I have a few spots open for one-on-one tarot sessions in December. For more about what sessions entail and/or to book an appointment, scroll all the way down.
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To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
It’s very cold on the coast for the first time since I got here and I love it. I’ve been pretty busy these weeks. Reading cards, reading books, doing writing. Cooking, washing sheets for house guests, attending services for a cousin who died. Making plans for next year, taking care of my dog, stacking wood.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time contemplating Offerings. Thinking about its history, purpose, what I’m asking from myself and of readers. The last years’ focus on grief and mourning has given me some new context in terms of how this project began back in 2016—stories of loss for another time, maybe—as well as what it may continue to be, moving forward.
Most of the reading and writing I’ve been doing is driven by my assumption that the ideas we have about grief shape how we can experience losses, as well as how equipped we are to support others through theirs. I feel like the more language we have, the more likely we’ll be to make way for grief processes that may be considered eclectic, eccentric or strange. Of course not all language is helpful, so I try to discern what I think is most likely to be.
I’ve been on a quest of sorts, to encounter and share as many expansive, creative interpretations of grief as I can. And while I don’t have a thesis, or any particular point that I’m trying to make, the effort itself has felt worth it. I’m on the receiving end of many more stories about grief, loss and mourning these days, and am feeling a lot more equipped as a witness. So that’s been affirming.
This week, I started reading Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life by psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear. For the last two years I’ve been sort of obsessed with language that could make losses more livable and in some cases even more vibrant, and Lear’s is some of the best I’ve found yet. It feels creative and vital and worldly. Toothed and hoofed, even.
For Lear, mourning is not only how we express our grief, but also in part how we flourish as humans. It is “an insistence that what happened was not a mere change” and “a distinctively human way of responding to loss.” Lear writes that mourning “constitutes us as beings with a history, a history that continues to matter. In response to loss, we make meaning: re-creating in memory and imagination what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear.”
If mourning makes us historical beings with histories that continue to matter, that makes room for the possibility that so much of what we’re actually up to in life is responding to loss. Re-creating, imagining, reanimating. Of course, never starting from scratch.
Lear’s language is the kind that I’m after in that it not only conditions the possibility of continuing our bonds in un-usual ways but also feels like an erotic invitation. Erotic in the sense that theologian Catherine Keller describes it, as “a lure to our own becoming, a call to actualize the possibilities for greater beauty and intensity in our own lives.1”
Philosopher Kathleen Higgins has suggested that if it’s true what Lear describes, that mourning is a process that constitutes us as beings with a history, then aesthetic practices like writing, art-making, religious and spiritual rituals may be conceived also as mourning. For her, such practices are “part of the intergenerational enterprise of keeping alive ideas and achievements that contribute to human flourishing despite the deaths of their originators.2”
Another thing I love about Lear’s language so far is his choice to describe the pursuit of understanding through making meaning in mourning as a way humans flourish. I have loved this word since I read theologian Grace Jantzen’s description of the flourishing metaphor: “Linked with flowers,” it suggests “to blossom, to thrive, to throw out leaves and shoots, growing vigorously and luxuriantly.3”
Wondering what might happen if the Christian doctrine of salvation were displaced by and replaced with a metaphor of flourishing, Jantzen imagines that an emphasis on flourishing “would lead in quite different directions, opening a way to a divine horizon which celebrates alterities.”
In other words, rather than evoke reliance on a hero-savior as does the aim of salvation, a doctrine of flourishing would make way for diverse presentations of the divine. Whereas salvation relies on a fix from the outside, flourishing “draws upon external sources as a plant draws on the nutrients of the earth and air and water, and is part of the web of connection with others.”
Jantzen’s use of flourishing is positive in contrast to salvation’s “negative condition or crisis,” a site from which one must wait to be rescued. But importantly, a metaphor of flourishing would not deny death. It would just think of death differently.
“The orientation is not towards death and what happens after death, but towards life in this world,” writes Jantzen. Mourning—considered in Lear’s terms—is also positive and world-directed, in that it involves “ongoing imaginative engagement that keeps the absence alive yet renews a sense of hope as one goes forward.4”
I love winter, and have become somewhat ferocious about making use of and protecting the dark-quiet this season affords. This need-to-make-excellent-use-of feels directly responsive to the warming and shortening of winters, paired with the ways loss tends to highlight mortality. I want to make as much good use of winters as I can, while I can.
I am grateful for the seasonal opportunity to reflect on the work I am doing, to carefully consider who it’s for, to affirm what I’m committed to in it, and to imagine how and why it might matter.
I feel excited by the idea that aesthetic practices and creative work can be thought of as mourning, and it feels true for me that writing, like mourning, is a mode of both continuation and renewal, of linking other times and attachments with these ones, and potentially of flourishing.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
Just a reminder that hitting the like button is a great & free way to support this project!
I have a few spots open for tarot sessions in December. These are ninety minute, one-on-one sessions in which we look at an area or areas of life that you choose alongside ten cards from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. If you have questions about what to expect, you can reach out by replying to this email. If you’d like to book a session, you can click here.
You’re reading the Offering for December 2024. I make these Offerings weekly-ish in both text and audio formats for those interested in supporting the work for as little as $5 a month or $50 a year. Paying subscribers have access to the archive of Offerings and are offered first and sometimes exclusive dibs on workshops and live events. To upgrade your subscription, hit the subscribe button below. As always, liking and sharing are great ways to support this project as well.