Rebirth

Postcard #50

Hampstead Heath / London, 2025

Dear friend,

I love the fact that we are made of dead stars. Something that was once so powerful that it tethered entire planets into its orbit now rests in a fingernail, in the lattice of a ribcage, in the lining of our eyes. We are simultaneously young and ancient. It reminds me of why death is important and necessary: so that new things can be born, and so that the universe has the opportunity to reinvent itself once again.

Someone asked me once, I can’t remember why, what my theory was on the afterlife. I responded with a physics law. Sidebar: I actually loved physics at school, I found it fascinating how it gave a scientific explanation for all the forces that guide our lives unseen. The law I gave was on the conservation of energy: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one kind to another. I’d said that I found this comforting, to know that the energy that once moved my muscles, turned air into my voice, and jumped from synapse to synapse in my brain would still continue on in some way or another, regardless of what happened to the vessel of my body.

I wonder how we would consider the use of energy differently if we considered energy as our ancestors. What would we continue to (em)power if we considered that the energy that made our grandma’s laugh, the blooming of daffodils in the winter, an old cat’s flicking tail or our backyard tree growing up could now be the energy that powers empty corporate buildings overnight, freight ships full of rubbish to be sent overseas for burning, if it’s the energy that goes into making a single plastic cup. What would happen if we imbued sacredness into everything we touch?

Death feels particularly present at the moment on a global scale. I fear that many of us (myself included) have not learned how to approach death candidly; it’s one of the reasons why the pandemic was so mentally tough, and why people don’t like to talk about it today.¹ I fear that we are so caught up in how to find our way back to safe waters that we are forgetting that those waters weren’t particularly safe for everyone to begin with. Most importantly, I fear that we are missing the fact that there is potential, if we can grasp it, for rebirth amongst all of this. Somehow, the far-right are envisioning a future (a terrible, fascist one) much better than we are. We may very well be witnessing the fall of the American empire, a genocidal project at its peak in Palestine, and the slow, sputtering death of the reigning mode of economy for the past few centuries. These are not aberrations, but rather decades of politics reaching their tipping point, their final evolution.² It is not enough to decry all of these things then go back to life as normal, because life as normal is what led us here.

One of the most critically important things we can do right now is to engage with our imagination seriously, and consider alternative ways of living to the destruction around us. If that sounds unrealistic to you, I would urge you to engage with Indigenous and Black Feminist literature (I can happily provide a list if you’d like!) - there is a way to live in harmony with nature and with each other, and it has been done before.³ I don’t think that all of this violent, selfish energy can last forever, because nothing does. It will change, like all things, but the small & beautiful role we get to play as members of the human species is that we get to influence what that energy will turn into.

I went to the Tate Modern exhibition of the AIDS memorial quilt last weekend, and it was one of the most moving pieces of art that I have seen in years. I knew generally that AIDS was a tragedy, and have learned about the many people, artists, family members and friends that were lost; but when faced with dozens of quilts lovingly handcrafted for individuals who’d died, I felt overwhelmed by the grief in the room. Nearly everyone around me was sniffling as they shuffled past the lives taken decades too soon. Partway through, some members of Aids Quilt UK read out the names of those who’d died. As I stood amongst the crowd, hearing mundane first names read with reverence, I felt as though the spirits of those named people came into the room, lounging amongst the quilts, laughing and dancing in their youth once again. Giving them the space to be seen gave them a new life, a way of coming into the 21st century, on the backs of those who remember.

Dear friend, in what ways do you respect and honour death? Are there any parts of your life that need to die so that something new can be born? Do you trust your sense of creativity? And if you could consider rebirth as a gift from death, what would you like to receive?

Thank you all for coming along with me on this journey over the past year. I’m hoping that this small death will provide fertile ground for the next project to bloom. I’ll be back soon, but until then - catch ya.

Lots of love,

Vee

1. There is a brilliant article I found online that uses a psychoanalytic lens to dissect death denial in capitalist versus gift economies. Read it here, if you’d like.

2. Naomi Klein writes about this very well in No is Not Enough, if you want to understand this more deeply.

3. Ah what the hell, I’ll give you some right now. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Country by Bruce Pascoe & Bill Gammage, and Race, Women & Class by Angela Davis. Some books I plan to read are Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, Gathering Moss by Robin Wall-Kimmerer, as well as adrienne maree-brown’s writings and more of bell hooks, June Jordan and Audre Lorde. For fiction, I want to read Alexis Wright, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and (more) James Baldwin.