LA is Burning again ... and a Full Moon is on the Way
Fascism is here, Full Moon ritual coming on Wednesday eve at 6pm
I’ve got a FULL MOON IN SAGITTARIUS RITUAL COMING UP ON WEDNESDAY at 6pm. I hope you can join us for that. This post was supposed to be about the moon, but Empire got in the way. See below for a note about what’s running through my heart rn. And come to the Full Moon ritual Wednesday if you can, Sagittarius is a healer, and we all need some healing right about now.
Los Angeles is on fire again. For the second time this year.
I’m starting to get used to the smell of smoke. And having things I plan to share with you get interrupted by the crisis du jour served by our colonial overlords.
Today, what I wanted to share with you was a meditation on performance studies and Full Moon rituals.
The crisis (or at least ONE of the crises) is that my town, Yaagna (colonially known as Los Angeles, CA) is under siege by ICE agents ripping mothers from the arms of their children, supported by the National Guard.
The good news is that the good people of Yaagna are resisting.
As we witness people being dragged from their jobs, kids being dragged from their schools and shoved into unmarked vans, I’m reminded of the quote by Toni Morrison:
“The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
Here are people trying to live their lives, to do the most basic things a human can do (learn, love, work) and they’re getting violently interrupted, their whole lives disrupted, maybe for generations.
And those of us who care, who have the capacity and the courage to peep out of our own little bubbles to resist this horror, are spinning disoriented from crisis to crisis to crisis trying to figure out how to respond to them all.
All because the most powerful people in this country haven’t developed the capacity to deal with their grief.
Looking around the world today, I see our whole planet choking on a thick miasma of 10,000 years of unprocessed grief.
[Click the link below for a visual]
If we don’t deal with our grief, if we’re unwilling to feel it, we’ll just keep creating more of it to burden future generations. If our species even survives that long.
Our unprocessed grief shows up as greed, as colonialism, capitalism, and racism. As Zionism. As abuse, and neglect, and ecocide.
Our grief is like an abused dog, snarling in our families, biting our kids, hoarding our wealth like it’s dog food.
There is no single quick fix to heal an abused dog.
Dogs heal in community, in packs, and packs live on land. What happens when our communities and the land itself are abused? How do we heal then?
I’m placing the above in the form of a question — how do we heal a violent, abused dog — because the question of how to bring healing to this world is something we all must answer together.
We are all the dog, and we are all the pack, and we are all already participating.
I trust our collective wisdom. We are the Universe becoming conscious of how to live in harmony. There is no external answer. We must live the answer.
It gets overwhelming when everywhere you look there’s someone saying:
call this number and demand your reps “x, y, z”
join this protest, or don’t protest, or protest in this specific way
vote
don’t bother voting
give money here
don’t spend money there
prioritize this, don’t focus on that
All these loud voices saying what we should do in panicked tones. Meanwhile, fire and brimstone.
My point is that we are all already swimming in this grief.
I am swimming in grief, disoriented, exhausted, uncertain where to focus my energy and action, guilty for feeling these feelings when so many have it worse.
This is what it is to feel grief. It’s a complex emotion. A revolution of spirit, overthrowing whatever it is we thought we had.
Grief requires that we feel it, that we cry, we mourn, we drift through confusion and anxiety and numbness and fury, and realize what we’ve lost and what we never had in the first place.
Healing requires that we turn around and focus on what we want to create. To become aware the cups of inspiration are there, waiting for us to drink from them.
We need to do and feel it all. We must develop the capacity to feel our feelings and to live our vision for collective solidarity simultaneously.
I don’t want this to be just another notification pressuring you to do something: call, protest, fight, vote.
I know all of you. I know you’re already doing these things. So many of you are doing so much already.
I can only answer for myself and what I’m doing.
I’ve devoted my life to rituals because they are an ancient technology developed by our ancestors to help us feel feelings too overwhelming to handle alone and invoke healing visions too grand to conjure in isolation.
My hope is that the ritual space I hold for us on the Full Moons is a place where we can practice feeling and visioning together in the presence of the gods.
Maybe later this week I’ll get a chance to write you about what I mean by “the gods” and what performance studies has to say about all of this.
But in the meantime, I have some resisting to do. (And some resting). (And some coursework I need to finish). (And…)
So for now I’ll just say: see you Wednesday evening at 6pm for our Full Moon in Sagittarius ritual!
On this Moon of the Wounded Healer, we will be calling down the moon to share with us the medicine we need and the medicine we offer. Hope to see you there!
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