Happy Venus Day!

In the last few weeks, two teachers I admire foregrounded their own nervous systems in relationship to their teaching in ways I found connective and empowering.

Our small family loosely follows a parenting school of thought that stems from non-violent communication and aims to privilege connection with the child over controlling or manipulating their behavior. This can sound simple. But for me, it has sparked awareness of all the ways fear and control were implemented as the primary mechanisms that shaped my behavior (and so my character and paradigm) and oriented me towards a worldview rife with hierarchies and dominance.

Undoing these––orienting my compass towards different horizons--has been both life-giving and all-consuming.

I struggle with the physical and emotional violences I participate in and inherit.

Last year, in order to best honor the child I am privileged to be raising, I knew I needed more formal support. I committed to a parenting class with Pamela Quiery, a teacher whose voice I liked and whose perspective felt tender and insightful. Knots that had been tightly tied slowly began to unravel. Last week, this teacher outlined the principles that guide them as they help other people parent towards connection instead of control. One thing they shared is that drumming up people to take their classes every few months took a toll on their nervous system that was not sustainable.

I struggle with the physical and emotional violences I participate in and inherit.

Last year, in order to best honor the child I am privileged to be raising, I knew I needed more formal support. I committed to a parenting class with Pamela Quiery, a teacher whose voice I liked and whose perspective felt tender and insightful. Knots that had been tightly tied slowly began to unravel. Last week, this teacher outlined the principles that guide them as they help other people parent towards connection instead of control. One thing they shared is that drumming up people to take their classes every few months took a toll on their nervous system that was not sustainable.

Renee Sills, a teacher whose monthly insights I look forward to and who works through the lenses of astrology and embodiment recently shared an expansive message around the ways they had been impacted (consciously and unconsciously) by turning their gifts into more formal business practices. This is part of what they shared:

"The experience of the last week has amplified some big themes that have been present for me for several years as I’ve navigated through the challenges of turning something that I love and feel deeply called towards into my job. There is no healthy relationship between creative intuition and capitalism. The pressures of production schedules and budgets are not supportive to deep listening and attunement. Worrying about perception as an audience grows has created a rhythmic pattern of anxiety around these release dates for me that has come to include a physiological reality of stress, decreased self-care, and poor postural habits.

I’m being honest and open about this because I think it’s important for us to be humans with each other. That’s what Aquarius is all about – taking ourselves out of untouchable places and faraway stages and placing ourselves smack in the middle of messy, imperfect, struggling, trying, beautiful humanness."

In nerding out with my partner this week on the pitfalls and possibilities of humans convening to generate responses to one another’s creative works, we talked about the many ways traditional “workshops” and “crits” can shut down rather than expand what people came here to bring forth.

I realized––for the first time––that the last time I wrote “fiction” was in 1993 when I took a short story creative writing class in college. During that semester, I wrote a story that was tangled and messy and full of the electricity I know now that I came here to befriend. The professor told me it wasn’t a story, that no one cared about the lives I was writing about, that it was confusing, that it didn’t work. So I wrote a story with regular characters, clearly divided subjects and objects, one that I knew was clever. And then I never wrote “fiction” again (although I yearn to and drink it nightly like the magic elixir it is).

In her book The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom, Felicia Rose Chavez writes about the silencing of writers of color that happens in workshop and extends into futures far from the workshop itself. She writes:

"This matrix of silence is so profound it enlists writers of color to eradicate ourselves. Even now, as I type this, my heart tells me “No, you can’t say that, you might derail your teaching career, shrink your literary network, hurt their feelings, sound ungrateful, blow things out of proportion.” Even though I am the commander of my own experience, my heart tells me to choose subservience out of fear that my narrative might ricochet off of institutionalized white power and smack me upside the head. That’s how racism works, right? It’s systemic oppression that breeds behavioral norms."

I’m sharing all this because this year I pulled The Fool card.

Read Steffani Jemison’s essay entitled “Wind Bag” in the Brooklyn Rail.

I’m sharing this because it’s a Chariot year and the time is ripe for change.

I’m sharing because more and more plastic shows up on the beaches where I live every single day and all of this is linked.

Change can be small and repeated and consists of decisions made each moment of each day.

In the opening of the WA state legislative session, poet Rena Priest shared this wisdom and reminder:

“...an orca whale and a cedar tree are sovereign sentient beings with inviolable rights just like you and me/those beliefs are not childlike or primitive/they are the blueprint for a just and fair society/which for native nations is not a vision but a memory.”

I have never been more certain that committing to one’s joy and creative nourishment is an integral part of the revolution that is already here.

Chariot Year January Hey Hey (¡The Fool!)