This originally started as a Facebook post but in the light of day, it holds up for me enough to share on my blog. Of course, anyone who knows anything about the internet and social media would gladly inform me that I’m being silly, far more people are likely to see this on Facebook than will ever read it on my blog. That’s true, but there’s something just slightly less ephemeral about my site here, I have just a breath’s worth more of control, and I can preserve this indefinitely.
So anyways, the backstory that wasn’t shared on Facebook: this week has been a pretty tough one for me. While being inundated with the absolute terror of Trump’s cabinet assemblage as well as feeling generally down about struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline, I also spent a better part of it working on some stories of young people who lost their lives to drug addiction.
It’s part of an epidemic that is, in part, the result of people getting hooked on pills and after the pill mills got shut down, they switched to heroin. Just for the sake of stating it, the fact that people suddenly care about drug addicts when it’s impacting young, white, middle-class folks is not lost on me, but that’s another discussion.
In this bleak landscape, I yearn for hope, and I turned to one of the earliest expressions that stirred my then-nascent Pagan heart when I was a young teenager.
This Dead Can Dance show from Bremen in ’86 predates my teen years but it’s an excellent show, and it captures that post-punk, goth sensibility that flavored so much of my teens and early twenties.
https://youtu.be/WmQBhbAawKE
Inspired by this and realizing that, as always, the future is determined by those who show up, I wrote this poem which, sorry Doreen, doesn’t rhyme but I still think would work well as a spell, maybe dress a candle with some fiery wall oil, Candlesmoke has great products that I find to be very effective if you’re in need of some. Use it as a spell of protection in trying times.
I see a future of protest where we all stand defiantly and silently face oppressors with esoteric gloom blasting from speakers. Where the machinations of the established paradigms utterly crumble before the magick of our Will.
Where rubber bullets and tear gas fill the air and fall limply at our feet.
Where the dead eyes of capital are but the wisps of a spiritless desire we shrug off by the true power of the enspirited universe, by the ultimate death which we walk hand in hand with, by the endless one of which we are all a part.
For now and forever.
So mote it be.