As we open into 2021, I wrote a spell for you, dear reader, and for me, and for all of us:
Spell for 2021
May you witness daylight growing in wonder, feel the sun on your skin and know you are loved.
May you find connection in sharp, cold air.
May you touch the dry earth, dance under wet skies, and feel the roots tending to each other below your feet.
May you glory in the beauty of creations: human-made, animal-made, plant-made, earth-made, spirit-made.
May you knit yourself in community you can tend to, that tends to you.
May you feel the web of connections you are woven into.
May you celebrate with joy and abundance.
May you hold those you love in safety—in body and in spirit.
May you know your body’s boundaries and its strengths.
May you love and protect all that is tender in and without you.
May you carry the lessons from the year past with reverence.
May you find release from the pain and trauma.
May you offer gratitude for your growing.
May you keep learning who you are accountable to and who is accountable to you.
May you witness the ripples of your actions and learn from them.
May you speak truth to power.
May you hold those in power accountable.
May you turn anger into action, pain into change, injustice into righteousness.
May your heart keep opening to pain and to beauty; may you have the wisdom to know which to seek, which to hold, and which to release, and when.
May you find, learn, and practice rest; may you have many naps and nights of long, still sleep.
May your spirit find itself in the dark night and bring you back to your breath,
again and again and again.
May it be so.
A year of Starlight and Strategy
From premonition, to leaning in to uncertainty, to thinking about the collective and how we evolve from this moment. Here, in brief, is my arc of 2020 through starlight and strategy.
January: Premonition
I feel how so much has changed, so quickly, over the past few years, and how nothing has changed at all. How the structures of capitalism and heteropatriarchy and systemic racism grind on, maybe at a faster speed, maybe not, but toward, I believe, some culmination point.
That is to say, I feel how unsustainable these structures are. I feel it in my bones and in my psyche. And I think that culmination point will arrive soon—maybe this year or this decade, or maybe not, but it feels necessary to do the work toward what will come after. And I feel deeply how that work is not separate from planning my garden, or a trip to the wild Atlantic ocean, or the launch of my next collection of poetry. That the work is not actually about what will come after, but what we are growing and doing now.
February: A message from the Ace of Pentacles
The message was clear: building the next world requires using the tools at hand. It was an invitation to trust that such day-to-day work can be the bridge toward manifesting profoundly different ways of living on this planet, with each other, and with all the beings, than the ways of the dominant society.
March: The first lesson of the pandemic: we take care of each other
They are poets and writers, witches and healers, organizers and operations experts who have their own way of reaching people via the Internet or through community networks, disseminating wisdom. They help us see how we can and must take good care not just of ourselves and our family, but our neighbors and community.
(Note: I, and we, know so much more now than we did then. If I knew what I know now, I would have stayed at home.)
April: The bodily pleasure of stepping into my power
I’ve learned that when I dare to be powerful in the service of my vision, my body is flooded with a kind of joy and confidence I rarely experience. My blood flows, my breath deepens, my heart rejoices. It’s almost like dancing.
May: Making an ally of not knowing
Even though uncertainty can bring anxiety, I’m starting to appreciate this concept of making an ally of not knowing. On good days, it gives me a feeling of expansiveness: of new possibilities blooming from the space we create by not knowing or trying to know. I can see it as an invitation: What can I step into now, when only now exists?
June: A collective reckoning with anti-Black racism and what collective liberation looks like
We can be a complicated pronoun. It can erase difference, foreground the dominant experience, silence voices that need to be heard. It can also be inclusive, welcoming, and acknowledging interconnectedness. It moves toward wholeness but can easily fracture. It requires discernment and care.
July: Freedom as responsibility
[T]here can be freedom within networks of mutual care and mutual responsibility—doing what you want within reason, remaining accountable to those you love, who support you, who are your kin, in the largest sense of that word. That kind of freedom brings us closer, I think, to how humans are meant to live and survive. And I think that’s when we can start to understand that interdependence is so much better for us as a species than independence.
August: Vulnerability as a necessary component to abolition
I believe vulnerability is foundational to creating a world without the carceral state, to end policing and the prison-industrial complex. Vulnerability is necessary to create a culture of accountability. A culture without policing means that we are accountable, we hold ourselves and each other accountable. We learn to apologize, to hold the ways we have caused harm, to do the work to build trust again. This requires an enormous amount of vulnerability.
October: Evolutions: Aligning with the wisdom of our bodies and attending to the death of old ways and the birth of new ways of being
And I believe that this moment, this evolutionary season, calls on us to remember, uncover, and become aligned with the wisdom of our bodies. Wisdom that was there when we were born. Wisdom perhaps suppressed by our traumas and the messages we internalized from white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism. And wisdom inherent in and cultivated by existing in a body not seen, or hyper-visible, or vilified by dominant culture: fat; disabled; Black, Indigenous, of color; trans; femme; and more.
I’m wondering if, as many of us recover this knowledge and find ways to more deeply connect with ourselves as embodied creatures, we might make astounding evolutionary leaps. New ways to become embodied, new ways to relate and understand our individual bodies and our collective body.
November: Becoming whole in a broken world
Everything changes. And the profound love that is the fabric of the universe stays constant.
I try to hold both of these seemingly contradictory beliefs in my body, in my mind. I think this might be one way we evolve.
Thank you for being part of this journey, whether this is the first time Starlight and Strategy has landed in your inbox, or the 21st time.
What are your hopes and dreams for the coming year? Some for me are: an end to the pandemic, if not the eradication of the disease. The completion and births of projects. More learning, more building, more creating. More writing, more listening. More community, more hugs, more rooms full of people co-creating. More accountability, more evolution, more change. Less Zoom, less terror, less death.
Whatever yours are, I send much blessing and hopes for their nourishment and blossoming in the months ahead.
Prompting
Write a spell, or three, for 2021—for yourself, for those you love, for the collective.
What is the arc of your thinking/feeling/learning this year? Write it down, draw it, or dance it out.
What are you hoping for in 2021? Share with us in the comments.
Engaging
When I first started learning tarot, I often turned to Beth Maiden’s now-closed blog, The Little Red Tarot. I appreciated how she and her contributors approached the tarot from queer, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and feminist perspectives. So I was thrilled to learn that she wrote a book, All of Our Stories. Like her blog posts, the writing in this tarot guide is straightforward and clear, with a compassionate tone and great politics. It’s available both as a print copy and an e-book, and she’s selling it at a sliding scale.
I miss watching live dance and theater performances, and most videos don’t come close to the thrill and pleasure of live versions. But I very much enjoyed the Alvin Ailey company’s world premiere of A Jam Session for Troubling Times. It’s no longer available, but for the next few days you can catch the last of their “virtual season,” including “Revelations Through the Decades.”
Speaking of theater in these virtual times, I missed Sins Invalid’s show, We Love Like Barnacles, about the intersection of disability justice and climate change. But I very much appreciated listening to the podcast episode of the same name, from their podcast Into the Crip Universe. Disability justice leader and amazing human being Patty Berne drops some serious wisdom in this episode. I’m looking forward to listening to the rest of the season as I keep learning more about disability justice, and as I work on unlearning and undoing my ableism.
I also learned a lot from this article on disinformation and how progressive organizers and communicators can and must be proactive about countering it.
Community/Announcements
I’ve got some very exciting developments coming up in 2021 around the launch of my new book, Last Days. Stay tuned to this space for more!
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