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,…
Photo: 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,…
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…
Photos: Bill Green Originally from Poland, ceramicist, painter, illustrator and fiber artist Joanna Szachowska- Tarkowska moved to the Mojave high desert four years ago. Before Joanna and her partner, Artur, settled in this desert, they had traveled far and wide looking for that elusive sensation of an authentic home, a homecoming. They had explored India, Thailand, the Phillipines, Greece, Italy and Spain. It wasn’t until they arrived in the strange, arid landscape of this high desert that they felt able…
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…
by Damien Echols Ceremonial magick is the Western path to Enlightenment, the counterpart to Eastern traditions such as Buddhism or Taoism. Magick, however seeks to liberate the individual from the cycle of uncontrolled incarnation in a single lifetime, as opposed to many. It’s a tradition suited to those who have a psyche more inclined to the stresses of rapid transformation over a more gentle, gradual approach. The core of a magickal practice is a process of internal alchemy that traces…
