Align Your Orbit #74 - Clear for Mystery
Align Your Orbit is a series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide intentionality and impact. Find delight in these journeys of exploration. If you would like to receive these offerings as an email on the new moon, sign up here.
We wake from the fatigue of devastation with a newfound sense of direction, excitement, and collaboration. The obstacles have fallen, and the way is clear. Our quantum realties have collapsed into a new consensus reality, full of people eager to make change. Be one of them. Pour yourself into this ocean of regeneration.
Generalize your experience to dig out the path for others following behind you. Leave space for what can only emerge. Embrace open-source knowledge sharing and freely distribute what you are learning. The whole world walks with you.
Experience these experiments as a playlist!
New Experiments
1. make visible – Dominant culture obfuscates the costs of resource extraction, consumption, and disconnecting from the metabolism of earth. Take pictures of plastic that becomes litter, call out the brands without a closed loop of production, de-sanitize the artificial promise of “safety,” and talk openly about difficult logistics. De-naturalize what’s masquerading as necessary for life.
Challenge Mode: The natural world and our deep collaboration within it is not without violence. Wounds fester when hidden. Recognize the violence that makes space for other life. Honor all parts of this experience with understanding and reverent awe.
2. surrender – Even the most experienced facilitators remain subject to the whim and energy of the greater group. Some dynamics are outside your control. Offer yourself grace for when reality deviates from the plan. Accept this unexpected dance partner and keep twirling forward.
Challenge Mode: Experience inevitable resistance and let it guide you to your next step. Bigger monsters mean you’re headed in the right direction. Open yourself to the mystery of scaling up your purpose. Take risks and learn from experiments that fail.
3. witness the wound – You can’t feel the whole of the world wound on the daily and maintain sanity, but you can make offerings on a sustainable basis. Add a symbolic object of grief to your altar, honor the dead sacrificed in the unholy temple of greed, find a sustainable action toward change. And then set it aside knowing when you will pick it up again. Nurture the spark of your own joy. If you do nothing else, enjoy this one breath at a time.
Challenge Mode: Witnessing may be enough to change the outcome. Other times, you must exercise your ability as a free agent, clearing the brambles for what’s emerging. Reflect on how you make this determination for yourself. Mark when you act and when you respectfully stand aside. Pay attention to how your body feels after these catalysts for growth.
4. love in real-time – Since every person is unique with their own necessary, sacred gifts, accept the reality that you genuinely could love anyone, everyone. Imagine that love is not specific to an individual but is rather an invitation to expand beyond the people involved. Invite mystery into intimacy. Worship the divine where it exists in the space between your relationships.
Challenge Mode: Clinging to a person or way of being only increases the likelihood that conflict, friction, and tension will eat away at what would otherwise be beautiful. Don’t cage or contort—hold loosely. Offer blessings to what you cannot control, and breathe into the knowledge that prioritizing agency is in everyone’s best interest.
Andra’s Recap of Rise & Fall
The themes for the last new moon included reversing the narrative, outdoing competition, recognizing growth intervals, and varying routines.
The primary narrative in my social networks post-election is devastation that our culture has somehow recreated the conditions of the 2016 election. However, after the initial shockwaves settled, I noticed that volunteer-based groups doubled their membership in the weeks that followed. It feels more obvious than ever that we need to form functional networks outside of the existing government. And now, it is almost impossible to ignore how farcical the national political scene is. In these ways, I am grateful for this outcome. The path ahead actually feels clearer as a result, and now there is more people power behind what we had already been building.
The challenge mode for reverse the narrative was to break the participant-facilitator binary. This came up in recent memory, as I taught a class called “Permaculture of Touch,” which applied the principles of permaculture to platonic touch interactions, complete with a number of playful consent and touch exercises. This class took place inside of a week-long set of classes, many of which I participated in. Being fluid in the ways I switched roles felt nourishing and exciting, even and especially when I pushed gently outside of my comfort zone.
In terms of outdoing competition, I have doubled down on my own group collaboration, especially in groups with a primary purpose that goes beyond lobbying the government. But, in doing that, I have needed to set boundaries to make sure that my participation is sustainable.
The challenge mode here was to continue asking questions to challenge the dominant perspective. While I believe I have normalized these sorts of questions in my social circles (e.g., can we walk there? is it imported? is there a local alternative? what are the long-term consequences?), I also need to find a sustainable equilibrium for how much information I can keep front-of-mind. I need to feed myself to sustain my ability to make large-scale change, but I also need to foster relationships with the beings who sustain me. Yes, it’s true that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but that doesn’t mean we give up entirely on making individual changes. I have the impression that I will be working on this balance for many months to come.
I faced some major growth edges in this last cycle after being profoundly humbled by a surprise difficulty to eat normally. I wanted so much to opt out of systems of harm that eating anything felt like a betrayal to something I loved. I sought support, knowing that I can’t just make myself a casualty to this work. I am re-embracing what is sustainable for me and making small steps toward transition rather than drastic ones.
The upgrade for this was to redirect unhelpful energy received from others, which I feel like I handled well during a recent de-escalation with someone I had been close with. I did everything I could to let them down easily, honestly, and with as much closure as I could provide. It’s been a puzzle to determine exactly how much detangling we need to do to re-create sensations of safety, but we have made some successful strides that direction.
As ever, it remains truly challenging to keep up routines given how much variance there is in my life, especially after I caught covid at the beginning of this month. But, I have been doing a lot more acroyoga, which has been a delight.
And, I spent a lot of time this cycle thinking about the low-simmering undoing that happens in compost. In a very literal sense, I learned that I was not adding enough brown matter (e.g., leaves, pine needles, etc.) to my compost, giving it digestion issues. It is interesting how much longer brown matter takes to decompose. I need a lot more space than I had originally allotted for this process.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy this moon’s experiments.