I drew a symbol on the window facing the skyline of Los Angeles this time two weeks ago. A symbol to banish evil. I lit a black candle, carved with ancient sigils, ringed in rose petals. Tied nine knots in a strand of red string and whispered of the things I wished to be rid of. Toxicity. Pain. Hurt. Illusion. Hatred.
As a punk, Oxford Witch once said to me,
“Leave that shit at the altar, babe.”
We’ve been driving through Mulholland and as always, I am exploring the dichotomy between my hate and love for this strange city, it's canyons deserted and doused in the uncommon rain. We all anticipated and predicted this in some variation. As an astrologer, there is a mighty mythological quality to these events, unfolding like a darkened sacred geometry. It’s like a puzzle, insisted by the planets, with terrible ticking clocks and invisible monsters. The change could be felt a year away. Most people don’t live in a world where cards spell out the future, and planets weave stories with their vast shadows and cylicar movements.
But it’s here. The dimmed urban light. The vast terrains of mini-malls, bland and barren without all the pretty people. Labyrinths of zigzagging streets in the hills, pocketing secrets of 70’s black magic and rockstars who sold their souls. There is an unsettled silence, an airborne anticipation that seems to hover above the freeways, sidewalks and winding pockets of the hills. I’ve never felt such omnipotent suspension, a dense layer of worry cloaking the streets. A swallowed prayer. Who knew the apocalypse would be invisible?
I suppose this is a blip of time, a mere wink in the earth’s story. Perhaps the past will be erased with a single, violent stroke, and we will begin from nothing. And no one will care who you were, where you were from and what you did before. It will just be about regenerating this mistreated planet, built on phallic falsehood and lies. It’s like we are all waiting for extraterrestrial intervention, or messages from the airwaves of the night. It’s a dark kind of romantic, this garbled, mass unknowing. I feel a strange kind of surrender, a drowsiness and still, growing in the spaces between the panic. If this is it, make it good. Make it more than invisible.
Grocery stores are the new anxiety themed nightclubs, with lines around the corner.
Harshly fluorescent and alive with a dark, primal electricity. It’s like seeing flocks of ghosts, brooding with a meditative temper, all in disguises. Grocery stories have always made me believe half of us might be ghosts anyways. There's already people wearing Supreme face masks and pleather hazmat suits, stocking their clinking carts with gallons of milk and strange variations of processed goods, yogurt, beans, and toilet paper. Toilet paper, naturally, to clean the collective, exploding root chakra problem in this country. The single men look at me with a hungered, primitive eagerness that both terrifies me and excites me.
Everyone I speak to is running a different story, a separate narrative about the state of the world. When we speak, it feels like these realities have to take time to buffer, before they collide, as if we are all underwater. I hate the idea of being cooped up in our virtual worlds, forming separate realities. Heads bowed, necks strained. My Dad always said, “Whatever you spend the most time doing is what you worship.”
Some of us are informed by 24 hour news, bound by fear. Others, hopeful, helpful, looking for silver linings. Some of us have glimpses of the deeper meaning. Stepping into the roles of Protective Witches. Lighting candles every color of the rainbow, inventing concoctions and channeling french cooking. This isn’t a dress rehearsal anymore.
Capitalism is suspended. Suddenly, we have time, luxurious time, to read, write, and nurture ourselves in ways we have neglected in pursuit of distorted ambition. To recultivate and rearrange our respective worlds. To incubate in our wildest dreams. Time to get to the top of the mountain, to sing, to cry, to feel what our inner resonance feels like.
So I walk and walk, and climb through towers of wildflowers. Try to stay in my body, stay awake, stay fighting, stay breathing. Even though I hear they’ve poisoned the air too. It is my inconsolable rage at the rape of this planet that has kept my nervous system buzzing for years. I hear of frequencies that cast nets over our city, driven from giant towers disguised as menacing trees. As the world trembles, I strike the ground back with the soles of my feet. Reminding both of us, of the sacred imperative of survival.
I remember that I miss the sea, so we go there, and play fight and kiss, contrary to the inclinations of this world. In those moments I lose my fear of fear, and the snake that has been bound tightly in my stomach uncoils. It feels easier to be lovers at the end of the world. Somehow, shared pain is more bearable. In the curling foam of the seas lips, I am reminded that we are the virus that keeps replicating our crimes on this planet. Infecting and possessing the land with a wretched, bottomless hunger. Mutating and mass producing. I don’t want to be eternal, I want the mountains to be eternal. The sea to be eternal.
There are Swans gliding through the Venice Canals, and Deers are patrolling the New York subway. Thousands of jet streams missing from the sky.
We are all hostage to an uncertain eternity. People will stay indoors and write poetry instead of giving handshakes, and the earth will regenerate in our absence.
The world won’t really ever end, but there will be vast change. There is healing to be found in the earth and in love and in the new kids, with their new dna.