🌕 To Stray & Stutter
it’s a full moon in taurus 🌕
💀 Join me next Sunday for Cosmic Collage! ALL SOULS 💀
This is my last offering for 2023. Also, the last time I offer a cosmic collage workshop. It’s the final spooky edition!! Come explore sacred thresholds through meditation, contemplation and creativity. On Zoom (and recorded) :: Sunday 11/5 :: 1–3:30pm ET :: $23.
Listen to me read this essay:
Hi friends
Thank you for being here. Yesterday was my birthday. 🥳 I am 53! I don’t take being alive for granted (thanks cancer! 🙃). I truly appreciate you showing up to read all about it. 🙏🏾
And Happy Scorpio Season! ⚡🦂⚡ May this fixed water benefit our deep dive into a profound passion for collective liberation!! 🌊 🌕 🌊 I hope you’re finding ways to stay nurtured and engaged.
How are you doing? For me, despite the overall sense of well-being and joy in my own life, apparently things do not progress steadily towards some mountain-top destination of unicorns and daisies for me or the world. 🤔 In a recent post of Recovering, Holly Whitaker referenced Bayo Akomolafe on the myth of guaranteed success versus the truth of “welcoming the strange.” He says this:
Perhaps, in these posthumanist times, we'd have to meander a little, stray a little more, stutter even more, and cultivate the capacities to relinquish the tyranny of Happily-Ever-After, if only to listen to elsewheres between the lines.
I’ve been doing some arduous meandering myself. That’s not surprising given the state of the Earth and the cosmos. I don’t say that casually or causally, I say it cosmically.
As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m trying not to write (or teach) in a declarative way any longer, but here’s some straight up mystical birthday wisdom from Kooky Old Aunt Sebene: The planets and stars are reflective, not causal. Also, all of reality as a whole. Hence, the whole “Cosmic Connection” schtick. Because if everything in our universe is inextricably intertwined (as it irrefutably is), then we are in fact seeing ourselves everywhere around us. Absolutely everything in life is a mirror. Greed, a mirror. Fear, a mirror. Hatred, a mirror. War, a mirror. Also: compassion, truth, courage, justice, liberation… mirrors. Shit’s bananas in our world right now… so, we may be feeling bananas. That’s understandable if EVERYTHING (and everyone) IS A MIRROR! That means we too are mirrors… with agency. We are affected. AND we affect.
You’re welcome.
And, I’m sorry — astrology (aka mathematics) gives us snapshots of future pictures/mirrors (The Sun, a mirror. The Moon, a mirror. Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Saturn…), and some of this upcoming collective astro weather looks rough! That does not mean there isn’t pleasure and healing and delights and insights and laughter and awakenings happening for our planet, for me personally, and likely for you. Both/And. I hope you meet any intensity in and around you with kindness and generosity to yourself and others, and you find processes that support your connection to love and joy.
I am finally getting around to sharing this prescient conversation on grief I recorded with my friend Jennye Patterson and my new friend Kate Tyson (whose work I’ve admired from afar). I’m struck by the double synchronicities involved: Kate contacting the two of us the day after we presented a module on grief in Jennye’s Breathwork program, and recording this just before collective grief peaked globally in response to the chaos in Gaza and Israel. I listened to it just now, and I’m so touched by the shared wisdom and the humility with which we three hold this powerful, often misunderstood process. Please check it out. I should have listened to it last week…
I am relieved that with today’s lunar eclipse, these Scorpio/Taurus Eclipses which have been trolling me since 2021 are (almost) over! Hurrah!! Eclipses are inherently powerful reflections of Earthly reality [seriously, watch the video, eclipses are awesome!]. And these past two years have been especially, eerily-timed lunations in my world (also, THE world). Last October, I was in Portugal, in between a pair of these eclipses. The preceding months, I had been walking relatively pain free for the first time in almost a year and a half (after cancer + radiation + hip replacement). Then, a few days before the trip, I started experiencing quite a bit of intensely sharp mystery pain. On my birthday, two days after the solar eclipse in Scorpio, my besties Michele and Rebecca took me out to dinner in Estoril to celebrate. As we walked to the restaurant, I chanted to myself please don’t let my pelvis be broken, please don’t let my pelvis be broken, please don’t let my pelvis be broken… My pelvis was broken (wah wah).
Then, last Saturday, (in between two eclipses), I was in the ER with an infection (yes, again 😐). I’m doing fine now. I have lots of support and resources (internally and externally). Yet, even for me (who has a stoopid amount of body stuff always going on) this was the camel’s straw. In a good way. The camel has been trudging too far, too long, with too heavy a load, without enough water or breaks, working and socializing beyond her capacities, generally doing THE most, ignoring how tired she is and resisting creating boundaries, thinking she can do so and not face any health consequences which is completely ludicrous given the general and extremely obvious state of her health.
And this, kids, is why the camel landed in the hospital. [C’est moi. Je suis le chameau.]
The thing is, I thought I was taking it slow. And compared to a long ago formed idea/fantasy of myself, I was. My schedule is much less hectic than it was pre-pandemic when I traveled many months of the year to teach and train and do personal retreats, served on two boards, wrote and recorded many meditations, mentored multiple groups and dozens of individuals, consulted for non profits, maintained a very full social life, and wrote a whole ass book. The camel has long been overloaded.
To completely mix metaphors and geographies, this past year, I have been building a bicycle while racing the Tour de France. I have restructured practically every facet of my reality while living it. I refreshed my home. I completely reconfigured what, where, how, and with whom I teach. I created entirely new workshops and courses (with resources). I practiced going out dancing regularly on my own. I got on a dating app for the first time ever. I went on my first solo vacation in over twenty years. I got licensed as a NY State Hiking Guide. I landed in the ER three times (once with sepsis). I hosted many, many (many) visitors. I engaged multiple new tech platforms to host my offerings. I found my marketing/pricing model. I decided whether to have a paywall on this Substack (I do NOT). I successfully supported myself as a newly single woman! I began to tithe 10% of all my online and Substack earnings to donate to the Manna-hatta Fund and other causes.
Besides my friendships (which have long been ride or die), I have transformed almost every single aspect of my existence in under one year. I’m very proud of myself. It has been exhilarating. Also, exhausting. I’m exhausted! I know I'm in the last few miles of this route. But, I’m not there yet, and these eclipses and my body were mirroring (screaming) at me to slow down. Synchronicities are not all fairy-dust coincidences, they can also be hard knocks in the head. Being hooked up to IV antibiotics for the third time in six months, I had to finally really look at my reflection. Here’s what my mirror reflected: I don’t want to ride in a fucking race. I don’t want to be hauling heavy loads. I don’t need to be trudging or racing anywhere. At all. Fuck that! What am I trudging for? The camel olympics? Where am I racing to? Death?
No more trudging and racing. More straying and stuttering… to stray a little more, stutter even more. I believe there’s magic in this too…
I haven’t done an In My Experience… since August. So, two weeks ago I looked at the list of existing questions and decided to finally address the many illness and cancer related inquiries submitted these past two years by answering a summarizing question to which most of them were pointing: How do you navigate your health challenges? Then, I went to the ER. [Synchronicity as a head knock!]
I’m not going to answer that question here. Because I will honor my capacities. That begins by admitting I don’t have many at the moment. I even paused my Ancestors to Elements course for one week. That may seem like a small thing. It. Was. Not. It took all my conviction to do it. Because I’m that m.f. camel, that bike racer.
I sent the email from my hospital bed on Sunday because I knew if I waited until I was released, I would convince myself that I could lead the two weekly sessions (technically, I could). Instead, buoyed by the lovely and encouraging messages from the course participants, I did very little this past week. I finally tended to my plants and not only merely watered them (they are literally the beings I spend the most time with, and I had not been paying them my loving attention). I decorated my new living room shelves. I cooked simple meals. I read. I guzzled Gerolsteiner. I made a collage. I drank a vat of kombucha. I went on walks. I received body work. I went to the coop. I planned my birthday party.
May we all release the trudging & racing for more straying & stuttering.
Much love
Sebene
P.S. This month, 10% of paid subscriber fees are going to The Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) to provide emergency assistance to families in Gaza who have fled their homes as well as for procuring emergency medical supplies for hospitals and clinics.
I don’t do affiliate marketing. I only share things from people whose work I have experienced myself. Two women I greatly adore and admire have new offerings and I am thrilled to let you know about them. Please check them out.
Lindsay Fauntleroy is my dear friend, a brilliant teacher, and a true healer. For my NYC folks: Lindsay is offering private acupuncture in Brooklyn again! 🥳 As she says, acupuncture is the right medicine for the heartache, uncertainty, overwhelm and confusion of these times. You can receive Lindsay’s profound healing at MINKA in Prospect/Lefferts or at Grand Street Project in Williamsburg.
Chela Davison is relaunching LEAD your Self, a self-paced, self-coaching program filled with the wisdom of her decades of expertise. I’ve worked Chela multiple times over the past decade and she really is a master coach. I can’t recommend her enough. Sign up for her free Align Workshop on November 9th & 10th to experience her magic.
Seems we share the same birth date. Happy, happy birthday to you and me!!! Thank you for your willingness to share. thank you for being here on this planet now. thank you, thank you, thank you.
Mary Ellen
Happy Birthday💜 I hope there was lots of cake🎂. Thank you for this insightful post. Hugs!