Episode 4: A Tribute to Gordon White

A tribute to Gordon White, one of my teachers and our community and tradition's contemporary leaders. A final lesson about carrying these starlit torches forward to continue the work, the field, the tradition.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, so I'm coming at you from my phone today. A lesson to myself that circumstances don't need to be perfect, and I don't need to have the greatest mic ever. Though I do hope that your ears don't suffer too much from the presence of road noise, etc. So, but another lesson to myself that those things really don't matter. Because this morning, upon waking, I found out that my community and my practice lost one of its great teachers, leaders, members, field workers, lineage holders, speakers, writers, preliminaries, authors. The list could go on. And this I have to I have to record this as a tribute to him. Gordon White of Rune Soup, of Starships, of the Chaos Protocols, for those who want to look up who he is who don't know. And while I, like everyone else, am in shock and grief and excitement for him, because don't we all believe that passing on through the cervix of death leads to greater and greater mystery and exciting journeys? So anyway, I think the point is that this what I speak here right now is a tribute that is a moment in time, but my takeaway is that my ongoing living is a continuous tribute to Gordon's work and that which he brought into and cultivated in the world, that he received from others before him, and so on and so forth. I have been really wrestling, literally birth pains, contractions and relaxations, and excruciating contractions and relaxations, bringing this my own magical practice into the world, you know, from everything from it sort of masquerading as something else to sort of the two by four hits you over the head with Nabitch. Like this is this is your contribution to and from magic to the incarnate world around you. And yeah, let me tell you, it's been excruciating because I love to put the cart before the horse and you know, do all those other human things of feeling like it needs to be X, Y, and Z before it can be executed. So how powerful and fitting that as yesterday, I you know, I'm gutturally screaming and getting out the again, the contraction pain of I need to do X, Y, and Z. I need to do the ritual action of putting together a website, putting together, you know, my next workshop, putting together whatever to make it real in the world for others to access. That this morning I get this profound and humbling reminder that the time is now, always. And that it doesn't matter if you're on your commute and you don't have your good mic or any of the other things that you thought were the most stripped-down essence. You gotta just fucking do it. Just do it. Just do it. I have been kind of shielded, protected from having really kind of significant losses, deaths, losses in my own life of people who were extremely close to me or of non-normative deaths. Uh, non-normative in therapy speak, meaning, you know, someone dying unexpectedly or before their time, or in, you know, something that it's not like your very elderly great-grandmother who, you know, had been battling cancer for years and everyone's like, well, you know, we've been expecting it. And of course, as I get older, the inevitable happens, and whether they're normative or not, I have been experiencing these transitions. And the lesson that continuously comes to comes through to me and surprises me, only because I wouldn't have known to expect it without having gone through the encounter myself, is that when someone dies in this physical reality, the things that they carried with them in their life, life, their the things that they held dear, which can be as unassuming as simply their values, like how they lived, what was important to them and what they prioritized, to their mission. A dear, dear, dear family, friend passed, and you know, she was deeply involved in community work. And just thinking back to older relatives of mine, you know, each one of them, it's almost like when you carry the torch in this lifetime yourself, yes, you serve as an example and a teacher. And yet, when you're carrying it, the people around you, it's like the the torch has not yet been passed. There is a a relational, a sort of expectation and reliance that you, living person, are the carrier of whatever that mission is. If you hear me making kiss noises, it's because I'm driving through yellow lights and I have this, I don't know, tradition, stereo, not stereotype, superstition, whatever. Fun ritual, a fun little ritual of kissing my hand and placing it to the roof of the car above my head that I've been doing since high school. And actually, when I was studying in Russia, it was really fun because we had a total tangent. One of our conversation classes, the topic that day was superstitions and rituals. And one of the other guys from the UK who had a French background said that so I just loved the sort of transnational, multiple stopping points along the way to our conversation. When I described that story, he was like, Oh my god, me too, we do that. My friends in France, we do that. And then I taught my friends in in the UK to do that. And so it's so cool to hear that you do that in the States. So, anyway, speaking of transmission, transmission and connection. So, anyway, as I was saying, and God, I need to merge because this left-hand turn lane is going to back everything up for a million years. As I was saying, when someone is still here in this lifetime, even if they are your teacher and a mentor or someone who is actively transmitting a practice, a lineage, a value, a mission, and the one are the one in charge, there is something kind of profound about when they pass, it the the potato, the hot potato of that work gets passed to you, the child, the student, the mentee, the follower, the reader, the listener. And while there is great grief in their passing, there is also great power in the sense that you are no longer able to rely on them to be that torch bearer in this world. And as I encounter every day in my relational therapeutic work as a family therapist, as a couples therapist, the when you are forced to take on the responsibility that you have, even if it was willing, willingly and consensually and enthusiastically accepted by the other person, that role of being the teacher, the carrier, the holder, the mother, the father, the, you know, whatever it is. There is learning and there is power that comes only from when they say, I can no longer do this anymore. Whether, I mean, I see that in couples all the time. There's renegotiating roles in like profound ways, not just like who's doing the dishes. But death. What is more profound, a severing than death? I love that my turn signal is on right now, and there's this dichotomy between the like ridiculously mundane and the insanely profound. And so what I felt this morning amidst the tears and grief and complete, you know, the shock and the wow and the all of those emotions, is this like really deep. Oh, the license plate next to me says Inana. I don't know if it's like i Nana, like an iPod version of a nana, but I'm gonna take that as Inanna. This morning I was like super, super struck by that feeling of, well, the work is yours to do now, yours and all these others who have been in the field and who are practicing in the field, and you know, there is of course the invisible energetic work that is extremely real. And continuously pass that along to willing others who would join. And I don't know, so on and so forth. I don't want to say it a million ways to Sunday. But like, holy shit, was that not another two by four over the back of the head? So a great, great, great, oh my god, utterance of gratitude, and thanks, and appreciation, and love for Gordon and for the people that and the people around him, his loved ones, and those he brought together, whether it was in just in these incredible, fascinating rune soup interviewees from the podcast from years ago that I started listening to. What a what an incredible intersection. Literally a crossroads. As always, always literally and a figuratively crossroads of people to learn from and a community and building a field, a real life, a human fabric of living stars. And for his work on with that through that weaving together this tapestry of those crossroads of an ongoing magical Western magical tradition. Gratitude for all of the courage and experience and sharing and teaching of those traditions, etc. etc. And of course for the gratitude of being and seeing all these other weird kids. And now ongoing gratitude for the torch that now has been past the dissemination, dispersal of all of these bits of stardust that each of us now get to steward and carry forward. Put on your big boy pants. I think is one of the ways that that goes. So with that, I'm gonna hop off and carry on. Leslie carrying on. Love you all. Weird kids.