Saints & Gorgons 🐍

IN THIS MISSIVE:

• Covid, my teacher.
• I’m Reading Stone Blind by Madeline Miller
• I’m Listening to This Medusa playlist
• I’m Watching with needle & thread
• I’m Planning a winter-tide subscriber hang

I’m musing on Covid as a teacher.

When I was a young woman, I looked to ailing and suffering saints—like severe asthmatic Bernadette of Lourdes—as I tried to make sense of my chronic illness. Suffering had a use, gave one an in with a suffering god. As I left the Christian church behind, I found myself in a minefield of toxicity in New Age communities. The wellness industry sees illness and disability as a sign of bad thinking, bad living, spiritual lack—a certain refusal. This is a perversion of the shamanic idea of illness as an initiation or a spiritual teacher. This is a paradox I have yet to unravel, but I’m listening to my body and what it has to tell me.

Recovering from Covid, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. It is a terrible teacher and I fear we have refused to learn from its lessons, both as a culture and as individuals.

I would like to think I know exactly when I caught it, walking through a crowded ferry lounge unmasked…but who knows? I had done so much to avoid it for five years—masking, getting vaccinated, and isolating. I was a final girl in this long drawn out horror movie. When did it finally find me?

Covid set my nervous system on fire. Night after night I woke, drenched as if I had been adrift in a wild sea, the bed my raft. I thought about Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as the fever raged and broke and raged again.

Now all the symptoms have gone and I have tested negative, I wait and wonder. I am the shipwrecked sailor, washed up on the foreign shores of the living. I sleep and devote myself to deep listening. I make a plan. How do you stay vigilant to the pandemic in a world that has ‘moved on’?

After after surviving a near fatal bout of influenza A in 2018, I experienced fireworks of pain daily as a result of something (mis)diagnosed as fibromyalgia, part of a post viral sh*tstorm. After years of pacing, rest and care, these were finally subsiding. They have now returned, two fold. A harbinger, but of what?

Vivid, frequent dreams deliver visions of painted panels made of door-skin—I’ve painted them in with wax and they form clouds of pale blue layers I can see even now, stacked high in studio sheds. I dream of vampire-hunter arsonists and sky-wineries. I am a witness to any and all transmissions.

I’m reading Stone Blind by Madeline Miller

I am late to the party but as I convalesced I read this book. It’s brimming with rage and sadness and was good company while I recovered. It’s nothing less than astounding, the transparent voice overseeing the narrative thrums with subversive compassion.

I also loved When Women Were Dragons—though if I were to say what I REALLY thought about it, there would be spoilers. But the cathartic rage of the first half of the book is just…DRAGON MAGIC.

Have you read either of these? What are you currently reading?

I’m listening to this Medusa themed playlist.

I’m thinking about cathartic rage (see above) and how useful this is. This is a fascinating playlist that is more melancholy than angry—another useful emotion, I find.

I’m watching needle & thread

I’m literally watching thread as I pull it in and out of the fabric, over and over again, forming flowers. This is one of the oldest skills my grandmother taught me. It is the slowest thing I know how to do, and I’m not even very good at it. That’s freeing, too. The poke of the needle’s point, that insectile pop and the hiss of the floss through the hole, the licking of threads through the eye of the needle, the winding and release, the finality of knots and planes of glossy colour soothe me.

What activity do you find most comforting?

I’m planning our next subscriber hang…

For wintertime—perhaps around the solstice. These are always at 7pm GMT. Will post more details as the date approaches!

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