New Moon Monster

What are You Ready to Become?

I hope you had the funnest, spookiest time last night but I have to tell you, I am less interested in what you dressed as and did for Halloween than in what you are making room to become.

There’s lot’s of language flowing through the commercial and social channels about Halloween, Samhain, Dios de los Muertos, All Souls and the connections between these traditions and this time of year. The boundaries between realms thins to a veil that can be pulled aside with two bony fingers for a peek at the dead, the lost, or the under and spirit worlds.

Halloween is the only one of these traditions that I can really claim, just by dint of growing up American and candy-hungry. But Autumn, a time of endings for most, marks beginnings for me. I’m a September Virgo and my birthday, the start of school and the clean, blank pages of my new notebooks always overlapped with the composting churn, cooling temperatures and burnished glow of fall. Perhaps this is why endings and beginnings have always seemed sisters to me, masked and dressed up as one another for Halloween. Maybe this explains the abiding sense I have of Autumnal time thinning into its bloom like the camellia tree  just now flowering in my back yard. I’m still a sucker for a clean, new notebook, but these days I mark this sacred time with longer walks, fall baking (of course) and tonight, some new moon meditations.

This new moon in Scorpio will be an intense one, I’ve read. A water sign, Scorpio represents big emotions and living into our fullness as well as death and rebirth. If new moon work typically asks what we want to call into our lives and what seeds we want to plant, this new moon asks what we are willing to release or lose in order to make the space for that growth and how shadow might be the very light we need in order to expand towards our  highest intentions.

Tonight, I’m asking (the moon): How do we leverage the season of the monstrous and witchy to explore and empower the shadow sides of our natures? How might embracing what we find there support us as we move through the darkly shifting forests of our current crises and battle our many-headed urgencies? Could feeding and cultivating our inner monster or witch be the practice that sustains us as we journey these dark trails between “modernity” and whatever is next? What do we need to become?

Black folks are already too familiar with the (truly) monstrous. We have a long tradition of artists, scholars, writers, healers and visionaries who “speak” to this. Kevin Quashie links the idea of Black Becoming to the fact that blackness is always already over-indexed to death. Quashie suggests that our response-ability is directly related to active, ongoing participation “in a world making where there is no black death that does not also index the fullness and softness of black life.” I’ve sat with his work a long time and gotten different insights from it. Today, that quote is sounding a lot like shadow work. It’s sounding like integration. It’s sounding like an invitation to become monster.

Feeling Witchy

I’ve been honoring the back-to-school vibes by reading Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch as part of Megan Leatherman’s gentle but sharp Composting Capitalism course. It’s been the perfect way for someone who is really getting sick of capitalism’s shit to celebrate the season. The conversations have been so thoughtful and the book is infuriating and brilliant. A single pull quote can do no more than gesture, but Federici describes here (p. 84) the conditions built over time that led to the witch-hunts, sustained processes of social terror that were central to forming the capitalist structure reverberating today:

“...the physical enclosure operated by land privatization and the hedging of the commons was amplified by a process of social enclosure, the reproduction of workers shifting from the open field to the home, from the community to the family, from the public space (the common, the church) to the private.”

Diverse (particularly but not only working class, poor, indentured or enslaved) women across Western Europe and the “New” World and across centuries of violence who dared to think for themselves, to pray and worship how their spirit called them to, to enjoy (or deny) sex and demand bodily autonomy, to engage in practices that kept them connected to the land, and god forbid, to grow old, were labeled as witches for their trouble.

Look, we need all the “childless cat ladies” in formation. We counter the ramping political rhetoric and action by staying curious about our witchy rage and intellect and spirit. By insisting on identification with each other and with those parts of ourselves we are taught to cast out, tone down or make small. And by honoring the the ways our power and wisdom flows through our ancestral lines.

How I Found My Monster

Anyway, I sometimes keep a little altar to honor the wise women of my matrilineal lines and ideally stay open to the flow of their wisdom love and guidance. A couple of weeks ago, I was sorting through a box of old photos in search of a favorite picture of my mother with which to refresh it. In the image, the 20-something is posing before a golden curtain of maple in full-length, jewel toned paisley, a black knit shawl draped over her head and shoulders. Chic, black love babushka with hope in her eyes.

This picture didn’t materialize but another did.

It was maybe our first halloween in the house on Woodhurst. My younger brother is a cheery red crayola. His cheeks, nose and forehead smeared with Revlon, the pointed hood of his sweatshirt snug over his little afro. Me? I’m dressed as some sort of princess-ballerina-type. The costume is vague. Snow-fairy white acts as blank screen for the projection of anything feminine you can conjure—so long as its …pretty. I seem to have bought into the act. My smile gleams and my fingers rest demurely interlocked on my lap. I kind of remember feeling a little tight and irritable, constrained. I didn’t want my brother touching me and smudging my pristine gleam with his greasy red. I’m learning the comportment and body discipline expected of a lady.

I found a set of four Halloween photos total in the box. Placed in chronological order, they provide a glimpse across a period of seven or so years, of my mother’s devoted but unpaid and likely under appreciated creative labor in the form of halloween costumes she imagined, designed and successfully executed for my brother and I in the time between teaching full time and cooking endless meals. They also outline a heartbreaking and instructive narrative of transformation. Of enclosure.

Rewind two or three years from the princess and the crayon to find my brother and I posing before trick or treating in the living room of the house on Rudisill. I think he’s a hobo or maybe a clown. He’s cute in his giant man shirt with the rolled up sleeves. Me? Pretty sure I’m a princess in a red sweater. Dangly earrings, glamoured face and tiara to prove it.

I remember a gold lame shawl with ruffled edges my mom wore on date nights. In the third photo, a year or two earlier, the shawl has been transformed. Jerry-rigged on my 5? year old body with safety pins to effect a surprisingly stylish one shouldered midi cocktail dress. Tiny feet swim in matching gold shoes. I remember being coached in how to pose, my mom stepping from behind the camera to come physically move my arm to hip—why, after all, would I know how to strike this Mae West meets Dream Girls pose?

This short stack of princesses makes clear the consistent messaging involved in making sure I knew what I was supposed to become. How comfortable did these get ups feel to me, really? How much was my willing participation in my own inculcation about pleasing the woman behind the camera? The woman whose gaze retraces the lines of training she negotiated before me.

Then. The last (first) in the Halloween series. My brother is a bump in the photographer’s belly and therefore out of frame. I’m standing alone in front of the oak credenza a different creature entirely. A little monster. Giant paper mache jack-o-lantern head, leafy collar, golden maple leaf hands sprout from the stalks of a little striped sweater over bell bottom dungarees. I look the most like…myself. My eyes peer out of one side of the head.  You can catch a glimpse of wild  hair through the pumpkin face holes but my full expression is hidden as I meet the gaze of the picture taker.

I don’t remember how I felt in that moment but I’m presently aware that I want to read autonomy, defiance, stubbornness and maybe curiosity in the girl’s eyes. I want to imagine her as her own, as wild and full of wonder. An untamed proto-princess of vines and secrets.

This picture is the only one inscribed on the back. There, in my mother’s elegant handwriting is the name of the monster I’ll be exploring tonight: “Punkin’ Head.”  As I stare at this small but powerful creature, I think of what I’ve read of Octavia Butler and wonder if the way through the end-times is to simply stop trying to be a better human, but instead to seek out the collaborative teachings and imaginative flights that encourage monstrous hybridities. I think too of the distinction between sym-poeiesis (making with) and auto-poiesis (self-making) that Donna Haraway makes as she traces imaginative and generative linkages of kinship between us and our more-than-human co-conspirators.  This beautifully ridiculous plant-girl is clearly—at least just for this moment—shunning the hierarchical body knowledge that will continue to be fed her until it takes.

The sympoietic monster I’ll be meditating on during tonight’s new moon knows that growth moves not “up” or in a line but like vines, outward and exploratory and always towards the light. This earth bound monster knows that what she releases will nourish the soil; she knows how to get dirty. She learned with her sisters Bean and Tomato how to collaborate. The Pumpkin symbolizes abundance and creativity. The Head symbolizes the seeds of new and of immortal life; “the vessel and substance of life’s eternal recreation (Taschen Book of Symbols).” Tonight I will be imagining Punkin’ Head’s friendly countenance morphing into a furious, bare-toothed glare, with strangling vines shooting from her finger tips, and her deep roots bursting upwards to destroy any one or thing that would threaten the precarious balance she helps maintain.

Monsters are for the young, right? Can they be for the middle-aged too, I wonder? Can they be for those of us who want to channel our grief and clearest anger and collaborative energy towards our highest intentions? Now, while time is thin, can I bend it back to meet this version of me and carry her just-forming wildness and wonder forward? Can I tape the construction paper mobius strip together in such a way that she and I can hold all of the princess versions in our arms as we grieve their necessary death?

My gaze grows soft and my eyes lock with hers, this little animal dressed as a plant. I try to take the whole of this wild thing in. I try to breathe in something of her spirit. I reach out for her little maple leaf hand grateful to be reunited. Time feels thin indeed.

Cake Ritual

Dios de los Muertos is not my tradition to practice and I no longer observe Halloween, but I did bake a cake for Punkin’ Head. I’ll write up the recipe for the next post. She wanted something a little wild and earthy and not at all lady-like, so I baked her a pumpkin cake with rye, orange, ginger and miso (no cloying spice blend here). I cut a thick slab, went for a walk in the woods on a burnished afternoon, found a quiet place to sit on the ground, and ate it by the ravenous, monstrous mouthful as I gazed out over the water.