Every New Years, I go into a small ritual filled seclusion - that's really the only holiday I actively celebrate, and the rituals are all from my childhood - things my mother did with us. I make Hoppin' John's, do a tarot reading for the year (she calls it a Twelve Month Thang) where a card is pulled for every month, to help plan for the year ahead and cross reference later on, and a prosperity list - a list of goals or things to do/acquire in the year ahead. Part of the process is looking back at last year's and noticing what events showed up in the cards, as well as ways the prosperity list manifested. Something I added shortly after college was a symbolic theme for the year - when I was learning to run crews, it was the year of the shield-maiden (Viking female warrior), and the year of the fox (learning how to connect to my animal instincts in scary environments where survival skills I wasn't able to develop in childhood hindered me). So much of my somatic training is about how our patterns of pre recorded responses and expectations of everything gets in the way of having a truly responsive, embodied experience - and in an effort to return to those practices, 2022 was the year of the Vessel. 2023 is the year of the Alchemist.
We organize ourselves in so many different ways, and Identity is a huge part of that organizing - when things we've used as major scaffolding for how we interact with the world shifts, it is deeply destabilizing BECAUSE we've attached them to our sense of who we are. When something like chronic illness or being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl become an identity rather then merely an experience we are having - then healing, or finding grounding supportive relationships can become a threat to that sense of self we've constructed. Same with claiming an expression of self that is considered more generally acceptable - like being a healer, a parent, a boss, an artist, the breadwinner, the hero. To claim something so encompassing can place other aspects of self into the shadow of ourselves accidentally - cutting off hungry parts of ourselves merely because we got validation for one aspect or another, or in an attempt to prove childhood phantoms wrong, or prove something specific to the voice of someone else that lives like a ghost in our internal spaces, shaping us without our awareness. Maybe this is part of my deep aversion to committed relationships of all sorts, professional and personal, call it Disorganized Attachment style, or being an INTJ type (that flips into ENTJ when the adrenaline kicks in), or having Mars in my 8th house - in Aquarius no less, the planet of our action and drive under the sign of emotional disconnection in favor of large/collective intellectual pursuits in the house of transformative encounters and intimate exchanges. They are all just different ways of saying the same essential stuff, different symbols and deep qualifications depending on your specific flavor.
The thing I appreciate about astrology in particular is how deeply time based it is at its core - it is an exploration of energetic overlaps through time, where the people or events in the center of a chart are being viewed as both a particle (each chart is a snapshot of a moment - of all the forces in that moment coalescing into the form of a person) and as a wave with distinguishable/measurable intersections between cosmic energies - it is poetry and it is quantum physics, converted into religion. With how much of the internal processes of other people, companies, governments, countries, movements across decades are indecipherable, deeply unknowable - astrology provides some sense of a system for organizing the complex behaviors of the many constellations we are apart of, and are as sensitive to as celestial bodies pulled into partner dances with each other based on the pull of forces we cannot see - though the evidence of relationships are clear in their movements. We are pulling together clues about all of these sophisticated relationships of the universe from literal snapshots, milliseconds trying to track so many billions of years. We have survived as a species by converting information into symbols, abstract concepts, things we can love and pray to and identify with.
I have a siren tattooed on my shoulder, with Odysseus' ship caught in her hair waves - something I felt very connected to while running crews, singing men into working more then they realized, to be further consumed by a system that did not care about them. A symbol I eventually outgrew. Later I put the Fool (from the Aquarian tarot deck from my childhood) on my forearm as a symbol that has resonated with me for a very long time - every culture has a fool or jester character, who lives on the outskirts of society, so is free from the normal rules and is the ONLY person in court who can call the king out directly without being killed or exiled. There is a trade-off to embody this character, it means never fully becoming a member of a community. The person I taught with this summer inadvertently started calling my energetic shift, from my quiet, thoughtful internal-ness into the performer - being a 'Jester'. Later while showing our young people some of the work I've done with students over the years I had to talk about how I was exploring in one piece my Scorpio (Sun and Stellium) side vs my Leo Rising/Leo Moon side - she paused what she was doing in the back of the room, closed her eyes and nodded to herself with a smile. It doesn't matter which cosmology you look to for a sense of selfness - she understood something very specific about me in that moment. I also felt the past tense-ness of that symbol, of the Fool, when she named that switch I flip - I have known for a long time that survival mechanism is directly negating my ability to fully embrace the Magician, which I've been considering getting on the other side of that same forearm - the Fool and the Magician are 2 sides of the same coin. Knowledge and mastery over the elements starts as the naivete of the Fool starting out on a journey with no expectations of what lay ahead of them, an open and available vessel to receive and embody the things they learn along the way. I'm finally ready to embrace the Magician/Alchemist - but my ability to survive still requires the naive full bodied approach of the Fool. How do I organize my energy so there is still space for alchemical exploration? How can I embody both aspects with really clear and thoughtful organization of my available resources?
Resources. That is my next question. For my young people, the internal narratives stemming from stressful home or cultural environments, impossible expectations without enough resources available through vehicles of emotionally available and engaged adults to other basic needs like food or shelter become identity structures - feeling like having needs pushes away or angers caregivers, systemically being denied supportive services from the systems being lived inside of etc often lead to alternative styles or markets for getting needs met, or becoming someone who doesn't need help, and especially in emotionally stunted or working class families - survival has required from a young age a denial of the vulnerability associated with having needs. The deeper I get into studying the body and child development, the more I am coming to realize how my experience growing up in a very low income environment has impacted my own ability to locate and utilize all of the resources available to me - and for this school year I am very interested in exploring ways I can use art forms to help my young people feel greater awareness and access to the many supports that exist all around us. The kinds of containers I design will very much be a hypothesis about relationships, but during a training/orientation yesterday I was asked what this is the year of - and I'm still thinking about a dance performance I witnessed last week as I answer her question. It was a private rehearsal moment, with mostly dancers in the small audience - a room full of people who speak really similar languages, listening with their full bodies as they watched - and the artistic lineages of each of the dancers were so clear next to each other on that marley covered floor of the Martha Graham studio space. I remember seeing the Limon Dance Company for the first time, years ago, and a main dance from this very masculine Mexican choreographer was done by a woman. Coming from my labor background, I felt that dance deep in my body - and a few Limon dancers were in the ensemble we were there to watch - those particular dancers were easily the most striking movers, their relationship with force and movement clean and defined with nothing in the way of those connections between parts of self and contact with floor and others. I realized during that intimate performance that all of these dancers were united in their ability to receive all contact with their environment as a resource for their bodies to combust and translate into movement, into something arresting, into a story. Their channels to receive were clear. Their internal capacity for organization was so practiced that each touch of a surface, another dancer, movements of air, their own hair and clothes was immediately translated into language, and the wholeness of their bodies were available to communicate that support into expression.
Like the alchemists trying to distill sunlight into gold - these dancers were converting ether and surfaces into poetry and their bodies are the crucible. To be an alchemist I realized, is not to master the elements but to have cleared the vessel to do what it naturally does. Practice is not to get better in a measurable sense, but to become increasingly available for the translation of thought to material, of stimulus to story. It is at our lips and in our bodies that the body and blood of Christ are manifested out of a wafer and wine. Transubstantiation requires a human body.
To become the things I want - I have to commit... and then surrender whatever ideas, identities, behaviors that block synthesis in the process. God that's so fucking vulnerable.
Gonna make sure to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for others to follow.
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