i was thinking about writing this one on halloween, and then it felt too topical, and now i feel like really it’s always halloween; as in our dead and our shadows are always with us, ever among us.
and, Ocean Vuong and others have taught me that the monstrous is in each of us, all year round.1
BOO!
in february of this year, during a rather wrenching time, i encountered this talk: Remembering Who We Are,2 by Lama Rod Owens. he shares that the root meaning of the word mindfulness is actually closer to 'remembering'....that mindfulness is really about a willingness to be haunted. this revelation has lingered with me ever since—it’s teaching me that so much violence is born of our refusal to be haunted. our refusal to acknowledge our dead, our dying, our wounds, our experiences. our refusal to be with our own & each other’s pain.
and so this pain and suffering can’t yet guide towards different choices.
were we to grieve, thoroughly, continuously, we might be less likely to collude with power structures and cultures that teach us to violate ourselves, each other, and the earth. as Ross Gay writes in his essay, Grief Suite (Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement) in his book, Inciting Joy:
haunting hurts. i’ve begun to miss people i’ve never met. i feel remorse. i’ve asked others who they are missing. their missing hurts too. so many of our people are gone. gone prematurely. especially in this country that worships capital at the expense of all else.
what would be different if we were to acknowledge that we will be missing the people in front of us—whose eyes we are looking into, shoulders we are squeezing, voices we are hearing—sooner than we know.
“The way things become more lustrous, dearer, when we know they, or we, are disappearing. (This might be, incidentally, the beginning of an ethics.)”4
if we’re haunted, here only briefly, monsters, what then?
we are ‘shelter and warning at once.’5
um holy shit: “Vuong also displays a fondness for haunting paradoxes, such as, “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.” And those lyrical reflections are counterbalanced by searing recollections, as when Little Dog overhears his mother at the sink whispering to herself: “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.” The distinction is not so clear to him. “A monster is not such a terrible thing to be,” he thinks. “From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/ocean-vuongs-on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous-is-permanently-stunning/2019/05/28/b1f8a1ba-7ff7-11e9-95a9-e2c830afe24f_story.html ↩
https://insighttimer.com/lamarod/guided-meditations/returning-to-who-we-are ↩
Ross Gay, Inciting Joy, 219 ↩
Ross Gay, Inciting Joy, 113 ↩
see footnote 1 ↩