Leaning into discomfort with the Devil
Toward necessary transformation
Sometimes these posts come easy, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I need a little inspiration, and this was one of those days. I shuffled my Wild Unknown Tarot deck, cut it, and flipped the top card over.
The Devil. A goat-like creature with huge horns, an upside-down pentacle on their forehead, and hooves on fire. A scary image in Western iconography, though pretty mild compared to the Devil card in some other decks.
Not exactly the inspiration I was hoping for. But I try my best to be open to the gifts that come my way when I ask for them. So I took the invitation to journal about how I keep myself locked up and stagnant because of fear. How I am complicit in the forces of oppression that surround me, affect me, and keep me in struggle with my own divine nature:
I am afraid to be in deep intimacy with myself because I don’t always know what to do with the big emotions that come up. I don’t like to be uncomfortable. But being uncomfortable is required of me as someone with privilege in this society. I have to keep getting uncomfortable. The systems designed to keep me comfortable and complicit are systems that are causing enormous harm and suffering to so many people and beings.
Contrary to popular posts on Instagram, getting in alignment with our values is not all light and love, rainbows and sparkles. It’s often hard, uncomfortable work requiring labor and sweat—maybe metaphorical or maybe actually putting our bodies as well as hearts and psyches to work in service of transformation.
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Several months ago, I read “On Wimmin’s Land,” an article by Sasha Archibald about lesbian separatists who started and lived on communes in rural Oregon. I was fascinated by what these women tried to do, how they succeeded and failed, and what lessons those of us seeking to create new societies can learn from their radical experiments.
According to Archibald, the women drawn to these communes were overwhelmingly white, economically privileged, highly educated, and from the East Coast. Their politics were aligned with the 1960s radical left, but the misogyny they encountered in the movement pushed them out. So, like the settler-colonialists before them, they made their way West and created their own communities. These communities were structured around values of feminism, a sharing economy, and a firm belief that it was possible to create a new society based on women’s love—for self and each other. These “land-dykes” put in the labor and sweat to do it: learning how to build buildings, grow their own food, create their own governance structures.
But their radical politics only went so far, Archibald writes. Their approach was highly binary: men were bad, women were good, and there was nothing in between. They were transphobic: there was no room for fluidity of gender, and they had no analysis of how misogyny affects transgender or nonbinary people.
They also upheld white supremacy. Archibald writes that the few lesbians of color who came experienced racism both inside and outside the communes. Additionally, most of the white commune members “indulged the colonialist fantasy that rural land was theirs for the taking.” And in their hunger to practice a spirituality divorced from the patriarchy, they created “such a pastiche of practices that it becomes difficult to untangle the appropriations. Goddess feminists borrowed from Native American, Buddhist, and Wiccan sources along with Sufism, Transcendentalism, Druidism, and shamanic traditions.”
In the end, many of the communes dissolved or became much smaller in scale. The article cites many reasons, but my takeaway is this: The land-dykes poured their hearts, sweat, and tears into creating a society that was in direct opposition to the patriarchal systems they were raised in. In many ways, these societies were beautiful, liberatory, and visionary. But without a full exploration and understanding of their own positions in other systems of oppression, they ended up replicating harmful structures and systems that could not be sustained.
That, I think, is the challenge for our times. And it is the work that the Devil card calls me to do: I must keep examining how I am complicit in my own oppression and in the oppression of others. It is when I can see both clearly that I can start creating ways to unbind myself and others. It’s not easy work; it’s uncomfortable and hard, but it’s absolutely necessary for the kind of transformation and liberation that I seek.
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I recently attended the Red Black Green New Deal Climate Summit organized by the Movement for Black Lives. I was struck, as I always am, by the brilliance of the women and nonbinary folks who present at M4BL’s events. Colette Pinchon Battle, Valencia Gunder, Keya Chatterjee, and Thenjiwe McHarris wove together the threads of Black liberation, climate justice, individual and collective responsibility, policy changes, and grassroots organizing. When asked about the role of democracy and the climate crisis, McHarris said:
If we are to fight for what our communities need—if we’re going to fight climate change, for the respect of our people and the planet—we must also contend with how the right is constantly trying to undermine any access that we have to real democracy. And we as a movement must center fighting for a form of democracy that will allow us to not only keep our people alive but fighting for structural change. There’s no separating any of what is happening to our communities and the planet from governance. On the road to self-governance and self-determination is clarity about radical democracy and the function it serves in our lives.
To that end, the 9-point plan they presented at the end was a visionary, expansive, and absolutely necessary set of demands which, if met, would ensure the survival and thriving of every one of us.
These demands—including freeing the land and ending extractive economies and restoring stolen Black capital—might seem impossible to achieve if you are a pundit in Washington or if you only listen to talking heads on TV. But that’s because pundits, the political class, and most who report on them operate within a certain paradigm of how change occurs. They don’t understand, or don’t really believe in, the way change can be initiated by people organizing their neighbors and by storytellers, artists, and builders creating possibilities of different futures. They don’t believe in the sheer power of the people when we take action, organize, and begin to create something different.
And maybe you don’t quite believe it, either. It’s understandable. Those who benefit most from the dominant paradigm carefully and strenuously (although perhaps unconsciously) work to uphold the lie that this is the only possible way of being, living, and governing.
That was the brilliance of the lesbian separatists: they saw through the lie. They fully believed a different society was possible. So do the organizers of M4BL and the hundreds of thousands—millions!—of other organizers and artists around the world working toward change in this moment.
So do I. And I am down to do the work required to radically shift the dominant culture and create something new. Economies that center care for each other and all living beings. Structures that enable all people and all beings to flourish. Systems that are built on expansive love, deep respect, and ebullient joy.
I think the biggest challenge to creating these systems is not the political obstacles that pundits would cite. To be sure, they are real, and we need to take them into account as we organize toward transformation. But even beyond them is the the challenge of truly getting free. It is the challenge of doing to the work that the lesbian separatists were not able to do fully: the hard and uncomfortable work that the Devil card was inviting me into.
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In the major arcana of the Tarot, the Devil is followed by the Tower. In the Tower, foundations crumble, structures are hit by lightning, royalty falls, and all that is left is ashes and rubble. If we individually and collectively take up the opportunity offered to us by the Devil card—to deeply examine the ways we are complicit in and perpetuate oppression, exclusion, and hate—then rotten foundations cannot stand. We will collectively strike them down. Change comes, quickly and cumulatively. And after the Tower crumbles, the Star comes out, shining brightly, joyously, affirming all that is beautiful and loving in ourselves and each other.
Yes, it’s a metaphor, and yes, it’s real. My ancestors—by blood and by artistic and political lineages—are calling me to do this work. To commit to facing what is uncomfortable, enraging, difficult, and vulnerable in myself. And to start mapping ways to transform what is hard into what is liberating.
I tell myself I can start small. Doing one thing every week that feels scary or uncomfortable toward getting free and getting others free. It adds up, in one person’s life and lifetime—and in our collective lifetimes. The generations ahead of me need me to do this work, now. What else am I here to do?
Prompting
Take a moment to think about or journal on these questions:
What are you afraid of? How does that fear keep you from bringing your full self to the world?
Where does that fear come from?
What support do you need to transform your fear into action?
Now, write a poem, story, or essay set in a world where the conditions that create or enforce your particular fear do not exist. What does that world feel like, sound like, look like? Make yourself a character in this world, liberated from this fear.
Quick note: I will be offering a Tarot spread based on the Devil, Tower, and Star cards on Friday over at the Typewriter Tarot’s Patreon. I’m a huge fan of Typewriter Tarot, and if you are as enamored with writing and the Tarot as I am, I bet you will love them, too.
Engaging
Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad’s breaking poems have been balm, fire, and inspiration for me over these last few weeks. And, I really appreciated the email sent by Split This Rock with both ways to take action to support a free Palestine as well as a list of other Palestinian poets to read. (Scroll down to find this list.)
I’ve been slowly re-reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, accompanied by Toshi Regan and adrienne maree brown’s readings and questions. If you haven’t already checked out their podcast, Octavia’s Parables, I highly recommend!
I’ve long loved Lace and Pyrite, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay’s collaborative chapbook about their gardens. I’m super excited that it’s being reprinted by Get Fresh Books.
Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had is a book on capitalism like I’ve not read before. Her writing is both rigorous and gorgeous.
Community/Announcements
If you haven’t already seen the call to gather in Northern Minnesota to rise up and protect beings, land, and water by stopping Line 3, you can check it out here.
I’m excited to be part of the Asian American Writers Workshop’s Page Turner conference on Saturday, June 26. I’ll be speaking about my new kind of book launch in a panel about publishing in a pandemic.
That’s it for now. Thank you for reading, sharing, subscribing. I’ll be back in your inbox probably on June 10 for the new moon, and definitely on June 24 for the full moon. Take good care.
Very thoughtful and powerful - I’m with you