A Grief Spell for the Depths of Winter

Dreaming & Waking Together in the Luminous Dark

Night Sanctuary by Otto Hesselbalm

Dear Shapeshifters,

More and more, it feels like the veil between our worlds is coming apart at the seams, and we too are being stretched. 

I’ve been trying to write, but I haven’t been able to. There are either no words or far too many. There seems to be a turning towards grief workers - a collective searching for someone who knows “how do we handle this (witnessing a genocide)?” 

It’s not me, friends. I am in the throes of massive grief with y’all, riding waves of activation, sorrow, dissociation, and awe and love for our courageous kin in Palestine, for our Jewish kin setting down their fear and saying nothing justifies this- not even our deepest fear and grief. 

There isn’t a blueprint or standardized response for how to handle any grief, let alone these massive collective losses. But I don’t think grief ever calls us to “handle” it.  I think grief calls us to loosen our grip. I think it calls us to transform, and I think grief is good at what they do. I trust our collective heartbreak. 

I trust too, our capacity for responses of care, courage, and beauty, and our capacity to care for our dying and dead. One of the biggest things I’ve learned from death work is that surrendering to what is outside of our control gets to be matched with a claiming of what is: showing up with care, doing what needs to be done. There is magic that we summon when we find the places we have agency and we lean in- whether that be lighting a candle, washing the dishes, providing a cool cloth on a forehead, donating and fundraising, taking direct action, making phone calls, doing rituals, making offerings, casting spells. We are good at what we do, too. I trust our bodies and their wisdom.

In these times of such colossal grief, I’m interested in how we can listen to the wisdom of our seasonal, cyclical, grieving bodies, and work with the energies of each season to support and inspire us to stay with the trouble. 

The Liminality of Winter

Winter and grief seem to share such particular affinity.

In winter and in grief, we may find ourselves moving more slowly, slipping into a world below the surface of this one–like Persephone, or those soil dwelling creatures who survive this time of year by moving below the frost level. 

We may find ourselves creating a refuge in this liminal interior, like the countless creatures creating whole subnivean ecosystems in tunnels between the soil and the still, shimmering snowpack.

Tom Hirons shares: “Winter… it’s always been, at least partially, a slipping into the dreamtime. Parts of me unanchor; I’m less moored to this world. For a poet, that’s a sweet thing; as a human in the spiraling catastrophe of these times, it’s unnerving. I try to live two lives at once, anchored and unmoored. Parts of me are roaming the fields of the Otherworld now. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

We are not roaming alone in these realms. 

The resting earth is a dreaming earth. Dori midnight shares: “Everything here is covered in deep sparkling snow, but below, the sap is beginning to stir and the trees are dreaming about blossoms and fruit.”

I’m imagining these mid-winter lands are much like us when we are in the deepest part of our sleep cycle. We are hardest to awaken, and yet our minds are spinning entire other worlds, while our bodies are regenerating tissue, muscle, bone.

The world is always doing the work of shapeshifting, even as it appears otherwise. 

Kate Belew reminds us:“While it may appear that nothing happens under your feet in the frozen ground, this simply isn't true. Magic and alchemy are at work. The soil is busy protecting life, generating, transforming.”

Our grief is changing us, even if we don’t know how, or what we will become.

Winter rituals of renewal and fertility

I know some of us may balk at new year's goal setting when we’d rather allow ourselves to winter, to attune to our bodies–personal, collective, and earthly. Or maybe when we’d rather throw down.

I’m thinking about how grief, winter, and rot can queer these distinctions between rest, attunement, and transformation. I’m thinking about Sophie Strand’s question: “What would it mean to claim fertility inside of decay?”

I’m also thinking about the calls for a general strike, and about how that kind of large scale change necessitates deeper attunement and wilder dreaming from within the heart of empire and these ruins of capitalism.

I’m thinking about how I address this letter to shapeshifters!

I’m interested in permitting ourselves this kind of dreaming and re-envisioning this season, and how this connects to older, wilder rituals of renewal, fertility, and wakefulness in the heart of winter.

In the Jewish calendar, we are coming to the end of the month of Shevat, approaching Tu B'shevat, the new year of the trees, on January 24th (tonight!). We bless the trees and their dreams of fruit.

The ancient English tradition of the orchard Wassail, which blesses and protects the trees, is also held (earlier!) this month, and is celebrated on the 12th night (which falls on the 5th, 6th, or 17th depending on what calendar you’re using). The custom involves incantations, song, noise making, and splashing the apple trees with cider to wake them up, scare away bad spirits, and bring about a good harvest. Wassail customs likely grow from much older, pre-christian, mid-winter fertility rites (Wassailing! - Notes On The Songs And Traditions).

There is also a carnivalesque thread in some of these older traditions. For example, the 12th night is also the mark of the start of Carnival season, which goes until Mardi Gras. And during the medieval Feast of Fools, held on January 1st, hierarchies would temporarily be undone, roles of clergies reversed, a false Bishop or Pope would be elected, and the church’s rituals would be parodied (Barbier).  Feldman shares: “The carnivalesque creates a space and time in which the norms of society are suspended.”

What an invitation to us shapeshifters!

Like winter, the carnivalesque invites us to otherworlds. 

These older traditions remind us of ways to ask ourselves in the heart of winter, how do we make the most delicious soil we can for the life to come? The root systems of dreaming landscapes reminds us that this season’s general strike is not just about with-holding our resources, labor, attention, but redirecting and redistributing them. 

Meanwhile, the carnivalesque traditions invite us to play as we dream, to hold ourselves a little less tightly, to play with the concept of “new year, new me” to reflect on how we really want to live inside these ruins. How can we allow ourselves to become soil for worlds we previously couldn’t imagine?

We can use this times themes of renewal and play in decay to ask ourselves:

• What beliefs about ourselves and the world are we hospicing this year?

• What and whom do we want to redirect our attention and nourishment to this year? What are some small ways we can do that?

• What are some of our gifts we’d like to share with the world this year? How can we be more daring in sharing them?

• What do we dream of creating, but haven’t allowed ourselves permission to? 

• “What does it feel like to understand how to support yourself when you’re on the edge of the known? What do you need to support yourself when you are on that edge? How could we congratulate and celebrate that we even got to that edge of knowing? ” (I love this series of questions from the magical Xenia Viray, channeling some glorious fool energy)

• “What would my resolution look like if it were in celebration of my porosity, the incomprehensible, the lost, the impossible, the preposterous?” (this is from Bayo Akomolafe’s irreverent list of queer resolutions, go check it out, it’s amazing)

• Or perhaps instead of resolutions, we write down all the questions we want to live inside and explore this year. 

Inspiration for Unmooring Times: The Hermit, Cottonwood Trees, and Sumud

I always like to choose some anchors or inspiration for each season, sometimes they are ideas, sometimes tarot cards, sometimes plants. This Winter, I’m choosing The Hermit, the cottonwood trees, and the Palestinian concept of Sumud.

As someone who considered themself to be an extrovert, grief has made me need a lot more “alone” and “quiet” time than I was used to. The three anchors I chose for this season are helpful in reminding me that community is a dance and a practice, that there are so many ways to be in it together, and that even in the face of death, we still get to decide how we want to live.

The Hermit

The hermit is a being who lingers between worlds. We might think of the hermit as a homebody - but when we look at some of the tarot’s iconic imagery, the hermit is also a barefoot traveler, a seeker, wandering the landscape at night. They have undoubtedly seen some shit. We can imagine the hermit is the fool after the fool’s been on their journey for a minute. Yet I’m also thinking of the hermit as a wise, strange, unsettling grandmother who lives at the edge of the woods, beckoning us towards the unfamiliar. 

The hermit holds up a lantern as they peer through the dark landscape with discerning eyes, the path before them revealing itself slowly, as they shuffle one foot in front of the other. While the eager Fool (who I adore) in tarot seems to be almost oblivious to their environment, eyes closed and face tilted to the sun as they skip off a cliff– the hermit is looking downward, listening deeply. They are not in a hurry. They are feeling their way though.

Rather than avoid the world, the hermit invites us to find the inner quiet we need to be present in the world, to stay with the trouble.

The Cottonwoods 

As we do experience presence, and we feel the ground beneath our feet shifting more and more, we might remember the wisdom of the Cottonwoods, who dance in their own shallow rootedness, finding anchors by holding on to one another, their branches growing into one another:

“Cottonwood trees have shallow roots. Their ancestors have taught them how best to survive the unsettled ground of floodplains. When the lands flood and the soil is waterlogged, the trees’ mutual support enables them to lean on each other.” (Susan Raffo, Liberated to the Bone)

The cottonwoods invite us to reach for one another, to create “branch-breadth” in these unsettled grounds of wild grief (Raffo). 

Sumud

I recently learned about the Palestinian concept of Sumud:

“Sumud is continuing living in Palestine, laughing, enjoying life, falling in love, getting married, having children. Sumud is also continuing your studies outside, to get a diploma, to come back here. Defending values is sumud. Building a house, a beautiful one and thinking that we are here to stay, even when the Israelis are demolishing this house, and then build a new and even more beautiful one than before - that is also sumud. That I am here is sumud. To reclaim that you are a human being and defending your humanity is sumud.” (Abdel Fatah Abu Srour in To Exist is to Resist, 2014)

“Sumud is not a single, demonstrative action...Sumud is an art of living.” (Zoughbi Zoughbi in To Exist is to Resist)

May we all summon the strength of that kind of dreaming, that kind of wakefulness and agency in the depths of grief’s winter.

A Spell for Dreaming Together in the Luminous Dark

By Coco Rosenberg (follow their incredible work @justcocohere on instagram or on their website at www.cocorosenberg.com )

and on the day all empires fall

in the season of decay and amidst the alchemy of liberation

we will all lie still

lips pressed close to the dark dirt

rich with hopes

and the compost of all this cosmic knowing

that one day

we would arrive

the luminous dark is a gift of sight

the rising rage, a pathway home

to our love

this grief is our channel

a beckon towards rot

wherein we find that the seeds we have nurtured

flourish

in the twilight

of transformation

Yours,

Mara June