In Inner Territory School, we teach practices that help students understand the architecture of their own inner and outer landscapes, and from that embodied knowledge, learn how to guide others with clarity and care. Our teachings weave archetypal work, trauma-aware spirituality, nervous system literacy, and embodied practice into a steady, relational approach to inner transformation.
Integral to this practice is the belief that each person is a complex soul system made of many parts. Within us are exiles, tricksters, shadows, monsters, young versions of Self, reclaimed parts, and looping stories. We believe that even our inner monsters are simply parts of ourselves that have adapted over time in an attempt to protect us or to survive. The worlds within us are not patriarchies. They do not require the slaying or conquering of monsters. Instead, we practice curiosity and self-compassion. We learn to soothe our shadows, our creatures, our beasts, and to invite them to rest and integrate.
Befriending the Whole Self
Ancestral Practices and Reparations
Inner Territory work is not new. It was not recently developed. This work is both ancestral and innate. Rainey grew up practicing it, without even realizing what her soul was naturally embodying. It was a childhood instinct that organically developed into an intentional adult practice. And, because of the labor and wisdom of Black and Indigenous femmes who have long asked white women to relearn, reinvigorate, and return to their own ancestral traditions so that, in doing so, they would stop co-opting the traditions and practices of People of the Global Majority, Rainey found her way to the study of Seðr. To the poetry and soul work of the Völva. From there, the practice itself bloomed, fed by the soil of countless pre-colonial generations. And still, the lifelong work of uprooting whiteness continues. Especially here within such tender and powerful work. You will find that, within your training requirements, is a commitment to decolonial work that is led by Black and Indigenous women and gender non-conforming teachers. It is not optional, but vital to the severing of the assimilation contract our ancestors once made with empire. We will provide suggestions on who to learn from, but it will be your responsibility to both your own evolving self and to the collective to reverently follow through.
Although we are teaching a complex soul system that is anchored in Nordic practices, we are only able to teach this system because of the Black and Indigenous femmes who taught us to seek out what is ours. We do not overlook the centuries of hard labor, preserved wisdom, and teaching that have gone into that. The Inner Territory is committed to reparations for that life-sustaining labor. 5% of everything we bring in goes directly to a Black or Indigenous creator or educator whose work has helped shape us. We do that now when what we bring in is minimal, and we will do that later when it increases. This is how we stay upright in community and in healing work.
Inner Territory, as we teach it, is anchored in the ancient art of traveling the inner landscape of souls, of meeting with guides and spirits on behalf of the individual and the collective. It is rooted in the archetype and practices of the Völva, making it ancestral for many. But it is not only for those with Nordic or Scandinavian roots. We welcome you to take what you learn here and use it to explore the traditions and practices you yourself come from. There is no one right way to operate within soul work, but there is a requirement that we continue to learn, to shed the habits and unconscious behaviors of whiteness. We must become people who do not harbor a belief that our way of doing things is superior or that it is learned solely by self-exploration. Those of us working within the realms of healing only hold any semblance of awareness, of community, of being tied to ancient, ancestral rhythms because of the way Black and Indigenous femmes have kept the fires of community alive - even when it cost them more than any one body could give. We must remain reverent with that. We must remain grieved. We must remain certain of our roles even now. White-led spaces will not be capable of providing your full soul work education. We can only be adjacent, a place to relearn what your ancestors once practiced together. Decolonial work will have to happen under the tutelage of people who have survived whiteness and who can spot it from a mile away.
If this calls to you, or if it agitates to read, come learn what existed before the soul-rending birth of whiteness. Both are reasons to lean in. Both are signals that something waits for you here. And, if you are ready to begin learning Inner Territory as Nordic ancestors honed it and as we have since reinvigorated it, please find your way to THIS PAGE where your Journey into decolonial work truly begins. Choose a teacher. Begin somewhere. This is the most sacred work of your entire life.
I (Rainey) am a white woman working within a soul parts practice. My lineage and spiritual practices are a patchwork of Nordic, Scandinavian, Irish/Celtic through ancestry, rich with animism, balance, story, and guides. I, like many, was born into the disembodiment of whiteness, a gross inheritance from too many of my ancestors who gave up parts of their souls in exchange for assimilation. This is not something I hold lightly.
It is undeniable that the practices, tools, and rituals of BIPOC people are appropriated within white spiritual spaces and beyond. I have learned from Rebecca, The White Woman Whisperer, that one way to interrupt the patterns of whiteness is to learn who and where we ourselves have come from. I have taken this to heart as a mapline leading out of assimilation and into a long-awaited return. I won’t pretend that I have eradicated every last drop of whiteness from myself (I’m often heartbreakingly aware I haven’t), but I make an ongoing vow to never stop investigating, naming, and dismantling the oppressor within as Audre Lorde has taught us to do.
So, in alignment with my integrity and always evolving in understanding, I practice what is mine, honor what is not, and revere collaborative energies. I teach Inner Territory from my own practices and invite you to explore it through yours.
As exploratory as I am with the spiritual practices of my pre-colonial ancestors, I am wildly cautious about who I learn from, knowing that many European spiritualities have been co-opted and distorted by white supremacy. I reject that insertion and oppose it with my entire soulbody.
My deeply revered lineage of thought is always evolving and has included Merlin Stone, Audre Lorde, Gina Pollard, Octavia Butler, Joy Harjo, Mel Gentry Bosna, Sean Kane, Perdita Finn, Holly Ringland, adrienne maree brown, Toi Marie Smith, Rob Bell, bell hooks, Ivy Mulligan, Andrea Gibson, Sophie Strand, Emily Dickenson, Ada Limón, Henri JM Nouwen, Carl Jung, Louise Erdrich, Jesmyn Ward, Chimamanda Ngozi Aidichie, Cole Arthur Riley, Chidimma Commer, Alok V Menon, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Malialani Dullanty, Holly Gilman, Clark Strand, Monjica Sjöö, Barbara Mor, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Maya Angelou, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Adrienne Rich, Jaiya John, St Therese of Lisieux, Glennon Doyle, Mary Oliver, Jovie Hawthorn Browne, and Elianne El-Amyouni. This well of influence is always evolving, but it is important to name the voices, minds, and lives that have, over time, impacted, softened, and helped birth all of the writing you will find here.
I have deep respect and appreciation for the kinship of soul work across many lineages and encourage you to learn from teachers who are living libraries of wisdom. Where and who do you also come from? Those mythlines are wildly important to learn so that your own spirituality and living begin to work in tandem to dehydrate the thirsty beast of whiteness.
White cishet women will not rebuild the world. We will not usher in a new way. Black and Indigenous women have spent lifetimes building and preserving the scaffolding and liberatory foundations of a better world. They are the captains of these ships.
It is deeply important to me that, as you come to my work, you understand that I am not, cannot ever be, an architect of a better world, but I am a diehard believer in one. I can see its shape and substance within the Inner Territory, within myth and folklore, within movements and resistance, within books and newsletters written by the women and others I have listed below, within the overlapping waters of past and present, within people, within Nature itself. I am a student and a recipient of the wisdom I’ve absorbed from Black, Palestinian, and Indigenous women, as well as trans and nonbinary People of Color who will, for a long, long time be, and are now, leading us.
With all my heart, I point you in the direction of these world builders and visionaries of a better world. Draw from them first and foremost. And, if Inner Territory work, as I’ve learned and teach it, calls to you, please come and find me. I’ll be here. A deckhand, not a captain, as we steer ourselves home.
An online rape academy was visited 62 million times by men in February alone. There are an estimated 6 million pages in the Epstein files. Only 3 million have been released, with the names of the predators mostly redacted, and within those, there are over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. A woman in France was drugged by her husband for over 50 years so that men - strangers and neighbors - could rape her without her knowledge or consent. Indigenous women and two-spirit people are taken from and/or murdered on Native land by non Native men at an alarming rate that is never accurately reported by the government. 400 Trans people - 60% of them Black trans women - have been reported as murdered since 2013.
Our rage has breached the walls.
So we close the gates to the Below and leave them to her
Ereshkigal
who does not wait for permission or proof
but hears the lament of children
of trees
of women
of rivers funneling our keening suffering
down
and it is enough
to swallow each one in cosmic chaos, in womb dirt, in sacred dark
to block the Return
to hold rotting souls Below for a millennium or two
until the rot has broken down, the soul has transmuted, the death has spread heavy and rich through bones of shame
and returned each man as a root, a stem, an earthworm
something low and useful
something alive and finally, in specs of minutes, in inches of time
serving the whole again
I meet a woman below the tree
branches dragging dainty, leafy fingertips across the ground
whispering Huluppu lore 1
as complicated as it’s ever been
so that we, too,
are heels in the stars
crowns in the soil
she brings an eye socket
hollow and glistening to the altar of Ereshkigal
so together we peer into a swimming void
pupil dilated between worlds
all the way Below
she and I
you and us
we nod in agreement
in alignment with the House of Dust, Death, and Decay
keep the return closed, we say
keep those souls in long decomposition
the sound of our children blown apart, burning, bleeding, and violated has not stopped tunneling through root cavern
through who and what we’ve endured
’we’ve had enough’ has long outrun its limit
they must not return
until they come up earth again
green again
soft again
us again
//what will we do with the men who have grown all rot, no soul?
Some things we transmute. We release to the Below. We trust Nature to take their eternal time with. Some things we deliver to the womb of The Dark Mother, where all of life has come from, returns to, and is transformed within. Some things we erect spiritual scaffolding around so they cannot return as they are. Some things we leave outside the walls, outside the village, outside the inner realm of vulnerability. Some things we confess have become so lost from us that there is no way of return, as they are. There can only be a circle of strong backs refusing readmittance. Some souls have become so corrupt, so void of substance, they can only be delivered to Her, left to Her, held by Her until someday they are soul again. Some things we ward against so that, when the time comes, the only possible return is new and low. The web of Nature, of aliveness, must refuse entrance back into the world. Let them go. Deliver them into the Below. Weave the gates closed. Leave them to Her. This, too, is a Third Way.
As if we need statistics to affirm what we have lived, witnessed, and know. As if even video proof is enough in this world.
97% of sexual assaults are committed by men. 2
From 1994 to 2010, approximately 4 in 5 victims of intimate partner violence were female. 3
Female intimate partners are more likely to be killed with a firearm than all other means combined. 4
More than a quarter (28%) of male victims of completed rape were first raped when they were 10 years old or younger. 5
Indigenous Women are 2xs more likely to be raped than Anglo-American white women 6
Murder is the 3rd leading cause of death for Indigenous Women (Centers for Disease Control) 7
As of 2016, the National Crime Information Center has reported 5,712 cases of missing American and Alaska Native women and girls. Strikingly, the U.S Department of Justice missing persons database has only reported 116 cases. 8
43% of dating college women report experiencing violent and abusive dating behaviors, including physical, sexual, digital, verbal, or other controlling abuse. 9
In Almost 400 Cases of Fatal Violence Against Transgender People Tracked Since 2013, 70% were Against Black People, Nearly 60% Were Black Trans Women, and 71% of Cases Involved Gun Violence 10
According to the US Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, domestic violence may be the single major precursor to fatalities from child abuse and neglect in the US. 11
Find more statistics, information, and resources for help HERE
CNN article on exposing a worldwide online rape academy
Gisèle Pelicot: Shame Has To Change Sides
1 The Huluppu tree itself was a result of Ereshkigal’s own rape. She birthed it in the Below and then abandoned it in the Above with its branches reaching down, its roots in the air.
2 Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sexual Assaults Recorded by Law Enforcement, 2019, Kimberly H. Martin, Ph.D. BJS Statistician
Third day of floods, tornadoes, lightning & hail. A 16 year-old girl has already died in Orange County from a mudslide. I turn on Peter Jennings to see if this unnatural Los Angeles weather was nationally newsworthy.
It was the top story!
My friends in the Pacific Northwest must be laughing their damn fool asses off. Sunny Southern California. Ha. "Hug a palm tree for me down there." Right, sucka. If you can dodge the fiery bolts from the blue.
In the kitchen microwaving asparagus, I hear through the radioactive hum the announcement a writer has died. "Who?" I ask my host.
"Hunter S. Thompson."
Holy shit.
Hunter Thompson, who's ruined more young lives than Thomas Chatterton, Ozzy Osbourne, Arthur Rimbaud, Jim Morrison, Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Cobain put together.
When, in the spring of 1980, Rolling Stone did a piece on you plugging the god-awful movie "Where the Buffalo Roam" and you said your current favorite drink was Scotch and Nyquil, yeah, I ran to Super Sadie's for a bottle of Black Velvet and some cold medication.
And I didn't even like Scotch.
So imagine what it tastes like with the bilious green Sludge that is Nyquil. I was drunk, sleepy, and nauseous-- but my sinuses were never so clear.
Hunter Thompson, who, in spite of my background as a first-year dropout of the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, taught me that no journalist worth his salt ever researched a story unless totally fried on acid-- a technique that miraculously actually worked when I got my first printed piece ever in the LA Weekly (and also explains why it was nine years before I was published again.)
Hunter Thompson who, regardless of my first perforated ulcer, I still admired unreservedly as the Ultimate Unrepentant Reprobate for his refusal, after his assault/drug bust, to cop a plea and go on Oprah as the first leg of "The Inspiring Story of My Recovery from Drugs & Alcohol Tour" like all the other pathetic whiny Hollywood losers who don't have the guts to pay the piper when the axe comes down and thus are all at the Oscars tonight.
O Hunter,
you never told us what you really felt.
Were you sad living in the O'Farrell theater,
the porn palace run by the infamous Mitchell Brothers
in San Francisco for two bloody years
Quote Researching a Book Unquote
when you couldn't even get it up?
Were you angry when the cheapass binding of
The Curse of Lono came undone,
making an intact copy of that piece of tripe
the most valuable first edition in your canon of work?
Was it really hip and back pain that drove you over the edge,
you--the man who had his teeth
kicked down his throat by the Hell's Angels?
O Hunter, will you ever send
that story racketing down the Mojo wire
to Jann Wenner's office at the Rolling Stone?
But, I forgot, there is no Mojo, we have the internet now,
and Jann is at the Academy Awards show
with his hand wedged up Scarlet Johanssen's butt crack
while laughing uproariously at the antics
of a network-sanitized Chris Rock.
And Gonzo is dead.
O Hunter, who can forget you immortal motto to live by,
We need to talk. I was in a really dark place last year. So dark that I went to Service. When a witch goes to Service, you know that shit is bad, bad. I cried from the moment I stepped in that building till the moment I stepped out of it. I haven’t been back but I did start digging deep into the history of Christianity. Read the Bible (& some missing ancient texts). Researched Rome, imagined walking through the holy door (cried so much I couldn’t see). Interesting where history takes you. I don’t know what’s going on with me. F**k, maybe I’m having a midlife crisis. I’ll keep you posted but that’s not the point. The point is this: Someone saw a quote I posted the other day, "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire," - Saint Catherine of Siena (the church where she is buried was my favorite church in Italy. Chills for days and days! I wanted to read about her- found that quote, LOVED it, shared it. The end. ) Anyhow, someone responded to that story with the above comment and I couldn’t resist saying something. I don’t know about you guys but posting about God isn’t gaining anyone any love online. At least not in the circle I run in. Have you seen how mean the online world is to people who love God. It’s actually wild. There isn’t a group of people who are talked down to online more (in my opinion), if we’re being honest. IF I was going to pose for likes or follows, it certainly wouldn’t be posing as a believer. ME of all people. ME!!! posting scripture. ME, going to a Church of ALL the ever-loving places. Ahhhhh!!!!!! NO. No. Just No!!!! That is almost like a social media death sentence. It’s too comical to even wrap the mind around. If I had a social media team, they’d be losing their minds 😂
Thankfully, it’s just me here.
Here’s the tea. I don’t know. Period. This is just where I’m at. But… like always, I am here to be me. To be as honest as possible (when it doesn’t hurt someone else to do so) and to share where I’m at. Not because I’m right, not because I know what the f**k is going on but because that’s what I commited to do with this space when I started it. Otherwise, what’s the actual point.
It’s why I don’t get paid to advertise or take on brand deals. I never wanted someone else to be able to tell me what I can and cannot post. I am the only one who will answer for my posts and that’s the way I like it.
Here I am: Doing a little (okay, more than a little) soul searching right now. I don’t know where that will take me but this is where I’m at right now >>> A witch going to Service (and maybe taking a OCIA class online cause I’m curious 🫣) & seeing where it leads.
I’ll keep you posted.
Halloween week seems like the perfect time to post this, right? 😂
Be patient with me.
Love you,
Rainey
Back story: I was never formally baptized but spent a lot of time at a Protestant church as a child. I always had the most magical (wrong word maybe?? lol) experiences there. I didn’t go back as an adult because I couldn’t get past their dark history. I've spent my formative "religious" years practicing the old ways and working with the old gods. But when things got bad enough, in Christ is where my soul ultimately wanted to be. It’s what I needed and that’s really all there is to say on that front.
who crawl with their heads down, slink like a dog that’s been caught eating cake off the counter
We are what we are to each other, which is
nothing now
But I see myself in loose crumbs around their mouths
bits of me snagged on the fur of their lives, and in my dreams, I reach to rattle me loose
Last week I think
Am I coming back?
In the last days of the last month, crumbling off the fractured first year of the last death
my shoulders have unclenched
The year is waning
I suspect I’m waxing
So I test my edge, feel for familiar divots
tiny gouges of bone and heart, topsoul and the poetry I gave without questioning whose mouth they’d wind up dangling from
still there
smooth, concave
all the sharp parts turned soft by sacral salt water and sand
I already knew
No one bleeds when they brush against my heart anymore
He’s playing a song in a dream
uses the word majesty and the worship intended sounds hollow
like an uncertain whisper
I wonder if it always did or if I was right when I heard his dry throat scratching for a divine sip
On instinct, I nod so he’ll sing again, let what scraps he captured flutter pretty in the wind
It costs me so little, the depth of me dark and bioluminescent
ribs flared to make room for what never stops flooding
I can spare a drink for a ghost on occasion
Three nights of dreams
I am telling myself I incarnated this time to be communion
to be split words and shared red, heady wine
And I think, after all these years, I am glad I have been both initiation
and revelation sliding between teeth, staining tongues
In the end, I’ll tell you I went willingly
And when you ask if I knew I’d return again, hag stone palms and the sweet smell of death caught in my hair
I’ll wink and shrug, let you make your own gospel or heresy of what you taste
To let a broken man sing, I am only made smoother by the release
and some part of me knows that what old lovers have gobbled quickly,
devouring like soft chocolate that might kill them
was always more sacred than that
Ritual baked into thick warm poems, Hathor’s body split among lifetimes
Integration poured into cups, the way some women send a text that says
This book is going to burn me down
and I’m ready
while I eye him [the universal him] sitting at a counter, avoiding the title, the author, the furnace between the pages
the cosmos between it’s legs
He’s brushing the whole point aside and asking for more cake
She’s already caught fire on the descent
This piece was originally drafted from the fertile soil of Kalapuyan land near the Multnomah River (now known by a settler’s name) with reverence for the people who carry displacement in their bones and who will someday be the rightful stewards of this land again. I recognize them as the original storytellers of these places, and I hope the ground itself feels the offering of this work as it spreads.
An eclipse-threaded prayer for honest passage through the September full moon.
Dear September Moon,
I am a humbled student of eternal new beginnings. I am grounding myself with slow hip spins and the light of a single flame. Under your watchful gaze, I am once again speaking incantation and remembering ritual, knowing— tenuous but real clarity— that whoever and whatever does not bring me alive is too small for me.
Dear Moon, my blood runs as true and dark and deep as the light you cast across our earth tonight, my pulse a snare drum promising my own eternal becoming, in the marrow of my bones lies the genetic path of every magickal woman who has ever left an offering for you. I call on them all tonight.
Dear moon,
Corn Moon. Red Blood Moon. Moon of chapters closing and doors opening and trusting in what cannot yet be seen. Moon of thin spaces and thinner veils. Moon of severing old patterns and clearing the fields so the new can be planted when spring finally comes. Moon of my own eternal becoming and sacred unveiling. Moon of the turning leaves, when we all ready ourselves for the inevitable shedding.
Moon of creative flow and karmic release, and all that lives on the other side of truth. Moon that spotlights the cage of the stories we tell ourselves so that we may continue to find a better way out. Moon of the waning and growing up and growing out and moving on. Mate-calling moon. Moon of seeking the ones who will hold you through the cold and asking, “Will your arms still be wrapped around me when we reach the night of longest dark?”
Moon of integrity, of knowing your word is honor and your honor is your truth and your truth is always what sets us free. Moon when the rice is laid up to dry. Moon of the heart-led. Slippery fish Pisces moon. Moon of the lunar north node eclipse. The dragon’s head casts fearsome shadows moon. Moon of restless hunger and wild ambition. Ninth moon.
Moon of severing old patterns and clearing the fields so the new can be planted when spring finally comes.
Moon of the plot twist, of the unreliable narrator learning to grasp the roots of her own story and pull it to the surface of the soil and offer it to the gods of the harvest as honest sustenance of a life well lived. Moon of late nights filled with nothing but words.
Moon of observing old patterns and the walk to somewhere new. Moon of the eclipse corridor, doors narrowing to a single honest passage that can only move us through. Moon of the dragon’s tail loosening what no longer belongs. Moon of memory and blood magick. Moon that illuminates self-sacrifice and harmful illusions and points the way to something new. Moon where all comes to ripeness, and we go to our knees in thanks for what the earth has given.
Catalytic Moon. Moon of cataloging unfinished business and promises unkept. For keeping track, making notes, and naming names. Moon of the plans and logistics that make the impossible realized before your very eyes. Holy devotion and wild discipline moon. Wine Moon, Song Moon, Barley Moon. Moose moon.
Moon of the plot twist, of the unreliable narrator learning to grasp the roots of her own story and pull it to the surface of the soil and offer it to the harvest as honest sustenance of a life well lived.
Moon of the undercurrent of knowing that runs beyond all logic. Moon of heightened senses and ancestral intuition, of opened portals to reveal inner clarity. Moon that invites in the darkness where even the stars have forgotten to shine. Moon of wild love songs and finding meaning in every last dream. Harbinger of change, whether we want it or not, moon. Moon of the ending that has been a long time coming.
Moon of heightened senses and ancestral intuition, of opened portals and doorways to reveal inner clarity. Moon that invites in the darkness where even the stars have forgotten to shine.
Moon of fluidity meeting practicality for the integration of the ordinary and extraordinary. Moon of renewed ritual and sovereign incantation. Moon of shortened days and fever dream nights, preparing the beasts for hibernation. Moon of noting what was made sweet in the final days, plucking it reverently, placing it in your lover’s mouth and inviting her to savor its bounty, and calling it all good, the fruit, the end of the season, the soft wet over your lover’s tongue.
Liminal moon. Moon of nuts and gourds. Little sister of the hot moon. Find your stillness, stick your landings, hold your ground, moon. Someone always harvests the final fruit moon. Put your ear to the ground until the earth speaks, moon.
Moon of nostalgia. Moon that holds the wisdom of all that has come thus far. Moon of oak and barley, of grapevine and elderberry, and sage. Moon of bearing witness, of closing cycles, of the release of all hope for a better past. Persephone’s, Ceres’s, and Ceridwen’s moon. Moon of Demeter’s impending grief, just as every mother one day grieves under the full moon.
Moon of noting what was made sweet in the final days, plucking to savor its bounty, and calling it good.
Moon of the last gathering before the feast. Moon of the last soft season before the harshness comes. Final moon before the frosts arrive and the earth freezes in the north. Moon of humbled ground. Moon of holy reckoning. Moon of building a shelter strong enough to keep the wolves out. There will always be an extra seat at my table for you, moon.
Moon of I am no longer willing to go to war with myself to be free. Moon under which personal grounding becomes an act of self-kindness. Turning point and shifting sands moon, where all that is buried is brought to the surface, eclipse at the fault line, the clean break that makes room for breath.
Moon of placing myself in the path of magic. Moon of standing still as sky and earth align, letting the shadow pass through me. Moon the color of blood vows, and rusted earth. Moon of whatever and whoever does not bring me alive is far too small for me. Moon under which I refuse any longer to be complicit in my own diminishment. For the love of all that is good and holy, kiss me like you goddamn mean it or be gone, moon. Moon of no more asking to be wanted. Moon of calling myself back home.
I am no longer willing to go to war with myself to be free.
Dear Moon, I am doing the hard work of looking at the raw spaces, the ugly places, the ancient and wounded girls who live in the shadowed parts of my soul.
Dear Moon, I am conducting a choir of all of their voices, so that in the harmony of all they have long needed to say, I can find the thread of my own singular note.
Dear Moon, I promise to learn to recognize my voice in your fullness, hone its power as you wane, and find its tenor before you are once again new.
Dear Moon, whisper to the one who comes next that I am coming back home, that she will not find me here, under the arms of the saguaro and grandmother creosote. Tell her I am crossing the ocean, answering the call of my one wild heart. Tell her that when she takes your place, finds herself finally fully swollen with light, rises in the northern sky just a month from now, she will hear my boots on the cobblestone and see my breath in the night air, and I will honor her as I return to the land that has known me since before I knew myself.
Dear Moon rising tonight, reveal what it is I need to at long last see, allow me to taste reciprocal desire and a fully answered call. And please, dear Moon, send me every last gentle and fierce reminder of what it is to be joyously and riotously and rebelliously alive, to taste it on my tongue and take it into my belly, to know it as a gift, just as, in the writing of this, I have come to know you.
Send me every last gentle and fierce reminder of what it is to be joyously and riotously and rebelliously alive, to taste it on my tongue and take it into my belly, to know it as a gift.
Tell me, what does this moon whisper to you? What do you hope to hear it whisper back?
Author’s note:
This piece braids together seasonal moon names used by several Native Nations with my own astrological reading of this moon’s influence on my life. For several years, now, whenever a particular full moon catches my attention, I go digging.
I look to learn about the moon from several angles, searching for seasonal names as they’re held by specific Indigenous Nations, along with cultural mythology around each month’s moon. I deep dive into current astrology and my own chart, then write what moves through my life—haphazard and heartfelt, exactly how I practice. I’m learning as I go. I’m not an expert, and I welcome corrections offered with care.
This piece braids together seasonal moon names used by several Native Nations with my own astrological reading of this lunation in my life. Moon names differ by Nation, language, region, and seasonality, and many communities use multiple names for the same period. Any examples here are illustrative and subjective (never exhaustive), drawing on my personal interpretation and practice rather than ethnographic or astronomical claims, and are offered with respect.
I honor the Mi’kmaq as the ancestral, unceded caretakers of these homelands, and I hold remembrance for the Beothuk whose presence shaped the island long before me. I live and write in Phoenix on the homelands of the O’odham and Piipaash, and I offer gratitude for their ongoing relationship with this desert.
but we are feral, persistent, inclusive little record keepers and this time we have the maplines of others to lead us through
I was in my mid-thirties when I picked up the book that would lay maplines so wide, so thick, so soaked through with an alive shade of red that something old would rattle awake, climb up my spine and tap against the back of my dry, tired, aching throat. I was freshly divorced, held in the womb (or the void? Who knows. It was a shapeshifty thing and wombs and voids are made the same) of a small community, a proclaimed heretic, and a woman with a parched desert voice reaching for something real to slake a lifetime of thirst.
What I’m saying is, I was ready. I had already burned down a life that didn’t fit over my body. I had already left and lost and drained away what had kept me unwell. I had nothing left to lose or cling to. So my hands had opened that book in the way reunited lovers would press a palm to the other’s cheek. Gently. Reverently. Longingly. Unsure of what they’ll find, but willing to risk the return.
That first day, I flattened my left palm on the opposite page, pulled my knees close to my body, pressed my back against the bedroom wall, and introduced myself to Merlin Stone.
“For people raised and programmed on the patriarchal religions of today, religions that affect us in even the most secular aspects of our society, perhaps there remains a lingering, almost innate memory of sacred shrines and temples tended by priestesses.” A thud. Like a quick, cunning cat sparing its last life. I felt it in my body - a suddenness, a lightning flash, a black shape arching its spine.
“In the beginning, people prayed to the Creatress of Life, the Mistress of Heaven.” Horse hooves flying over packed ground, an air shivering rhythm picking up - and my heart, so full of tinder, catching fire.
I don’t know why I’d lean closer over a page I could read just fine, but I was nearly bowing to the open spine. Ink and memory, breath skimming and scouring the libraries of my soul, looking for something left untouched for too long to remember its name.
“At the very dawn of religion,” Merlin Stone, the woman who would give me the first mapline I could use to transform what was shattered in me, spoke from another node in time, “God was a woman.” And in a breath that still reverberates a decade later, sharp reclamation broke through the scar tissue of my life, shimmered hot behind my unfurling heart. “Do you remember?” she asked.
Alone in my room, in the middle of a life that had cost me everything to save, I leaned against the door of my Inner Territory and said out loud, “Yes.”
Merlin Stone played such a large part in the birth of the feminist Goddess movement of the 70’s and 80’s that Gloria F. Orenstein, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote, “For me, it was always Merlin Stone who launched this movement toward revision and pioneering scholarship without tipping over into fantastic claims to paint a more original picture.” She certainly wasn’t the first to question the male lens that had structured our collective memory of history. G. Rachel Levy left her own maplines in her well-respected book The Gate of a Horn 1, published in 1948. Helen Diner wrote Mothers and Amazons: The First Feminine History of Culture, translated and published in English in 1965, though first published in German 40 years before. And in her own time, Merlin was surrounded by other feminist thinkers like Monica Shoo and Barbara Mor (The Great Cosmic Mother, 1975) who had all begun to ask the same question: “Was history rewritten to remove the immense role of The Goddess? And, if so, what does that mean for us?”
“In order to remove women’s rights,” Merlin famously wrote, “you have to remove women’s rites.” The rituals, sacred and mundane, that have the potential to transform the way we imagine and practice community are so detrimental to the reign of patriarchy that they have been buried, demoralized, and colonized and/or assimilated out of too many of us. We don’t even remember where we came from, so how can we imagine where we are going?
But feminism has a long history of being… well… white. Cisgender. Heterosexual. Exclusive to one demographic of women, and even outright declaring that other women should continue to be oppressed. What early feminists did to reject Black and lesbian women from their movement, many current feminists repeat now in rejecting trans women. It’s the same playbook, the same hunger for self-liberation that circles the drain of patriarchy, never going anywhere because it has forgotten that co-liberation is the only thing that can bust through the grate and let us flow free again.
I say it so often now, it feels like I’ve grown another limb in its shape: it’s all of us or it’s none of us. Anything other than that is an offering we lay at the feet of the systems that keep us oppressed. What we do to liberate only ourselves fits perfectly into the strategy that has kept us mostly disoriented and seemingly alone for thousands of years.
To remove our rights, they’ve removed our rites, and in removing our rites, they’ve removed the ancient memory of a collaborative village.
Some Indigenous and Native Nations have been able to preserve stories, language, and practices even in secret, keeping what is sacred far from the grasp of colonizing, burning, starving, enslaving, appropriating hands. Some have begun to revive languages that are on the brink of being lost forever. Some have never stopped working in the direction of collective liberation, earth reverence, and community care. And still, for many, we’re not left with much: so many ancestral, land-anchored stories, traditions, and rituals have been drained, the bones of who we might have been now rattling inside a rewritten history that centers, amplifies, and even worships men.
We cannot talk about patriarchy without talking about white supremacy without talking about religious empire without talking about colonization without talking about ecocide without talking about children being murdered in their schools without talking about a catastrophe of a healthcare system without talking about trans people having an average life expectancy of 35 without talking about the church orchestrating the death and enslavement of human beings over centuries without talking about Stonewall without talking about the mistreatment of immigrants without talking about concentration camps disguised as detention centers without talking about facism that never goes away for long without talking about women tortured and burned for being accused of witchcraft without talking about late stage capitalism without talking about a woman being kept on life support as an incubator without talking about our tax dollars funding genocide without talking about pastors spiritually manipulating and sexually assaulting people who trust them without talking about child pornography without talking about the repeated election of a convicted raptist without talking about single mothers who never have a moment to breath or heft themselves out of poverty without talking about America sucking up the resources of other countries and leaving them with the rubble of its waste.
Which means we cannot talk about a better world without listening to and allying with one another.
Feminism that does not involve the liberation of Women Of Color, trans, non binary, queer, gay, disabled, poor, immigrant, and othered people is not a mapline I want to follow. It’s just not full enough. It hasn’t cooked all the way through or spent time even learning its own landscape. So it can’t lead us anywhere new. It can’t even remember its way back to anywhere ancient, communal, or wise. Feminism as we’ve primarily experienced it is stunted, habitually circling back through patriarchy with new language, new villains, new outcasts, and new exclusionary practices.
When I taught the Audre Lorde Writer’s Soul class, I learned that she, like other Black women at the time, was expected to ‘choose’ a movement. She could fight for her humanity as a Black person or for her humanity as a woman, but not for both.2 Meanwhile, her humanity as a queer person didn’t belong in either movement, which ultimately gave her room to carve a Third Way through the world even long after she’d left it.
Audre was invited to speak at feminist events, but in her speech The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House, she pointed out that she and the one other Black speaker were invited at the last minute and were not paid the same as the white speakers. Merlin took note of this, too. She was a white woman with a body of work that was exciting and invigorating to the feminist movement, and she eventually understood that she might be in a position to do something about it. Although the feminist movement itself struggled to find its fluidity, when Merlin spoke at events, she insisted Black and Brown women be given the platform and that they be paid the same rate.3 She recognized the beast she was staring down. She’d seen it in her research.
Misogyny, Merlin was certain, was of the same body as racism. They were and are not separate issues, but solidly, absolutely, undeniably limbs of the same oppressive system. Although not published traditionally (and it isn’t a stretch to guess why), she wrote about the intersection of racism and the erasure of the Goddess in a twenty-eight-page, ten-thousand-word essay titled Three Thousand Years of Racism: Recurring Patterns in Racism. The only place this essay is currently accessible is in her biography, Merlin Stone Remembered4, and it gives me such joy to know that it was, in the end, traditionally published.
The history of The Goddess has been overwritten by, for, and about men just as the history of enslavement, genocide, and the dehumanization of Black, Indigenous, and other People Of Color has been overwritten by, for, and about whiteness.
In truth, our collective history has been rewritten in the dead of night - centuries of culture, life, collaboration, reverence, and tradition erased to clear the page for the elevation of white cishet men. We’ve woken in the cultural morning to find that we ourselves have been erased. Our role in the world has been so vastly diminished that we are still, in the year 2025, fighting for lifesaving medical care, safety for our neighbors, an end to carceral systems, reparations for BIPOC kin, safety for our children, and body autonomy. Even worse, exclusionary feminists seem to have decided somewhere along the way that patriarchy is right: not everyone can be free. They’ve drenched themselves in individualism, losing access to the soul of community, and told themselves that if someone else has to remain oppressed so that they can try to get out, so be it.
I woke yesterday morning still halfway swinging from a dream where I held my daughter and dove under tsunami waves. Again and again, we grinned at one another, pulled air into our lungs, held on tight to each other’s arms, and dove below the waves. What was enormous and towering, the sound of it hitting us in the chest with a brutal force, became still and quiet and aqua from below. And, in the waking, I heard the waves overhead. The same thing over and over again, “We each must be the Merlin Stone, the record keepers of our time.”
We are watching the erasure of history in real time.
This isn’t new. It’s how we got here. Every time there is an emergence, a rising, a hint of collaboration and reckoning, the systemic body of the oppressive beast swarms over what we ourselves have witnessed, heard, held, and shared. It crunches through our reality, breaking and remaking our collective story, not as a living thing, but as a golem. Empty and hollow, a shape meant to mimic something real. But you can feel it, can’t you? The lack of a pulse. The dead eyes. The stumbling gait of something new to the fit of our human bodies.
You’re not wrong. You aren’t crazy. It’s happening again, and something in your DNA remembers, warns, keens, pounds, screams for you to not be swept away.
So listen to me, we have maplines left for us by people who have gone this way before. We have neighbors and friends and family who have been part of the long preservation of what cannot be stolen away. We have books and storytellers and subversive art and inherited memories that are not so easily dislodged. We even have the strategies of people who have unwound the uncanny, ill-fitting rewrite of history and laid it out long and loose on the ground between us. We know that it can be done, that what is real and alive can be preserved and even reclaimed.
So that’s what we’re gonna f**king do.
Show up to writing class. Come with your blazing truth, your defiance of what wants to swallow us whole. Come with your pen, your laptop, your notebook, your diner napkins - just come ready to write. Not dragged down or back by despair, loss, or deeper individualism, but further into a return to collaborative, nourishing, tending, life-saving rituals. We are following the Writer’s Soul of Merlin Stone into a practice that is fringe, wild, defiant, and insistent that there is one way through: all of us or none of us.
｡☆✼★━━━━━━ ↡↡↡↡ ━━━━━━★✼☆｡
1. All book links are affiliate links that benefit a Black owned bookshop in Portland, Oregon.
2. bell hooks writes extensively about this in her book, Ain't I A Woman?
3. It feels important to note that Adrienne Rich often used her time as a white woman to help open doors for Audre Lord, and, although she was grateful for her friend, Audre resented that someone else needed to open doors she should have been able to open on her own. The solidarity is necessary, but the fact that it is needed in the first place remains an injustice.
4. This book was a little hard to get my hands on. I eventually found a copy through a secondhand bookshop that had acquired it from the Omaha Public Library. If you can find a copy, absolutely snatch it up.
We should have had grandmothers and elders teaching us the intricacies and the social responsibility of spirit work. But we still have each other.
for god so loved the Earth
she sent us
that whoever believes in a new collective, collaborative, nurturing world
willingly gives up the old way
for a third one
thoroughly passes through death’s creation water
and is reborn
a poet
a revolutionary
a dismantler of empire
a witness
a voice that cries out in the wilderness
a soul who has learned the way of Return
not that we would perish, but that we would rise
a collaborator with the Earth herself
a rebuilder of worlds
for what is more eternal than that?
¯`*•.¸"¤°´✿.｡.:* ♡︎♡︎♡︎ *.:｡.✿`°¤"¸.•*´¯
Two weeks ago marked the final session of the Inner Territory Guide Training. Ten brilliant, powerful, tender, humble, soulful women passed through the gates of this descent, transformation, and rising. They bolstered one another, spread everything they’d carried with them on the community table, shared, received, and left me so utterly, beautifully changed.
When I put out the call for this training, I asked my guides, my ancestors, my deities, and my dead to only bring the ones who could and would carry this work. I asked the universe, the collective soul of us, to lead the right people to me - the ones who would hold the foundation of this first training in their bones, who would build on it with their breath and wisdom, the ones who would mold this work into their own creation and share it with the world in unique and transformative ways.
My guides did not falter. They did not give me anything less than what I asked for.
On a Wednesday night, we gathered for the final time, and we were all so sad to have completed this part of the Journey together. Shapeshifters, healers, conduits, repairers, forgers of a Third Way - all of them - they added depth and perspective and mythlines and life to something that was so obviously always waiting for them. Inner Territory work is not easy, but it is sweet. It is not always pure, but it is embodied. It is not always light, but it is honest. And I can tell you now that, having witnessed the way these ten women have held, embodied, and lifted up the ancient, living Soul of Poetry through this work, I am more certain than ever that this is the thing so many of us have been trying to remember.
We should have had grandmothers and elders teaching us the intricacies and the social responsibility of spirit work.
We should have been taught how to hone our natural skills and gifts. We should have inherited mythlines and maplines through the wide, vast realms of the soul. Colonization, patriarchy, and the soul loss of whiteness have stripped, assimilated, and repressed what our ancestors had revered, cultivated, and shared for centuries. But I feel so hopeful that the ones who come after us will have something reclaimed, renewed, and revived to be born into.
There are so many of us who are traveling back into the old ways, sifting through the accumulated grime of immovable, unchangeable, unsavory, patriarchal systems to reach for what is ours and shed what is not. The pathways back into what was lost are so varied, so expansive, so unique to the traveler, and I feel nothing but collaborative and celebratory of the different ways we are all working in tandem.
The truth is, there are so many teachers who are opening doorways for us. There’s an abundance of modalities to choose from, and the wide array of options doesn’t diminish any of us. I hope that, as you yourself are searching for a way to revive what is ancient and sacred, you scour the world around you and choose what resonates most. As you do, I am here cheering you on. Even if your path looks different than mine.
As the wheel turns and in the months leading up to the beginning of 2026, I am asking the same thing of my guides, my ancestors, my deities, and my dead as I did before. May they only bring the ones who could and would carry this work, the ones who would hold the foundation of soul traveling and spirit work in their bones, who would build on it with their breath and wisdom, the ones who would mold what is ancient and ancestral into their own creation and share it with the world in unique and transformative ways. If that is you, my friend, the door is wide open, and I cannot wait to meet you.
Today, I spend hours writing, thinking about the lowest chakras and how they grip one another by the elbow. It’s just a crook, a bend, a river turning north in such an unusual way. But the root takes a dip overhead, a hollow place forming like the soft spot on an infant’s head. Press too hard here, and maybe everything will collapse, maybe we’ll flood every pre-verbal memory until it floats waterlogged and bloated to the surface.
Sacral sloshes a saltwater hymn up against the tomb, a hungry thing with too many deep, dark mysteries to make sense of. Reverently, almost, she fills the tender, vulnerable hollow of the soft slope. “Hello root,” she murmurs, but what she means is, “Hello death.” And it’s true, it always has been. At the base of our living, the very tip of our tailbones, is a cave we struggle to understand has always been a grave. Now, she has already sung a ballad, and curling up around the edges is a serpent-shaped memory. Erotic little thing, she’s never forgotten how to seep beneath the skin and turn the dial just enough to hold open the gate to Below.
Solar plexus flare. Slow temperature rise and acidic spiritual digestion. If you could hold the sun to your belly (think a flashlight gripped behind closed fingers), you’d know what I know. You’d see veins stretching out like branches, like lightning strike, like an awful gasp. You’d ask without expecting an answer and it would always, always sound something like, “What the f**k is this?” And the drip of that sacral serpent body would melt off a branch, land with a thud, answer you back. “If you really want to know, you’ll have to…”
And then the moment slips off the edge of the horizon, gone just like that. Interpret it if you can. Make sense of the overlap, of the soft spot, of the oddities spit out by the sea, of a tree spread through the mind of your gut.
We begin with death. We all do. Not one of us is an unmarked life, we all carry the afterbeforetaste of death on our newborn tongues. From the moment we’re born, we are turned in only one direction. We grow while we decay. We evolve while we become still more fragile. We build momentum while we lean against the edge of an eventual collapse. And so we ferry it with us, the tomb that harbors first memories, body stories, mythlines that make such little sense for so, so long.
We are born with the power turned on. With bright light cresting over the first cry, and a surging force crawling up along our spines. The Erotic dances through our bloodstreams, playing with threads of death, weaving along branches of knowing. Somewhere between the underworld and the oracular, an erotic lifeforce swells into a womb and we call it the sea. Every miraculous, beautiful, potent, creative thing crawls from the water of us. That is how we give it life.
We are infused with a Knowing. Intuition laced spirit spinning wild below our ribs. And it never stops speaking, never goes quiet or abandons its post. If only we’d let it digest everything we consume, everything we take in, everything we press against our lips and call holy. Look closely, wild thing, and you might see what you were always meant to.
Today I move back and forth between the root, the sacral, the solar plexus. Between Death, The Erotic, The Knowing. And I put my laptop down, curled over the screen, let out a breath like slow, dripping honey. “Oh,” I tell myself. “Oh.”
In the lowest parts of every one of us is everything an old colonizing patriarchy was so afraid we’d access. “Don’t touch that fruit,” a god told the woman. Or more eloquently, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’
The root. Tomb. Death.
But the serpent, such an old, old embodiment of the wisdom of the Goddess, said, “god knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened.”
The sacral. Erotic. Awakening.
“And you will be like god,” sang the wise one, “knowing good and evil.”
The solar plexus. Intuition. The Knowing.
I keep my hands over my lower belly even when I get up, walk down the stairs, stand in the kitchen. “Oh,” I keep saying. “Oh.” Here in our bodies are secrets, branches, roots, great wells of power, open tunnels between life and death. And I suppose, if it were nothing, there’d be no reason to carve a counter myth so deep. There’d be no point in taking it so far. There’d be no warning to chisel into religion. There’d be no Eve to villainize, no serpent to diminish, no garden to burn down.
So I let Lilith in me reach out across the expanse. I watch while she brings her Red Sea to the tomb of my own christ consciousness. I ask her to carry the tree’s fruit, press it to my lips. I make communion of the first woman reclaiming the second. And I hope the Eve in me is becoming a wild thing, a death portal, an erotic force, a crisp and dripping knowing that drips all the way to the hollow of my throat and pools against the cool river of my voice. I am seeing threads everywhere I look, rope bridges slung between every wide canyon of my life.
“Oh,” I find myself saying at the end of the day. “Oh. Well who fu**king knew?”
Did you know this about us? The maplines creased into our bodies? Coagulating pools of energy pressing weight into our shared humanity, into our single bodies, until we bend. Until we become a river turning north in the strangest way. Whatever it takes to make us pause, put our faces right up against the ground, and wait for the blaze within to light up every branch, every detail, every persuaded interpretation, and then to breathe so hard it all bursts into flames.
Let the garden burn. Let the trees that rattle us awake hold steady like the burning bush, not a leaf singed, while the ground around them turns irrevocably holy. I will gladly take off my shoes on a Monday afternoon and press my fingers into words that remain painfully incapable of delivering the message. I will tell you that the more I understand the Inner Territory, the less I truly know.
Have you noticed that more and more people are dreaming? They’re waking in the mornings with something else still smoldering below their pillows. They carry smoke below their arms for now, great billowing visions tucked in close. They’re noticing a familial bond between their dreams and their waking, the sweet love of our dead shifting and murmuring below their feet while they walk.
More people are dreaming because we need them to.
A witch is born of the true hungers of her time, Ray Bradbury wrote. We could say it any other way and it would be equally as true.
A healer is born of the true hungers of their time.
A seer is born of the true hungers of his time.
A revolutionary is born of the true hungers of her time.
A dreamer is born of the true hungers of our time.
A guide is born of the true soul loss of the time.
And for such a time as this, more and more people are waking up in the mornings with the scent of another place clinging to their skin.
I see the Inner Territory as an expansive, enveloping, changing, eternal landscape of the soul. I see it as having always been the true home of each being, cradling and preserving us through every lifetime. I experience it as such and I witness others do the same.
In the realms of our Selves we are both exile and beloved, both monster and mother, both healer and wounder. All of our many parts of Self - the complex soul system recognized by ancient Shamans and Spirit Workers - belong here within us. Some have adapted to protect us over time, taking on sharp teeth, claws, and fire breathing bellies. Some have shapeshifted in order to survive, hiding away and growing very, very still. Some still know how to listen to the ancestors, how to walk with unique guides. Some remember the deities we’ve made of Nature and revere them without hesitating. Some are young, some are old, some are uninitiated, and some are wise. All of these parts of Self make up the whole of us, meaning they belong here. This is their land, too.
There is no patriarchy within us. No part needs to be conquered, only loved back into being.
As we speak, you and I, the world around us is growing further and further from the arms of Nature. The Mother, androgynous and untamed, keens for what we have all lost. She heaves and fevers and chokes and screams and boils. She gasps and calls and demands we remember who we are and where we come from.
Not only have we forgotten we come from Her, from the Earth itself, we have forgotten that we come from one another and from the terrain of our own souls. We have forgotten that our Inner Territories even exist.
We need more guides. We need dreamers and seers and healers and revolutionaries who remember the way inward, who dare to envision something new, and who are willing to carry that vision out with them again.
I am inviting you to do exactly that alongside me. Come sit with me, learning the intricacies of guiding others through their Inner Territories by first learning how to navigate your own. Not only for yourselves, but for a better world. For your online spaces and your local communities. For your families and children and chosen families. For your exiled and repaired parts. For you, the sovereign individual, and for us, the world that you come from.
We owe one another everything. Our self work, our hope, our defiance of systems of supremacy, our medicine, our wisdom, our humility, and our love.
I trust the guides we need to name themselves, to step forward and pick up the work. We won’t need to chase each other down or convince anyone to learn this art. The ones it is meant for are the ones who will carry it into marginalized spaces, into secret rooms, into open fields, into a world so battered and weary it has nearly given up. I believe in us and I believe in this work.
I’m weaving the training I wanted someone else to share with me years ago because, for many of us, there is no one left to teach us.
“Your work is not for the masses,” she said. “What you do is meant to spore fungal into the world, landing in specific hearts and lives.”
She paused, quiet and thinking.
“Your work is meant to take root in a way that changes the way we live.”
I could not have asked for a reader, a healer, a seer to tell me any differently or to reflect the texture of my life more accurately. And I don’t think I needed someone else to affirm what I’ve known in the deepest crevices of my soul all along, but I could hold what she told me as a gift. A doorway. A nod between two passing strangers. A way of acknowledging that I am a quiet fungal cloud, a flurry of options, invitations, and questions. I have never intended to be anything else.
Once a friend asked me when I knew I wanted to be famous, and I gagged. Physically gagged. Fame is a nightmare, a world fraught with being perceived, misunderstood, remade in the image of the masses. It is a form of worship that coagulates with disappointment and leaves one sticky with tar, dragging along whisps of feathers that never had a chance of becoming wings. Fame is a platform my heart could not build a life on. May I never ever have to carry that weight.
May my life, my work, my love spore quietly into the night instead. May I slip between thin places, sip tea at worn kitchen tables, write alone in the sunlight of an Oregon summer, and pull back heavy red canvas for every circle of friends who come to gather. In another life, I would have lived on the threshold between village and wilderness. I would have been hermit, weird woman, seer, and poet. Anything else would have left me raw with rope burn, shielding my retinas from the too-bright light of being seen.
I’ve been thinking about those two conversations a lot lately while I weave together the thickening pieces of the Inner Territory Guide Training. Spirit work, soul traveling, is not new. I didn’t invent it, and I certainly wasn’t the first to remember it. It will never be a pathway to fame, trademarks, or hierarchy. This road is for the wild, the strange, the open-palmed, the creatures of transformation.
Many people have, in fact, preserved spiritual maps that were passed down quietly and subversively through their family lines. Especially in Indigenous, Native, First Nations communities, old ways, wisdom, and spiritual map lines have been tucked under the folds of preserved rituals to ensure all is not lost. Those stories are not mine to tell or to try to fit over my own body, but I bear witness. I bow to the spirit work of elders who have kept the most precious of anti-colonial work alive. They are keepers of hope, of connective tissue that ties us to our Earth, and of spiritual practices that threaten the power of a whitemalegod’s1 empire.
I didn’t come to the work of my ancestors by familial or communal preservation. I was born to a family of primarily Scots-Irish, British, and Scandinavian descent; to church going people, to ritual and worship that had been forced on our ancestors so long ago we couldn’t intuit what came before. No one even suggested we try. I grew up in white ruffled Sunday school socks, with sermons about sin and repentance spilling over my shoulders, with purity culture stripping the last remnants of agency from my body.
I grew up leaning into Nature and calling her god, wrapping my arms around the trunks of trees and climbing so high I could swear I heard her speaking. I grew up asking questions that burned in my throat and fizzled into vapor when they left my tongue. I grew up hungry for spirituality, weaving it new again all alone in my strange chosen solitude, and assuming the presence I was experiencing was the great male god I had been raised with. The one that had so, so long ago replaced the godds of my ancestors. The one who had come laden with a garden of regret, a mountain of shame, a hungry demand that my very life be the offering.
So I remade him in the field behind our house by the Rappahannock River. I built him shrines in the small sliver of woods nearby. I crunched him below my feet like fragile spines of autumn leaves. I carried him into the attic, where the greatest harm had reached for my small body. I shoved him under my bed at night. I saw his body in pitch black night skies. I swung his words over, under, around the swingset bars. I raced him on the kickball field. I challenged him in the thin places of my world where old goddesses stretched across dry centuries of exile to tap the back of my spine and urge me awake.
I welcomed the god not-of-my-ancestors, and I stretched him so thin he eventually split.
I came to my Inner Territory by instinct, by some other kind of memory. Eight years old in the trees, weaving something through me as a way to preserve what I could not protect in the attic. Seventeen in church buildings, where an approved kind of witchcraft swirled in the air around me til I named what was mine, began to slowly shed what was not. Twenty-three alone in the desert, trying to dislodge what was slowly dying in me, instead discovering another set of feet crunching through the gravel somewhere I could not see - the first sense of Lilith walking with me. Thirty-two, steeped in early years of an ugly divorce and a very public deconstruction. Lying flat on my bed in the middle of the night, traveling backwards in my own timeline to sit with the version of me who had once tried to die.
Over and over - initially without thinking much about what I was doing - I’ve spent the years of this lifetime traveling the terrain of my soul to find me.
I’ve severed cords of connection that had grown stagnant, one-sided, poisonous, and far too lonely to keep carrying along with me.
I’ve crawled through inner dirt to find parts of myself that I’d tucked away so early on, desperate to keep them alive and safe, even if it meant I could no longer access them.
I’ve sailed out to a sacral sea, untying ropes from the boat of my soul, setting myself free of narratives and beliefs that had kept me trapped and alone.
I’ve pressed my forehead to the cheeks of inner monsters and loved them for how hard they’d fought to keep me safe. I’ve sung them to sleep, safe from the swords of patriarchy and the burning torches of other feral parts of myself.
I’ve drifted along rivers in dappled sunlight, entered caves where The Goddess lives, descended into underworlds where ancient alchemical integration threads mycelial through every step, and I’ve named my own name where it has been safe to do so.
Reclaiming, shedding, making living amends, shapeshifting, relinquishing, liberating, drawing maps of where I’ve been, and pulling down no trespassing signs that I myself had left hanging from fencelines.
Without planning to, twenty years ago, I brought the habit and practice of Inner Territory work into the yoga classes I taught, weaving and knotting and untying as I went. Even early on, when I taught specifically and appropriatively christian yoga, I worked a red thread through every class - a meditation of sorts. But more. Always so, so much more.
And then came Wild Soul, a village carved from the rough rock of spiritual wilderness. A meeting place for heretics and healers and strange wanderers. A place of agitation and shedding. A shared ground of reclamation and naming. There the work became far more direct, liquid, and shimmering as we passed together through inner doorways, traversing landscapes we might have once thought impossible. Over and over again over the past three years, we’ve built trust in ourselves and we’ve worked by intuitive guidance.
Only in the past few years have I learned that the work I’ve come to by instinct, by strange habit, has been ancestral. It was work done by Irish, Celtic, and Scandinavian healers, shamans, and seers before it was colonized and christianized out of many of them. As hungry as I was for a teacher, a mentor, or a grandmother, no one taught me where I came from - though I had been practicing it in my sleep, alone in a field, tucked into my bedroom, out in the desert, laying starfish wide in canyons, and sinking into the Salish Sea all along.
I came to the spiritual practice of my lost inheritance by some stimulated, ancient body memory - by archetypal guide and Nature’s dirt womb, by whale song and the instinct to return for parts of me I had left behind. And although I’ve grieved not having grandmothers to teach me, I realize now that my dead have walked with me all this time. They’ve nudged and tapped and howled through the languages of Nature, of intuition, of threads strung between seers regardless of when they’ve lived.
And so, when I began to think more directly about what I wanted to do with the wide, living work that has filled the crevices of my life, I realized I wanted it to spread. I wanted it to wake up in more of us. I wanted us to remember.
Of course, Wild Soul is not for everyone, but the Inner Territory is. We’re not building empire here. We’re building networks and webs with strong nodes. A better world will lean on diverse and thriving villages that work together in ways that are unique to them. It will depend on a mutual reverence for the way our reclaimed spirituality overlaps and the way that it differs.
This work is ancestral to most of us. It originates with traditions that are vastly different, with distinct and fragrant wells of wisdom spilling over the top to create a shapeshifting cloud of witnessing.
“The shaman is not merely a sick man or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”
-Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching
Medicine Women, Shamans, Mystics, Draoi, Volvä, Vitki, Bobohizan, Healers, Curandera - all of us. The names, the practices, the interior maps are as vivid as culture itself. I want us to shed the vice of assimilation. I want us to know what terms, nuances, and elements of tradition truly root into the long story of our ancestry. It is an act of resistance and reclamation to know where we came from, even if all we can access at first is a vague map.
Where do you come from? Who have you been? Search for the form of shamanism, healing work, and spirit journeying that belongs within your long story. Begin there.
The more you travel along the map lines that were ripped from your ancestors, the more you learn exactly how to rebuild it - remake it - mile by mile.
Cradled inside our vast collective expressions of culture and tradition are spiritual pathways that have been subversively passed on, but there are also spiritual pathways that have been mostly lost to us. For those of us raised in the cultureless wound of whiteness, we are born existing between the two. We are raised disembodied, drifting, isolated, and alone. The long-story wound of enclosure and forced obedience to a whitemalegod have confiscated what was once a rich, vital part of how our ancestors took care of one another. The soul traveler has been dehumanized and delegitimized for so long now, it’s become a social norm. We might even find ourselves participating in the oppression of our own souls by mere habit.
And yet we haven’t stopped looking for ways to soothe our inherited longing.
In the black hole of spiritual and even physical diaspora, we’ve fallen prey to spiritual predators who have repackaged patriarchy to look like love and light/divine masculine and divine feminine/manifestation for the individual, and to people who claim to hold the keys to our healing if we’re ready to abandon ourselves in exchange. We’ve lost ourselves between the pews of churches that take our tithes, our agency, and our power without giving anything but shame and fear and disembodiment in return.
For many of us, what has been lost truly has been lost. There is no way to unburn the archives of our old ways.
And so, I think many of us will have to do what our oldest ancestors once did.
We’ll have to learn our own rituals, traditions, and spirit work by communion with Self, the Earth, and one another. We’ll have to become students of old ways, even if we don’t have elders to teach us. And we’ll have to do it alongside the vital, lifelong work of decolonization.
To truly reject empire on behalf of a return to village, we’ll have to refuse to co-opt someone else’s traditions. We all know it’s easier to copy than it is to remember - it is an internal avoidance that has held us in white patriarchy’s fist for so long. But we have to become resolutely unwilling to mindlessly snatch up another culture’s expression and repeat the soulless, ugly theft that originated with the very colonizers who left us so rootless to begin with. We have to risk the discomfort and stunning beauty of discovering where we come from, too. Otherwise, we have nothing to share at the communal fire.
I don’t have the answers. I don’t have some magical grimoire that was hidden under centuries of loss and only awakened by a guru. I don’t have a rigid absolute or a sense of how it should be done all across the board. I don’t have a desire for boss babe empires built on thinned-out spirituality. Nothing about that sounds appealing to me. Those are not the kind of spores I have ever found to be native to the land of my soul.
But I do have a lifetime of intuitive remembering. I have maps of where I’ve been, stories and books scraped together with what did outlive the colonization and assimilation of my ancestors. I do have a way of ancient remembering that has shown up in me, around me, for me more times than I can count. I do have a life’s work that continues to spore quietly into the dark night of our collective soul.
So these days, I’m gathering everything I’ve learned about Inner Territory Journeying. I’m marking the parts of the map where I’ve had to stop and decolonize, truly terraform, the landscape of my life. I’m weaving the training I wanted someone else to share with me years ago because, for many of us, there is no one left to teach us. There are no elders left to show us how to find ourselves deep in the realms of the soul. And yet, it is in us. We feel it, we move with the flow of it, and we notice how instinct has become practice.
I want my life’s work to lift into the wind. I want it to travel fungal on the breath of our old goddesses, finding its way to the hearts who are waiting for it. I want my version of Inner Territory to evolve and adapt into your own unique version. I don’t want you to do it the way I do it. I want you to do it the way your ancestors did.
I want the practice to soften into the tissue of your body, to fruit up in your heart, and to flow outward in a way that is unique to you. I want you to deconstruct as you go, to pivot when you miss the mark, to walk with humility and with your sacred agency intact. I want you to carry this work into your own village and use it as medicine for everyone who has been living with a deep need for spiritual connective tissue.
I’ve created The Inner Territory Guide Training, not as a cute little certification to add to a list of many, but as an offering to fellow seers, healers, volväs, and guides who see where the wound leaves us all still yearning. What you do with what you learn is for you to decide. Use it in your own personal practice, share it with your community - do whatever is yours to do.
Only, please do it. Give yourself to the ancient work of soul retrieval, of spirit traveling, of returning to old ways on behalf of yourself and of your community.
Lean into your collaborative village, fill it with people who want a better world, and use what you learn here to build within it. Even if you, like me, are a weird hermit poet who slips away into thin places every chance you get. We don’t build empires in a better world. We build miles and miles of shimmering, many-noded webs of remembering.
We are living through a time of intensification: of energy, emotion, technology and spirit. The outer turbulence reflects an inner quickening. Things are moving faster than they ever have, and the way we hold and direct our energy matters more than ever.
This practice is for those who feel it all and want to do more than just feel.
It is for those who are learning to be precise with their presence.
Not just to sense the subtle, but to shape it.
Not just to hope for better, but to become a steady vessel for it.
Below is a ritual and journaling framework to help refine your energetic field, to clarify your thoughts, align your heart and ground your will with care.
Use it with the moon, at the turn of a season or any time your energy feels scattered or needs recalibration.
Suggested Timing
+ Full Moon or Last Quarter Moon
+ Twilight or early morning
+ As needed for energetic recalibration
Time Required
45 - 60 minutes
What you'll need
+ A candle
+ Three symbolic objects
• Mind = Feather, quartz, or ink
• Heart = Flower, cup, or photo
• Will = Stone, key, or blade
+ Journal
+ Pen
1. PREPARATION
Dim the lights. Face east, if possible.
Arrange your three symbolic items in a triangle.
Light the candle.
Center yourself with this breath:
Inhale through the nose: clarity
Hold: alignment
Exhale through the mouth: release
(Repeat seven times)
2. INVOCATION (SPEAK ALOUD OR SILENTLY)
I enter this moment to become a clear vessel. May my thoughts reflect truth. May my heart carry no harm. May my will be guided by purpose greater than self. What I invoke, I become. What I become, I offer.
3. JOURNALING: THE THREE GATES
Mind - Heart - Will
CLARITY (Mind)
Where have I allowed confusion, fantasy, or mental looping to misdirect my energy?
What thought-patterns have served alignment?
What do I need to think less about in order to see more clearly
DEVOTION (Heart)
Where has my emotional energy been reactive, leaky, or self-serving?
What would harmlessness look like in the current relationships or situations I’m navigating?
Who or what have I truly offered love to, without condition or agenda?
WILL (Action)
Where have I been overly passive, or overly forceful?
What action(s) do I feel called to take that I’ve been avoiding?
Where can I apply my will in alignment with service, not control?
4. FOCUSED REALIGNMENT (RITUAL ACT)
Choose one insight from each area (Mind, Heart, Will).
Speak aloud your new commitment:
“I commit to clarity by _______.”
“I devote my heart to _______.”
“I will act by _______.”
Place your hand over each symbolic object as you say:
As within, so in my field. As in my field, so in the world.
5. CLOSING
Sit in silence or stillness for a few minutes.
Optionally, sip water or pour a libation.
Extinguish the candle with intention.
This practice is not about perfection, it is about precision. Every time you pause to examine how you're thinking, loving and willing — you participate in planetary energy hygiene. You become a more luminous point in the web.
When Third Way1 first came to me, it was only a bodily sensation. An agitation. A sense of a scaly patch of amber snakeskin I was desperate to shed. Third Way crept in under the floorboards of my divorce, my public deconstruction, and my too-late-in-life awakening to the many-headed beast of white supremacy, patriarchy, and the endlessly repackaged system of power-over.
Dissatisfaction began to gnaw on me, crunching the calcified rigidity of my spine, my hips, and my heavily forested soul while I slept. In the mornings, I’d wake up grumbling, restless, and overly frustrated with the way of things. We rely so devotedly on banishment as a punishment but then what? No one seemed to have a plan or a map or even an idea of what to do with people once we’d exiled them. No one was talking about repair, only about ruin. Rupture seemed to be the core deity of our world and, whether we knew it or not, we were leaving offerings and sacrifices at its altar at an alarming rate.
We are so carceral as a society and I was beginning to suspect it might be exactly that keeping us from doing anything new.
Creating something that hadn’t been done before - or even in a very long time - would require imagining it first. Wouldn’t it? Were we capable of imagining ourselves outside of the boundaries we’d been given? Were there options that had not yet been thought of, or even worse, that had been scoffed at and disregarded simply because they were so far outside of the socialized norm?
Early in my own awakening - those feral maiden years of leaving my marriage, religion, and cultish communities - I had found myself furious typing away on the internet. I clashed and gouged and walked away bloody but certain I had fought for good. And I had. I had raised my sword against the Hydra of our age: a beast standing at the gates of hell and embodying the worst of the worst. It dripped with disembodied whiteness, with unacknowledged privilege, with misogyny, with poisonous hierarchy, with ravenous capitalism, with rigid cis/heternormativity. But as I hacked and stabbed and threw myself at it with the full force of a woman on fire, I found that the Hydra, just as it did in myth, only grew back its own head. More than that, for every head I dislodged, two more replaced it. I wasn’t defeating the beast. I was making it bigger, stronger, and far more ferocious.
What I did on behalf of liberation, inevitably only fed the beast. And I believe now that it’s because the sword I wielded was made of its own bones. I used shame as a weapon, slicing and gutting without hesitation. I used what had been used on me. I used what the beast had built its empire on. I used the tool of the oppressor and, in the end, it didn’t serve the purpose I wanted it to. I wanted to slay it, not embolden it. I wanted to destroy it, not poke it into grinding us all between its beastly teeth.
I wanted to understand what Audre Lorde meant when she wrote:
“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
And so I welcomed the agitation of Third Way. I let it burn against my emerging new body, an itch that nearly drove me mad some days. I left my weapons in the yard and walked towards a gate so ancient, so long-lived, and so carefully cultivated I’m not sure any of us know who first constructed it.
I could see the gate - a doorway really - glimmering against the horizon, an occasional flash of green that slipped between boundary layers and webbed itself through worlds. I could hear its slow, haunting song out in the ferocious desert. I would wake with its salt waves lapping against my skin. I began to believe in Third Way the way I had once believed in a godd, only this was no whitemalegod2. This was something as elusive and vital as a tree boasting some sort of otherness, left in a garden on the off chance someone would risk reaching for it. I began to reach, Lilith placing her shoulder against my hip to help me grab for branches just out of view. And I decided I didn’t just want a single bite of a forbidden fruit. I wanted to know what lived in this tree, what sustained it, and where its roots led.
In the beginning, thrust deep into the agitation of a Third Way, I began to ask myself a single question before I reacted to obvious pokes or to invitations to pick shame back up and wield it righteously again (and even rightly at times).
What outcome do I want here?
Do I want the other person to slink away, giving me the momentary satisfaction of having been right or even of having silenced them? Or do I want true change to seep around the edges of their cracks, dripping into the caverns of their hearts? Do I want to create an invitation or do I want to add another brick to a dividing wall?
And I decided that if, in that moment, I did in fact want to silence the other person, I could do that. If it were an embodied choice, I would let myself have it.
The thing is, once I started asking the question, I found that I never actually just wanted to be right. I didn’t want to simply silence someone or to send them off riled up and looking for ways to repeat the harm somewhere else. I didn’t want to participate in banishment or in building a thicker wall. I wanted change. Real, thick, juicy change. The kind that grows over time like fruit on a tree, not the kind that blasts onto the scene in a singular flash of behavior modification before it fizzles out and lies limp and charred on the ground.
Asking myself that question was akin to the satisfying removal of an ill-fitting patch of that snakeskin. I had an entire slithering, growing body to bring relief to, but it was a start. It was a beginning.
The question became a true tool, rather than an oppressor’s weapon. The tool was more like a crowbar, prying open shuttered windows and letting in the chance of daylight. It might have been startling or too much for some, but for others it did exactly what I hoped it would. Third Way began to touch the ground of ready hearts, bringing the relief of self-reflection, of humble self-ownership, of repair, and of a strange kind of transformation that still ripples out from the point of each impact. Third Way changed me as it changed the people I offered it to. They offered it back or out into the air around them, something coming to life in the exchange.
Shame has never gotten us anywhere that lasts or that truly transforms. It just hasn’t. If it were an effective weapon, I supposed I’d wield it in some circumstances. But there has not been one instance I have ever heard of where shame led to true change, to repair, to the rebirth of a person’s soul. Instead, shame opposes what may actually have the ability to transform us. It chokes out the flow of healthy guilt - the embedded signal that we’ve misstepped or caused harm - ensuring an untransformed life and the eventual repeat of the very behavior we’re trying to protect each other from.
Shame keeps us circling the same drain, wondering why we aren’t getting anywhere. It offers us momentary relief - like cracking the lid on a pressure cooker for a second or two - but it doesn’t change us. It doesn’t teach us how to shapeshift or how to terraform. It doesn’t return us to our true Selves. If anything, in my experience, shame only divorces us from ourselves even further. We return to an internalized carceral system over and over again because we cannot imagine any other way and because we’re certain someone has to wield the power-over. Might as well be us.
Until it’s not.
Exiling one another puts that power in our hands for only a moment. And then we curl behind it, some part of ourselves already aware that someday soon, we ourselves will be banished. Somehow, someway, the drain we’re circling will open its mouth and suck in. We’ll flail and yell for someone to keep us from being swallowed, but if we’ve surrounded ourselves with people holding only shame-infused swords, there won’t be any open hands willing to reach for us. We’ll discover that the beast has always been circling, its many heads swiveling while it watches for the inevitable opportunity to devour us. Even us. All of us.
Our work - for those of us summoned by Third Way - is not to convince the entire world of something that is so agitating, so far removed from the way of things that it bounces off the armor of their hearts. What an impossible task. What a weighted burden for one person to carry. What an individualistic and disembodied way of looking at the whole of us. No, our work is to toss seeds everywhere we go, to till the ground of our own souls, to give ourselves to the sweaty, fluid, lifelong work of being transformed by the animist song of Third Way.
If this is for you, fill your pockets with seeds. If this is not for you yet, I like Yeshua, will clean the dust from my feet without judgment and keep going. I, like the Cailleach, will scrub cracking mud from the last place off of my body in cold winter streams. I, like Lilith, will float in the Red Sea until the next doorway opens for me. Because this is my work. It is as much a part of me as the small ridge of a chickenpox scar on my collarbone, or as the scar on the back of my left calf from a sharp swingset screw in my childhood, or as the birthmark on my right ankle, or as the way my soul tilts to the water like it is a home I’m hungry for. It belongs to me and I belong to it, my poet soul unfurling with its breath and often finding myself in places I did not intend to go.
I am a creature of Third Way and so I have spent years now learning how to read its scratching in the dirt. I have listened long and hard to its tongues, its strange languages that mimic aspens glittering in a breeze. I have become familiar with the velvety underbelly of its greening leaves. I do not expect to understand every nuance in my lifetime, but I can gather what I know here so that, maybe in your lifetime, you’ll start further along the small trail, adding to it as you go.
If this is your work, too, new as it may be, I invite you to begin with the same question. Ask it a dozen times a day. Pause before every response to the wildly activated world around you and let the question settle between your bones.
What outcome do you want? Start there and work your way backward. Know that you might not see that outcome - or even the beginnings of it - in every interaction. There may be times that you ask yourself the question, answer it within, act from it, and then find you’re left with no other option but to wash your feet alongside the Cailleach before walking away. Not to banish or to wield shame like a sword. Instead, to remove yourself, to keep going, to leave behind what is not yours, and to carry always what is.
There is fertile ground everywhere. There are people whose lives have turned to readiness, to an emerging otherness that swims with possibility. There are souls who are waiting for someone to just name the thing that has been agitating in them for years or months or even mere moments. Third Way is as alive as we are, and what else is there to do with a living, wild, familial thing but to shed what anchors us to the way things are, pick up our brimming hearts, and run alongside it?
Third Way is an idea, a body, an entity, a way of being inspired by Mel Gentry Bosna that I have been practicing for years. I highly recommend subscribing to her work if this post resonates with you.
As these cold days and long, wintry nights continue for a spell, I’m wishing you deep comfort, and hopes that winter’s embrace might at least at times be nurturing, cozy, restful. “As winter wraps her cloak around / She lights the fire… and gathers bones”
I tend to write more poetry in these deepwinter times – perhaps in a desperate attempt to find and remember beauty amidst such austerity. Small, hidden treasures in the shapes of stone, held in ice, sparkling in the stars…
I share them now in case they may soften or rekindle frozen bits of soul in these most interesting of times. May they be one small drop of medicine… An antidode. A spark. A remembrance.
2 Midwinter Poems
{Poem 1}
Sometimes it happens
That I stay up late
Twinkling with the stars
Sirius flashing
her bright beauty
Hello old friend
Winter
Night
Quiet
Was that a coyote
off in the distance?
{Poem 2}
Oh beautiful world
White crystalline winter
Moon and Jupiter
Everything sparkles
Everything shines
Fruits still hang
on tree and vine
A winter feast
for the birds and me1
As the land rests
Trees sleep deep
But still we scurry
Bunnies, squirrels, foxes…
Life becomes simple
Sustenance, sun, and sleep
In burrows we dream
✦
the belly of the bear
Life becomes simple
In burrows we dream
I am dreaming inside
the belly of the bear
Curled up and warm
Quiet in the hush
of fallen snow
My mind out in the stars
Spread across galaxies
I wander the vast black
Star to star
I watch the polyrhythm of light
Sparkling pulse
And listen
to a deep, gentle hum
Is it her blood?
Ursa, the mother bear
My companion in the night
Or is it the blackness
singing to itself?
Singing, “welcome…
Welcome welcome”
✦
Icicle Sky
Icicle sky
Winter stillness
I stand stretched
Between you
and a world that asks us to
Make Something of Ourselves
Between my longing to belong
And my need to pause
So I stop
Let the waters settle
Again
Until my lake reflects the stars
I have gathered only meager twigs
on this short, stark day
But soon I will carry them home
To feed the embers
nestled like rubies
in the ash of yesterday
✦
This narrow passage
Remember to be gentle
Patient
It is February
You still live in the mystery
Winter’s deep
Let life surprise you…
when it’s ready
Rest your thinking brain
Let loose its reins
For wandering into
earth’s crevices
Amidst tendrils
of barely spring new
It is stark
Barren
Let yourself be cast
into the dark
The quiet cave
where your song
is the only company needed
We’re all just making it through
this narrow passage
Tend small things –
birds, houseplants, soul –
with tender care
✦
Sadist
You can’t fight
the night that
pins you on your back
Says, “you can squirm,
but you’re not
going anywhere”
A sadist is winter
But for some reason,
I’m into it
✦
Micro poetics
(A handful of short, untitled poems)
1
The wind. she is silent
But everybody talks to her
Everybody is an instrument she plays
Are raven wings beating
one of her favorite songs also?
Or cottonwoods shimmering?
Now the world is a thin song
Frozen still
And occasionally a deep howl
2
I am a girl
in winter's garden
Measuring out meager rations
that feel like feasts
For those small moments
of shared beauty
Song of a bird
Swirl of kitten fur
A shimmer of warmth
And then night
Long, contemplative night
3
Moonshadow naked limbs
spider their way
across the bare clay
Every which way they reach
their ghostly arms southward
to claim their stretch of night
4
A mantle of shadows
shakes down from low clouds
rests heavy on my shoulders
like a sealskin
Now I can dive into
even the winter sea
waves wild and sharp
with the striking smash
of all we've known
The ocean claims her own
5
Sometimes no growth appears
But really, all life is in the roots
Strengthening connection
with the ground
Seeking deeper for water
Holding onto soil and stone
Hunkering under where it's warm
Do plants yearn for springtime?
Or do they just do what it takes,
each moment complete?
✦
Obsidian
Underground
An obsidian black river
carries down the stars
To be buried as seeds
for next year's garden
Some will explode
Some will fizzle
Some may rest for awhile
If you were a star
How deep
would the river carry you?
And can you be still
and wait?
✦
Let bones rattle to the floor…
Peel away the skin
Let bones rattle to the floor
To be gathered in loving arms
Brought to the fire
To cook, to char
Sending smoke signals
towards the stars
Let my charcoal feed the garden
Scatter the ash upon the wind
Wash clean the slate
to be born as blossoms
Rooted in last year’s death and decay
Let me be the soil
Married with sunshine
And wait…
And one more short poem – a reminder that though the crushing weight of winter often feels too much to bear, and we sometimes lose track of who we are anymore or what-even-IS-this-frozen-earth? – that this is how it is to be digested in the primordial underworld of winter, the death and remaking season… Like the seed or the chrysalis or the babe, it is good to keep it in – to fully cook – until it’s time.
✦ Diamonds ✦
Deep in the dark
Of earth's mantle
I am molten lava
Formless
But still
Waiting
Dreaming
Singing
Breathing
When at last I erupt
I will be diamonds
I wish this for you: that you will be transformed in beautiful ways from winter’s lean, stark times – so you may shine forth even more bright and clear in the seasons to come. This is certainly my own prayer. Let’s be honest: winter can be rough! But it also can bear gifts and insights I only seem to find in these raw-to-the-bone times. I have been doing my best to remember them. And they’re there, buried deep under ice, or right up there sparkling against the vast, vast black.
May you get the rest and comfort you need, the companionship that nurtures, the sparkles of crystalline stars that delight, and enough time to dream deep.
May your heart be wild and free. May you find small wonders every day. And may you find your way home… to this beautiful place.
With all my love,
Rainey
If you really start to look at even the most fallow-appearing scrubby landscape, you will start to notice shriveled fruits and berries all over the place – these are no small nutrients for the birds and other critters. Some of them even might be delightful to humans. Both squirrels and myself are fans of previously-frozen crabapples, for example – they’re like a tart version of medlars (which have to get frozen to become edible). And of course chokecherries and rosehips are sweeter after a frost. (I sometimes harvest rosehips after a whole winter of freezes!)
“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' says the White Queen to Alice.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
Magic, Mystery, and Mysticism
There is a poet named Ruth Stone who tells this story about her creative process:
Growing up in rural Virginia, she was often working in the field when she would feel and hear a poem coming across the landscape. It would shake the earth beneath her feet as it came barreling toward her and she would have to run as fast as she could to make it home in time to catch the poem on paper. If the poem passed through her when she had nothing to write it down with, it simply continued on its way, searching for another poet to embody. Sometimes, she said, she barely made it in time and she had to reach out and grab the poem by the tail and pull it into her body. At these times, she claimed she was able to write the poem down perfectly word by word, but it came out backwards from the last word to the first.
(source: Liz Gilbert’s amazing Tedtalk on creative genius - which I highly recommend you watch if you have the time)
I love Ruth Stone’s story of catching a poem, because while it may sound a little eccentric, I think it's true for her that her writing feels like it comes from outside her body and is gifted to her. I feel that way too when I really let myself go creatively. I will re-read stories or pages I wrote a few weeks or years ago and have no recollection of ever having written it or even recognize the narrative voice. I have no doubt I wrote it, but it came from a deep place, a place where I am connected to more than my own experience.
Morning Pages/Dream Journaling
I was first introduced to the concept of morning pages through Julia Cameron’s influential book,“The Artist’s Way.” This book is described as a 12 week creative recovery program (loosely based on other 12-step models) designed to help you overcome your inner critic and return to your natural state of unblocked creativity. When my therapist at the time suggested it to me, I hoped to start making more art as a result of the program. I didn’t expect it to unblock long hidden feelings about my childhood, re-establish my connection with some kind of universal energy, or launch my life into a whole new realm, but that it did.
“Morning Pages” are pretty simple. You just wake up and write three pages. That’s it. You just write whatever comes to mind. Mine is usually a list of chores I don’t have time to do, followed by some rambling about my feelings, and sometimes it is a recounting of my dreams. The key is to not edit, to not re-read them, and to just let them be a brain dump for all those thoughts rattling around in there.
Prompt: If you don’t already, try writing morning pages in your book every day this week. If you can’t do three pages, just do one. The practice is more important than the details, but I do recommend trying to do them as soon as you wake up.
When you first wake up, your mind is in a state of creativity very similar to dreaming. Poems and stories live there, in the in-between spaces, waiting to be plucked, hanging on to the threads of the other world.
My entire world changed with this one practice and now I wake early most days - the words tugging at my sleeve, the darkness calling to them.
Dreams, Visions, and the land of potentiality
“A dream is not reality but who's to say which is which?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
This saying from Zen Buddhism tells us that enlightenment is not about a grand achievement or profound realization. Rather, enlightenment is found in the mundane details of everyday life.
The Buddhist monks lived simple, self-sufficient lives. Their daily tasks included chopping wood for fire and carrying water from the river.
“How is enlightenment achieved?” a student once asked his master.
“Chop wood, carry water,” the master replied.
“What does one do after enlightenment has been achieved?” the student asked.
“Chop wood, carry water,” the master replied.
How you do something is often more important than what you do. And anything done with dedication, selflessness, and single-pointed focus can be a spiritual ritual.
In his book Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel describes how he came to understand and act out the principle of Zen Buddhism not through meditation, but through archery.
“Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out,” he wrote. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will.”
My writing practice has been the most consistent relationship in my life. Every morning I wake up ready to dump my emotions and subconscious mind onto the page.
It’s a ritual of necessity. Writing helps me clear my head and process my emotions. Skipping my morning writing routine would be like forgetting to brush my teeth. Or, perhaps more accurately, painfully holding in my urine when my bladder is ready to burst.
Some days my writing practice is more productive than others. I’m not concerned with my word count. If I have something to say, I say it. If I don’t, I don’t. The ritual is more important than the result.
To master anything, you have to practice it ritualistically. Not casually or half-heartedly. You have to jump in head first with the stubborn and optimistic commitment of a wedding vow – for better or worse, till death do us part.
Imagine a basketball player practicing her shot. The court is her sanctuary. Shooting the ball is her ritual. Again, again, again, eyes fixated on the rim, she refines her technique with the single-pointed focus of a meditation.
The composer John Cage compared his process for making music to a religious ritual.
“Rather than taking the path that is described in Zen Buddhism itself,” he said, “namely sitting cross-legged and breathing and such things, I decided that my proper discipline was the one to which I was already committed, namely the making of music. And that I would do it with a means that was as strict as sitting cross-legged.”
Chop wood, carry water.
The goal of Zen Buddhism isn’t achievement. The goal is awareness. One does not strive to chop wood or carry water “better” than the other monks. The art of refinement is about bringing more awareness to your practice, to be fully present in the ritual.
Writing, painting, and singing can be rituals for mindfulness and self-care. When we refine our art, we refine our mind. The artist doesn’t chase perfection for the sake of acclaim. The artist is committed to refinement for the sake of beauty itself. The focus is on the ritual, not the result.
The care we put into our art spills out into other areas of life, teaching us how to be patient, to trust ourselves, and to pay attention to details. How would your life look if you did everything – cook dinner, brush your teeth, drink tea, clean your room – with the care and attention of a sacred ritual?
A big creative breakthrough – just like the Zen concept of enlightenment – seldomly resembles an explosion of fireworks. Rather it is the whittling away, little by little, of your mind and your creative practice, into deeper refinement, deeper awareness. It’s not one huge leap, but a series of tiny steps.
And one day, on a random afternoon, you will look back and realize how far you have come.
Owner of a Lonely Heart @belamuse - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
