Full Moon // The Nothing Revolution

*originally published on Magic Inclined // 28Jan, 2021

Full Moon // The Nothing Revolution

The weekend had all the internal weather expressed through each window of my second-story home; a mist upon everything, two earths in slow motion. I'd just returned from time writing on the Oregon line that rolled over to three days in an olive orchard in southern Mendocino, weeks spent spinning thoughts into language and patching them into perfect space. On Thursday, I stood in my flat and felt a sadness creep in gently like leaking dark water, and I recognized the conditions as the building absence of something: my flow state had left the building. 

Armed with a list of concepts and the intention of looping these insights to the coming of the first full moon of this new year, I sat at my computer and found myself empty of mind and empty of mouth - as if my creative fuel line had been cut at some point while loading my bags back up the tight staircase built for the widths of elvish lifestyle in the mid-1800s. I found myself wanting to do nothing...  Let the hunger games begin. 

'Doing nothing': the final frontier of deaths I'm down with. When these moments come there is a point where my mind begins to build narratives of procrastination out of nowhere, spinning gold out of straw and burying me in the weight; quickly. I want to blame myself for the shutdown. I then begin to pin this fault to every unfinished project in my studio, I start to see them first when I look at myself in the mirror, I hear them affect my conversations, I taste them in the meals I make to nourish my being. Creative block for me is a flood of the sensory: and I am separated from the very things that make me beautiful. I mourn in blue jeans and beat up sweatshirts and forty-eight hundred bags of tea. 

The point of disconnection nearly always begins in front of a computer screen, and this time was no different. I don't use computers at all in my creative work: it's an active choice and to me, a political position. I am an analog gal. I write longhand on yellow legal pads and type into an electric olive green Smith Corona, there is ink on everything. So the computer is for commerce and there I bend my boundary. Isn't that the edge of most sadness anyway? And so, I shut it and tucked it under my bed and mostly out of my mind for the next three days. 

On Sunday evening, upon the backside of a brown record mailer, I found myself tracing a map of my relationship to the Full Moon with my royal blue and yellow pen from the Beck's Motor Lodge in San Francisco. I scribbled fondly about my years living in Carmel when full moonlight would fill my house so intensely that its interior looked like a moon too, so I had no choice but to wake up into it. And I did. I would get out of bed at some wolf hour like one a.m. and get dressed up for a walk to the beach, slipping scissors in my pocket. And I would stroll to the sea and back, clipping Calla Lilies from the yards of my very rich not-neighbors' second homes. I'd fill my arms like a floral Robin Hood and whistle something like The Staple Singers under my breath on my way back home walking slow, a huge smile on my face and healthy trouble sparkling in my eyes. My favorite memory of that time. 

On the road for five years, the Moon and I became one thing because nothing separated me from it. The things that happened across that time all happened away from social construct, each night punctuated the memory in some meadow somewhere. This punctuation replaced time itself. I can remember a night camped outside Devil's Tower in eastern Wyoming. It was warm, and I had masking-taped black tulle, the high technology solution of ballerina skirt fabric, to the seams of my open moonroof over the back half of the van in order to watch the Perseids float by. I can hear myself speaking to the moon as some people speak to their pets, never in a possessive tone, but as equals of different species staring out upon the same horizon, as friends. 

I have been in one place for this Cholera year, and the grounding- such a benefit of this unexpected pause. 'The work' has consisted sometimes of simply sitting with physical manifestations of fear bubbling up where at first glance they don't belong. In the beginning, I experienced hive-like rashes on my neck and chest and soft shades of panic I hadn't seen in years all while in a friend's cabin in the woods totally at peace and in comfort. I am sure that the nesting finally laid down a resting place, a safe space for all the fight or flight symptoms I suppressed to work their way out of my system. Shades of 'doing nothing' were actually proving themselves a processing ground for serious emotion- interesting. 

On one of the last full moons of 2020, I chose to celebrate by burning all of the plants I had collected in my van. This was a tall order of release for someone like me- I pinch small pieces of plants off from the landscape wherever I go, maybe how some people take photos with their cell phones. It's my way of remembering, my way of tribute, and my primary conversation with higher powers. Pockets become shrines. My primary form of prayer. 

I was so full of joy; I knew it was the most honored time to release them. They included flowers from a friend who became a lover and then a symbol of home which made the draw-out break my heart, branches from the places in the desert where I mourned the shocking news of two important friends' disconnected deaths within 36 hours of one another in May, Sage gifted a girlfriend in congratulations which also became death but one without birth and I’d held those branches back to pray over when ready. Greasewoods and roses, and coastal laces: the most tender stories. So many flowers of celebration too- it was the night. So with all the stars in my eyes, I cranked up 'Child of the Moon' by The Rolling Stones and let it roll in my garden as I fed the fire. Smiling at each memory from my current well of happiness and then setting it free, dancing in the dust. Such a powerful night. 

Back to the exercise at hand Sunday night, a blue pen from the motel of all SF Pride's wildest tales, the brown cardboard map, and me in my sweatpants. I gave name to the sensations felt in the dull internal skies of Thursday evening... and Friday... and Saturday. In pen without thinking I had given them names, rendering them perceptible, and now I could see the constellation's shape take form in front of me. And only now, I know how to celebrate it.

This Thursday, on the first full moon of the new calendar year. The Wolf Moon, a symbol I write about often and hold dearly, I will be doing nothing. 

I will not be jumping naked off a river cliff in the night in Arkansas, slow dancing with some cowboy at The Legion in Nashville, drawing flowers in the Badlands back to my ancestors, or lying on my back in the Medicine Bow forest. No, I'll be doing nothing, because after all this time that's the thing that needs celebrating, it's where the work lies that holds such a deep seat in my bones and in my body.  

I will likely join a community meditation in the evening, and dress in blue jeans and a beat-up sweatshirt on purpose as a symbol. The rest of the night's program all just reads 'Acceptance'. 

The Nothing Revolution. 

*happy Wolf Moon babies. however you spend it. 

you are held on all sides, and you are beautiful there. 

x, 

LDV

*this week's blog was written cumulatively across many years and the lands of many many people...  

It was pressed into a shine-box from my desk in Petaluma, California on stolen Coast Miwok land

*thank you to Rohini, who I called suspended in space on Saturday with nothing to say, 

and Kimi Recor whose Magic Inclined breathwork workshop Sunday Morning opened the container of my mind and helped me hear my heart speaking. 

It changed me.