on Hope/on Praxis

hoping our way into the future

Posted on
two brown hands holding a heart-shaped stone carved with the word 'Hope'

cw: apocalypse

I’m making dinner today — it’s my turn — so I am hoping to finish writing this before it’s time to start meal prep.

Two things happened today to bring this theme to my mind. Or rather, I encountered two things while on Twitter that brought this theme to my mind because they shed light on something I have been struggling with for a while now: hope is a discipline, which I first heard from Mariame Kaba.

hope is a discipline

This is an assumption I’m making, but I am guessing that most of you have some kind of pain in your personal history. And as people with pain that shaped us, it is wretchedly difficult to open up to the idea that there is hope at all.

I think that hope is the hardest of the things I’ve been working to learn, probably because it’s interwoven with other things that are true in me.

I find it difficult to love the wholeness of myself. Decades of trying to be the right shape for other people has meant that I’m still a child wearing adult trauma, now that I can finally look at myself with compassion and see my broken pieces and also my hope for wholeness.

There is a part of me that believes that the world will end and nothing will come afterward. A part of me that wants to — tries to — give in to despair. Daily, I take in the pieces of other peoples’ pain, their sorrow, their anger, their faltering will to survive. And I mirror that pain in myself, because I am a person that would rather take the knife into my own body than to let it bury itself in anyone else. This makes me remarkably self-focused, and is part of why it is hard for me to learn how to have the feeling of hope and to practice the discipline of hope.

And yet, I do hope, even when I don’t recognize that I’m doing it. I watched a short video today about two tigers who were rescued from years of being trapped without the feeling of grass under their paws or the shade of trees or the freedom to run as fast and as far as they want, and I cried and cried because it thrummed in me like the vibration of a bass chord played through an amplifier. I can relate to the feeling of being trapped inside a tiny cruel imitation world, not able to imagine what freedom might be like.

Then I read a web comic, about what could happen after the apocalypse, posted in a tweet thread by its writer-creator, and again the way that hope is possible hit me right in the gut.

(if you click on the tweet below, it should take you to the whole thread so that you can read it yourself)

Lots of crying for me today, which I suppose is appropriate given that the moon is full today and I often lose control over my shit in some way on the full moon.

hoping and hoping into the future

Because I see patterns in things, I tend to view the world through a lens that sorts events into groups, and I can easily lose sight of any individual thing. I see a planet at war — people against people, the natural world erupting into chaos that kills us and itself — and I despair for us. I see apocalypse like fire on the horizon, growing and burning ever closer. I do not see escape, or reasons to expect any kind of salvation for what we have done to ourselves.

But.

What if that isn’t how the world ends? What if the world — what if we — continue on despite ourselves, and learn to hope again? What if we hope so fully that our actions are hope?

What if hope is the only way we can make it at all? That the hope of even one single person is the catalyst, the tiniest grain of sand, the feather on the scale, that swings the arc of the universe toward life rather than eternal death. That hope in action is a force that builds and grows and draws us together. That the way to change the future is simply to learn how to hope and to decide to hope as often as possible.

It’s like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer. I know now folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something. That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.

Samwise Gamgee

choose to hope

I am begging you, tears in my eyes, to try and hope. Try to remember what hope feels like. Try to believe that hope matters, even while the future is uncertain.

I want to be there with you when the fires have died down and the flooding is done and the shape of the planet has changed again, and what remains is just us, just each other, willing to hope because it’s hope that saved us. Because hope will outlive us, if we let it.

featured image is a photo by Ronak Valobobhai on Unsplash

on Deathwork & Griefwork/on Decolonizing

a deathworker’s statement on Queen Elizabeth II’s passing

Posted on
logo for Ever On And On: a multicolored infinity symbol at the top, overlaid by the words 'EVER ON AND ON griefwork + deathwork'

cw: death, colonization, grief

Note: it is completely okay if you don’t agree with this statement. You don’t have to agree with me in the slightest, and if you’re reading this, I really appreciate it. The tiny head of a pin I’m balancing on as a deathworker and someone actively trying to decolonize myself puts me in a precarious situation; but we can’t just sit some things out. I have a voice to use here.

Queen Elizabeth II has died, and I wanted to make a statement, to the best of my ability as a deathworker and as a member of a mystery tradition that has many roots in Celtic lands and even specific protocols (that I cannot speak on) with regard to the British monarchy.

As a practitioner and a deathworker, I want to be as lawful neutral as possible here.

Everyone dies. All of us will experience the great mystery of death at some point in our existence. Being alive for ninety-six years does not mean death cannot come.

With every death as public as this one, there are those that mourn, those that rejoice, those that have confused and upsetting feelings and either do or don’t have the language to speak about those feelings.

No one is required to respect the dead, whether they died today or a thousand years ago.

When one of us dies, the world changes a little. How does it change? I cannot really say. Despite how much I would like to know the answer to that question, all I have is subjectivity.

When the leader of a country dies, they are judged by the actions they took, by the ones they did not take, by the ways in which they did or did not uphold the structure that they existed within.

I believe that we should all be free to speak about what that person means to us.

I also believe that with every death, there are those whose grief is immediate and sharp. Death rites and funerals are for the living and the left behind. They enshrine what we believe and hope is true.

We can miss someone deeply and hold them accountable in the same moment.

A brief personal story: when my paternal grandmother died recently, I felt an immense sense of relief. She had been overtly and passively abusive to me and my kids for decades. It was a relief to know she couldn’t do that to us any more.

When my maternal grandmother died, I had (and still have) a huge amount of grief and a feeling of deep loss. I was not able to be with her in her last hours, which I had hoped to do. My grief for her is wrapped up with my personal loss of time with her, and I can’t untangle that.

And yet, my maternal grandmother was a white woman that benefited from the patriarchy and she never did anything to address that. She was racist. She had a frightening capacity for hatred. It was nearly impossible to make her happy.

As her grandchild, I usually experienced the best of her. There are still some things she said that I will never be able to forget because of the meanness behind them, and there are many memories I have that I will always cherish because they meant love to me in that moment.

All that is to try and communicate that the dead are just as multifaceted as the living. The Queen’s legacy means something completely different to her blood family than to the thousands of people her monarchy conquered and kept for as long as possible.

There are people in my household today who are mourning, and my perspective is absolutely colored by that truth. In my very own small bubble, I am seeing the paradox of love and hatred contained in the mystery of death. My speech is tempered because of this.

I am, and will continue to be, a flawed person that is working to decolonize my thoughts, my belief system, my family, my legacy. I will fail and I hope to sometimes do the right thing.

On this day, I acknowledge the grief of many while acknowledging the celebration by others.

Such is the dichotomy that death presents to us, I suppose.

I hope for the dead Queen the same that I hope for every one of the dead: what she deserves. She is now among both the honored dead and the problematic ancestors. We must learn something true from those who pass.

What is remembered, lives.

And what is wrong, must be torn down and replaced with what our own problematic hopes can build.

featured image is the logo for Ever On And On, my death doula work

on Chosen Family/on Co-Parenting/on Generational Trauma/on Harm & Reciprocity/on Neurodivergence/on Praxis

adventures in a chosen family

Posted on
oak trees silhouetted against a summer sunset

part one, because I think this is going to be a series

TOPICAL: this is part of the on Chosen Family series

Did you know that I live in an intentional community? I live in an intentional community. One of us came up with that descriptor (I think it was me?), and it feels accurate.

We are a group of chosen family, some of us blood related, some of us not, some of us related legally, some of us not. We are all somewhere along the neurodivergent spectrum. Most of us identify as queer. Most of us are introverted as well, and need plenty of personal space and alone time. And we all need to know what to expect and when, although obviously some things are just unplanned.

communicating with words

One of the hardest things to manage when you live this way is the time and effort it takes to communicate with everyone. We have a great many themed chat groups in Keybase (it’s secure, which is why we use it), so it’s usually easy to decide where to put something we need to say, but that much communication can really use up the spoons.

The biggest reason that communication within our group takes so much effort, I think, is that we have a set of guidelines for how we communicate with each other, which includes an extra moment to think about what we’re going to say. In person, we get someone’s attention by starting off with ‘Excuse me, [name],’ and we try to be in visual range when we do so as much as possible. A lot of us have C-PTSD and are easily startled and occasionally hyper-vigilant. In a text chat, we only tag @here when it’s the right importance level (like ‘@here does anyone know where the extra toilet paper is?’ or ‘@here I lost my water bottle somewhere, please let me know if you see it’ or ‘@here if you heard a loud noise that was me dropping something, no need to panic’ or ‘@here dinner is ready!’), and we only tag specific people if we especially want their attention (for instance ‘@person lol’ accompanying a meme we’ve just shared that reminds us of them, or ‘@person and @other_person, do you know where the toddler’s favorite blanket is?’, or ‘@person could I run two loads of laundry tomorrow?’).

speaking of memes lol

One of my favorite things we do is ask for emoji reactions to something we just typed up, like if we are voting on what kind of dinner to have and ‘taco’ means tacos and ‘fries’ means McDonald’s. It’s much lower effort to respond with an emoji.

Private chats are important too, and operate much the same as group chats in terms of how we speak to each other, but of course they are different. Having them is important especially because it gives each person a way to say something that they don’t need or want everyone to engage with, whether it’s because it is sensitive content, or because they are having a problem with someone else and need help, or whatever other reason you’d want to share something privately.

communicating without words

We have other ways of communicating other than in-person and over text. For example, we have a toddler who has recently discovered how to open doors, although for the time being he only wants to open the doors he cares the most about — his door, the door to downstairs, and the door to the deck — so we leave the bathroom door shut. We have one of those cheap push-to-turn-on-or-off lights attached to the outside of the doors of both the second and first floor bathrooms, so that we can click on the light when we go into the bathroom, indicating this room is currently occupied, please do not come in, and click it off again when we leave, so whomever needs the bathroom next can figure out where to go (lol) without needing to guess or knock.

Oh, that’s another thing. We don’t knock on doors except VERY occasionally, because of the anxiety that a door knock can bring up. Did I mention that most of us have C-PTSD? I think the only person in the household that doesn’t have C-PTSD is the toddler. Personally, my door-knock anxiety is a result of the sheer number of police and CPS visits three years ago when I lived in a whole-ass other city, about my former second-eldest child: whether he had gotten into trouble, or was in the hospital, or had said something offhand to a mandatory reporter, which then had to be untangled because he has the ability to lie without even blinking. So in order to get someone’s attention or to ask to go into their space if their door is shut, you’d use the chat you have with that person and ask. Or, if the door is open, you would stand at the doorway and say ‘Excuse me [name], may I come in?’

A closed door, an open door, a light on the bathroom door — these are all pretty useful ways for us to communicate without words. Another thing that many of us tend to do is to use headphones or ear buds to manage sensory input and to have soothing background noise of some kind. Or we’re actively listening to music or a podcast or an audio book, or very occasionally, having a “phone conversation” like some kind of barbarian from 1990. Seeing someone wearing headphones or holding and interacting with a device or preparing a meal with the exhaust fan on is a signal that they may not hear you speaking, so you would default to texting them or carefully getting in their line of sight to get their attention non-verbally.

free to choose

The answer to any question at any time can be no. It’s false choice when there isn’t an option to say no. If the thing we’re talking about doesn’t have a yes/no option, we take a lot of time to explain why. We trust each other and are actively working on increasing our trust with each other by reaching agreement on things and by following the structures we’ve all agreed on.

We do our best to balance the needs of the many against the needs of the few (or the one) — thank you Leonard Nimoy and I miss you a lot — and this means that sometimes, saying no would be more harmful than saying yes. But we each have to make that choice for ourselves individually. This does mean that sometimes, one of us is spinning more plates than they can normally spin, and there’s an understanding that this means when the plate spinning is finished, that person is going to need some time to recover, whether it’s a few hours or a few days. And, again, that understanding exists because we’ve had conversations about it in different contexts and for various reasons. We try very hard not to make assumptions about what someone else already knows, which makes communication so valuable and necessary.

parallel play and infodumping

If you’ve been on the autism/ADHD/neurospicy side of TikTok or Twitter, or you ARE somewhere on that spectrum (which is entirely likely given that you’re reading this), you’ve probably heard something about the ways that people like us have different styles of personally relating with others.

Parallel play is one of the things we do when we all hang out together in the same room; we’re on our phones or maybe someone is streaming a show or playing a game or reading a book. We have a shared understanding that this kind of behavior does not mean that we don’t care and would rather not be present; it means that we are comfortable hanging out, and probably enjoying just being in the same room as the people we care about. There are many times that I want to be alone, but I don’t want to be by myself.

Another thing we tend to do is infodump about whatever thing we’ve been learning about or doing or noticing. But before the information is about to be dumped, we ask if the person or people would like to hear an astoundingly large amount of facts about that special interest. And, again, anyone is free to say no. I’m not always able to handle a firehose of information, but when I can, I love being able to be present when one of my loved ones is excitedly detailing all the things they know about their favorite video game (including who the game devs are and what the game creator is like including their life philosophy and how that shaped the story of the game, and/or what things are frustrating or problematic or amazing or enjoyable); or the type of book they are reading and which ones they love the most right now (including talking about where those books and authors seem to fall in terms of intersectionality and whether or not the queer person survives to the end of the story); or the current understanding of black holes or space-time or theories about the multiverse or how incredibly cool the images from the new James Webb telescope are.

even more stuff that I could talk about on this topic

It looks like I was right and this will be a series, because there are quite a few other things I want to share. Living this way is supportive and kind, and it is hard. I don’t want to pretend that having chosen family is superior to the experience of one’s family of origin, although for me personally that is true. And I don’t want to avoid the comments we’ve gotten occasionally about whether or not this is a cult. We aren’t a cult, and it’s not exactly possible to prove a negative, but I want to talk about who and what we are, and there’s a lot more than what I’ve covered here.

I hope you enjoyed this and are looking forward to the next time I write about it.

Oh! Feel free to ask me questions in the comments, because it would be really interesting to know what you are curious about.

And as one of my favorite content creators says, please consensually smash that like and subscribe button!!

featured image is a photo that I took from my bedroom window