Equinox and Eclipse Portals...
The horrors persist, but so do we.
I always feel a bit squeamish when I haven’t written in a while.
The blank page gets more and more intimidating with each passing day, and my mind invents a crazy kind of pressure to come back onto the “stage” very dramatically.
This isn’t going to be that. It’s going to be a gentle and quick(ish) sort of catch up.
Please think of this post as my way of stretching my writing legs after a long nap - a very gentle unfurling. No dramatic explosive epiphanies or awakenings here. Or no new ones, at least.
If you like, go grab yourself a cuppa to read this one. Imagine that you and I are sitting on a verandah somewhere warm, watching the sunset, smelling Spring on the breeze.
The Equinox feels like as good a day as any to come out of my little rut.
Spring seemed to arrive very abruptly and violently this year.
Australia was swept up in high winds and huge temperature spikes in the middle of August. There’s a flower that only blooms in early Spring - the jasmine - it grows on shrubs and hedges in massive clumps, and it has an incredibly strong fragrance. As the seasons begin to change, the smell of it starts saturating the breeze.
It’s always the sign that Winter is ending, here. The smell of the jasmine shrubs.
The jasmine’s been blooming earlier and earlier for a few years now, it feels like Winter keeps shrinking away. It’s pretty normal here to have a kind of false Spring, where the temperatures go up a little bit for a few weeks, and then drop off again in late September and October, before they climb back up and stay there for the Summer.
This year though, the initial temp spike was higher than anyone can remember. All the jasmine came into bloom, and then shrivelled and died, before September had even really started.
Birds are migrating South sooner and sooner too.
It’s dizzying to witness these relatively low-stakes reminders of the climate collapse we’re living through.
Spring is shrinking.
I wonder how many more Springs we have left.
It’s all very jarring, particularly from a cyclical consciousness perspective -
Spring mythologically and poetically represents a time of vulnerability, potentiality, and newness. It’s little buds, seeds just planted, little saplings juuuust poking through the dirt.
Spring isn’t (mythically) a time for fullness or fruition. It’s a time for beginnings. Trying to push past the beginning-ness of Spring and skip to the fullness of Summer causes us a lot of strife.
For those of you with menstrual cycles, you’ll already know that sprinting out of Inner Winter (menstruation) and charging into Inner Spring (pre-ovulatory) full throttle is how we burn ourselves out and end up fatigued and over-wrought by the time Summer (ovulation) comes.
Without the tenderness of beginnings, without room for the vulnerability of Spring, Summer is exhausting.
We know this in our bodies, and it’s jarring as fuck to see this sprint from Winter straight to Summer playing out in the wider world, almost skipping over Spring entirely.
Climate activists, decolonising feminists, and cyclically conscious folks will know what I mean here.
Spring is a beautiful time where I live, the land greets the sun so joyously. Winters are cold here (not intensely cold, but certainly cold enough), and the warmth of Spring is a delicious reprieve in a lot of ways.
But yeesh. The climate anxiety is starting to hit harder and harder every year as Spring gets shorter and shorter.
Which brings us to the Equinox! What a glorious time!
I feel like it’s more important than ever to anchor into the cyclical wheel of the year, to notice ourselves respond in a mammalian way to the change in seasons, to sing the poetry and myth of these significant moments into being as much as possible.
Our colonised minds only see the world linearly. We’re conditioned to perceive ourselves, and our lives, through a lens of exponential growth and constant forward momentum.
We know in our very bones that this exponential growth mentality is a dangerous lie. We know on a primal level that there are seasons for growth and potentiality… and seasons for stagnation and decay.
We know it too in the overwhelming evidence of the daily onslaught of climate disasters we see every time we open our phones.
But the indoctrination into that linear, exponential growth model is fucking strong. The socialisation into it is constant.
Particularly because for the vast, VAST majority of us, our livelihoods depend on our participation in that exponential growth, forward momentum-based, linear model.
Our economy is tied up in it, which means that while capitalism is still a thing, our ability to afford basic survival necessities is tied up in it.
The vast, vaaaaast majority don’t have the option of simply opting out of the linear way of doing life. We’ve got nine-to-fives, rent, bills, kids to feed.
Which makes it all the more vitally urgent that we accept the invitation these moments represent, to divest from the linear, exponential growth mentality… at the very least inside our own minds and with regard to our relationship with ourselves.
We’ve all got bills to pay, and we gotta keep paying them.
But that doesn’t have to mean that your mind and your relationship to your body and spirit has to be tied up in the same delusion.
Fellow Southerners -
What SEEDS are you planting for the coming Summer?
What are you CULTIVATING?
In what ways are you willing to EXPAND INTO our collective liberation?
Friends in the North -
What needs to die? How will you bear witness to its death with grace and dignity?
Where can you more courageously TURN TOWARDS the organic decay you’re feeling within you?
What is the HARVEST you are now reaping from your labours, in preparation for Winter?
These are important questions. They’ll break the colonial capitalist spell.
The past few months has felt like a real get-my-shit-together time for me.
I’ve had a building feeling for many years that I was going to be needed soon. That my specific genius was going to be a part of a vast web of change and radical shifts, and I’d need to be ready to face that.
I didn’t know what it was going to look like, I only had the sense that I needed to commit, and commit hard, to dealing with my own bullshit in a regenerative way, so that I would be able to step into this web when the time came.
Since the beginning of Israel’s live-streamed genocide of the Palestinian people on October 7, and the wave of mass-awakening that’s followed, I’m experiencing a deeper and deeper clarity of what the fuck I’m doing here.
My specific flavour of cycle work as our map to recovery from colonial patriarchy was always a little bit fringe, a little bit weird, a little bit too complicated and nonsensical to the menstrual cycle awareness spaces of 5 years ago that I was hanging out in, and certainly to the so-called “feminist” spaces I was in before that.
Back then, a lot of mainstream cycle work (it’s weird to call any cycle work “mainstream”, because from a deeply colonised perspective, any recognition at all of cyclical consciousness was fringey as fuck, but anyway I digress), was still huuuugely white-feminism-ish.
A lot of it was focused on “optimising” our hormones, how to maximise productivity by “using” your cycle… basically just a lot of “how to perform and compete more effectively inside of capitalism and receive more colonial accolades by extracting from your body with more precision, in the same way that the coloniser extracts from the land”.
(Not to mention, fucking rampant with cisheteronormativity and transphobia, with a dash of New-Age ✨divine feminine✨)
It’s come a bit of the way since then, to be fair. And if you can read some bitterness in my tone here, you’re right. I am bitter about the state of so much of the cyclical awareness world. I’m desperately saddened that a space that has the potential to be so deeply liberating for so many is still so (largely) tangled up in the colonial capitalist lies we’re all urgently needing to interrupt and dismantle. I’m bitter that my own budding anti-colonial awakening was derailed when I first entered into so-called “feminism”, rather than nurtured and bolstered.
But there’s a sense now of illusions dissolving in a big way. I’m sure you’ve felt it too. The Empire is running out of places to hide, and the movement for decolonising and collective liberation is gaining more and more momentum.
The penny’s properly dropped over the last few months - and it came to a head for me with the Eclipse.
Like OOOOOOOHHHHHH.
This is what I’m needed for.
This is when I’m needed.
This is the web of radical creatives and teachers and way-showers and movement-holders that I’m stepping into.
This is what it’s all for. It’s what it’s always been for.
I’m forever galvanised by my beloved mentors and friends and colleagues who are answering the call for collective liberation, and have been for decades and centuries.
I’m inspired eternally by teachers like Nikki Blak, Dr Rosales Meza, Sarah Durham Wilson, Patricia the Radical Somatic Therapist, Sonya Renee Taylor, Adrienne Marie Brown, and so many more who have been bellowing the call for so long, standing on the shoulders of the likes of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Malcolm X.
This wave of mass awakening is where my work makes sense, and it feels really fucking good.
I’ve been giving my all to REWILDING - my cosy little teaching community for decolonising the mind and finding our roles in the revolution via radical cycle reclamation and mythwork.
It’s been a deeply humbling, inspiring, heart-achingly beautiful process to meet the people who are coming into that space. Sharing our grief with each other, being witnessed in our rage together, stepping into our commitment to interrupting colonial consciousness with everything we say.
There’s no greater joy than being seen and loved by decolonised eyes.
There’s no greater gift than being able to see others this way.
We’re coming towards the end of a five-month pilgrimage we’ve been taking together, through the five seasons in our cycles, and their five somatic counterparts in the pelvic bowl. Each month has been more profound than the last.
We’re doing Dark Mother work now - working with the cervix and with our experience of premenstruation to reconnect with primal rage, orient towards fierce clarity, learn how to reap the harvest of our labours, and disentangle from the white feminist indoctrination of “niceness” and “politeness”.
When the New Moon comes, we’re going to move into the Womb, and the Crone. Void, stillness, death-and-rebirth rites, and decolonising our spirituality. The Crone is one of my favourites, I’m really excited.
Protecting the coziness and intimacy of the space is really important to me - so applications to join us are currently closed (we’re capped at max 10 newcomers a month to give everyone’s nervous systems time to adjust to the new humans - this way we all get to keep being people, and we don’t turn into numbers), but they’ll reopen again with the New Moon.
I hope you join us then. We’d love to have you.
It’s becoming more and more clear - if we’re not actively working for our liberation from the death cult that is colonial capitalist patriarchy…
…we’re complicit in our own, and everyone’s, subjugation.
Our liberation MUST be the focus of everything we do.
Truly, what’s the point of anything else right now?
We don’t have any more time for complacency with this.
Decolonising our minds, reanimating our bodies, championing a free world and a liveable planet - all of these are urgent tasks.
Resist the false urgency that capitalist oligarchs will try to sell you.
You know in your bones where the urgency is.
So, that’s me for now. Thank you for being here!
I love and need you, I couldn’t do any of this without you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
How are you?
How was the Equinox for you?
What’s coming through for you in this Eclipse portal?
Do let me know.
Glad you’re here, I’ll write again soon.
Leila xx