collective.aporia- blog - COLLECTIVE.APORIA

Aquarius Full Moon | 5 of Swords Reversed & 6 of Swords

7/23/2021

[Image credit: "Kyoto Red" by Trey Ratcliff is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

In the SoundCloud recording below, collective.aporia founder Shawnie Hamer gives a reading of today's Aquarius full moon in Leo, a tarot reading, and reads from CA Conrad's While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books).

*apo- press · July 2021: Aquarius Full Moon in Leo | 5 & 6 of Swords

Tarot Reading | 5 of Swords Rev. & 6 of Swords

Recording Script:

full_moon_reading-_july_23.pdf
File Size:	60 kb
File Type:	pdf

Other references:
Chani Nicholas
Sarah Vrba
Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack
Rider-Waite Tarot
Mary El Tarot

About the Author

Shawnie Hamer (she/her) was born in the heat & dust of Bakersfield, CA. Her first book, the stove is off at home (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) is an experimental art & poetry book curated through a community ritual that focused on the identification & exorcism of trauma. Hamer is the founder of collective.aporia, & a co-conspirator of the off.collective. She proudly received her MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where she was able to befriend the most inspiring group of artists she's ever met. Her writing can most recently be found in publications such as More Revolutionary Letters: A Tribute to Diane de Prima, Entropy Mag, South Broadway Ghost Society & Tiny Spoon Lit Mag.

From Our Facilitators: Close / Bond / Hold: Proximities and Enclosures in English by Honora Spicer

7/22/2021

[Image credit: "Bound" by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0]

Close, bond, hold. What do you think of when you hear these words? What positions do you picture your body taking? Or perhaps, how do you picture another body in relation to your own? These are each words that have to do with ways that we move our bodies. In investigating histories of enclosure of common land, I became curious about a series of words in English which speak to many scales of proximity, from the position of our bodies through to actions of the state.

Enclosure can be defined as, “the action of converting pieces of common land into private property.” Close is a Middle English word which came from Old French and Latin, meaning, "Of proximity in space, time, form or state. The primary notion is that of having intervening space or spaces closed up, whereby the parts are in immediate contact with each other or near each other" (A.II.). This is a word that has to do with how bodies move and are positioned.

I love this next definition, which has a poetic quality. This is straight from the Oxford English Dictionary: "As near as can be, very near. Especially with stand, sit, lie, stick, cling, keep, hold, press, etc. or with verbs of motion, as come, bring, etc." (B.1.). In Scottish, close has been used to mean constantly (ie. close in time), another proximity between a place and a time word.

A ‘close’ as a noun has also been used to describe delineated, confined land (n.1). When we look at the history of close as a verb, to enclose becomes a very different side of this grouping of meanings. "To shut up in a building; to seclude, imprison" (v.2.a.), to restrict movement, to come to an end, to encompass, shut up (3.a.). The very first definition of close as a verb, I. 1. a., "To stop up (an opening or channel) so that it ceased to be open or to allow of passage. Where the opening is provided with a gate, door or lid, turning on hinges or sliding, to close the opening."

This word circles connections in English between divisions in space and divisions in time. To close is a conclusion, termination; closing of a speech/ argument, conclusion of a musical phrase, setting in of darkness/ night (n.2.). I'm fascinated by all these intersections between this word which has connotations of intimacy and proximity, and also connotations of being 'bound' (v.4).

That led me directly to another word that likewise straddles meanings between intimacy in English and boundary: the word ‘bond.’ One of the most recent definitions added to the dictionary in 1993 defines uses in psychology in the 1970s: 7.b. "To form an emotional or psychological bond with a person (especially one's child) or social group." A much earlier definition of bond, which this social and psychological definition draws from metaphorically, is "To bind or connect together (bricks, stones, or different parts of a structure) by making one overlap and hold to another, so as to give solidity to the whole" (n.1.a). As a noun, some minor meanings are a covenant between two or more persons (n.8.b.), in English law: a deed which binds the obligor to pay a sum of money (III.9.a.), and it's also used as "A metallic connection between conductors forming part of an electric circuit" (n.13.d.). This sense of affiliation, and a sense of completion through connection.

Again, when we go to the primary meaning of this noun, we find the oldest usage of all. "Anything with which one's body or limbs are bound in restraint of personal liberty; a shackle, chain, fetter, manacle" (n.1. I. 1. a.). An 1804 book, Animal Biography, included the line, "As soon as the parts of the animal, within the shell of the chrysalis, have acquired strength sufficient to break the bonds that surround it." Bond becomes this natural or unnatural casing and restraint— confinement, imprisonment, custody. In Milton's 1667 Paradise Lost, there's a line "to endure Exile...or bonds, or pain," bond taking a parallel construction to pain.

In a figurative sense, bond is "any circumstance that trammels or takes away freedom of action; a force which enslaves the mind through the affections or passion" (n.II.5.) and at the same time is "A uniting or cementing force or influence by which a union of any kind is maintained" (n.II.7.a.). I think this is essential to our understanding of how English has been used and formed as a language of conquest. Each of these words is indicating a fissure within language. Words relating to intimacy and interdependence take the same shape within our mouths as words relating to confinement, and the imperative of separation.

In 1690, John Locke wrote in an Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "Speech being the great Bond that holds Society together." In this sense, what I hear is speech as this bond, this intimacy, this closeness, and possible conveyance, as well as this enclosure and limitation that is used as a mechanism of restraint.

It's within this territory that I hear certain contemporary documentary poets working, through engaging techniques that identify language-enclosures, hearing underlying doublings, and re-ordering proximities. Poet Layli Long Soldier describes the poem Whereas, which redacts and intervenes the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans: "I removed from that national document...its hold on our spiritual life, our beliefs" (quoted in Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument). Here, another word arises in the mode of close and bond— the hold.

Bond, bondage, and hold are words that have deep roots in the US nation state as being utilized to describe many forms of confinement. As David Neimon says in a Between the Covers interview with Long Soldier, her work is making "a space in language for unlanguageable things,” and indicating ways in which words held in the wrong spaces and the wrong mouths can be appropriated violently. Documentary poetry offers ways into and beyond noticing these language-enclosures, in seeking means of holding words differently, removing them from a hold.

Sign up for Honora's upcoming August Workshop
Unsettlement and Resurrection: A Word Laboratory

Asynchronous | Online | $40 | Made for all

About the Author

Honora Spicer is an experiential educator, poet and translator. She holds a BA from Oxford University in English Literature & History, and an MA from Harvard University in Early Modern History. She teaches an online and experiential course in Place-based United States History centered on the question 'How do we know where we are and when we are?' She has designed and led expeditionary learning programs, teaching college-accredited courses in literature, history, and Spanish language while mountain biking, mountaineering, and paddling. She currently teaches history at El Paso Community College. Her writing and translations have been published or are upcoming in Asymptote, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, and Latin American Literature Today.

From Our Facilitators: It Begins With Architecture by Angelica Maria Barraza

7/15/2021

[Image Credit: "Urban Nature and Tree Shadows" by cobalt123 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

Six summers ago, in a workshop with Fred Moten, I was introduced to a slender red book titled Architecture After Revolution. It’s collaboratively written by the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), and was not only the first book I’d ever read with multiple authors but also the first that had a distinct feel to it. Like it emerged not from multiple competing minds but from a stream of conversations amongst comrades, nightly revisited in various permutations at the dinner table, or sitting on the porch looking up at the moon, who stood united in a shared vision of utopia. And while utopias are notoriously fickle, they nonetheless index sites of possibility: if only things were different, if only x and y ceased to exist and we re-learned how to be with each other; what if x was never invented or discovered; how else might I, might we, proceed?

Architecture After Revolution creatively imagines ways of re-entering and utilizing spaces in ways that do not reaffirm state power. It sets forth a series of propositions on how to go about the formidable task of decolonizing architecture. In the process it repurposes, subverts, profanes, and counter-configures already existing buildings and locations and turns them into something else, something that doesn’t work for the state (Israel) but instead supports a new way forward for the people (Palestinians). And it isn’t just about buildings and monuments, it’s about inhabiting space--and the world--in alternative, equitable, and community-driven ways.

After reading it I began looking around and really noticing my environment for the first time. I lived in a highly-curated, majority white upper-middle class urban area on unceded land previously inhabited by the Hinono'eiteen (Arapahoe Nation). I walked on master planned sidewalks and bike paths, worked at a university that had covered up serious cases of sexual assault, and purchased groceries from giant supermarkets where the US global exploitation of land, labor, a resources was invisibilized by savvy marketing and exoticized packaging (“Super Food of the Andes”). Once I started paying attention I couldn’t stop noticing the ways in which so much of my life was under direction. For example, have you ever noticed how many trash cans there are? They’re outside in parks, at bus stops, in parking lots, in every building and bathroom and library and café. It’s so normal, so completely and utterly banal and convenient to produce massive amounts of trash. Mass consumption and the mindless production of waste are built into our infrastructure. It’s a part of the architectural design.

There are things you can't un-notice once you make up your mind to see them. All the subtle, invisibilized ways in which our lives are directed by our environments, by the spatial details and design, are overwhelming. It feels inescapable, like architecture is closing in on us, dulling our senses.

And yet--

DAAR is not working alone. Architecture After Revolution does not exist in a vacuum. There is a movement, a community--a community of movement--invested in reimaging how we relate to one another and the planet through reimagining how we relate to space. It begins with architecture and ripples outward. It trickles up. And right now it’s largely speculative because impossible is a thing you think through in order to arrive at something other than what has for too long passed as real.

Sign up for Angelica Maria's upcoming August Workshop
Speculative Architectures

Asynchronous | Online | $40 | Made for all

About the Author

Angelica Maria Barraza is a poet, interventionist, queerdo, bruja, lover. She is a PhD candidate in English Literature (UCR) where she studies the intersection of race, gender, and poetic form. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and currently teaches writing and literature at UC Riverside and the University of Redlands. She is the author of the chapbook Dreams the Water Gave Me, and her work is forthcoming or published in Jacket2, Cipactli, Bombay Gin, among others. When she is not reading, writing, or thinking about reading or writing, she can be found wandering outside with her pup at golden hour, a thermos of tea in hand.

Capricorn Full Moon | 7 of Cups Reversed

6/24/2021

[Image credit: "water fire earth man" by irisomnibus is licensed under CC BY 2.0]

I want to write of origin. But how does one adequately speak about something so monumental? So subjective & unique? We all have our own beginnings, our own associations with this word, origin. Some of us might attribute our creation linearly, or by our birth in this life. Some of us might see it as when our souls first arrived, lifetimes & universes ago. No matter your take on the subject, no matter your personal associations, I think we can all agree that our beginning often sways the paths we take, how we form, what stays with us as we move into the world.

But does it need to? Does our origin need to dictate the self?

There are two major etymological meanings of the word origin. The first is as described above. From the Latin originem meaning, "a rise, commencement, beginning, source; descent, lineage, birth.” However, from the Sanskrit iyarti, it means "to set in motion, move." To begin/to move. To birth/to reimagine.

It is in the tension between these two meanings of origin that we find today’s Full Capricorn Moon in Cancer.

As of the Summer Solstice on June 20th, we are in Cancer season. Cancer is cardinal water, and can very easily be interpreted as a mothering feminine energy. The crab’s deep waters can at once soothe and unnerve. Can mimic the motions of the womb and the unnerving overwhelm of swimming alone in the ocean.

On the other hand, Capricorn, our steadfast cardinal earth sign, radiates the fathering masculine. It can tenderly guide or harshly discipline. It can ground us in inspiration and responsibility, or crush all creativity under a rockslide of micromanagement.

As I’ve mentioned in other offerings, every sign has a shadow. And none of these energies operate in a binary. The described manifestations of masculinity and femininity can happen simultaneously, cyclically, etc. Capricorn and Cancer don’t need to represent the heteronormative mother/father duality or family, either. But what they can represent is the tension and collaboration between mothering and fathering that we hold within ourselves.

I also want to say that many of us don’t embrace, or maybe even know, all or parts of our origin story. Sometimes working with our beginnings, or even our child selves, can be harmful or painful. I’ve said it before, and I’ll echo it again here: please don’t go anywhere you can’t come back from.

What I do believe this Full Capricorn Moon in Cancer is gifting us is a moment to gain clarity, and perhaps even acceptance, around our origin. Not so that we can remain in the past, but so we can channel it towards the other embedded energy within origin: to set something in motion.

What are ways we can re-learn or reimagine our inner parenting in order to achieve fulfillment?

What parts of your origin, your lineage, need to be left behind? What can be brought with you?

What definitions of mother/father or masculine/feminine need to be broken or expanded within you so that you feel fully held by your inner parent?

How can our origin become both a space for reprieve and a launch pad for passion?

Tarot Reading | 7 of Cups Reversed

This card in this position speaks to the true power and motion that can arise when the Cancer/Capricorn energies come together in harmony.

Upright, this card is about being stuck in fantasies, dreams, or emotions without a course of action to make them a reality. Reversed, however, we find our path out of fantasyland, not by shrugging dreams off as immaterial, but by embracing them as possible. By embracing the authenticity and ancient wisdom of our emotions/fantasies (Cancer) alongside our action-oriented, grounded self (Capricorn), there’s no stopping us. The actions we set in motion find footing internally and externally. And by doing so, we learn more about our true origins. As Marie White, creator of Mary El Tarot, writes of the wolf shown on this card:

The forest is reality. It is dense and alive, growing and changing. There are many ways through it. There is a well-worn path, tended to and passed down from our ancestors and society. We can take this path with relative ease; or, we can create our own path through the forest, the one that is best to reach our highest potential as an individual human being.

This wolf is the one you meet when you go off the path. He is your own animal self. Wild, passionate, and dangerous, he isn’t tamed and ‘well bred,’ he is majestic and natural. It is such a difficulty for people to balance the beastly and the civilized nature in themselves, but done, it can be channeled into greatness.

Accepting our watery, moon-soaked, wild origins; accepting the grounding of experience, the one that can only be gained by purposefully leaving aspects behind us--this is what allows us to clearly see, maybe even for the first time, not just a path, but our path.

Bibliomancy | “Girl in her Dreamings and Girl in her Hair” | pg. 38 from Some girls walk into the country they are from by Sawako Nakayasu

The mistake is in both belief and memory. At that Girl H lies down flat she is like that. On the bed, she sinks in. In the street, she gets run over. Over a body—body of water—her hair spreads, largest and smallest as a convergent point burned by the unbearable light. Her dreamings do not fracture, they leach slowly into the water, the street, the sheets. Even more slowly, they are welcomed or rejected based on their color. When she catches on to what is happening, she takes to hiding her dreamings, in her hair. Her hair goes long, longer, all the better to hide more and more believings.

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From Our Facilitators | Have Snakes, Need Birds: An Interview with Travis Klempan

6/15/2021

Buy Have Snakes, Need Birds here

Shawnie Hamer (SH): Alright, let's jump in! Where did the idea for Have Snakes, Need Birds come from? This project took 7 years, right? What iterations did it take over that time? How were you able to decide the paths it would take?

Travis Klempan (TK): Instead of having an idea for a story and then building it out, I had a single line that grew into a story. Eight years ago I was dating someone who said (after seeing a clip of Atticus Finch in the movie adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird claim that all mockingbirds do is “sing their hearts out”) “Harper Lee is full of shit.” She told me that, where she grew up, mockingbirds were the hooligans of the bird world, tearing into dumpsters and throwing garbage around.

For some reason, that image and that line stuck with me. (For the record, I don’t think she actually thought Harper Lee was full of shit): the image of mockingbirds feasting on a dumpster, probably somewhere in the American South. I started turning that line over and over in my head and finally saw someone watching the birds, perhaps throwing pebbles at the dumpster to set them to flight. I asked myself why he’d be doing that, and the answer was “Wasting time.” Who waits around more than young soldiers waiting to go off to war . . . and that was the kernel around which the rest of the story grew.

For a year or so before that summer, I’d tried writing other stuff, off and on, but nothing felt big enough or promising enough to explore further. Who was this guy, I wondered. What was John’s role in the world? Who were the people around him? I started seeing things that fit together into a story. I attended Riot Fest that fall and saw this young man—named John Carter at the time—at a similarly weird music festival. His name changed to John Mackenzie based on a song I heard on the radio; other characters came and went, consolidated or split apart on the page; and the two malicious forces in the story came from misheard words.
The structure changed, but not significantly. It was always going to take about a year or little less on the page. Some of the dynamics changed pretty substantially, though. I tried it as first-person and it never seemed to work, especially as I met these other characters and realized I needed to get in their heads to really tell the story. I changed some names to avoid confusion (and in one case to introduce it, intentionally) for the reader, and excised entire substories and secondary narratives. There’s still a lot of that in there, those sorts of side quests (to borrow a phrase) that I think not only help illuminate and demonstrate character but can also just be diversionary and fun.

In response to receiving these interview questions I went back and looked at a lot of my saved material. I don’t know if it’s my natural inclination or being so enamored of the notion of the archive from my time at Naropa, but I tend to keep a lot of stuff related to my writing . . . not just notes (I have entire spreadsheets with dates and calendars to keep things straight, like what night a full moon would have occurred in 2007, or when was sunset in Baghdad in December) but also drafts, at least when they make significant changes. Some of the older drafts showed John as brutally cynical, very bitter, and I realized at one point I didn’t want to show another disgruntled soldier in a stereotypical war narrative. I think that was the biggest change, breaking away from the typical combat story of young man going off to war.

Introducing (or uncovering, revealing, excavating) the supernatural elements really opened up the book. I don’t think I went so far as to assign blame for violence on the two malevolent forces (Moonlit Samuel and taliment), but I kept circling back to this idea of stories and storytelling, that speaking stories can bring them into existence, and that kind of magic has consequences. So in some ways maybe it’s ultimately a book about stories.

SH: What was your writing process for this book? Tell us about your rituals.

TK: I loved writing the lion’s share of this book in public spaces. I think there was an element of accountability, even if the people in the coffee shops didn’t know what I was doing. I also wrote or rewrote sections while on trains and planes, and during visits to see family in other states.
I also listened to music almost constantly while writing. Often it would be background instrumental or atmospheric stuff—lots of classical music—but I kept a playlist of songs that connected either directly or indirectly to the action and the characters: who was listening to what, and when, or music that amplified the feeling of a scene. As an example, I must have played “Host of Seraphim” by Dead Can Dance a couple hundred times, it felt like, to get into the proper mood for a couple of key scenes.

Editing and revising was a whole other story. I think I had the major bones of the book within a year or so, but fleshing that out, getting it to work right, I went through lots of major changes, and each time something like the POV or the tense or plot would change, then I’d have to go back through and make sure everything still connected.

Even after having the book published, I think I’m going to hang on to all these old documents and drafts . . . it’s kind of fun to go digging through the discarded heaps of my personal archive!

SH: What were you most afraid of and/or excited about in writing this book?

TK: A lot of things were on my mind as I wrote. I wanted to get a lot of the technical aspects right, or as close as I could without inundating the reader with jargon and minutiae, so that it still rang true to people who were in the military generally and in the Army specifically. I didn’t want to glorify war by any means, but I did want to convey the exhilaration that comes from high-intensity situations (without specifically leading the reader down one path to a conclusion or another). I also wanted it to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. I think a lot of military fiction can be esoteric or inscrutable to civilian audiences, and sometimes intentionally so, and if the book couldn’t connect with readers outside the military or veteran world, then that would have been a failure, in my mind. (Luckily I’ve had positive reactions from both sides of the bridge.) What was probably the most difficult, though, in terms of wanting to get something as true on the page as I could, was writing characters whose identities I did not share—specifically, a lot of the soldiers are not straight white men, and there are a few women in this book who are critical to the story. I wanted to make sure none of them were caricatures, which is where I think my focus on dialogue helped. How we speak is often a reflection of how we think (even when there’s a disconnect between the two), and so I paid attention to how people spoke, not just in terms of diction or lexicon, but the cadences, the intentions, and the tenor of how people spoke, and how they spoke differently to different people. This was at least an entryway into portraying as authentically as possible people beyond what some might consider the stereotypical American soldier. Some of those characters were my favorite people in the book, so what was difficult became exciting.

SH: If you could impart one piece of advice to our collective members writing a novel, what would it be?

TK: Have at it. Take chances and risk failure. I sent out a lot of my chapters as short stories, whether to small presses or journals or as writing samples, and the feedback I got was formative and helpful. A lot of it was revealing, though, that the story as a whole was still under-developed.

Take a section and rework it by changing something major, something like POV or tense or perspective. Write a flashback, write an action scene, strip it down to dialogue, take out all the dialogue. I have a whole set of background knowledge of the story, including things that never appear on the page, that helps inform and guide what gets written.

Show it off and share it. I sent other pieces and even the whole thing to some mentors and colleagues and again, their responses helped shape the final product. I read it aloud to my girlfriend (now wife) . . . even if you don’t read it aloud to someone, try reading the whole thing aloud.

That’s a lot of little pieces of advice I guess, so the big one is: take risks with your writing and your writing process.

SH: What do you know about the publishing world/process now that you didn’t know before?

TK: There are multiple paths to getting a book out into the world, so the definition of publishing seems to be broader than what is now called “traditional publishing.” I queried for years—agents who said they worked with veterans, small presses accepting unsolicited manuscripts, contests and universities—and got some really nice feedback, beyond the standard form rejection, most often something like “The writing is good and the story sounds interesting, we’re just not the right agent/press/person for it.” I would go through phases of querying like mad and then getting disappointed until something prompted me to get going again. In the last (and obviously successful) round, I found a place that bills itself as a “hybrid publisher,” which seems like a step up from self-publishing (in terms of streamlining a lot of the services) but a step below the traditional route (in terms of payments, contracts, agents, that kind of stuff). One thing I appreciated going with the hybrid was my level of control over the content and final product. I’ve heard that traditional publishing can change a lot of the pieces, including the title (and I’m glad I got to keep my title—I love it!), so was happy that I got to be as involved as I was. The cover design also turned out great, through a combination of a collaborative process and an online poll.

I think what I’m getting at is: determine what your goal in getting your book into the world is. If it’s to have something you can hold onto or put on a shelf or in a bag, there are lots of options, but you have to be clear about what your choice offers and what it doesn’t. Marketing and promotion is almost entirely on me (as it is on anyone who self-publishes, too), so my sales are never going to be through the roof. Creative control never really got out of my hands, but a lot of the technical stuff like formatting and cover wraps was handled by professionals.

Sign up for Travis' upcoming July workshop
Geography and Ecology: Writing the Landscape

"We inhabit a world at once hostile to and necessary for our survival. This has been true for generations, but ours is a time of acceleration and disintegration. Where do we find the oases on our journey? What lives in the caves and oceans and forests around us? What do we do when the compasses and maps were inherited are no longer useful?"

About the Author

Travis Klempan is a Navy veteran and fiction writer living in Colorado. His novel Have Snakes, Need Birds (from Koehler Press) explores war, magic, and love through the eyes of the land and its storytellers.

Meditation & Ritual Offering: Full Moon & Lunar Eclipse in Sagittarius

5/26/2021

*apo- press · Full Moon Ritual/Mediation May 2021

[Image credit: Pinterest]

Recording Script:

The following ritual coincides with the themes of this Sagittarius Full Moon and lunar eclipse in Gemini, as well as other planetary placements occurring right now. Please remember when working with shadow energy that deep, and sometimes ancient traumas, can arise. As my dear friend Sarah Richards Graba once said, don’t go anywhere you can’t come back from. My hope is this ritual helps you to explore yourself and your creativity in an expansive way. May it feed you, may it hold you.

Blessed full moon, dear ones.

Unseen MagicCollect your (creative) tools. Create your collective circle. Find a quiet place, ideally one that gives you the warm and fuzzies. That makes you feel safe. Tell yourself: I feel safe.

Place your items around you and call in those you’d like to protect you during this work. This can be ancestors, friends, loved ones, gods, and it can also be elements, such as lighting a candle in honor of Sagittarius’ adventurous fire.

Close your eyes and count backwards from 26, the date of this illuminous event. Take a deep breath with each number, and begin to check into your body. Send love and attention to the tight or nervous places. Send gratitude to the places that are grounding you.

Once you reach zero, ask yourself these questions: where do my beliefs come from, especially the ones about myself? Where were they built? Who helped build them?

Try to imagine the location, the temple that created your beliefs. Maybe it’s a home, a church, a school, a city, a sanctuary. If you’re having difficulty finding a location to explore, construct one to your liking.

Who is in this place? How do they move within it? How do you move around them?

What items are in this place? Old photos? Trinkets? Your grandmother’s necklace? Identify the things that have been collected.

What object do you gravitate to naturally? Choose this item. Hold it in your hand. Examine it. What message does this object give you about your beliefs, about the beliefs you have of yourself?

Now take this object to one of the people here. Ask them the same questions: What message does this object give me about my beliefs, about the beliefs you have of me?

Listen carefully. Don’t cling to the answer. Not all ancestors or people in our lives have our best interest at heart. Simply notice where the two messages, the one from the object and the one from the person intersect, collide, or deviate.

Thank the person for the message. Take a deep breath, and find the door. Yes, there is a door here. You notice it is unlike other doors. It is a portal, it is magic, it is made so only you can go through it.

Open the door and step through. You're now in the same space as before, but inversed, inverted. The unseen aspects of the space are now visible to you, like the upside down. Like the veil has lifted.

What can you see now that you could see before? Now that the people are gone, what space has been made?

Now that you're in this place, without performance, without confusion, take the object and place it in your belly. Ask it once more: What is the true message you have for me? About my beliefs, about the beliefs I have of myself, without shame, without guilt.

Listen carefully. When complete, thank the object and remove it from your body. You don't need the extra weight. Set it down on a special place in this room. Know you can always come back to it, to this place of the unseen.

When you’re ready, start to wiggle your fingers and toes. Check in with your senses to help you return to your circle. What do you hear? What do you smell? What do you taste? What do you feel?

Open your eyes and grab your creative materials. Document the places, the messages, the people, in any way that first comes to mind. The first thought is the best thought.

Trust your instincts. You are full of unseen magic.

Being Inside with Karen Light | Part III: Hold On or Let Go?

5/6/2021

[Image credit: Karen Light]

When is it time to keep ahold of an idea and see it through and when is it time to detach and let go?

I thought I finished a painting. Then, a week later, I painted over the whole thing and basically started from scratch.

I found the flow state here and there, but mostly hit a lot of bumps in the road. There is this “click” that happens when a piece is finished and I heard nothing. I couldn’t figure it out. So, eventually, after a lot of trying, I decided to just not finish it for now and move on.

Perhaps you are a parent or you have worked with/been around lots of kids like I have. If so, bring to mind a teenager. There is an outcome that you really want for them and you try to steer them down paths that will lead them to it. But they are on to you, resisting and rejecting every suggestion you make.

You could continue this power struggle (Who hasn’t tried this many times before?!) or you could take a deep breath and let go. You could ask them what they want and how they want to get there. Then, you might start to see things clicking in their minds. Your genuine curiosity and willingness to let go was all it took for them to do the work on their own.

Ever have that experience? Well this is sort of what happened with my painting.

I detached from what I needed it to be. I didn’t even need it to be finished! In fact, I went into my studio to clean everything up and reset the space for a new project.

As I cleaned up, my painting suddenly started telling me what it wanted. (Actually, it was probably doing this the whole time, but I wasn’t open to hearing its ideas since I was so attached to my own…) What it wanted was so strong that I stopped cleaning, got out some paint again and it practically finished itself!

It wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be, but it clicked! I felt quite satisfied as I enjoyed the surprising path and destination. After all, much of the point of making art for me is to be brought to new places!

Are you banging your head against the wall trying to get into the flow or make something work? Are you constantly trying to figure it out versus enjoying the process? If so, you can watch this short video to help you determine if you need to detach and steps to help you let go.

What new and exciting places might your creativity bring you to if you detach and get curious?

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Karen Light is an Artist/Illustrator and a Creative Coach at Studio Light Illustration. She is passionate about healing and nurturing the creative spirit. Empowered creatives change their worlds as well as the world and have a lot of fun doing it! Bring your creativity out to play with us during our next Creative Wisdom Doodle-Shop! Want a more individualized approach? Fill out the Creative Journey Roadmap Assessment.

Scorpio Full Moon | 6 of Swords

4/27/2021

[Image Credit: Shawnie Hamer]

Where in your life are you being too polite (with yourself)?

One of my favorite Scorpio poets, Samiya Bashir, once said during a reading at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program: politeness is a form of self-denial.

Notice your shoulders, now. Notice what binaries you gravitate to upon hearing this. Polite/rude is not a two-sided coin. It is a prism. Politeness is a multifaceted construction, built on many things, but the biggest being power. There are many forms of politeness that exclude—genders, races, classes. There are forms of politeness that even oppress, that tell us we have to perform in a certain way to be accepted or even loved.

And our relationship with ourselves is not impervious to these constructions.

Politeness is often rooted in deception and inauthenticity. Most of all, when it comes to ourselves, it is often rooted in fear. We paint on a smile and say, I’m fine, thank you, when everything inside is saying otherwise. We are terrified to wear our complexities, our edges, even our joys or desires, because it might not be received.

What if we gave ourselves permission to be impolite, not mean or harsh, but completely honest. Outside of performance, outside of expectations?

Scorpios have a reputation of being sharp or severe with their honesty, but this is just the shadow side of this sign. Scorpios are also incredibly loving and supportive with their honesty. They can help you see things buried under the debris with new eyes. But the truth is, we often aren’t ready to see or hear this kind of honesty, because it challenges us to fully step into ourselves, to fully love ourselves the way we know deep down we deserve.

I watched a film last night called Spotlight, and at one point, Liev Schreiber’s character says, “I think it’s important to remember that we are stumbling around in the dark. And when the lights come on, it’s easy to assign blame.”

This Scorpio full moon asks us to switch on the lights within ourselves. To look at the ways we dole out blame, which is to say, how we give away our power to others. To search the room and identify what brings us pain, what triggers us, what brings us delight. Where in the room do you desire to be? What do you want to do there?

And most importantly, this moon asks us to see the room for what it really is: a safe place. This is our room and we have the power there. We don’t need to say we’re okay if we’re not. Here, we don’t have to pretend. We can simply be. Is there a better, more freeing feeling that exists?

Give some space to this tender, honest full moon to shed the weight of politeness. Be truly honest with yourself and others. Only you have the agency to go inside this room, to curate it, to clean out the things that do not serve.

And as you go through this process, always come back to this affirmation: Love will not leave me for simply being who I am.

Love will not leave me for simply being who I am.

And with this mantra, and with the vulnerability of this full moon, feel your body begin to shed the weight.

Tarot Reading | 6 of Swords

[ Mary El Tarot ]

The 6 of Swords is a card of quiet transformation, of looking within to find the places of grief and pain that we’ve been forced to accept. These pains have often been with us for so long that we have adapted ourselves around them. And though they do not sink our ships or cause us to fall apart, they do weigh us down.

To me, this harkens back to our room. If we can calmly begin mourning and letting go of these pains that have grown like wily roots in the corners of our heart’s chambers, we can start to see new light fill in through the windows. As Rachel Pollack writes of this card, “The Six of Swords is a Gate. Looking at it with sensitivity and then entering the picture will produce first a quieting effect on the mind and then later, slowly, a sense of movement within the self” (pg. 223).

This self-exploration and honesty doesn’t need to be rushed, nor does it need to happen only for this full moon. Give yourself the space and time to make this journey with reverence. The key is to gently create a shift, a movement, and to clear out the stagnancy that politeness often fabricates.

Happy spring cleaning, dear ones.

Bibliomancy | “Carnot Cycle” by Samiya Bashir

Only sometimes does homegrown bedrock glow moneygreen.
     Sometimes rock whines mommy. Sometimes rock coos baby.
     Sometimes rock calls late with the mortgage. Sometimes rock
     knits shoulder blades right where you can’t pluck.

Early mornings something doesn’t sit right over the sink. Sits crooked.
     Slumps askew. Body doesn’t lay the way you left it. Squinting gets
     you nowhere. You squat to the floor and feel around. Stop. Smell
     for it. Shrug. Still some dangling something modifies you.
     Smackdab midchest you feel lumpy empty. Sniff. Sniff.

Shrug.

Like those days we grab our own pickaxes and head down to the
    mine. We hum worksongs. We sing hymns. We chip worry stone.
    We gather moss. We lie flat. We scratch at the mineshaft. Not
     toward exit but deeper to the core.

Source: Poetry Foundation

From Our Facilitators: Are my desires my own or am I drowning? Two dispatches from a soft place by Emily Marie Passos Duffy

4/5/2021

[Image credit: Emily Marie Passos Duffy ]

about the author:

Emily Marie Passos Duffy is a poet, writer, and performing artist. Her works explore longing, labor, censorship, and spatial identity. A 2020 finalist for the Noemi Press Book Award and a finalist of the 2020 Inverted Syntax Sublingua Prize for Poetry, she was also named a 2020 Disquiet International Luso-American Fellow. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in 2018. Her ongoing community collaborations include work with Writers Warehouse, Boulder Burlesque, and Tart Parlor. She is currently rebounding from her breakup with higher-ed, working on a chapbook of strip club ephemera and a full-length poetry manuscript. You can receive monthly missives from her here: https://duffylala.substack.com/

Sign up for Emily's Workshop:

May 2021- Writing Desire into these Walls w/ Emily Marie Passos Duffy

$40.00

Being Inside with Karen Light | Part II: Follow the Breadcrumbs

4/2/2021

[Image Credit: Karen Light]

Sometimes I get these headaches from literally trying to figure everything out all the way through. Have you ever experienced that?

It is a clear indication that I must let go of the reins a bit, which is especially difficult for me to do when I am really excited about a big vision, either for my art or for my creative company. I just want to dig in there and work out all the steps and see the path laid out before me in one clear linear line…

But then my head starts spinning or my eyes start crossing or suddenly I notice I have been scrunching my face for a while and I have gone too far.

I was having one of these moments and I decided to do one of the cards from my new Creative Wisdom Doodle Deck! The card is called 'Move Mountains' and I chose it because I felt like I wanted to do it all, but was limited by time and energy.

As I doodled, the image that emerged was me following little breadcrumbs on the ground.

The message that arose as I contemplated the image was that all I need to do is follow one breadcrumb at a time. Sure, I can hold the big vision! I can use it to be energized and excited! But if I was given everything I had to do to achieve it now, it would only lead to burn out and possible failure. And frankly, there would be little joy in the process.

Instead, the practice is to trust that the piece of clarity I have right now is enough. That taking action on that clarity is the only next step I need to do. And, when this clarity is present, I need to trust that I can handle it, even if it is outside of my comfort zone and a little scary.

Each little breadcrumb is helping me to build the confidence, the skills, and the ideas that will help me to see the next breadcrumb. And, one by one, they will take me on a surprisingly meaningful and creatively adventurous path towards my vision.

Where are you trying to figure it all out? What happens when you just look for the next breadcrumb?

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Karen Light is an Artist/Illustrator and a Creative Coach. She is passionate about healing and nurturing the creative spirit. Empowered creatives change their worlds as well as the world and have a lot of fun doing it! Have fun with her and other creative minds as they all find the next breadcrumbs on their creative path in the upcoming Creative Wisdom Doodle-Shop on April 15.

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