reality is collaging itself and I am doom gazing ⋆｡𖦹˚.★
In an effort to express my feelings, a mix of fearful, maddening and inspired, I made a collage. I rip and cut magazine pages into pieces, a hurricane of color and texture—whatever catches my eye, and then thoughtfully piece these fragments together into a new vision. It’s something doomy, something omniscient, and something courageous. It’s beautiful, at least to me, violent as it may have been to arrive at. This process of which I become a vessel for dawns something on me: Isn’t the world like this? Brutally ripping itself apart only to reassemble itself back together into something anew. Same materials, new forms. Same pieces, new arrangements. Is the world merely collaging itself, over and over, and I’m just one eye on the page of its latest creation?; a piece of the violence, a piece of the harmony.
I’ve been drawn back to this beloved art form of mine in recent years. As I pay closer attention to my creations and how they feel, I understand why. I am communing with reality. She is speaking and moving through me, she is using my hands as hers. She is sharing her truths with me in exchange for my attention with her and to her. The truth is not hard to arrive at, after all. One just has to stop looking for it. Surrender ownership of it—of knowing it, and give of their attention freely and with focus; with a loving curiosity; with tender devotion.
It makes me wonder when we began saying “pay” attention. It seems to me saying to “give” or “share” attention is much more relational and helpful of a metaphor, not that that should have any bearing in this world of illusions. What is relational and helpful is hardly what we lead with. Rightfully, to “pay” attention seems a feature of a capitalistic society, something along the lines of time being money and our attention being our time. This may be true from an egoic, narrow perspective, but it’s certainly not the whole true. Additionally, our attention can be stolen and lost—even willingly, which also seems capitalistic.
It’s no coincidence to me, then, we’ve dubbed our current dystopia “the post-truth era”1 when our attention spans are completely shot. Truth is always available, of course, but it requires our attention. This is how the world slips through our fingers, we lose focus on the inter-connected details and instead scroll for likes and center solely on our own accolades. I cannot claim for anyone else what should matter to them, but I will state that our attention is worth the weight of every broken heart on earth over the scraps we give it away for. What we give our attention to is the highest form of respect, the utmost love—where are we giving it? If it is something we are paying our lives with, what is the cost?
As I collage, gluing the ominous, overseeing make-up face here and the hellflames made of hair there, these questions guide my hands. In my fingers I can feel the pain of the world—mostly currently but also since. If I’m honest, I often do. It makes enjoying my own fruits difficult at times. My cozy bed would feel that much warmer on a bone-cold night if I knew people weren’t freezing on the streets or sleeping on subway cars. I’ve felt a weight-of-the-world pain since I was a young buck. There are many ways I learned to numb my ache over the decades, but my act of collaging is not one of them. My body becomes a vessel for creation, and instead of disassociating, I’m dissolving. The difference between these two is gob itself.
Instead of panicking or burying my head in the sand, I’m collaging. And isn’t that what the universe is doing? I am not shying away from the horror of the world right now, and I will continue not to. And I think I need to make that clear here and now, dear reader. That to share in this newsletter is to share my process of understanding and relating to truth as it occurs to me. This includes life outside of human suffering, there is much to savor and celebrate—absolutely. But what is happening in the world right now is not something I can ignore in my conscious nor my writing. The truth also includes the wars and the genocides, the affliction happening to people on all sides of every “war”, and the propaganda used to fund and ensure them—of which I have been complicit in believing and thus upholding.
In the early weeks after the October 7th attack, I did my best to not feel the terror. I critiqued the actions of everyone else, especially how rapidly and carelessly information was being shared, more than I dared to feel inside of myself. Not all critique is a defense mechanism, but I was using it as one to keep myself safe—from what? I didn’t know then, but I know now. I was not ready, see: did not yet have the capacity to face the disturbed and festering darkness of our shared humanity. I’ve talked about darkness a lot in this substack—it seems I was referring to the darkness of child’s play. Shadow puppets and monsters that go away when the light turns on. What we are witnessing now is the real deal. This is the horror humans are capable of, and this is what goes on when we are not looking, and it is happening Right Now in numerous places.
My defense mechanism (ego) was smart. It new if I watched the atrocities play out in Palestine, not in a detached, doom-scrolly way, but with my attentive gaze, if I let myself touch my own pain—dissolve into it, over still alive children buried under city rubble, I would eventually make contact with the fact that the potential for “evil” out there is also at home in me. (This is the work of the ego2, among other necessary and sometimes helpful things, to keep us hidden from ourselves.)
I say this not to insinuate that I am “good” or “evil” in some biblical sense, or even that “they” are (whoever that is), but because I am human and we are human. We each share the same DNA from the same lineage that includes (but is not limited to) cannibalistic bacteria, viruses, mass extinctions, asteroids, dead stars and more recently chimps3—who demonstrate high amounts of aggression. My defense mechanism, my ego, guided me to keep searching out there for the fault—for the people making too big of a fuss or the ones not making a fuss at all—anything to not look at or feel myself. If I can just remain the right amount of aloof, I won’t hear the call coming from within. But my defenses are weaker, I guess, or maybe I just respond differently to them now.
I’m not sure if it’s because I learned the sound of my own alarm system from my many years spent with addiction, or because the veil is thin; I mean, veils are inherently quite thin and see through, lol, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say I understand I’m underneath one—but I’m letting myself go there. To the dark place. And not just my dark place—I mean the collective dark place. It’s at once chilling and compelling, and I’m becoming familiar with it. I call this practice ‘doomgazing’, not to be confused with ‘doom scrolling’ where we sit on our phones in an attempt to disassociate, of which I do plenty. Doomgazing4, on the other hand, is an intentional, somatic form of detachment5. It is embodied work, no phones allowed. It’s a container for letting myself feel and accept death—its teachings, its pains, its beauty. Currently, this practice includes the reality of war—the wretchedness of the few people who steer it and the human systems that cause it, and the ache of the civilians who are used as pawns—how this could me be, this could be us.
An important part of doomgazing is not just how I let myself feel the pain of the world, but how I also let it go—a crucial step not to be skipped. Before I leave the doomgaze session, I give the pain over to the doom. I throw it into the beckoning abyss. The lava filled heart of doom can devour then transmute it more-so than my mortal, pulsing organ can. My doomgazing practice has forming for quite some time, I realize, but I only gave a name to it just the other day when I stopped pretending that 17,000+ human beings, men, women and their children, being blown up by an ethno-nationalist state in less than two months is acceptable. Instead of tuning out, I am now tuning in. Not to the headlines, the narratives, or the pressure to pick a side per se—but to how I feel.
In the past it might have been easy for me to say, “Well this is just what humans do because it is what we have always done.” Fine. I won’t settle for it now. I know who we are. We are the species that can change its mind. We are the species that can imagine and embody new worlds. We are the species that can heal itself and other species, create art, make music, and kiss with our tongues. This doesn’t make us superior. We are not special compared to other species, but it does make us capable of choosing how we are going to respond to this collapsing world—and it is collapsing. Will we respond with love or let our fears override these capabilities?
I do not claim to know exactly what is coming, for better or worse, but I am becoming clearer on the cues and signals reality offers the more clear I practice being. I of course am never without fault or flaw, but I trust myself to the best of my mortal ability. I trust myself even though I know I will get it wrong many times. And I trust that the things I cater to are the things I perpetuate. No longer do I want to cater to false gods and the lies of corrupt and senial men. Turns out I’m a cater to love, to connection and to being imperfect—this is the world I want, this is the shape I’m holding, this is the hill I will die on, smiling.
We have a great trauma on our hands in numerous areas of the world, dehumanization happening on all sides—to the victims and the perpetrators of which these titles can oscillate through time. All of our hands are involved, sadly, because that’s how globalization works. It’s how being alive in an intra-connected world works. All are complicit in suffering and no one is entirely free, not yet. This is why Simone Weil, one of the greatest female thinkers ever and who in part inspired my doom gazing practice, encourages us to learn to be in the void—the raw, at times unbearable space of pain and horror and loss—and to do so without reaching for a way to escape from it or seek pity. In the void, in the pain and sorrow and grief, this is where we can truly touch grace. Grace being the love of god. And god being love itself. Grace can only meet us in the void if we ride its waves of discomfort. When the weight becomes too heavy, when we’d rather harm the other or bury ourselves, we only must surrender instead. The grace that finds us can transmute all of our pain if we can simply learn to let it linger.
A quote from Lee McIntyre, author of Post-Truth: “It’s easy to have a misconception about what post-truth means. And to say that we live in a post-truth era doesn't mean that truth doesn't matter anymore, or that no one cares about truth. It means that we live in an era where truth is at risk, where we're in danger of losing sight of what truth means. In my book, I define post-truth as the political subordination of reality. So I think of post-truth as a tactic that's used by authoritarians and their wannabes to control the flow of information so that they can then control the populace. It's intended not just to corrupt our belief in some specific thing that's true, but really to undermine the idea that we can know truth outside of political context.”
In the work of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, from her book Whole Brain Living, she discusses how there is a function within our very necessary and misunderstood ego that is cellularly arranged in such a way that it does not and cannot access the part of our brain that comprehends oneness, love, and unity. This means we have a paradox built right into us. We are bred of paradox! And I think the way we accommodate this part of us that cannot access the broader and more accurate truth of the whole that is accessed by the right brain hemisphere, is to greet it with tender loving respect. We cannot rid ourselves of it, we need this part of ourselves, its function helps us survive. But it can trick us and distort things, and so it is necessary to be aware of it.
We share 99% DNA with chimps. They also go to “war” over territory and resources, have hierarchy, and they also practice their own forms of “politics”. Sound familiar?
Doomgazing is a practice in “going there”. I treat it like a meditation with a time container (5, 10 minutes). Going there means letting myself feel the truth that I will die. That I, Samantha Morgan, am but a brief element in the collage of the cosmos. I let myself sift through the imagery of terror: of war, disease, aging, death, murder, genocide, grief, the loss of everything I love, famine, slavery—all around suffering. I tell myself I will die and it may be scary, but I will be ready. I have a few years now of sobriety under my belt which has allowed me to cultivate capacity in my body, not only to withstand pain but open to joy and receive love. Because of this space in my body, I feel open to doom gazing, but I only do this when I am in a regulated, safe state. I do not recommend anyone else do this practice per se, it’s just something I’ve felt called to explore with myself. If you have more questions about my process, email me, I’m happy to share in more detail.
By detachment, I do not mean disassociation. By detachment I mean, to not be attached. This is not to insinuate that we as humans, while alive, can actually be free from our attachments, at least not entirely or for very long. We must eat and drink and breathe and need each other. Rather, detachment is (more-so) the true nature of reality, if I dare make such a claim. This is because reality is in a constant state of flux, and thus is technically never attached, certainly not to our mortal concepts and ideologies. It is not likely for many of us to remain in a perpetually detached state; it’s a practice of surrendering attachments—to people, ideas, places, identities, beliefs, etc. I suppose the ultimate detachment, in a sense, is death.
ON MY MIND:
As you all know I made this newsletter a free or paid subscription. Thank you to those of you who are contributing money for my work, it means a lot to me as an artist, and thank you to those of you who are not and who just want to read along—this also means a great deal to me. After reading Holly Whitaker’s most recent substack in
where she discusses dropping the paywall to access her content ie. life’s work, I’m inspired to continue with what I’m already doing and let this be a paid or free subscription without extra perks for paid subscribers. This is partly because I simply don’t feel like spending tons of time on extra offerings when I mostly just want to write the truth as it occurs to me. I am considering creating a sub area in here titled digital ⋆｡𖦹˚.★ ritual which will be an offering of prayer/meditation/magic/still trying to figure it out. I’m going to offer it for free at first, and if I later feel like making it paid I will. But in the meantime, I value being accessible foremost and anything contributed to me financially is a huge bonus. As you all may know by now, this space of words is evolving just like all else in the living universe. Thank you for being here!
I love this concept of doom gazing ❤️❤️❤️ we just collage together soon
I bought some really cool collages at a art fair yesterday. Feeling super inspired to try it. I love the one you did babe!