vol. 5 issue 16
Greetings,
I heard a story today about an Inuit man who asked his community to arrange for him a ceremonial potlatch, a traditional gathering and feast. He requested this because he anticipated he was soon to die. Before he passed, he wanted to give away his earthly possessions.
He also wanted to assign who would be the ones to finish what he’d be leaving yet undone, to carry on singing his songs. This was especially important, the narrator of the story stressed, so that the man’s soul would be easily untethered from its sacred earthly aims.
What is left incomplete, is the soul’s burden.
Yesterday, I also sat on the back porch quietly experiencing the passing eclipse as it grayed the sky. The birds, in the confusion, sputtered their songs.
I spoke by phone with a friend. She has family in Israel, many friends, too. There is so much emotion, yet so little to say about all that, we discovered.
The best we can do is be present with one another as we absorb the shock and grief —and dread — of what may come. To not judge the shape of things, but to deconstruct those shapes with love and forgiveness. To do what is hard.
I told her about my recent odd journey.
I recounted how I left my home in Montana suddenly, having heard the internal call to go. I told her I had no idea where I was headed, other than “east”.
In short, I had faith in myself, in the process, in the journey, in the spirit of what had called me.
I told her how, each day, for the next three days, I sometimes did not know where I was headed until a turn here and another there got me over an unexpected mountain or through a stretch of desolation, and then it was clear:
Yellowstone. The Big Horns. The Badlands. Pine Ridge.
On the fourth day, when I found myself at Wounded Knee, I understood the meaning of my spooky journey. Wounded Knee is the site where, in December 1890, the US Army massacred hundreds of unarmed Sioux, including several chiefs and shamans known as “Ghost Dancers”. It was the definitive ending of the white man’s war for the Plains.
Alone on the crest of the hill, staring through the chain-linked fence at the dumpy, poorly tended, mass burial site of the chiefs who fell that day, I suddenly was moved to read their names aloud from the single pillar of cement upon which their collective epitaph is etched.
As the last warrior chief’s name rang in the air, I realized with an emotional jolt that in those four days, I had completed the “bucket list” of my lately departed former partner, Peter. He would not be a ghost.
As the eclipse passed overhead, I happened to be reading an excellent reference book by my recent podcast guest, Susie Chang, about the correspondences between the planets, the Zodiac, and the minor arcana of the Tarot. In particular, I was reading about the Six of Cups, the middle card in the suit given to describing the range of human emotion. Most interpretations refer to this card as indicative of nostalgia.
Chang goes further, noting that it metaphorically depicts
...the most beautiful time of day, the lighting most flattering to our human selves, [it] is the ‘golden hour’. Just after sunrise, just after sunset, the Sun’s light is warm and diffuse. The shadows are longer, but also paler than they are at noon.
Where does a shadow come from? From standing in the sun – no sun, no shadow. Wherever we go, as long as we are living, we carry our shadows with us. It’s the negative space cast by our presence in life; it’s a prerequisite and a corollary of our being here.
In full daylight, our shadow invites us to contemplate the hole left behind when we are gone. You don’t simply vanish – you leave an imprint, a memory, a you-shaped shadow in the hearts of those who love you. To thrive in life is to cultivate the shadow; the brighter the light, the stronger the loss.
The synchronicity of reading this passage at a time when the sky drained of sunlight and the shadows evaporated, captured my imagination. I considered how, whether by cause or effect, the ancients related solar eclipses to the imminent fall of kings, and so viewed them with dread and fear.
I believe our kings now in this moment are all mostly fallen, whatever titles we give them: president, prime minister, punk. We have tried, some of us, to send them away, but they will not go. They skulk among us, undead. With them, there is no shadow, only an absence of light.
We have more evidence for their untrustworthiness than we do their fidelity. Some of us accept the evidence, others pretend those who do profess it only occult the truth.
Regardless, I am in league with the ancients. I keenly note the correlations between times when the ionosphere momentarily goes dead to disruptions here on earth. These odd shadow moments have, in my own life and on the world’s stage, seemed to coincide with times of sudden loss.
And so, I am thinking of Gaza. Of Israel, Ukraine, and the Plains, too. When nations, communities, neighborhoods cease to exist, how deep are the holes they leave behind where their shadows once fell, cast into our hearts by the fact of their light?
How should we comfort their ghosts?
Chang also notes that the human psyche, as it seeks to order our existence linearly, places our collective relationship to time on a continuum: memory as the story of what was; nostalgia for that narrative; dread or anticipation of what is to come; and lastly, a continuity that comes from allowing others to complete what we have not by bequeathing to them something of ourselves, be it children, love, or our songs.
Perhaps in these past five years, with all that we’ve lost, our eyes have grown accustomed to the dark such that we no longer even look for the light. This is a problem. It breaks our connection to the future, prevents us from leaving what is dead in the past.
But this also is a nuclear moment, make no mistake.
It is a golden hour intersecting memory and nostalgia, dread and anticipation, but also heaven and earth. It is a moment precipitating existence or nonexistence. What comes after is not guaranteed. Our ghosts may yet roam, unless…
Unless enough of us accept this: The darkness is no excuse to avoid, as Chang emphasizes, cultivating our shadow. If there is light in us, then there must be a shadow. It holds the negative space of the very fact of us. It is proof of our light.
If there is to be a continuum, reality’s imperative is that those of us who understand what is actually “the matter” here on earth claim it.
That is to say: we are the agents of pain on earth, and we are its agents of healing. Some of us know this. Stop acting otherwise. Have faith in us.
Our ghosts are calling.
They say: do not pretend you never learned our songs. Sing them! The future listens.
Peace,
Whitney
Touching.
This is so moving, dear W. Thank you for posting it. xo