Align Your Orbit #86 - Fluid Refraction
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.
The world fractals in dazzling, vibrant colors, mirages and epiphanies. The magic feels close by, at your fingertips. What was once a prayer for manifestation is now reality. And yet. Some of the incoming visions disturb even our strongest stomachs.
Dreams do not follow rules or even adhere to boundaries, possible or impossible. Take the tragedy with the oases of awe and hold it all in your heart unmerged. You are capable of feeling this much as you refuse to deny the reality of each and either.
Want to experience these experiments as a playlist?
New Experiments
1. reality is waking dream – Living through the horror of active war and fascism only pulls dreamspace closer. The strangeness of being present, aware, and sensitive to the undercurrent of these times brings a sensation of surreality, and with it, a proximity to the malleability of existence. Bring two or more people together for a shared purpose and the impact with ripple out, seen and unseen, for years to come.
Challenge Mode: There are people and more-than-human beings more accustomed to navigating these liminal spaces than we are. Invite the ancestors, the descendants, and the entities who pay attention to you to guide you toward your most sacred futures. As heard in a recent ceremonial journey, find the labyrinth makers.
2. that brings inside outside – Explore methods to express what is internal by making it external. Use your objects and altars like paint and canvas. Visualize what you’re holding within you. The difference between what you see in your mind’s eye and how it appears on the page will help you realize your embodied gifts. If you’re not satisfied with how it looks, you’re not done yet.
Challenge Mode: As you create your drawings and altars, ask yourself what you feel comfortable having others interact with and what you would prefer to keep private. Honor your gut reactions to observation as you bridge inner and outer.
3. something always fills the gap – Assess the places of your life where there is a specialization that causes a single point of failure. Trust that something or someone is ready to come in that allows for necessary redundancy. Ask for back up and identify places where you feel alone. Shift the illusion.
Challenge Mode: The nature of bureaucracy creates situations where it’s not possible for every single thing about an organization to be fully compliant. This leaves everyone vulnerable to scrutiny and suspicion, especially those already systemically disenfranchised. Stand in the way or otherwise interrupt undue surveillance. Ask questions to make it obvious that the lack of integrity of this system is universal.
4. to focus refraction – Because you and your perspective are the easiest and most accessible points of change, it’s easy to blame yourself for what’s going wrong. But, the world is much bigger than you, and you don’t control the universe. Allow for others to accept their own agency and responsibility as you accept the pieces that are yours.
Challenge Mode: It’s impossible to heal all wounds at once, and begrudging yourself for what you have doesn’t help what’s hurting. If you have abundance around you, your ancestors and descendants would want you to relish in it. Share, but also enjoy what’s available while it’s here. Your bones won’t be this warm forever.
andra’s Recap of What Do You Get Out of This?
The experiments for the previous moon cycle included practicing discernment (challenge mode: extricate yourself as necessary), prune and strengthen tethers (challenge mode: get your agreements on paper), co-curate reality (challenge mode: make sure your organization practices what it preaches, and accept help (challenge mode: stop making it look easy).
We didn’t receive feedback from our form, but if you would still like to fill that out, here is the link.
Discernment is an ever-evolving practice, but given that both my birthday and the winter holidays happened this month, I feel good about the activities I chose to engage with and felt deeply satisfied on both fronts. I have a tendency to do a little too much and overextend my energy, and I’m offering grace for myself. I think the hardest place to make good choices is not between what is a strong yes and what is a strong no but what is a strong yes versus and slightly-less-than-strong yes, and that difference feels understandable.
Additionally, I had a situation this month where it was no longer fully rational to continue pursuing a path I had started down, and I feel proud of the energy I have been able to compost and pivot. Rather than continue to work on renaming a creek nearby where I live, I’m recognizing that replacing the signage would spend money that would be better spent on the landscape itself, and instead, I am hoping to have a visioning session for the relevant neighborhoods about the future of the restoration work down at the creek.
There was some natural pruning that forcibly occurred earlier this month as I suffered a break-in while travelling and lost laptops, personalized first aid kits, and sentimental objects. As a result, I have had to reassess what it is I have and why in a lot of regards. While the situation was frustrating, it happened at a good time as it offered people in my life actionable ways to offer gifts and support. In that way, this helped with one of the later experiments for this month as well.
In terms of more intentional pruning, we did a lot of space tending and curating within our home to address spaces that had start to outgrow their containers, which we imagine we will have less energy for once the baby comes. And, during our little babymoon adventure, we tightened up our Trello and Discord systems, and now those feel fresh and exciting.
Putting agreements on paper has been an ongoing process, but we started a system of reviewing one “rule” or “policy” every other month at our house meetings, which has been going well. This is helping to keep our agreements current and make sure that we collect feedback about what has been working and what hasn’t been. Additionally, I have gotten some relationship agreements above board, especially as it relates to what happens if things needed to dissolve, and that’s actually giving me a lot of security in the future of our arrangement.
In recognizing that any gathering is an attempt to have an effect on reality, I have been more thoughtful and aware of the intent of any gathering and what the outcomes are based on that intent. While I have received a lot of messages from the more-than-human world that our current human attempts at magic are clumsy, I do think there is value in trying to restore the traditions and rituals we have lost, and I’ve enjoyed participating in that, especially where it relates to singing in circles.
I’m not sure that I am quite to the step in my organizations of assessing whether or not we are still serving our mission, but I suspect that will arise naturally in the process of this upcoming cycle, especially with the beginning of the new year.
I really do need to work on not only receiving help but letting someone else do it more slowly and maybe less accurately than I otherwise might have. If I can practice this now, I imagine it will make guiding a child through their own learning process that much easier.
And, making my emotional and practical processes visible also continues to be a process for me. It’s easy to tuck the emotional impact of a big crisis or big energy expenditure behind my back. I get anxious about the ways that others will feel indebted to me, but I know it is important to be transparent and honest about what I am doing. Even just documenting where my energy is going gives others a more thorough look at what it takes to keep our lives running smoothly.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy this moon cycle’s experiments!