Considering the nature of my life as it is: a series of moments, only occasionally written by the time on a clock face, but more often punctuated and defined by the urges of bodies: mealtimes, the feeding and watering and playing with of animals and children, naptimes and sexual encounters and physical touch and sometimes the settling down and reading of a book or indulgence in art or film or dancing. The ecstasy of simplicity, of doing what bodies ask of us, of doing what the land asks of us, its parched tongue caressing our worn hands. The walking of food to a neighbor, the kind of grief and acknowledgement of need and sickness and the days of our lives intertwined with the cycles of this shifting, rolling earth. The kneading of dough and the movement of water, acts of humility: contact with one another's skin and fur and feathers, with one another's sustenance and perspiration and hot breath and excretions. The breaking down of one into all, of all into many moving parts, of breezes and shadows and sunset and parasite life cycles. The rising of all like performers -- synchronous and slow -- in this grand dance of existence in all its demands and guiltless wanting, in all of its perfect splendor, in all of its grace. The setting of all simultaneously ruled by the Sun: the children to bed, the birds to roost, the dog to patrol and then to sleep, the breeze shifting and calming as though tired and making way for brilliant stars.
So much of our culture inspires or at times requires us to relate to ourselves and the world around us purely through a lens of conflict:
Whose side are you on?
It insists that there is no nuance, that you are either on the right or the wrong side. It insists that the disengagement from these infinite wars will lead to certain death, that it makes you complicit, that you cannot be good unless you perpetuate the psychological warfare perpetuated against you against the very people you are supposed to be standing up for. This, it says, is the only way to truly be good.
You are constantly at war, it says, with every externality you can think of: you are at war with everyone and everything you can imagine. The price of losing is death. It tells you that they are going to kill you. It tells you that it is going to kill you.
There are no draft dodgers here: to be accepted into society you absolutely must pick a side. The people who claim allyship with you will turn around and ostracize you in an instant if you don't, and then you will have no allies, no friends, no support. The cost is isolation. There are no pacifists, we must all determine who we are in the face of never ending conflict, and who we are is defined by whose side we are on.
So whose side are you on? Huh? Are you a good person or a bad, evil person?
Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps the only thing you really need to be fighting is your own lack of awareness? That regardless of how much you yell, or banter, or argue, or insist that you are GOOD, god damnit! you will do nothing but perpetuate the systemic failures that you claim so vehemently to be against unless you first recognize that everything is a mirror reflecting itself? And like that long, illusory hallway created by two mirrors reflecting one another, the ramifications of culture stretch from the macro to the micro, infinitely into the distance, but that it is the very same thing reflected the whole way down? That rather than believe the lie that disengagement is complicity, that you might have to recognize that engagement and perpetuating these never-ending conflicts is the complicity you fear taking accountability for?
Our culture insists we must take a side -- the easy choice. Stomping your feet at the edge of the trench and claiming you believe in the right things is much easier than getting into the trench and doing the work of doing the right things. In other words: our culture aims to absolve us of hard accountability through the perpetuation of constant psychological warfare that makes us feel better when we project it towards the next person but that leaves us ultimately unable and unwilling to look within ourselves and make critical changes where we are capable of making critical changes.
You are a victim in this unending psychological warfare that leaves you chronically stressed and stretched thin in an constantly emotionally reactive state, and yet you are also the abuser: the perpetrator of the crimes perpetrated against you, and on and on and on forever. You are a reflection of the reflection of the reflection. Just like any abuser with a trauma history that leads them to harm another, you ARE culpable for not taking the appropriate steps to recognize and reconcile your own patterns, and to find ways to cope that do no harm.
When you hold a lot of space and give a lot of energy, sometimes you end up finding that you're surrounded by people who require a lot of space and energy but who aren't capable (for one reason or another) or willing to hold that same space or give that same energy to you.
There is so much to community building that becomes so complicated, and everyone is unhealed in their own ways. Sometimes those ways are compatible with the ways in which you are unhealed: and you find that you are able to hold space for one another, mutually, and that the space you hold doesn't open up into wounds (or it does, but the very act of holding space becomes healing, less self-sacrifice than a pouring into one another). Sometimes, though, those spaces are incompatible, and the opening of space feels like the opening of wounds, and if not at first then after a time, as though something has rubbed you raw right down to the bone after the accumulation of each time you've let it touch you. Sometimes this is just a critical incompatibility, perhaps you aren't the right people to be in community with one another at this time. Sometimes it's the result of someone not being able to recognize the ways in which they demand. Boundary holding is so vital, but often leads to the triggering of maladaptive defenses and sometimes the ending of the relationship you were trying to preserve by setting the boundary in the first place. Some people advocate for boundary setting loudly, but are also the loudest to criticize you and claim you are abandoning or harming them when you do so.
The bringing together of people and the fostering of intersecting relationships requires time and effort and very careful communication and consideration, and is sometimes the rolling of a snowball gently towards the cusp of a hill: from there it flows so holistically and genuinely and easily, and these people find each other and fold each other into their nets and the shared net of the community. Sometimes it is Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill over and over again until eventually you realize that perhaps one or more of these nodes must exist in satellite to the whole, and will not or does not desire to integrate within it.
Right now I am tired, and feeling as though critical boundaries must be held. A few of the relationships I've spent the past months fostering are crumbling for their own reasons: one because the other person is determined to remain in a power position that I refuse to engage with any further (giving the benefit of the doubt has to stop at some point, but the loss of this relationship impacts more than just me, which is hard) and the other because boundary holding is causing the other person to feel abandoned. After weeks of holding space for this person through a crisis, at the very moment I need that space held this person is pushing away and yet dragging me towards them -- unwilling to hold space but still demanding mine. And I am just tired, and wondering what patterns exist that push me to continue to forge unequal relationships in my own life, or if this is just really how most people are.
Someone I recently met who studied under Buddhist monks put it this way:
"The only thing we can really control is how we relate to everything else."
When you choose to relate to everything around you in conflict, when you choose to relate to the world as its victim, you inevitably become a void. You accept a station that was not given to you, but that you've given to yourself. You accept a mindset of eternal war: war with yourself, war with others, war with community, war with society.
I find myself less and less on here, because this once positive space of learning and shared ideas has, for some reason, devolved into voids. Voids of self-appointed victimhood, of constant warring with everything, everyone. I find myself more and more particular about the people I allow into my space, because even some people I find very dear are voids, and I am very sensitive to it, and because I am still learning how to create the appropriate psychic boundaries. Because I am, also, prone to becoming a void, and because if I spend too much time in others' I tend to then create one myself, and I want to choose not to allow myself this.
It's harder for many of us to choose the alternative: to relate to the world as its beneficiary, as a responsible steward of it, as a crucial moving part of it, even when it sometimes wrongs us; to relate to others with compassion and empathy and appropriate boundaries rather than constant conflict. It's easy to choose neural feedback loops of cortisol and adrenaline -- it feels good for a moment (and then it feels bad long term as it impacts our health negatively), our society provides plenty of opportunities to do so, and many of us learned to seek these feedback loops in our environments growing up. But what feels better, long term, that is harder to cultivate, are the feedback loops of dopamine through appropriate action and fulfilling achievement, oxytocin through true connection and existence among and with others, and so on.
It's easy and even rewarded in our society to tell me I'm wrong: "I don't get to choose how I feel about anything. If it's bad, it's bad, and it has to be bad." It takes work to relate to hardships with resilience, to accept that "trauma", the way that our lives shape us, is not always negative.
Pain is real, suffering is a choice. This I've learned. This I continue to learn, the hard way, each and every day as I engage with this journey I've been tasked with.
It's been a long period of necessary isolation due to some really intense psychic experiences after the Solstice event, and yet it feels as though the intentions I worked towards at that & the previous ritual I held are slowly beginning to manifest.
A long time friend of mine was kind enough to furnish me with exercises to improve psychic hygiene, and I recently just met with someone who has been working with a spiritual healer on the same and who is willing to engage in ritual space together to share some of her techniques with me. It's incredibly profound to have begun to build or find this community, and I am so grateful to everyone who shares their time and space with me.
I have some really interesting tattoo work planned that I can hopefully pick back up in April or May, after this month's push to improve the land and the two weeks in April I'm dedicating to a survival medicine class.
Spring feels fruitful and hopeful, and there is grass growing everywhere, triggered out of dormancy by the rain we received in January and early February.
We're not moving backwards, or forwards, but rather engaging in an unending cycle of existence, death, decay, and existence. Of growth, slow and then exponential and then not at all.
The world is not ending. Let me be clear: "our" world might be. But we are but a moment, in harmony and in concurrence with all other moments simultaneously. The world is not ending, simply moving through another cataclysmic cycle. We are simply myopic, we are simply enveloped in ego and fear. The universe, the world, however, does not have these shortcomings. It is indifferent, it honors both death and life equally.
And when we are all "gone", we are not really gone, but simply shifting states of existence to ride the ferris wheel of cyclical Being once again.
Sometimes it's hard to live out here, and winter is especially isolating. As we all retreat and focus on inner work and reprieve from the often constant movement of other seasons, we tend to reach out less, travel less. This is true for both us and our friends we see often, usually, and so since the Solstice it's been quiet here at the Ranch. We've really not gone anywhere, and no one has really come to visit.
However, I'm reading "The Independent Farmstead" by Shawn & Beth Dougherty, and feeling renewed and inspired. Sometimes this path feels too difficult, and I reminisce on the period of my life where I was ignorant of the depth and multitude of the issues that plague our species and where I just lived in the way that society dictated. In a way, ignorance really is bliss. In a way, it was just easier.
But I think back on the suffering I experienced then: the suffering I experienced at jobs, at the hands of others abused by our society, the suffering I experienced feeling like I was drifting along without a purpose, and the suffering that came from seeking purpose in careers that I could never attain because of my chronic inability to engage in personal politics. In a way it was easier to work many hours a week, eat out, go to parties, and move through life unthinkingly chasing the next thing that made me feel alive, connected, loved, despite that those experiences never lived up to my memories of them and despite that they were always so fleeting.
So it's not that we don't suffer now, of loneliness or of hardship or of our own interpersonal shortcomings. But we feel guided by purpose and by duty, and in so many ways that eliminates suffering. Though we don't always have other humans here to feel connected to, we do often, and in their absence we are connected to place, and to other living things that help sustain us and which we sustain in return.
It's been a while since I've posted meditations, and I hope to begin again one of these days, but in the meantime, this is kind of a personal one I suppose:
I've been spending a lot of time reflecting on the relationships I have with the people around me, and feeling a little frustrated by the lack of mutuality in some of them. On the other hand, someone I just met in October is willing to fly across the country with me to help with my daughter so I can take clients and not feel so isolated during the trip and I'm eternally grateful for her and the people like her that we have around us. Truly we are blessed if just one person shows up for us in this way once in a while, and we are fortunate enough to have a small handful of people who show up like this frequently (and for whom we are always happy to show up in return).
Every small community is a microcosm of the greater social context, and unfortunately our broader social context punishes a lot of the traits that make people truly great members of a small community in favor of traits that make us productive in our economic system, or good members of a much larger and much more disconnected (in most senses) community. Context matters, and dysfunctions within small communities are usually the result of mechanisms that serve individuals in a dysfunctional broader context. We have to understand that, and we have to give some grace, and we have to be willing to accept that these dysfunctions exist and that people just simply aren't perfect (and that we share in these dysfunctions, too, no matter how much work we think we've done). Many of our friends and loved ones still must exist in much of their space and time in jobs and homes within the broader social context, and the work occurs, according to them, the most when they are able to break from that and come take space. But there is no great trigger to take that leap to leave the macrocosm entirely: we are often bound in complicated ways to it, and sometimes occasional space and baby-steps towards preferred potentialities are all we can manage.
There is also the reality that some people are just not interested in existing in a space made for community -- even if (I'm learning, and this is very confusing to me but I'm starting to understand) they explicitly state aloud that they would like to. And we also have to give grace for that, and have patience with that, and hold fast our boundaries and be willing to do the difficult work of disentangling with people we care about when their needs and desires begin to disrupt our community, our family, or our peace. It does not have to be perceived as violent or rude to do so, although unfortunately again it often is, even when people state that they respect and adore our boundaries.
It's tricky to exist this way, but I'm learning slowly to hold fast and not be hurt when people don't appear to have meant things that they've said. I'm learning how to deal with people, I guess is what it is.
Accepting a lack of control is one of the hardest things (seemingly) for people to do. I can say something like "you cannot control another's thoughts and feelings", and most of the people I'm conversing with would agree with me.
But then, if I were to re-word that and say "you cannot control whether or not someone is racist", or "you cannot control whether or not someone is upset by your attempts to moderate their behavior" or something along those lines, most people would (and do) instantly begin coming up with reasons why they can, in fact, control the outcome of the above two scenarios.
Part of this seems to come from a semantic misunderstanding: control is not the same as influence, and vice versa. To control someone's prejudices is impossible. "Control" means that you would actually decide the outcome that you desired and make that happen, unequivocally. To "influence", or attempt to influence, would mean that you might try to educate someone, expose them to new ideas, to the damage their behavior or ideology may cause or is causing, etc.
We all have the ability to attempt to influence outcome, but that does not mean we are guaranteed success or that we have control over an outcome.
The understanding of this, in my experience, has been crucial to my well-being and ability to productively make decisions based on my own values (and not the attempt to control or change someone else's). And yet, it's generally a conversation that causes a significant amount of discomfort and frustration.
Welcome, winter! Welcome, crisp pink mornings and cerulean full-moon evenings by bonfires dug into the sand, burning away the year's resolutions and warming bare blue feet.
Welcome, winter! Welcome openness and all day outside, coming in red-nosed and panting.
High desert winters are harsh and yet somehow mild, with biting dry winds and freezing nights, but tolerable chilly days and not much snow. We're around 2000ft above sea level, so we don't have quite as harsh a season coming as those who are higher up in the valley.
The climate here is tricky: it's dry, with a moderate growing season, but the extremes of summer & winter make it a little tricky to choose crops & sustainable shade trees that can survive both the extreme heat and the severe cold. Many species that are touted as being "drought tolerant" and that are popular are unlikely to make it through the freezing nights and occasional frosts. Succulents and cacti are included in this: I've noticed that once the liquid in their pads freeze they're unlikely to survive. It'll be interesting to see how our agave, aloe, and nopales do this winter now that they've had a few months to establish themselves. I know that they're possible to grow, because there are many, many homes here that have enormous specimens of all three. So I'm optimistic, we'll just have to see how it goes.
Last year, wild things began to sprout in October, including a wild species of lily, wheat and other grasses, and a kind of daisy. This year, with significantly less rain, I haven't seen a single lily shoot or a single daisy flower, and the wheat that began to optimistically poke its head out after the single August storm has stayed brown. There's an urgency here, amplified in my mind by the tourist hype: off-roaders will be making noise and carving up topsoil for the next month or so en masse, and camper vans and Subarus have taken over nearby Joshua Tree, making the most of camping reservations they made last year and milder temperatures in the park for bouldering and hiking. Some visitors come with respect for the delicate altered ecosystem, many with the misconception that this land, if left alone, will itself save desert tortoises and chollas, and spring forth abundance. Some come with the misconception that this land is useless, and all it's good for is spewing gasoline and destroying native grasses with rubber tires.
This winter will be full of making plans as we weather the weather and the influx of visitors. We have a plan to try to buy some vacant land nearby to expand our regeneration efforts, and in the spring hope to (finally, we hoped to this year but weren't ready) introduce ruminants and poultry to help manage our existing property.
I recently watched a video of Cedar Springs Ranch in the high desert of Western Colorado, and the owner said something along the lines of us needing to become the animals that once managed this land. Settlers eliminated the bison & buffalo that trampled grasses, grazed & spread manure, and the beaver that once dammed streams and slowed down water. So we must be the bison, we must be the beaver. Through holistic management of livestock and thoughtful earthwork, we can coax life back here while maintaining the existing ecosystem.
So, anyways, this is a long, rambling update/rumination as the seasons change and my mind is full of considerations, possibility, and energy to work through cooler days.
it never stops
this feeling worthless
and falling from grace.
men are always angry,
she said
it's in their goddamn genes
maladaptive mutations
all blamed on you
you you you you
you disrespected me
you rolled your eyes
you talked back
you weren't down
you sighed
you made me feel like maybe I need to look inside
but I can't because of how I learned to treat you this way
"you don't know how it feels"
the fucking irony
we carry your pain, you men
it came first from our fathers
next from our brothers
then from our partners
we carry the hurt tenfold
yet you think its yours alone
like that absolves you of something
of the work of healing
like it's your god given right to be healed by a woman
while you make us meaningless
while you feed us your anger
and then doubled
when we dare
to get angry
Something spurred my partner to begin building a temple to Osiris, and this temple site was the location of the altar we erected for our Dia de Muertos celebration. It was fitting, the idea that offerings were being made both to our ancestors and the god who watched over the underworld.
The altar I hand painted with symbols related to Egyptian, Western occult, and Meso-American systems. This practice of ours is growing oddly eclectic, but somehow feels placed and connected with the landbase despite its tenuosity of place literally.
The temple site itself is an island 14 feet in diameter, hand carved from the land and built up by my partner. The 'moat' around it is encircled with rocks, and he likewise created a spiral path off of one of our walking paths to enter the temple. We've planted four marigold plants and a date palm at strategic points along this path. You enter the temple from the East, and face West as you worship.
There are plans to build a structure here, but for now it is freestanding, an altar in the middle of our land, in the middle of the desert, covered still in marigolds and offered seeds, petals and incense.
This morning my daughter & I walked out there, and sat with the altar for the first time since the event. I offered new flowers, seeds, and scattered petals. My daughter made herself busy arranging flowers on the ground in quite an intentional way, although she can't tell me about the designs in her head yet. I sat and meditated for a few moments below the altar, as the sun rose over the valley.
I think that this is to become a daily ritual. It's been a long time since I've properly engaged in prayer or ritual on a regular basis, and even my once-daily meditation practice has become "here and there, as I have time". There is something so powerful about structured practice, and I really don't know if I can explain why.
This might become a thread of other updates with regards to my spiritual practice, since I feel as though a lot has shifted in the last few months.
When I shifted away from calling my practice "chaos magick", because it had shifted away from being that, I was wary of ever adopting the term "witch", despite the fact that the textbook definition was semi-accurate and that it's a common descriptor. But quite honestly, the way that I used to describe my practice most recently, as ancestral cultural practices, wasn't accurate either.
There are aspects of our practice that are very loosely and tangentially related to pre-Catholic Mexican practices (and for me more personally, Sicilian beliefs or practices, although my scholarship is lacking here and it's kind of hard to explain why I even say this, but I'll try later), but to say that our practice is ultimately based on these is inaccurate.
I think that what I've been trying to convey, or to honor, is that I've been following a complex set of experiences which have left me with impressions of these practices, but not necessarily the practices themselves. That the embeddings I've had into various kinds of spirituality amongst groups or people I've been involved with have opened the door to a kind of connection and a kind of openness to the wisdom kept closely within their practices. However, I think that I've miscommunicated and inadvertently conflated this impression with the real thing.
Meanwhile, my practice has developed along a different trajectory as experiences with guides and teachers continue to occur. Based on the actual, tangible actions within this practice, there is more than just worship occurring. The practice of magick itself has been a central part of my practice for years now, and for this reason I plan on re-introducing my practice and using the term "witch" as a descriptor.
That still feels strange, and I can't quite put my finger on why. By definition, it is accurate: a practitioner of magick, the tangible practice of which is usually rooted in pagan or neo-pagan systems.
But it's complicated, because much of the education, especially in the last year and a half, on these systems has come from guides and not books, from intuitive action and not grimoires.
This path has been complicated, but perhaps that's normal. Perhaps many of us here have found that once we open the door to wisdom, to spirits, to gods, to guides ancestral and not, that we find ourselves exploring a little, feeling out our own intuition and learning little by little what the right direction is, like someone groping about in the dark with the tiniest candle flame to guide them.
A wave 🌊 breaking on the rocky shore. Reminder that life is always moving. Even when we feel stuck, things will shift around us to change the situation. 💙
One thing that's been unexpected but wholly fulfilling and important as we take this week to prep for our unorthodox Dia de los Muertos event has been cleaning.
For maybe 8 weeks, I wasn't getting any cleaning done but the basic laundry/dishes/spot sweeping, and dust and bloodstains and residue from the heightened emotions were gathering in corners, across floors, and under furniture.
I don't think that we realized the magnitude of what this meant. We kept giving ourselves the space to let things go, and I think that in those moments we needed that space to just let the balls drop. But this week, it became apparent that it was more than just dust accumulating in the corners of our household. Our daughter, who's been sleeping through the night since she was a year old, stopped sleeping. Everyone was cranky, not working cohesively, inexplicably frustrated at all the little things. I was constantly feeling overstimulated, overwhelmed, and was picking up feelings and thoughts that didn't feel like my own, but was trying to just force them out and push through.
One night, after trying for five hours to get my daughter to go back to sleep, I woke my partner and told him that it was his turn, that I needed some sleep. When I woke in the morning, he told me that when he asked her what she needed she wouldn't sign like normal, she would just point to different spots in the room repeatedly. He had the thought to smudge the room with some sage we have from a friend's garden, and he said that she fell asleep right after.
So Tuesday, I deep cleaned the interior of the house, threw open the curtains which had remained closed for weeks, recharged the saltwater & palo santo charms I keep on our front altar and in the hallway to the bedroom, and re-arranged and recharged elements of both altars.
And then we spent Wednesday cleaning the patio, hanging our new sign, cleaning the outdoor bathrooms, sweeping and picking up the studio.
And then, last night, our daughter finally slept through the night again. Our actions have been more cohesive, our patience less thin, and overall the house feels lighter, brighter, more positive.
It made me really stop to think about the influences behind our feelings and actions, and how infrequently we think below the surface or the story we're telling ourselves. Cognitive behavioral therapy tells us that the way we feel about things and react to them is largely shaped by our childhoods and specifically our childhood trauma, but we rarely stop to consider the ways in which other external forces influence our behavior in ways we might not realize at first.
So, as we push forward through this most liminal of weeks which, for most, ends tonight, but which, for some, keeps going through the 6th, I challenge you to sit and meditate on the things that may be influencing your mood, your stress, your sleep patterns, your reactions.
I didn't want to work on your request until I had something meaningful to say, and until last night I just... didn't.
Because I'm sure you've heard tips from other people about setting energetic boundaries, but like what does that even mean? Purification rituals are cool, but they aren't necessarily restorative and in and of themselves require energy to work.
But last night was strange. Suddenly, out of the twilight darkness settling over my house, I became suddenly and inexplicably overstimulated. It took me a moment of focus to realize why, as there were really no stimuli beyond the sounds of our footsteps walking in from outside, and the usual visual stimuli of objects in my house. The TV wasn't on, we weren't playing music, no one was talking to me.
But someone, or rather, many someone's, were talking to me. It was as though I walked through a doorway into a packed room, and everyone was trying to greet me at once. Except I couldn't tell who was speaking, I could only hear the roar of distant voices. And I'm using terms we can all understand, it wasn't quite so apparent what was going on. The stimuli was more like energetic frequencies trying to tune to my channel rather than actual audible voices, but I think you all get the idea.
This is something I've struggled with my whole life. I've always had an issue finding balance between shutting down connection with the worlds around me (if we choose to distinguish states of existence as different worlds entirely as is common) or not knowing how to shut out influences that weren't positive or that I just couldn't figure out how to channel at all.
It dawned on me that perhaps so many people have a hard time finding connection with the Divine, or the land, or even themselves, because we really are able to access communications from beings who exist in other states when we truly connect, but that's probably a thought for another time.
I've never really understood the concept of spirit work, I guess because I've never intentionally channeled spirits, they've always just accessed me somehow, and I don't know why or how that is, but it just is. So when you asked me to write about how to care for yourself when intentionally engaging in this kind of work, I was a little stumped. But I think what I realized last night, since this was on my mind already, is that the most crucial component of protecting yourself from energy drain when engaging with these spirits or beings in other states of existence is a proper, regular practice of engaging with them.
That sounds counterintuitive, but I've learned that access points are like muscles, and that the more you engage them, the more you can really feel what or who it is that you're speaking to or channeling. I'm quite early on this journey of finding balance and finding healthy ways to channel these beings' communications, but this has been the single change that has made a world of difference in my ability to not feel just... exhausted and almost even violated after engaging with these beings. Lots of practitioners say "learn to set energetic boundaries" (or the same in different terms), but I've found few resources (and by no means have I exhausted all options) on what this means or how to do it. The best guess I can hazard is that like anything this takes practice, but learning to set boundaries against influences that try to chime in while you're channeling the spirit you want to seems to be the most important thing you can do, and it takes practice to be able to distinguish between communications from different entities.
I hope that this was a worthwhile read, this is a space I have a strange relationship with because I don't feel as though my perspective is the same as many. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I know that this veers from "energetic self care" so to speak, in that it doesn't have any tips for restoration after a session, but perhaps it'll help nonetheless.
Is there anything in particular you'd like to see me write up a meditation about? Something gnawing at you, something you'd like a framework to help you start digging deeper?
I have so many in my mind right now but they're all over the line of what I'm willing to post online. In the meantime, I'd love to fill the gap with something useful to someone, if possible 🖤
I've been on BlueSky for 10 minutes and... (An Essay)
I get it now. I used to be like "Why can't people just stop using Twitter/Instagram/WhateverTheFuck? If they need social media, why can't they just use Mastodon? Why doesn't Pixelfed get more users? It's literally the same UI".
But I get it. I've been on BlueSky for what? 10 minutes? And I can feel my brain chemistry changing. Mastodon is a coffee shop. It doles out caffeine. You still get the little dopamine hit when you get notifications, you get that kind of substitute for human interaction that feels nice. But Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and these apps from companies with access to inordinate amounts of data to build algorithms designed by psychologists to literally be As Addicting as Possible? These apps are dealing meth. But they've pressed it like ecstasy and made it cute. They've made it socially acceptable. But let me tell you something.
Ever since I logged onto BlueSky, I've been thinking about it. I don't think about Mastodon all day. "Oh my god what should I post next? What will get me followers? Would this be funny? Is this on brand?" I don't think about it. I come here because I have interactions with people without the pretext that they're engaging with me to get engagement in return. Because sometimes in my life I feel isolated and because this substitute for human interaction feels nice.
I thought I'd get BlueSky (despite their horrifying privacy policy - more on that later) because there are some Things Going On that make me need to get a little more serious about making money. But fuck, if this is the only way? I'm taking a vow of poverty, or getting a day job.
Because then there's their privacy policy. Access to websites you visit before and after, identifying information about your device, purchases you make, and it goes on. But even that level of invasive access should give us pause, right? I have a lot of things set up on my computer that mitigate some of that access, but then let's think about how we give the app access to our photos and videos (all of them, not just what we post in the moment), our device's camera and microphone (not just while we're using it) and so on. And then think about how our society grooms us to believe (and maybe in some circumstances this belief is true) that we need these sites for access, for engagement, to make money.
The price of not working in a warehouse is every piece of information we can reasonably gather about you to use and sell however we please, for whatever purpose, indefinitely, and it never expires and we don't pay you for it.
This is exploitation and my ancestry makes me pause, horrified, at what this information will eventually come back and do to us when inevitably the wrong person/group gets ahold of it. And that's pretending like we even know who has our data and what they're doing with it, right? Because we don't know. We really don't. Call me paranoid, say that I shouldn't worry if I have nothing to hide, give me all of the excuses you've been programmed to give about why we should not worry about a surveillance state that we pay for. Then come online and rant about how dangerous governments are and fail to see the irony in it all.
And I'm a hypocrite. I bought in, too. For personal gain. After criticizing others for years for doing the same thing. It's true. But the interesting side effect is that I've gained so much insight into why we're so addicted to sensationalism, why we're so addicted to these sites, why we're so unwell in general. The kinds of things my feed is inundated with, especially since I haven't curated it yet and it's showing me what it wants to? My god. We cannot have a healthy society when this is what we're consuming all day every day. There is no way to be a healthy person, I believe, when consuming this all day every day.
So anyways. As always, perhaps a bit sanctimonious. But I'm a little dumbfounded at the experience of all of this after years off of corporate social.
There's something else really interesting happening on this post, and that's the phenomena of "If you don't feel the same way I feel, you're attacking me".
I'd really urge anyone who was severely upset by this post to read my first reply, re-read the original post, and then to take a step back and evaluate your feelings before replying.
I'm always open to disagreements, and learning that I don't know as much about something as I thought. I love respectful discussions where I can learn something. I know that I don't know what I don't know, and that plenty of you can fill knowledge gaps, and that's such a beautiful thing.
However, this is a post about one single person's experience (mine). What about it makes you feel that I'm judging you? Why would you care about my judgement in the first place? Why does it bother you that I don't want to use this other platform, and why does it make you feel that you need to defend your use of it?
My initial reply to this post was extremely clear that I'm not placing a value judgement on anyone, and yet there are several replies calling me out for being narrow-minded, for trying to ruin things for other people, and for playing into something specific to Mastodon that is apparently a dislike or constant discourse about how bad other social media platforms are. Some are just telling me I'm wrong (about my own experience!).
I ask you: so what?
Why would it bother you if any of that was the case?
Then also, did you read the post? Did you read the whole thing? Did you realize that the entire post was a humbling post, saying "oh shit, I've been on my high horse, but I have a lot of empathy now because I became obsessed with this well-built app in 24 hours, how silly, let me not use this!"?
I recognize that many of us are trying to manage emotions in our physical lives and our virtual lives, and that our virtual lives become outlets without consequence for the frustrations that are generated both by physical "real-world" things, and by the things we encounter online. But if you're willing, maybe take a step back and use this as an opportunity to reflect on your anger. If I am truthfully the sole reason for your anger after you really sit with yourself and attempt to be honest with yourself, then perhaps there are other things you need to be focused on, because you don't know me and my opinion of a web site (a web site! not of you as a human being! a web site! you didn't build it!) shouldn't shatter your world or create a heightened emotional response.
I truly never meant for this to get so popular, and I really kind of wish I hadn't. It's been an emotional few weeks, and the least you could do is to take a deep breath and be kind in your reply. Disagree! Call me out! Whatever, just be nice about it. Because I have to read you to know to block you, and I really don't think that I'm the source of the problems in your life. If I am, then I envy you for this being the biggest problem in your life today. Share some gratitude for that, if that's your reality.
October brings flocks of vultures engaged in inexplicable aerial maneuvers high above the highway. It brings flocks of tourists to the desert, and hundreds of hermit artists open their studio doors to all of us, hoping for connection, recognition, or a sale. Elsewhere, especially in the Northern regions, September feels like the dawn of this autumn season. But here in the desert, October is the door that brings us out of scorched, parched hallucinatory summer days and into, in many ways, rebirth.
Rattlesnake grass is growing out of control near any plants we're watering. The beavertail cactus we thought was dead when we moved in has new growth (it took us a year to revive it completely). The sweet potatoes the coyotes stole somehow still sent new leaves up from the ground, and seem to be living on. Rosemary and sage are blooming, embracing cooler days despite this weekend's heat wave. Wheat grows, we assume some kind of wild cultivar, dormant most of the year. It usually only grows a few inches before summer cuts it down again, but we always wonder at the fact that it grows at all when no one tends it. It's a relic from a time before this place was stripped of its diversity, and it no longer is suited enough to the environment to grow large enough to fruit. It grows alongside carpets of tiny yellow flowers, another oddity that has lived dormant in this sand, triggered by heavy August rains.
We wonder at life here, and consider life elsewhere, and seek to reconnect with ourselves and our community during this new season. We plan celebrations and engagements to honor this time of abundance and rebirth, knowing that we can truly never engage this ecosystem in the way it's meant to be. But we surely can try, and so we do.