Oof y’all, we are living in some surreal times, aren’t we.
Happy Samhain: season of acknowledging thresholds, reckoning with ghosts, and feeding them. My sense (maybe yours too?) is that the hungry ghosts are out in force this time, this year.
To placate them, we feed them—and this is a good time to nourish our well ancestors, too. One way to feed ghosts is to speak their names and remember them. Remember 2020? Oh yeah. Ghosts.
Rozzell Medina is not, himself, a ghost. He’s an artist and educator, a program manager with Oregon Humanities, and the director of the Portland EcoFilm Festival. I spoke with him several weeks ago, and I’ve waited to release these two episodes with him—today’s short Immersion and a longer conversation, coming soon—until now, because I had a feeling that election week, Samhain new moon, threshold week, would be a good time to sit with Rozzell’s thoughtful storytelling, comfort with complexity, and lifelong commitment to imagination and experimental futures.
In this short Immersion episode, we time-travel with Rozzell back to 2020, when all our lives and expectations were cracking apart. Maybe you remember that year with shocking clarity, or maybe it feels like a dream. Either way, the story Rozzell tells acknowledges the many ruptures of that time—speaks their names, delves their emergent truths, and carries them forward and homeward. In returning to this time, we invoke the clarity—of needs, of values, of constraints—that so many of us were shocked into, and ask, what did we learn? What is still unsettled? What might still be possible?
The poem I reference about 2/3 of the way through this episode, when Rozzell and I are speaking about belonging, is “Meditation at Lagunitas,” by Robert Hass, a poem I’ve loved since I first encountered it when I was oh, probably eighteen. It’s still fresh. All the new thinking is about loss, indeed. Here it is:
Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.
Yes.
I hope this short Immersion episode feeds something that’s been hungry or unresolved in you. The full conversation with Rozzell, which dives more deeply into his work as an imagination protector and a futurist, will be coming soon.
Further election threshold resources: If what you need this week is a freewheeling trust that chaos can birth new ways forward, revisit Kinward Episode 08 with musician and artist Jason Graham on the Shaking Awake of What Is Possible. On the other hand, if what you need right now is grounding, Lauren Macdonald’s Practicum meditation might serve. I also recommend the “election time” conversations that adrienne maree brown has been sharing on the show she runs with her sister Autumn, How to Survive the End of the World. This series is radical, compassionate, and strategic. To help materially with this election, give money and resources to the ground game via the Movement Voter Project. Finally, in any threshold time, it’s good to refresh boundaries and practice self-protection. On that front, you might find the Emerald Podcast’s recent episode on Guardians and Protectors supportive.
Take care of yourselves, everybody. And please do vote.
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