Our Joy Will Be Their Downfall

Queer pleasures, spiritual poetry, and the end of fascism

Hi y’all,

A while back, I had started taking notes for a post today on how mystics and yogins use language to induce an experience of the unnameable.

On the surface, speaking of the mystical can feel like a kind of spiritual bypass in a moment like ours. The U.S. is under an authoritarian government, climate-change disasters abound, trans rights are disappearing, and violence and mass deportation of immigrants is looming. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t organize or stop giving mutural aid.

I’m saying that the numinous—wonder, awe, amazement, deep contentment—belong to us as our true nature, as the birthright of every human being, and that beneath every effective political struggle is an alignment with these numinous qualities.

I am certain that our relationship to our deepest joys will help light our way in the hard years to come.

Hardship, Integration, Expansion

My certainty comes from the countless people who have gone before us who have experienced suffering and difficulty the likes of which I can only begin to imagine. I know that many of these people found a sanctuary in a power greater than themselves.

It’s not a power that belongs to us, it’s a power we belong to.

Aligning with this power allows people to survive in impossible conditions to act outside of our ordinary, constricted sense of self, and become beacons of light for others.

If they can do it, then so can we, because while this power is great it is also ordinary.

My own personal hardships feel so small in comparison to those leagues of people I’m thinking of, that I almost hesitate to mention my own struggle here. But anyone who has experienced trauma and difficulty in a way that’s been integrated can look back on their lives and find evidence that struggle, if one survives it, can lead to deeper compassion and awareness.

For much of my life, I lived in a kind of low-grade constant state of hypervigilance. Growing up as a child in a queer family in Kentucky during the ‘80’s, and ‘90’s, I