Welcome to the Wax Pot

Let's talk about sticky times and tangled solutions.

Hi.

You may have forgotten that you subscribed to this stack. I said I’d get it started in 2022. Much like the wider world, a lot has changed since then. Back then, I was trying to keep my writing moving through an earth-shattering era of loss, illness, disability, and isolation. My heart was often heavy with grief (and still is). I suspect some part of me was waiting for the grief to pass, or for the change to cease.

And then I remembered what Octavia Butler taught us: “god is change.” There will be no lull.

In early 2024, I realized that if I don’t take time to compost my thoughts about “publishing a thing,” it’s going to stink up the whole metaphorical street of my creativity. So I asked myself: By doing more, what patterns of “proving myself” am I perpetuating? Why? For whom? What if I slow it all the way down? What if I respond to the urgency by doing less?

Slowing down gave me permission to go deep into myself, to excavate my creative practice, and to return to a sense of home. In 2024, I learned that my work spans genres and practices— from wax to written word, from science communication to ritual. I am a polymath. I am both of and in this polycrisis time.

The pace of chaos has not slowed. Amidst this slow collapse, I find myself and the ones I love trying to stitch ourselves back into some thing.

What is it? Bless our hearts, I don’t think we know.

It is, perhaps, some connection to the land— earth, trees, rocks, place, time, one another, consciousness, joy, pleasure, and a tangible reality beyond consumerism. Words about “how to shape change” have leaked from my mouth like blood. Meanwhile, change has shaped and reshaped me.

I have often felt crushed under the weight of our collective and individual suffering. I don’t know about you, but some days I can barely lie on the floor and breathe. Other times down on the floor is where tangible change happens. It’s where I remember my breath and ground myself in the earth again.

On the days when I can stand, I walk to the woods and stand in place like the trees. I let the wind whip my face. I remember what it is to bend, break, mend, and regenerate in a cycle. I imagine what it’s like to drop branches that no longer serve me and reach for new growth when the sun shines just so.

From the place of the tree, I reflect on time. How it’s passing too quickly, to love everything slipping through my fingers. How it moves in spirals when I’m grieving. And how it isn’t, in fact, linear or one-dimensional. It moves in cycles and patterns, though.

In the totality of my adult life, I can see the pattern of loss and change speeding up. I have witnessed the grief of the earth and her people as we try to negotiate survival and joy. Currently, it feels like we (in the West) are urgently awaiting “the apocalypse,”. While we are refreshing our devices with vigilance, it’s been slowly unfurling— from crumbling social and political structures to innumerable “once-in-a-lifetime” natural disasters. The term “unprecedented” has lost all meaning. I don’t know about you, but I’m not reading one more theory of change. Instead, I’m riding waves of practice.

This month, in an effort to be present in the face of monumental heartbreak, I’ve been practicing reframing “This is it” and noticing what happens when I feel “This is it” as a joyful celebration, instead of a teeth-clenching dread.

What am I talking about? That walk I took with my little yellow dog on a day filled with blue skies, crisp air, and chubby little titmice eating seeds in the garden. That was it.

Kissing my lover’s forehead and holding them in a pool of soft blue blankets while they cried about their heartbreak. That was it.

Watching the sun set over an old red barn and create an iridescent rainbow across striated clouds. That was it.

Every moment I get to witness and work with honey bees. That is it.

In the face of an apocalyptic unfurling, each moment of wonder, joy, and loving expressions of care— happening moment by moment across the world, even in places where genocide wages— that is it.

Let’s add another layer to the practice. Collectively, with human kin, what does it look like when we practice “this is it”?

When my Southern friends and bees got washed away by a flood and my friends organized care for me and resources for a regional supply run. That was it.

When my friend was dying, and people in our community helped his family raise enough money to cover his medical bills so he could die at home. That was it.

When a mentor dedicated a memorial to that same friend so I’d have a place to visit and connect to both my lost friend and a place we both loved. That was it.

We are what we need. We have the skills we need. We know how to survive. We can, if we want to— if we work at it— cooperate compassionately through this unfurling.

It is not going to look like #thriving. "Thriving" in a world of suffering, in the wake of modernity crumbling, is not where we are. I try to be grounded in reality, not romance. Our romantic ideals of community and each other will need to shift. Our web of relationships can expand with compassion at the center. Because that web of relationships— tangled as it may be— that is it.