work on these topics. My thoughts were just speculations.
I wanted to write about two particular worlds that I committed to making in mourning, but then got turned around and mixed up. I was thinking about one specific period of responding to loss, but through the process of writing realized another. It was a time of life that I’ve definitely thought involved grieving, but had not thought to call what came out of it “mourning.”
In the early days of the pandemic I experienced a sort of sudden, insatiable, and overwhelming yearning to reconnect with more-than-human worlds. I was living in a studio built into a hill that was shrouded in Bay Laurels. There was a porch overlooking a huge botanical garden, where I’d sometimes read or talk to friends on the phone. I lived there for ten months, and each day was astonished. Flowers and scents blooming out every which way, and once a deer even peeked in my window.
I’ve said this before, but me in California always felt kind of like Odysseus on Ogygia with Calypso. Everything’s stunning, it’s harvest season year-round, the whole thing is a vibe like you would not believe (at least not if you were from New England, like me). But at the end of the day no matter how gorgeous it is, it’s not home. And that does it. I found an old rained-on copy of The Odyssey on the roadside, packed up all my things, and drove three thousand miles back east where I came from.
When I got home I still yearned to be closer to plants, and animals, and trees. I let myself believe any place could be like Ogygia, if I just took the time to be curious. I signed up for my first ever horseback riding lessons with my good friend and lifelong rider, Kat Kendon. I took an herbalism class. And a couple years later, I got a puppy. Who I was woefully unprepared for, but whose goofiness and friendship fit the vision I had. (Though he still makes me work for the latter, and what a gift that has been).
Cultivating these six-legged kinships was not easy for me, at all. After the highs of doing a cool, new, and highly photogenic thing wore off I fantasized almost all the time about quitting riding. Horse riding lessons were basically Fear School for me. So much fear all the time, every time. Before riding I really had no idea how much I believe that I need to be scared to be safe. As for the dog, I wanted to quit on him lots of times too.
I wanted to write about these friendships in the original Offering, but it’s a hard task not to fall in the trap of romanticizing interspecies relations. I guess the best thing to say is the truest; I’ve struggled hard to make these friendships. It’s been lots of fear and frustration, lots of learning and unlearning, lots of bewilderment and confusion and self-confrontation. But there was something in me that carried a flame to keep making those worlds. And looking back, I think it had something to do with grief.
Ret (the horse) and Mango (my dog) are two of my favorite beings on earth but it was clear from the beginning that they had not entered my life to bolster my “rarely excusable, neurotic fantasy” of being loved unconditionally, or having constant ease and delight in relationship. Though entitlement to be loved no matter what by an autonomous other may be wrong and misguided, biologist Donna Haraway has argued that “The permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other and the inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest” is a different matter entirely.
One thing I came to through writing about these worlds in particular is that they didn’t make a whole lot of sense right away. Both Ret and Mango have made me work and keep working, for a shared world that feels good. They’ve helped me understand what Toni Morrison writes, that “You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn—by practice and careful contemplations—the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it.2”
The interactions between us took a long time to start making sense, but more broadly the need that I had to make worlds with them didn’t quite add up, either. I, like probably most of us, don’t always know when I’m grieving. And I’m sure that at least to some degree we all look back on things that have happened and warp them to fit with our stories. But it really makes sense to me now—through the process of writing this Offering, actually—that what I was doing back then in that first year of COVID was mourning.
Which is to say that I was engaging imaginatively with what had been lost—a social life that looked a certain way—in a manner that honored the absence of what was gone, while finding a way to renew the sense that there was a way forward. A way that was sometimes kicking or growling or going too fast, sometimes whining or snorting, sometimes tossing his head or wagging his whole body with unbridled animal joy.
Philosopher Line Ryberg Ingerslev has written about how in grief we make commitments “to something that is not known” but which may unfold as “a relearning of the world,” and that these commitments are “inherent to survival.” And I’d say that’s just what it’s been for me. In order to stay in tact—not only through COVID but other losses, as well—I’ve committed to strange unknown worlds that have involved a lot of relearning. Whole new ways of moving and asking and telling and becoming with.
The idea of mourning as making worlds feels especially important because it’s about being responsive to losses in ways that connect us with others, even if we’re feeling afraid of connection, or the loss has been too painful to feel that risking again would be wise. I’ve learned these last years that there are so many ways to make worlds that acknowledge and make room for my fears, without convincing myself that my fears are invalid. The awareness that one can be badly hurt on a horse, for instance, is a legitimate thing. A respect issue, even.
(And as a relevant aside, this episode of Death Panel includes a critical read of NPR’s “Wrestling with my husband’s fear of getting COVID again” and it’s really good, on empathy and the pathologization of taking continual COVID precautions.)
Finally, today is the first day of fall here in the northern hemisphere (and the first day of the winter session of Sunday Meetings!) and here is a picture of a bucket of pears that I encountered on my first Autumn walk back in New England on Friday.
Moments after I saw these, the person whose tree they’re from waved me down to let me know that he’d just mowed a path through the wildflowers that Mango and I would be welcome to walk anytime that we wanted. He seemed hopeful we would, and we did the next day. But then we ran into two raccoons. And both of us got scared, so we fled. We’ll try again another day. Happy Equinox everyone.
If you read these Offerings regularly, hitting the heart button is a tiny but great & free way to support them. <3
I am offering a few one-on-one Tarot sessions in October which you can click here to book. Tarot sessions are 90 minute processual wanderings with images (10 cards), careful listening, and collaborative interpretation. If you have questions about what to expect or about what a tarot session is and is not, please feel free to reach out.
I’m also teaching Tarot for Change: An Introduction to Tarot for Spiritual Practice on October 19. Click here for more details & to register.