This DIY residency came from a calling: an alignment of people, place, and Earth movement in practice. So many of us dream of intentional communities. Witnessing a window of one’s reality there gifted me a real-life example to portray.

It’s tough to build living systems on sandy soil in the high desert where the groundwater’s been drained by neighboring corporate “organic” farms leaking water at high noon, zapping the aquifer dry. And, just like anytime humans gather, there are relations that grow sensitive to the climate’s and economy’s demands. Still, they have built earthen structures, grow food, recycle waste, and generate a pedagogical framework of care.

So, the painting pulled me in. Wind told me to go; my heart implored me to follow this thread. The kin I belong to there conspired to make it possible.

“Are you getting paid?” is a frequent and understandable question I get when people learn of the collaborative storymaps I’m making with Indigenous movement and ecommunities. It gives me pause; I start to shrink in shame that it’s not the immediate pay one might expect. The payment, however, comes in many forms:

• learning new earthwork skills on-site

• unplugging from the city hustle and relishing in seeing the milky way

• one week to partake in daily life with my bestie out there

• animal therapy in the form of goat walks, kitty cuddles, and quail conversation

• the bliss of visiting a spring feeding the valley floor, asking her what story she’d like me to tell

• the ceremony a visiting indigenous group invited us to participate in

• three delicious meals a day, often made in elaborate menus of whole ingredient

• nervous system reset from earlier bedtimes, infrequent cell signals, and slower time

• future visibility when the painting and its print sale meet their masses

• future dividends should we split said painting and print sale

• a body of work building a window into real-time paradigm shift as planet

• Examples of dwelling, farming, waste, and water systems that nurture and uplift the local ecosystem rather than deplete it

• seasonal hues of buoyant desert bloom

These intrinsic values are vast. I return to my soul, a deep spirit place. I come back feeling restored. I get to play with gongs and kittens and cottonwoods while listening, learning, building up the background.

So, how does one make a living at this?

For me, a lattice of support unfolds as I take my next step. This trust can be challenging to shape and maintain, yet here I am, crafting an artist’s life as a parent 23 years later.

1. Barter for meeting basic needs and big costs

This one is a mercurial art that involves putting special requests out to the Universe, speaking this dream visions out loud to community members who might know someone or something of alignment, and catching the opportunity that comes.

For the past 14 years, I’ve kept housing costs from zero to low through creative arrangements and barters. Whether teaching Spanish in exchange for utilities, squatting on private but unmonitored land, nannying a child, or stewarding the land; I prefer gifting labor to pouring money into rent.

One day a week of tending to soil or baby feels more accessible to me that long hours at a desk or company or computer. This isn’t for everyone, but it’s been a blessing for me to free up time for parenting, painting, and ceremony.

Disadvantages: housing can become contingent on what an able body can produce. It could get easily get taken away by landlord or owner. This can mean tenuous housing security. It can also mean accepting conditions of the home or land that are out of my hands. It might imply having to shrink or adapt to someone else’s control and ideation of the space, and quickly pivoting when circumstances take an unexpected turn.

Advantages: I keep overhead low and maximize time with my daughter. I pursue the path of painting that Pachamama calls me to. I spend a lot of time outdoors, co-regulating, regenerating, and learning from habitat. If one can find skills that feel aligned and mutually abundant/helpful a crack opens in the rent on stolen land scam.

2.) Cultivate niche patrons for your art

One art market is marked by speculation and insider trading. There are infinite others that can intersect and depart from that main stream. Patronage via platforms like this (thank you, thank you to the paying and founding members here). There is a scaffolding of art pricing - from original works to reproductions - that can make its collecting accessible to a broad array of people.

For me, two decades deep, niche patrons have collected my work. They tend to be women, ecofeminist, and/or interested in the integrity of the socio-environmental practices and collaborative ritual that go into my visual art output. They tend not to purchase a work for its market value, but for an intrinsic value. They are following a quality that the painting emanates. The way it feels to be enveloped in a scene, trailing the story held within. They are purchasing for the transformative power of a painting, rather than contemporary trend.

Disadvantages: It can be hard to connect with patrons when just starting out, especially when there are class barriers for high cost works. Sales can be sporadic and hard to plan for. My time at UCLA’s MFA program, for example, gave me an initial boost of visibility for LA-based patrons.

Advantages: social media, word of mouth, and community exhibitions can help broaden one’s reach outside of more formal art world settings. Consistently sharing works on a social media account that links to one’s artist website can cultivate broad audiences for one’s work, especially if there are multiple price tiers for folks to peruse.

3. Steady income streams from offerings

To supplement unpredictable art sales, we can generate classes, cohorts, and services as consistent income. There are often steady opportunities via part-time work for reliably pay the bills. Our works are connected through broad strokes of meaning-making and the teaching can feed the painting which feeds the movement. A pedagogical practice is creative praxis, too.

For me, this has primarily come through the DIY PhD program. Offering sliding-scale tuition for an 8-month course has been the most reliable source of income for my family. The cosmology maps and multi-species community connections we make in class are deeply tied to the visual expressions of my work. They feed each other; making a place for world-building and meaning that can ripple impact far beyond me.

Disadvantages: One wears even more hats upon starting businesses; the marketing, logistics, enrollment, payroll, AND curricula departments can be a lot. (Co-founding a cooperative school helped me to lift some of this multi-modal burden.) One can hire help at a certain point. Consistency in communication can be challenging for me as I follow deer trails and aquifer lines. It takes discipline to be my own task-master. I’m not great at many aspects of running a business; but the service still feels strong.

Advantages: Flexibility! Make your own calendar. Map offerings with your personal rhythms and work habits. Prioritize body, mind, spirit, habitat, and community. Share what you truly believe in, cultivating values-aligned networks and expressions of your medicine. Finding a sweet spot of seasonal long-term and short-term offerings can expand one’s reach and shimmer with new collaborations and connections!

What about you? Do any of these resonate? What’s your experience of crafting an economy in the mainstream and/or margins of capitalism’s decline? I’d love to hear your thoughts 🦌

Do these wounds come from being part of the mother, idealizing them, …

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The contents of this book were found rather than planned. When I started my DIY PhD, I didn’t know where it would lead. I was wanting to prioritize listening: to my body, to the mountain, and to the ancestor guides whispering, “Try this.” I was curious in following a pulse and inner chispa rather than calculating a path of study. This was a continuous free-fall into what felt certain.

Following the scent led my cohort David Whitaker and I to a mountain cave where I toned deep-set grief from blood and belly. It had us howling and crawling, silly walking and crying.

When I asked what hope could root in, I was told to turn to the people creating systematic and paradigm shifts in their everyday lives, with community.

Johanna Iraheta, Bruje Fuego, Raquel Lemus, Íssa Victoria, Jasmine Nyende, Queen Hollins, and Olivia Chumacero agreed to share their testimonios. Their words and inspiration became the heartbeat of the Textbook.

Each chapter additionally holds research from a range of texts from Mayan elders to 3rd world feminists, how-to diagrams, and prompts to try at home. The lay-out unfolded like the chakras of the body, from root to crown an expression of curiosity and care.

Rather than pedantic, I hoped it would make the tall order of composting this late stage capitalist empire feel more approachable, realistic, and tangible. The open-ended prompts asked folks to imagine what their DIY PhD would lead them to; what desires or query were pulling at their heartstrings.

There’s so much we cannot change, yet everything we touch generates ripples of impact often hard to imagine.

This Textbook, for example, was first published by Co-Conspirator Press in 2020. Instead of an opening, we plunged into a pandemic that had folks looking for new ways of thinking, being, and learning. The Textbook made its way around the world and sold out in a few quick months.

It was reprinted last year and is seeping into more spaces, organizations, loving hands than I ever could have predicted. The desire to shift our paradigm with our bodies and ancestor guides, communities and habitats is more universal than I realized.

The seeker is a mystic is a guide is a student and this path is ancient. After listening, we channel. After channeling, we expand.

Come say hi this Friday, May 8th at 5 pm in Los Angeles!!!

I’ll be signing copies of Textbook for the Ecocene on Friday, 5 pm, at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair in booth C15. Stop by if you’re there!

We never got to launch the book in person, so it’s a sweet full circle to share with Printed Matter’s annual fair. Their post on the Textbook back in 2020 helped to proliferate its audience and put our book on the ecofeminist map.

Checking in with local native elders lead me to Run4Salmon, a prayer run led by Chief Caleen Sisk of the Winnemem Wintu tribe.

This collective of Indigenous women, activists, and allies have given so much energy and love to the vision of the salmon returning home. For over 10 years, they’ve followed the journey that the salmon used to take from the headwaters at Buyum Puyuk (Mt. Shasta) to the deltas of Ohlone Lands (Bay Area, California).

Due to the construction of the Shasta Dam in the 1930s, the Winnemem Wintu’s villages were flooded and the salmon haven’t been able to return to their spawning grounds. The lifecycles of so many beings, including humans and whales, have been drastically impacted by the dams and subsequent colonial water management still wanting to raise the dams even more, today. The environmental and cultural devastation is drastic.

Here you can hear Chief Caleen Sisk share about the tribe, the run, and their sacred salmon cosmology.

Our beloved mbgenerator had been supporting the run for a few years, and invited us to join in 2022. While paddling downstream with my family, I saw this story-map emerge.

I asked Chief permission to draw and paint it, and she asked me to work with her son, Pom, and educator Nichelle Garcia to bring the run to life.

For a year, I relayed drawings and questions to Pom and Nichelle as the painting progressed. We wove basketry patterns, origin story, prayer run, and visions for all people coming together to support the salmon returning home.

The ancestors often whispered to me what was supposed to come next; and I was a willing channel for this incantation of native lands and waterways returning to native stewardship. Sun and moon deities are frequent guides in my work; imprinted sometime in childhood and Andean ancestry.

The songs, dances, and prayers of a collaborative storymap transmit medicine in nonlinear time.

In this storymap, the water cycle is made whole again; dams are bursting; the oil rigs are relics of the past, strewn with flowers of future harvest.

Many hands of many tribes pull invasives from the banks of the river and plant baby cottonwoods to shelter young fry.

The whales return to feeding grounds; all creatures find a way back toward balance in rhythms of collective cooling, blooming, regeneration.

May all these prayers and more come through.

For thousands of years, Indigenous people have known how to steward these sacred ecosystems sustainably. Now, Trump has removed funding for this Winnemem-led effort to restore salmon to the McCloud river, and there’s now more at stake than ever.

Native stewards of traditional ecological knowledge are the best guides to guide watershed management as the rivers heat up and aquifers dry.

Please consider supporting the run through a generous donation if you can, or through the purchase of our 11” x 14” limited edition fundraiser print. This is an archival artwork on cold press watercolor paper. A beautiful reminder and support for native women-led remediation of life-sustaining ways.

Should you be in a position to support the tribe with a print purchase, please do! As of the publication of this post, there are 35 out of 58 left. Help us sell them out! All proceeds go directly to the tribe.

Salmon Home Print

Thank you for reading.

Thanks for all you do in your corner for our beautiful home, planet Earth.

I’ve found a new rhythm going into my second year of substack. Initially pouring into new moon fieldwork and full moon archive posts; my pace has softened. A rush of output has given way to the riding of waves of energy, despair, hope, nurturance.

I like to give myself a tight structure when starting something new; a framework builds momentum and keeps …

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I started this last full moon eve ~ but grief asked me to sit without writing for a lil while longer. Coming into this week of continued, expanding US-Israeli military terror, I turn to Láwû Makuriyente’s legacy more than ever.

Láwû Makuriyente’s one year angelversary was yesterday.

Our demi-god, our Beloved, opened portals in their music and performance. I first saw them play as one half of the duo Mirrored Fatality in 2019 at Omni Commons, Ohlone Land, Oakland, California. We weren’t bystanders but participants in a ritual for transmutation.

Dagger and Láwü descended into spiritual trance of world-changing proportion. They’d been deepening a path of Earth Medicine with Queen Hollins at the Earthlodge Center in Long Beach, and brought altar and exorcism to their experimental noise performances.

Witnessing 20-year olds bring us collectively into an altered state of consciousness through sound, talisman, release bent time. Diasporic Desi Muslim (Dagger) and Kapampangan-Pilipinx (Láwü) medicine came through punk expression. The magic was known by their souls long before this lifetime.

As nonlinear time-keeping teaches us, we can access choreography for tending to imbalances from long ago.

Our bloodlines have knowledge in tact even when the teachings are broken. It’s not a trajectory of healing, but an acceptance of death in service to life. Without expression of rage, our nervous systems get consumed with the impact of pain.

In a conversation between Memo Navajes, Dagger Wound and Láwû Makuriye’nte on Radio Axiom in 2021, the duo talked about how in their project of Mirrored Fatality, they’re able to die and be reborn again and again to continue on this soil.

Dagger shared: “With fatality it really came from understanding how there’s always parts of us that we are releasing…it’s kind of like letting go and giving death to things that I think either of us want to release or no longer want to carry with us.”

Láwú continued: “One of our teachers, Queen Hollins, always talks about how in Western Society we view death as something that’s very sad and very very depressing; which is very true because there’s a lot of grief with that, but death can be a new beautiful beginning and when something dies something is able to be rebirth. Whether that’s here on the Physical Realm or the Spiritual Realm. We really think that through the project of Mirrored Fatality we’re able to die and be reborn again and again to continue on this soil.

..I think also we live in a world where our chaos doesn’t have a space. We’re expected to just be like ‘Hey! How are you? Good morning!’ clock into your job and clock off, or just be on the great and you’re just…going.

I feel like through our music, we’re able to really embody all of the rage, embody all of the sadness, embody all of the things that are necessary to keep going. What that means is chaos, it’s chaotic, it’s a living breathing being that has its own life.”

Rage as resistance reigned in Mirrored Fatality, and expressions of chaos continued in EOBIONT, Láwû’s solo project.

“EOBIONT’s live performances solders infernal dissonance, kapampangan experimental music, prostheses, lethal movement, and mixed-reality visuals to encrypt its instinctual bloodcurdling resurgences.”

Music, performance, rituals of release express the pain of continuing to witness the US-Israeli war machine terrorize people at home and abroad.

Láwû brought the inside out in transmutation, while achieving an incredible amount of mutual aid to those in need through their shows, albums, and residencies.

Localized actions of solidarity contribute to global waves of liberation. Láwû made a weft of action-pattern for us to keep going.

The phosphorescent links of their love, and all the freedom fighters before them, light us up as nodes in a global cacophony of liberation.

As we generate resistance, rebellion, and alternatives to the art-education-economic-food-prison industrial complexes, we are creating holes, rips, tears in Empire’s masterplan.

While they attempt to subdue, disract, disregulate, and dissociate us into submission that colonial wars for fossil-fueled and techno-billionaire profit, every time we point to the violence, call it out, and choose to invest our time, energy, and money elsewhere, we make their masterplan obsolete.

I keep hearing Americans- people I consider friends, neighbors, peers- say “Im thankful we have peace here.” Is it really peace when our comfort is paid for by the blood of Palestinians, Iranian children, Lebanese communities? Is it really peace when terror is reigning across the globe, with real impact, no accountability, and paid for by our tax dollars?

The American population’s apathy, nihilism, corporate consumption, and feigned ignorance are co-conspirators of war.

Our multidimensional and collective action happens in iterations, out of time, out of control, out of our wildest dreams.

Whatever our art form, creative expression, collective and personal rituals might be, find them, prioritize them, and pair them with action.

Keep drafting visions of death to the US War Machine and put your time, money, energy elsewhere. Know the corporations funding war and keep divesting from them. Bank locally in credit unions.

Scream louder, cry harder, make medicine stronger; keep coming back together.

Happy New Moon! This lunar new year feels so clearing after all that snake year drudged up. In that time I unwound myself from an unhealthy living situation with my coparent, began to listen to my needs and capacities while foregoing people-pleasing, and found spaciousness and growth after torrents of grief.

This fire horse energy asks us to ground and b…

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This passionate neurodivergent artist living in a squat on the side of mountain didn’t know how to be a parent. My time was spent painting and frolicking with friends, biking to protests, growing in ceremony, playing in the plants.

I didn’t have the prerequisites I was taught:

• an established relationship with my coparent

• a stable income

• a house/apartment (my make-shift yurt was on land owned and abandoned by some family trust; a site we squatted for 6 years)

• a retirement plan

• family support

• strong mental health

Lidagat’s soul didn’t care. She wanted me as mama, her papi as parent, too. We decided to have her after dating for less than three months. As her papi put it: we could keep doing what we already knew; living as renegade artists in non-traditional shelters in Los Angeles, or we could take a leap into the unknown and try something new.

With moon goddess as our guide, a decade of love and learning transpired with unforeseeable grief, transformation, joy, and medicine. My relationship to the planet shifted. New abilities opened up that came through hosting her DNA in my womb. I became a different person and didn’t know how to grieve that. I became a different person and celebrate my continual transformation while raising our starseed at the edge of societal / climate collapse.

My days were shaped by exhaustion. Sleep-deprivation shifts our ability to regulate emotions. Postpartum depression set in, but maybe that’s another name for not having enough physical, emotional, nor financial support. Maybe that’s another name for the impact of patriarchy on a new mother. It was worsening anemia; the impact of my brain not getting enough oxygen over a long period of time.

Two women elders visited and let me know that I didn’t have to keep giving so much. That I wasn’t getting the support I needed, that I could leave the relationship I felt like I was drowning in and find a way toward happiness again.

Most of my friends hadn’t had kids yet. It was easy to feel misunderstood, alienated, alone. For all the rhetoric about chosen family; it was a small few whom I could count on to show up consistently. Most of them are also mamas.

Mis comadres sheltered me with mutual understanding; we nourished each other’s spirits back from soul-loss in extreme burn-out from over-giving. We trade childcare and swap stories, exchange looks and love.

Then, like now, there were glimmers. Threads of care that would weave me back to myself.

And the making! Caught between sleep cycles, I enter creative space with clarity. Art was and continues to be sanctuary.

Art is liberation, peace, patience, and another birthing; an act of creation that dissolves my identity and links my limbs with those of trees. When I start painting I’m not overwhelmed mother I’m a node in a web of ecosystem response. I’m out of my head and responding to the imprint of habitat. I’m nonverbal and present, dropped in and deeply reverential.

My practice became more non-linear; being beholden to a market and class-driven Art World became less and less of a priority. The making was more directly in service to Pachamama; our Andean deity-guide ~ the same Earth Goddess of many other names in all places. She holds me when I break as she will hold my daughter and her generation to come.

Earth is meta-mother not receiving enough support, her needs ignored by colonial supremacies (human, white, elite class, male, christian) for far too long.

I held in my arms an immediate stake in the future. Yes I was punk, yes bohemian and radical but no, not nihilist. How could I give up trying to leave my daughter and her generation a better future?

To make as mother means incubating ideas for longer and choosing between sleep or creation. I shelter my peace when I can. I left the confines of market and meet art in the world: cloud, river, tree creation. How to sustain these ecosystems sustaining us?

I was told I had to go to the parties and impress the curators and do the drugs with the collectors who would support my art career in LA. I was told I needed to build massive bodies of repetitive work and undersell my paintings (to be flipped) because that’s where my name was at, not where their true value lay.

That path was incongruent with parenting. The few mama artists I saw make it either had generational or spousal wealth to back them up, or they chose career over child.

I choose Lidagat over and over. I sold paintings in studio and online sales, created DIY residencies and exhibition tours, found tiny places to grip and pull up. A feminist center residency and book publication lifted me when I couldn’t find footing.

I started an online school with a calendar to match hers so I could span time with her during winter, spring, and summer breaks. This is a privilege and also a non-negotiable that pushed me to get ever-more creative in crafting a career. My art and teaching practice have put food on my table for twenty years.

It is often women who collect my paintings, participate in the programs I run. I’m eternally grateful to every person who’s nurtured me~us, this practice, stayed steady.

I follow the spirit of my work, I follow the spirit of my child. I pick her up from school and drop in. I catch pockets to draw and dream and process lichen. It’s all part of the weave of a living practice.

I’ve had a complex relationship to time. Being a steady rock for my girl, being breadwinner, cleaner, care-taker, cook, task-manager means a majority of my weeks feel like triathalons; fitting an intense amounts of physical and emotional labor into a single day while trying to remain as present and grounded as possible. I get scared to ask for help because of how many times I felt let down.

I’ve shown up for my kid when I wasn’t sure where rent would come from next, where my energy could continue springing forth from. I’ve given her stability in spite of the instability I’ve navigated. I model shifting or leaving relationships that leave us drained and unfulfilled.

Our sovereignty matters, our art deserves our attention. We can express through unscripted paths, build our own rules and terms, fulfilling the visions and intentions pulling at our hearts while tending to the heart and body of another.

All this, knowing my privilege and position in Empire grant me a safety that Black, Indigenous, migrant mamas don’t have. The ones in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, those in internment camps, separated from their children right now. Trying to keep babies alive under compounded ongoing colonial trauma.

Que vivan las madres; making the world’s next generation, raising ourselves and kids for an unknown future. Let the mamas lead the rebuilding. We’re speaking up, shouting out for all children’s chance at a future. Rematriate the land, break up with patriarchy and capitalism. Our making makes the way.

Solstice is for pulling the sun back to Earth.

A focus on the light, the sun, the Son

is scorching the planet.

The work is to cool

propagate, cover, water, shade

cultures of divine balance between light and dark.

Two of the same expressions

one entity

snakes ~ the fear, unknown

shedding pretenses, pretention

truth is revealing,

truth is changing.

Goddess is change

We can’t force this shedding, the transmutation, either.

All will unfold in its time.

Allow, reveal, shift, move.

Edging at human relation, connection, construction, supremacy, sexuality -

I know nothing, again.

I’m wide-eyed, poised, watching, listening.

Saying the thing that feels off over there,

saying the thing direct, no filter.

Slow down to imagine its impact; soften, speak truthfully, pause.

Breathe before beginning again.

Loving myself means seeing big picture patchwork ~ weave

some stitches are pulling

my water table is high

juicy, generative polyrhythms

melting

my sensitivity barometer

went off to be told what I’m feeling is wrong.

Talk real, really

another white intellectual man explaining the world?

Your nose points in one direction;

our truths are serpentine.

This winter I run through speedy thoughts and surrender to feeling it all.

Slipping into grief again

with cushions of compassion.

It might seem to be a story with a sad ending

but that’s only this phase or that chapter.

See big! Open up.

What else nudged me to a place post-bullshit.

Christianity, violence, ICE

Paving the ponds of life

they fear the unknown.

But there’s a leak in the street.

The estuary, swamp, lake seeps through.

The plan’s not working.

Moisture pulls us back into remembering

how much came before

this iteration built on lies

from wealthy European patriarchs

manipulating religious shame for greed

with closeted cocks under frocks

wanting to control Earth, brown body, women, desire, knowledge

or so they thought, so they think.

I feel into

the edge of my being ~ brain

this extreme sensitivity

can cloud balanced vision,

or reveals true feelings.

They swell and the swale becomes

barriers to friendship, kinship.

Or is it protecting me?

Walking along borderlands

between oversharing and avoidance.

Sensing through darkness

for connection.

Why does everything feel so strong?

From the Odu:

Surrender intellect; listen to heart.

Go off of feeling.

Close the cycle, completion.

Open heart and ancestors will guide you (things will get finished)

Life, death, transformation, rebirth.

An interdimensional portal

shows not what looks most logical.

The heart sees what the mind does not.

Openness of heart allows for efficiency.

Surrender intellect; listen to heart.

Go off of feeling.

The solution to the problem involves community.

Make an offering, be present with words. Speak honestly from the heart.

Let go.

Remove the block so opening can allow the heart to flow forth.

Snakes move in unexpected directions

pulling the past into the present

forming futures from fluidity

Fuck a patriarchal police state.

Long live the beings of Earth.

Moving between day and night.

between plant and animal worlds.

Seeping like water: turn, gather, run.

Sink this colonial nightmare

six centuries in the making.

The mysteries are revelatory

the snake is medicine.

When Lida was five she asked me, “Mom, why don’t you pray for baby Jesus?” after seeing the name over and o…

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Manifest landmarks in theory transfigure when the foundational underplate that makes their very existence possible shifts upward.

During our DIY PhD, David Whitaker and I were slow-stepping through and around lingering traps of Western academic legitimization that confines knowledge for capitalist extraction.

Desire to decolonize categorical supremacies moved through three areas of study: aesthetics (minimalist, conceptual, muted, classical); ecology (permaculture, scientific method, nature as other); and education (hierarchical, one-right-way, patriarchal, human-centered.)

To explore these themes, I made pedagogical posters with paint, post-it note, and collage. Their visual mapping brought my query out of the confines of the English essay and into another form to see if it could aid a shift in consciousness. I made them as teaching aids to remind myself what was coming through:

On the other hand, this categorization of life and thought fell away when I stepped through the portals of ceremony held open by key Indigenous elder-guides. When I tuned into what my heart wanted to learn, it was spirit. It was the language of clouds. It was the blood memory activated when offering purple papitas to my bis-bis-bis-abuela at dawn. They whispered to me: your fieldwork this semester is singing to the hill. Your fieldwork this semester is becoming mountain.

In the Indigenous-led ceremonies I’ve participated in, the prayers don’t start and end with the self. The loving intentions for healing branch below, above, and around to reach the heart of the Earth that pulses in everyone and everything.

The primary focus isn’t to clear one’s own karma or repent for one’s sins to secure a heavenly life after death. It’s to honor and perpetuate this gift of a home planet. It’s to cast spells for the well-being of everyone in the community and beyond.

I’ve witnessed shifts inexplicable to rational thought or linear time and space during ceremony.

After staying up all night at the fire in prayer (safely, with the protection of protocol, plant support, and Indigenous leadership) is when spirits come through to remake material reality.

On one such occasion I looked up and the clouds spelled DIY Fly. Clear letters formed from the particle mass; an affirmation that the DIY PhD could weave ceremony and education to support us beyond the false binaries of right/wrong, mind/body, and so many more.

As shared in the Original Glyph post, I made this codex to map the shifts in consciousness opened in theory by Chela Sandoval, experienced since time immemorial when we connect our spirit to ripple healing within and all around:

While so much seems to be moving backward, cycles of exploitation and extraction by wealthy white men in power continue to wage war for natural resources, Black, Indigenous, migrants of global south. This has been happening since the founding of this false democracy.

What’s shifting upward; the foundational underplates Chela refers to, are the levels of interconnected awareness being rapidly continued and/or recovered in popular thought and culture. If Trump’s been able to positively accomplish anything, it’s to tear away any remaining façade of the benevolent nature of the United States.

In the society of my youth, witchcraft was negative; LandBack was unheard of; reindigenization was laughed at; and herbal remedies were scorned upon. There was a common belief (again, in the white popular culture we were surrounded with in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginina) that this flag represented freedom. That Christians were the good guys. That the patriarchy was unquestioned.

There have been monumental shifts in consciousness whose sources are as mycelian as the trees sustaining the life still left on our planet. We are relearning through social media, meditation, creativity, ceremony, global social movements, unschooling, ecosystem, intuition, magic, and Earth medicine.

Possibilities previously unheard of are commonplace; especially amongst youth, radicalized queers, humans marginalized through colonialism, poor folk, gender non-confirming humans, women, and hybrid hijes of colonial-colonized differential consciousness.

So when logic fails to show us a way out of this age of technocratic oppression, ceremony tells us that there is medicine moving within and around us that can materialize beyond what’s currently known. If enough ceremonies for rain are being now remembered, if the land is getting sung to by a critical mass of care-givers, if threads of coalitions weft living systems beyond capitalism’s hegemony:

Our wildest dreams can emerge.

“Did anyone else see this? Who would do this?” the neighbor wondered.

Two days later in our backyard I felt a watchful presence. I peered into green and convinced myself it was old tree trunk.

Two days after that I was playing by the trampoline with our two-year old housemate Azi when the feeling came over me again. I looked into the forest, slowly scanning. Probably a stump again, I thought? Then the form came into focus: a regal buck was staring at me. Framed by bay laurels; he had a peaceful look on his face.

Lida come outside to be with Azi so I could get a little closer. I started singing, walking a toward him. I tried to communicate: I will not harm you, I love you, I’m kin.

He began to rise revealing wounds on his side where the arrow had been. It was him from the photo. A second injured deer that found their way to sanctuary in the woods behind our home.

He moved slow but didn’t wince in pain. He walked down his path, watching me as I watched him back. Lida and Azi looked on from the trampoline: “Mom, do you wish that was your boyfriend or something?” I laughed with, “Yes, if I were a deer deity, yes!” Lida sensed a connection between us.

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It was 2006, my first year out of college at UNC-Chapel Hill. I was living with a view of loblolly pines from a dreamroom in the first of many homes I would curate for visual bliss. My eyes feasted on subtle then broad contrast, on color relationships, the lines of everyday objects and the function of rooms.

I fell in love with the patterns on this bedspread, living in a painting well before I painted it. I’d graduated in Latin American Studies and bypassed the art degree since I already knew the subject and style of my work: simply homages to the places that enchanted and housed me. Or making home a site of enchantment. There wasn’t an intention to craft an artist’s life, just a continual turning to the pleasure of putting inspiration into paint, reducing and expanding three-dimensional content into a picture. Culture remixes and worldview encounters kept my intellect mulling over contrasts in values and perspectives found around me. This study was ongoing. This interest was self-generating.

While teaching Los Artistas youth art club at the ArtsCenter I met a couple who owned an old Millhouse and cabin a little ways out of town. They mentioned wanting to offer an artist residency of sorts on their property. It would involve free housing, a stipend, and working toward the goal of an exhibition.

This would become the first of continual unique housing / DIY residencies that allow me to follow the trail of inspiration rather than money.

These liminal places come from relationships and the calling in of dreamvisions. Named desires: “I want to live in a cabin and paint,” “I want to live in nature, not an apartment, in LA” “I want to live in a multi-family home in the forest in the Bay” are spoken as spells and find their form in opportunities.

The relationships are a necessary ingredient, in that you must not only speak the dreamvision to yourself, but name it to your loved ones, your trusted confidantes, your broader circles, who can catch the seed and pass it to where it might germinate.

If the clarity of vision feels challenging, don’t worry. Maybe it’s not quite time yet. Or if it feels present but hard to fully see ~ consult your spirit during an epic nature adventure, on a day-off devices, or through guided meditation (something I love to support folks with). In the quieting of the mind we can listen in to what our soul is longing without worrying about the details.

Whispering the vision summons surrender to a myriad of ways it might land that you never could have imagined.

I think of it different than manifestation. Because in prayer these tendrils of desire are given to the caretakers of us in the spirit realm; who will work them into a benevolent path, rather than destructive one. A manifestation can be the force of will against nature, an incantation or spell or prayer isn’t so specific but holds qualities we want to call in.

Part of the process of summoning is a necessary shedding. Allowing what’s not working to release its hold on our lives.

The shedding can be emotional, physical, relational, spiritual, mental. It can be a practical deep-clean or a therapy-supported relationship transition.

When I moved to Morrow Mill the landscape, the cabin, and self were my muses.

A shotgun ship, the cabin had a wooden panel bedroom on one end and a glass atrium living room on the other. The kitchen and bathroom were passages on a boat that tilted with green and red carpets and creaked with wall furnaces.

Living alone for the first time in my life brought emotional turmoil to the surface. Mental quagmires gripped me with distortion and horror. I could only paint my way out of them. I painted views, each room, all angles, and seasons. At the edge of my psyche I burned through anxiety by portraiting images in the mirror. (Oh the stress on my brow!) Again the pattern and color brought calm. I needed to work through the ability to be alone, and see what could come out on the other side.

To make this much work while teaching part-time was a privilege. It would have been impossible without the artist residency that the family provided for me with very few strings attached. One opportunity allows a body of work to pour fourth that informs and opens the next.

There is a certain insecurity to these life choices, as they don’t make sense under capitalism. They’re financially irrational. Yet they are creatively stimulating. My home is my studio. To paint and teach where and when inspiration calls is a gift. The habitats build me, reshape me, break me, release me from a mundane existence.

I crave the wisdom and mystery held in landscapes, structures, and gardens. For fifteen years the generosity of relations, teaching, and intermittent painting sales have kept me housed and fed. What looks unstable to some has been generative enough to support my daughter and community. There is enough, there is abundance.

Following projects that call rather than waiting for paid gigs to arrive is betting on the integrity of the work to find a way.

The places have greater plans, telling me what and how and why I must paint. I don’t have to sacrifice content to markets that want to flip the work. I don’t have to fit the desire to paint storymaps of place into someone else’s definition of art.

Today my painting pace is slower. Life is still brimming with visual pleasure.

Everyday beauty + unexpected magic soothe a hurting psyche, a broken economy, the deep aching grief of watching violence unfold unilaterally. It’s not going to fix it all, but it’s my contribution to what can keep us going

It pulls us into priorities beyond capital.

Speak the circumstances you desire to inhabit so they can find you.

I can be high-functioning and masking, but there are low points and quicksand overwhelm. I like being transparent about this here, to normalize whatever neurodiversity it is that makes everyday adulting often feel impossible for me.

I stare at my phone: a message of love I want to respond to, but the synapses aren’t synapsing. Instead, glitch-media has me opening an app I keep trying to delete but get distracted on the way there because: how much horror can keep unfolding? To dissociate or isolate with the information?

Some of the things that paralyze me:

• major ecocide like coral reef die-off bleaching the biodiversity of Lida’s future

• everyday moments of runaway consumerism for instant gratification with no end in sight

• billionaire tech monopolies profiting off attention, vulnerability, information

• bills and tasks to keep funds in my account and food on the table

• having so many brilliant, talented friends without jobs or funding

• watching a buck lie down in our backyard with an arrow-wound

• staring up at the English ivy and sudden oak death choking the forest

• witnessing children murdered by Israel after another fake ceasefire

• seeing human beings terrorized by ICE

It doesn’t have to be this way and a total overhaul of this capitalist hellscape is in order and the masses are too complacent, too privileged, too ignorant, or pushed into their own survival mode.

The violence of capitalism is relentless. These instances aren’t comparable; the inequities are devastating. It’s feeling so out of control and beyond what we can impact…or is it?

Enter: will-power. Solar plexus. Soul-care. Trying and trying to remediate within so that we can be out here, facing all of this, together. Releasing the need to be strong all the time, to be understood or liked, to have it all together, to hold everyone around me. Accepting the frequent paralysis and allowing openings to soften the fright.

Sit: sick. Stuck in bed. Two weeks ago some virus took over and I couldn’t base my value or distract my mind by doing. Release, release, release. In between I had to get my girl up and ready for school. Find energy to pick her up, try coordinating care, try cooking for her. Being real with her about where my energy was at. And still showing up.

I’ll get stuck and sink and then a lift will come when I least expect it. In the unknown of what’s unraveling, there’s some solid forms holding us. What are they for you?

Some of mine:

🦌 Being a gentle landing for my daughter. Teaching her and holding her hand through learning life at 9. I’m so proud of her. Even in the moments where we make mistakes, we repair. We talk about what came up. We keep growing. I won’t stop striving to be the best mama I can to her.

📓 Indexing. Here is my current postdoc summary. A timeline to understand the life events and sites of learning. It reminds me what’s here, present, asking for my attention. Expanding my experience. Schooling me, teaching me, shaping me, too. I can track meaning, sew intention.

☎️ Phone chats with Beloveds. I don’t care if I should be able to sit with my thoughts alone; I wanna hear my beloveds’ voices, see their faces in a video call. These kindreds keep it real with me. Chatting helps keep invasive thoughts aired out, head-spirals straightened out. After tears we find our way to laughter.

🖌️ Slow painting. I make 2-3 paintings a year and that works for me. It means I come to them as old friends. I sit with layers of memory in place and get privy to multi-species communication, color therapy, generative stillness. Sitting, I sink in. It’s where I don’t rush. It’s where I follow inspiration, planet/plant medicine.

🌊 Releasing comparison and shame. I’m not the best at cleaning, cooking, or communicating. I’m not performing like I’d hoped in many of my responsibilities. The mistakes are many. Pero there are things I do well. There are qualities I do possess that are offerings to this world. I release the shame by toning in the tub; sinking into warm herbal waters and moving emotion through sound around my water-body.

🪷 Noticing the medicine that persists. There are deep pockets of joy. There are connective conversations. There are birdsongs and crickets that have come back. We’re three wet seasons into refilling aquifers. The pozo blue is thriving. The black sage is growing, the native bees and hummingbirds are fed. These scents bring respite to the people I work with, to me and the people I love.

👓 Bringing attention to what people are doing to resist facism. The brilliant maneuverings in LA, Chicago, and beyond that are stopping ICE’s rampage, refusing their passage, notifying neighbors and pulling people to safety. How our local public school won’t rescind Indigenous People’s Day and teach lies about Columbus. Pointing toward examples where restoration has happened, where Land is returned to native stewardship, where otter are populating urban waterways again. So we know what’s possible.

🎧 Audiobooks, music, guided meditations, comedy, and more

I had to stop trying to make it all make sense and stop believing that it’s going to get better soon. I had to pause what my plans were and what I thought I could take on. I had to drop in to not drop hope. Not turning away and not turning against myself. Sinking into Earth long enough to recharge and break paralysis for one little task here, one returned call there. Investing in reciprocity.

It matters how sensitive we are. We are feeling and reeling. We will not succumb to false illusions of security. We will keep trying to organize against all odds. Reaching for each other through pain and hurt. We will not stop joy. So much is slipping away. Speak your truth. We will tether to what’s living and expand its possibility when we can. Then, we will rest.

We might freeze but please reach out to not stay frozen. Try to not take things personally. Ask for accountability and hold boundaries when your kindness feels violated.

Divest, defund. From google, meta, amazon, spotify, corporate banks, fast-fashion. Try Ecosia as your search browser. Protonmail as your inbox. It’s not on us to fix the world but we can withold our money when possible. Divest from Empire’s mythologies of competition, individualism, and scarcity.

Fund change-making artists, mutual aids, and food banks. Find shifts away from this matrix of extraction and power, in ways that are accessible to you right now, planning for the shifts that are larger and more complex with one smaller step at a time.

Ask for help.

Every act of care that defies capitalist violence matters.

little hands helping me prepare Black Sage for foot soaks at APTP

My mom cultivated a nest for us at home. She is a sanctuary artist; combining color, pattern, plants, and form to delight our senses. Here, Bolivian ephemera and conversational Spanish warmed an environment for relaxation and joy in a neighborhood where home colors couldn’t exceed a beige palette and unruly yards beget fines. A culture of suppression and shame caused depression, violence, and anxiety to fester behind the identical doors. Nuclear families, individualism, and mythologies of supremacy bred the culture of small-minded conservatism tearing communities apart today. Between culture and subculture, I arrived to college with a mistrust of authority that would shape my educational and artist paths to come.

I tentatively stepped into my University’s art department, trying out classes that could meet my curiosity and creativity. I found the 101’s draining; so much theoretical banter and so little inspiration. The meaning had to be unpacked in artist statements; the symbolism hammered out in critique. The world is rife with inspiration and meaning; why did the conceptual art we had to study feel so dry? Why, furthermore, was there an inherent belief that the Western academic canon represented the finest of Art-making when the folk art I grew up surrounded with made my spirit feel something?

The aversion was so strong that I couldn’t comply with assignment to make paintings representing ideas filtered through theory, then pigment. Instead, I kept painting the interesting things I saw: my feet, my bedroom, our neighbor’s yard. I saw these as artifacts of life moving outside of rational thought and they fascinated me. I wanted to study the lexicon of image and bliss in my ethno-visual field.

I gravitated to the Latin American studies department, instead. There I read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where Paolo Friere made the apparently radical assertion that human beings come into the classroom with knowledge. And that education is about sharing tools so people can better express their positions, articulate their dreams, and defend their sovereignty.

There we immersed in subaltern theories that flipped the map; South America and Africa were on top, the Global North could be placed below. Philosophy from hybrid academics, like me, legitimized their community’s knowledge. I applied critical pedagogy to art education to create Los Artistas; a Spanish-language art program for the children of recent guatemayan and mexica immigrants to North Carolina. We used art practices to study, uplift, learn from their families making their way in foreign culture. Patterns on dishware, doodles in journals, decorations in living rooms; life’s bricolage imprinted artworks with a living aesthetic so captivating to guests at their exhibitions.

Fastforward to 2010 in graduate school at UCLA, where I attended art school because I could work on the body of work inspiring me instead of conceptual assignments. I had a professor proclaim that he knew what I was doing, that I was copying Grandma Moses’ work. I’d never heard of her, but after looking her up, I wasn’t sure why her style would be a pejorative. The folk versus fine art binary is fake. It’s supremacist. It’s valuing academic art over everyday art.

Creation is everywhere. This planet is the most beautiful work of art. There are collaborations between the elements, with animals, with plant communities, with human communities. There’s art everywhere we look, and often the most interesting (to me) is the art that reflects unique cultural locations. Contrast, complexity, story, and sites of memory unfurl experiences that haven’t been expressed before. The novelty is the brilliance. The multi-coded consciousness already lives in everything we do. We don’t have to explain it; we feel it through the material, intention, and expression.

I’ve been lost in people-pleasing, misunderstood by blood and chosen family, confused by avoidants, and ghosted by community. Overwhelm from care-taking and unreciprocated relationships led to burn-out and break-ups.

Three years of therapy later, it’s clear that the Universe is teaching me these major lessons: 1) it’s usually not about me 2) not everyone is for me and 3) loving myself helps me discern where, when and how to share energy with others.

This year, discernment is a site of learning.

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“Let’s make something to represent our DIY PhDs.” David Whitaker and I were in our first month of class together, dreaming up a program to fill our cups.

We overflowed with joy and creativity, untethered to academia and following spirit. Spirit was a question mark yet perceived with a sense and direction.

When I closed my eyes and asked what to make the Mayan glyph of Caban immediately appeared; every time after when I asked what my DIY PhD was about it was the same response: Pachamama. Gaia. Mama Earth. Like “spirit,” it wasn’t about the name, but a cosmology whose origin and a destination that were the same: knowledge of being and sustaining as planet.

I’m neither a student nor descendent of Mayan glyphs. Pero the mystery suggested in caban imprinted on my psyche like the afterglow of chlorophyl. It lingered long after I’d closed the book. I painted caban as meditation, put it in a leafed cut-out holder, and brought it to class. “This is the Original Glyph, OG, it’s my guide.” Glyphs reach before limitations of words and pull primordial meaning to the forefront.

After our first Fall and Spring semesters I strung theories, images, videos, and journal entries into a Year One Paper. It was bricolage and raw, goop like chrysalises before matter morphs to butterfly. I was embarrassed to show this to my mentors who held academic jobs and professional careers in Art. It was a holding place for pulse instead of finished product for review. Still, it allowed me to stretch and leap past preconceived notions of formal writing and stay true to what pulled and pulled me in.

Now when I look at the paper I see the six-year trajectory it opened. Like caban, it illuminated that which is steady and wise. It allowed me to strengthen instinct and ecstasy of a living practice. Like this substack, I jumped before being sure of the flightpath. My heart asked me to stay a course unfamiliar to the confines of canonized knowledge and trust that it was a valid study. Here are the beginnings of the paper, which I’m sharing right before we begin our 9th DIY PhD cohort as School for the Ecocene.

I’ve been taking extra care during this round of applicant calls to emphasize how unscripted this program is. We aren’t handing out curricula but holding a steady container to practice relaxing intellectual control and deep-listening to our guts and desire. Each person becomes a channel rather than silo. In six years of practice, what starts as ephemeral has current and impact that are real. Managing expectations is the hardest part of its initiation. Consistency and connection are ingredients feeding its momentum, but rest is found.

The next few full moon archive posts will pull from this paper as an excavation into the bones of what became my Dissertation. The embarrassment I felt then had me hiding it from view. Now I see tender courageous roots that helped me ground what was to come. The codex painted at the end looked like any room portrait I’d made before. It held academic theory and the clouds spelling messages after ceremony on the same plane. Their lexicon was remaking what I thought was possible.

Knowledge as Healing: Resonance that Unfolds and Reveals Itself

An Autobiographical Annotated Bibliography

DIY PhD

Year 1 Paper

Sarita Doe

2014

My DIY PhD shifts and re-organizes itself according to what I am learning. It morphs yet holds a tone, like my body; an aesthetic vibratory identity. This identity resonates in socio-ecological places found through an integrated bloom management: a map, a cosmology to locate bliss.

Learning in the DIY PhD is alive. It’s an organism that self-regulates according to the experience unfolding in space. There is no concrete position. Rather, there are cycles of clarity, confusion, mystery, deepening, and flowing.

Western theory discovers cracks in its system and openings are created. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval is seeking to reveal a rhetorical structure in which the languages of supremacy are “uttered, rationalized, and ruptured.” She authored a guide towards coalitional consciousness. LOVE feeds this consciousness with methods and materials to bypass the current order of dominant perception.

My body and my home are test-sites of colonizer and colonized. I experience the juncture Sandoval describes between being a “disoriented first world citizen-subject” and “oppositional consciousness developed by subordinated, marginalized or colonized Western citizen-subjects… forced to experience aesthetics of postmodern globalization as precondition for survival.”

From my habitat in Late August, 2014:

All of Los Angeles floats through my window. I swish the dust around and suck it up and find medicine in my home-tent. I am part of the arteries and happenings in the valley below yet I am separate. My separation is in my privilege of education, and participation in - an understanding of - white culture.

My connection is the air particles. My connection is the sunlight- fierce and drying or mottled and giving. My connection is in English, my connection is in Spanish. My separation is in a skin-tone, a height, an accent. My connection is in the soil and dust in our pores. We connect because we have to drink water and because we share body composition / water weight // We are bags of fluid and flesh.

Now I know this love/hate. Now I know this ebb/flow. As a visitor I exoticize her colors and flora. As a relative I feel her soul. As a daughter I hate her imposed values, her cold shoulder. As her lover I scorn her vastness. How can I know the corners, how can I hold her essence? Her complexity made me fall in love. Her complexity makes me want to leave her for a simpler home.

When she lets me be her mother I sing into her folds of hill and wind. I cradle and clean the dirt with prayers. I embody her pain even while knowing that it doesn’t lessen its impact.

New moon help me plant good seeds in a good way. Help me understand which path will illuminate the best situation for all concerned. GRACIAS ancestors GRACIAS teachers.

Chela states that now, transnational capitalism colonizes and subjectifies all citizens, across borders. Revolutionaries that she calls the US 3rd World Feminists have learned to both occupy and/or throw off subjectivities in a process that can reinforce or decolonize their various relations to real conditions of existence. They have “kinetic and self-conscious mobility” when identifying “oppositional subjective positions” and enact them differentially. She speaks to a topography of mapping these guerilla practices where no action is privileged over another; each is just as potentially effective as the other in its opposition.

> ENTER CODEX 1, ENTER SONG <

CODEX 1. OCTOBER’S FIRST FULL MOON “Manifest Landmarks in Theory Transfigure When the Foundational Underplate that Makes their Very Existence Possible Shifts Upward” -Chela Sandoval on Differential Consciousness Tactics

I’m enjoying sharing this work without a paywall. For those able to offer patronage, I so appreciate it! Artists getting support for their work is like paying for a show so musicians can get paid. Folks can cancel any time. I sharing full moon posts from my archive and new moon transmissions from my post-doc research.

their shell a carbon offering to 500 years of silence

a genocide almost complete

so colonial children get Thanksgiving

taught as friendship with people they call extinct

The eagle used as false prophecy knows all

saw all, sees all, tells all

rapid-flight, Midlothian

fall into Powhatan again.

Bridging, we bend to see osprey at a man-made reservoir

There are shells from new mussels of old villages under

water memory, we bow to you, mourning dove

release from your place of slumber.

Cull more from my heart, tap root, native fruit

Feed from my tears

release Christian fears

from these lands and creeks.

Spring back, ever-green

ban petrochemicals, balance at the edge of tribelettes, tributaries

Reparations, Land Back, land beneath, pour out

our arms carry herbs, melt guns

Melt your heart, bless your heart

police officer repair, balance

budget post-national equity spectrum

you, me, all, we, ever-melding, different, complete.

I pray us queer biracial relatives

Bring hard lines to soft surrender into rembrance-joy.

Before Mother-Wound father sky and Pachamama

built channels of trust.

Alone they perish; together we won’t suffer or fall

cross spells into circles

kneel, head to soil

Let this healing commence

Breathe life into a fire both ancient and new

ivy-off, dear, boulder-cooling

the Sun Empire retooling

care technologies renewing, improving

Us into gifts beyond gold

us in receiving, becoming bold

in soul, in chorus we grind the leaves as we press the fruit

surrender, all, into brew of fog

Considerations of multiple, not few

I stay on the rock, undoing blue

You meet me at green beneath the veils unseen

holding braids between us

Light the ember, pouring truth. Unlocking them over you

bowing, below, sighing so deep.

Often wandering into catching my breath, falling asleep.

Rest, deer. You are loved by all creation.

Next week I’m thrilled to be facilitating an ecosensual ritual at Honcho Campout, the queer forest festival rooted in planetary liberation. The sacred sensuality of our planet-bodies will move through three phases: offer ~ eco ~ eros.

Until more recently, there’s been surprisingly little written on the topic, however ancient and vast its practices are. From sex outdoors to ecstasy experienced seeing sunlight through leaves; most of us have felt moments where the perceived separation between us and ecology melts into oneness.

There’s no one way to talk about or experience the ecosensual to ecosexual spectrum; it’s about what feels good for all beings involved.

In the branching beyond confines of human-only pleasure, eco-eroticism can be experienced with moss, stone, water, tree and oneself, or also with another.

It’s our birthright to experience consensual eco-erotic bliss. As with humans, we must ask and receive permission from more-than-human lifeforms like mountain, rock, tree.

The practices are opened through touch, sight, taste, sound, or smell. Our ancestors knew how pleasure is enhanced by merging energy with the elements. This ecstasy can be offered to habitat, as well. The heightened vibration of our cells is felt by all beings around us and reverberates back to us, multiplied.

A muse I met in an ecosensual workshop at Honcho last summer inspired a river of ero-erotic poetry to flow through me; breathless beauty tumbling through image and rhythm unto the page.

I caught a few and share them here with you, along with a sketch of manzanita’s sexy arms as well as the melding of bodies, love, and mountain in the 2015 painting, Native Grasses and Our Naked Bodies.

The Forest Felt Your Breath

Gentle poise

may I sit upon your lap?

Your softness reached me

at the bench.

How grounding to put the rock

pressed between us,

an edge beneath us,

to feel into each other’s aura.

Without leaving our bodies

we inches closer,

blindfolded, finding our way

to honey.

Your collarbone led me to your lips

past instructions,

the forest felt your breath

and I, your hips.

Our direct brightness is new

and needed in 2000 bodies.

How steady you feel

in finding me.

Forest fairy play with me longer in the water,

linger at the lines beyond desire

where we are luscious and full,

where your face frames the sun and moon.

Your soft orange landing in the morning

meets the beauty of your gentle curves,

our inhales submerged

in dirt and fern and dew.

Service in servicing, serving into sweetness.

Tall and strong like trees

bathing me, holding you

fire and lights radiate, summer hue.

Tender tendril of hunter, tanner.

Ecology crush, let me study you.

Let!s meet again, twinkle-eyed.

I’ll kiss you camping til the day is new.

One of my favorite questions to ask artists is: “So what’s after contemporary art?!” Aside from some blank stares like its canon will carry on forever, it’s clear that so many of us are already building outside of its confines. When speaking with Alana Fitzgerald on this topic I heard her say “Ancient Futurisms,” which resonated deep.

Our ancestors wove creativity into daily life; so many people still do. Art based in theory or concept feels alien to a timeline materially falling to fascism, climate chaos, and a billionaire corporate economic, media, governmental, educational chokehold. Ancient art speaks seasons, ecologies, food, elemental spirits, cosmologies, homes, habits, the body.

I like futurism for noting that we aren’t talking about the romanticization nor essentialisms of how art happened in the multitudes of pasts we can’t possibly know, but how creation can expand beyond this profit-driven, individualistic, Art Market human-supremacist art complex has run its course.

It’s art in conversation with life and not in the coffers of fossil-fueled, military, and agro-industrial endowments.

Art active in the hands of many beyond the same five tokenized artists getting all the grants, shows, and write-ups. Art making soil rather than polluting it with micro-plastics. Art generating multi-species coalitions not more white-walled exhibitions. I’m not above these contradictions, but of them, too. I’m curious and questioning what’s next.

So many art worlds are happening simultaneously beyond the Western Academy’s Contemporary Art production. They are blended like us. So many of us are in-between, trying to find our way past the folk art / fine art false binary.

How do we contend with making a living in a country that devalues art not made in marketable series within a narrow identity arc and conceptual frame? How do we price what’s taken us a year and 50 relationships to craft, or put into 200 words what intuition and integrity ask us to visually create?

I love this precipice. Looking over it, I reflect on what Nico from Climate Control asked me: “What makes good art?”

For me, it’s felt in the conviction of finding what one’s called to make from the primordial depths of their being and matching it with the medium that can transmit their visionary medicine.

It’s in the instinct and dedication to keep creating, not for a market nor an attractive-sounding narrative (although it can still engage with these) but because the calling is so loud that our spirit finds relief in its making. We self-soothe, as a species, in art. We express in reverence, and hope that the channel is resonant for someone else.

Existing in-between what we were told is the way is the medicine. It’s not an either/or, but taking up space through authentic creation in the both/and.

This era after Contemporary Art is full of incantations for a world that is enhanced, not polluted by our crafts. Where living systems are buoyed not built out of the equation.

I make a living as an artist by some gallery shows, some art sales, some high quality prints, some teaching, some grants, some consulting, some fundraising, some gift economy some crowd-sourced support, some barter, some low overhead, and some magical vision spells. None of this is consistent, pero, goddess-willing, altogether it somehow works out and feels abundant ~ especially when I’m abundant in quality time with my daughter and beloveds.

As the sole provider for my child, it’s a risk. But as a citizen-witness to Empire’s path of death, it’s necessary. I’m privileged in piecing this together. The artists in Gaza and undocuartists are living in the tightest militarized state prisons of creation.

I hate the idea of doing the same thing everyday, giving my labor to corporations, workin for someone else, doing anything beyond what Pachamama is asking me to do. I am driven by beauty and nurturing the living systems on this miraculous planet to keep existing for my child’s generation and beyond.

I make life as art in community, in ceremony, in offering, in parenting, in habitat, in failing, in trying again and again, in grief, in heartbreak, in solidarity, in loneliness, in collaboration, in love, with creek, with plants, with Apu, and in the quieting of my mind to see the sacred in movement of light and color on leaves. I make art because it’s what I’ve done since I can remember and all I know to do.

This new moon shares a walk-through I did of my recent show at Climate Control in San Francisco, Raymatush Ohlone Lands.

What does making art today mean and look like for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.