Sigillo Sacro

Floating back to pagan.plus, most of my posts (with the exception of the newsletter posts) will probably be there for a while.

@Siiin@pagan.plus

How much of what we think we know is wrong, absolutely wrong?

I think in whispers and visions, my dreams repeat, repeat

Swarming ants taking over my body, and it says "you're close, but you still won't let go. You won't do what needs to be done," and I wake

Being a mother and doing what it is we're doing, these are important things and I'm very grateful. But sometimes lately I miss dearly the act of performing, and of transmuting flesh. These days will return, yet, and I remind myself to enjoy this season while it exists in its current form.

Photo from a performance in 2022 at the Ranch, the first year we resided on this land.

This is silly, perhaps, but I am considering hopping back on a Masto instance rather than my ActivityPub instance for a time, at least until this particular ActivityPub application plays better with others

As months shift, and the weather becomes increasingly unstable, the timing of our harvests and preparations for the turning over of our garden for the Summer remind me that it is quite time to once again offer a few updates from my world in order to contextualize all of the coming material I hope to publish.

While I don't really wish for this to become a "personal blog", there is a sense in which what I publish here is quite tied to what is going on in my life, and that as I share with you things that may or may not be relevant to and aid you in your own Path, I am at the same time walking my own. Therefore, there is some relevance to the context of my thoughts and actions, as it not only colors what I choose to write about but how I choose to write about it, and how my Practice and overall awareness of How Things Are evolves as well.

November was a precipice, a blade upon which the communal project stood. I do not wish to "get into" the details of what occurred yet again, but the cleaving of that project has given me a significant amount more space to focus on our family, the land, and Practice.

This does not mean, however, that things have necessarily been more free in terms of time. While psychologically I feel freed from the constraints of constant conflict resolution, I'm now giving my children the space they deserve and, now that my eldest is about the age that most children start preschool, playing the role of teacher as well as caretaker. Chores that were once split among five adults are now settled on the two of us, and we've taken on more with the Ranch. Quite honestly, it's been intense, and Practice has taken a much different form lately, though this is not necessarily my intention for it nor what I wish for it to look like forever, though I accept that I must accept trade-offs at this time.

I do not have the bandwidth at this time for daily seated meditation as I once did, but I attempt to make my morning and evening chores fill that space by being wholly present in the activities of the garden, the taking care of animals. I listen to them, and in that listening I've found that I'm actually quite good at this thing called gardening or perhaps cultivation more broadly. Furthermore, things have begun to happen. While, at first, when things were busy and I was still processing the end of relationships that I was quite invested in, it felt that for a time that bidirectional communication channel had been closed, I find that it feels open again. I walk out into the desert with Oso and the mountains expand and contract: they breathe, they speak. I have the most intense prophetic dreams when I ask for them, and have been able to answer incredibly difficult questions in my sleep that have nagged at me while waking. There is a new era of Practice I have walked into, or ushered in (or both), and I find that the things I am capable of now exceed that which I have ever found myself capable of before.

And while the new schedule and this particular season as we complete a critical project for the Ranch leaves me with little time for art, there is much going on conceptually that will be transmissible as soon as time permits. Of course, there is also the constraint of injury, though despite my necessary hiatus from much of my visual art, I am still working on my book with the spare time I can find.

The perhaps idealistic optimism of November has been permuted into something altogether different: not an optimism, but a kind of tightrope walk, the apprehension of which is the awareness that we are so close to the achievement of critical breakthroughs both materially and immaterially. The current moment is a precipice, one which seeks to define who we are and what it really is that we're doing here on this land, and we're stepping softly but confidently in the direction of Purpose.

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Thank you for reading this brief but hopefully welcome update! Later this month I will be releasing a write-up on the concept of forces and balance, and how this relates to the existence of the Work of magick. My goal is to work backwards, taking what I've shared so far and stripping it back down to the fundamentals, whilst offering a perspective that is perhaps somewhat different than so many of the authors out there who've already written some variation of "the basics of magick".

Expressive death

"Wisdom & Illumination"
Another from the archive as I take unwanted time off to heal

My partner has the kids out most of today, so today's work has included beginning to tackle the to-dos that I've been getting behind on in the house and garden, and while I hoped to have more time to rest after the rabbit fiasco last night at the very least I'm no longer weeks behind on housekeeping. Hopefully some writing, planning, and even perhaps a bit of clumsy drawing can occur in the next hour or so before everyone returns.

If anyone cares to support the community sovereignty project (funds this year going to more tree planting, paying down the land, lots of the food we produce goes to people who need it for free). Note: if your funds are limited consider offering them to the folks on this thread who are in more immediate need. We're in a less dire situation these days. https://rancholibertad.com/participate/#/portal/support

I've just released "On Death", a less literal, less informative, but hopefully thought provoking reflection on Death as a character in our lives, and how it perhaps illuminates or encapsulates some of our oft oxymoronic hang-ups with relation and life, as well.

https://sigillosacro.com/on-death/

I don't disagree at all but tbh how many sex workers' clienteles truly include the top 0.1%? Many people who solicit strip clubs and escorts are working class or just above, sex work has also historically been a service within a socioeconomic class, also. Few SWs make it into the echelon of truly high end escorting. This is all from a former survival SW -- NOT momentary niche OF creator.

Trees also make shade, and produce humidity, and are probably better at transforming solar energy into something that does a lot more for an ecosystem than power your fridge Planting trees and reducing energy consumption would be a better environmental win than planting annuals under solar panels

That would be nice if we could all forget how steel is made, or transported, or how those blades are lubricated, or how the crane that installs it is fueled, or that it only has a working life of 15 years or so. We can't afford to lie to ourselves at this point that wind turbines or solar panels are an exit from extraction. Fossil fuels are so deeply embedded in so much of the entire pipeline, there is no petrol free future without less energy demands, period.

I'll piss on anyone's space travel chips anyday, without shame. How silly to spend trillions on something so grandly useless to anyone but a few very rich people who wish to get *even richer*

I see who you are in your responses, friend You asked. The gaslighting is hardly necessary. There are healthier ways to deal with discomfort.

If "freedom" is ultimately conflated with "the right to enjoy material affluence and luxury at the expense of others", well, I guess I don't want your freedom.

But yes, let's go on and keep spreading this hilariously reductive and laughably historically-placed sentiment that "if only we were all as civilized as the Europeans, well of course we would be free", and ignoring the real implications of that entire statement (and it's blatant wrongness).

There is the less obvious fact that each and every European and settler-descended American alike knows on some level that this myth of their freedom and their "civilization" is ultimately responsible for the deaths and subjugation of untold millions of humans, and an irreconciliable amount of ecological extraction and destruction. There is no escaping this fact: both people described in the OP are the prisoners of their own lineages, the knowledge that their existence begets harm.

Now, there is a price to be exacted for all of this. The American is not free for all of the obvious reasons alluded to in the meme: poor infrastructure, economic exploitation, and so on. But aren't the Europeans to a similar degree not free for the same reasons? Despite enjoying some increased level of social welfare. Beyond all of the obvious, though, and the reality of modern surveillance states, and Europes ultimate dependence on the US tech hegemony...

Europeans, riding on a train, sipping wine, are enjoying those aspects of "civilization" on the backs of hundreds of years of colonial exploitation. Notwithstanding also that the much better socialist democracy that many Western Europeans enjoy is the result of American bankrolling post WWII - in other words, their much "higher level of civilization and sophistication" and "victories in the realm of social structure" are the result of.. well, American barbarism

The funny thing is neither person this post describes is "free" in any philosophically or ethically sound sense of the word

Very much love this!

Wow it's been a year since this one. On local art legend Art Fool