Weirder and Witchier
On going deeper and wider.
A few weeks ago the man I love asked me what’s missing in my life, and what’s next.
The missing things are for one, him. He’s in a different country, not by choice. What’s next,
"Letting myself be weirder, and caring even less.”
I used to write, a lot, for a living. I interviewed iconic and talented people like the late Lou Reed and Brian Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Miranda July, Bon Iver and the extraordinary, and terrifying Agnes Varda. I spent many a 3am finessing the cadence and punctuation beats on album and film reviews. It was uneconomical, and very enjoyable, until it wasn’t, and I eventually started feeling like a word-factory.
Then my mother got sick, and 20 months later she died; only after her spiritual becoming and bodily undoing. There were miracles in both directions. I was 30. It took three years for me to draw breath, and then I started writing about grief, my version of it, on her birth and death-anniversaries, the big absences.
There was a lot of laundry that day she died. I stood outside, hanging her bedsheets under a yellow sun. They flapped in the acid wind of that 30-degree day; a domestic elegy that I still hear. That huge, plain sound furling upwards. Of bedsheets. Of my mother. Drying out, gone.
My writing was channeled into ‘comms’ for my own fledgling business that was conjured during my Mother’s dying year, and for the clients and agencies I worked with. But my more personal writing and the interviews, stopped. I didn’t feel like it after Mum died, and I didn’t know how to enjoy accessing it again.
Then blogging and social media got bigger, ‘everyone’ became a ‘writer’, and I didn’t feel like adding more words into the crowded digital shanty. So I didn’t. Fifteen years happened.
Interestingly, in those fifteen years, the ‘wellness industry’ also boomed. In 2009 I remember trying to explain to my then horrified housemates why I was putting kale in my morning smoothie. Since then, kale had its lifecycle, in and now out of smoothies. It’s an industry that I have resisted ‘joining’. That’s ego, too. Mirrors of rejected parts of self and hesitations that I bring into this writing, too.
Last weekend two friends that I haven’t seen in a very long time, separately asked when I would start writing again. Every few months for the last 15 years someone has said similar. Yes, one day, maybe.
Two months after my Mum died I turned 31. Two weeks ago I turned 46.
My mother was a spiritualist, simultaneously shy and unselfconscious about it. A combination of old-hippy meets early-world new-ager, but with zero pretence. Less identity adoption, and more: the one who sees very clearly.
In 1989, as an antithesis to the decade’s overarching grandiosity, she joined an MLM scheme for paraben and sulfate-free hair and skincare. Not to sell to anyone else, but to access this clean, sudless shampoo for our home. Deodorant was aluminium-free. When I was 10 she started taking me with her to a musty rumpus room in a northern Sydney home where we would do hatha yoga with other suburban dissidents. And to acupuncture, in 1991, where we were the only Jews in the otherwise Chinese clinic, to help cure my insomnia; a phase I now recognise as the signs of intense early-adolescent anxiety.
I caught up with a childhood friend recently who spoke about her experience of my Mother as if she were an oracle. Another friend once referred to her as a 'goddess’. These are the kinds of ethereal impressions my Mother left on those she touched. Plain view.
She was also very funny, very real. She became funnier the closer she got to death, too, as her senses merged with unseen forces.
When we first got together, my Mother channelled through him, a message to me. It’s not like ‘Poltergeist’. More like a feeling, unseen forces, magic. Neither of us had experienced that before.
What I said to that man a couple of weeks ago wasn’t only about wanting to be ‘weirder’, but witchier, too.
A more public revealing of that part that my Mother gave me. With this 15-year returning to words, there is in some way, a returning, or re-merging with that part of her, the most sacred part.
In Vedic wisdom everything in the universe follows a pattern of creation–maintenance–destruction. From digestion to a friendship, to literal death, and birth.
In this evolutionary view of recycling and cycling, I’m not picking up new things, but revealing always-there things, in new, emergent forms. An up-spiralling.
For a long time I kept my personal interest in spirituality separate to my public persona and professional life. Perhaps, like my Mother, it was obvious anyway. A couple of years ago I stepped away, tentatively, and then very deliberately, from the career path I had been transmitting on, and started to do the thing I had been scared to do for a long time. Merge.
Merge the weirder witchy parts into the public self. A public spiriting.
It’s allowed me to get close to what feels most alive under old skins.
It’s a proximity, an intimacy with my now-passed Mother, a sense of cyclical re-creation.
For me, caring less is not about apathy, it’s about un-apology.
Actually, I care more.
I’ve been in the business of connection and community and communication my whole life. I’m not going to stop now. Community, from commūnitās, latin for ‘public spirit’.
In séances, spiritualists receive messages. Writing works that way for me too.
This séance is both secular, and spiritual. A miracle in both directions. I’m going deeper, wider, weirder.
Loved reading this Ghita 🧡