Writer and diviner Selah Saterstrom on taking turns to light our passageway through disaster

Through divination, I enter a flow—or a field, or a drift—where story and potential stories linger in sensations, traces, gestures. Divination is a narrative art, a storytelling practice. From an early age I was immersed in a culture of storytelling shaped by family. It formed the ground of my orientation—in a daily way and in terms of larger mysteries moving beneath the visible.

In my family, there was always an audience—intended, intimate. Most often, it was one another. On the hardest days, this meant holding up a mirror to our losses. On good days, it was shared pleasure, a way of keeping each other sharp, a means of subverting power.

For example, I was still in grade school when my sister went off to college—the University of Southern Mississippi. In her composition class, they had to write a short story. Hers imagined the rapture: blood and guts and boobs. When she came home, she gathered us around the kitchen table over morning coffee and cigarettes and read it aloud. I remember the professor’s droopy red marks across her pages. He hadn’t been generous. But we were the real judges.

When she reached the last line, my grandmother paused then tipped her head back and released that deep, marvelous smoky laughter. A triumph. We were all delighted—not because we believed it, we didn’t believe a word, but because a story could be outrageous, gory, unapologetically feminist, hungry, horny, and still wield power. A-fucking-plus. My grandmother said the professor had a boring, potentially weak constitution. That settled it. Then we ate donuts.

Among my mother and her sisters, there was always something in the works. Not quite a competition—more a communal craft, a tacit ritual. Well, maybe a competition. The ghost stories were ongoing, threaded and revised. When we gathered from our various homes in Mississippi and Louisiana, the latest installments were shared. Whoever’s story was the most uncanny, won. The prize was respect. To be the one who held the room in a charged pause before the end. To be believed, if only for a moment, in the intensity of the invisible.

There’s a place in Natchez, Mississippi, called the Devil’s Punch Bowl—a vast, sunken Kudzu bayou. My grandparents lived in an antebellum farmhouse on its edge for some years and we sometimes lived there, too. I didn’t learn the bayou’s full history until I was an adult and moved away—it certainly wasn’t taught in my eight grade Mississippi History class. After emancipation, a military encampment was established there. Thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans were forced into the basin and left to die from disease and starvation. There are estimations that twenty thousand died. Most local historians predictably dispute this as anti-southern propaganda. Wild peach groves grow in the Punch Bowl, and there are stories—if you eat the peaches, you’ll fall ill. These stories aren’t entirely untrue, but they’re also something else: a way for dominant white culture to mythologize the site of its own violence. To shroud atrocity in legend. Storytelling can work that way, too. It can conceal. It can carry memory—or displace it.

I ask myself often: What story am I telling—both to myself and to the world? Most of the time, it runs just beneath overt awareness, like the ambient sound in a hotel lobby, a soft murmur, a water feature you stop hearing. Then one day, you catch it. You really listen. And you realize: this is what’s been playing on a loop. Now, I try to be responsible for the texture of my thinking. Not in pursuit of perfection, but as a daily practice—a quiet vow: to become, thought by thought, more hospitable to the invisible and less bound to the performance of a self I once believed others required.

I’ve let go of the idea of a unified identity. What draws me now is something closer to cogency—not a fixed core, but a constellation of what I love: people, practices, questions. What gathers there, hums.

In my divination practice, there’s a group of cards I call the poverty cards. They speak to the ways we dim our light. There are many reasons why we do this—we are conditioned to, yes. But sometimes, especially when we’re young, we do it to survive. When we break our contracts with the lie that we are not enough as we are, we begin to believe we deserve to be seen, to be heard, and something opens. A kind of radical creative potential is unlocked.

Now “home” has a lot to do with a regulated nervous system. I was always scandalized by the fact that in higher ed, in critical creative graduate programs, we expect students to travel to the dirt floor of their guts under poverty conditions, make art, and bring that back as a meaningful story path for the community. We don’t talk about the nervous system, or how to take care, or why.

As a professor in the University, I learned about the importance of boundaries. The lessons were hard and I’m a long-suffering student. My conflicts often centered on the division of labor. I was told, again and again, that it had nothing to do with gender. Nothing to do with queerness. And yet, when I left, I was the only woman and the only queer Full Professor in my department. When I asked why, I was offered the usual deflections: timing, coincidence. Never structure. Never the systems that normalize delay and invisibility. I was eligible for promotion likely seven years before I was encouraged or supported to apply. That’s not just lost income, it is labor rendered invisible.

I am grateful for all that my academic position made possible, and I do not regret the work. And I mourn—mourn—what is being dismantled—the slow disintegration of institutions like the University, hollowed out under the rising pressure of authoritarianism. But I no longer mistake endurance for belonging. And I no longer offer my devotion to systems incapable of loving me back.

Leaving academia requires the reconfiguration of a self. In the blogosphere, it’s often likened to leaving the military or a cult—and while the comparison is a bit theatrical, point taken. Academia is not just a profession—it’s an identity structure, a social ecology. It confers class standing, vocabulary, access.

To leave is to forfeit a kind of legibility. You are no longer fluent in the codes that once organized your days. And more disorienting still: you are no longer fluent to yourself. To walk away is to rupture the narrative that taught you how to be seen—and in doing so, how to see. It is a break in the mirror. And yet, in that refusal, a different kind of thrilling recognition begins.

Writing is not just an act, but an approach to the day. A commitment to awareness. I hope I would write and do my work anywhere. I often think of the Dutch Jewish writer and mystic, Etty Hillesum, murdered by the Nazis in 1943. Her workshop was located in the ditches of suffering. She met annihilation with an unyielding devotion to bearing witness as an act of resistance and love. Refusing numbness, she upheld the soul’s sovereignty, even in the relentless hell devised by men with small, failed imaginations.

I’ve discovered that the more care I invest in my mental health, my spiritual practices, and my emotional integrity, the more I can take radical creative risks. We don’t get sick alone, and we don’t heal alone. Healing is relational—woven through bodies, systems, and stories. But too often, pain becomes privatized, packaged into progress narratives that protect the very structures doing harm.

How many times must a person tell their story—whether they move through the system or refuse it? The raped person is asked to repeat. And even when not asked, the mind repeats. Trauma loops. It engraves. The nervous system circulates the wound, restimulating it— until, through the slow, aching labor of loving ourselves, and of living anyway, it becomes a powermark. There is something in repetition—not only as symptom, but as structure. A kind of refrain. The same refrain that holds our pain also carries our prayers, our celebrations, our names. Repetition is not only what binds us to trauma. It can provide the conditions for emergence, a place from which we can begin to sing.

Healing has reconfigured my relationship to the sentence—the sentence as a threshold, a site of encounter. It has made my language more permeable to silence, more exacting in its care. It has made me a better writer. It has taught me how to let the wound speak without becoming a spectacle. I write differently now—because I listen differently.

One of the things I have learned from disasters, personal and collective, is a quiet prayer I carry: May I and my loved ones be on the fortuitous side of the interruption. Disasters and oracles share a compositional instinct: they love juxtaposition. Rupture beside pattern. The visible pressed against the unseen. And the altar—turns out—is wherever we are.

As my friend Lou Florez reminds me, the ancestor altar begins at the cellular level. We carry the archive in our blood. We sit at the table of our own becoming, and sup with the star that made us and the great-great-great-grandmother who kept the fire lit. We are always in conversation with what preceded us, and with what has yet to arrive.

My mother taught me, in her way, to cultivate a poignant relationship with impermanence and uncertainty. She was right to do so. I’m learning to stay close to both—not to conquer or resolve them, but to let them shape me into something more honest.

I’ve been on a long journey of learning to understand descents—initiations into the holy darkness of the underworld. I love a good catacomb. I feel at home there. There’s a kind of orientation that I sense that only becomes possible in the dark.

Once, I was walking the catacombs outside Rome and I’d fallen to the back of the group. There were two torchbearers—one at the front, one at the end. You have to stay close. A few weeks before our visit, a Boy Scout had gotten lost in those tunnels. Not temporarily. Entirely. The lesson is simple and unrelenting: we do not make it through alone. We walk together. We take turns carrying the light.

Story is a kind of torch. It holds us. It marks the passage. I am lucky—for those who love me, who call me back when I begin to slip behind, who remind me: stay. Not for the certainty. Not for the resolution. Not even so that, at last, things might make sense. But to dwell—open, wanting—in the radiant complexity of being alive—with others. With you.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mairead Case.