I haven’t been sharing here because I’m re-adjusting to writing more publicly, but I have been sharing quite a lot about the ritual work and other community comings and goings I’ve been up to on Facebook, behind the safety fence of “Friends Only” posts. I wasn’t expecting so many folks to check in with me and ask me about tossing in a coin or two for my ongoing efforts — I am so sincerely grateful that folks thought of me and want to invest in my work in the world. It’s muchly appreciated, and I will have more on how you can do that in the short-term at the very bottom of this post.

First: I nuked my Buy Me A Coffee, in favor of moving to FourthWall (which is on my list, but not yet done.)

I have looked into a few different SaaS and e-commerce platforms, but none of them - besides investing in setting up a Shopify/WooCommerce/Squarespace shop, and not even then because it was clunky mess - met my needs. I didn’t want to be selling art prints in one place, originals in another, membership over here, one-time contributions over there, courses and workshops and other digital deliverables over in what light in yonder window breaks. To say nothing of VAT and sales tax compliance nightmares, which is even more relevant for me now, soon-to-be (goddess willing) global citizen.

So when my friend introduced me to FourthWall, I was thrilled. FourthWall solves 95% of these issues for me: I can accept one-time and recurring support, I can sell art prints as well as originals through the same point in the near future, and I can also offer digital products, too, *without* the headaches of sales tax & VAT compliance. I don’t mind having my consulting work separate, so it’s a perfect solution.

Second: I am working on resurrecting/reconfiguring my Substack membership.

I think it’s set at $18/mo right now, I’m gonna lower that to $5/mo. It makes it more accessible to a wider swath of people and I think that’s a reasonable amount to ask for in exchange for the privileges of commenting on my work and having access to a fun community group chat. I plan to use the latter as a way to share the type of updates I might behind the safety of ‘Friends Only’ on Meta’s dead strip mall platform.

Charging for access to my comments on my longform work is a deliberate choice on my part as a historically marginalized person. I refuse to accept or indulge this idea that anyone can have access to the intimacy and relational care of my attention, for free, especially when so often now that comes with time-wasting bullshit and violent abuse meant to get me to stop creating or feel shame for my self-expression, without any reasonable basis or argument.

(Also, I realized the people who read + appreciate my art (community ritual, literal art, writing), tend to overlap the folks who then go on to hire me for consulting support and whatnot, but the latter is a much smaller segment of my audience because I do my best work in higher touch containers with a lot of nuance and personalization, which are, by their nature, more expensive, and not a good or accessible investment for a lot of people. Business 101 audience segmentation, a thing I understand intellectually because I was basically a fractional COO in my early 20s, did not express itself in this corner of my professional universe because clients have always just magically found their way to me, no content or marketing strategies/plans in place, even when I was making 6-figures. I now know that this is a feature of my starstuff design — that trying to use marketing strategies actively hurts me (it’s true) — but I still need to know who I’m talking to when I do run my yap!)

So, stay tuned for these changes over the coming month or so — in the short-term, you can always pitch in at Venmo (thatgalbunnybrown) or my business PayPal (alexis@alexispmorgan.com).

Tata for now! <3

And to a certain extent, I still hold that to be true. But also.

There’s a community of Indigenous people in the Amazon called the Pirahã. They’re most well-known for helping to stir fistfights amongst linguists over the universality of recursion, and for being a token amongst politically ardent (mostly white) atheists to showcase why any novel belief in the unseen is dumb, because the Pirahã have no concept of deity, specifically because they are primarily focused on what is tangible and empirically demonstrable. Mind you, the Pirahã don’t have a lot of linguistic categories and concepts that are endemic to the languages most of us speak, it just so happens that the main Western scholar who is best known for discussing them, who lived with them consistently for almost 20 years, was an ardent Christian when he went to go missionize to them and failed miserably, like most missionaries who hit remote jungles, assuming they don’t die shortly thereafter.

What those atheists leave out, however, is that the Pirahã do - as in, all of them - see and communicate with spirits. They have a very robust spiritworking and spirit-warding practice. They are able to physically see and hear spirits and interact with them, to such an extent that aforementioned researcher said that on multiple occasions he was told the spirits were threatening to harm the community. Isn’t it interesting how *that* gets dismissed and glossed over?

So, you can imagine what it’s felt like to have to return from my own Uranian wandering in the jungles of Finda Asiliya, so sure I was a nutcase, armed with the realization that I was probably lying to myself and a *lot* of others, human and non-human, thus making me feel *even more* like a nutcase. That even as I happily trotted after ritual and meaning, trying to be transparent and earnest, what I’ve mostly been doing was trying to appease the gaze of people who are very limited by a need for control and fear.

It’s Pesach and shabbos. I’m out of lamb’s blood because Pharaoh’s reincarnation has also kept inflation high while indiscriminately murdering children, the enslaved, innocents, and the planet- the former my ancestor, Moshe, also engaged in. I’m thinking of Miriam, who held our shit together on the shores of the Red Sea as the rest of my ancestors allegorically scurried the hell up out of that mess with rapidity. I am reflecting on the first experience of Divine Inhabitation I had many recent moons ago: I passed out singing and playing tambourine using Elana Arian’s arrangement of Mi Chamocha. I am reticent to talk about what that experience was like, other than to say that that’s really when I knew something had changed in my life in a way I severely underestimated.

I’m in this really liminal space of my Jewishness being incomplete and insufficient (my Hebrew is, genuinely, disgusting, to start), but leaving where the Shekhinah led and took me, and from where the Shekhinah was said to have departed long ago. I have come back to lands and people I recognize but I feel foreign to, I am here, gathered with loved ones, but also very alone. How do I talk about experiences that were genuinely so existentially confronting that it spun me into a deep grief for several years, where all I wanted to do was go back to regular life, and avoid them, because I do not know how to think about the experiences I’ve had? How do you return from the mountain? The abyssal sea? Do you ever, really?

Behold Your Name, my affliction, champion of my cause. Redeem me for the sake of Thy Presence. Blessed are You, Transcendence, who hides Their face in the wilderness, and brings redemption to the wrestler.

• Plants have proprioception - meaning they are capable of understanding their own position in spacetime by being able to detect changes by monitoring internal and external mechanical signals, even if they don't have a nervous system. There’s a thing called cellular proprioception in single-cell organisms.
  

• Congenitally blind people very rarely (I don't think there are any confirmed cases) develop schizophrenia, but they *do* experience motion sickness _and_ have auditory hallucinations.
  

• Schizophrenia has a clear connection to serotonin dysfunction, specifically higher concentrations released in certain parts of the brain. Congenitally blind people have an inverse issue: they tend to show reduced serotonin levels, and tend to develop issues with their sleep, because their perception of circadian rhythm (which is impacted by the presence of light, which requires some vision) is instead dedicated to non-visual sensory processing.
  

• Proprioception is pretty critically impacted by serotonin, too.
  

• Autistic people, who tend to have underdeveloped proprioception, *also* have universally higher concentrations of serotonin in their brains and blood. ADHD also impacts proprioception in a similar manner - see also Simone Biles and her 'twisties' - her orientation to time and space is thrown off and warped while in the air when her medication isn't dosed correctly or she's not taking it during competitions.
  

• Autistic people consistently demonstrate enhanced focus and attention on detail alongside reduced sensitivity to global, moving, or social stimuli. Autistic people can demonstrate an ability to detect subtle details (pattern recognition), but struggling with the rest. Autism primarily has to do with different perception of stimulation and how that impacts sociability, relationships, and the ability to physically care for one’s self. It may or may be accompanied by other types of intellectual or physical disability.
  

• Notably, we also know that psilocybin more or less functions by being an agonist of serotonin receptors, reducing the presence of serotonin in the brain and doing some other nifty shit. (“…​​psilocybin temporarily disrupts a critical network of brain areas responsible for reflective thinking, such as daydreaming and remembering.” [source])
  

• Electrical stimulation also impacts the concentration and production of serotonin in different regions of the brain and spinal cord, impacting how we perceive pain, etc.
  
  So, my best dummy guess hypothesis is as follows:
  
  Our serotonin levels impact our proprioception and our ability to process visual information (light.)
  
  Our proprioception potentially has the ability to orient based on the geometry created by gravity (mass and energy interacting). Maybe gravity creates pattern in the distribution of dark and regular energy, like binary code, that then influences the distribution, density, and form of dark and visible matter. Our bodies track these cycles and patterns (caused primarily by the presence of celestial bodies and certain imaginary points in their geometry) through this proprioception, and it impacts how we develop as beings.

  
  Theoretically, people who have visual hallucinations or purport to see spirits are perceiving and interacting with these invisible impressions, and their brains are translating that information into sensory information. When people enter altered states, there’s some sort of interaction happening between their nervous system, their proprioception, and these imperceptible impressions, allowing them to - subtly or significantly - interact with and possibly even change this data in some manner.

  
  I don't know.

  But now I can get this batshit off my chest, lol.

I wasn’t talking to Christian Zionists. I am fully aware they outnumber Jewish Zionists 10:1, financially 100:1, and have the institutional reigns of power here in the United States. That’s why I explicitly named Christian supremacy as the primary culprit of harm against Jews in the world, especially here in the States, because they’re the fanatics who will refuse de-escalation and pressure Trump to keep going. They would never listen to me, so why would I write anything for them?

I was talking to Jewish Zionists and Jewish sympathizers of the state of Israel, who may or may not self-identify as Zionists.

Because even though they have less structural power than Christian Zionists, that doesn’t mean they have no power at all. There are enough who do have some influence that, with enough leverage, it could change the equation of power on the ground in Israel politically.

They have the power of their relationships and communal connections. They have the power of interpersonal care and consideration. They have the ability to encourage, organize, persuade, and pressure the people they are in community with to use their power to do the right thing — and also, along the way, to defang any remaining arguments that allowing the state of Israel to continue on, and to continue down this path with the US, is about anything other than US imperialist capitalist interests and the maintenance of white and Christian supremacy, here and world-over. It is now extra especially abundantly clear that Jewish safety or any those (has always been a crock of bullshit) arguments are null when we’re all trapped on this speeding locomotive to ecological and economic collapse that will make the Great Depression look like Disneyland.

Feigning powerlessness because one has less power is a recipe for apathy, destruction, and absolutely ZERO chance of changing anything at all. And coming from fellow leftwing Jews, that’s absolutely appalling, because not only have we been waging a campaign of liberation against this shit since the colonial project began… what the fuck is our ancestral story but a bunch of power-filled, but systematically less powerful, people, overcoming tragedy, violence, and oppression, and continuously managing to move forward and press for better and for change DESPITE that messy, unequal, and dastardly ass playing field?

The thing about accountability and responsibility is that it puts into sharp relief who isn’t taking ownership of their contributions in a situation, and who does have the greater amount of systemic power. That was the point: the United States and Christian Zionists are, in majority, responsible for the continued existence of the occupation and the survival of Zionism as an ideological and literal weapon against the Palestinian people and those who stand with them, because Zionism is separate-but-equal white supremacy for some Jews (heavy emphasis on some), who are willing to be lapdogs and do the dirty work of the Christian Zionists and (white supremacist) capitalists of the United States AND Europe.

Also, for the record: I AM JEWISH. I was raised in a Jewish home. My parent was an Anti-Zionist. My husband is a rabbinical student who has been organizing for Palestinian liberation since he was a college student. I let those words move through me with clarity and intention, even if they weren’t read with clarity and intention.

Agency still matters even when the fascists want you to think you have none.

So again, I ask: American Zionist Jews, use yours to do the right thing.

I have been trying to find the words or the courage to speak aloud or on camera, but they keep evading me. I am writing this now because this is the way I feel closest to Gd and closest to clarity, and I feel both are necessary to effectively relay what I feel compelled to say from the seat of my ancestral soul.

For the sake of the wellbeing of the planet, for the future of the Jewish people, for the liberation of all beings and the restoration of the world, I call on all American Zionist Jews and Jewish sympathizers of the state of Israel, to demand the unconditional surrender of the Israeli government, the voluntary dissolution of the state of Israel, and an end to the occupation of Palestine.

The modern oppressors of Jews have always primarily been European - and now, American - Christians & their descendants of all denominations, irrespective of ethnicity, nationality, or class. Their historical actions are the reason why many of you have been falsely indoctrinated into believing Zionism is for your benefit and protection, when it is actually for theirs, economically and politically. European and American Anti-Zionists -- especially theologically progressive & former Christians who are politically leftwing in America -- want to disclaim their contributions towards the continued existence of Israel & its occupation, as well as blame their own domestic complacency, violence, and suffering on Israel and its lobbying interests. But the geopolitical reality is that Israel only persisted this long because it served their hegemonic interests, whether they want to admit it or not. We’re primarily in this mess because oftentimes, these same folks enjoy the fruits of white and/or Christian supremacy (or aspire to them), and don’t actually want to give them up, and that shows up in everything they do and say. You know they are hypocrites and what that hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance is capable of.

You can undermine them all, now, by doing what they think you won’t or can’t do. You can deny them the ability to use you as a weapon and a shield of deflection. Withdraw your consent from Zionism, your material and ideological support for the state of Israel, now. Loudly. Then let the rest of the world show us who they really are, for better or for worse. Put the onus back on them to fix the disaster they’ve helped to make. Make them responsible for their own actions and agency, by being responsible for yours.

American Evangelicals and their stooges will not allow Donald Trump to de-escalate. They are on the Third Crusade, and the government they will institute when they inevitably dispose of Donald Trump, will put you in detention camps alongside our immigrant neighbors. That government will engage in systematic mass murder and ethnic cleansing, including of Jews, above and beyond what they have already done to people who exist outside the parameters of their utopia through chattel slavery, colonial genocide, and xenophobia.

Zionist Jews and Jewish sympathizers of the state of Israel: if you do not use your political and moral power in this moment to choose your Jewishness over Zionism, to pressure Israelis politically and expose the naked reality of who and what the American government is, and to demand Israel’s unconditional surrender and dissolution, the Jewish people will not survive. The planet may not even survive. You have the power and agency to choose life in this moment, when the continued existence and actions of the state of Israel have now reached the level of provoking nuclear annihilation and global catastrophe. American Evangelicals have made their intentions for the world crystal clear, and those intentions haven’t changed since the Inquisition, since the Puritans who created Zionism in the 1600s, or the Shoah. You cannot outwit madmen or negotiate in good faith with them, either.

What is more important to you: your children’s lives, your own lives, the survival of the planet? Or refusing to admit that you were wrong and some of our people are complicit in unthinkable horrors?

The Jewish sages have insisted that a key component of our way of being in the world is that we are called put life before the covenant, before our communal practices and principles. We celebrate life, we do not venerate martyrdom or promote it as virtuous. Allowing half the population of the world’s Jews to martyr themselves & innocent people for the greedy, self-interested, reckless behavior of two despicable nation-states, against a backdrop of nuclear annihilation and human rights violations, is untenable and unacceptable. It directly contradicts your own professed beliefs in why Israel should persist or exist in the first place.

Your enemies were *never*, and have never, been Palestinians, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iranians, the Lebanese people, or Muslims in general. It was and always has been the bastards who are now dropping bombs on a girl’s school, starving little girls world over to pay for those fucking missiles, and the cowardly governments who are cutting deals to keep the oil and consumer goods flowing through the Strait, with little regard for human lives and our collective ecological security.

Do the right thing.

Do it now, LOUDLY and without delay.

Withdraw your institutional, economic, and personal consent from this disaster.

Pressure your Israeli loved ones to surrender, and trust in our ability to advocate for the just application of international law in creating accountability for Israel and the United States.

Refuse to martyr the living and our ancestors.

Refuse the fulfillment of Christian apocalypse, and further enabling the reign of terror of globalized white supremacy.

Choose to redeem the captives of centuries of domination and injustice from their violent oppressors: Palestinians, Iranians, Israelis, yourselves, and all other marginalized Americans held hostage by delusions and denial.

Pikuach nefesh: choose the life of the soul of the world.

Tikkun olam, choose to repair it, and let the false promises of the state of Israel die.

There is no other way. This is it.

Almost a decade ago, circa 2015-2016, I posed a question in a short-form essay on Facebook that would go on to change the course of my life:

“Did James Baldwin know he was James Baldwin?”

The question itself was less about the man and more about his eventual ascendance into our collective consciousness as an icon, even whilst still very much a human being. Further, it wasn't interested in fame itself, per se, but the existential and spiritual questions of why, who, and how people capture historical or popular consciousness, and ‘imprint’ themselves into our collective universe: how someone becomes an icon, a shining example of humanity unlike any other. It would be another year before I landed on a description for the process I observed: astralization.

The name for astralization came about because stars, symbolically, are historically correlated with the ancestors in my lineages, as well as with the origins of life itself -- which is also, largely, scientifically true, too. It's also an homage to the creative genius & fellow unintentional spiritual iconoclast, Octavia E. Butler, and the political mythology of Earthseed she created for her Parables trilogy:

The Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.
It is to live and to thrive
On new earths.
It is to become new beings
And to consider new questions.
It is to leap into the heavens
Again and again.
It is to explore the vastness
Of heaven.
It is to explore the vastness
Of ourselves.

As we enter into an astrological age of Fire and Air, with Pluto in Aquarius paving the road of liberation and lasting collective power, we are all being called — especially those of us who have the personalities and work that find us regularly in positions of responsibility, public service, or engaging with the collective imagination — to step forward and into deeper, more intentional relationship with our star power, which is what astralization is all about.

It’s this process of collective becoming that lies at the core of what makes us human, and in a world contending with existential crises like climate catastrophe, late-stage capitalism, genocide, nuclear war, and even technology like artificial intelligence and social media, we need more influential, compelling, and interesting people who know how to effectively role model holding power, influence, and wealth in ways that land on the right side of history and opt out of supremacist thinking, rather than repeating all this bullshit again, and again, and again.

So…what exactly *is* astralization?

The best way I can explain this is with an example: think of Beyoncé.

Unless you’ve met the woman in person and have a living, genuine, intimate relationship with her, the ‘Beyoncé’ you’re imagining is not representative of the ‘real’. Your ‘Beyoncé’ is actually a facet of an infinite diamond of mind: your Beyoncé is not my Beyoncé, even though they are all tied, however tenuously, back to this singular, flesh and blood woman named Beyoncé Giselle Knowles, daughter of hairdresser-cum-fashion-designer, Tina Knowles. The ‘Beyoncé’ you’re conceiving of is a mycelial structure of relationships between a whole bunch of objects that may or may not actually have any significant, 'real', intentional, and/or consensual connection to the woman herself. They simply mirror her.

These objects could be a photo taken of her, the concept of her gender expression (further, as shaped by the concept of assigning to her race, nationality, and ethnicity), a song she sang but didn't write, the simple gesture of her brushing her hair, deepfakes meant to be a simulation of her, other people’s opinions of her that were also derived from these mirrored objects, the story somebody once told about that one time they saw her eat a croissant messily at a Paris café (is the story even true?), the use of her image as memes, conspiracy theories, logos of her brands, illustrations of her by artists, irrespective of their realistic likeness or their quality, etc. All of these mirror-objects constellate and re-constellate, sometimes in response to the behavior of the actual, flesh-ensouled being, but oftentimes more in response to behavior and thoughts of people just perceiving and interpreting her, and deriving their own meaning from interacting with these representational images.

However, here's what makes things get tricky: all those objects all represent a fractal part of her human being-ness, even if they're not significant, 'real’, intentional, and/or consensual. What makes this even loopier is that this is all happening within, and in reaction to, both time and memory, too. And even weirder still, when the woman Beyoncé acts, she impacts the shape and trajectory of these objects in the lives of an untold number of beings...and when those objects are acted upon by her or someone else, even at a small scale, that action has the potential to shape the trajectory of the woman and all or some of the fellow connected objects, even if that impact is so subtle as to be seemingly negligible.

OK, so why should this matter to me, Bunny?

Well, I don’t know friend, do you want to live in a society that doesn’t dehumanize people and also doesn’t exist in a constant state of voluntary destruction and imbalance?

In its most cynical and disturbing expression, these constellations of objects (and the relationships of action made between them) can lead us into uncanny valleys and potentially very dangerous diversions from a clear, critical, and grounded state of mind. Modern day sorcerers of marketing and public relations, for example, can turn someone into a hyper-curated ‘personal brand’ that drives consumption, but hollows out both the subject and audience. Or, you can get ‘personalities’ and ‘leaders’ who will debase, destroy, and/or exaggerate anything and everything they feel is necessary to access a sensation of significance, or to temporarily alleviate their fear of things like death, disability, or more often than not, genuine accountability. Yikes!

With the introduction of “artificial intelligence”, the algorithmic manipulation of social media, and state censorship of journalists, academics, and experts, not being aware of our constellated existence can make us very vulnerable, and lead to us perpetuating ongoing cycles of these harmful dynamics, replicating themselves amongst the new objects that come into being. If you want an excellent representation of the dangers of this (albeit in fictionalized form), Star Trek: TNG’s narrative arc with Georgi LaForge and Dr. Leah Brahms really hits it out of the park. Because of the deliberately constructed hyperreality (def: a state in which the line between the tangible and the simulation are blurred, resulting in people accepting the simulation as being ‘more real’ than embodied experiences, eroding the discernment of the subject) — dehumanization & objectification has become a normalized aspect of interacting with the world, ourselves, and one another, both online and offline.

What is particularly salient about this in this moment in particular, as billionaires + oppressors and their misguided to enthusiastic accomplices attempt to burn the planet down, is that the bigger this mycelial constellation can become, the harder it becomes for the person to experience + act with, and be received with, genuine compassion, due to this prevailing overlay of dehumanization and objectification. This is where it becomes important to note that empathy is merely all of the conscious and unconscious sensory data we experience from the movement of these objects — our unprocessed, unfiltered, raw response — but compassion is responding to this data with careful reflection on how to lessen our deleterious impact on others, and by extension, ourselves, and the delicate material balance of the Universe as a whole. The more we are aware that these objects and the actions moving between them exist, and the fact that they are not entirely within our control, the more we can shape and move through our relationship with them from a place of compassion, however imperfectly. Further, it becomes a lot easier to access your imagination, and to have the skill to contribute towards creating a world that is more gentle, kind, and downright fucking glorious, because empathy isn’t obliterating your nervous system in an out-of-balance manner. To borrow from Octavia E. Butler again, in deepening our observation and awareness of the true nature of our astralized selves, we become, “The life that perceives itself/Changing.” because, “Kindness eases Change.”

Does everyone go through astralization, or…?

The short answer is yes.

We’re all going to die and become an ancestor one day, and as a consequence, our memory will exist long after we are gone as a force unto itself, shaping consciousness and matter's ability to become responsive to itself in a compassionate manner, even if this isn’t literal.

Where we run into issues is when our astralization rapidly expands to including objects and actions from sources that go beyond the limit of Dunbar’s number, or we experience a trauma that impacts our perception of ourselves and others. This disruption and distortion can happen in a number of ways: we can have our perception warped by being vested with hierarchal and/or semi-consensual influence over others (like being a boss, or an elected representative), or, you know…having millions and billions of dollars. You can also simply exist in an ecosystem of relating that is based on a consensus reality that is defined by assigning people lesser or greater importance/value, irrespective of your place in that system. There’s also trauma, which can manifest from violent imposition, but also just…being alive.

Much of our modern world has been built around exploiting the fact that we moved away from a lot of indigenous (little i) ways of knowing and being that was inherently aware of these dynamics, however they conceptualized them in philosophy, story, song, and practice. Taking this psycho-spiritual process seriously, however your culture(s) conceptualize it (not to flatten this into a universal phenomenon, but to say that this existential idea isn’t new), requires living life in a way where you are aware that you are still responsible for one another, even after we post-haste it over the rainbow bridge. In an animistic worldview like the one I am suggesting here, whether it’s political or literal to you, we would have to live life with the knowledge that having right relationship with the world — not by trying to escape it, but by embodying a seamless relationship with the Universe through harmonizing with and to it.

Notably, adopting that type of mindset is how we thrive as a species, and guarantee the survival and thriving of all beings we share the world with. Every action, every object created, then takes on a different dimension of care and intentionality. We further opt to design our communities in a variety of ways that account for the fact that we're never going to get this perfectly right, and we have to account for that imperfection, and there's nothing and no one to save us from it. There is no transcendental escape hatch. You can float your spirit up out of responsibility for your actions. Not how that works. As the human world becomes an increasingly hyperreal place, though, and that is mixed with the cultural memory loss and violence of colonialism, capitalism, and related -isms, we are being called to replace mechanisms of death and dehumanization with ones of connection and restoration. An unexpected, explosive, and highly collective astralization process that expands beyond one's psycho-spiritual skill is now possible for anyone: you fart in the wrong wind, you can go viral, and there goes a buckwild ripple through reality, taking your fragile human self and this rapidly expanding collective footprint with it.

But what’s genuinely even more frightening to me, is that because of the state of our globalized communication, having even an intuitive knowledge of this reality can allow people to weaponize it. We have seen countless examples o people leveraging this power + influence to quite literally get away with rape, murder, and getting elected President of the United States of America not once, but twice. Turns out there was a little and wildly myopic something to the worldview of a certain rotten white-browed tit-warbler-in-chief, but in the worst of ways.

Well, that’s not great. What can we do about this?

Because of the real-and-present existential dangers I’ve outlined above, we need more people who can act as a Hermit’s lamp for their communities, helping others find their own way through this process. Unfortunately, though, astralization can only be pursued through experience and close observation of life itself, there's no intellectualizing away this sucker. It can take a lifetime to get in sync with, and it can be WILDLY hit or miss, leaving a lot of carnage in its wake. The constant dysregulation of late stage kyriarchal capitalism doesn’t do us any favors, either. I am hopeful my illustrative description might jumpstart your engine, but the rest is all from, well, direct experience.

To be clear: there is no ‘one true way’ of remediating the painful dimensions of this process on a personal or collective level, and there never could be. There are an infinite number of ways for the Universe to become, so...why would we think there is a one twue way? Even when we stand in a line on the same patch of grass, we're all getting a different view of the grass, shaped by all of the things we experienced before we looked down...including whether or not we are a Blind person.

But there IS one requirement of any path of astralization you take that's non-negotiable: ancestral reconciliation and responsibility.

We need more people who are willing to take on this responsibility as an intentional path and priority, where they are going to spend their time in their communities demonstrating how to commit to masterfully wielding, cultivating, and engaging one's own astralized self with a clear mind and deep, abounding compassion. Further, they (we) must do this work in a way that rejects supremacist ideology, hegemony, and colonization, that can be shared with others in culturally relevant + meaningful ways to the communities they're in, and through processes that are somatic and individuated, so we don’t lose our fcking minds anymore than being alive or existing amidst these minefields of harm are intended to cause. Our collective loss of our Plutonian imagination and awareness has brought us to the brink of global ecological and social collapse, and the only solution is to do whatever we can to provide the foundation for people to dream beyond our lesser angels.

This is a very easy, but deceptively simple, shortcut is the reason why I am here, and why you're reading this. It’s the route that led me to even having this hypothetical mysticism in the first place. Having the support and tools you need to retrieve, adapt, and apply the wisdom and insights of our Ancestors, human and otherwise, is the primary path of least resistance for the plurality of human beings to find their way to a better, more compassionate state. But astralizing consciously in this manner requires having the capacity and personal relationships to be brave enough to confront all who have been to make you, and taking on responsibility for redirecting the momentum of their (sometimes long-forgotten) power + agency, as well as your own.

Picking up a copy of Mallorie Vaudoise's Honoring Your Ancestors: A Guide To Ancestral Veneration (Bookshop.org affiliate) is a good starting point, and I primarily recommend the book because it’s culturally expansive & respectful, with information that speaks across a number of paths. Setting up a simple altar, and making a daily practice of asking your helpful ancestors to guide you through this process, to reignite your ancestral memory and knowing about it in an experiential, visceral way, is really all you need to get started. You need no gods, nor masters, no authority to invest in you what is as natural to you as breathing. You just have to invest 5 minutes a day and let your helping spirits lead the way, whether you "believe" in things as I have laid them out here is fundamentally irrelevant.

Everything else is up to you and the spirits who support you from here out

(But I’ll keep everyone posted about what else I discover as I go along with this unexpected spiritual hypothesis of mine.)

You should totally play this song while you read this post.

My friend Amanda and I had an art date yesterday (does art get made? sometimes, lol), and I am really grateful for these conversations, because they always ground me back into myself. Last night I ended up giving her an extremely spontaneously astrology reading, fully prefacing that I was just...going with it, and that admittedly, I am a Le Bebe(tm) and didn't know what I was talking about. I was just letting her chart - and the stars - talk to me. Apparently that went extremely well, so polite claps for me.

But I bring this up because while I was...divining, I can't even say analyzing, I was channelling up in that biznitch...I ended up employing a few techniques I know ain't kosher to read her chart. In the process, one of the themes that I touched on was how Gemini is the sign of the mastery of paradox. Identical twins have the same DNA, but they are two different beings, with two different (but the same) faces. The healthiest twins fully individuate while still retaining the profound intimacy and recognition of their unique sameness. Building on this further, because of that, there is a mastery of self-expression with Gemini because of this ability to exist in this seemingly contradictory state fully (which, you know, Mercury is exalted in Gemini so there's that *shrug*.) That got me thinking about how people tend to talk (or not, in pop astro spaces) about the character and quality of polarity pairs in understanding and making a whole self from our chart.

My 11th house - the house of friendship, and in a sense, freedom, hope, love, happiness, and the notion of liberation (utopia); it is also the house of mass media, including social media - happens to, notably, be in Gemini, and my Mercury is down in my 4th house in Scorpio. Understanding how I relate best to social media requires understanding this part of my chart. What this tells me is that I have a pretty easy relationship with these types of platforms (generally, true) - especially when it comes to writing - and that I gather a crowd when I speak to 11th house themes with nuance and complexity, specifically in regards to what we are asked to repress in order to have them, and when I hold the tension well between what is, what could be, what has been, what hasn't even been dreamed of yet as a consequence. Because my natal Mercury is where it is, my voice is generally going to show up most powerfully and in optimal form when I lean into being transformative, sensate, grounded (but I can sometimes be a bit too gnarled and cynical), ancestral in my tone, and focus on getting into the root of what inhibits these things in our most localized community (a.k.a., family), in our sense of sanctuary within ourselves, in our nurturing and in nurturance. However, because showing up to friendship - to love, happiness, creating utopia - requires the presence of self, I have to take a look at where my Sun and Leo are in my chart to ensure that how I approach this is balanced. This, funnily enough, also brings us back to (my) Chiron.

I have made the argument (controversially) that the highest expression of one's Chiron is actually more akin to a tattoo, because Chiron is generally conceived as "the unhealable wound." Well, fun fact: tattoos are, in a sense, unhealed wounds because the dermis doesn't fully leech the ink (also because if they get infected, those infections can kill you.) If the cells did that, the skin wouldn't be able to hold designs. The fact that they don't, means that the cells have not fully repaired and that subsequently cells continue to choose to hold the ink. The fact that our skin continues to maintain these details in our skin, is pretty extraordinary, actually. But thinking Chiron as a tattoo is a...very Aquarian approach to this subject, actually. Aquarius is, notably, the polarity sibling of Leo, where my Ascendant and Moon also happen to be. And...that was the big lightbulb 💡 moment for me when it came to understanding what changed about my relationship with social media (and, simultaneously, my understanding and connection to friends, hope, love, etc.)

With my Sun (self) and Mercury (self-expression) in Scorpio, I am keenly aware that I have WAY more lateral than most over how others perceive me (or don't.) If I don't wish to be perceived, even subsconsciously, ain't nobody gonna see nothin', lol...but if I want people to see me, they will SEE me. This is honestly quite funny when you consider that they both reside in the deepest, darkest, most private part of my chart along with my Pluto and Mars. So when considering how I show up as myself, I also have to remember that my Midheaven has this prevailing, extra layer of influence. Our Midheaven speaks to, at least according to Alice Sparkly Kat, how we react to oppression, and integrating this energy is done by "...telling yourself that your reactions are okay, that your existence is justified despite what always weighs down on you (being at the top of your chart)." Why bother? Because, as they go on to say, "...your midheaven is more than your sense of oppression - it's also your potential to contribute to the world in the largest sense you have." My Midheaven is in Aries, so I am the epitome of "Do not allow perfection to become the enemy of the good." when it comes to embodying and applying my actual values. This is especially true and relevant in this society that takes a Puritanical identity approach leftist politics, one rooted pretty profoundly in white supremacy culture and colonial assimilationism.

In the last few years, post-Saturn Return in Aquarius at exactly 0* in my 7th house of commitments, I have taken many more steps towards trusting the sincere warmth and gentleness of my Leo Moon and that people will see my genuineness when I show up to situations and the world without having to perform it. I was actually forced to do this, by virtue of genocide, a horrible election from hell, and a profound violation of my sanctuary while trying to understand my own suffering, to let go of any attachment to an identity of being a "good" and "selfless" person, which has been so deeply and inextricably baked into how I have been engaged with (and engaged) on social media. And it's true: so much of the world and community I'd built around me really did, in fact, reward this dehumanizing and helpless approach to showing up to community. I was forced to embrace and recognizing that I am limited in what I can commit to: I am only me, I can only do so much. I need to understand the structure (real, illusory), limitations (assumed, actual), and finiteness of how I see myself and the world in order to actually *be* myself in relationships. When I am in relationships, when I talk about love and friendship, when I am expertly self-articulating and narrating a vision of liberation, I need to be someone who is understood as being a genuinely talented (a.k.a., I am actually impactful + effective), creative, liberatory vehicle. I must allow myself to be someone who expands what is possible for myself and the world through *who* and *how* I am in the world, vs. merely wearing the mask and performing the motions. That takes risks. It’s messy.

So being able to show up to the world again - to overcome this discomfort and unease with social media (and with my immediate community) - is intimately tied into this story of my Chiron (and, also, my Moon and Rising) in Leo, and their relationship with their cousin, Saturn, over in Aquarius.

I have to accept that my methods and processes may not be kosher, traditional, or conventional: but I am always going to try to build something that will upend the limits of my time(s), and what I thought was possible for me, too. I will freely cop to my own fragility due to disability, and the limitations of knowing I am just another very human, personal self, while dreaming of how to find the Universe’s magic and understand its paths of least resistance. It’s because I strive to know the limitations of the material so well, that I keep speaking to the need to (re)dream what compassionate systems we need, and about my own struggle to reject the impulse towards relying on heros, saviors, righteousness, or salvation, be it my own or others. My inner vastness of goodwill and gentleness is best witnessed and recognized, I am most congruent, when I allow myself to be a star for rejecting arbitrary conformity, not community: to (re)create and imagine what it can be like to a fully expressed, individuated self - a sun of your own relational solar system - while still knowing you are but a tiny, effervescent star in a vast, near-incalcuably old, seemingly-infinite-yet-infinite Universe.

I’m just another run-of-the-mill Aquarian Anti-Superstar.

My name can live and die inside of my heart.

So I have been paying attention to Magione's new attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilio, for awhile now as a legal commentator. I did not realize, however, until this announcement that her husband - their shared practice, actually - is *also* representing P. Diddy in his legal troubles. I think this is a really important piece of information, but not for the reasons folks might assume.

In this country, everyone is rightfully entitled to vigorous and qualified defense under the law, even if you're caught in 4K doing the thing you're charged with. I know there are a lot, and I do mean a lot, of people with very strong opinions about the moral and ethical character of criminal defense attorneys (and, to a lesser extent and depending on your political praxis, prosecutors and similarly positioned counsel.) But in all actuality, these roles are occupied with much more complicated social, moral, and ethical tasks than many folks want to make it out to be. Has our society, at broad - even folks who pro-actively identify as abolitionist - really grappled with their own opinions about their *praxis* of social agreements and the law? Of the nature of the state? Law represents the generally codified logic of a society's relationships within itself and with the world at large (rights vs. responsibilities vs. obligations) -- and the existential framing of that perspective largely depends on collective work not ever subject to adjudication and collective debate (at least not within our current society.) Ethics, morals, justice, accountability, and the law are not the same. Those terms don't even have the same meaning to most people. I think we do a great disservice when we mislead people about what the function and purpose of law is vs. what it needs to be vs. what actual justice, accountability, and responsibility are in a socio-political, personalized context.

Outside of being on the receiving end of the only socially sanctioned way to call an undiagnosed, neurodivergent femme child an annoying bitch - by telling me I'd make a great lawyer - I am, in fact, not a lawyer. But I feel marginally comfortable saying that I believe that the law should serve the interests of equity and justice, but I understand it will never be the vehicle from which those things spring (notably, this is the same with class consciousness, but I digress.) Even in a most ideal and collectively liberated society, that would not be the case -- because while liberatory justice and the law can and should, ideally, twain, the purpose of law and our current theory of law is centrally about the maintenance of social order and cohesion, which by its nature is going to conflict with (r)evolutionary change. Because the law is built to provide consistency, not evolution. This is a whole universe of discussion that is only barely within my most general understanding, so Imma leave this here for now.

In a truly liberated society, the unavoidable reality is that the likes of P. Diddy - who allegedly ruptured the social contract because he's a vile individual who felt entitled to abuse and terrorize others who would not bend to his well - deserves the same level of defense of his human rights and inherent dignity, irrespective of his violence, as Luigi Mangione, a person who allegedly ruptured the social contract because he was impelled to act in response to the suffering inflicted on him by both his target and the people who enabled his target. And the same person(s) can make representation for both, do so well, and that is a good thing despite the former individual being horrific. Our instinct is to assume that anyone who could or would offer a defense of the inalienable, inherent dignity of a human horror movie is likewise a monster. I hope this gets people to rethink their default biases and assumptions not only about how we judge folks before the law, but also how our society responds to violence, including the violence we freely consent to be party to.

The same law firm representing these two VERY starkly different individuals - simultaneously - in the public eye, is going to force this country to have a much more complex and very necessary moment of ethical grappling: not only about what is just and fair, but with how we exist in relationship with violence, who gets to do said violence, when, and to whom, but also about law enforcement and the fundamental architecture of our legal system(s). I think these cases being in the public mind together are going to significantly redefine our relationship with the idea of "rule of law", and what that can or should mean. Oddly, that’s what also happens when you hand fascists the keys to the burning care vs. choosing each other instead: suddenly everybody gets hip to the fact that the law is shaped by the labor and work that lies beyond the scope of the law itself. Fancy that!

So...what are we going to do about that?

I honestly don't know.

I, personally, will be revisiting Proudhon and reading up on anarchist legal theory in my fleeting spare time.

(And figuring out how to become a gym girly so I can self-medicate through the fucking doozy, bullshiterous hot takes I know this is all gonna produce 🥴)