What if the collapse is part of the medicine?
Deep rest within a kairos moment and internet mycelialings
Within this culture, we fear experiences of disintegration, breakdown, and collapse.
But what if the collapse is also a part of the medicine?
There are openings and cracks in these times of breakdown, windows into other worlds.
“I have come to believe that the great unraveling always begins with a turning inward,” says Liz Koch in her delicious book Stalking Wild Psoas. “Curling within, leaning toward, collapsing into, landing upon, and diving through are all gestures of return. They denote a vital longing to come home.”
When I fully slow down, I can sink into the imaginal, into the felt sense intelligence of my body and the earth. From this slowness, I begin again to feel the sacredness of time, its spiral nature, those dilations into other worlds in which deeper knowings from earth and the sacred emerge.
This slowing down invites us into “a time in the ashes,” a practice described by Francis Weller as a mourning ritual in ancient Scandinavian cultures. In this contemplative time, people who had experienced a loss would spend many months alongside the hearth fire within the center of a longhouse. "It was a time out of time, an underworld journey to the place of sorrow and emptying. Whoever came back from this sojourn came back changed and deepened by this work in the ashes.”
Relinquishing the emotional flooding and elevated stress of trying to “function” amidst the pervasive woundedness of business as usual, the thickness of a time in the ashes can give us the capacity to perceive other ways of being.
As we slow down, we open towards the wisdom of a larger intelligence, feeling the many threads of relationship, the earth we are embedded in, the medicine we carry in our bones.
The words above are a reweaving from an essay I wrote in 2020, at the beginning of another time of intense collective transition.
I was struck today as I revisited these words at how resonant they feel in this time also—this kairos moment threshold point where so many things that have long been broken are coming to the surface to be seen.
In phone calls with friends this week, again and again we are coming back to the practices of slowing down, attuning to the presence of wider time scales, calling in ancestral and ecological bodies of support.
These kinds of dissolving, immersing, releasing the shape of human for a time to actually connect to what is bigger than us that can help us remember our embodied belonging to earth-body is going to be even more necessary in the months and years to come.
We have to know what to return to, where resource and support abides, even in these moments when it feels like the future is sliding away from our cupped hands.
What are the practices that root us into relationship with our embodied wholeness and our ecosystemic belonging?
Who are the mycelial allies that weave us home?
Last winter, around this time, I was tapped to be a co-organizer of a Summit event called Mundane Magic, co-created by the loosely woven community of witchy practitioners who over the last few years have become my close kindred, colleagues, and mentors across this vast ecosystem of social media.
The ways in which my translocal relationality with these witchy others has allowed me to root into my own body and life rhythms is impossible to fully articulate. The embodied permission that I am learning to actually meet myself here, to turn towards my nervous system in self-intimacy, to stay rooted in my energetic center as I move through the world, and to feel a sense of support from wider presences, is deeply potentiated by this ecosystem of online relationships.
Together, we’d already begun to sense into another form of gathering for this next year, and the theme that came roaring in over a month ago now in conversations with my co-visionaries was that of Nadir—the lowest point, resting inside the darkness, in the lap of the crone, a supported journey of dissolution and immersion within and through the energetic portal of midwinter. We did not know at the time how collectively potent this medicine would be for this specific moment. But damn am I grateful that we had already been incubating this as we are stepping into this new year.
There is an event page that we just put up here Midwinter Mundane Magic: The Nadir and a webpage with more info will be up on my website next week.
For now, just know that it exists and it is one space of holding which you can bring your body to and lay down your bones with a great sigh, to really feel yourself held within a wider context of collective nourishment and the robust resonance of practitioners who are ripened in these processes of disintegration and remembering.
I’m so grateful for the mycelial potency of these tech weavings and the relationships that have formed through the internet space here. I do not take them for granted and part of the savoring and leaning into these spaces now is the awareness that they may not always be here.
For me they are practice spaces—magical, multi-spatial, and often transtemporal altars to the unseen—that offer ways of deepening my relationship to embodied intimacy and ecosystemic relationality in the company of rooted others.
My prayer is always to weave these ways of being back into the fabric of my local relationships, to the cultivation of right-sized relational feedback loops, and to the circulation of nourishment across ecosystems throughout time.
If you feel called to support my work and my writing as I am going through my own Nadir portal moment these next few months with my own healing process from mold exposure, you can make a donation here.