april dark moon rituals newsletter

unraveling & weaving back together

As I get older, I find myself feeling more fragmented, and having a harder time pulling the scattered pieces of myself back together. I hear a voice in the back of my mind, scolding me - aren’t I supposed to be cohering as I age, pulling my meanings and selves together into some tidy identity, a unified narrative? Why do I feel the opposite?

I look around and see that, as a culture, we are also scattered, fragmented, frenetic: capitalist attention economies, driven by technology, social media, and profit, have destroyed our attention spans and physically re-patterned our brains. There is a constant imperative to pay attention to everything everywhere all at once, to juggle an impossible amount of balls simultaneously just to survive. We are all stretched so thin. My neurodivergence is flaring much more than it used to, my ability to “mask” draining away through capitalist burnout, and my cognitive function diminished by the impact of technology and the systems that we must inhabit to survive.

I am fragmented & fractured, inside myself.

And we are fragmented & fractured, from each other.

I’ve written at length about the cultural isolation and severance that permeates our hearts and minds, and I will continue to do so, because it is the water we are swimming in.

I crafted a memorial ceremony a few weeks ago for a family whose loved one died unexpectedly; the family members lived all over the country, in different states, and converged here together to say their tender goodbyes. As we shared stories and words of love, one family member began his letter to his loved one by apologizing through tears: “I am sorry that this is what it took to get us all back together again.” In our world today, our lives are so “busy” that it can take a tragedy to bring us physically together with our beloveds.

But for many of us, this physical separation is not a choice.

While colonial capitalism severs us from parts of ourselves, and severs us from choosing to see each other, it also physically tears us apart from those we love - nowhere is this more real than in the militarized systems of policing, imprisonment, immigration, and national borders. We are seeing an increased amount of media attention on deportations, on families ripped apart and separated with no hope for reunion in sight. And the truth is that this has been the reality for millions of people for a long, long time. When I was involved with immigration justice, I saw over and over again the mortal terror of being separated from those we love, the horrific feeling of helplessness. The depths of ache in families, lovers, friends who are torn apart by borders and hate and prison walls is immense - there are people who haven’t been able to kiss their lover, embrace their children, grasp the hand of their brother in decades because of borders. And this is an ache, an injustice that almost defies the heart’s ability to hold pain.

I felt a tiny taste of this firsthand years ago when I fell in love with someone who lived 9,000 miles away from me. Since fleeing war as a refugee in childhood, their life had been marked by the fears and pains of migration, spending long years separated from family members. We didn’t want to spend our lives separated by such a long distance - we wanted to build a life together. But the bureaucratic, financial, and emotional hurdles we had to surmount to be physically together were exhausting, and this even with my privilege as a white US citizen. We fought so hard to be together, haunted always by the fact that our ability to hold each other was decided by politicians & laws & visas & green cards. And through it all, our love and hope sustained us when we were physically apart.

They were finally able to move here, reuniting what had been separated.

And yet I am learning, the longer I live, the more opportunities I have to love and to lose.

Sometimes, even with the deepest love, things unravel.

Our divorce was finalized yesterday morning.

The grief feels so heavy in me, as I look at our old photos together and feel the tears on my cheeks. Although the choice to separate is undoubtedly best for both of us, it still feels like losing a part of myself.

More fragmenting, more fracture, swirling inside of me.

Weaving together, and unraveling, again and again.

Although our relationship has shapeshifted, the love is still there. I dedicate this month’s dark moon rituals newsletter to this beloved of mine, who may never read this. To grieving changes and shifts, in our relationships and our capacity and our bodies; to grieving people who are still alive.

Grief is a force that sometimes unravels us, and can also weave us back together. I am trying to learn to be more comfortable with the unraveling that is here with me, in my relationships and identity and life plan and career and in the workings of my mind and body.

While I was writing this, the song “Kill the Ghost” by Motherfolk started playing, and I smiled at the synchronicity as these lyrics washed over me:

“If you look too close, I start to unravel,

The stitches that hold me together don’t matter,

It all comes loose if you pull a single thread.

And if you say too much, the words lose their weight,

What I thought was profound was just marks on a page,

And it all came loose when I pulled a single thread.

It all came loose when I pulled a single thread.”

Even as I try to trust the wisdom of the multiple unravelings in myself, I also resist the fragmentation imposed on us by colonial capitalism. A few weeks ago, when I was in the throes of some emotional turmoil, I scrawled a prayer in my Notes app, joining all of the other bad poetry I’ve written there over the years. Some of us write to survive, and this prayer I share with you all, on behalf of all of us. It is a prayer to the weavers, the spiders, the ancient grandmothers, the fiber arts magicians, the mycelial webs beneath our feet.

Please,

gather me together,

like dogbane fibers flitting through your fingers.

I can’t do it alone.

Alone, I threaten to spin out,

scattered as a thousand solitary threads,

bereft of meaning and purpose.

Please,

laughing ones,

with joy wrinkles at the corners of your eyes,

weave me back together.

My soft parts are spilling out,

the fragile stitches unraveling,

I am coming undone.

I am coming undone.

Gather me up.

Spin my threads back to wholeness,

wrap me tight in gentle cloth,

whisper to me,

laugh over me,

and softly, firmly, pull my insides back together.

And as you weave me

back into myself,

weave us all

back together.

tenderly,

Summer