August is ending, and the summer garden is dying. It is almost time to rip up the roots and start planting the winter rye.
Cleansing the Disabled Body
This month has been a time for rest and cleansing before setting out on the next big task. I’ve spoken before about how I think most people overcomplicate magical cleansing. I very rarely do a complete, full-body, wash-it-all-away cleansing, but it was needed: I scrubbed the bath down, consecrated my salt, hallowed the bathwater, blessed the water with the salt, and immersed my whole body, head to toe, submerging myself so that nothing was untouched.
I feel spiritual dirt and debris very strongly in my body. The bath itself was peaceful. Once I left it, I rapidly became sick and then it passed, just as quickly. My body, pushing out what was not serving me. Now I feel physically lighter, more attached to my body, less “muddy.” I feel like a room that has had all of the cobwebs dusted from its corners.
I draw a firm line between honoring the body as a spiritual tool and treading into ableism. I myself am disabled, and much of the New Age sentiment around disability and the spiritual is that it is some great “price” to pay for spiritual power, or, on the other end of the spectrum, some “punishment” for magical misbehavior. It is difficult to argue with these frustrating people that magic both has the power to affect the physical body and is not some mythological form of “justice.” The body simply is. I can feel the effects of magic in my body–it has made me ill; it has made me tired; it has taken a toll on me; it has made me feel light or high or euphoric–but my body is also simply a vessel with all of the qualities of its making. Having a disability may be fate, but so may be spilling my coffee on the way out the door in the morning. It is not special except in that everything is special.
There are some pains and weaknesses that are part of me. There are others that magic hangs on me like weights. The former I carry, and the latter I do my best to offload.
Pastoral Care
One of the large transitions I am making that makes cleansing so necessary is that I am embarking on a new career: social work, pastoral care, and chaplaincy.
I came to this path by way of activism. I was once on track to be clergy as a druid, but I let that moment pass in order to focus on other aspects of my life that needed deep attention. Fascinatingly, though druidry is not for me, it seems this is a path I’m never going to get out from under.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the difficulty of balancing a spiritual calling and its real-life practicalities. It does not feel deeply spiritual to send inquiry emails about practicums. It does not feel deeply spiritual to shrink your budget, decline social invitations so that you can study, or scrawl notes in college-ruled composition books. But a spiritual task it remains, no matter how it feels.
I don’t often share this, and I won’t linger on it too much here, but a large part of the reason I’m changing careers is spiritual impetus. When I was younger I felt a calling that I put off, and about two years ago I began the process of reopening those doors and letting spiritual direction flow into my life again, which it did with force like a dammed river, immediately pushing me into difficult changes. Each of those changes has been ultimately to my benefit (and for the benefit of other beings). None of them has been easy, and I’ve wrestled with many of them.
It would have been very easy to continue with my previous career and let the spirit-work be something I did on odd hours. But the thing is that, fortunately or unfortunately, the work will commit itself to you if you commit yourself to it.
Spirit-Working
I was talking with some acquaintances recently about what it actually means to me to be a spirit-worker, because the term seems vague. Perhaps it’s worth noting that the term is both precisely accurate and vague on purpose.
As a spirit-worker, I quite literally work with spirits, as one might work in the household with family or work alongside coworkers at a cooperative. The exact nature of the work we do together is frequently one of the most private aspects of my practice, but we might, for example, work together to heal a watershed, reroute a destructive force, or build protection around something vital. It is a kind of work done in relationship and community, frequently altruist, and rarely to my direct benefit.
I also prefer “spirit-worker” to most other terms precisely because it is less semantically loaded than alternatives. “Shaman,” for example, is a word which is both deeply semantically loaded (do you have images and ideas that immediately come to mind when that word is said?) and deeply unuseful. There is no one definition of “shaman” or “shamanism” and it is effectively, outside of the Siberian context, a word that was generalized out of cultural specificity by anthropologists and thus constructed to have no coherent meaning1. I do not want people to have specific pre-loaded images of my work in mind when they come to me. I want to force them to have an actual conversation with me directly to reach genuine understanding.
“Spirit-worker” is also helpfully agnostic to both the specific spirits I work with and the methods and frameworks that I use to work with them. There are some spirits I am fairly open about having relationships with, especially magical allies (herbs, lands, and so forth), but for the most part I do not advertise them. On the other hand, terms like “vættirverkr2,” for example, directly imply a relationship with the vættir through a Heathen lens.
Spirits are a lot like people. I have close relationships, a “family” or inner circle, which I work with regularly, maintain, and deepen. There are some spirits that I specifically sought out, in the same way that one might hire a handyperson to fix their deck or browse dating sites for a hook-up. And there are some spirits with whom my relationship is amicable, but professional, and usually ephemeral. There are certain kinds of work (say, the watershed work I mentioned above) that I make myself available for as needed, and spirits with the same goal are welcome to call me in to contribute, until the task is complete.
Back to the Garden
The garden is like a sandbox in which I can develop and play with my relationship with the land and its spirits. One such exploration is the winter rye.
We are not planning to harvest and eat the rye ourselves in any real way (though we’ll almost definitely dabble in the process, just being the plant-fascinated people we are). Instead, the goal of planting winter rye is to embrace the fallow field as something other than “empty” or “useless.” There is no land that is empty or useless, but when we live in a gardened land dynamic the temptation is often there to think of the land as something that produces for you.
There are some direct corollaries one could draw from this philosophy about the fallow and disabled body: The body that does not produce, from which no labor value can be extracted.
Winter rye, instead, is a deliberate act of tending that nurtures in the opposite direction. The roots control erosion and protect the soil, especially in tumultuous weather like the weather that climate change brings. It holds nutrients and fixes nitrogen. And it is an excellent winter forage for the wildlife, who may go hungry without it.
I often reflect on the naturally reciprocal dynamic of tending the land, even a little patch like a windowsill planter or a pot on the front step. It produces for us, but we can also produce for it. We can feed and water the birds when pickings are scarce. We can leave berries on the bush for the foragers. We can be mindful of what we wildcraft, and leave enough for itself and thus for everyone. We can enrich the soil with fertilizers, with bone or blood or feather. We can quench the thirsty roots that would otherwise wither. We are not apart from nature, but part of it. It is not unnatural to intercede for the land we tend. We farm; so do leaf-cutter ants. We build houses; so do beavers. We use tools; so do crows.
- For example, practices commonly cited to be characteristic of shamanism include drumming, chanting, and spirit contact, which, by definition, nominally includes Pentecostal Christians who speak in tongues and work toward personal experience of God. However, Pentecostals and religious anthropologists would both soundly refuse to call Pentecostal traditions shamanic, which indicates that calling diverse practices across the world “shamanism” is likely simply indicative of the othering of indigenous and alternative religion. ↩︎
- Still literally “spirits-worker” but I’m sure you can appreciate the difference in any English
conversation. ↩︎
The featured image is of a Barasingha stag shedding the velvet of its antlers in Kanha Tiger Reserve, Madha Pradesh, India, by Pranad Patil. Antler shedding is not seasonally current but rather reflects where I am in the personal cycle of action, rest, and return.
