Operation Underbelly

My last exposé may have seemed like an overshare, but I don’t feel like I gave much away. Secrets, lies, and suffering are all very commonplace. It seems better to let them unite us than to feel uniquely diseased, exceptional, or outcast.

During the sunniest month of Snake Year, our dark underbellies are exposed. Yin Wood Snake is deep, mystical, and revelatory. The Solstice sun illuminates everything we would rather not see. The good news is that we have a standard-issue underbelly. Exposing it feels vulnerable, but variations on human pain are few.

We might mistake resolution for retribution if we don’t recognize this as the jewel of an opportunity that it is. The potential for catharsis is astronomical (literally). Family grieving is especially present in my broader community. Let uncomfortable truths surface without stifling them. Put yourself in the good hands of a trusted witness. Talk or weep or pray with a river or a rock, or a person, if you’re lucky. Air out wounds that may have not seen the light of day since childhood. You won’t need to look for them. They’re the ones at the surface, maybe the ones you’ve been avoiding. Clarify your purpose—resolution, integrity, wholeness—then let go.

Attending to personal fate during planetary war is a guerrilla skill and collective endeavor. Nothing is truly personal. We are a compound dream, cohering. I have not found a difference between outside and inside—war is everywhere, and we can’t estimate the impact of our efforts toward integrity.

Snake Year has zero chill. Now is the time to face our fears, our feelings, and our underbellies. Nothing is going how we planned anyway. Surrender to the disruption—transformation cannot occur without it. Even if we never meet, know that we are collaborating in a resonance of courage. Allow our shared dream to hold you. Who knows what small, good things may come of it?

A Village Holds My Body in Its Gnashing

We have arrived at the Summer Solstice, when exhausted mania reaches its peak. Midsummer begs us to be reckless. Violent, impulsive war-mongers express unregulated sun glut. Light gets into everything, and there’s nowhere to hide.

I’ve been cussing up a storm and regressing to the angsty girl that “no one gets.” Deep in perimenopause, I’m still a teenage misanthrope at the mall, scouring the crowd for shrewd eyes. I wanted to be seen. I still do. I wanted to force-feed people lightning so I could have a friend. I still do.

On the Winter Solstice, I attended a fairy dance in a dream. All eyes were shrewd eyes, overflowing with mischief and life. The tall, fair folk said I could be there because I had a drop of their blood, which I already knew, just as I knew the rules of their world.

I granted the Germanic Power Frau a favor without looking her in the eye. We nodded afterward, acknowledging the folk code. At the end of the dream, a group of small, queer men in blue told me “my kind” weren’t allowed in the bathroom. They issued me a stamp back to my own world.

I awoke in a state of full-body ambivalence, elated by mutual thriving, but crying to be back in the human realm. It had never felt so flat. Here in Babel, no one speaks the same language or agrees on the rules. Very few of us understand what it means to hold a world that cannot, by definition, be carried alone.

I have always struggled to be a person, and have never allowed myself to be seen. Publicly, I don’t pretend to be perfect, but I have developed a habit of presenting a relentlessly generous perspective, in writing and otherwise. To me, this feels like an offering, not a lie. Cultivated grace has value, but it’s not the whole story.

I am socially stunted from hiding my whole life. People close to me have been shocked by my wildly destructive choices. I’ve lied my way through double lives more than once. I'd start each morning with vodka, and drink all day because I wanted to die. No one even knew. Not my husband, not my mother. Maybe I took pride in that. Maybe I still do. I kept demons in the closet until they’d burst out every couple of years to expose the ruins of my life. I’ve cut myself, overdosed, wrecked cars and homes and lives.

I realize this is garden-variety flailing, but I wanted you to know. I am still reckless and awkward, and have trouble relating to people outside of teaching and practitioner roles. Before this year, most of my friends were dead or nature spirits because they are much easier to talk to (and to listen to). They “get it” and do not exhaust me.

My experimental openness still endangers me and burdens others. I walk the line between non-duality and death wish. Things can go badly without the checks and balances of kinship, culture, and common sense. I learn about boundaries by crossing them. I have repeatedly violated my own by tolerating trespass from others. I’ve transgressed against the people I love most and exiled myself from my own species. My heat-seeking curiosity for the unknown has grueling consequences, but every time I don’t die, the contours of human belonging widen. The silver lining is understanding for the exiled.

The procession of solstices shows me the story of my own alignment. I am not a fairy or a nature spirit or an ancestor. I’m a human being in the human world. Now I even have human friends (exactly what a real human would say)!

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a minor existential crisis in their company, a major meltdown with my husband, and an unprecedented catharsis with my mom. I have decided to be ugly around others, to let the village hold my body in its gnashing. I don’t want to protect demons anymore. They rely on us to hide them. They thrive in secrecy and isolation. Kinship naturally exorcizes. Decades of suffering have surfaced due to collective care.

As the sun illuminates this turbulent earth, who knows what may come to light. May your demons be exposed. I didn’t want anyone to see mine because they are big and scary and want to kill me. But it turns out human beings are more powerful. I would much rather die to the village than to the demons who are too weak to enter it.

The Power of Paradox

Listen my beloved nothings, your seriousness will kill you! —Ilya Kaminsky

A filmmaker asked a Peruvian culture-keeper what she does with all the discarded plastic visitors leave at her rainforest retreat. The Maestra, a walking embodiment of ancestors and land, replied that it’s no problem. She simply collects it and burns it in ceremonial heaps. The smoke clears the dense energy that modern people leave behind, she explained. “I like the smell.”

One of my teachers advocates space for childhood aggression—toy guns, stick swords, whatever their imaginations require (within reason). “They should have the full array of things to act out what they need to act out,” he says. By resolving fate in childhood, maybe they avoid a prison sentence.

I joined a Facebook group to cosplay my supposed ideological foes. I get to say things like, “ONE GENDER UNDER GOD. 🇺🇸” Unified by typos and hyperbole, we gather to reclaim our casserole dishes from Carol, brag about our grandchildren, and rail against liberals. Our aggression is real, and our toy guns are CAPSLOCK.

All of us think our dogmas are the correct ones. This is good. This is bad. I am right. You are wrong. Before certainty set in, we played.

Now we ask how anyone can play as fresh horrors roll out daily, as the regime gleefully punches down, due process dies, and untold numbers of people face erasure, murder, and worse. In our inverted world, ecocide is “advancement, growth, and development,” while climate collapse levels us, literally.

What is the value of upending our perspective when the world is already upside-down?

Once, I entered a healing ritual with a Daoist priest. Before the ritual, he dismissed me (not unkindly). But as soon as we entered ceremonial space, he could see me. I physically relaxed for the first time. He created a symbolic “mirror” by making his hands into the shape of a frame, and examining me through it. Then he slowly rotated the frame until it was upside-down, signaling a shift in vision. Flipping the mirror grants access to an inverted plane where hidden causes can be seen and known.

Eclipses have a similar impact, thinning the veil between the visible (yang) and invisible (yin) worlds. Hidden phenomena surfaces clearly. From unresolved family drama to Bigfoot, everything comes out to play. Ultimately, eclipses invite integrity. They catalyze, through their alignment, the dual world dumpster fire.

How is it even possible that the Sun and Moon appear to be exactly the same size during eclipses, despite their tremendous differences in size and distance? As our founding father Nate Bargatze says, “Nobody knows.” We come into the world like eclipses do—chaotic, liminal, unbalanced yet unified through wildly astronomical odds.

I told a friend to check out the Facebook group so she could let off some steam by play-acting “the other side.” She recoiled in horror: “I would never do that.” Are we afraid that softening conceptual divides will degrade our ethical integrity? Do we think it will make us evil? For me, undoing the architecture of separation dismantles the blueprint for war. I take up the toy gun to stay out of prison.

I’m not telling anyone what to think or how to be. Paradox is easier for ultra-sensitive relational smears. As a Monkey, I mimic, I play, I provoke. I love unlacing the corset of moral panic. I enlist hilarity to see me through disaster. I hear that burning plastic works well for the Peruvian shaman, and I think, “Of course! Why not?”

Paradox is a mirror held up to the whole thing. The Daoist ritual would not have worked if the priest acknowledged only half of what he saw. We're already living in the ruins of certainty. How would it feel to look around and claim the chaos and contradiction, to flip the mirror upside-down, and finally see ourselves for the first time?