The Moon is Earth’s celestial anchor in a vast and mysterious cosmos. Honoring lunar phases reminds us to feel our connection to nature’s rhythms & cycles. Welcome to this moonly missive…
Happy Last Quarter Moon! 🌗 Three quarters through the monthly lunar cycle, this phase supports disseminating & releasing.
Because my body can’t give me even a few moments of peace, I have some fresh cancer nonsense surfacing. The great news: because last year felt so spectacularly shitty, currently I feel fine—physically. And because I’ve been navigating my own mortality for 21+ years while also devoting myself to deep spiritual practice, I feel pretty good psychically as well. I’m incredibly grateful for the well being I feel right now, the love & support I receive from friends, and the vocation I get to fulfill. There’s magic involved, I’m certain. I have a wonderful life.
My path continues, until it doesn’t. While I’m here, I aspire to keep making. I have the 10 Rules for Teachers and Students by Sister Corita Kent posted on the wall next to my desk, except I’ve crossed out the word “work” in #7 so it reads “The only rule is make.” I continue on my path, continue making: essays, meditations, collages, retreats, courses, books, experiences, and next up… zines (stay tuned!). Thank you for being here with me.
Happy Pride! 🏳️🌈🖤🤎🏳️⚧️
This month, 10% of paid subscriptions will go to Trans Lifeline for their work providing trans peer support. Thank you to paid subscribers for your contributions to these monthly donations to various causes.
Buy me a matcha: If you appreciate my work but have too many monthly subscriptions or don’t want any more emails, here’s where you can make a one-time gift or ongoing offering without subscribing!
In my opinion, my friend and spiritual-brother Jeff Warren makes the best meditations—his teaching is incredible. Also, he understands the true power of meditative practice, especially in community, to transform lives. Jeff’s Substack, Home Base, is a treasure trove. His new personal website is packed with resources. And this post on The Democratization of Mental Health is a powerful manifesto for the movement towards cultural change through meditation happening all around us.
“In the case of mental health, the outdated way of thinking about it – the way I thought about it when I didn’t know any differently – is that mental health is an individual issue, and one you don’t need to think about until something goes wrong. Then, you go to an expert to get fixed: a therapist, or a psychiatrist, or, these days, a twenty-something shaman with a pipe full of 5-MeO-DMT. But mental health isn’t an individual problem; it’s inextricable from the health of the world around us. It’s also not a one-off fix, but an ongoing preventative practice that is inseparable from daily life.” —Jeff Warren
In this epsiode (with the wow title: Blackness is the Radical Incompleteness of the World), adrienne maree brown asks Bayo Akomolafe a question I’ve always wondered which is basically: who does he consider his audience to be because his work is extremely intellectual to the point of being a barrier. His response is a fascinating critique of colonial constructs of legibility.
“It doesn’t come down to, oh, I finally get it. It’s something that does it. It’s molecular. It’s a minor gesture. So I have people say, I didn’t get anything you said. Or, I got 50%, that’s fine. And then they say, but I’m so in the field of resonance. And a field of resonance is not collapsible to meaning. It’s where our bodies are activated by things we do not know how to name. And I think that is the poetry, the poetics of this.” —Bayo Akomolafe
Given my health, I do not say yes to many invitations. I’m so glad I did to Maria Bowler for her new podcast Make Human. Together, we create some beautiful metaphors about creativity and talk about how to practice authenticity while “translating” to different audiences. And I come up with my new job title: post-colonial, intellectual, spiritual, creative with a tiny dog. You can hear our conversation here.
I’ve only just started Rima Vesey-Fled’s newest book, The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin & Audre Lorde, and I already want to underline every other paragraph. I know Rima to be a brilliant scholar and teacher (and a lovely person), but because of a cancer surge, I sadly had to drop out of her online course on the same topic in 2021. I’m so glad to have this resource now. In this personal-meets-political book, she illuminates freedom teachings from these oft-quoted but often misunderstood Black ancestors, and offers clear guidance for our own liberation maps. I’ll report back—and do yourself a favor: get it too.
I listened to the podcast When We All Get to Heaven over six months ago and meant to share it here (I thought I had). For some reason the link mysteriously ended up in this month’s collection (just in time for Pride). The series tells the story of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, one of the nation’s first LGBTQ-positive churches, as it struggles with the AIDS pandemic. It incorporates rescued historical tapes rescued and this archival material makes palpable the horror and humanity of a community facing the rapid death of hundreds of its members as well as politicized choices about how to respond to those, like homeless youth, who were being shunned elsewhere. Better late…
My wise friend Sue (who always has the best recommendations for transformational resources) recently turned me on to the Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families (ACA) Daily Meditation email. I open every single one and read some of them over and over. After my mom died, while dealing with lots of family drama, I went to exactly one ACA meeting, which I appreciated, but due to many issues at the time (including assuming guardianship of my sister), I never went back. I may one day. The emails remind me of my time volunteering Monday nights for two years at New York Insight Meditation Center. This was before I joined the board, before I became the executive director and a teacher there. Monday night was for monthly affinity sanghas which included what was then called The Buddha & Bill W, the recovery group led by the late Sandra Weinberg. I knew nothing about the 12 Steps, except they existed. Every month was a new step and after going through all of them (twice), I decided we’re all addicts, to many things, and everyone should be in recovery… from modernity.
After my last newsletter about singing as a liberatory practice, a reader sent me this video of Tracey Morgan belting U2 in an airport waiting area, and now he’s my public singing guru. Thank you Daniela!
This new video from Iebyi is a spiritual teaching and my dance guru.
I love my neighborhood. I’ve lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn for 16 years and while gentrification has come for us, there’s still plenty of diversity, a strong local tenants union (and a burgeoning association in my building), and a strong community vibe with lots of cool projects emerging. Some people turned an old dry cleaners a block from me into a non-profit space which hosts events including a monthly comedy show produced by a young Ethiopian American comic. My favorite newish group is Field Meridians, an art collective centered around ecological resilience that runs workshops on everything from bird watching to healing clinics, publishes a local paper, and is starting an actual radio station. Last weekend, I attended their tree walk in Bed-Stuy where we learned about the various trees on one city block and I marveled at the resilience of these beings making it in this dense concrete (the trees too).
I’m looking forward to more writing by Starhawk on what political strategy and ritual have in common.
“Creating ritual, learning how we can create experiences that move people emotionally, has a lot to teach us about how to move people politically and get them to take action. The most important thing I’ve learned about ritual, in all of those fifty or more years, is that a powerful ritual begins with a clear intention. An intention is not just a list of what we intend to do in a ritual. it tells us why we’re doing it. What is the transformation we hope will occur?” —Starhawk
My dear friend Paul invited me to the opening of North Star at the Irish Arts Center. Apparently Frederick Douglass went to Belfast in 1845 (who knew?), and Ghanaian British artist Kwame Daniels created a mutli-genre, live music and spoken word show inspired by Douglass’ speeches about his trip. It’s a standing room only 70 minutes, so it requires some endurance (and sneakers), but it’s filled with powerhouse performances by the multi-national, multi-racial, intergenerational cast (including poetry readings by adorable local NYC school kids). Somehow, Paul and I ended up accidentally dressing exactly alike.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.