If you believe hard enough...

can we believe ourselves into working together?

New Moon, Same You: Next week, on Wednesday morning, 7:35AM ET, we have our next New Moon. This time it’s in Aquarius, sharing space with Mercury and Pluto. New Moon’s are always easy demarcation points, the start of a new cycle. I talk about this at length in the Mary chapbook I’ve got coming out, but, basically, this is a seed planted. This is the moment when the Moon and the Sun line up in a sign and begin a new dance. Since it’s in Aquarius, we think about the community, the marginalized, the lowest.

It’s a funny cycle in the broader context of the zodiac, since the Sun is always a little uncomfortable being in Aquarius. The Sun prefers to be in Leo, the sign of royalty, and it’s from there that the Sun will shine when we see the Aquarius Full Moon in August. Until then, whatever seeds you’re planting with your community will take root and put out branches. What fruit do you want to be harvesting in about six months time?

In this week’s newsletter:

• The New Moon in Aquarius

• Uses of belief

• One more apology about the tardy zine that you probably wouldn’t know is late if I didn’t keep saying it.

If you get anything out of these weekly newsletters, I’d appreciate if you’d share with someone who might also enjoy them! I’m eight subscribers away from my next milestone of 150 subscribers. It’d feel great to get there!

mother and mary.

Some more thinking about if we’ve outgrown belief…

One of the comments from last week’s blog was from my friend Kathryn about how there’s some kind of connection between belief and collectivism. I think this is at the crux of why this is so interesting to me, on a lot of levels.

I think this matters at the political and social level, because we know that the ruling class of people is relatively small but has nearly infinite resources. For anyone else to redirect our society’s path, it will take many, many people. This isn’t the kind of work that can be done by rogue individuals. Don’t let Disney’s Marvel studios fool you. We need collectivism.

I think it matters at the individual level because belief and, I think, spirituality are ways that we get beyond ourself and our individual needs. A touch of the ecstatic can help shake you into doing things differently. It behooves the technocratic, oligarchic class for us to enjoy frictionless lives, communicating, creating, eating, connecting, and even fucking through the smooth medium of a Super Retina XDR screen. Something like the divine has the potential to make you look at this from outside yourself, to do things differently, to reach out to other people.

Okay, if spirituality and religion is so good for the oppressed classes, then why is America determined to be a Christian Nation™? Why does the prosperity gospel work so well to ensure a capitalist movement and why do we not see religious leaders and religious communities doing more to overthrow the status quo? For many reasons, more than I understand, but I think we can start getting into a few ideas that are worth chewing on…

Obviously one of the core issues with American (and by extension the American-ish far right that is so widely spread across the globe today) religious dogma is that it supports a hierarchy and it supports a belief that what you have is a result of what you have earned. It wasn’t so long ago that Christianity was radical, that it was inherently supportive of collective action and mutual aid. Religious community was once pretty communal. It seems like an open question as to whether we can return to that.

There are many churches from many denominations that manage to enact something like community all over the world. But this isn’t ~scalable~ in the same way that Joel Osteen is scalable. It’s not scalable like megachurch worship services streamed for free globally are scalable. These kinds of religious experience are consumption-based. They ask very little of you and give you lots of affirmation and future-oriented promise. They tell a story about an afterlife that will be even more frictionless. Everything is chrome in the future.

Messier, mutual, local churches and religious communities (I’m thinking of Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, and interfaith spaces) exist, but by definition they are not able to spread in the same way. One imagined version of this happening successfully is in Parable of the Talents, the sequel to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. If you haven’t read them, you should. They tell a story we can learn from, a story of shared values and collective action, but it does not come easily. Blending the local with scale can happen, but without shared space the shared belief becomes even more important.

I gestured at this above with the idea that a lot of church can happen through a screen these days, but something else that prevents a seemingly highly religious country like America from using “belief” for the betterment of our lives is how disembodied these things are now. I’m coming freshly out of finishing the book Mysticism by Simon Critchley, so I’m revved up on this idea at the moment, but I truly believe the embodiment that comes with a personally felt and mystical relationship with belief is essential to ethical religious practice.

To clarify, I don’t mean the kind of ecstasy that is so scandalous and delicious to witness in a Hulu cult documentary. Maybe that’s a version of it, I don’t want to make a blanket statement, but I am focused primarily on the kind of ecstasy that does not impoverish anyone to the benefit of some leader or leaders. I’m thinking of the way that mystics throughout history have found where in their own bodies their belief sits and have used that knowledge to seek unity with the divine. In doing so, they share what wisdom they uncover and they create opportunity for the rest of us to wrestle with own own beliefs. They stress test belief and show the results of those tests.

I’m not the poster child for feeling things in my body. It’s often hard for this Gemini Moon to bring ideas and experiences out of my head and down into my fleshier parts, but I know it is necessary. Putting it another way: I’ve never accomplished anything that I merely wanted to do. It has had to be an urge, a need, something felt at the gut level. This is what motivates me to turn desire into reality. Magnify that across a collective and I think we have real potential to make change.

As an extension of the above point, I think one of the simplest ways that belief, particularly mystical or ecstatic belief, can be useful and support collectivism is in how it is rooted in the material. This might sound odd, but I don’t mean a consumer materialism, I mean that these beliefs work well in the matter of the world you live in. Often the sensory experience of this non-frictionless (frictionful? frictive?) belief system reminds you of where you are. It reminds you of the season you are meant to experience, the dirt underneath the concrete, the sounds of the living things around you.

I think there can be a tendency to avoid these kinds of ideas because they often smack of appropriation. That’s a prudent concern in a world where anything remotely good can be packaged and sold to the highest bidder, but I don’t think it should mean we ought to pretend that it isn’t innately human to connect with nature. For many of us, we don’t live in a place where there is an ancestral or even cultural connection to the land. That is tricky and fraught and has happened because of a million injustices committed by white and western people over hundreds of years at least. But I think it is a mistake to let that keep you indoors and at your computer.

There have to be respectful and honest ways to connect your body and your spirit to the land you live on. It takes experimenting and openness and action (give back land, give back money, give a shit), but it has to be possible. This internal distance and separation from the nature around us feels a lot to me like a lack of belief and I think it is a barrier to collective action. I’ve got Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, in my stack, but I’m curious if you’ve found any other works that made you really reconsider your attitudes toward your place and space? Let me know, I’ll share the list we come up with.

Once again I feel like I’ve just opened some doors, peeked into the rooms, and then backed away before I’ve so much as taken stock of how large they are. There’s so much more to get into with each of these topics, so I’m thinking that’ll be the next few weeks. Essentially you can consider these bullet points as first drafts. Like I said, please send me any ideas you have for reading, listening, watching. I’m completely open and very excited about this topic.

I lied last week. I said I was sending the Mary Zine for sure, but I didn’t. I’m… so close. It’s gotten longer, clocking in at about 12k words and it’s still not covering everything I want to. But I’m calling it quits and tying up what loose ends I can and printing and assembling and sending. It’s a draft one, basically.

Also, the link I shared last week to add your name to the list to receive one was wrong and sent you to the Azaelia Banks article oops. I do really think you should read that article, but if you want to order a Zine and haven’t, you can do so here.

Some things for you:

1. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. If you haven’t read them, you must. If you have read them, time for a re-read.

2. You may as well read Mysticism by Simon Critchley. I’m going to be referencing it a BUNCH, don’t want you to feel left out :)

3. Watch this sad but beautiful video of a very old and sick chimp connecting with someone she knows from her past. I’m not one for seeking out tear jerkers, but it felt good this week to see something so sincere and good.

4. I was thinking about this poem yesterday. Not sure why. Enjoy.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.