dark moon rituals newlsetter
defiant gratitude in a world on fire - August 2024
A few days ago I spent the afternoon breathing in smoke and watching helicopters soar back and forth overhead, carrying water to pour on a raging wildfire behind my parents’ house.
It feels like the world is on fire. And every summer it seems to get worse.
The last few weeks have been marked by oppressive heat and continuous blankets of smoke from over 100 wildfires that are currently raging across Turtle Island (North America). It has been difficult to spend any time outside recently, especially for anyone with respiratory concerns, and the scale of destruction and resource-depletion caused by these wildfires is staggering.
I’ve been feeling the heavy weight of it all this summer - wildfires fueled by climate crisis & denial of Indigenous traditional land-tending knowledge, ongoing genocides, political shitstorms, racist police violence, health struggles in my life and those of my Beloveds, and the ever-present daily oppression of surviving in late stage capitalism. This smoke filling our nostrils and pressing down on our shoulders feels like an embodied metaphor for the current state of our world. How do we go on? How do we access joy amidst all of the fear, gratitude amidst all of the grief? And if we can even find it, what use is gratitude in a world that is burning?
If you are feeling like it is hard to get up in the morning and find the will to go on, you’re not alone. I’ve felt this way many times this summer. When the world is on fire in all these ways, I have a very difficult time accessing gratitude. I’ve always been this way - more attuned to the shadow sides of life, a melancholic emo with a bleeding heart. A lot of gratitude practices feel like toxic positivity: “love and light” spirituality that bypasses all of the very real pain, oppression, and death in this world.
But as I search for a ritual to ground me in these times, my ancestors & the Land point me toward this - a rooted, defiant gratitude. An antidote to the poison of the Wendigo.
In the crackling flames of these fires, I can hear the shrieks of the Wendigo, a mythological monster of folklore from the Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, and several other tribal peoples. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Indigenous author & biologist, describes in many of her writings the connections between the spirit of the Wendigo - the hungry ghost - and the voracious capitalism that has been a major driver of climate crisis. The Wendigo, as Kimmerer describes it, is an eternally empty creature, driven to cannibalism by an insatiable gnawing hunger. Capitalism, in its constant need to consume more resources and generate more profit, is just such a Wendigo, a hungry ghost that is always consuming and leaving destruction in its wake. The capitalist and colonialist destruction of our ecosystems and plundering of the Living Earth’s resources have set the stage for the increased natural disasters and crisis events that have multiplied exponentially in these days, including wildfires.
The gnawing emptiness of the Wendigo is oh-so-familiar to me, deep in the marrow of my bones. Francis Weller, one of my dearest teachers, says that at the heart of all our sorrows in the world today (the world constructed by white patriarchal colonial capitalism) is emptiness. The individualist gospel of the Western world stripped away our ancestral traditions and violently severed us from the village, destroying our original identity - which has always been nested and embedded in relationship. We are not meant to be alone, to define ourselves apart from our relationships to the land, the ancestors, our Beloved Dead, the plant and animal kin, our human and more-than-human communities. The grief and trauma from these losses seeps deeply into our bones, impacting our very understanding of our identity. We are a lonely, isolated, longing, empty people.
And this emptiness feeds capitalism - an economic system that relies on scarcity mindset to exist. We feel hollow, cut off from the relationships & rituals that sustained us, and so we fill the void with consumerism, exactly as the capitalist machine wants. Much of our economy is based on creating unmet desires so that salespeople can sell us products that they have created the desire for. Capitalism depends on continuous growth, profit, and sales, fueled by a sense of lack in the consumer: “the badgering of marketers [are] the stomach grumblings of a Windigo” (Kimmerer). If we had a felt-sense of embeddedness in our living world, of abundance in our bodies, of belonging to our relationships, of purpose, would we be so vulnerable to the siren call of consumerism?
Our feelings of emptiness and lack are intentionally cultivated to keep the capitalist machine going. Capitalism would have us believe that the way to quiet the hunger pangs of our emptiness is to fill ourselves - with food, objects, sales, substances, experiences, etc. But as Francis Weller says, “The opposite of emptiness is not fullness, it’s presence. It’s embodiment. It’s embeddedness. It’s participation. It’s connection & intimacy… the opposite of emptiness is entanglement”.
I am in a lifelong quest to rediscover this entanglement: to re-embed myself in a vast ecology of human and non-human relationships, seen & unseen communities. And gratitude practice is one powerful way to begin re-weaving these webs. It is also a powerful way to stand in defiance to the cries of the Wendigo that seek to keep us always hungry, always unsatisfied.
Kimmerer describes it this way: “while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness… Gratitude doesn't send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That's good medicine for land and people alike.”
So on this Dark Moon, as the world burns and the Wendigo whispers to us that we are empty, unfulfilled, unsatisfied, here is the radical ritual I am turning to: gratitude. Gratitude practice is how I am going to try to find the will to go on, to find a sense of ground. Because I have so much to be grateful for, when I am remember that who I am is always in relationship - with my ancestors, my Beloveds (living and dead), the Land, sacred allies & guides, the mycelial networks spreading under my feet, the Rue & Rosemary plants on my little balcony.
There is so much to grieve on this Dark Moon, so much loss of relationship and resourcing and land and life; and there is also so much to be grateful for. We have each other, we have everything we need - and we will raise our fists in defiance, and in gratitude.
A Defiant & Rooted Gratitude Ritual
Find a natural being who wants to aid in this ritual (a flower, dried herbs, piece of fruit, a stone, a seed, a piece of tree bark, a bone…). This is your offering.
Go to a place in the wild where you feel connected to the Living Earth, whether that is your backyard, a park, near a creek, out in the forest... Settle into your embodied presence. Breathe a few deep breaths, and synchronize your heartbeat with the pulsing of the natural world. Allow your weight to sink and be held, generously, by gravity and the Living Earth.
While holding the offering object you have chosen, begin to speak a gratitude prayer, to the beings you love and support you. Really feel into the vast sense of support & abundance that is available to you, and speak out loud those people, places, relationships, and things you are grateful for. Let this practice not be simply a “gratitude list”, but a real conversation and prayer with the Living Earth, your ancestors, deities, or any other beings you are devoted to.
Hold the offering object close to your heart, and let your gratitude flow into this object. Let your gratitude be drawn from the deep wellspring of love and power that is available to you, let it flow through your body as a channel. If your heart feels leaden with despair or numbness, and you can’t find the gratitude in your own body, then allow the abundance of the earth itself to flow through you. Call on the gratitude and the resourcing of the living world to be yours.
Dig a small hole in the earth, and place your offering object in the soil. This is your offering of gratitude & reciprocity to the Living Earth. This is a vow of relationship with the Earth, to accept her gifts and to fight for her wholeness. Fill in your hole with reverence, holding both your grief and gratitude (or your joy and despair, your courage and fear, etc.).
Allow yourself to be filled with the sense of relationship, with all of the beings you mentioned in your gratitude prayer. What does this feel like in your body? Where can you feel your gratitude and sense of entanglement with a loving ecology of relationships? Come back to this embodied feeling when you are tempted by the cries of the Wendigo, when you feel despair at the state of the earth or the gnawing emptiness in your gut. Remember that you are enough. You are embedded. You are held.
Close with a song, or a good cry.
With defiant gratitude,
summer