Because I am a mother, an aunt, a friend, a neighbor, and a person in this collapsing culture, I awaken to worries. I begin the day fretting about, well, everything. The kids, the phone call I have to make, my health, my aging pets, my aging car, my aging husband, my dilapidated house, the bills that need to be paid, the event I need to promote, all of it. I glance at the newspaper and fret about the planet and what a friend of mine calls “the bright green lies” of the corporate over-culture. I am a class A, Olympic caliber, high grade fretter.
But “fretting” is actually a complicated activity. On the one hand fretting is turning something over and over in our mind repetitively, frustratingly, and irritatingly to those around us. On the other hand, to fret is to make music with our hands and to weave fibers into wool with our fingers. As we fret we untangle knots, we wear away problems, we spin new possibilities into being. Our busy, fretting minds are also creative, imaginative minds…we are not just identifying problems, we are in fact beginning the process of addressing them and dealing with them.
And I don’t do that on my own.
As I sip coffee in the morning, watching the goldfinches at the feeder, I call upon those on the other side to get to work on helping me with my problems. I put Clark’s grandmother who lived to 105 to make sure he eats right, I call on my godmother’s husband who had a gorgeous voice to help me do the audio recording for my book. I put a man who cared for the young people in our town on helping my daughter find a new home—and he leads her to the farmhouse he used to rent and where, many years ago, he saved her life. I call upon family members, pets, neighbors, and people who pop into my mind. Yesterday I was having to send some difficult emails to get stuff done for my book promotion…and I called upon my mother’s incredibly bossy Irish nanny who ran guns for the IRA and kept everyone in line. Each day I assemble my team and give them their assignments. This is my daily ritual.
There are helpers on the other side working on big intractable issues. My grandmother the gardener is in charge of my future grandchildren coming into the world. St. Rita keeps me sugar sober, one day at a time. St. Thecla helps me manage the feral fellowship of Way of the Rose….St. Elvis keeps an eye on my children’s genetic disorder, that almost certainly led to many of his issues.
I have prayers I say, altars in my room that I look at and tend, and the whole business takes about thirty minutes when, my coffee finished, the birds fed, and the living and dead attended to, I start the day.
Without any worries.
I am not in charge of the problems or the solutions. I’m just on the team with those who have a very different perspective than I do, for whom nothing is impossible, and do not have to follow the rules of time and space the way I do.
When I worry about climate change, and I do because my husband and I have been reading the climate research for thirty years and feeling like Cassandra at the gates of Troy for just as long, I call on the dead. I call on the dead who have navigated all kinds of ecological disruptions and extinctions. I call on my ancestors who endured ice ages and volcanic super eruptions. I call on my Neanderthal ancestors, gone but not forgotten. I call on the dinosaurs and ask them to guide us. Show us how to become small again, to sing again, and to remember how to fly.
Everyone in our culture seems to have a “generalized anxiety disorder.” Which is not the problem. The problem is imagining that we are ALONE with our problems, that we have to be in charge, that there is no one to help us. The exact opposite is true. We are not in charge and we have all the dead from the bottom of time standing beneath us ready to support us, guide us, and love us beyond measure.
So go ahead. Fret. But remember that with your fretting you are actually weaving the entire fabric of existence.
TONIGHT July 12 I am offering a FREE talk through the Shift Network about ancestral collaborations. Come and listen and find out more. The talk will also be offered again on July 15th if you have to miss tonight. AND this will all lead to a seven week course on how to summon and work with the dead. Reach out if you have any questions. I hope I will see you there!
Pre-order my book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World. Publication date is September 12 and we’ll start an exciting 49 day countdown at the end of July.