Dearest Reader,
In this a Craft newsletter where we delve deep into the art of living, embracing eco-centric rites and rituals, astrology, and somatic mysticism. Here, Crafting is about actively sculpting beauty in every facet of our existence. Such as the capital S Self, we are naming and communing with the body, the soul, Nature, and the Universe as a regenerative Craft…these are the very places we have been turned away from through systemic oppression. Here I am crafting a place for you to return to what is yours, mine, ours.
I invite you to engage, to question, to contribute. Your presence shapes the very culture of these pieces, infusing them with depth and nuance. This essay is centering on ecological rites and rituals. Ecological and Somatic share the same root words of home… When I talk about ecological rites and rituals I am sharing practices that shape both the mind and the body in coming back home to our bodies and our bodies inside a larger ecosystem; socially, naturally, and cosmically.
Listening to Your Intuition
How do you listen to the great beyond? How do you follow your intuition? Is it intuition or anxiety? Why do we assume that intuitive nudges only appear to keep us from going astray? What about the intuition that tells us to order a plate of pasta for lunch because the salt and the fat would feel good in our body or the desire to go for a swim in the lake where we see the twilight dip below the horizon allowing us to see the photosensitive plankton glowing like green embers on the shore?
Mysterious things occur in life when you tune out of the noise of our artificially developed life: dreams, synchronicities, great love, coincidences, secret signs, a song we haven’t heard in a long time drifting from the radio at the gas station reminding us a friend we fell out of touch with…How are they? Perhaps you check social media feeling satisfied by scrolling through their feed. You see their dog, their kids, their wife. You put your phone back in your pocket and go about your day.
Or how are they? You take the song’s energy and give them a call. You still know their phone number by heart and dialing it rewinds the sensation of fun, laughter, and good times. Your heart sings as the phone rings and you get their voicemail. You say, “Hey brother, I am in a gas station out on 64 and that song came on you know the one that goes like this. I wanted to call and say hello, how are you? Give me a call back when you can, would love to catch up!” You put your phone back in your pocket to go about your day but energized by a connection rekindled.
“How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress-related diseases, and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.” (Redfield)1
This is the secret, the problem, and the answer all rolled into one: slow down. Everything is a sensory input that drives us. In nature, the sensory inputs of sitting with a tree, a rock, a river, or an ancestor, were subtle, quiet, and slow. Nature has evolved this way over billions of years. Hammerhead sharks follow ancient lava beds through sensitive receptive hairs in their snouts.2 Human beings are evolving to be sensitive to technology, artificial light sources, working hours, mental loads, and stress but we were made to tune into matter, nature, rocks, subtle shifts in the wind. We are not using our sensitive receptors and thus the practice or muscle of tuning into ancient flows, dreams, synchronicities, and the music drifting from the radio passes us by without effort.
The number one thing that distracts us from following our intuition? To dial into our authentic expression amongst all these minor distractions is the mental load of trying to recall and thus discover the answer to the question, “What is my purpose?”
Is it my career? To be a mother? What is my value to society? “What is my life worth? How many likes is my life worth?”3 (Chainsmokers) Imagining our lives outside of our current paradigm is difficult for many of us,4 as we struggle to get through the swim lanes of casual violence, systemic racism, heavy policing, and extractive work environments, we come to the grasping, gasping for any line to hold us afloat. At the same time, others float by us, waving from their boats in their Gucci slides and sun-colored, umbrella-anointed drinks, causing a wake of jealous rage.
Many of the clients I see struggle with a host of mental health issues caused by an extractive and exploitative system that breeds diseases in the individual (mind, body) and the larger groupings (community, relationships). “So many public agencies — education, healthcare, and so forth — have absorbed policing functions. Where, at the same time, many of the agencies of organized violence, such as jails and prisons and police, are absorbing social work functions, mental health care functions, things that they actually can’t do.”5 (Ruth Wilson Gilmore)
These issues then become the source of our life leaving us with no life force of our own.6 We are too depressed to change our own lives, we cannot rally against the systems that oppress us. We blame our spouse for our lack of intimacy rather than the work environment that pushes them to the edge of relational availability. We blame ourselves for an inability to focus, but our focus is being drawn into an artificial vortex. A world in which absues are commonplace; a wasteland.7
We cannot remember why we are here, what we are striving for, or what we are doing with our time… if it makes any difference at all? This is where abolition medicine and intuition link up: in the imagination at the individual and collective level. Mariame Kaba asks us this in her book We Do This ‘Til We Are Free, “What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves?”8
“There's so much more to who you are than you know right now. You are, indeed, something mysterious and someone magnificent. You hold within you — secreted for safekeeping in your heart — a great gift for this world. Although you might sometimes feel like a cog in a huge machine, that you don't really matter in the great scheme of things, the truth is that you are fully eligible for a meaningful life, a mystical life, a life of the greatest fulfillment and service.” - Bill Plotkin
What is my purpose? What am I here to do?
Your purpose is to be alive. To live a life. “You were born to occupy a particular place within the community that ecophilosopher David Abram calls the more-than-human world. You have a unique ecological role, the way you are meant to serve and nurture the web of life, directly or through your role in society. At the level of soul, you have a specific way of belonging to the biosphere, as unique as any maple, moose,” (Plotkin)9 The comfort with picking your phone out of your pocket and scrolling social media when a song comes on that reminds you of a friend is one example where exploitative companies hijack our intuition.
We are craving social connection and intimacy in both examples yet how we get intimacy and/or connection only benefits us (the user or experiencer) in one of the two examples. In the first, we externally orient to social media, without making contact with the actual source of our desire, and slip our phones back in our pocket. Meta is the benefactor. In the second example, we call our friend, we make contact with the source of our desire. We then are the benefactors.
As everything in the marketplace competes for attention, using tricks that hack our biology orienting us towards the artificial and superficial, intuition doesn’t stand a chance. Not unless we each, individually and thus collectively, chose to orient inwardly to our sensitivities. To follow our desire to a source, rather than seek a source for some definitive, the closer we are to fine.10 Our life’s purpose is to be alive. Trying to find our purpose in a job, in a car, in our stress at best distracts us and worse kills us.11
Our life’s expression is where we become nuanced in our purpose: charging forward into creation (another form of life) from our imagination (a blend of life and Mystery) to create a more beautiful world (Mystery). From here we can begin to merge with something larger than our ego such as Nature, God, Allah, Jesus, Angels, the unconscious, the Great Mystery, or whatever works for you. “The coming together of conscious and unconscious mind on the common ground of the imaginal plane gives us an opportunity to break down some of the barriers that separate the ego from the unconscious, to set up a genuine flow of communication between the two levels of the psyche, to resolve some of our neurotic conflicts with the unconscious, and thus to learn more about who we are as individuals.”12 (Johnson) I like to refer to this as the divine who lives in me as me. But of course, I am not the only person to see the divine dwelling within us.13
What are rituals we can practice, to bring us into contact with that divine more regualry? To open the portal for intuition to flow unimpeded, we need rituals.
“Given half a chance, habits seem to want to augment themselves into ritual: embellish a habit with attention, stylise it slightly, and it will elbow its way into
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