Death Practice Musings 05

Sucking Dirt From The Wound

The summer heat is in decline. Prepare for the great gratitude of harvest (small yin) and the expansive dissolution of winter (big yin). Scrub the skin evenly and bathe in cool water. Drink the full moon light into the kidneys and release all unnecessary heat by expressing and then forgetting (letting go). One moment of true acceptance (no clinging to promises) can exorcise a hundred ancestral ghosts! We do not have to bargain in a devil’s trade, the freedom of our ancestors with the imprisonment of ourselves. This is a ghost’s idea of reciprocity.

Tranquilo, Tranquilo…

I have a brief moment of internet availability again before the next Death Practice Group on Wednesday 7/20 4pm PST. Here is the link to sign up and here is the link to read more about it and order the previous recordings. You can also peruse previous writings on this substack.

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I have been pouring what little energy I have into this offering. It is the culmination and in some ways, the most naked distillation of how-to-do-the-thing-nobody-wants-to-deal-with. American Modernism drives me nuts. No one will be saved by salvation-fantasies, by fascistic anxieties. We seem to be caught in a time loop of sorts, the last seven-ish generations of lost ancestors bargaining with their children’s souls (that’s us by the way) in a zero-sum game of thrones. Imperialism never works out, it’s always dust in the end and a lot more stories to stoke our rage fires with. It’s an enticing mousetrap, to keep thinking our ideas of domination are somehow innovative and that we’ll be the ones to “get it right”.

But, like the unmanned tv station playing reruns on repeat, the narratives don’t match up to the current reality unless we really succumb to a kind of confusion addiction. To a belief that nothing completes. That completion part is the humility, death, decline, letting go part. Like, actually stopping the march of progress until next spring. Like, actually calming down and chilling out.

Sure, we can channel more and more desperate anguish from the depths of our bellies in a final blaze of defiance. We can shriek and gnash and foam with our insulted lineages, amplifying the offenses and the personalized hurts. In many ways, this is the only option that the cult of modernism allows us to choose. There is no peace here in this dream. No solace, no comfort, no rest and no return. Just an eternal highway of promises screaming by at 100mph. The speed of escape through the tunnel of distraction.

Despair, Doom & Nihilism are the natural delusions of this mode of operating. Apocalyptic behaviors, breaking all the toys because, if we can’t get what we want, no one can. How can we deprogram ourselves from the cult of domination, how can we detox from the addiction to codependent dynamics?

And why would we even want to?

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I didn’t find reality until i hit rock bottom after rock bottom after rock bottom. No tradition or scripture matched up to my lived experience, until i finally gave up my own dirty fuel source and surrendered to the inevitable. Maybe that’s all anyone can do, maybe there’s no point in trying to help.

But looking back, it sure would’ve been nice to have the kind of complete worldview that I’m talking about now. Sure would’ve been nice.

I think that every practitioner accepts the job without being offered it. There is something about just doing the damn thing, becoming confident that little old you can update the wisdom formulae in a decent enough way for all beings to benefit. You can’t trademark it but you can add to the wisdom pile and keep the hearth fire burning, you can take your place with all the Original Grandmothers holding polyphonic vigil at the Pit of Dead Children. You modify the scriptures to wrangle the specific critters of your ecosystem, your cultural era, your karmic pit. We feng shui that shit!

And it is a lot like shouting into a hurricane. The dirty blast zone of of our ghosts emanating irradiated kinship.

But what else is there to do? We either add to the harm or we aim to reduce it. and the poets know, beauty and terror exist entwined in this strange and tidal dance.

But what gets this kind of work, death practice, to “stick”? Does it absolutely require some kind of “trauma” event to “wake up” a human being to that which they are constantly distracting themselves from?

I don’t believe so, yet, there is something gorgeous about how reality contacts us, keeps contacting us, a thousand little nudges on the shoulder until there is a break, a crack in our armor, a collapse in our vaunted strength. There is Love here, and always, yet it is not the love of hallmark cards and politics, not the love of transaction, debt and hope. The Love Here is a learned thing, obscure and inconspicuous except to those who practice recognizing it. Peeling away at the heavy cloaks of the mind, the constant propaganda, the residues of revenge.

Learning, real education, the tough thawing of ignorance, is still a radical act of rebellion. It is not “academic”, it is not what modernism has told us it is. Not a way to indoctrinate children into ‘behaving’ and producing. Not a way to become stronger, more inhuman, more addicted. Our natural curiosity, our natural experimental attitudes, our natural kinship bonds secrete this kind of passion which, when intimate with, melts the built-up resistance we harbor towards the very core of reality.

We must become intimate with those forces who we constantly seek to defeat, the three wisdoms called Pain, Fear & Hunger.

This second month of the Death Practice Group we will introduce these wisdom beings and begin to learn how to “go in” with harm reduction and disability justice ethics.

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If you’ve read this far, I thank you, and I have a small request. I am an independent researcher and teaching artist. Along with my partner Larissa Kaul we operate Animist Arts and are funded mainly by patrons and workshop participants. This substack is free, and if you find the ideas inside helpful, please share it with people in your life who are adventurous learners and lovers of nature. We are not wealthy or supported by large organizations. Our work is anti-racist, anti-cult, pro-queer, pro-disability justice, pro-mutual aid. The models of learning we have inherited from our recent settler-colonial past does not prepare us adequately for our current times. We are available to provide bespoke group processes for orgs and groups who want to learn how to better collaborate with each other and the wider world.

How can we help?

Thanks for reading, blessings