A Grief Spell for the Arrival of Summer
Meeting our Thresholds, Becoming Libations
Dear Shapeshifters,
The mulberries and raspberries are ripening more quickly than we can pick and eat them, staining our fingertips a delicious dark magenta. The Virginia Creeper is snaking up the stairs to our porch, reaching playfully for our ankles as we walk past, and the poison ivy is creeping in from all sides of the garden, which towers with goldenrod and sumac and other plants I did not plant but who are nonetheless very much HERE and thriving.
As this Sagittarius-strawberry-honey full moon rises, we welcome surging resistance from LA to Palestine, as we bear witness to increasing state violence and the world seems to finally have reached its limits in the summer heat.
Welcome summer, overwhelm, sadness, rage, ripeness, awe, joy, and all.
The arrival of summer can feel full with intensity and paradox.
In the Northern hemisphere, as we tilt towards the sun, warmth, light, and rich green spill across the landscape. Our gardens become unruly. The days swell.
Imagining this season’s verdancy as the “in breath to winter’s out-breath” allows us to feel the permeability and dance between our hemispheres (Danica Boyce). While we breathe in, the southern hemisphere breathes out.
One spills over as one is spilled into.
A good reminder to breathe.
The Veil is Thin
Maybe you feel it too?
Living through the extreme violence of late stage capitalism, Bruno Latour argues in Down to Earth that this era will marked by a shared, repeating sensation of the ground, like a rug, being pulled out from underneath us.
I wonder about this also being a pulling back of the veil. An encounter with the precarity and proximity of our worlds. A reminder that the lives of those of us not actively being displaced are intimately bound up and inextricable from those who are.
There are older stories that tell us the summer solstice is a potent time for communication between realms.
Across European traditions, the Summer solstice (which falls on June 20th) has been a potent time for illumination of possibilities, and divination, using plants, water, and fire.
As the fireflies return and appear to bring the stars closer, blurring the realms of worlds, all manner of spirits, magical and supernatural beings, fairies, and the dead were said to be closer, as the veil between worlds was especially thin on this shortest night and longest day.
Other stories tell us of this communication between realms this time of year: In Judaism, this month’s Shavuot commemorates the divine revelation of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. The twins of Gemini season are associated with expression and communication, and ruled by the trickster-psychopomp-messenger between the worlds, Mercury.
How might this season’s blurring of worlds invite us to be with this world and that one, to be with our polarities, the both/and of our experiences of grieving/loving/ fighting, and to more clearly sense other worlds, including those that we might bring into being?
And with this seasons’ themes of opening channels of communication, we might reconsider the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. If we imagine ourselves with Mercury’s winged heals, what messages are we getting, and bringing, where? What is the quality of your listening? What stories are you telling about your experience of sadness and grief this summer? Whose interests are they serving?
Coming Apart, Coming Together
This time of year is associated with play, being social, and being in community. All this sociality and input and finding new rhythms together can be joyous and beautiful and it can also be overwhelming and stir up deep grief around relationships and belonging.
Perhaps the sociality of the season might also ask us to imagine how we could make more space for grief, normalize the overwhelm, in our relationships with others and in community spaces. How can we create more spaces to hold us when we are spilling over? In robust community, we are not just bringing our “best” and most grounded selves. We are also bringing our messiest selves. Instead of thinking of this a burden, what if we thought of showing up as we are as a libation?
Our grief in this season might call us spill over unhelpful norms or one-size-fits-all expectations what being social or participating in community looks like in the midst of ongoing genocides and the push for business to continue as usual.
Stories of the veil being thin this time of year also tell us that this sociality isn’t only for the living - but also with the spirit realm, and our ancestors, and future generations. And it is not only the past, future, or supernatural who are louder this time of year, but entire ecosystems humming with the pulse of summer. If Spring resurrected our senses from the rest of winter, now those senses are being summoned by our entire ecological communities. When we create space to be “alone” and get quiet, we also get to be with them.
Meeting our thresholds, Exploring our Range
“‘God’ must be the way reality overwhelms itself; the messianic rift that tears open new dimensions of the ordinary, reintroducing it to itself; the disturbance that never permits the world to cool off absolutely into one thing or the other. The promiscuity of things.”
- Bayo Akomolafe, Coming Down to Earth
My singing teacher reminded me that in our speaking voice, we generally use a very small portion of our actual vocal range--perhaps another reason why singing can feel particularly vulnerable, why listening to someone else sing can move us to tears, and why singing with others can feel particularly powerful.
Not perhaps unlike dancing, compared to walking other the other non-dancing ways we move through the world each day.
It's intimate, to bear witness to these lesser witnessed parts of ourselves and others, to experience far more range in our voices and bodies.
And being in a singing or dancing practice can also bring us face to face with a lot of fear around being heard or seen -- especially being perceived as "getting it wrong" -- which I think is really about not feeling loveable or belonging.
Stuckness, overwhelm, trying and failing, all have a place in our expression. Those too are encounters with our range.
I'm thinking about how in Bearing the Unbearable, Joanne Cacciatore talks about grief as contraction and expansion, like the cycles of the moon, the tides, birth and death, like breath. I’m thinking about the depths of grief that somehow break into laughter.
I’m thinking about what I learned from Latham Thomas about birth work that has changed the way I think about being with overwhelm, pain, and care work: she shares that there is a point in all births when a birthing person feels like the only way forward is impossible, and how the role of the doula in those moments shifts from being a softer presence to being firm in reminding the birthing person they CAN and are doing this.
How might these times of upheaval and unbearable loss and violence, amidst a season of "peak expression” of plant magic and the sun, call us to find a more expressive range and ways of being together? How might we move between supporting ourselves and one another with softness and firmness?
Inspiration for the Both/And & Becoming Libations
I always like to choose some anchors or inspiration for each season. Sometimes they are ideas, sometimes tarot cards, sometimes plants. For this season, I’m choosing Poppy, Honey Bees, and the Star Card.
The Brilliance of the Poppy
An ancient symbol of death, fertility, spilled blood, and ephemerality said to grow in the footsteps of Demeter as she grieved, the seeds of the Corn Poppy (Papaver Rhoeas) can lay dormant for up to 100 years, their seeds only germinating in disturbed soils - finding ways toward the sunlight through pockets of air created by tilled fields, but also wastelands, war zones. This capacity to bring beauty amidst these conditions has also made the Poppy a symbol of beauty amidst destruction, and life in the midst of death.
In WWI, the decimation of Europe’s landscapes by bombs, trenches, and mass burials caused a blanket of millions of corn poppies to bloom across the countryside, a startling contrast with the horrors of war. Soldiers wrote poems about it:
“In Flanders field the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below” (McCrae, 1915)
The Poppy, whose lore spans and disrupts binary thinking, being both medicine and poison, used for support in life and in death, being both beautiful and terrifying, erupting in fields disturbed by war, agriculture, and death, makes me think of Bayo Akomolafe’s suggestion that we might really call birth, life, or death, the inseparable “life-death”. Poppy invites us to think of life and death less linearly, as well as less separately. Life-death is here the whole time, entangled with one another, and we are entangled with them.
What other categories and binaries might we trouble together?
In times as ripe with horrors as ours, the Poppy makes me wonder at a seed that can lay dormant for a century, but in the face of devastating violence to the land and one another, responds, and awakens with vigor, returning from the underworld, bringing us beauty, medicine, and awe. The Poppy makes me wonder what other small beauty has laid dormant, waiting for these particular conditions to erupt and blanket the ruins of our times.
Honey Bees & June’s Honey Moon
Another inspiration for becoming libations and powerful collectivities that I’m thinking about this season are honey bees.
While also known as the strawberry moon, June’s full moon (June 11th! Tonight!) has been called the Honey Moon, or the Meade Moon, and midsummer has traditionally been an important time for harvesting honey and bee activity. Bees are often in the peak of honey production and bee swarms this time of year in temperate regions in the Northern hemisphere, when the days are warmest longest, and there is an abundance of plant life.
Honey has been a part of many magical traditions and has been considered to be a powerful, precious, magical, and healing substance - having been one of the oldest libations that humans have offered the spirits, whether to call upon them or placate them.
Bees have been considered to be psychopomps and messengers between the living and the dead in various European traditions.
Bees have also been admired for the way they work for the well being of the collective, connecting with summer and Gemini season themes of relationality and community.
In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown shares:
“Bees are a fascinating example of decentralized leadership, collective decision-making, and adaptation. No one bee is in charge, no one bee tells the others what to do, but each bee is observing what is needed for the health of the whole and acting accordingly."
Bees and their honey have been associated both with the underworld, death, and grief, as well as sweetness, blossoms, pleasure, connection and collectivity, and are great teachers for staying with the trouble, and straddling dualities and multiple realms. As honey bees are endangered, what would it look like to honor and bless and put out libations for the bees this honey moon, and to try to be more like the honey bee in their incredible capacities for pollination and community care and defense?
The Star Card
In the star card, we see a figure who has one foot in a pool of water and one foot on the shore, with stars behind them, and they're mixing with pitchers of water, pouring one back into the pool of water and the other pouring water onto the earth. And they have what looks like to be a small smile on their face.
Laeticia Barbier says the Star is Venus herself, "a spectral and reassuring presence, this entity welcomes us to the other side, after the death card, under the benevolent guise of an angel... She teaches us that death can be fertile ground." (Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive)
This figure straddles and queers the distinct realms of water and earth. They are fire, the star, playing with water. They trouble the distinctions of categories and binaries. Perhaps rather than pathologizing the ways we collapse, the Star card asks:
“What would it mean to claim fertility inside of decay, instead of always feeling like you're a failure every day...? when your nervous system is still glitchy, when you still have triggers, how can you stop problematizing that and overburdening your already burdened system, and begin to think of yourself as soil?” (Sophie Strand)
I’m thinking of this season’s wildfires as dammed grief. About how capitalism and colonialism have tried to dam/n the rivers of the earth as well as those rivers spilling out of us - our grief, our love, our creativity, our self-expression, our desires, our dreams, our strange brilliances. This star invites us to give ourselves permission to spill over these dams and out into the world. To spill is to take the “risk new shapes” (Sophie Strand).
There is also something about the star card that reminds me of a child playing at the beach or in a sandbox or making potions. Perhaps the star card reminds us of the power of play.
Perhaps to become a libation is to allow ourselves to feel, to flow, glorious and messy, however softly or fiercely.
The Star reminds me of the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estés:
“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.” (Women who Run with Wolves)
A Spell for Becoming Libations
May the gravity of our grief bring us back to each other, ourselves, our bodies, the plants, the land, the water, the animals, our ancestors, and future generations.
May the welling in our chests remind us of how expansive our capacity is to hold and be held, to spill over and be spilled into, of the deep well of love and nourishment in which there is enough for everyone, for every child.
May our breaking break patterns that need breaking, and break us open to even deeper capacity for making beauty, love, and magic where it seems impossible, for making honey at the places of rupture inside and between us.
May our grief make us into delicious libations for worlds in which we all belong.
Yours,
Mara June
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Ooh, Mara, thank you for these words. So much resonated for me, but especially this bit:
"In robust community, we are not just bringing our “best” and most grounded selves. We are also bringing our messiest selves. Instead of thinking of this a burden, what if we thought of showing up as we are as a libation?"
You've given me lots to consider/reflect upon as we inch towards the solstice. ✨