🌗 July Last Quarter Links

We are not separate AND we are not the same. Welcome to the paradox party! The revolution will not be desacralized. 🌗

Image ID: A Blue Moon in Exaggerated Colors from NASA, Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Fedez

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Hi friends

I’m away for this quarter moon and writing this before I pack my bags for a ten-day Toronto trip to visit friends and family. How’s the future? Everything still bananas? I’m no longer on social media (except for following a select few astro-girlies on X), but even I’m looking forward to being offline for a bit. I hope you’re finding time to take breaks from this heightened energy.

Welcome to the many new subscribers! I’m going to take this opportunity for a short intro for new people to explain what you’ve gotten yourself into…

I send emails on new, full and last quarter moons — at the exact moment of each lunation. To the minute. That’s why you may get this newsletter at weird hours, not because I’m a mess (there may be other manifestations of that). On the first quarter moon, I post an inquiry in the Substack Chat and we gab a bit (usually about whatever I wrote on for the new moon). On the last quarter moon, I send links (see below!). On new and full moons I send an essay (with audio read by me — I also include a guided meditation and a collage) I write about all sorts of topics from fear of the erotic to clowning to making sacred space — but mostly about the inner work of getting free. [As bell hooks said: If you’re fucked up and you lead the revolution, you’re going to have a fucked up revolution.] Four times a year, on the full moon nearest the equinoxes and solstices, I send In My Experience… (my “advice column”) where I answer a question and don’t give advice (submit a question here).

Actually, that’s kinda my whole entire vibe. Attuning to the Moon. Jibber jabber about beauty and joy and freedom. And not telling anybody what to do, how to meditate, or even whether to meditate.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions and insights (and meditations). I got lots of thoughts about a lot of things. I’m here to share my cosmic and earthly experiences with you. I don’t trust when I take a side (which I do, even though I believe there is only one side — faith in love… and singing.) I do trust in taking a stand.

Everything I offer connects to what I call the sacred paradox of belonging – the fundamental truth that things are both irrefutably interconnected and perplexingly particular. That absolutely everything is made of the same vibrating energy patterns throughout time, and I am an old Black lady living in Brooklyn on stolen land. We may not agree on everything. We still belong to each other. My guiding pronouncements: We are not separate AND we are not the same. Welcome to the paradox party! The revolution will not be desacralized.

Things get do woo around here. I honor mystery and welcome complexity. I translate between the soulful and the social in my writing and teaching because I believe connecting to the truth of both our interdependence and our intimacies is our only way out of the current chaos. Also, jokes. And kindness.

All my content here is open. There is no paywall! I appreciate paid subscriptions. They support my livelihood. And I value every reader. You inspire my work.

I appreciate your presence. Glad to be with you.

With love,

Sebene

P.S. 10% of July paid subscriptions will go to Alabama based Transgender Advocates Knowledgeable Empowering (TAKE) Resource Center. Thank you for your support.

Also, Lin Wang Gordon and I will be leading a meditative hike for BIPOC folks on Saturday, September 7th. Information about the hike is here. Registration will open August 4th. Watch this space.

Thank you for all your replies to my newsletters. I appreciate and read all your emails. Unfortunately, I can no longer keep up with responding to them. BUT, I do read and acknowledge all comments.

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🌗 Last Quarter List 🌗

• This “endurance check in” with adrienne maree brown and Palestinian American writer, professor and clinical psychologist, Hala Alyan — “all of our life has to be that we believe that people can change.”

• I saw Eno, the generative documentary about Brian Eno which is different every single time it’s shown. Interviews, footage and music is sequenced by special software that serves up a different film with each screening. Wow! A fascinating experience. Plus it’s a sensitive and beautiful portrait of a visionary artist whose profound process of art making is rooted in feeling and wonder.

• Bringing to read on my trip: Mural by Mahmoud Darwish, Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir, and Trust by Hernan Diaz.

• I’ve been diving into Human Design and considered also bringing this book with me but if I did I would end up neglecting the three above and it’s so damn heavy and really it’s a months-long coffee table sofa read not a travel companion.

• Finally read Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and it does not disappoint. Nadia and Saeed stayed with me for days after I finished the book. Their brave and beautiful choices through impossible circumstances made me feel hopeful about how we survive what seems impossible.

• It was wonderful speaking about time with Jessi Hempel on her podcast Hello Monday. Jessi and I met as first time authors at the Miami Book Fair in 2022 and I can’t recommend enough her memoir The Family Outing about everyone in her family coming out. It’s wise and hilarious and oh-so tender.

• Scientists discovered “dark oxygen” on the seabed floor! [And companies are already trying to mine it. This is why we can’t have nice things (like clean water and air). Why is our species like this?]

• I read all 100 of the descriptions in perhaps the best listicle ever — a hilarious ranking of the American Library Association’s iconic “Read” posters of celebrities mostly awkwardly holding books.

• Julio Torres. Fantasmas. Genius.

• I’m very slowly watching the now decade-plus-old series Enlightened and can’t stop thinking about the fact that Laura Dern and Marianne Williamson were once roommates (a fact I learned from my friend Melissa’s excellent booklength essay on Inland Empire for the Fireflies Press Decadent Editions) when Dern was 17 and she must be channeling her memories for this role .

• I love how you can turn on and off the categories in this chart of the daily routines of famous creative people. Kafka’s sleep cycle is incredibly disturbing.

• This will mean nothing to most of you but I CANNOT get over this image of the skyline of Addis Ababa where I’ve not visited since 2017 when it did NOT look like this. It is hard to reconcile this image with the current turmoil and suffering plaguing the country.

  

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• Project 2025 reveals the depths of of anti LGBTQI, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant vitriol currently being fomented and organized.

• Recently, I met a friend of a friend of a frined in line for something and we got to the “what do you do” portion of our convo and they said they’re starting an MA in logistics and disaster preparedness because not enough progressives are considering these things and that hit deep and made me google “leftist preppers” and then I saw this Canadian emergency kit and go-bag guide and I aspire to be a pragmatic optimist and my friend Shawna and I are thinking to host a strategy party for neighborhood friends to come up with real plans because July 20,2024 is the first day in Parable of the Sower and as Octavia taught us God is change.

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