Get in loser, we're finding transformative meaning and belonging by investigating the mystics

Which gods will we worship on this journey?

Leonora Carrington, Amor che move il Sole et l’altre stelle (1946). Because like Dante, Carrington knew that love is the force that makes the stars move.

I’m hard at work researching the mystics, learning more about the women whose creative energy and access to higher realms exploded at midlife. I can’t wait to share what I’m learning with you.

But as I worked, something was beginning to happen—something I can’t allow to go on unchecked. My good-girl complex entered the room. The part of me who is desperate for approval. Who’ll work herself into the ground to impress an imaginary audience of critics, and make any project miserable in the process—no matter how passionate I am about it to begin with.

I’ve spent most of my life worshipping at the wrong altars, without even knowing I was doing it. My gods have been prestige and approval. They’ve been distraction, intoxication, and financial security. And part of my own midlife awakening has been a rough reckoning with how lonely all that has made me, and how unfulfilled.

So here’s a practice you might want to adopt too. Before embarking on this journey, I am laying out my altar. I am speaking the names of the gods I will be worshipping. And I’m stating this aloud, because the old folk tales tell us that you’ll never get what you need unless you voice your wish.

What are you serving at the moment? What do you want to serve? And do they diverge?

Here are mine:

1. Connection

   All I’ve ever really wanted is to connect with people meaningfully. (In truth, that’s what all that approval-seeking was always about—I just couldn’t see that I was going about it ass-backwards.)

   *

   And I don’t mean the kind of connection you find on Substack Notes. I mean that I plan to turn this project into an occasion for real-life, in-person get-togethers. I mean that I want us to gather around fires or in candlelit caverns someplace and celebrate Hildegard and Hilma and the rest. Talk about them until they enter the room. Tell them how our own lives have been lit up with meaning, whether at midlife or any other time. About the ways the imaginal realm is stitching itself into our lives, and about the ways they’ve inspired and guided us.

   *

   I want to hear about your transitions (whether midlife or not), your epiphanies, your struggles. I want to see the look in your eyes when you talk about it.

   *

   I have no idea at present what any of this will look like, but I’m trusting that it will unfold if I show up faithfully.

2. Learning

   It’s eight-ish months since I finished my second master’s degree, and I can’t ignore it any longer: when I’m not actively learning, I quite quickly become depressed. Learning lights me up and feeds the connective part of my brain, the part that is forever piecing the world together in new ways, forever working to love it more by understanding it more deeply.

   *

   But—much to my dismay—I can’t afford to keep taking master’s degrees for the rest of my life.

   *

   So this project will prioritize learning. I’ll push myself to the edges of my knowledge and beyond, and bring back what I find, through research, interviews with experts, voyages into the imaginal space, and more.

   *

   It’s worth noting that this approach doesn’t sit well with scheduling. My friends, if you only knew how many spreadsheets litter my Google Drive, filled with meticulous publishing schedules I just couldn’t stick to. I plan what I’m going to send you every week, sometimes months in advance—and then a new idea finds me and leads me to other ideas and the whole journey of discovery lights me up and I simply have to go with it.

   *

   Well, maybe that’s OK. Because my god here is not organization. It’s not predictability or even the growth of this Substack. It’s the fizz and light and alchemy of learning itself. I submit myself to that god’s whims.

3. Beauty

   I’ve been writing a newsletter in some shape or form since 2018, and I love the immediacy of the practice and the relationships it’s allowed me to build. I love the discipline of pulling all I’ve been learning and feeling into a shape every week, and I love the freedom to experiment.

   *

   But writing rapidly for the internet changes the nature of a writing practice. You don’t sit with sentences in the same way. There isn’t time to think of crafting pieces that might truly last, might lodge with someone for the long haul. Not to mention that all these missives very quickly get shunted to some kind of digital bardo. I’ve been reckoning with the fact that the bulk of my writing output over the past few years is just hanging there in cyberspace, invisible and unbodied.

   *

   For this project, I will continue to write these weekly missives, but they’ll be leading up to finished pieces that will have more weight, more finality, and more body. I want to hold my writing in my hands, at last, so I plan to create limited-edition, hand-bound copies of the finished works, which I’ll distribute through this Substack when the time comes.

4. Adventure

   A lot of the above commitments terrify me. What do I mean, I’m going to hand-bind books and create events about the mystics? What am I even talking about? I don’t know yet, and that’s why I’ve got to do it. A new world is trying to be born in our times, and whatever my part is in that, it will require getting out of my comfort zone and creating the conditions for the gods and the greater powers to come through into this realm.

5. Reverence

   When you dance with the imaginal as part of your daily practice, it’s easy to get jaded about it. It’s easy to start asking too much, losing your humility as you cross the threshold, and generally bringing the extractive attitude of mainstream Western culture into sacred spaces. I say it’s easy because I’ve noticed myself starting to do it, on occasion. This is my pledge to stop, to slow down, to remember with every part of my being the awesome potency and gift of imaginal practice and imaginal connection, and of embodied life in the material realm, too.

Hereby lifting the anchor, and praying to the gods for these winds in our sails.

Love,

xx Ellie

PS. You’re not losers! I love you! Because only millennials will understand the title and you’re not all millennials, and because I can’t resist being perhaps the only Substack ever to include images from both Leonora Carrington and Mean Girls, here’s this: