Scroll down for an audio version of thisinstallment of Letters from Luna. by Rohini Walker There is a vision that lives in me from childhood, a tiny island amongst the larger land masses of time and memory. It persists, vivid and fleeting, mysteriously relevant. I know it wasn’t a dream, in the conventional sense of the word at any rate. My formative years were spent in India, before my family and I immigrated to the UK, just as I reached…
by Rohini Walker Click here for an audio version of this installment of Letters from Luna. Times of momentous uprising and archetypal shifts in the fabric of reality, as the year 2020 is turning out to be, necessitate looking to the wisdom of certain minds; ones who bring the lightning bolt of timeless, illuminating insight to the unseen nuances of the zeitgeist. For me, Toni Morrison is one of those – especially and fundamentally now. The essay-transcript of her speech,…
by Rohini Walker/ Photo ‘Ripple/Emergence’ by Angela de la Agua “Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.” Angela Davis ‘Freedom is a Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement’ Just over a month ago, the Pain returned. I could feel its clarion calls in my body, announcing its arrival…
by 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…
“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…
by 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…
by 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…
by Rohini Walker In Of Power and Time, the first essay in the incandescent anthology Blue Pastures, Mary Oliver describes herself as a vessel of, at a minimum, three selves: “I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child’s voice – I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful,…
I. Decolonizing Our Souls // Re-membering Our Indigenous Soul Wisdom by Rohini Walker Lofty sounding, yes. But deeply necessary at this time, at this crucial fork in the road. We cannot remain in the clutches of the oppressive ways of colonialism and its legacies anymore. Not as people of color, or as Caucasians. We have, all of us, been colonized into becoming oppressor and oppressed. “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the…