Tag: Kalamazooligans

Transformation, Rebirth, and Constant Screaming: Understanding the Message of the Cicada

A few days back, I got a bit of a fright when I sat out on the back patio to chat with some friends back home on the phone. I noticed a freaking enormous bug just chilling on one of the support columns. My first assumption was a massive dreaded horsefly, which I am (rightfully) terrified of. But he wasn’t moving, so I eyeballed him a bit closer to figure out what he was.

He was a cicada! Or rather, his shell. The real little dude had long since moved on and left part of himself behind.

I left it there in the moment, not thinking much of it, but something later on prompted me to revisit it. I kept thinking about the shell sitting out there on the patio all day.

Going out to retrieve the shells that night, I felt an odd kinship to Satoshi Tajiri, a certain Japanese little boy with autism whose passion for bug collecting would, in adulthood, lead to his masterwork, the Pokémon universe. Who woulda thunk my lifelong obsession with collecting little digital critters would come in handy someday? When I finally reached the patio, I noticed a second one on the other side of the column. Bonus! I snagged both and placed them in a little bowl, careful not to damage the delicate exoskeletons.

When I brought the two shells inside, my girlfriend disclosed to me that as a child, she was petrified of the enormous insects. To quell her anxiety around them, her mother made up a silly song about them: “I’m gonna get some brand new skin/And I’m gonna fly away.”

And it hit me. I’m in my cicada era. Because this is the part of my life where I need to shed my skin and begin anew.

I consider my religious views deeply rooted in the Christian tradition I grew up in, but I also dabble in witchcraft and related spiritual arts. The two are surprisingly compatible. I had this crazy realization that the Abrahamic faiths’ blanket ban on all things witchy is more or less rooted in the fact that the big dudes who’ve always run those faiths get real squirrelly about a woman taking spirituality into her own hands. Don’t you need a pope or a priest or a pastor or a husband to tell you what to believe? I’ve discovered the answer is a huge “hell no,” and that’s the difference between orthodox Christianity and my personal belief system. God didn’t stop moving after the events of the Bible. I believe He is still speaking. And when He wants to tell you something, who’s to say He can’t speak through tarot or meditation or signs from nature?

Like finding two cicada shells.

Speaking of tarot, when my best friend/frequent collaborator, Luke, and I decided to be roomies, I did a reading for us using a deck I’d gifted him forever ago. I’m not superstitious, but I am a little “-stitious.” I had a feeling if we did a reading, something important would jump out at us. Well…

When Luke first got the deck, he pulled exactly one card — the Eight of Wands. It’s funny because before doing this reading, I shuffled the everloving fuck out of the deck and had both of us split it. And wouldn’t you know, the very first card was the Eight of Wands again. It feels significant, and it is. It’s the card of rapid change and new adventures. When I do my favorite reading, the first card is usually something to embrace. The second is something to release, though. The Ten of Cups was sobering. The happy family card. I’ve always wanted to be a mother, but as I’ve begun to realize, perhaps by letting go of my dream of having literal children, I can step into my role as the mother of a great new movement of some sort, even if that’s just starting a creative collective with my friends and helping them find their voices. The third card, a message from God or the universe or whatever higher power you choose to believe in, was the Five of Pentacles. Things will be difficult for a while, especially financially, but we’ll get by with a little help from our friends. The message of that card is to remember that folks are there to pick you up when you fall.

The left two cards were incredibly interesting. I like to flip the very next card in the deck is to see “what’s next” in life. The High Priestess. The only major arcana card I pulled. Divine feminine energy. She’s considered something of a “femme pope,” to the point where some decks call her the “Popess.” She’s a guru of spiritual wisdom and intuition. I don’t know what that means for us, but it feels right. My immediate thought was of Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval nun who also happened to be the first named composer in the canon of Western music. I feel a deep kinship to her, both spiritually and creatively. She is proof to me that these things are not incompatible, especially after having grown up in the evangelical church, where your sense of creativity tends to get stifled. While modern American Christianity has devolved into Skillet and Forrest Frank, Hildy was busy laying the architecture for music as we know it. And she was, like me, a deeply spiritual person with strong convictions.

Then, I usually check the bottom card as a way to see what’s behind me, what problems I no longer need to contend with. Seven of Cups. Illusion, distraction, wishful thinking. Those things are in the past. The time has come to take action. If we can dream it, we can make it happen. Being roommates, getting this podcast off the ground, making a difference in our community and in the world — that’s what we need to be doing. This tarot reading was all the confirmation I needed. Me, Luke, and all our friends here in Kalamazoo are the creative dream team I’ve longed for since I was a kid, when I just wanted to be in some kind of band or similar collective. I was never the child who played team sports, but I longed for connection and for a group to lean on. I finally found that here.

But I digress! This post is about cicadas, right? After I collected the shells, I did my due diligence reading about what they symbolized. I couldn’t believe the things I was seeing on my screen. Cicadas represented everything I needed to embrace in order to move on from all of the things that have been weighing me down. They are a beacon of change and transformation, and perhaps most appropriately, they are the patron insect of musicians and singers, as their song is the soundtrack to late summer. They reminded me that, as I’ve said before, if I can scream, I still have a voice. The cicada is a sign that I need to use that voice and be loud, even though it’s scary at times. I have important things to say to this dark world, and I will be heard. We will be heard.

I gathered a few special objects to make an apartment-warming gift for Luke and I. I found a cheap wooden picture frame and hot-glued a few dried catalpa leaves and Luke’s amethyst to it. The catalpa leaves, aside from being my favorite tree, are a symbol of uniqueness and creativity. The amethyst is for spiritual strength and wisdom. In the frame, I put a print-out of our tarot reading from the day we decided to become roommates. And as a finishing touch, I affixed the two shells I found to the frame. It felt serendipitous, finding a second shell. I wasn’t meant to go it alone. I have an ally in Luke. He and I are just two little bugs trying to transform ourselves and the world by screaming into the void.

Maybe we’ll change the world for the better someday. Maybe we’ll crash and burn. But we have to try, while we still have a voice. That’s what cicadas do best.

If you enjoyed what you read, please consider donating to my GoFundMe! I’m trying to restart my life with my kitty, Krubby, but we still need so much to get back on our feet. Even a little helps!

A Different Kind of Motherhood: Learning to Nurture Your Passions, Community, and Self

Once again, I was given a surprisingly relevant prompt for what I already had planned to write about. It’s funny how this thing knows me.

If your future self could send you one sentence, what do you hope it would say?

I guess the sentence I’d most want to hear from Future Jessa right now would be “It all turns out okay,” but that doesn’t narrow things down, as there are a lot of potential “its” in my situation. There’s my uncertain living situation, which I’ve written about a bit already. There’s that matter of me still not knowing what I want to do with my life as a now thirtysomething, since music therapy didn’t pan out. And of course, there’s that nagging feeling that I’m trapped in the burning house that is America, and as the walls are crumbling, who the hell knows what rights I’ll have left as a queer woman. I would love a future version of me to tell me I get some semblance of a happy ending out of all of this. I’d love a crumb of reassurance that the story I’m living through every day still has many pages of bliss left to write, and relatively little hardship. I want to know that the worst is behind me now. And when all is said and done, I want to leave behind something — or someone — to carry on my legacy.

I always thought my mark on this world would come in two forms — through the things I create, and through the people I will eventually create. I wanted to be an artist, but I also wanted to be a mother. Well, maybe not always. The idea of making a baby with most of the guys I went to school with was absolutely nauseating, even if lizard-brain still wanted to get laid. I would eventually get married and have sex (in that order, I believed, because I was a good girl), but not a damn soul was coming outta this uterus. That thing was closed for business.

Then I met and dated this guy in college who already had a daughter. I loved this dude, whom I still speak with now and then to this day, but I freaking adored this little girl. I fell into the role of stepmom-lite with a surprising amount of ease for a girl who’d previously believed she had the maternal instincts of a football. I remember going to Burger King to fetch her some nuggets and eating them together on the stairs, with her cuddled up next to me. It was the weirdest feeling, this twinge of motherly love toward a tiny person. And wouldn’t you know it, my ovaries started tingling real bad.

But I couldn’t have kids of my own. Not then. I wasn’t stable enough. We’d both end up on the streets.

Time went by, I got married twice, and still, over the course of both relationships, we could never quite achieve the amount of stability required to safely bring a child into this world. I’ve worked with children many times throughout my life, but I’ve never had the chance to raise one myself, and it breaks my heart. I’m approaching my mid-thirties, and while I know women have given birth well into their thirties and even forties, a part of me wonders if it’ll ever be my turn.

Always a caregiver, never a mom.

Maybe its just a side-effect of the barrage of pro-natalist propaganda coming to us from the government, but part of me feels like I’ve failed as a freaking biological lifeform if I can’t even reproduce. Even dumb seagulls are better at spreading their genetic material. And it’s a damn shame because I’d like to think I have some freaking good genes to pass on. Thanks, Mom.

Lately, though, I’ve been re-evaluating what motherhood even means to me. Is it really so important that I be a mother in order to matter? Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett, and Debbie Harry are all famously childfree, and yet their names will still go down in history. Another classic rock queen, singer and guitarist Bonnie Raitt, once said, “I feel that my job is to mother the causes that I’m involved in.” And then it kind of hit me. I’m already the mother of something, in a way.

I studied Arabic a little in college. I’ve always been fascinated by the language, having grown up near Dearborn (which is not the scary place conservatives think it is, unless you think swanky-ass hookah bars are scary). I remember a really interesting concept where, after someone has a child, their name changes to reflect their status as a parent of that child. This name is called a kunya. In a way, its the reverse of how we in the West approach names. Theoretically, if a guy named Gray had a son, his son’s name would be Grayson, as in “Gray’s son.” (I am using a real life example, as I truly used to know a friendly uke-wielding hippie dude named Gray and his aptly named son, Grayson.) That’s basically how many of our last names evolved. But Arabic is entirely different. Let’s say, for example, I finally had my little girl and I named her Cadence. If I spoke Arabic, my new name would essentially be “Cadence’s Mother.”

But what if you never actually have children? Can you still get the lofty title of “umm.” In Arabic, that answer is a resounding yes! The word is also used metaphorically to reflect distinctive traits people may have. One may be the “mother of the cats” if they’re a cat mom, or even the “mother of the chubby face” if they’ve just got cute pinchable cheeks.

Maybe I need to look at motherhood more like that. Maybe we’re all mothering something in a strange way, even if we don’t immediately realize it.

In my last post, I mentioned the joke rap comedy group I started with my two favorite men on this planet and whoever else is unfortunate enough to be in the room with us at the time. What I didn’t mention was the massive multiplayer 12-minute monster of a megasong we were all working on. It started life as a stupid TikTok video that up until recently was my most viewed ’Tok. I was messing around with the synths and drum machines in my DAW and trying to make a Thriller/Ghostbusters-type beat from memory, with disastrous results. Then, I showed Luke and David, and they ran with it. Soon, the number of rappers on the song somehow doubled as more and more folks wanted in on the project. Before we knew it, the song had ballooned to an absolute behemoth, comprising well over 100 individual tracks as of writing. Pray for my MacBook, please.

But the subject matter of the song was what really surprised me. At first, we started making this entirely unserious song about how, because I’m the shadowy figure who makes all the beats in the background, I am the BEAT MOTHER, this benevolent but fierce goddess of sick beats, bro. It was going to be entirely unserious…until I started realizing how serious my friends were about their love for me. I started tearing up a little as a few of my collaborators recorded their parts because I started to realize just how much my friends care about and respect me. That’s all I’ve ever wanted in life. Music has always been my conduit to the outside world, ever since I was a selectively mute autistic child who could barely utter a world to her peers. I was so lonely, but I couldn’t make friends. Somehow, twenty years later, that little girl still gets overwhelmed when she truly grasps how loved she really is. I’m so lucky to have the chosen family I’ve found through music.

That’s what the whole BEAT MOTHER title came to represent, as absolutely bonkers and silly it was at first. I end the song with a much more introspective and somber tone than it opens with, having intentionally changed the ending to reflect my new realizations. In the final few lines, I say:

“I did it all, and man, I did it loud. To think I did it all to make little Jessie proud.”

Circling back to the question at the very beginning of this post, sometimes I like to imagine the opposite. Sometimes I imagine myself speaking to that scared little kid who couldn’t fit in anywhere if she tried. I’d like to tell her that it will be okay in the end, and that things will be hard, but we are stronger than anything that will come our way. We’re resilient. In a way, I feel like I’m stepping into a motherhood role with my own inner child. As Whitney sang, children are the future, and the greatest love of all is learning to love yourself. I think she was onto something with that song.

Maybe I won’t be the mother of anything more than a couple of decent songs. But I’m learning to be okay with that. Nurturing my friends’ creativities and passions and helping them make music they can be proud of is something to celebrate too.

Help me relocate with my kitty, Krubby! We’re close to our goal, which will be enough to cover a Uhaul and a nice bed for us! Even just spreading the word is appreciated!