Sometimes Grief Cleans the F*** out of your Basement
Mundane Grief Magic for Virgo/Libra Season, A Witch's To Do List, & New Offering: Grief Studios!🎨
I used to think of being busy with mundane things in the midst of loss as a problematic distraction.
I remember going through all my dad’s things after he died. I remember with vivid detail what it felt like to slowly unfold and put on a pair of his jeans.
I remember helping my mom make and move through the lists of things that had to be done after his death. I remember thinking how fucked up it was that death requires so much paperwork.
But I also remember the grounding sensation of feeling useful to my mom in her overwhelm.
I remember the slow magic of holding each of the objects from my dad’s life.
I remember the feeling of my dad’s hand on my shoulder as we sat signed the paperwork for his cremation.
When I look back, it’s clear that even in the lists of things to be done, magic was there. And that capitalism and colonialism work hard to obscure the magic in the mundane- to make it feel empty instead of animate and alive. Our work is to sense the world anyway.
“Things speak all the time, but if your ears aren’t attuned, you have to learn to listen… Look at all the things around you. What do you see? The chair you’re sitting on. The pencil in your pocket. The sneaker on your foot. Still can’t hear?… Try it with the pencil first… Just hold it next to your head and listen. Can you hear the wood whisper? The ghost of the pine? The mutter of lead?” (Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness)
I remember when I was the only support for a loved one in ongoing mental health crises and I took to organizing the fuck out of our basement. I also tried every approach to create a more sustainable support system and care plans with them. But there was only so much support that they could lean into, and I quickly learned that meeting them with urgent or controlling energy never worked. Real attunement to them meant that I largely had to surrender control, and create systems of care for myself. Some of what that looked like was prayer and therapy and being held by friends, and some of what that looked like was a ferociously determined tidying of the most chaotic part of our house. I surrendered control where I did not have it and took control where I had been avoiding it. And months later, it was this same detail oriented, organizer part of me that was able to help create the lists, make the calls, put the financial systems and paperwork in place to support this loved one when they were ready.
I used to think that tending to the mundane was a form of conditioned productivity. Something we lean into only because there isn’t the space to collapse and feel the weight of our grief. And we absolutely need that space under systems that coerce us into business as usual. But dismissing the magic in the mundane is something those systems also depend on us doing.
So I was problematizing something that was a deep support for me (and others), something that was an important part of my experience (and also.. the daily life). A way to find ground, to find agency, to organize and create systems and doable steps that worked for me and made daily life easier.
Now I know that grief isn’t only and always either howling or immobile. Sometimes it deep cleans and organizes, makes lists, dissociates and integrates, puts in order the things it can, as other things fall apart.
Magic also lives in the mundane. In the details.
Tending to the Mundane in the House of Mystery
This Virgo on the cusp of Libra season, I’ve been reminded how the mundane and the mysterious, the practical and the ritual, are perpetually seeded within and queering one another–that “the rituals of our ancestors rise up out of the mundane” (Peai Luzzi).
In this Jewish month of Elul, one practice is that of repeating Psalm 27 on a daily basis, which says: “Let me dwell in the house of the lord”… but we might understand that to be “the house of becoming/mystery.” (Dori Midnight)
Mystery as a house. A home. A place, like many homes, that isn’t always comfortable, and in fact which is often quite uncomfortable, and not always safe, and for many, is quite dangerous, but in which we try to create sanctuary. And that place must be tended to, and that tending, a practice.
As Dori Midnight shares, Psalm 27 can be understood to be about “finding home in the unravel, touching stones in the flowing river of change, placing our feet directly in mystery, the unknown as foundation… [finding] a remedy for fear, and a daily practice as we move towards the gates of the new year.” And if this particular psalm doesn’t resonate, we can find whatever anchor works for us: another piece of text, a letter to self, a cup of chamomile tea, a song, a dance, a moment of prayer, a conversation with a loved one, a spell cast before an altar to change—whatever way we can daily create space for and recognize the divine where we are, even and especially when we find ourselves inside a storm.
Grief, being with the uncontrollable, the presence of change, and the unknown, invites us into this home, and to find these touchstones, again and again.
It is mundane, reproductive labor —daily practices of care and organizing and tending during times of ease and times of crises— that makes the home of the sacred. If our systems need changing, it is both our wild dreaming and the ways we live our daily lives that will bring about the systemic change we need.
As we approach this veil-thinning season, we might allow Virgo energy to move us towards looking at what organizational systems are already in place in our lives, and if they create space for what is sacred to us, if these systems need tweaking, tending, or unraveling and remaking. This exploration gets to be directly related to mystery. We might allow Libra energy to help us sense the sacred there alongside us as we do this work.
This liminal season invites us to straddle both realms: to do both the sacred dreaming and mundane magic necessary to bring about new systems.
This is prefigurative politics.
This is reproductive labor.
This is mundane magic.
New Offerings: Grief Studios✨
Join us for our Fall Equinox Grief Studio September 25 from 6-7:30pm eastern time!
Beginning this Fall, I’m offering a regular live event called Grief Studios for subscribers and current students. These studios will be held every month, and will be a space to dialogue with, make, and share your own art and writing alongside other grievers. 🕸️These studios are my attempt to express a deep thank you for supporting my creative process, and to help create systems of mutual support for yours.
This upcoming Grief Studio we will be exploring mundane magic as inspiration and ally in our grieving and creative processes.🧹✨
Structure for Grief Studios*:
Welcome & Grounding
Small group discussion around a particular theme, tarot card, plant, or text related to grief (this time, the mundane as a place where magic lives)
Intention Setting for your creative practice
Creative Exploration/Studio time: Undirected, parallel play/creative exploration using whatever mediums/materials you feel called to, with the understanding that all of life can be lived as art, and that our artmaking gets to be a practice of attunement to ourselves and the world around us. Studio time can include anything from painting, collaging, dusting off your apothecary shelves, making tea, making music, rearranging your room, casting a spell, cooking a meal, or simply laying down and allowing yourself to rest as a creative practice…
Reflection: Set aside time to free-write/reflect on your creative process, and witness and dialogue with your own art/creative process as if it were animate and speaking to you.
Witnessing one another: Time to share our art and reflections with one another, without the intentions to critique or comment. Here we are simply in the magic of witness - hearing ourselves share, feeling ourselves be heard and received by one another.
*This structure is adapted from the lineage of the Jewish Studio Process, whose two year Creative Facilitator Training Fellowship I am currently in and deeply grateful for!
Sessions (not including break out rooms!) will be recorded for those unable to make them live ✨
To join us for monthly Grief Studios, become a paid subscriber (paid subscriptions are $12-15 per month).
Paid subscribers, find the zoom registration and other details here!
P.S. I’m including a poem by Evelyn Archer, who is in the current iteration of the Tears of the Gods course, and who wrote this poem celebrating mundane magic during our month with the enchanting Blue Vervain!✨
Witch’s To-Do List (after Theodora Goss)
A poem by Evelyn Archer
Walk outside in your caftan and bend
over the vegetable patch.
Greet a tumble of five bees in a huge yellow zucchini blossom.
Twist off that
one zucchini before it gets too big, but leave
the bees to their labor.
The basil’s gone to flower. The tulsi, too.
Remember your negligence.
Cut them down, the tulsi, the lemon balm, the blue vervain
to tie in storybook bundles in the kitchen.
Put your cigarette out in the sand at the bottom
of the fire pit, but don’t disturb
the spider’s web in the old sheet you left out to dry and then forgot.
Sometimes negligence has her own plans.
Go inside, fry an egg and the last slice of brown bread
in your iron skillet. Sit down at the table and
finish off the last of the coffee.
Fill in your Grimoire, the speckled composition book from Dollar Tree.
Revisions of spells like revisions of poems -- this spell wants a green candle.
This poem needs another image to tie it down.
Remember your moon phases.
Last Quarter today.
Reset your wards: yarrow oil and salt. And while
you’re out there, take care of the cherry tomatoes that are just this side
of green before the wrens get them.
Wash up and dress. Summer is closing up shop and it is past time
to think about making winter clothes. Take up and finish
the pomegranate wool sweater you were knitting and then
put aside the day your mother died.
It is time to take up the doing again.
Time to clear the workspace, time to mix the bread dough, time to
put calendula oil on the stove (double boiler. Too much heat robs it of its medicine)
Time to rethread the Singer. Time to cut out
a kerchief or a simple apron to remind
your hands of what it is like to work again.
This is what Magic loves best.
Not the wands and chalices,
but this quiet industry,
the focused working of hands --
at a tincture, a tonic, a Witch’s Knot.
At Granny Squares, those plainspoken spells
of threes on threes on threes.
Around and around until it makes something so mundane
no one would see the magic there on the back of the sofa.
It is a power all its own, an invisibility
like an old woman or a cat (both sacred to witches)
It is time, too, to take out the books and
notebooks. Clean and refill your pens. Time
for reading poetry again: Ovid, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath.
Time to hammer on the typewriter, new-old friend.
What a document, what a companion, what
ghosts might reside inside of you.
These are the hands that magic loves:
ink-stained, covered in flour or bacon grease or dirt.
I will say it again:
It is time to take up the doing again.
Subscribe to Grief Spells
Your subscriptions help support my work and help us skirt the whims of the algorithm! As of right now, all subscription tiers (including free) will receive access to seasonal grief spells with audio recordings/ voice overs, which you can listen to like you would a podcast.
Paid subscribers receive additional writing I do in between these spells, as well as invitations to seasonal Grief Studios! Grief Studios are spaces to dialogue with, make, and share your own art and writing alongside other grievers. 🕸️
By becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter for $12-15/month, your paid subscriptions help me so that I don't have to spend as much time marketing, and can instead focus on creating and doing what I love!
THANK YOU!
