Snake Year

Snake laid me bare. At times, “I” completely resolved into the undulating alchemy of my environment. If it sounds like an act of erasure, it felt like a bright medallion galloping. Our family expanded by seven members—six chickens and a dog—opening us to continuous love. My dreams and waking cooperated seamlessly and productively. Treasures surfaced. Nature had found me, through the systematic unmasking that happens when I relax. Complete connection left no room for wanting. There was nothing to want, nowhere to go.

This was the best year of my life. It began with catastrophe.

I got so sick I thought I might die. Every night, my face swelled up and turned bright red. I could barely breathe for weeks. The sensations my body had to feel kept me in bed. I went to the hospital for IV steroids. I lost one half of my hair. Then I got sick again. Then again on my birthday, when a deer tick bit my ear. Ehrlichia and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever sent me back to the hospital. My body did not know what to do with the pain. My lungs burned, and I could barely form a sentence.

It was just the beginning.

**Copyright Michael McGrath.‍ ‍***Autumnal Gods Singing, Grouches Lurking* Oil, oil pastel, and acrylic on canvas. 40” x 30” (101,5 c 76 cm). Shared with written permission from the artist. | A colorful, dreamlike painting of a tall, white, human-like figure standing in a lush green landscape. The figure’s body is covered with painted plants, flowers, and small natural details, blending into the surrounding grass and foliage. Around the figure are stylized trees with faces, small human faces floating in the sky, and childlike figures on either side. The background is soft blue-gray with scattered circular shapes, and the overall style is whimsical and expressive, with loose brushstrokes and layered textures. I imagine this being saying, “Hi, Erin.”

In spring, a giant land guardian appeared before me while I was fully awake. I’ve heard I shouldn’t talk about these things, but a world that doesn’t talk about them has no place for them, has no place for me. Coyotes yipped, thunder cracked, and wind ripped through the trees. The electric air made my heart race; every hair stood on end. I tried to talk myself out of what my senses were telling me. Am I not a fringe critter, too? Shouldn’t I be used to the strange and unbidden? But I wasn’t prepared.

A tremendous roar, unlike anything I’d ever heard, cut through the storm.

This is happening.

Have patience with me as I work through fear, I told him with my mind, knowing I meant months, not minutes.

I'd met him once before in dream. In the subtle realm our presences combined easily. We sat in a small pool, where he transmitted love beyond conditions. I didn't want our visit to end, and I cried when he sent me back to the waking world. His last words were, "I'm about to call your bluff." I had no idea what he meant. But now, through white knuckles, and bated breath, I couldn’t help laughing.

**Copyright Lou Benesch.‍ ‍***Untitled (horse and serpent)*. Shared with written permission from the artist. A stylized illustration of a gray horse covered in evenly spaced white polka dots stands against a pale blue background. The horse has a purple mane and tail and lifts one front hoof while bending its head down toward a blue-and-green snake rising up to meet it. The snake’s long green body loops in a double loopty-loop shape across a lavender ground at the bottom of the image. A flat green circle, resembling a sun or moon, floats above the horse. The overall style is whimsical and graphic, with soft watercolor textures and clean outlines.

In those first new days, I wandered the woods tending uncanny connections. Basking in nature as the fluid language that unifies us made me long for fluent humans. My new guides let me feel, through their senses and my own, how wholeness moves. My body knew continuity. When there is wind, we are in it. I brought my husband outside to show him. Can you feel it?

I felt lonely and burdened by unity. I craved elders and a village to welcome me home after a harrowing initiation: Oh! You’ve met the Forest People. They have always been here, guarding Earth and guiding humans. Here is what you need to know.

The Forest People set a new standard of ecological integrity, mirroring nuanced truths I had not yet discovered. By summer, I’d invoked the latent hells in my karmic junk drawers. Lifetimes of desire-gone-wrong confronted me. Agonies of my own making haunted me in ways I don’t want anyone to feel. I writhed and gnashed. Every catastrophe alchemized me. My crucible would not leak. After annihilation, a double rainbow came. A bat spit on my face. One white flower bloomed outside my bedroom window.

I don’t know how to move forward without acknowledging these eviscerating changes. If I refused to shed, nature flayed me. A year of death, loss, and transformation marked us all. So many of my friends lost their parents, a tectonic shift I mercifully cannot imagine. A parade of luminaries moved on—Joanna Macy, Malcolm Margolin, and Brian O’Dea—to name three East-Bay elders alone. I wonder how the ground has shifted beneath you, and if you’ve let yourself say, “Something big has happened, and now everything is different.”

**Copyright Michael McGrath.** *Lions, Witches, and Ghost Gods (2024)* Oil, oil stick, enamel and acrylic. 78” x 106” (198 x 269) cm. A large, densely layered painting in vivid yellows, greens, pinks, and purples. The scene is wild and dreamlike, populated by a menagerie of animals and spirit-like figures. In the upper right, a large predator — lion or bear — bares its teeth, mouth open wide, beside a darker wolf or bear figure. A black bird flies in the upper left. A pale, ghostly fox or dog stands in the lower left among thin, bare-branched plants scattered with red berries and small flowers. At center, a dark cascading form — possibly a figure or tree — drips downward like rain or roots. To the right, a crowd of small rounded creatures with bright pink oval faces and wide open mouths fills the canvas, suggesting a chorus or congregation, watched over by dark primate-like figures behind them. Pink slashing marks streak across the middle. The overall feeling is mythic, feral, and alive — a spirit world teeming with voices.

Ring of Fire

On the whole, dying is easier than being born. —Joe Warner, my high school English teacher, in my dream shortly after his death

The Ring of Fire solar eclipse marked the dramatic gateway between Snake Year and Horse Year. The moon, being farther from Earth, did not fully cover the sun, creating a two-minute, 20-second ring of light over Antarctica. Ring of Fire also describes the intense burning women feel during the final, crowning stage of vaginal labor, when the baby's head stretches the gateway between life and death as wide as it will go. (While writing this, my friend Laura dreamed I had an “infinity tear,” a complete laceration from front to back.)

The transition between years (between lives, between breaths, between waking and sleeping) can be fraught. The lead-up reveals everything that doesn’t align with the new order. Much of it’s not personal; if the elements of our birth chart don’t jibe with the yearly elements, it feels like friction.

Ritual togetherness sees us through. We rely on cultural practitioners to ceremonially quell the interference patterns. I think of this time as “the back end of the bardo,” after so-called death, where we meet the last vestiges of disconnection. They rear up like monsters, scaring us into unity, or some new womb.

My body writhes in this interim turbulence, and I find it impossible to write. It’s also a time of divinatory listening. So, I writhe and I listen, preparing to push this baby out.

**Copyright Patricia Iglesias Peco.‍ ‍***The Green Dodo*, 2020. Oil on linen on board 36” x 36” Shared with written permission from the artist. An expressive, painterly image shows a deep blue horse rearing up on its hind legs, its body covered in bold, textured brushstrokes of cobalt and indigo. The horse faces a green, stylized Dodo bird with a large beak and soft, feathery shapes, which stands to the right. Behind them are loose, abstracted plants in pink and green, and a pale, neutral background. The ground beneath is loosely rendered with patches of earthy green and a dark, inky shape in the lower right corner. The style is vivid and gestural, with visible crayon- or oil-pastel-like marks and a sense of movement and tension between the two figures.

Birth

What I Didn’t Know Before

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking —Ada Limòn

After Snake's strange dark womb, we are squeezed out onto Georgia asphalt at high noon. Winter to summer in the blink of an eclipse. I picture Fire Horse Man coming out with his megaphone on New Year’s Day: Ok, everyone! Time for embodiment! And let’s pick up the pace! It's not just the rapid adjustments we must make, but the full-scale fuckery that greets our first breath of the year.

It isn’t easy being meatside.

My body feels like a haunted 7-Eleven—fluorescing at ungodly hours, full of Diet Coke and pain. On the first day of the year, I smashed my tailbone into something—a cabinet? I wasn’t keeping track of space or time. I thought it would just bruise and heal, but the next morning I could barely walk. Days later, I went to my chiropractor, reluctantly because bodywork usually backfires.

“Happy Horse Year,” I said because it’s all I think about.

“Isn’t Horse Year all about getting out of your comfort zone?”

“I think it’s about relaxing into our bodies so that more things become comfortable. It’s about an embodied relationship with time,” I offered, oblivious to irony. Horses are not in their heads, so there’s nothing stopping them.

“Oh,” he fired back at the pace of cocaine, “so we have to be connected?”

Horses run
but do not hurry

Going nowhere,  
only Here

**Copyright Mariano Peccinetti.** *Still from Digital Collage for Horse Year*, 2026. A white horse covered in green flower patterns gallops up a steep hillside blooming with pink and green flowers, against a flat blue sky.

Body

I am more sensitive than most humans
but less sensitive than a horse. —Lindsey Boldt

I clawed my way into this body. I really wanted it—wanted to be crushed out of my mother into a cold, loud hospital room. Wanted to launch headfirst into a turbulent world dominated by predatory men. I wanted love under the gun, to feel the searing pain of ecocide, genocide, isolation, power-over. I wanted to throw down on Earth, the rough block of our cosmic neighborhood. I wanted to cry every day of my life, to make water sovereign through my own eyes. Apparently.

Despite and because of its limitations, I love my body. My willowy build belies the full breadth of agony and ecstasy it occupies. My close friends long ago abandoned expectations of how and when I show up. I am actually very reliable—I’m always there when I can be. Sometimes I feel like a canary, enlisted through no say of my own to detect every invisible threat. I sway in my cage on the front line, telling the men who hold my life in their hands to turn back, turn back. This way is dangerous.

Sometimes people blame me for being sick, or try to fix me. It bothers me most when anyone assumes my absence means indifference. I don't take any of it personally. We all grew up in the same atmosphere. I’ve internalized the eugenics of the sensitive, too. Mostly, I want to thank the canaries. I bow to the people who absorb the burden, willingly or not.

**Copyright Audrey Bialke.** *Under Ever-Changing Skies.* Oil on panel, 16 x 12 in, 2025. Shared with written permission from the artist. A luminous white horse, outlined in golden light, floats mid-stride in a twilight sky above an open prairie. Below, a decorative panel in green and black frames a white farmhouse flanked by heraldic swans. The feeling is of a vision — a spirit horse presiding over an earthly place.

Overburden (Serinus canaria)

In their native range — the Canary Islands,  
laurel forests of the Macaronesian archipelago —  
the wild canary sings conspicuously.  
Layered, mature vegetation,  
seed abundance across seasons,  
water nearby, a low ratio of predators.

Silence means danger. Turn back. Turn back. It is not safe until you hear singing.

Coal-mine canaries were waste-product birds —  
females with pale plumage,  
thin songs,  
bought cheaply from breeders
for their sensitivity
to carbon monoxide and methane.

An estimated 100,000 miners still died.  
No one counted the canaries.

Overburden: soil, rock, and vegetation covering a coal seam that must be removed to reach the coal. Large machinery and explosives are used. Operations continue until the coal is exhausted or the stripping ratio becomes uneconomic.

Whose body cannot measure earth in dollars.
Whose body is gold.

What have I removed to get what I want.
How many canaries

mine
mine
mine

**Copyright Paris Rowden.‍ ‍**Digital drawing, 2024. Shared with written permission from the artist. A stylized front-facing horse head rendered in soft pink and gray tones floats against a vivid red background. The horse’s bangs are loose and feathery, and a glowing white star-like symbol radiates from the center of its forehead. The horse looks calm and powerful, emerging from the red field like an emblem or spirit figure.

Name

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."
She had horses who called themselves, "spirit." and kept their voices secret and to
themselves. — Joy Harjo

Now it’s time for a new name. Let your name find you. Let it be strong enough to see you through war. Maybe it will come in a dream or through a friend or in another strange, bright way. Stay with the name of your birth if it rings like a bell when you hear it. This will be the secret name of your heart. Keep it to yourself so its power stays inside you. Let it live there for as long as you like.

My name is a strong name, and fearless. Last year, I went to the mountain and lay down on a slab of basalt. I asked the vulture circling overhead to peck away everything that isn’t my name. Snake Year took what my name is not. Horse Year shows me what my name can do.

Draw a symbol for your name, so that every time you see it, you remember who you are.

What is a word that means stop—you are love.

**Copyright Adrian Novac.** *Lungta* 50 x 40cm Oil on linen panel, 2023. Shared with written permission from the artist. A dark, atmospheric painting shows a pale, gossamer horse, slightly luminous, moving through deep blue terrain beneath shadowed mountains. Seated on the horse is a blue flame, representing the human spirit,. The painting evokes the concept of Windhorse.

Windhorse

Windhorse

bind the rider,
a two-legged thunder comes —
one lithe light joining
four hooves that beat the earth
back into a bell

Windhorse is an ancient symbol so vital it rode from the cradle of the Central Asian Steppe onto Tibetan prayer flags all over the world. A jewel on horseback, Windhorse depicts human essence—the sum of our strength and fate in action. We raise our Windhorse like we'd raise a flag for a team we're really proud of. Only there's just one team, and all of us are on it.

Windhorse feels like the sovereign flow of artistic expression, delight in others' success, swells of generosity, any true experience of reciprocity. We raise our Windhorse when we dedicate our days to all beings, and our days take the shape of dedication.

I imagine Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu relaxing into her full capacity. "People think I'm unreliable, but I'm actually very reliable. You just have to trust the process." This same trust has grown up around my own vacillating horsepower. Something more fundamental than circumstances has befriended me—something more reliable.

As a young girl, I felt deeply inspired by Audrey Santo, a child who survived drowning and lived for decades afterward with the profound love and support of her family. Dignity and agency radiated from her nonspeaking, bed-bound body. People came from all around the world to feel her spirit, so completely connected that she regularly conferred miracles to anyone who entered her room. Nearly 20 years after her death, the statues by her bedside still weep oil.

These two women show me something about the interplay of support and sovereignty—Alysa, a physical wonder; Audrey, healed and whole in her own perfect body.

Strong communities produce jewels.

**Copyright Claire Taboret.‍ ‍***Le Soldat (en rose)*. 2016. Oil on canvas. A bold, high-contrast painting in saturated pinks, teals, and orange shows a rider on a horse. The figures are loosely rendered with thick, expressive brushstrokes. The horse’s body is striped with dark, gestural marks, and the rider appears partially skeletal or armor-like, blending between human and structure. The sky behind them is teal with sweeping pink cloud forms, creating a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere. The ground is a warm orange band at the bottom of the composition.

War

King Gesar

I know a man who lives the sky—
rides the bright horse

no enemies, no others

thunder in the joy of skin—
his sword drawn, my pen

Gesar of Ling, warrior king of Eastern Tibet, rides into every battle having already won. A dynamo of extraordinary skill, he lives wherever fear cannot enter.

Recently I had the honor of seeing Joy Harjo, Muscogee elder and wisdom-prodigy, the first Native American to serve three terms as United States Poet Laureate. Her poems have saved many lives, and have made my own life easier to bear.

At the end of her reading, she told the true story of a psychiatric hospital where patients rarely recovered—until a new doctor arrived.

I don’t remember the doctor’s name, so I will call him King Gesar.

King Gesar walked calmly through the wards with his clipboard, never reacting to outbursts or seeming to mind the extreme behaviors around him. By the end of his five-year tenure, every patient had been discharged for the first time in the hospital’s history.

When asked how he had done it, he replied, “I healed the parts in myself that created them.”

bobcat

that day
dreamed a bobcat
to my doorstep
true story

I could not be afraid
of its trustworthy legs or wide eyes or perfect fur —
not because its dangers were so knowable

but because we knew what we were getting
each of us peeled back to our thunder

one weather on the threshold
of home

**Copyright Gizem Akdag.** *Untitled digital art.* A woman of East Asian descent wearing a sweeping red fringed coat gallops full speed on a dark horse across a golden steppe. Mountains or foothills rise in the distance beneath a deep blue sky. The rider swings a lasso overhead — a perfect circle of rope suspended against the blue, still and geometric against all that motion. Her face is calm and focused.

Wayfinding

Did you know houseflies slow down
when you let them know
you’re only trapping them
in a glass temporarily
to carry them back outside?

I’ve coaxed dozens
into cups.

They slam their whole little bodies
against the window, wanting
to fly their little hearts out.

And I want them
to be happy.

The sky’s the limit, I tell them—
stop at nothing
but the very best shit.

My friends and I have the same tattoo, a sinuous ribbon with dots on either side, representing the Mo’o, a powerful protector of water and lineage from the Polynesian islands. Our late elder, Keola Sequiera, master carver of the Hawaiian tradition, designed this symbol with each bend in the Mo’o’s body representing a generation, and her long tail symbolizing the unbroken flow of ancestors. My tattoo is a commitment to making good choices for Earth, ancestors, and future generations.

On Maui, elders taught me so much about navigating life, but I only learned about Wayfinding last year from my friends Lila and Rosey. Fierce protectors of water and earth, they shared that when Polynesian wayfinders set out to find tiny islands, they consider their boat to be at rest. The islands move toward them.

In the flow of living divination, they respond to cues that magnetize the lands they can’t see. According to Wayfinder Lehua Kamalu, “The true navigator only knows that they don't know anything. It’s a discipline that offers no absolutes, only humble attempts to read what nature is showing us.”

I traded my paper map
for listening—

A map of many hands
unfolds as I move

What is community?

Still the boat.
Read the signs.
Let the island come.

**Copyright Michael McGrath.** *Summer Systems, night search.* Oil, oil pastel, and acrylic on canvas 16” × 20”. Shared with written permission from the artist. A dark-haired woman in a pale gray dress rides a vivid pink horse through a field of wildflowers and fire. A gold halo or rainbow radiates behind her. To her left, a volcano erupts. The woman faces away, calmly moving through a burning landscape. The horse glows as though lit from within. The world is on fire.

Horse Power

heavy as oil drums, the beasts that gather in my big-ass heart

I’ve already experienced many perils of Horse Year—scattered thoughts and efforts, confusion and restlessness, anxiety, collective aggression and despair as we behold wars waged to distract us from cultivated depravity. I feel the toll this takes on our individual bodies, the heat and off-gassing of old systems burning down.

I’m learning about rebellion as the discovery of what’s real, and the courage to move toward it. Horses insist that there is a new way to do things, even if we don’t know what that looks like yet.

One image that keeps coming back to me is a great big horse heart. Horses have so much heart. Our human hearts are on full display, too. We can no longer hide our startling gifts and capacities, not even from ourselves.

**Copyright Rocky Hawkins**. *VISITING PINK CLOUDS*. 24” x 18”, Acrylic on panel. Shared with written permission from the artist. A rider on horseback gallops across a yellow ground against a panel almost completely black with broad brushstrokes. Above, a single pink cloud — thick with paint, impasto, physical — floats in the darkness. The horse and rider are rendered in the same yellow as the earth beneath them, as though they were made of the same substance as the ground. The painting sings with cosmic potentiality. The horse is unmistakably running toward something.

Dream (February 6, 2026): A shimmering parade, invisible except for what resembles the glint of light on water, processes across the paved road from a dark hedge to an open, emerald pasture. One of the faerie lights turns into a beautiful chestnut mare with a white stripe from her forehead to the tip of her nose. It’s not a horse, of course. And the children who appear aren’t children. The sidhe can take any shape they like, but they can’t conceal their nature, which in this moment, feels completely loving, mischievous, and joyful. A “little girl” places something small and bright in the palm of my hand: a decorative pin with a brown horse and pink letters below that read, “World’s Biggest Hugger.”

I came here to be thorough, not to hug the good half of the world. I am not advising this arduous path, only sharing what I have learned from being leveled.

Last week, with a fever of 103, I sobbed, "I want my Mommy." So, I called her, and just like when I was a baby, her love worked. The situation had not changed, but I felt better.

Some time after we hung up, my fever had burned away all distance. In the hot mix of complex inputs, nature came to me. Nature is not a place outside. There is only here, now, together. Human/non-human—tomato/tomato. I felt strong healing forces collaborating with my body.

Desperation opens the door to unconditional love, but I do what I can to keep it open. I’ve been reduced to what’s real over and over. It’s how I know the current systems can’t hold. Power-over has no ground.

Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in France, painted 36,000 years ago

I’m learning that the most powerful way to create community is to notice it—to feel the abundance of loving beings, seen and unseen, surrounding me at all times. To enjoy the company of pillows and plants, food and water, dogs and chickens, sun and moon, wind and river, Diet Coke and laundry, ancestors and Forest People, horses, houseflies, bobcats, canaries...

For years, my friend Clarissa and I have sown the language and culture of dreaming across timezones and oceans. Naturally, we received payment for our significant labor. I wondered what would happen if I planted these teachings hyper-locally, as an offering. What happens when all the power tied up in money circulates freely back into the land and people? What happens when we all begin to share the same language? When we all begin to listen?

I recognize the luxury of the experiment, but it’s where the ball has landed, and I am sure as hell going to play it. My friend Tara whipped up a list of dreamers, and delivered them to my doorstep. It’s a dream come true in the diaspora, discovering how one land—Yesáh land—speaks through its settler community as we unmask our whole minds. Different people with different ancestors, origins, and stories enter the alchemy that culminates in culture. Ceremony is the jewel of the land.

I really wanted this body—wanted to dive headlong into my mother’s arms to feel the most complete love a human being can offer. I wanted to leap into this beautiful blue planet, guarded by grandmothers. I wanted to throw down on Earth, the most colorful garden on the block. I came as a small, bright body. I came with ceremony in my bones, to know the joy of song. I am so moved by this opportunity that I cry every day to make water sovereign through my own eyes.

I see the island, I feel the map, I hear the song.

Can you hear it?

**Copyright Cynthia Moku.** *Shiwa Okar.* A radiant warrior deity rides a white horse through an open sky of pale blue and cloud. The figure wears elaborate armor inlaid with jewels and raises a flaming torch in one hand while holding a melong (mirror) in the other. A many-pointed white star blazes at the crown. Behind the figure, a luminous rainbow halo glows gold and white. The horse dances on clouds with jeweled offerings and a mirror in the azure blue sky below.

Thank you, humbly to each artist who shared their work here: Erin Vest, Michael McGrath, Lou Benesch, Patrica Iglesias Peco, Mariano Peccinetti, Audrey Bialke, Paris Rowden, Adrian Novac, Claire Tabouret, Gizem Akdag, Rocky Hawkins, Cynthia Moku, and the unknown cave painter. Your work and your way of life is so important in this time, and in every time. You may click on the artist’s name below each image to learn more about them, purchase their work, and support their way in the world.

Thank you to my husband Darren Gibbs for supporting me in every way. Thank you to my teacher Liu Ming for planting the seeds and encouraging them to grow. Thank you to all of my friends, ancestors, animal companions, and collaborators seen and unseen for strength and courage. Thank you, reader, whom I called upon to complete this task. Thank you for receiving my offering. Thank you to my mom and dad for giving me everything I know, and to my children, for teaching me utmost love. And thank you to the canaries, who make it easier for the rest of us to breathe.

I dedicate this offering to the complete and irreversible liberation of all beings. May the seeds of ultimate love take root and flourish in every heart without exception.