“Shelly touched many lives with her tender and caring nature and her beautiful outlook on life. As a mother and as a friend, she was always supportive and loving. She was a selfless person, always putting others before herself. Even though she had little, she still donated what she could to various charities. Her love for her children, James and Alexandria, is an ever-lasting love that will never be forgotten and always felt. Even though Shelly has passed, she will be everywhere surrounding the people she touched and loved. As my Mom always told my brother and I, "I love you to the moon and the stars and back" and we both feel the same way toward you, Mom.”
Is it weird to quote your mom’s obituary? MEH, if it is, then so be it. Y’all are gonna have to ride with me, because I am following through on a promise of making an alter space for my mom in this project. It was her birthday last Saturday, October 19, so I am making space for her here in this paid post. Shelly would have been 73 years old if she was still here. She was the single most important person in my life until I met Lily in college. As I explained to my daughter tonight while looking at a picture of my mom while she was holding me as a baby, “this was the most important person in my life until you and your mom came into my life.” Juniper looked intently at the photo and I gave her a little squeeze. I never want anyone to forget that I am Shelly’s son, especially my daughter. Never. She is the reason that I am who I am through and through. She was my mother and my father as well once she became a single mom.
Most of y’all have been around me for a minute, so you know that my mom’s death is one of the single largest life changing events in my life, aside from marrying Lily and becoming J’s father. Losing your mom when your 28 is not advisable. For me, it was even worse, because I had just re-established a stronger relationship with her after I emancipated when I was 18. Given that my upbringing was on the west side of horrendous with being made the man of the house at 14, I needed a couple years to come back to my relationship with my mom with fresh eyes and gratitude for all she had done for me. Then, after I got home from visiting her for Easter, I got the call no one wants to get. Yes, a twist on the main premise of the LCD Soundsystem song “Someone Great” also happened to me.
My mom was incredibly distended, so she went to urgent care. They referred her to a hospital where we found out she had stage 4 colon cancer. This is all a rehashing of stuff I have talked about with my project before, since the whole reason I started weaving was to finish her wish to learn how to weave. However, its essential to really underscore why my fiber art practice will always be death work with my mom. I will always just be a continuation of Shelly’s bustling crochet and illustration practices and the way that she was able to learn to weave after she passed away.
Since I didn’t do anything on October 19th to explicitly mark her day, I made sure to have a silent supper with her on Sunday. For those of you who have never practiced one, a silent supper is the practice of having a dinner with a departed loved one by setting them a seat at the table and having one of their favorite meals. My mom, like me, was pretty simple in her taste. She liked good home-cooked meals and chicken chop suey. Yes, we would go to this Chinese restaurant in our tiny town of Sylvania all the time—almost as much as we went to Little Caesars (before the $5 hot and ready was a thing). We would all pile into our Jeep Liberty, the car she had to drive because her brothers and sisters prolly built the car on the Toledo North Assembly Line, and pick up the food. We would drive back home, sometimes stopping at family video to grab a movie to watch. We always would always watch something on TV while we had this meal. So what did Lily and I do? We let Juniper watch her tunes and I talked to my mom. Lily and I talked about that house on 5129 Railroad street; a house I haven’t seen since I cleaned it out by myself to prepare it for sale after my mom passed.
Since my mom has been gone for over a decade, we have been doing this silent supper ritual for some time. However, through some death magic of its own power, it never ceases to be the most profound experience. If anything, this silent supper has gained in power since my daughter was born, because this is how I let juju know who my person was before her mom and her were my people. I have never once talked about my dad to my daughter. However, once I get started talking about my mom, SHOOSH it gonna be awhile. I gotta have someone shut me down. She was the person behind me while I was on America online and Napster, telling me what Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Pink Floyd Songs to download first on our dial up connection. She was the person who I sang Seal’s “Kiss From the Rose” with while we sat in the McDonald’s drive through listening to the radio while waiting for our soft serve cones. I still remember us both agreeing in that same drive through, while listening to Blackstreet’s “Another Level” cassette, that “No Diggity” was the only hit on their album. She was the person who let me peruse the cassette section at Meijer, the local target-esq store with the best eclaire donuts that we always used to share.
She didn’t stop me from buying the parental advisory records. Nothing was off limits. Hell, her and I watched almost the entirety of X-files from the time I was 7 to 10 years old to when I was in my teens. She even let me buy Eminem’s Marshall Mather’s LP. I will not ever forget the interaction her and I had after the first time I listened to that album all the way through. I came up visibly shaken, given that Em would talk killing all sorts of people in that record. She asked me what was up. I told her that I just got done listening to the Eminem record. She asked me how it made me feel. I will never forget that question. I explained to her that it made me feel angry. This was my first lesson in somatics or what people generally call embodiment. Her lesson to me always was to be careful what I consume, because you are what you listen to, read, and watch. I carry that with me today still. Yet, as a 14 year old growing in a dead-end rust belt town in the shadow of Detroit as the “man of the house,” Em allowed me to work through the anger of having to grow up in a shitty spot. Sometimes you need to have some outlet for that anger or else it will eat you alive.
I talked about have a hardscrabble code in my recent essay “I Live By A Code,” which I learned growing up in relative poverty with my mom as a teenager. I was sorta joking by riffing on fast and furious, but I kinda wasn’t, ya know? Like, yes, it is amusing to quote Paul Walker and that film franchise for me in the same essay as talking about my commitment to my magic lifeway. However, I was forged in the fires of the 21st century American hellscape. Like many, I was told to excel but offered few tangible pathways to do so. Instead, the money that could have been used to invest in my generation was blown on rockets fall on rockets fall and any of a number corporate welfare projects with no humanitarian or societal pay off. What did we get? The lost promise of hope, getting sold up the river once again. In such a context, you get
repeatedly knocked down, so to survive, you can’t help but develop a code of dos and don’ts. It was my mom that shaped my code. She is the reason I survived those years and believed in myself enough to become who I am today. I would not be magic without her. I would not be a fiber artist without her. I would not be a curious little woodland shrew of a gardener without her. I would not have my belief in egalitarian horizons without her. That’s why I take her maiden name, Gardner, as my own.
In a typical situation of synchronicity, my celebration of my mom’s birthday coincides perfectly with my own re-awakening to the power of my own magic. In the divinations that I have received this year, there has been much discussion of a big shift on the horizon. I have been sort of puzzling over this shift, somewhat nervous and scared, for most of the year. However, the other night, I pulled the Birch card from Tonja Reichley’s Way of the Wild Oracle deck; a card that stands for initiations that reads at the bottom: “You are initiating the next steps in this beginning.” You know that I need to be basically hit over the head with truth for me to realize sometimes, so I am grateful for this moment where this shift reveals itself to me clearly. The shift that I needed to make was to reaffirm my commitment to this work, take on my mom’s name (even if informally), and continue to make way for what it means to be a tender of kiddos, craft traditions, magic, and furry and green things. Like I said in a recent essay A Personal Change of Season:
“It struck me while I was dyeing that tending is one of the most real things you can do. Sure, I joke about only wool being real, but what underlies that little quip is that tending to any animal, human, or craft disconnects you from the illusory time of contemporary hyperreal capitalism and connects you with a deeper, cyclical time that isn’t governed by any clock.”
Yes, I want to devote myself to devote myself to all those things than make me feel the depth of time, the heft of living a corporeal exist, and the enchantment of the everyday. That is the spiritual discipline a Gardner tries to live up to. It’s what my mom did each day and I can only hope to carry on that legacy and teach my daughter it like she taught me.
If this all feels very much like a spiral, you aren’t wrong. It occurred to me that I am spiraling back to a point I was at before the pandemic and becoming a father with new insight and tools at my disposal while reading Amy Torok’s and Risa Dickens’ recent book New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-Enchantment. In their introduction, they talk about the spiraling nature of the stories we write and live as a way to encourage us to gives ourselves leeway to embrace our own stories again that touched me right to my core:
“We hope you'll embrace the stories, tools, and ideas in this book in the nonlinear way they were created. Because this was written in spirals and dedicated to the moon's spiral through the Milky Way, there is no right way to approach this, and you can't fuck it up. Whatever skill or knowledge you bring is enough.”1
Alongside embracing Risa and Amy’s stories by reading the same chapter of New Moon Magic every night for a week, I also want to spiral through my own stories and reconnect version of myself that was more in tune with walking the tending path I mention above. That is the powerful magic of Amy and Risa’s book. It’s a powerful spell that reminds you that you already have everything you need, an explicit point that they make when telling folx you don’t need to buy anything to be a witch. You just use what you got. For me, this means spiraling back through my own formative stories to come back to pathway that will offer me a new way forward in this moment of where I am as an elder in training, tending to all my crafts, magic, and kin.
My focus on Amy and Risa’s work is not surprising. They are some of my kin. I joined in their virtual coven a year or two ago, because I want to be community with other people who are working towards a feminist, anti-capitalist witchcraft praxis (the process of grounding ones actions in theory and placing that theory into action.) We are woven together in the same web, and I am only upset that I have not devoted more space to their new book yet. You know why? As I talked about in my essay I Live by a Code, I am interested in growing with and through the wisdom that my friends weave with their words. It’s my loss to not pour over the lessons they have to offer like my life depended on it. I am not interested in hitching my cart to some charismatic individual’s get-rich-or-die-trying, new-age-spirituality, pyramid scheme.
No, I am weaving myself into underground networks built by my kin. That’s why I am turning my copy of New Moon Magic into a dog-eared, loved text by reading it in a devotional way. Think about how great the world would be if we read our kin’s wisdom as if it were as sacred as the bible, setting it aside for the quietest moments of our day as a refuge.
I can’t say that I approached their chapter New Moon in Aries: Needles and Knives with that devotional approach in mind. Upon finishing that first read of the needles and knives chapter, I felt such a resonance that I wanted to be in the world that was created in that chapter again the next night. By the third night of my re-reading, it dawned to me that something more significant was happening. I was approaching my friends’ work with a devotional lens, pouring myself into the text each night just as it was pour itself into me. This was much different than my typical readings of books, which tend to be marked by one read through. No, I found myself re-visiting my favorite excerpts to see what I missed along the way. This pouring was much similar to how I approach music, listening to the same albums over and over again and still finding something new to hear. This reading was much more akin to the sort of deep read that Loam co-editor Kailea Lofton hopes people will engage in with their print news letter. Kailea described Loam’s publications as slow media, “slow as in the pace our bodies are meant to be living at. As in, we will not burn out doing this work.” Yes, I don’t want to hurry up and finish reading something to just move on to the next thing. No, I want to linger in the spaces between the words and let the spell of the story change my mind, my perspective, and the way I live my life. I want to hold the needles and knives from Amy and Risa’s first chapter in my hand, like a toddler considering them for the first time. That’s where the most potential for magic lies, treating a text like a chance encounter with an old friend that is potent with potential for both of you.
In my multiple readings, one excerpt from Risa and Amy in the New Moon in Aries chapter shined through with the most power for me:
“We choose every moment of our lives to weave and stitch and heal and defend all that is living and good, and to have hope and to stay on this side of the blade…Your choices cut and shape the fabric of the world.”2
In a world where we are told to accept passive consumption as the ultimate expression of who we are, Amy and Risa call us to take up our own needle and the knife, two tools I cherish as well, as a way to participate in the making of a new world and protecting it. As an Aries rising who plies their magic in service of boundary-making magic, I see clearly how the needle and knife serve one another. We humble weavers are the artisans that cut tiny off sections from the great tapestry that extends in limitless direction for all of us to use in what Amy so aptly described as a “blanketing protection spell.” I can think of no more apt a set of tools to start off a book that is calling you to participate in the creation of a new world than to talk about how we might build and protect that world. I know I have taken to keeping my knife on my belt again as a nod to this powerful spell I encountered in this chapter. I know I owe it to my daughter and all my kin to participate in building the world my mom would have wanted to live into and protect it with all my might.
Ok, the essay has run long this week. hehe I told you that once I get started talking about my mom that I have a hard time stopping! Aptly, in the spirit of the new moon in Aries, I have been busy creating a series of protection weavings that I will place above my front and back doors and windows of my home. As we are deep in the
practice of building a new world via our underground network, I need to protect my family with the boundary power of blackberry and nettle and the boundary sigil that Leah Sommers of Moonlight Offerings Tattoos designed for me that I have tattooed on my left wrist. Not surprisingly, this tattoo was explicitly designed by Leah to match my Aries rising placement and the boundary work that I would complete over the last five years to honor that placement on my birth chart.
I also completed my first natural dye job with nettle harvested from my yard. This was very special for me, because my nettle-dyed yarn is some of the most important that I use in my weavings. The nettle-dyed yarn I use always serves as a protective boundary in all my weavings to gently dissuade any person who would like to cause mischief in our life or do us harm. If there are two tenants to my daily magic practice aside from the typical bardic work I am engaged in, it is protection and cleansing. I am always caught up in the daily work of ensuring that I am cleansing ill that is sent my way and refreshing my own boundaries so that I am honoring what Risa called her “Holy No” in the New Moon in Aries chapter. So, it felt like a powerful bit of both personal and community spiritual hygiene to harvest this nettle that I have tended explicitly for the purpose of creating magic boundaries in my fiber spells.
Here is a short video of me at various stages of the dye process:
I already posted in this on the social medias, so you may have already seen me dunking my skeins and cheesing for the camera. hehehe.
Photo Essay
Since I was swamped at work trying to finish some deadline-related stuff, I only have four polaroid shots for you this week. These photos were a real balm to take and look at as my professional work made me feel disconnected from all this stuff that I was writing about here. It’s wild how a very simple practice like taking a photo or grounding in while you consider a hawk flying with the wind can bring you back to yourself in very profound ways.
Ok, I was gonna start a series on writing about 1995 albums that are important to me, but I have run out of time friends! My mom and coven take precedence! HEHE. I will have the start of that series for you next week, thoughts on Chapter 2 of new moon magic, and the typical studio update!
Be well friends,
James
Dickens, Risa and Amy Torok, New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-Enchantment, North Atlantic Books, 2024.
Ibid.