When the portal opens
Honoring ancestors
Beloveds. It is the full moon lunar eclipse, and below is the post I began preparing last month. Yesterday, Israel cut off all communication in Gaza and intenisfied its already devastating bombing overnight. More than 7,700 people have been killed in Gaza—probably many more.
My heart continues to break and break, my anger continues to mount and mount.
I’m getting my news from Al Jazeera. I’m stepping into the space of collective grief and prayer with adrienne maree brown. I continue to call Congress and take action, to pray, and to cast spells.
I sent a post last weekend with a love poem to so many in this moment, and links for more resources on Palestine.
If it feels right to read about portals and ancestors, I invite you to do so below. No matter what, I am sending love and care and outrage and prayers.
~~~
Story
On Tuesday evening, Patti and I will make a simple, delicious dinner. Maybe murasaki potatoes, mushrooms, and greens. We’ll put a third place setting, fill up a third plate with food, and eat silently. We’ll welcome our ancestors, blood and beyond, those we’ve loved and lost, those whose name we don’t know but whose love and support we feel and honor. And there are so many this year.
In many cultures, this time—Samhain/Halloween/Days of the Dead/All Souls Day—is acknowledged as a time when the veil between the material and spiritual worlds is thin, porous. It’s a time when transitioning from one state to another feels like it might be easier.
In this time, Patti and I invite those who’ve passed to stay with us a while. To eat and drink with us. To receive our offerings of gratitude and love.
~~~
In Japan, that moment of mingling of the dead and alive happens in late summer, during Obon, which I’ve written about before.
A few weeks ago, fellow poet and spellcaster Kenji C. Liu posted a painting he made of Bon Odori, a communal dance that happens during Obon festivals. His caption:
the japanese gateway between life and death is communal dancing. i am trying to learn from the pleasure of dancing with and for the dead.
As a child who loved to dance, I adored Bon Odori. On summer evenings in Tokyo, I couldn’t wait to get into my yukata and geta. I’d clatter down the street holding my mom’s hand to the corner park, which was decked out in paper lanterns and lined with vendors.
I loved the street food and games of the festival, but I loved most of all the thudding rhythm of the taiko drums after the sun set, calling all to join the Bon Odori circle. Traveling around and around the drum as traditional songs blared from tinny speakers, I’d lose myself performing the simple gestures with my neighbors and friends.
Little Tamiko knew the pleasure of communal dancing, but she didn’t know anything about the spiritual dimension of that ritual.
So, after seeing Kenji’s post, I did a little research.
What I learned was that, because Bon Odori is an integral part of the Obon season when the dead are welcomed back home, ancestors are invited to take part in the dance as well.
In this podcast episode of Uncanny Japan, “Bon Odori: Dancing with the Dead,” host Thersa Matsuura describes a version of Bon Odori from Akita prefecture, which she says is at least 700 years old. The dancers of Nishimonnai Bon Odori cover their faces with half-moon-shaped hats or black cloth. As she puts it:
“You can imagine as the night wears on, everyone becoming a little dizzy and drunk on the atmosphere. How easily it would be for an ancestor or two to slip into the line up and dance alongside everyone else. Especially with all those hidden faces.
What does it mean to dance with the dead? To feast with them, to drink with them? To spend some silent time with them?
~~~
I’ve written here about learning from ancestors whose worlds ended, the new worlds they built and what we might learn from them.
I wrote recently that I think of this moment as a portal, still, going on three and a half years since the start of the pandemic.
By which I mean all of the ways the world continues to crack open.
War, the climate crisis, the continuing pandemic, the rise of authoritarianism, book banning, the Supreme Court tilt to the far right, hyper-racial capitalism, necropolitics, and on and on.
Inside all of the pain and suffering that these times bring, I believe there are possibilities. Openings for change to take hold. For the ideas, dreams, visions of those forced into the margins to bloom.
I feel this moment (which might be years or a decade or more) is a rent, a tear, through which this broken, breaking world might be flushed out and better, brighter ones welcomed in.
~~~
Perhaps to eat and drink with our beloved dead, to dance with and for our ancestors, is, in part, to celebrate the body and its pleasures while remembering that such pleasures are finite.
Perhaps it is to touch into an embodied experience of transcendent love. To invite the possibility of feeling a love beyond this corporeal experience, an infinite, nonlinear love that connects us to all other beings, in this world and beyond.
Perhaps it is to become more intimate with the cyclical nature of our existence, to remember and feel how an ending is a beginning is an ending is a beginning.
~~~
What I remember most about Bon Odori dancing as a child was how I felt invited into the circle.
In 1970s Japan, my multiracial family always stood out. On the trains, on the streets, in the stores, we were gaijin, foreigners. My earliest memories are of feeling different and strange—to myself and all those around me.
But in the Bon Odori circle, I was an unremarkable part of the whole.
I was part of the dance that never seemed to end as we went around and around the drummer in the center, repeating the same movements again and again.
I was in my body, neither gaijin nor nihonjin, or both and everything. I was neither alive nor dead but perhaps both.
I danced, seemingly forever, with my family, my neighbors, my best friends, the spirits of the land, my ancient ancestors who whispered, we are home, we are home, welcome home.
Special Announcement
Dearest reader,
I’ve been writing Starlight & Strategy for more than three years. And whether you’ve been here from the start, or just subscribed, I’m so grateful for your attention and energy. You’ve helped me learn—about myself, this world we share, and the craft of nonfiction prose.
For a while, I’ve been feeling an invitation to shift what I’m doing with this newsletter. And I think this time of portals and transitions is a good time to start this shift.
I don’t have a clear sense of what the shift will be, but I know I will be taking a hiatus after next month’s issue. This may be a permanent hiatus, or not. We’ll see.
Here are some logistical details:
For those of you who have supported this project as paid subscribers, I’ll be turning off paid subscriptions after November 28. I invite you to continue to support the organizations I’ve been sending funds to (Families for Justice As Healing, Soul Fire Farm, Transgender Law Center).
I won’t be shutting this Substack newsletter down entirely, so you may still hear from me once in a while. There’s no action you need to take to stay on this newsletter.
And finally, I’d love to highlight YOU, Starlight & Strategy readers, in the next issue. Specifically, I’d love to feature:
Your answers to: What opportunities do you see in endings? What new things have arisen from endings in your life?
A writing prompt or tarot spread.
A photo or song you love.
A link to a resource you want to share.
If you’d like to take part, please reply to this email with any of these items, or fill out this form by Nov 15.
Starlight
A prompt
Try your own version of a silent dinner, communal dance party, altar for the dead, or other ritual on Oct 31 or Nov 1 to invite your ancestors to stay with you a while.
If it feels right, invite your ancestors to communicate with you. Take some time to write what comes.
Or, a day or two later, describe the ritual—the physical, spiritual, and emotional experience of it. Turn it into a poem, an essay, a short story. Be open to being surprised.
Stargaze
What I’m reading and listening to
Over the past few months, I’ve read A LOT of books! I have been enjoying reliving my childhood pleasure of going to the library and checking out huge stacks of books. Some of the books that have stayed with me are:
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. I kept thinking this book was like a (M)olly Costello art piece come to life. A beautiful evocation of what is possible, with plenty of humor along the way.
True Biz, by Sara Nović. I’ve never read a novel in and of Deaf culture. It was both educational and an engrossing plot.
Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon. A deeply satisfying, harrowing, gorgeous sci-fi queer Black revolutionary novel.
How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis. The main point: your house should take care of you; you don’t need to take care of your house. This has completely changed my relationship to chores—or as Davis has renamed it, care tasks.
Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy, by Zazie Todd. As I go further into learning about fear-free training and how to learn and understand my pup more, this has been a great grounding text.
Starshine
Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community
I’m excited to announce that for every copy of Poetry as Spellcasting sold between now and December 31, 2023, up to 108 copies, North Atlantic Books will make a matching donation to the Women's Prison Book Project. Just reply to this email to let me know you’ve bought a copy, so it can be matched.
Poetry as Spellcasting is coming to Durham, NC! Join us on 11/18 at 5:30 at the NorthStar Church of the Arts for an evening of poetry and spellcasting toward liberation. Featuring all three co-editors, Destiny Hemphill, Lisbeth White, and I; and contributor Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
We (the co-editors of Poetry as Spellcasting) had the pleasure of speaking with Amy Torok on the Missing Witches podcast recently. You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
I can’t wait to get my hands on fellow poet Kate Schapira’s forthcoming nonfiction book, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth. It’s a book of stories, reflections and exercises that people can use to live within climate change with purpose and care, available for pre-order now.
Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!
Thank you for reading to the end! I’ll be back with perhaps the last, or last-for-a-while, issue of Starlight & Strategy in your inbox on November 27. Look for it—a noncapitalist island among all the Cyber Monday emails that might be flooding it that day. LOL. In the meantime, I wish you beautiful moments of silence and communion with what lies beyond.