finding belonging, being a priestess of death, and other notes from the lair of my saturn return
Throughout my adult life, I’ve belonged to many communities that banded around core values and visions for a better world, and for a deeper sense of connection to all that is. Nonprofits, many jobs, spiritual communities, witches’ covens, and radical activist spaces are all sites of belonging that I’ve found myself cycling through over the past 11 years. A theme that emerges for me is one of excommunication from particular spaces, whether through my own choice of leaving – or, more often the case, being pushed out. Almost always, my exits from these spaces have come after I have used my voice to speak to the lack of integrity among the leaders and stewards of these spaces.
I’ve witnessed abusive, anti-Black, “progressive” nonprofit leaders berate their employees, regularly scream and slam doors during staff meetings, squeeze as much labor as they could out of their Black staff while paying them the least… all to create “social justice theatre” based on the real accounts of marginalized people. Theatre funded in part by the Walton Family Foundation, an institution that has garnered its enormous wealth through the marginalization of Black people and degradation of indigenous lands. This has sadly been the experience of many people I know navigating the nonprofit industrial complex in Northwest Arkansas.
I’ve witnessed multiple spiritual practitioners think that it’s okay to date and have sex with the clients who come to them for guidance and spiritual teachings. Other practitioners have stolen my work and words from me verbatim. I've been told that it was "jaw dropping" and induced "horror and upset" when I've gently asked to renegotiate contracts to better reflect the value of my work and magic... by practitioners who brand themselves as anti-capitalist.
I’ve been slut shamed by fellow activists weaving futures of liberation. I’ve been belittled for my embodied prioritization of rest by the same comrades who posted and spoke emphatically about the importance of rest in freedom-weaving.
I’ve witnessed far too many witches and spiritualists get lost in a sea of spiritual bypassing, harmfully ignoring the lived, material experiences of the most vulnerable among us – and when invited to be in relationship with those tangible realities, refusal to have their spiritual bubbles be popped, or for those bubbles to take new, more exciting and expansive shapes. Shapes that revere trans people, people with disabilities, and beyond. Shapes that would free them too. Or, if they did decide to expand, they would only do so as far as it brought them more money and more clout.
There are so many more instances I could recount. In all of them, I used my voice to point out the discrepancies. They've all hurt deeply, and tending the resultant disillusionment has been heavy. Thankfully, I’ve had many glimmering examples of enriching community and belonging. I have immense love in my life. But these painful experiences have been dizzying and alienating, and as I integrate them, I also see them as potent initiations into my own power.
In the thick of my first Saturn return, and prompted by powerful experiences that have taken place during, I’ve really racked my brain trying to understand this theme in my life. “Is it meeee? Am I the drama? Maybe I’m too much, or expecting too much of people. Is this what it means to be a Black femme in a relentlessly anti-Black, femmephobic world? Why does it bother me so much to see leaders out of integrity with their values? Why do I always find myself in the position of the heretic?”
So much of this restructuring is nonlinear and internal, and challenging to weave into words. I don’t yet have all the neat conclusions that I would like, and I’m learning to be okay with that blossoming.
But I am confronted with this: the pain of knowing that many people may profess liberation and belonging, but very few will dare to embody them.
Many leaders will sell liberation and belonging, but very few will dare to embody them.
Many teachers will prattle on and on about decolonization, #LandBack, and then turn around and be some of the most colonial muhfuckas I’ve ever had to interact with.
To truly devote your lifetime to your liberation, to your freedom, is a sacred devotion to consistently raising your ceiling of imagination. Which also means consistently confronting the depths, aches, and root rot of how colonialism has brought so much erosion, so many little deaths to your wild being.
To liberate is to grieve. To be free is to feel.
When I look back on my many moments of being a heretic, and the many moments I was belittled, abused, and/or outcast as a result, I am better able to hear what some of those people were really saying.
“Haley, please don’t guide me into feeling. Please don’t walk me through the land of my grief. I don’t want your map.”
“I don’t know who I am without these shackles. It is safer for me to reenact colonial harm than it is for me to hold my grieving heart.”
“Please don’t show me how free I can be. Put that mirror down. The responsibility of possibility terrifies me. I am afraid of what new life will blossom within me if I make room for the process of death.”
None of this is to excuse the hurt of my experiences, nor those of many of my colleagues in these spaces. It is more my translation of a huge reckoning I’m in the middle of, which is the notion that some people don’t want to get free. And way too many of those people are dangerous, positioning themselves as progressive trailblazers of liberation to the people they lead – people who do want to dream up their own freedom and the freedom of others. These leaders are charming, intelligent, and are often deeply gifted orators. They have diligently studied Black and brown revolutions, and speak the tongue of liberation well. Behind the scenes, these leaders are some of the most chained people I have ever encountered. And the way that they lead is far too often out of step with the words that they speak.
None of this is to imply that witches, revolutionaries, and leaders in the arts world must be perfect. Nor that I’m perfect. I’ve had plenty of very unpleasant, uncomfortable moments of having to be accountable to people who I’ve hurt. This is specifically about those who consistently refuse to relate to their power beyond the confines of the lies of white supremacy and capitalism. The ones who valiantly critique oppression while being oppressive. The ones who have a track record of abusing people while espousing an ethos of liberation, and repeatedly reject invitations to expand in their humanity by correcting their harm.
All of this brings up deep grief in me. Grief in knowing how many people in the world will continue to roam the Earth unchecked in how they treat people. The grief of knowing that spiritual charlatans will continue to sell community to a world full of people with the primal aching for true belonging. People of all backgrounds who ache from generations of forced diaspora and displacement, and disconnection from their ancestral traditions.
The grief of how so many people, both my loved ones and people I may never meet, have had similar experiences. The grief of knowing that people will continue to use the language of liberation in their marketing and in the ethos of their nonprofits (so much of which comes from Black femme ingenuity and theory, and goes largely uncredited), while carrying out practices that are deeply colonial and anti-Black. The grief of how hard-yet-vital it’s been to carve out spaces for myself and others.
In October, my Spirits talked to me about what it means to be a Priestess of Death. What it means to carry the energetics of someone who sparks, sees, and summons change – who can intuit the endings that are so necessary to newness. To be someone who sees what needs weeding in a person, or in an organization. In this way, I also see how I am a Tender of Life. A Tender of Love. Nestled within all the grief I feel from these experiences, I know that much is moving and sprouting inside of me. Exciting, unknown flowers I will soon meet. So much fragrant wisdom made possible by the nutrients of all that I’m decomposing now.
I’m learning that to be the Heretic is to also be the Lover. The realm of Love is the realm of infinite possibility, and when you listen closely, the Heretic is often illuminating anything that is out of alignment with the truth of Love.
I’m learning that I can’t afford not to tend my freedom. I can’t afford not to tend my joy. I can dream up no other way of being than to be an artist of my liberation, and to delight in others doing the same. I’m learning to love this about myself, and to be increasingly tender in the moments I coil up in shame about feeling like an outsider.
I’m feeling that perhaps new ways of belonging and community are gestating within me, readying to unfurl when the time is right. I’m learning to love not having the answers.
I’m learning that in using my voice, I don’t lose belonging. I belong even more deeply to myself. My deep, wild, delicious self – strengthening her roots, reaching out new tendrils even more to the people she loves and the people she has yet to love. And this is a wondrous place to be.
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