The Smuggler

For Gordon White

I spent the morning re-listening to something that’d felt like a personal gift from the Other when I’d first heard it. It was something that confirmed a direction for me, like seeing a sign post or a trail marker reminding that the sudden wending path I’d taken was actually what I’d thought and not just some deer tracks through a forest.

Gods, I hope you’ve heard the sad news already, that I’m not the first person from whom you’re reading this. Gordon White’s not “here” anymore, having become alive to another kind of life in the same way that all the dead do. Well, maybe not in the same way, because some dead live much more strongly than the other dead.

I heard yesterday, just a few minutes before starting a coaching session. “How to not bring a death of someone important into a coaching session twenty minutes after you found out” isn’t really something the trainings directly covered. But I didn’t need to worry, it turned out. And anyway, I could almost hear Gordon chuckle at such a concern.

I spent the morning reading through our texts and laughing, and then I played the recording of the broadcast I mentioned. That’s the one that made me feel like I was going where I need to go, doing what I need to do. It was called “Wearing Jung’s Skin Like a Pelt,” and it came out about a month after I’d announced my decision to become a Jungian coach. In it, Gordon talks about how Jung’s framework functions as the re-introduction of magic into a modernity that has finally understood what its absence has caused.

Anyone who’s given time to reading Gordon’s books or listening to his staggering archive of broadcasts would probably agree: this is also what Gordon’s been about. Not necessarily “re-introducing,” since this was already done; rather, through relentless work (that I’m sure didn’t always feel rewarding), building the kind of soil from which magic could thrive and outgrow what would try to pave it over.

Sure, he didn’t always do this in an agreeable way. And here, I should go ahead and admit that the first experiences of Gordon and his work weren’t really pleasant. Though I enjoyed his podcast, I’d find myself quite often irritated by certain blindspots and what I still think was, back then, an insecure need to self-aggrandize at the expense of others.

I recall a particularly difficult moment about ten years ago, listening to one of his conversations with Conner Habib while I was a guest at the home of Peter Grey and Alkistis Dimech. The topic was the intersection of anti-capitalism and magic, the very thing I was most known for at the time, and Gordon said, to Conner’s enthusiastic agreement, “You and I are the only two people who even talk about this.”

At that point, Peter hit pause, turned to me, and said, “I’m so sorry you had to hear that.”

My response then, more unconscious than conscious and thus coming from my better self, a self that would manifest much later, was to shrug and say: “Gordon has his work, I have mine.”

And Gordon was really good at his work; better, I think, than I’ve been at mine. Maybe it’s because he knew he had less time to accomplish it, a fact hinted at by several who were close to him. But even without that kind of validation, there was definitely an urgency in Gordon that was hard not to notice. Perhaps, that’s what made him rather intolerant when it came to opposition and especially to the mostly-misplaced criticism aimed at him.

When I think of Gordon, I think of a pirate smuggling material out from the Otherworld through a blockade. It’s not the nature of such a person to seek sanction for such an operations, nor to tarry long whilst others interrogate their motives and methods. Stuff has to get through, and you have to be a bit ruthless about it sometimes, but no one would ever deny that lots of us were damn grateful for the spoils he widely shared with us.

And actually, he was fucking kind. Really. I choked up this morning re-reading his messages to me during a really scary crisis a few years ago. Unsolicited, he did spirit work to help me, returning with advice and truths that in retrospect prove to have been even more accurate and helpful than I’d first thought. He’d predicted what would happen next and exactly what path would need to be taken to get to the required healing, and that’s precisely how it all played out.

At other times, he was wonderfully irreverent, sending the kinds of messages that make you snort loudly. Ambiguous compliments, too, like the screenshot from a gay dating app while in a leather bar, “Half the guys on my grid look like you,” without clarifying which half. Or just plain funny in a domestic way, like how bringing in outdoor plants for the winter was like turning them into temporary pets that you, oddly, also have to dust.

Mostly, though, I think about that work he was doing, the smuggling. I think he did enough of it — it’s all there for us. No one else could possibly have brought in so much, nor would anyone else have dared rise to such a challenge. Because of Gordon, enough of us know what’s possible, what can be built, and what we can do next. Besides, those paths he took through are now a little wider, more well-marked, thanks to his repeated treading.