Grief Spells for the spring Equinox: Losing, Joy, and Planting ourselves as seeds

The Tower - Mara June

Dear Shapeshifter,

Each month as I finally find a way to move through procrastination and sit down to write this letter, I fight the voice that says “You’re too late! The month started week’s ago!” and try to give myself permission to be publicly messy, and to begin, as always, in the middle.  You know, to justify it philosophically as best I can. 

So I missed the beginning of Adar, a month of Joy in Judaism. So I missed the beginning of Pisces season, of March. And yet…

The Spring Equinox is upon us. Spring, like water “bursting forth” from the earth, like the Great Flood, like life in death and death in life, unfurls around us. Suddenly, the trees are blossoming. The crocuses, anemones, and daffodils are springing forth. The landscape wakes from winter slumber like a dam breaking, like raucous laughter breaking into the world. So we plant our seeds in the rich soil of last year’s decay. There’s no such thing as waste, or at least, as disappearing waste. We must salvage and repurpose what we can, digest and compost what no longer serves. 

And Spring is, at least where I am, muddy. I’m spending the month in my old home in the four corners of the Southwest, in Dinétah, in the mountains where the clay earth is soaked and slushy with snow melt from some of the biggest snowstorms in years. There are ponds and streams forming in places I’ve never seen them. You can’t walk in the woods without your shoes getting caked with red clay, packed with dead grass, and your feet getting at least 5x heavier by the end of your walk– like you’re wearing straw bale platforms. It gets harder to pick up your feet. It gets easier to slip and fall. The weight and slip of the snow soaked earth doesn’t just bring us to our knees, it brings us flat on our asses, over and over again.

This Spring, in the context of our ever growing political shit storm, ecological collapse, snow-collapsed roofs throughout the country, repeated falls in the mud, reminds me of the Tower card.

In Tarot, the Tower card, like the death card, often evokes a sense of dread when pulled by a reader. Its most forward notes: collapse, big time failure and terror, shouting that everything has gone to absolute shit. The image, always evolving, is often depicting something like this: a tower cracked almost clean in half, struck by lightning, and in flames, while a figure or two are seen springing or falling from the tower back to the earth. A good card for unsettling times. 

In some images, those jumping from the tower are throwing seeds. We can also interpret them to be the seeds themselves, as a friend, and artist Kim Wayman shared with me. The Tower card is about being destroyed by massive change, and it is also about feeding life in death, how brokenness can make good soil. The tower tells a story about the trickstery power of grief to move us. To change us. To bring us to the question of what to do to plant ourselves as seeds. For a seed to sprout, it must crack open. To flower is to fall open and apart. Some plants, like the anemone, have seeds that bury themselves, and are said to grow from ruins, where blood has been spilled and tears of sorrow have hit the earth. The Tower tells a story about losing, failing, cracking, and collapsing as a sacred identity from which life springs, rather than purely something to fear. 

My friend Ben Gordon, former steward to a green burial sanctuary in town, shares: 

“I've spent a lot of my life wondering if I was a Loser. Becoming more acquainted with death has helped me realize for sure that I am, and to claim that identity as sacred. You can too if you want and here's how: 

We can define a Loser as a practitioner of loss, and since the last thing any of us ever do is lose- everything, I believe it behooves us to cherish every opportunity we get to practice losing. That means all of our heartbreak and grief, as well as every shortcoming, every missed accomplishment, every time we don't get what we want, every time getting what we want doesn't go how we wanted, every failure to assert ourselves as right or triumphant or more-significant-than. Being primarily oriented to triumph and success can make you a douchebag, but it will also betray you, because not one of us comes out on top. If we instead orient towards losing, and learn to grieve every large and small loss we experience, we can let each of those moments soften us into connection with the boundless fields of vitality and death below and around us, and I think that's a good way to move in the world… The void is soft.”

I spent the last year as a caretaker for someone with Alzheimer’s and with increasingly limited mobility. As someone who struggles with memory, I often found his experience of the world relatable, though of course different from mine. He often playfully reminded me of things (“you still have my wallet” and “I smell my toast burning”) and we bonded over some of these similarities in the ways our minds worked. More and more, words and memory would escape him. He would point a finger to his temple, then away, and rolling his eyes, he’d say “I’m losing it.”

I wonder about how we envision losing it, and how this overlaps with grief, and how instead of primarily fearing and pitying loss and disorientation, we might try to make ourselves a place of welcome, asserting the dignity of losing it, or at least let it soften us, or open to the possibility of being reoriented to the world through it.

Grief has drastically slowed down how I think and speak. Sometimes my words sputter, stutter, become guttural on their way out into the world. Other times, the words trail off into the woods ahead of me–on the tip of my tongue one moment, then just as quickly, gone. Or, at least no longer in my head. Somewhere outside it, with their own desires.

If I let myself be soft, if I see myself as a seed, I think, perhaps “grief-brain” isn’t only a forgetting, but a remembering of a kind, a return of words and memory to their entanglement with breath and landscape, an escape of language and knowledge from a burning tower into something unfettered and alive. Perhaps it has only ever been an illusion that memory lives inside of our heads, rather than in the world and in our relationship to it. What if memory is not a distracted, disembodied lingering elsewhere, but a deeply embodied “sense of the ancient world surrounding [us]”? (Sam Lee, Rewilding Mythology). What if the fog of grief asks us to lean into this kind of memory? 

Beyond the verbal and cognitive changes many of us experience in grief and in life, we might understand the experience of losing through the lens of what Bayo Akomolafe calls “mispronunciation”, in speaking about Yoruba traditions, which challenges European moralities of striving always to “getting it right”:  “Our cosmologies… are built around flight, errancies, shitty situations, mispronunciations… The world is constantly shaking, moving, mispronouncing itself… Constantly seeking other ways of being with itself.” And being a mispronounced version of oneself can be painful, but this is how new ways of being are birthed, again and again.

And in this month of Adar, a month of Joy in Judaism, we might remember joy as the sense of one’s capacity to move and be moved, to affect and be affected, the joy of wrestling with ourselves and the world, and seeking other ways of being with ourselves. We might remember that joy is distinct from happiness, which we might envision as a lack of struggle, rather, “Joy is a process of coming alive and coming apart… Joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new things.” (Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy).

It may seem foolish to look at the Tower card elements of our world and try to find joy, but Tarot is known as the fool’s journey: It is the fool, the clown, the troublemaking dreamer, the loser, the mortal destined for repeated loss and death, who journey’s through the nonlinear major arcana.  It is the fool’s disposition to be in perpetual dialogue with the world around them, to seek life amidst death, to get in the mess of the world and be changed by it, and to find and feed some wonder and joy in this fleeting existence. It is the Fool who, endlessly shape shifting and springing into the unknown again and again, says, yes, even here we will make life. Perhaps the biggest illusion of the Tarot is that the Fool does this all as a solitary human figure, rather than as a web of relations, a collectively held force of change, joy, creativity that threads together all life, every cell in our bodies a collective call and response with death.

Lars Adams, a friend, clown, and child of Patch Adams, shares:

“Everything and everyone is a clown. As a clown, it’s my duty to connect with and reflect the clown in you, your capacity to be spontaneously playful and silly in the present moment. When I’m fully in my clown, I am in perpetual reaction to the reactions of those I’m clowning with. If they cringe and look away or show fear, I make myself smaller and channel safe, shy playful energy in hopes that it might allow them to feel safer to engage in spontaneous play with me… I have clowned in hospitals, orphanages, prisons, mental institutions, refugee camps, nursing homes, etc… around the world in over 20 countries. It has shown me that being a clown… is an infinite portal to play and that play is a universal language we all speak. It’s also shown me that no matter how deep your suffering, there is a part of our humanity that craves being brought into the present moment by spontaneous play and shared joy.” 

The spring equinox invites us to nourish our capacity to move and be moved in community with others, human and more than human, to come alive as we come apart, to play, to be festive together even in our grief. The Spring reminds us that to make ourselves a site of welcome for new ways of being, we have to allow ourselves to be messy, mispronounced, and cracked open. Possibility dwells in the silly and strange and the new shapes we will learn to make together. As Bayo Akomolafe shares, “The times are serious, we must play.”

May we plant ourselves and our joy like seeds in the soft void.

With love,

Mara

P.S. Consider submitting your own grief spell to the next collaborative digital zine: Grieving as Shapeshifting: Spells for Coming Undone

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