connection - integration time 🌹

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essays tagged with {connection 🌹} are short snippet pieces about my actual thoughts and my actual life, before they become teachings or analysis. they’re for connection. just like it says on the tin. so glad you’re here. love you. 💕

this eclipse season has written me off entirely. chaos has swirled around my life and my heart over this past week, no part of me feels untouched by it. maybe you too? if it has been for you too, know that you are seen my friend. I can feel a re-integration happening oh so slowly now, little by little. emerging today feels like spitting out blood and chipped pieces of tooth, face and arms covered in sweat and mud, clothes tattered, knees shaking.

this week has been deaths in the family, “one last visit”s, funeral planning and attending, injuries and illnesses, entirely non-functional internet, and deep existential melancholy. the last two days in particular represented a kind of unrelenting internalised cruelty that I only experience when I'm burnt out to fuck and desperately needing to feel connected to something. I couldn’t stop cackling over my coffee today while I was sitting down to do my morning cycle awareness practice, looking up the astrological weather for the day and seeing that the moon had just moved into Sagittarius. meaning Luna had spent the last two and a half days travelling through murky and Plutonic Scorpio. for me personally, no matter what else she’s doing or whoever else she’s aspecting, no matter what my own cycle is doing or how my external world looks, the moon in Scorpio is when I descend into my own emotional underworld.

re-emerging now demands integration. landing back in the body and wiping the sands of sleep from my proverbial eyes while I stretch myself awake again.

I want to use the space today to tell you what I know, and what gets re-affirmed over and over again. saying it here because I have to say it out loud somewhere, lest it drift away and never be thought of again. saying it here too just in case it helps you.

love you so much.

#1 - my creative metabolism has been overburdened to fuck recently. giving it some space to recover was essential

the other week, in a frenzy of maniacal desperation to extricate myself from gratuitous screen time, I created a kind of backup account on instagram for loved ones, memes, artists, and organisers. on my main account, I unfollowed everyone. it became a cavernous empty hall for me to shout into, somewhere for me to get a sense of what the echoes of my own voice actually sound like. I needed it to be a space where I came to create, to express, to be in community, and then to immediately leave. I needed to free myself from the endlessness and infinitude of the scroll. I didn’t have the fortitude or mental capacity to just put my fucking phone down, I had to starve that particular demon in order to exorcise it.

I’ve said before that the only way to really find your voice is to use it, and keep using it, but I know now it’s deeper than that. there’s a longing for discernment, for honing, for the Saturnian blacksmith’s forge here too. my voice cannot belong to me if it’s always wrapping itself around the echoes of others. my creative metabolism desperately needed to digest some of what it was consuming. I'd gorged myself.

#2 - when I am not actively creating, I become incredibly unwell.

I have an extreme tendency towards self-destruction. which is to say that I have a desperate need to be incredibly creatively prolific. eros and aliveness tell us that creativity and destruction are in inhale-exhale of the same breath, they will always match each other, you cannot cultivate one without also expanding your capacity for the other. before I’d properly grokked this, my creative / myth-making / destructive / mystical capacity ate itself whole, nearly taking me with it on a number of occasions.

I'll often visualise this extreme self-destruction tendency as a border collie. the border collie in my mind needs a run around, I’ll say to my partner. it’s started eating the couch.

which is to say that when I'm not writing poetry, scribbling up silly little essays here, recording up lessons for REWILDING, or actively working on any one of the other one million projects I've got going at any one time (I need plenty, because the best way to get me moving on something is to be procrastinating from doing something else), then the border collie in my mind starts eating the proverbial couch and ripping open all the cushions. going just two days without a specific creative practice of any kind meant the unrelenting stream of cruelty I mentioned earlier. vicious insults poured through my mind ceaselessly, the noise of it was terrible, and the self-flagellation of it made me remember why I used to drink so much.

it’s easy to pathologise this, to see it as a wound that needs healing, or something that needs to be fixed in some other way. beloved reader, if that’s something you want to do, please do it. if you share this propensity for extreme self-destruction, and your internal border collie eats the proverbial couch all the time, and relating to that aspect of your psyche through a lens of healing is something that feels liberating and safe for you; do it.

I know though in my own being, this internalised cruelty and sadism is symptomatic of a lack of creative digestion. not a punishment, not proof that I’ve fucked up in some way, and not something that necessarily needs to change. but the spiritual / creative equivalent of eating nothing but cheap white bread all day and then feeling physically shit. this doesn’t mean that eating only cheap white bread and nothing else is morally wrong, or that my body is “punishing” me for it. it’s just what happens. when border collies don’t get enough exercise, they will eat the couch. when my propensity for destruction doesn’t get enough space to alchemise itself into creativity, it will turn inwards and begin to devour me.

#3 - myth-making and a cyclical cosmology is the foundation of my sanity

without a practice of hermetic cycle awareness and the space to mythologise & eroticise my suffering within that practice, I would be lost. like Theseus moving through the Minotaur’s labyrinth, I am only safe when I have the Red Thread to guide me. end-stage capitalist modernity prioritises a materialist / egoic cosmology specifically so that we’re cut off from this myth-making propensity, so that our understanding of Ourselves within the Passage Of Time can only be reached through the metrics of capitalists and colonisers. recovery is getting free of that, and remembering the agency we have over the mythos we live into.

~

thank fuck for a Sagittarius moon, eh?

may we celebrate our own emergence from our own personal underworlds together.

love you. cheering for your creative and liberatory becoming always.

til the next time,

Leila xx

The REWILD publication is a space where I share my long-form writings, astrological & magickal essays, resources for world-building and liberatory myth-making, radical cycle reclamation, and more.

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