September Letter

Consequence is the realm of the body, and crisis is when we are most our bodies again.

The past five months have been quite strange and unexpectedly beautiful for me, and it all started with a frightening crisis, a moment of The Tower.

Maybe you remember this essay, written a couple of days after one of the most terrifying nights of my life. Some things can happen that seem like lightning strikes, great calamities that momentarily illuminate everything around you while sending you plummeting toward the earth.

That moment was like that.

Most of this story isn’t mine to tell. What I can tell is that my husband had a really severe medical crisis that shook his life up, and therefore also mine, and I wasn’t sure what would come next. What’s mine to tell is what it felt like for me in those days, how I got through, and the longer-term transformations completed because of all this.

You know, there are still countless wonders in my life at which I still shake my head and laugh. How it came about through an unlikely encounter that I, a druid, found myself living a brief bike ride from an ancient druidic stone grotto dedicated first to Arduinna and then to Freya, for example. That’s a wonder, and a mystery, and too strange really to believe it wasn’t somehow … orchestrated.

Peter Grey

wrote that “the witch is created by the land to speak for it.” In my case, it sometimes feels like I was summoned by this particular land, and maybe not so much to speak for it as just to be here with it and witness it. Perhaps it’s that, or “mere” chance, but regardless, the land’s first of all what got me through all this.

I visited that site that first week, crying, to have a bit of a chat with the place, and with Freya, one of the goddesses of the place. And then, just after, I went to the gym.

The Buddhist exhortation “chop wood, carry water” is usually interpreted as a method of remaining present by focusing on daily tasks. But take it literally and you’ll notice something else. Swing a heavy axe repeatedly, and haul heavy buckets of water over distances, and you’ll get quite strong quite fast.

It’s basically, “push weights, pull weights,” and that’s what I did. Despite all the chaos and uncertainty during those days — or, more truthfully, because of it —I found myself even more committed to my body. My usual two days per week at the gym soon became four and sometimes five. Thinking my way through all this would have been impossible, and anyway useless. That’s the case for most problems, I now find, and straining muscles is a lot more effective.

Five months of this changes you. Though my intention in doing all this was just to keep myself sane, grounded, and as available as possible for what my husband needed, I’d not noticed I was engaging in a ritual that deeply transformed how I think about everything in my life, and also everything else.

Or, more accurately, how I think at all.

Tracing each of the ways in which my thinking has changed would require much more introspection than would really be interesting for this letter, but I mentioned at least one of those ways in my last essay, “The Body is Never an Interloper.” Feeling the weight of things — and the weight of myself — was a perfect antidote to the sense of being out of place or unwelcome anywhere on earth, and it was especially in these past five months where that medicine completed its magic.

Related to this was another long transformation completed through this work. This requires a bit of explanation for more recent readers, while those who’ve read me longer will already have noticed this change.

If you’ve read my essays and books from before 2019, you’ll no doubt detect a vast difference in the way I approached certain kinds of political and cultural questions. The simplest way to describe this is to say that I was previously quite taken in by a lot of social justice theory, but this isn’t quite accurate. Better to say that I was still a faithful believer in the absurd doctrine that some of us have an obligation to reduce harm and do the self-work of others for them.

Anyone who’s done social work —as I did for six years — eventually notices that harm reduction doesn’t actually reduce harm. Instead, it just redirects that harm back on those practicing it, and it postpones the crucial crises that can transform harm into something better.

In other words, harm reduction keeps the crucial moment of The Tower from ever happening.

You see this particularly with addicts, but it’s also a much larger political problem as well. Addiction is highly destructive, both to the addict and also to those around the addict. When the family and friends try to reduce that harm, they actually help keep the addiction going, “enabling” and prolonging that destruction through a tragic (but completely understandable) belief that their love for the person requires this.

What’s rarely noticed is how the addict doesn’t even see any of these attempts to manage the harm they cause as “love” at all. Rather, the addiction re-narrates the sacrifices of those who love them as duty and obligation, something owed to the addict. In this way, they come to believe that the self-work required to face the addiction (and more importantly, the roots of that addiction) need never be done.

Harm reduction’s political and social equivalents are numerous, but it’s most prominent in the doctrines of social justice, and that’s what becoming more body began to show me. All the talk of inequality, of oppression, and especially of privilege amounts to little more than attempts to reduce the harm of capitalist social relations and the mental derangement they constantly cause.

Corporate strategies like DEI, esoteric creeds like intersectionality, and academic insanities like performative gender are at most the equivalent of “safe injection sites” or fentanyl dispensaries. Capitalism generates the problems these doctrines try to manage, and by managing those problems, they are only prolonged.

This can sound cruel, but you know already that I am not. And you’ve been following my writing because you know that I am neither cruel, nor tolerant of cruelty. In fact, that intolerance is precisely why such doctrines no longer make any sense to me — they are, at their core, deeply cruel. It’s cruel to prolong harm and suffering, and these social justice doctrines do nothing more than this. What’s needed is not a reduction of harm, but the refusal to stave off its consequences, and this is seen much easier when you look at what generates this harm in the first place.

I could never list even all the obvious examples, because you don’t need to look very hard for them. The “green transition” is of course one of the most obvious, a strategy to stave off the energy crisis of consumer capitalism as effective as a heroin addict hunting for another place to inject once other veins have collapsed. Then, there’s also all the military funding thrown at Ukraine and Israel, attempts to prop up collapsing states and the imperial political orders that rely upon them. Or all the empty “joy” of Harris/Walz, a rebranding of neoliberalism as empty of product content as Hello Kitty. And there are all the increasing religious, national, and “woke” fundamentalist movements, each striving to create collective identities based upon ressentiment and fear.

They’re all essentially trying to stop the inevitable, to hold back the tides swelling against the crumbling seawalls of our current political order.

My friend Felix Marquardt, who is quite public about his previous experience of addiction, often made a point that I didn’t really understand until now. When an addict hits a crisis moment, it’s usually seen as a time when he or she finally “loses control” and can no longer manage all the consequences of the addiction. Contrary to this, Felix insists these are actually moments when the addict finally loses the illusion that they were even in control in the first place.

The “illusion of control” extends far beyond the logic of personal addictions to entire societies, nations, and governments. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it’s full of repeating forms, persistent social forces, and inevitable consequences. When the history is written of our societies — especially those we might include in “western civilization” — it will be the history of addicts trying to pretend otherwise.

Everything is falling apart right now, and what tragically pose themselves as political movements are just groups of codependent enablers. The “left,” the “right,” and the “center” — if these terms even make sense anymore — are each just differing strategies to stave off necessary and inevitable crises, and also the transformations those crises bring.

They are each trying to stop the moment of The Tower.

This understanding really cannot be gotten through the mind. It was only through lifting — chopping wood, carrying water — that I could finally feel my way to it. I first started lifting in 2019, which is why my writing started to change back then. And I never became truly committed to it until this year, just after this recent crisis.

This is part of what I wrote for the entry of The Tower in my book, A People’s Guide to Tarot:

We often need external events or influences to shake up our world, especially when we’ve become too set in our ways. Of course, this can be quite scary, especially if we’ve become addicted to the sense of being in control or shutting out unpredictable things. When that happens, even the most minor inconvenience or unforeseen event can feel like a great crisis.

If that applies to you, consider the meaning of the word “crisis” in ancient Greek. Early doctors like Hippocrates used it to refer to the point in a disease where it became clear whether or not the person would survive or would die. In other words, the crisis point was a moment of revelation, not of emergency.

So, there’s a sense of sudden enlightenment or illumination in The Tower. The situation has become suddenly very clear, the true nature of things is revealed, and what we thought was solid and sturdy crumbles around us. Like Death, this is something that occurs many times in our lives, and it is not a process to be feared.

I’d never have come to such an understanding through the mind, because the mind cannot understand cause and effect.

It’s the body where we learn how things affect each other. Sleep enough, and you feel great the next day. Don’t sleep enough, and you feel awful. Eat too much, and you become sluggish and slow; eat too little, and even the slightest effort feels impossible. Touch something burning and the pain lasts for days, do nothing after you smell something burning and everything catches fire. Caress someone gently and they open to your presence, punch someone and you’ll get punched back.

Consequence is the realm of the body, not of thought, and crisis is when we are most our bodies again. This has always been the best way — I think perhaps the only true way — to understand Marx’s formula about man “at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.” To stave off these moments of crisis, to try to prevent the moments of The Tower, is to only ensure the cruelty continues forever.

And what’s most important about The Tower is what comes after. Though it’s again not my story to tell, the rituals of the body are precisely what brought my husband through his crisis as well. For him, it was gardening, much more of the literal “chop wood, carry water” then my own gym work, a practice that can really heal anything.

Gardening is anyway the best “work in the ruins,” to borrow from

Dougald Hine

’s brilliant book. We’ll need to finally let The Tower fall, the consequences play out, and seed better things for all of us in what remains.

---

Two brief notes:

My books and courses (along with those of many others!) at RITONA are still 30% off until the end of this month with code REDESIGN.

And I’m offering a 25% discount on annual paid subscriptions to From The Forests of Arduinna. You can either use the button below for that, or find out more here.