[Liminal Letters] Sacred mysteries of love and liberation
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Not into weekly newsletters? You can opt-out of the weekly newsletter without removing yourself from other updates HERE! Hey, Reader! Let’s talk about little bit about love today. I originally wrote this email on Leap Day, as we were leaving the month of February. I was thinking about Valentine’s Day and the depths of winter, how Aquarius season is in opposition to Leo season and the height of summer, and how this season might be understood as an antipode of vitality that make’s Valentine’s Day a necessary reminder of what it is to be in loving, living connection with spirit and with life. That had me musing on what has become my favorite spiritual mystery: the mystery of love & liberation. I pushed this email a week so that I could send last week’s letter about Aaron Bushnell, but it’s never a bad time to talk about love & liberation, so let’s get into it! LOVE In the English language, the words freedom and friend share a root word. This is an insight that I picked up years ago from Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery. This might seem strange to us in the modern world where freedom is often understood to be freedom from responsibility, from obligation, from the need to do anything but respond to one's own will and impulses. But exploring that strangeness, offers some fascinating, liberatory, and potentially magical insights. I learned this fact way back in 2017 and I was instantly OBSESSED. Because at the same time Joyful Militancy was making this connection for me, I was also starting out my journey into paganism and devotional work with heathenry and the Norse deities. In heathenry, I'd encountered the idea of frith. Frith was the web of loyalty among kin, among those bound together, among those in sacred intimacy. Traditionally, this would have been family, and the loyalties of chief and king, and the land and its deities and spirits. Slightly stretching the concept and placing it in modern terms, it is a web of connection, solidarity, mutual aid among people who recognize their collective interconnection. It turns out that not only do friend and freedom share a root word, so does frith. And that root word? The word from which all three words originated, branched off, and developed...the deep ancestral memory lurking in our language...that root word is the Proto-Indo-European root *pri- which means "to love". Built into our words, is the idea that our relationships are what brings and ensures our freedom. That love is what sets us free. But not the "love is love," "love is all you need" cliche love of our modern world. Not a love that is siloed off into monogamous relationships, nuclear families, bloodline lineages. A radical, mycelial love that truly recognizes and honors the reality of our deep interconnection on this planet, in this life. A fierce, radical love and a commitment to act in service to that love brings us back into connection with the expansive collective our our kin, expansively understood. LIBERATION This web of interconnection woven of love, this web of frith that connects us to friends and moves us into freedom…I’ve come to think of this as the web of fate. In heathenry, fate is understood through the notions of wyrd and oorlog. Wyrd is one’s “fate” as influence by the conditions of reality, one’s own actions, and the action’s of others. Oorlog is the string of connections between these actions and their outcomes. A full discussion of this is beyond this particular newsletter. (Though perhaps I might explore it in the future!) But I introduce these concepts because there is also a very similar understanding of our individual fates, our interconnections and entanglements, and our actions within the strain of ancient Hellenistic thought that is Orphism. In Orphism, Aphrodite is the genetrix of the universe, she is a force of love and union, pulling all things into connection. She brings it all into existence and holds it all together. But the love and union that she pull us into is undifferentiated, homogenous. It’s beautiful, but it’s perhaps not terrible interesting, much like the heat death of the universe where everything eventually come to occupy the same energetic state. But Aphrodite had a daughter, Ananke. And Ananke is necessity. Ananke is the force of separation. Ananke holds the drop spindle that weaves the web of fate. Ananke holds us separate, within the interconnected webs of fate. Love is a force that pulls us together, but as mortals bound up in the web of fate it is through our bounded actions that we are liberated as individuals into something discrete we can understand. And it is also through love that we can transcend the bounds and restrictions of necessity. (Credit to Kristin Mathis for providing the factual, academic basis for this discussion of Orphism. Her talk at AstroMagia provided the intellectual basis to confirm this aspect of my personal practice.) LOVE, LIBERATION, & FREE WILL In Making Kin, Donna Haraway offers the following appeal for kin & kin-making as a liberatory practice, highlight the power of creating connection as a practice that creates freedom: “Making kin seems to me the thing that we most need to be doing in a world that rips us apart from each other, in a world that has already more than seven and a half billion human beings with very unequal and unjust patterns of suffering and well-being. By kin I mean those who have an enduring mutual, obligatory, non-optional, you-can’t-just-cast-that-away-when-it-gets-inconvenient, enduring relatedness that carries consequences. I have a cousin, the cousin has me; I have a dog, a dog has me...To be kind is to be kin, but kin is not kind. Kin is often quite the opposite of kind. It’s not necessarily to be biologically related but in some consequential way to belong in the same category with each other in such a way that has consequences. If I am kin with the human and more-than-human beings of the Monterey Bay area, then I have accountabilities and obligations and pleasures that are different than if I cared about another place. Nobody can be kin to everything, but our kin networks can be full of attachment sites. I feel like the need for the care across generations is urgent, and it cannot be just a humanist affair.” In this age, our kin is not merely our blood relations, not merely the folks we live and work with. Kin can be anything, is everything. It is your family, it is your pets, your lovers, your house plants, the plants growing up through the sidewalk cracks, the spirit(s) of the land upon which you live. The things that connect us in groups is not simply good times or common interests. It is shared oppression, shared resistance, shared responsibilities, shared joys, shared sorrows and burdens. It is an interdependence woven of our human need-obligation to one another. That woven interdependence is frith and it is the fateful balance of Ananke and Aphrodite holding us together and also apart in both love & liberation. It is the collusion of our relationships and our agency to create friendships, freedom, and union. Sometimes, I think about this through the metaphor of the 8 of Swords. In the 8 of Swords, we see a figure blindfolded, bound, and trapped by a circle of swords. Often the tide is coming in, and they are in immediate danger. If the blindfold was removed, they could see that all they needed to do was walk forward and their binds would be sliced apart by the sword, freeing them. But they cannot see the truth. They believe they are well and truly fucked. To free themself they have to refuse to give up, they must take it on faith and move forward anyways. What capitalism and the other systems of oppression with live under has done to us is to place us in the position of the figure in the 8 of Swords. These systems of oppression disconnect us from our expansive kin - plants and animals, ecosystems, community, found family, and spirits of all sorts. We've been bound by the thread of our severed connections. But the truth is, if we step forward into the unseen, we find that not only can we free ourselves from being bound in place and helpless, we can work to repair those severed connections to our kin. That is the the root of my own magical and spiritual practice. This work is about re-building, re-weaving connection to kin, to nature, to magic, to community, to the unseen, to your own personal power. Taking that first step into the unseen initiates you into connection with the unseen. That first step into the unseen is an act of will. It is an act of expectation, desire, conviction. What do you love enough to find the courage to take that first step? What do you love enough to seek your liberation from this bounded state? When you love something enough to move into a liberated state, your are accessing your power within the web of fate: your will. Along the journey of development and change from *pri- to freedom, in Old English there was the word freo, which had the meaning "not in bondage, acting of one's own will." Freedom is the capacity to act in accordance with your will, your own desire. The secret of the 8 of Swords is that you were always at liberty to act in accordance with your will. There is always some small act that allows you to move in the direction of your desire and conviction, your love, the pulling threads of fate that weave you into interconnection. And that's the magic of working relationally with spirit. When we nurture an expansive animistic kin-network, we nurture the strings that weave the microcosm of interconnection between us as individuals and all of creation. Magic happens when we pull at our strings of interconnection and work to weave or re-weave them in accordance with our own love, desire, and will. It might sound cringe, but those connections of love and relationship set us free. They help us make magic in this world. They help us see and pull and influence the threads of our fate. In Case You Missed It:
This Week's Joys & Gratitudes
What's bringing you joy this week? Where are you finding magic? Feel free to hit reply and let me know! Until next time! In Joy, Magic, and Solidarity, P.S. Know someone who would find magic in this newsletter? Please forward it on! Word of mouth is one way we weave connection & magic! |