Greetings from a mind-meltingly hot desert, after a deep hibernation period, we’re excited to announce that Luna Arcana’s issue 6 is out. This issue is a whole new experience, completely self-funded, with no ads. It’s an exploration of the nuanced experiences around the threat to wilderness and ecological grief – and making space for grief in particular as a necessary portal towards understanding, evolution and transformation. The cover art is by the brilliant and prolific Zara Kand. Zara is a London…
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Articles & Stories Letters from Luna News Words
Letters from Luna – The Migration of Memory, Part II
Posted on March 23, 2021by Rohini Walker Click here The Migration of Memory, Part I It’s the in-between time here in the Mojave high desert, as winter shapeshifts into spring. Calm, sunny days are peppered with winds so wild, it’s a wonder the house doesn’t end up in some other, other-worldly faraway. On days like this from my remote spot, the wide vistas swirl with haboob-like dust devils, and eyes smart and sting if you have to venture outdoors for some outlandish reason. Today is one of…
Articles & Stories Letters from Luna News Words
Letters from Luna – The Daemon’s Vision: Continued Excursions into Soul-Making
Posted on February 1, 2021by Rohini Walker In a previous installment of Letters from Luna, we began some initial explorations into the nature of the soul – what Mary Oliver described as the ‘Third Self’, and James Hillman, borrowing from the ancient Greeks, called the ‘daimon’ or ‘daemon.’ This is – for me and for countless others who place inestimable worth on a commitment of intimacy with what is mysterious, ever-changing, and vastly precious within us – a tireless topic. It is to live within a state of gossamer…
Articles & Stories Letters from Luna News Words
Letters from luna: A word on the wyrd
Posted on January 18, 2021by Rohini Walker A gentle summation of the year 2020, and – in here the U.S. – these first weeks of 2021, would be highly, deeply weird. We’re living in strange times. Yet, for those of us who have been paying attention for preceding years, decades even, and who recognize the cyclical, ever-in-flux nature of the universe, this weird, troubling moment in humanity’s story is unavoidably necessary. Radical change needs powerful pattern interrupts. It needs the seething underbelly of a…
Articles & Stories Letters from Luna News Words
Letters from Luna: Of Imagination, Dreams + Reality
Posted on April 9, 2020by Rohini Walker / Illustration by Martín Mancha I’ve been playing a game with myself for the last couple of months. It revealed itself to me seemingly spontaneously, while out on a hike in the desert one morning with my beloved familiar, the black pitbull, Bodhi. A voice, the one I have come to call Lila, murmured: “I wonder what it would be like to imagine if I was awake in this strange dream of life?” And with that, my curiosity was…
Articles & Stories Letters from Luna News Words
Letters from Luna: The Mythic Desert + An Initial Excursion into Anima Mundi
Posted on March 8, 2020“If you speak on the mythological level, you may speak of what the Divine is like because myth is not a falsehood as one uses the word in a sophisticated way. A myth is an image, a concrete image in terms of which man makes sense of the world.”– Alan Watts Click here for an audio version of this installment of Letters from Luna. Doc and I have been living in the southern Californian region of the Mojave Desert for almost…
Articles & Stories Letters from Luna News Words
LETTERS FROM LUNA: Eros through the lens of Jouissance & Audre Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic’
Posted on February 17, 2020by Rohini Walker “I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s upto him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us once men have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.” So wrote the Algerian-born French feminist writer, poet and luminary, Hélène Cixous in her provocatively subversive essay, The Laugh of the Medusa – a work so rich and layered and…
Articles & Stories Letters from Luna Words
LETTERS FROM LUNA: THE MOON AS PSYCHOPOMP
Posted on January 29, 2020by Rohini Walker Perhaps it is because it’s winter, and I, having recently returned home to the Mojave Desert from a deep-snow covered northern New Mexico, am inclined to meditate longer than usual on the subject of decay and dying. Perhaps it’s because I have chosen to live in a desert that I am one of those in whom a certain fascinated terror into this inevitability of life is particularly present. Or perhaps that, born as I was on…
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The Syuxtun Collective: Restoring Reciprocity with Health & Nature
Posted on November 21, 2019Photo: Members of Syuxtun Collective inspecting plants at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden. | Still from Tending Nature by Rohini Walker What does it mean to participate? In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, a beautiful, indispensable meditation on the gifts of reciprocity and participation with nature, she writes: S2 E2: Holistic Healing with the Syuxtun Collective “In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top – the pinnacle of evolution,…
By Jessica Dacey / Photo by Carly Valentine “I think it comes from your spirit, maybe your heart. Is your heart your spirit?” It’s dusk, and Victoria Williams is walking her dogs. As we weave through the desert bush, she is explaining how to sing in tongues. “I wasn’t raised in a church that people sang in tongues, but I would unconsciously sing in tongues at night before I went to sleep. Then when I moved to Los Angeles, I…
