SUSAN GRAY BLUE

It took some time for me to get back into a writing groove after moving to London, so it feels especially sweet to have another essay published this week. It’s about how (and why) I rewired my brain with poetry (and lots of other books), and it’s in the Bustle books section.

Emily Dickinson figures prominently in the essay, as in my life. The medieval poet Rumi plays a role as well.

“Book by book, I formed a new way of seeing the world.”

"... the fundamentalist version of any truth turns into dogma, like a miracle gone wrong where the bread turns into stone."

You can read the essay on Bustle.

One of my most prized possessions is this pink sweater that my grandmother knitted for me when I was 3. Today, Racked is running an essay I wrote about that sweater … and religious fundamentalism … and faith … and finding our way back to something. Maybe to something like a cozy sweater. 

I started tearing up as wrote the end of this essay. I’d been feeling a bit stuck about it, but when I sat down and started typing, I realized what was coming together. Now both the sweater and the essay mean more to me than I can say.

Bonus material for an essay I wrote for The Millions about the apocalyptic books I read as a kid.

The books were called 666 and 1000 and mashed up conspiracy theories and the evangelical interpretation of the apocalypse with sci-fi touches like ruby red laser rings. 

A quote from the essay:

Whether I believed the Antichrist would actually posses a ruby laser ring that harnessed the power of the sun into “a devastating laser beam of destruction” that could wipe out buildings in a poof, I definitely believed the Antichrist would show up and have lots of tricks up his sleeve. And I didn’t want to stick around for it. I wanted to be raptured.

What really sets these books apart is the author, Salem Kirban, and his use of photomontages. You’ll see some crazy scans from the books mixed in with the essay, including but not limited to a guillotine on a church lawn. The plot of 666 is even more baffling than the book’s images, like the one above. 

Of course, the plot of the apocalypse itself promises to be confusing as well, so here’s a sort of cheat sheet from the back of one of the books. 

Merit Badges for Distinctive Acts of Badassery & Aplomb Nos. 011 - 012 

You have badassery for days and aplomb for miles. Here’s why: Your head and your heart are in cahoots.

Some days you shine like the sun and other days like the moon, but never like a fluorescent rod. You’re on a first-name basis with several powerful metaphors. Maybe you’re a fragrant tree or a rustling breeze. Like the poets, you know the right metaphor can change everything. Maybe you wear your metaphor like a feather in your cap, or maybe you carry it like a coin in your pocket. It helps to carry your light with you. Sometimes others need to see it too.

Anyway, there’s a Sioux prayer that goes: “May the great mystery make sunrise in our hearts.” 

Time is enough, and so is that light, and so are you.

Want the badges? They’re yours! They function both as a reward for a job nicely done and as a magical token to ensure badassery & aplomb in your future. I’d love for you to follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my occasional emails because I’m hoping to build an empire here. I’ll have more badges soon — and stickers. (Stickers!)

Instructions:

1. Download your badges and revel in the moment. Just right-click the image and save it onto your computer. (Remember, the printing press wasn’t easy at first either.)

2. Print them out, or stash the files for a rainy day (or for the next time you’re joining a protest or calling an elected official to tell them what’s what).

3. If printing, cut out each badge separately and affix to something using tape. Or laminate your favorite and keep it handy. Consider printing on cardstock or iron-on transfer paper or sticker paper.

4. Flash the badge at yourself or others as desired.

Post-religious travel in holy lands.

The funniest things can happen when you leave religion behind. Like, you might end up in the most religious place of all. I used to think that was a metaphor. Hahahahahahaha, replied the universe.*  

I mean, it is a metaphor. More on that in a second. But it also happened on a literal level: In the last few months since starting a new job, my employer has sent me to two of the world’s holiest places.

I’ve never been on a pilgrimage--didn’t go on one before my unconversion, didn’t go on one during. I changed my beliefs one book at a time, between my 9-to-5, not in an ashram or following in the footsteps of a saint. I never thought I’d find myself in Israel or India. But there I was on an airplane, flying last fall to Tel Aviv and this summer to Mumbai. Unexpected business-class pilgrimages.

Like I (and the universe*) said, hahahahahahaha.

Part of my unconversion meant welcoming a few truths back into my life, you see. I knew religion wasn’t for me, but not believing just as adamantly ended up seeming like the other side of the same coin. I wanted a new currency altogether. I had to rescue big concepts like hope and love from the hold religion seemed to have on them. But cozying up to those concepts again after letting them all go was disconcerting.

It’s like you round a corner on a mountain path and have to pause and pull out the map because something looks familiar, even though it doesn’t feel familiar. You know you’re in a different place in the same way you know the difference between a fluorescent light and sunlight. But you’re blinking at it all the same. So you lose your footing now and then, but you forge ahead and find new ways of relating to those concepts.

And then you discover that metaphors are more powerful than dogma anyway. You discover that truth is more powerful outside the narrow confines of fundamentalism. This gives you a greater appreciation not only for metaphors but also irony. And then a few years after you’re more into the metaphors, you find yourself walking down a crowded street in a monsoon after eating some paneer masala. Or you’re eating some shakshuka after walking down the Via Dolorosa. See what I mean? Life after religion can get you to the holiest of places.

I guess I’m post-religious but pro-sacred. I believe sacred places can look like golden domes in Jerusalem and mountains in California and water pools in Mumbai.  

I’m just saying, anything can happen after an unconversion. Maybe you’ll also get a couple of free trips to the stomping grounds of Jesus and the Buddha, once you don’t care at all. Or maybe something even more confounding and wonderful will happen.

I don’t have to understand the mystery anymore, but I damn sure like to revel in it. So I took a few photos of my unexpected pilgrimages. And it turns out sometimes the best commentary is writ in spray paint.

*Or my soul or The Ground of All Being or The Unfathomable Mystery or whatever. Somebody somewhere called something clearly thought this was hilarious.

A Jerusalem rooftop presents an unexpected view of the dome.

Tel Aviv graffiti artists say it best.

More from a happenstance graffiti tour of Tel Aviv.

Bursts of pink and orange (and some laundry getting done in the corner, not for nothing) at a sacred Hindu water tank. 

Sign outside of a Mumbai church. Agree to disagree? 

Indian Ocean on one side, graffiti on the other.

Centuries-old Buddhist cave sculptures north of Mumbai.

If I had a series called “Things to Read by People I’d Like to Meet,” this post would fit so perfectly. Likewise if I had a series called “Things So Up My Alley I Wish I’d Written Them.”

The writer of the things: Alex Mar.

The things written: An article about saints and rebels and a book about witches.

Saint Melania, depicted in an illuminated manuscript compiled circa 1000.

1. An article  

Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers

Mar recently wrote a Longreads essay about noteworthy female figures in early Christianity. Oh, you didn’t know those existed? Oh, those existed.

I wrote over on BuzzFeed about how reading helped me find my way out of fundamentalism (and into feminism). I was never more astonished than when I read books about medieval mystics in grad school, so I’ll forever have a soft spot for mystics of any century. I learned about a couple more from Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers.

While many females today are “barred from being fully ordained and are closely overseen by men,” Mar writes, “this was not always the case. Scores of early Christian women — like Marcella, the desert-dwelling Susan, or the scholars Melania and Paula — embraced radical lives, helping the young religion fan out across the Roman Empire and beyond.”

I think what surprised me most when I read about those medieval mystics was how equally earnest and subversive they were. Mar writes of a similar tendency for Christian women living under the law of Augustus and describes how they “began to use the vow of chastity as both an act of devotion and an excellent legal loophole.”

I just can’t get enough of stories like that.

2. A book

Witches of America

Now that’s a book cover.

I was going to write some semblance of a review, and then I read the review that the New York Times ran. It’s so good — I think we’re all better off if I link to that instead. As you’ll read over there, the book is "a seeker’s memoir told through a quilted veil: a collection of strong, journalistic profiles of several fascinating American practitioners of the occult.” The book, the review continues, is “a pastiche of history and biography, cultural anthropology and comparative theology. It’s also a nice compendium of obscure arcana…”

It’s true. So you might want to get on that.

Do you like witches? Or America? Or weird religious things? Then maybe you’ll like another post of mine: Ways in Which My Fundamentalist Childhood (1969 - 1987) Was and Was Not Like the Salem Witch Trials (1691 - 1692).

Brilliant. I don’t know where that quote’s been my whole life, but I found it in Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692.

The book is a detailed telling of that crazed American saga, the Salem witch trials. A gifted storyteller, Schiff chronicles the events with equal parts poetry and history. “The sky over New England was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black,” she writes to set the scene.

A widow, her cat and her demon. From a 1621 witch case in England. One of several fascinating visuals in Schiff’s book. (Copyright: The British Library Board)

I love the way Schiff describes the Puritans themselves too, as “off balance and on guard.”

The Quakers come off with a bit more sass. The fine for interrupting a minister during a sermon at the time was five pounds or two hours on the block. But that didn’t stop people from doing it now and then, Schiff assures us. A Quaker woman once interrupted Samuel Parris, the Salem preacher at the center of the drama, thusly: “Parson! Sit down! Thee has already said more than thee knows how to say well!” (Go ahead and use that line — minus the “parson” reference, perhaps — the next time you’ve had enough mansplaining for one day.)

Schiff brings some of her own sass into the book as well, as she recounts the supernatural events described during the trials. She recreates that entire world vividly and offers insights into the mindset of those early Americans along the way, digging into what led to the accusations and what brought to them an end.

Schiff won the Pulitzer Prize for one of her earlier books, and The Witches: Salem, 1692 was featured on several best-of-type lists in 2015.

Image via The Week article referenced below

We’ve likely all noticed the cult-like effect of CrossFit gyms, and a religion columnist recently officially wondered whether the workout centers qualify as a religion in this age when we increasingly find transcendence apart from church. To nobody’s surprise, another religion columnist got pretty testy upon reading the suggestion.

The first columnist -- Mark Oppenheimer, who writes for the New York Times -- noted that CrossFit members talk about their workout centers “as others might speak about a church or synagogue community.” He continues:

The same is true of some 12-step program members, and devoted college-football fans. In an increasingly secular America, all sorts of activities and subcultures provide the meaning that in the past, at least as we imagine it, religious communities did.

Any criteria you choose to define religion will quickly reveal its shortcomings. Is it about belief in a deity? Judaism and Christianity have that, but many varieties of Buddhism do not. Existence after death? Mormons believe in that, but plenty of liberal Protestants do not.

Yet consider football. Religion scholars have noted that it brings people together in large crowds to “worship,” and has a weekly holy day and even annual holidays, like N.F.L. draft day and, of course, the Super Bowl.

The second columnist -- Damon Linker, who writes for The Week -- would prefer that we stick to precise definitions of religion: “Religion is any set of norms, practices, and beliefs that establishes a comprehensive way of life that is held out as the right or best way of life for those who adhere to it,” he explains. And he continues:

It is above all this comprehensiveness that precludes CrossFit from qualifying as a religion, even for those who take the fitness routine very seriously, because it is still just a form of physical exercise and not a sweeping statement of how a human being should live and understand his or her place in the universe. It makes no broader claims about the meaning or purpose of life, death, morality, love, and the origins, foundations, and ends of existence. The same holds for football, Star Trek, and dieting fads. Which is why those activities aren't religions but Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Jainism, and Sikhism very clearly are.

This may be true in a textbook sense of religion, but it seems like a limiting way of looking at how people experience meaning in their lives these days.

Or, as a CrossFit member says in the first article, “There is something raw and vulnerable that happens to you when you go into the CrossFit gym. A workout can bring you to your knees, so to speak.”

I never dressed up as a witch for Halloween. I was allowed to go trick-or-treating after brief refreshers about how we were only in it for the candy and not the bedevilments. We did not believe witches and devils were anything to be trifled with, and the phrase “all in good fun” wasn’t known to us.

Nor was it known to the Puritans, our philosophical forbearers. Although 200 years separated us -- dramatic centuries that brought advancements such as Laffy Taffy and sewing machines -- I had a lot in common with those early Americans. I believed in witchcraft just like they did, for one thing. I just didn’t go around having people killed when I suspected they might be dabbling with it.

They did, though. You’ve probably heard the news by now that in 1691-1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, 100-plus people were accused of witchcraft and thrown in jail. Chained up, to be precise. Many of them were put on trial and were most definitely not presumed innocent. Nineteen were killed after being convicted.

I went to Salem for the first time this summer and read A Delusion of Satan by Frances Hill leading up to the visit. (Who doesn’t love a little thematic road trip reading?) This fall, it seems witches are all the rage. The New Yorker recently ran an article about Salem by Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff, who has a new book on the topic; Witches of America by Alex Mar came out a couple of days ago, too. They’re both on my reading list.

In her book, Frances Hill digs into not only the historical details but also the psychology at work. “In Salem Village,” she writes, “young women were as rigidly controlled, as powerless, and as dissatisfied as perhaps they have ever been anywhere. In the backwaters of New England, the exercise of the private will was regarded as inherently evil.... Their human urges to express their emotions, fulfill their desires, exercise personal will, and exert control over others were pushed out of sight...”

My life in Iowa wasn’t so stark -- we had an excellent iron-on T-shirt shop at the local mall, for one thing -- but my ideals for girlish behavior weren’t so far off. As I read Hill’s book, I couldn’t help but think about what parts of that Puritan mindset I inherited as part of my Midwestern evangelical childhood.

I.

1690s: A bunch of girls started having fits. They became tormented and afflicted, in the parlance of the day. Specifically, they screamed, barked and choked. Their bodies contorted into impossible-seeming poses. And what did the Puritans suppose caused those fits? Pacts with the devil, duh. Witchery. Evil-doing and cavorting with animal spirits. The girls would claim a witch was hitting or pinching them, and marks would appear. Frances Hill points out that although girls had no power in that setting, the entire town paid attention when they had those fits. Their affliction gave them “complete power over parents, caregivers, and everyone else within range,” she writes.

1970s -1980s: I had no fits. I wouldn’t dare. I knew to behave, unlike those wackadoo Puritan girls.

II.

1690s: At the early stages of the hysteria, the reverend’s female slave, Tituba, baked a “witch cake” using urine from a couple of the girls having fits. The idea was that if a dog ate it and also had fits, evil was indeed afoot. The reverend didn’t approve (also didn’t want to eat it, I guess) and accused everyone involved of witchery.

1970s -1980s: I invented and baked “orange pop cake.” Nobody accused me of witchery or wanted to eat it. 

III.

1690s: The Puritans believed in a pitiless God and had no sympathy for anyone who didn’t conform to their standards. Children were no exception. Neither were Quakers, whom they not infrequently whipped and hanged. They viewed people as either godly or devilish, and punishment for acting like the latter was supposed to be humiliating. Was a punishment shameful? “Good one!” they would say. Was an admonishment terrifying? “Perf!” they would say, “just the way we like it!”

1970s -1980s: Same.

IV.

1690s: Puritans loved giving their children odd names like Trugrace, Tremble and More Mercy.

1970s -1980s: Names of girls and boys at my school included Krystal, Dustin, Jon and Missy. (Missy and her twin sister Melanie had blond, perfectly feathered hair.)

V.

1690s: Like others who lived that era, the Puritans drank ale and hard cider with their meals.

1970s -1980s: Ever hear of avoiding the appearance of evil, Puritans? We never drank any alcoholic beverages.

VI.

1690s: Puritans often blamed bad behavior and bad luck on the devil’s work. If a cow became ill, they might suspect that a woman who had paid a recent visit to borrow a farm tool had really come by to cast a spell on their cow.

1970s -1980s: We too placed blame on the devil. Or that Chicago Cubs goat curse thing. Or women’s lib.

VII.

1690s: Their best entertainment was at the Meeting House.

1970s -1980s: Mine was on The Love Boat, if the episode didn’t get turned off for being too suggestive.

VIII.

1690s: Wardrobe was deemed relevant in testimony at witch court. The devil was said to wear a black hat when signing pacts with the witches, causing some decades later to notice that so did the reverend. And if one of the accusers knew what one of the accused was wearing that day before she appeared in court, it was decided that the accused witch had obviously visited that girl as a specter earlier that day.

1970s -1980s: My wardrobe was also questioned, especially when I wore gauchos to the roller skating rink.

IX.

1690s: Some of the women confessed, likely thinking they would be spared or would at least find some reprieve from the pressures of witch court. Tituba, the reverend’s indentured servant, claimed that she’d been flying around on a broom and meeting other witches in the woods.

1970s -1980s: I once attended a slumber party where one of the girls first suggested we get out an Ouija board and then that we play “light as a feather.” I don’t think I shouted “Get thee behind me, Satan!” at her, but I might have come close. And that was the end of my slumber party career until a preacher’s daughter became my best friend.

X.

1690s: Sunday was the Puritans’ only break from chores, and they spent three hours at church in the morning, two in the afternoon, and then went home for more Bible reading and prayer. (In 1656, a man returned home to Boston after three years at sea and kissed his wife in public. It was Sunday, so he was convicted of “lewd and unseemly” behavior and spent two hours in the stocks.)

1970s -1980s: I was subjected to golf being played on the television on Sunday afternoons between church services and opted instead to sit on porch and listen to the grass grow in person, as was the custom of girls in the pioneer books I read.

XI.

1690s: Puritans were less austere when it came to vittles as you might think and enjoyed mixing sweet and savory when they had the chance -- for example, eating venison with maple syrup.

1970s -1980s: We ate maple syrup only on pancakes, thank you very much. 

XII.

1690s: Perhaps the craziest thing about the trials with a couple hundred years of understanding (nevermind, there’s no way to pick the craziest thing) is how calculated the targets of the accusations now seem to be. If you were a rival to the family behind most of the accusations, guess what, you got accused of being a witch and causing their daughters to have violent fits when you showed your face! If you suggested maybe the accusations weren’t legit, guess what, you got accused of being a witch and causing those girls to have violent fits when you showed your face!  

1970s -1980s: I was once accused of being stuck-up and had to ask my older brother what it meant. Honestly, I was just scared out of my mind that I might say the wrong thing.

XIII.

1690s: Salem inhabitants never met some ergot they didn’t like. A theory surfaced in the 1970s that the Salem fits were caused by grains tainted with ergot fungus. It doesn’t seem likely at this point, but it’s a worthy theory. And who knows -- maybe it started that way? And then the witchcraft lore and human nature took over?  

1970s -1980s: My grandpa raised sorghum on his farm in Nebraska, but that’s as close to ergot as I got.

If you visit Salem today, you’ll find stores on every corner named with uncomfortably glib witch references, but you can also find two houses from the era still standing. One is the homestead on the outskirts of town where Rebecca Nurse nurse lived before she was hanged for witchcraft; the other is a foreboding-looking house in the middle of town where one of the judges lived. Many of the exhibits throughout his house are about witchcraft and seem almost instructional.

It’s all so strange. But all so familiar. Here’s what I think: If you really want to know why the Salem witch trials happened, take a look inside yourself, assuming you are a human person. Have you ever had a moment of wanting to take control when you had none? To place blame somewhere convenient? Or maybe to testify in court that you fly around on a broom and plot with other witches in the woods? Congratulations, you could have been a player in the witch trials!

Another historical site you can visit in Salem is the cemetery where one of the men killed in 1692 was pressed to death by stones. That’s what the weight of judgment does -- it presses the breath right out of you. Sometimes this is a metaphor; sometimes it isn’t. More than anything, it’s that Puritanical judgment that I inherited. I learned to hold a witch trial for myself with little cause, to hold myself in contempt. It’s a wonder I didn’t choke on all that Halloween candy.

In telling another part of my story today over on BuzzFeed Ideas (!), I got to mention both Emily Dickinson and Brooke Shields. Her infamous Calvin Klein commercial from the early ‘80s came out right around the time I attended Christian Charm School. (Emily Dickinson preferred white dresses to denim, as far as we know.)  

“You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?” Shields asked the camera. “Nothing." Scandalous!

I’d never heard of John Robins before I read this article about what 17th-century English sectarians can teach us about the perils of biblical literalism. How did I not know about this man? This cobbler and farmer who claimed to be the reincarnation of Adam? This man who claimed to possess magical powers and promised to lead his followers to Jerusalem and bring about the second coming of Christ? This man who was imprisoned for heresy and appealed directly to Oliver Cromwell for his release, which he was granted?

Well, now I know. Against the backdrop of John Robins’ beliefs, the article explores literalism across the centuries and makes some interesting connections.

It is … easy to think of the time in which Robins lived as an era of ignorance and hysteria that has no bearing on our own age of enlightenment and reason. But the truth is that Robins' time and ours have much in common. Both were times of great strides in science and philosophy. Both saw significant shifts in the social strata and in political theory. As Western Europeans made contact with the New World, Robins' time was one of increasing globalization, much like our own. Both Robins' age and ours experienced difficulties with and drastic changes in the national economy.

The modern motives of biblical literalism are, I think, quite clear. In a social and political environment as tumultuous (and interconnected, thanks to social media and digital news services) as ours, Scripture can offer us an unmovable model of stability. And in an age when information is both atomized and treated as relative, the Bible remains a trove of (apparently straightforward) moral precedents. So vast a source is bound to contain something resembling a verdict on virtually any question of morality, society, or ontology—especially for cherry-pickers.

I follow the Virgin Mary as much as the next curious girl, but I’ve never seen her circus manifestation.

You can read an excerpt from standup comedian Bridget Christie’s A Book for Her now.

A few choice delights:

Feminists don’t like humour, except slapstick. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy and Bottom are all very popular at feminist comedy nights. Anything that involves men being physically harmed always goes down very well with feminists. They also enjoy watching Tom and Jerry, Road Runner cartoons and war documentaries.

Feminists never have sex and hate men opening doors for them, even into other dimensions.

Christmas is banned in the “feminist community”, along with birthdays, wallpaper, nuance, giving people the benefit of the doubt and all music.

--

All feminists do all day is burn bras. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without eating, sleeping or taking toilet breaks. A feminist would rather wet herself than leave a bra unburned. If you read the CV of a feminist, under “Occupation” it would say: “Bra-burner.” And under “Skills” it would say: “Very good at burning bras.” And under “Hobbies and interests” it would say: “Finding bras and burning them.”

And under “My five-year plan” it would say: “To have burned loads of bras.” And under “My 10-year plan” it would say: “To have eliminated all the bras, by burning.”

Feminists steal bras from wherever they can. From lingerie departments, barns and hay bales, the wardrobe department for The Benny Hill Show, the stage floor at a Tom Jones concert, milkmen’s pockets, James Bond’s glove compartment and Carry on Camping star Kenneth Williams’s face.

There’s this idea in C.S. Lewis’ sci-fi trilogy that evil is more banal and annoying than anything else. Satan shows up on a planet somewhere and irritates the hell out of the main character, as I recall. Northern Exposure played around with that idea, too, when the devil showed up in Alaska as a balding hot tub salesman. Similarly, your basic run-of-mill fundamentalism is just as destructive as the more obviously heinous Duggar-family-style religion in the news these days. All levels of abuse should be kicked to the curb, and the system and all of its permutations needs to go.

Merit Badges for Distinctive Acts of Badassery & Aplomb Nos. 009 - 010

Maybe an angel gets its wings with each ding of a bell, but getting that kind of lift as a human takes more effort. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen. I once saw a quote by Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck in the program notes at a Momix dance performance. He wrote in The Intelligence of Flowers that to break through the earth, a plant must “invent or invoke wings.” Yeah. That sounds about right. Why not? Invent or invoke wings. I myself have been hoping to do both ever since. That’s a metaphor I can live with. I mean, really live with and get down with — or get up with, as it were. You invent by your own doing. You invoke by opening yourself up to what’s beyond you.

So here’s how you get your wings. Work really hard, think big thoughts, clear out the gunk and inhabit your story. Your story, not somebody else’s. That’s the inventing. While you’re at it, do some invoking. That’s the ancient muse part, the unexpected grace part, the mysterious part, the eureka part, the wow coda.

This badge grants you the power to invent & invoke wings. Flutter about with them for awhile and see where they’ll take you.

Want the badges? They’re yours! I’d love for you to follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my occasional emails because I’m hoping to build an empire here. I’ll have more badges soon — and stickers. (Stickers!)

Instructions:

1. Download your badges and revel in the moment. (Just right-click the image and save it onto your computer. Remember, the printing press wasn’t easy at first either.)

2. Print them out, or stash the files for a rainy day (or a foggy day or a sunny day or the next time you go horseback riding).

3. If printing, cut out each badge separately and affix to something using tape. Or laminate your favorite and keep it handy. Consider printing on cardstock or iron-on transfer paper or sticker paper (or stay in touch so you can buy a sticker from my shop soon, what?!).

4. Flash the badge at yourself or others as necessary to affirm your wild nature.