Scroll to the bottom of this post for ways to find me and ask for help. No strings.
Today I have words, but I’m not sure that any of them can be adequate enough.
What I want to say, I think, is this:
We are all angry, and some of us are alone. We rage for justice, we weep for the circumstances outside of our control. We panic and we mourn and we want to make contingency plans but it’s not fucking happening today.
This is not an unprecedented time. Time is not really a flat circle; it does turn back on itself in an endless loop, but perhaps if we are lucky the loop is a spiral and we are getting somewhere better, a tiny movement at a time. And maybe we aren’t. Maybe this is the sum of the parts of our struggle; maybe the only thing to hope for is some moments of quiet and perhaps the strength we may find in love.
I’m a deathworker. I am intimately acquainted with the vast lands of water and fire of grief, and regret, and desire, and choices, and the end of choices. Most of us don’t want to make plans for our own death, and beyond it, for the ones we’ll leave behind.
Today it seems like a sham to hide from our eventual mortality. No matter what it is that takes us from here to there — wherever there is, for you — we will all die. Some of us will have a choice in those moments, and many of us will not.
If you need someone to hold your hand while you scream and cry, I am here. If you will someday want someone to help you navigate how to protect your last moments, I am here. I will be here now and I will be here then.
Until that day, we fight.
How to reach out to me: leave a comment here. Email me at nixkelley at proton dot me. Text me at 734-386-0537. Call me on that number and leave a voicemail. Find me on keybase (keybase.io/nixkelley). Find me here in my room, if you are here in my house. Find me on Facebook Messenger (m.me/phoenix.v.kelley). Ask for help and I will answer.
featured image is a photorealistic recreation of ‘Truth Coming Out of Her Well’; ‘To Shame Mankind’ is often appended to that title; painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme
I have been in a struggle with myself, looking at the world from my own eyes, which are by definition inside my own head and whose sight is imperfect.
The war in Ukraine is the first war that I have intentionally immersed myself in, which isn’t saying much — this is not the first war in my lifetime. When I was young, I was afraid of what might hurt me, terrified of unknown danger, believing that damage without justice was inevitable. I no longer believed in a just world, even before I could articulate it. Now that I am older, I am still fearful of what might hurt me, but I also fear what damages, kills, and wipes out people who are not me.
Thanks to messages written and shared on social media, I have been given a glimpse into the terror and fear and death of people who are not me. I want to look away, but I am constantly in disagreement with myself: I should take a break, I should keep my eyes open. I should remember that this is not about me, I should remember that until all of us are free, none of us are free. I should turn my selfishness inside out and step directly into the hurricane of loss. I should acknowledge this burning presence of genocide, even as I look away to close my eyes and rest a while. I should keep my mouth shut so that the voices of others can be lifted higher. I should speak because silence is fraught with injustice.
The sound of death, its grinding relentless force, is so loud these days.
Death brought into being by people that have the ability to stop it but choose not to.
Death brought into being by the young and misinformed. Death brought into being by those who know better. Death rained down on children.
Death brought into being by occupiers, by apartheid, by cruelty, by an abundance of pride and ego and the inability to admit that they have chosen violence.
My spiritual belief and understanding includes the concept of reincarnation, rebirth, being given more chances to get it right this time around. I believe that most people will be reborn, some with baggage, some without. It is its own horror to contemplate the idea that eventually, some people will no longer be given the opportunity to live another lifetime.
The kind of death that is happening right now sounds to me like an endless silent screaming and a darkness that brings no peace or rest. This is not to say that this is a unique time in the world’s history for death like this; I am only now able to look at a beast that consumes, even though it has existed for as long as we have also existed.
It’s that old recurring dream where you’re drowning Flailing your arms out, fearful and frantic And black waves are curling and pounding Down onto your head somewhere in the Atlantic Through the fathoms below you a shadow Is gliding up towards you with singular purpose And hundreds of thousands of gallons Of ocean froth and foam as it breaks the surface
Its black eyes find you almost at once You can’t hide, swim away or take air into your lungs To scream for help that won’t come
from ‘Black Eyes‘ sung by David Wirsig
I cannot stop listening to this song; it has been on repeat in my head for weeks now. It feels to me like a snapshot of the terror and finality of death. Of understanding and then accepting that there is nowhere left to go, no more choices available.
But: there is hope.
Like Mariame Kaba has said, “Hope is a discipline.”
I believe that death and grief and hope can exist simultaneously. We are complicated creatures and hold paradoxes within us.
Yesterday I had the privilege of listening to Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg give a lecture on The Torah of Reproductive Freedom (tweet about it is embedded, if you can’t see it the link is here:
— Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (@brandeis_hbi) March 20, 2022
At the closing of the lecture, she said “Step by step, we will bring the new world into being.” Then she read the following poem aloud, and I wanted to share a bit of it with you (along with the link to the full poem; emphasis added):
Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up, when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts, embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders, teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies, recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire: Another world is possible.
… imagine winning. This is your sacred task. This is your power. Imagine every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin, the sparkling taste of food when we know that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed, that the old man under the bridge and the woman wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car, and the children who suck on stones, nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their shelter. Lean with all your being towards that day when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.
Death and hope are forever intertwined. We cannot understand death without also holding the feeling of hope, even if it is buried so deeply that we cannot find it within ourselves.
Grief needs its time. War needs to be seen, because there is no way to choose differently if we do not comprehend the consequences of choosing something else.
We must take these lessons and let them make a home in our hearts, so that we never forget; and when we do forget, we take turns telling the stories that remind us. If hope is the thing with feathers, give it space to soar high overhead. When the hope of morning is overshadowed by the darkness of the night, remember that the light always returns.
I have had so much to say but no ability to push the words from inside me to out here. It feels like I go from crisis to crisis — and maybe that’s true. Peace is difficult to locate and even harder to keep, a tiny burn-bright light held deep in your chest, near your heart, so small you might forget where it is or what it feels like.
My habit of naming these — posts? Emails? Newsletters? (ew) — with either song names or lyrics is difficult when there is so much going on but almost no end in sight, either personally or gestures vaguely everywhere.
Music has always felt like a second language for me, or maybe a waterfall, or a still deep lake, or perhaps what nebulae look like to our imperfect eyes. I cannot describe it in anything but metaphor. Music lifts me, explains me, explains things I should know but didn’t, traces the outlines of my grief and fills in the empty places. Music expresses the inexpressible.
Today there are so many songs that seem fitting for today’s offering of words.
Let Me In by The Unseen Guest. One More Light by Linkin Park. Hey Brother by Avicii. Hands by Jewel. Nova by VNV Nation. Secure Yourself by the Indigo Girls.
What am I trying to say to you, today? What am I trying to say to myself? I want peace, I want comfort, I want my fear to have a fixed time and length, I want to give comfort, I want to be Light, I want to hide, I want to open my arms wide and weep.
Lay me down, and wash this world from me Open the skies, and burn it all away
I chose Nova, because at the heart of all my collection of feelings and fears and what I know is true and what I think will outlast all of us: is a reason to exist. Whether it hurts or not (and usually it does) to exist is almost irrelevant, because to live is to suffer, all of us. The world is full of children, some that are loved, some that are lost, some that are all but invisible.
I cannot contain that much pain. I cannot hold that much joy. A world full of fire and death is our birthright, here and now. We were born into this timeline.
I long to feel my heart burned open wide, ‘til nothing else remains Except the fires from which I came
I think that this is why we have each other, why connection is the way forward when all is lost, why joy has any meaning at all.
I dreamed the world, with my eyes open But time moved on and then, new worlds begin again Oh my heart, in this universe so vast No moment was made to last, so light the fire in me
It is easy for me to exhaust myself just by thinking. It is a horrible time to see war and death and feel simultaneously close to it and so very far away. It feels both selfish and necessary to give words to my own horror, knowing that I am not protesting in the streets, I am not living in the places being bombed and destroyed, I am only me, I am only here, and my perspective will always have holes in it, things that I can’t know or don’t understand.
I think it is important to watch, to witness, to see and try to understand. I think that when we look for as long as we can — and look away if we have the privilege to be able to look away — it helps remind us that while the world is big it is also small. There are people on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook who are saying the last thing they will ever get to say. There are life-ending circumstances that we are able to witness with almost no delay between the happening and the witnessing.
I don’t have a way of wrapping up this piece. Hopefully I’ve stopped writing it at the correct point in time, before this devolves into a paean to selfishness instead of an attempt at self-interrogation.
All quoted lyrics from Nova, from VNV Nation’s album Automatic.
