Fault lines and mindfucks

Make your way through the desert (+ June community event announcements)

Hello + happy Tuesday!

Register for this week’s group calls here:

🌀 Group Call #1: (Tuesday, 5/21/24 @ 6pm PST // 9pm EST): Register here.
🌀 Group Call #2:** (Wednesday, 5/22/24 @ 9am PST // 12pm EST): Register here.

**This call features structured breakout groups of 3-4 people.

Thank you to everyone who came to last week’s workshop, Chaos is a Friend of Mine. I loved the conversation that sparked at the end and I’m so grateful (not to mention, gobsmacked) by the fact that *fifty* of you registered to dive deeper into a subject that what most would consider, let’s say, pretty darn niche. I haven’t taught much since last year and it was SO fun to see your faces and interact with you a bit.

I’m excited to continue to teach free monthly Self Made community events—here are a couple of “save the dates:”

“INVEST IN DIVESTMENT” Interview + Discussion

Join me in conversation with friend and Self Made community member Rayleen Courtney, founder of The Somatic Coven, on June 26th at 5:30pm PST. I’m going to interview Rayleen about their journey from political consultant to heeding a deeper call to significantly minimize their lifestyle, to the point that they now live in an RV in Portland. We’ll explore what to consider and experiment with if you’re curious about divesting from capitalism—and not just physically divesting, but also mentally, emotionally, and spiritually divesting.

Registration to come - please save the date in the meantime! Cost: FREE

SUMMER SOLSTICE WRITING WORKSHOP

I’ve officially adjusted the cadence of writing workshops and I’m so excited for a very special ☀️Summer Solstice☀️ edition.

This generative writing workshop is based off the Amherst Writer's Method. There will be two two opportunities to write. Then, you'll be invited to share your work aloud if you like (no one is obligated, you can pass at anytime). Readers receive feedback on what listeners like and remember from what they heard; there is no critical feedback (critique is great and can be very helpful—it's just not part of this style of workshop).

This workshop is appropriate for all levels and I hope you'll join me. If you have questions, let me know—I'm happy to answer.

13 participants max - will probably sell out.

Registration is live! Fee: $33

Today’s inspiration:

Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It’s really working to create something beautiful.

-Assata Shakur

You can do it like it’s a great weight on you. Or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.

-Ram Dass

Photo by Robert Murray on Unsplash

Dear readers! I am taking a break from posting a fresh essay this week as I poured every last ounce of my creative juice into last week’s workshop. Next week, I’ll be closing out the month’s theme of MAY IS FOR MAYHEM with some practical applications of chaos theory you can start experimenting with in your own life.

In the meantime, here’s a repost of an essay that fits real nice, if I may say so, into this month’s theme.

This is not a dark forest, this is an open plain, and I am exposed, sunburned, wind worn and dry. I seek cover, but the saguaros are too skinny, and besides, the sun is a sped-up sundial and I can’t follow the shade fast enough. I stumble, and sweat, eyes casting about horizons and periphery, ever on the lookout for the cool blue calm that runs softer than the unforgiving sky. You know, water. I want to be quenched, I want to float on my back for a while, I want to fill up my hat and smack it over my head, let the coolness drip down my face, under my shirt. Basically, I’m looking for a break.

Or a map. A map would be nice. I seek instructions, a how-to manual, the wisdom of plants and beasts and stars and rocks to help me traverse this open plain. Someone must have come before, I tell myself. Someone must know the way. I’m not stubborn or proud, I say to the jackrabbits—I’ll take your advice! I don’t know how to be still on top of a shifting underfoot so I slither, I hop, I dream of the steadiness of tortoises, and all the while I’m keeping on the lookout for breadcrumbs, for makeshift signs pointing the way toward warm beds, clean water, safe people who will provide nourishment and care along the way.

It’s exhausting, looking everywhere but here.

No one has come before, because I’m the only one who’s ever been here. Maybe I am stubborn, because one thing I can say, is that I don’t want to do this alone. Fuck a map, I’ll take another person, any person, as long as they will tell me what to do. TELL ME WHAT TO DO! I spit into the ground, I scream into the sky. I’m just so tired. I want to lie down. I want to swap brains. I want to change places with my dog, I want to not worry so much, or, if I must worry, let it be about nothing more than what’s in front of my nose. I don’t want to think about that impending fork in the road, the one that looks ruefully familiar but that I’m too proud or too clueless to acknowledge or admit.

I shuffle along, I cover some distance, and new tools become available. Basic ass tools. You know, like a compass. Like, the North Star. None of it is very showy or fancy or exciting, but I’ll admit it—ok, fine, whatever—the tools are working. I am learning how to live in the desert.

Suddenly and on cue, a spindly little beast sneaks out of her secret burrow to bite my ankle. The effects of the venom lay me out for days, months, millennia. My drama and preciousness notwithstanding, I’ll give myself this: at least I know I’m not unique. I know not to fight the venom. I know that the venom can also be medicine. I know that despite every available physiological system in fight, on the other side there is a lesson. So I let it’s holy potency thrum and pulse.

So many lessons! I’m sick of this shit. But then I shut the hell up, because I also know that the day the lessons stop is also the day that death comes, and despite my tantrums, ugh, I want to stay and see this through. I want to get to where I’m going.

I resist the lessons. I let the beast bite me over and over.

And here’s what I’m not supposed to say: sometimes, the bite feels so good.

It goes like this: I feel the memory of the venom pounding it’s pattern in my pulse, so I go searching for the beast, exposing my ankles, calling out her song to which only I know the words.

Slow down, wait, no. If I’m honest—and that’s what we’re doing here, right?—if I’m honest, out here in the desert, it is I who am the beast. I am craving. I am desire. I am full of unabashed want. I am longing, I am sex, I am rushing water in a dry riverbed, I am an iris in dank purple bloom there in the dark mud, and in these moments, I don’t care what you think. I cast spells and conjure ghosts. My vision clears, and I can see all the way back to the beginning, trace the fault line of neglect that connects me to a rosary of women who came before, I can see them now, quaking, tired of pretense, tectonic with their demands, no longer settling for anything less than satisfaction, diciéndome: “ya!”

I know that to transform the venom, I must take care not to become it, even as it’s distilled, singularly focused essence transforms me. Too many bites, and the ankle grows weak, necrotic, gangrenous, and leads to other ailments if I ignore it, threatens me with impending amputation. I don’t ignore anything anymore. I don’t cut anything off anymore.

I take the tools—compass, North Star—and I place them inside my body, and they hover about, floating more often than not in that soft and tender space between sternum and navel. I am learning to trust their span and spin, the way they urge me to give over to desire with as much care and attention as I give to the things that keep my feet on the ground, my head on straight. When the venom wears off, and everything in me is urging me to cast everything out—to exorcise my desires, to buzz my skull down to the skin, to delete, to reorganize, to exfoliate my face too hard, to track, to count, to scrape away at the wound of lack, to pine for a nonexistent map—the lesson, again, goddammit, is to stay. To make my home in the fault line (the metaphors, they’re too literal sometimes). To let myself be rearranged, as ever, as I must.

Not all the beasts you meet in the desert will bite you. Some of them will walk alongside you, sharing snacks and sips of drinks and other simple tools, and even better, some of them will make you laugh like a child. Some of these beasts are the most loyal animals in the kingdom. They’ll be the ones to suck the venom out of your ankle, spit it out into the dirt, help you make some sense, even though this shit is never not going to be absurd as hell. They will love the wild, messy beast of you. And your beast will love their beasts, and fuck a map, for you have found your place amidst the prickle and the heat and all the other spindly beasts, and in the desert you belong and are known—here we are, look at us, this motley, sweaty, scaled heap, full of surprises, skins tingling on the breeze, blink and we’re gone again.

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA. 

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