Align Your Orbit #75 - Open Channel
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.
Having felt into the flows of movement around us, we understand what it feels like to follow the floods when they occur. We’ve practiced being the rock—now practice being the water. There is an inevitability to life, to love, to learning that will guide us toward the path of least resistance if we are willing to surrender.
You are also a being of water. This potential can be as gentle as tears down a cheek, or it can carve canyons. Your hands change the landscape. Find which flows feel natural, feel nourishing, feel like speaking your native tongue. And, above all else, widen your channels so anything that comes will move easily through.
Experience these experiments as a playlist!
New Experiments
1. flow into the landscape – The rainy season is one of the best times to see the watershed in action. Notice tiny tributaries as they spontaneously form and follow them to larger bodies of water. Get curious about the paths water carves around you. Experience awe in the full-bodied nature of rushing flow. Take note of ephemeral ponds that increase biodiversity in the landscape. This practice of noticing will bring you back into relationship with the land.
Challenge Mode: Your own circulatory system is a watershed. Drink water and feel it move through you. Practice inverted poses to recirculate your lymph fluids. Breath into the movement that is always happening within you. Make offerings with the nutrients that come out of you. Take your body’s river wherever you go.
2. with watery words – While word choice joins tone, body language, and context to shape meaning, it still matters. Words have the capacity to offer room for spacious replies or create narrow and defensive positions. Bring additional curiosity and caution to how you word your requests, statements, and observations. Ask permission before offering someone a reflection. Let more questions flow from your lips and gently receive the answers.
Challenge Mode: Listen for the meaning underneath someone’s words. It’s possible they are saying one thing but actually pointing at another. What language creates an “us vs. them” dynamic in the conversation and which words unify our shared purposes? Avoid assumptions and instead seek deeper understanding where available.
3. seek subtle relationship – Every substance you allow into your body has an effect—some more obvious than others. As you sip your tea, spoon your breakfast, or select your produce, sink into the relationship you body builds with other entities. What does reciprocity feel like? Listen to the ways you are changing each other.
Challenge Mode: Many plant medicines and western medications are less subtle and can crowd out the sensations of gentler relationships. If you are ending or tapering off a relationship with another substance, find ways to honor the spaciousness and other gifts medicine has given you. Allow yourself to grieve and rejoice—this also aids in the flow.
4. and slow the steady stream – It’s easy to find yourself doing more scheduling than living. Before you put something on your calendar, get curious about if you can instead create more opportunities for spontaneous occurrences. Bring groups of people together rather than scheduling many one-on-one visits. Seek physical interactions with people in your life where possible.
Challenge Mode: Human beings take in more information now than ever before, and though we adapt quickly, our physiology still responds in the old ways. Be diligent about limiting notifications on your phone and in your email this cycle. Decide when to allow the unknown to reach you through the wire and when you want to reach out for it yourself through the atmosphere.
Andra’s Recap of Clear for Mystery
The themes for the last new moon included making the costs visible, offering grace when reality deviates from the plan, witnessing the wound of the world, and loving in real-time.
Making the actual costs visible took shape this month for me in two ways. First, I have been more and more transparent about my unwillingness to take flights, which means that taking the bus or train significantly increases travel time and has a much higher toll. As a result, I’ve needed to shift or decide not to make plans, even when friends and family members don’t understand the choice. Instead, I’ve recommitted to practicing hyperlocality.
Second, I’ve gotten curious about how to look at the land I live on more holistically—not just the property I “own,” but beyond the streets and fences and paths. What does a whole piece of the landscape feel like in my body? How can we interact? One result of that process has been a deepening relationship with a nearby creek, which has smelled terrible since I moved into the area. After doing some sleuthing, I discovered that there was a sewer pipe causing a blockage, and I called the relevant people to come and remedy the situation. While I felt some shock at how quickly the “authorities” undammed the area, it felt necessary to let life and the water flow again.
Allowing for deviations from the plan has mostly taken form this moon cycle in my relationships. Many unexpected people have danced into my life with varying degrees of success. I have some ache for a person who may not be ready to keep dancing, and I must allow for the time we spent together to be enough. And, I want to offer a lot of grace for the ways I am not yet ready to dance with certain people either, having unearthed an old heartache that has not yet healed. I’m taking deep breaths and working toward letting these things take their course as they will.
In terms of scaling up my purpose, I have been working diligently with a group of people in my area to form a landscape regeneration team, and as part of that work, we are building a directory of regenerative groups and projects. As I was creating some of that, I naturally began making a directory of directories, and it was wild to be looking at that scale. I am so excited for this parallel society we are truly beginning to build.
Witnessing the wound of the world has been a major focus for me in this moon cycle as I have spent a great deal of time working on a full-length collection of poetry that grapples with the intensities of both grief and joy and how to move through them in and with the landscape. While much of these wounds are personal to me, extrapolating them out to what is universal has been both rewarding and full of ache. I appreciate the ways this collection will be a gift to my future self any time I experience these profound emotions again. I know they will come.
Choosing when to be a witness and when to act is a process. From permaculture, I have learned that it is important to spend time observing the situation before taking action, but it is unclear how long to be in that witnessing state. Some would say a full year—four seasons—especially for work in the landscape. But sometimes, not acting feels itself like harm. For me, I need to have an intuitive sense that the timing is right, some trust in my understanding of the situation, and a willingness to take on any of the possible consequences of such an action.
In living into the idea that I could genuinely love anyone, I feel a bit lost. I want to honor the fluidity of not labeling relationships and allow everything to emerge as it may, but I also cannot deny that I have more or less excitement about specific relationships in my life. I find myself unwilling to close the door on opportunities with new people seeking my time but also uninspired about what to do with that time once I have it. At some point, I think I may need to close off some possibilities in order to make space for what it is that really lights me up.
The challenge mode here was about not clinging too tightly, which I have struggled with to some degree. There is someone I have a lot of sparks with who isn’t in a place where they can fully engage with our mutual excitement. I am practicing gratitude for the memories we created and letting go of attachments to possible futures, but it is a consistent effort. And how loosely is loose enough to hold when I do actually want something? As ever, it is unclear. Best to be patient and trust the process.
I suppose, in prioritizing the agency of others, I also need to hold space for their ability to give up their agency to others. That is their choice, much as I may lament it.
Thank you for coming on this journey with me! I look forward to hearing how this new set of experiments sits with you.