Thank you everyone for your support as we transition to a new phase of Luna Arcana under the auspices of this Scorpio new moon! Issue 4 will now be retailing at $4 – all pre-orders will be mailed out today đđ˝đ¤đ Not local to the Joshua Tree area? Order a copy inline: Click here…
by Rohini Walker / Illustration by MartĂn Mancha Iâve 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: âI wonder what it would be like to imagine if I was awake in this strange dream of life?â And with that, my curiosity was…
Art by Bon Bizkerre – (click here to see more) In these wildly weird and reflective pandemic times of “social-distancing” and being in quarantine, we’re making the most recent Issue 4 available for digital download. So if you haven’t got a copy of the print version, and you’d like to check out this issue while you’re battening down the hatches at home, look no further. A donation of your choice in exchange will be a radical act of support for…
âIf 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.â– 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 âI write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique consideration will be found here of man; itâs 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.â So wrote the Algerian-born French feminist writer, poet and luminary, HĂŠlène Cixous in her provocatively subversive essay, The Laugh of the Medusa â a work so rich and layered and…
by Rohini Walker Perhaps it is because itâs 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 itâs 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. Â 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: âI 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 childâs 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 Kimmererâs 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 âIn 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. âThe 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 wasnât until they arrived in the strange, arid landscape of this high desert that they felt able…
