A Grief Spell for the Last Stretch of Leo Season: Loving the World When it Hurts
Dear Shapeshifters,
The days are becoming shorter, but the sun’s heat remains potent. We can’t truly orient ourselves to the particularities of each season without being being painfully aware of the ways that climate change is impacting all places, and changing our seasons and our experiences of them.
Late summer can bring with it not only some of the hottest temperatures of the year, but increasingly record breaking heat as each year passes.
While heat waves, hurricanes, wild fires mount, empires double down on their projects of reactionary violence: militarizing borders, criminalizing resistance and houselessness and reproductive freedom, and escalating wars and genocides to hoard resources and displace indigenous peoples in a desperate grasping at business as usual. No wonder many of us feel especially burnt out this season, brought to the edges of ourselves.
It hurts to love this world.
And yet this time of year also can hold a bounty, a bounty of green. A bounty of reminders of why we're here together. A bounty of reminders of the possibility for transformation.
The rain and storms can break the heat and bring in gusts of cooler air. There can be a sense of release when the rain clouds break open, darkening the sky. Fall is on its way. We are on the threshold of descent. The longest day is behind us. Change is inevitable.
How brilliant and terrifying, this inevitability of change. Instead of bracing ourselves against it, how can we lean in? How can find ways to “live audaciously” within the eye of the storm, to dream and spin and pass the seemingly impossible golden thread between us?
Aurora Levins Morales shares, in Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals:
“If we are to live audaciously, we need to step into the calm eye of the storm and steer by the stars, to imagine in rich details the biggest, most delicious, satisfying, inclusive future that we can, a great flowering of human potential and well-being, project our hearts and minds into that future, and then spend our lives walking towards it, and each time the weather buffets us, wait for a glimpse of sky, find a bright point of light, and adjust our course.
But in order for that dream to be accurate, to burn bright enough for navigation, it needs to be rooted in the reality of here and now, all of it… The more we face into the world, the more we let ourselves know how other people live, the more we learn about not only their pain and rage but also their love and resilience, their defiance and hope, and it’s from that full spectrum of knowing that we fill in the details and colors of the world we want. There is a joy that rises from being with what’s true, even when that truth includes the terrible.”
Leo Season: Feeding Life in Descent & Living Audaciously
This beginning of harvest season is full of inspiration for us as we join our ecosystems in composting and releasing what needs to be transformed, becoming ripe fruit, going to seed, and finding ways to feed life from within the eye of the storm.
In this twilight of the year and this final stretch of late summer, the Greek Goddess Persephone is on the verge of her yearly descent--her exile also a return to her reign as Queen of the underworld.
There are also many stories this time of year honoring the dying of vegetal gods - gods as embodiment of plant life, who, rather than being immortal, are cyclically born and die, who come from and are composted back into the soil.
As we sense the retreat of sunlight in the Northern hemisphere, we might also sense the retreat of plant-life underground, and the capacity to make life in the decay of grief.
I learned from Xenia Marie Ross Viray that skototropism is the scientific term for “roots’ ability to sense light and grow towards darkness.”
Plants grow towards both light and dark. There is nourishment from being with both. This makes me think about how we might also grow towards darkness in this descent of the year, and in the descent of grief. How this might be a way of “facing into the world” (Levins Morales).
In The Light in the Void, Kai Cheng Thom shares:
“Tired of fixing myself, of being fixed, of trying to explain myself with personal and social histories of oppression, trying to be sane, trying to be worthy of love, worthy of loving myself. Tired of clinging to the edge of the void with my fingernails, trying so hard to not fall in.
So I let myself descend.”
At a time when summer heat and collective loss and violence are feeling increasingly unbearable, skototropism offers a story of life-giving descent, allowing rather than resisting our grief, attuning to what’s happening above-ground while reaching for rootedness and one another in the cool, dark, nutrient-rich underworld.
Though at first the boldness of Leo energy may seem incongruous with these stories, this courageous and life affirming Lion meets us exactly here, where we feel most stretched, on the threshold of descent, and asks us to “live audaciously”, to “face into the world” (Levins Morales).
Kate Belew shares: “Leo season is associated with the archetypal lion and the sacred flame. It asks us to walk across the Savannah of summer, drink from the cup we call life, and create consciously and with all the wildness in our bones.”
And that wildness, that sacred flame, includes the dark. Includes honoring our pain and grief.
I’m thinking about the way Martín Prechtel talks about grief as praise that can bring us to life.
Martín Prechtel shares:
“Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses…If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.” (Grief as Praise: The Smell of Rain on Dust)
Leo season is a season of welcoming creative expression and our own peculiar ways of being, as a way of showering praise for this being alive.
Leo season is a season of allowing ourselves to embrace the messy, uncertain, risky process of dialoguing with the world, being changed by it, and defying even our own ideas of who we are.
The shape of the Leo constellation itself has been said to resemble “a backward question mark” or “a sickle.” And it is made up of many galaxies of various shapes and messy irregularities, believed to be formed from the contact zones between galaxies–“where intertwining gravity disrupts a galaxy's original structure” (Harrington).
Though we may be in the last stretch of Leo season, it's not too late to welcome the risky and disruptive, collaborative gravity of Leo season, Leo placements, and Leo energy. To welcome artists, performers, and those who remind us that all of life is meant to be lived as art, that there need be no separation between the two. To welcome those juicy friendships who invite us back into aliveness again and again. To welcome this hot and fiery, glittering, galactic mess of life and death, tears and sweat.
And to welcome Leo, the lion.
A being who has captivated the human imagination for some time, symbolizing everything from the king of kings to a wild beast to be tamed or slain for human entertainment. The lion has been portrayed as a frightening, uncivilized, sensual, and prideful predator – as well as a strong, courageous, inspiring, and beautiful Sun god, symbolizing spiritual strength and purity of heart (think Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia).
I do wonder if we traced the ways human and lion relations have shifted over time and space, how these changes might map onto changes in human relations with grief and death. I wonder how colonial stories and moralities have sought to flatten and disrupt our capacity to relate with animals like the lion and grief as dignified, complex beings with their own desires, outside of our stories of “goodness” and “badness”.
And I wonder how lions and grief might disrupt human centrality in a grand narrative, and simultaneously be teachers of savoring pleasure, laying our bodies on the dusty earth in the sun, and moving through the world like our belonging has never even been a question.
While Leos may be notorious for being big, bold, and prideful, I think that kind of leo daring becomes most possible when we hold ourselves playfully, lightly, acknowledging our own smallness in the vast galaxy.
Some of these invitations of Leo season remind me of Molly Brodak's poem "How Not to Be a Perfectionist":
People are vivid
and small
and don't live
very long
In this final stretch of Leo season that tips us towards fall, how can we accept the season's invitations to grow towards and live audaciously within a rich darkness?
Inspiration for Loving the World when it Hurts: Motherwort, the Strength Card, and Imaginal Cells
I always like to choose some anchors or inspiration for each season, sometimes they are ideas, sometimes tarot cards, sometimes plants. This late summer and last stretch of Leo season, I’m choosing Motherwort, the strength card, and the imaginal cells of the butterfly.
Lion-Hearted Motherwort
Motherwort also goes by the name Lion heart, or Lion’s tale. Their Latin name is Leonurus Cardiaca. Lion-hearted.
Their soft tufted petals are protected by fierce, prickly protective calyxes. Often used to support the heart and those in grief, Motherwort offers both a plant hug and a chin lift, asserting the dignity, courageousness, and power of our grief, and can calm and steady racing hearts.
A relaxing nervine and a bitter, cooling Motherwort can also help us rest, digest, and recover from burn out. I am taking my motherwort tincture daily this Leo season!
Both Motherwort and Leo season assert our need to be witnessed, held, and celebrated. A student in a past cohort of the herbalism for grief support course shared that the tiny, fuzzy flowers look like many small mouths, open in song. I was reminded of the vulnerability of creating and singing and expressing, how Motherwort, traditionally used to support new mothers and caregivers, has also supported the pouring out of songs sung to new life.
Motherwort can also connect to the story of Demeter and Persephone in grief around parenting, caregiving, and reparenting ourselves.
For those whose hearts beat out of their chests at the thought of being witnessed in their expression, Motherwort offers a supportive balm of love and praise.
And, there are many plants who can support us this season... Some who are or will bloom around us here in western north Carolina, who particularly feel to me to be channeling some Leo energy include Passionflower, Sunflower, Mimosa, and Goldenrod✨
The Strength Card
Much of the imagery in the strength card has been focused “on the relationship connecting a human and a fierce, impulsive animal” or a human holding up a large or broken column, or both (Laeticia Barbier).
Sometimes in the relationship between the human and the fierce animal in the card, the human is portrayed as a man slaying the beast or violently engaged with them in some way. In the Rider-Waite depiction, a woman is gently interacting with a docile lion, her hands placed softly on his head and mouth.
While I much prefer this softer image, which implies that strength is also about softness, I wonder what might it be like to relate to the wildness of the lion, grief, and expression without trying to conquer, use, or tame them however softly.
I want a strength card that looks like lovers in a field, or bees humming and dancing in the open mouths of motherwort flowers, or the galaxies in the Leo constellation colliding and changing shape.
May this season of bold expression invite us to take the risk of loving, of delighting in our “bad” art and our strangeness and our many, always changing, shapes. May this season invite us to take the risk of being misunderstood. To express ourselves in ways that really honor the multitudes of ourselves while opening up the possibility for others to do the same. To remember that creative expression is the birthright of every being on this planet. To follow our pleasure and joy.
To come alive as we come apart.
Imaginal Cells
The imaginal cells of the butterfly provide us with a direct and clear teacher for how to be with our own breaking and our glorious smallness.
I learned from Xenia Marie Ross Viray that imaginal cells are the only cells in the caterpillar that know they will become a butterfly. In our grief magic class, Xenia shared: “When it gets closer to time to make a cocoon, the caterpillar feels that something is seriously wrong.” As they experience their caterpillar body failing, the caterpillar’s imaginal cells are seen as a foreign body, at first attacked by their immune system. But the imaginal cells keep finding one another as the rest of the caterpillar cells become goo, and eventually allow themselves to be pulled by the imaginal cells’ future memory into new shapes.
Leo season invites us to trust those parts of us with future memory, our imaginal cells, to find one another, to hold open the possibility for the new forms we will take, when we are confronted with failing systems.
A Grief Spell for Adorning our Edges
Let us make sanctuary
In the strange
Let us savor
The drips of honey
The chamomile scattered
At the shorelines of our longing
As we surrender to breaking
And singing
Hollowed out, bursting,
Let what needs to crumble, crumble!
Let it break. Let it rot. Let it go.
Let us hold
The hand of Persephone
Let us meet
Our fear with gifts
As we make our descent
Remembering the pomegranate seeds
have always been in our bellies
And we are galaxies of seeds and juice
Scattered and sown
Let us love
Within the folds of rupture
Let us remember
That safety
At life’s expense
Is not nourishment
That coming undone
Need not be comfortable
To be what is needed
Yours,
Mara June
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