Align Your Orbit #66 — Turn Outward
Align Your Orbit is a series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide ourselves toward intentionality and impact. Synthesized after years of conversations and now with inspirations from MidJourney, we’re fully embracing our cyborg natures. Find delight in these journeys of exploration. If you would like to receive these offerings as a monthly email, sign up here.
We’ve been in learning spaces to build momentum for months and—for some of us—years now. It’s time to begin the process of turning outward to practice these new ways of living. Live into parallel structures of organizing and have the bravery to ignore systems that need disruption.
To come toward a unity of intent, let’s think globally and meet locally. Turn to face the eyes that seek your contributions with gentle curiosity. Invite them in. Seek actualization in emergence together. Accept your leveled-up capacity as you revisit dead-end problems with new perspective.
Note: Next month, we are shifting to a model that cycles with the phases of the moon rather than the day of the month. We aim to get our next series of recipes out on the new Moon on May 8th.
If you’d like to experience these recipes as a playlist, here’s the link.
New Experiments
1. stop waiting – Especially with regard to group and relational spaces, turn to face the dilemma. Do what you can to address what’s happening now with immediacy and presence. Avoid kicking the can down the road. Communicate what’s going on inside to the outside. Make your needs, wants, and desires known.
Challenge Mode: Revisit or strengthen relational agreements. Determine where you want fluidity and where you want structure. Forgive or settle emotional debts in community and trust in the ripple effects of karmically neutral exchanges.
2. to move at the speed of pleasure – How slowly do you need to move to enjoy even this? Walk to an event, resist the urge to task-switch, leave extra buffer time. There is always energy to accept, no matter the situation. Match pace with regeneration.
Challenge Mode: Any time you imagine debt or guilt in an exchange, you diminish your own return on energetic investment. Guilt is useful when it encourages repair but not as a stagnant entity. Give yourself grace, practice mutuality, and accept what’s offered. It’s yours.
3. this is what growth feels like – It’s time to clarify the difference between growing pains and genuine discomfort. How does your body distinguish these forces at play? Look for situations that increase your agency and the agency of others. Seek feelings of inclusion and belonging. Be skeptical of all forms of hierarchy.
Challenge Mode: Trickster energy is abundant in this period—listen to the wisdom of play. Refresh your living spaces, use fire magic for quick releases, and live into your own audacity.
4. in your bones – Regenerating the land begins with creating relationships with where you are. At the end of your life, your body is a gift to the earth—where will you give it? Take steps to tend that place while you’re still living. Spend time with the soil, learn the names of the trees.
Challenge Mode: As is reiterated many times in No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred, there is no justice on stolen land. Use this resource to find out which tribal lands you are on. Research events your local tribes put on and attend actions to be in solidarity. Prepare yourself for impending empire collapse by researching local medicinal plants and food.
Andra’s Recap of Rebuilding Starts Now
Our previous experiments related to trusting your internal system, approaching with curiosity, engaging with mutual aid structures, delegating tasks, and taking care of your feet while lifting from the bottom and getting your hands dirty.
Through a combination of concurrent events, this month generated an openness, lightness, and capacity for peace and patience for me that I don’t think I have ever known. What felt like a long period of spiritual stagnation seems to have finally ended, taking all the blockages with it. What remains in me is a raw, tender, blown-open version of me I am only recently getting to know.
Particularly impactful in that vein has been the book, The Ra Contact: Teaching the Law of One. While it might seem a little off the deep end on first glance, it has been the beginning of a pathway I am eager to follow. One of the learn-teachings of that book is that we are all expressions of one self. In this way, I feel very strongly that collaborating well with my own internal system prepares me for the journey of navigating other life with love, empathy, and compassion. As such, it’s been infinitely easier to offer grace and understanding to everyone around me, for honestly any reason.
This year has already been characterized for me by the process of getting involved in the local regenerative work in my area. I recently joined the Portland Mutual Aid Network and the Democratic Socialists of America (PDX chapter). I continue to engage with the Neighborhood Emergency Teams and my neighborhood association as well as a number of activist groups. At this point, I’m looking at scale to see if there are ways to get some of these organizations to start working in coalition with each other.
I also joined a course on creating Bioregional Learning Centers through the Design School for Regenerating Earth, which is a global course self-organizing by geography. It sounds like a lot of the ideas we will be exploring over the next six months revolve around creating bridges between work already being done, which is very exciting. I hope to learn a lot.
Many of the group spaces I have been in reorganized, leveled up, or disbanded this last month. In all this shifting, I have done what I can to put an emphasis on becoming “leaderless and leader full” as Dean Spade says. One big area of impact there has been working toward organizing physical spaces so I am not the only person who knows where everything is. Labels work wonders! But all of this is a process, and I’m still balancing how to step back with where to step up.
Paying attention to my feet has primarily related to keeping them warm. I discovered that is much harder to meditate successfully when I don’t tend them well. It’s been a process, however, as I am inclined to ignore some of my own discomfort, especially if it is not significant. I’m working to train myself out of that. (I’ll go put some socks on now, in fact.)
For me, practicing humility and getting my hands dirty has looked like full, active listening, less multitasking, more presence, and engaging fully with all the seemingly menial tasks that keep a group space fully functional. I have done a lot of work to treat each aspect of organizing equally valuable, whether internal or external.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy this cycle’s experiments.