Offering: October 2024

Turning points

Early autumn sheep in southern Vermont

I am teaching Tarot for Change: An Introduction to Tarot for Spiritual Practice on October 19, for more details & to register click here.

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I woke up in the dark to a pack of yapping coyotes. I usually hate being woken up, and it’s so quiet here that I didn’t mind much, but it was another night of spotty sleep. In the morning I scrawled the usual calculations in my journal, a ritual effort to figure out why I slept poorly. The night was warmer than it’s been, I had a sweet treat late in the day, some nerve pain kicked up before bed.

I also hadn’t hugged anyone the day prior. And saw a picture of a baby who had survived one of Israel’s Beirut bombings. And I thought of all those who did not survive to be photographed breathing. I looked at my phone a bit later than I probably should. I learned someone I’ve known my whole life has water in their kitchen that’s up to the counters.

About halfway through my cup of coffee I opened my computer to write the Offering just as I do every Saturday. Earlier in the week I’d jotted some notes to start out with, on chaotic beginnings and Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said’s idea that beginnings are intentional and productive, but always “include a sense of loss.¹”

Because I’m in a period of transition myself I’ve been thinking about how, when I attempt to trace the origin stories of some of my biggest life changes, I often find that there’s so much loss there. Some of the juiciest paths in my life thus far—many which I now look back on with clarity, humility, and awe—have unfurled from pills I have struggled to swallow.

But on this particular morning, none of this felt relevant. I had no idea what to say, so I began with the labor of locating myself. I am in southern Vermont. And it is a beautiful place. And this particular trip has been magic. I see lambs everyday, for example.

I met horses who live in a forest. I’ve drank cold maple seltzer, which has no water added. That’s right, it’s just pure maple sap that rises up to the crown of the tree where it’s tapped, and then bottled. I saw the man who mowed the wildflower path again. This time, I met his wife too. I am a human having a privileged, fairytale time. I am also a writer who is tired, disgusted, and a little bit numb.

At a loss for what to write, I read a series of letters between Irish novelist Sally Rooney and British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad. In one of her letters, Hammad addresses the question I yearn to see answered, which is “what artists in particular are supposed to do in this moment.”

Hammad wonders if part of the difficulty in this question is in the scale of violence that’s happening, which is so enormous and “brings humanity so close to inhumanity that…it shakes the very sense of what we, as humans, actually are.” Rooney articulates the difficulty of writing in a world which “makes everything I have to say feel absurd and disgusting.” She continues, “The only word that means anything to me at such a moment is the word: No.”

After reading Hammad and Rooney’s letters, I read the transcript of this astonishing conversation between Hammad and writer David Naimon. The conversation revolves around Hammad’s new book, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.

If you write, if you make theater or music or paintings, if you tell stories somehow, if you are afraid to be wrong, if you are curious about beginnings, and points of transition, and revelation, and radical change, if you are at a loss about what to say besides “no,” I really suggest checking it out.

Hammad’s book is an expansion of her Edward Said Memorial Lecture which she delivered at Columbia University on September 28 of last year. In the introduction to her book, she references Said’s book Beginnings and notes that “it’s difficult, in life, to pinpoint with any real sense of confidence where a turning point is located…the turning point is likewise a human construction, something we identify in retrospect.”

Hammad is interested in anagnorisis, Aristotle’s word for “the moment when the truth of a matter dawns on a character, the moment toward which a plot usually barrels, and around which a story's mysteries resolve.” She notes her interest in points of transition, when people develop political consciousness or start to see themselves as part of something larger, as well as what gets people there. 

Big transitions and revelations often involve a willingness to admit that one has been wrong, or misguided. Being wrong is something I am personally working on. I encountered so much beautiful language last year, but some of the most useful by far was author Sarah Schulman’s thinking about what makes it so hard for people to face themselves in a critical way.

In an interview, Schulman suggests that reckoning with the ways we’ve been wrong may be so tough because “we have a bar that says you are only eligible for compassion if you are a complete and total victim. If you say that you are participating in escalating or creating a problem, then you don’t get any support.”

If you live in the U.S. and see yourself in this mindset as I do, it may be helpful to remember that we’re inside a country that executes people the state deems to have done something sufficiently wrong. Last week, the day after Khaliifah Ibn Rayford Daniels was executed, poet Hanif Abdurraqib wrote:

“The binary of ‘innocent’ and guilty’ is language most commonly weaponized by the state and passed down to the public…To be so easily seduced by an investment in innocence recreates and reinforces a binary where someone deserves to be executed more or less than someone else.”

In the stages of grief model, which was put forth by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and author David Kessler, denial’s named first. While both Kübler-Ross and Kessler have acknowledged that the stages—denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance—were never meant to be linear, the “stages” metaphor lends well to linear thinking, and they’re often appropriated as such.

In the five stages framework, a point of significant transition or anagnorisis might be exalted in a similar way as acceptance. Both turning points and acceptance involve the recognition that something has changed. Something’s been lost that is not coming back, whether it’s a person or place or worldview or belief. In both cases, there is loss that has real implications. Implications which one is now tasked with making a life in response to.

What feels useful about the stages model in the context of turning points and revelations is that it underscores the way these moments don’t fall from the sky. They’re part of a process of grappling, which may seem like it’s going direct at times and retrograding in others. Those things we tend to look back on and call revelations, or major life breakthroughs, or cold turkey quittings, or new-leaf-over-turnings, are actually made way for by complicated and often contradictory historical contexts.

And while it is often extraordinarily soothing to tell stories that are clear cut and linear, our actual lives are full of reactions and responses and repulsions and affinities and things that are done out of love and in fear and from spite that, as Said argues in Beginnings, are impossible to ever be fully aware of, let alone name.

And what I hope this can mean is that pathways toward big confrontations and key realizations and big revelations and significant changes are always unfurling even when it looks like they’re not. Even when the path is not making sense, and the nights are restless, and the only word that makes sense to say in the mornings is “no.”

I am so grateful to those who continue to tell loyal and lived human stories, and to encounter the right words when I most need them. If you are as enticed as I am and want to pick up a copy of Hammad’s new book, Workshops4Gaza have added it to their bookstore, and all proceeds will go to Muni Gaza who are providing vital services like water supply, waste management, and sewage treatment.

Hi, hitting the heart button is a great & free way to support these Offerings. <3

I am teaching Tarot for Change: An Introduction to Tarot for Spiritual Practice on October 19, for more details & to register click here.

You’re reading the Offering for October 2024. I make these Offerings weekly for those interested in supporting the work for as little as $5 a month or $50 a year. Paying subscribers get first weekly-ish essays in both text and audio format and first (and sometimes exclusive) dibs on live events including classes, Sunday Meetings, and one-on-one sessions.

1. From Said’s book Beginnings