◐ eClips: Seeking
This past weekend, the moon reached its halfway point between the previous week’s new moon and the upcoming full moon. In a few days, Saturn and Jupiter will triangulate with the waxing moon, with Jupiter to the left and Saturn to the right.
This week, I’ve been paying extra attention to hydrangeas, because one of my best friends eagerly points them out whenever we pass them. I’ve never really noticed them before, but I’m now enjoying their colorful pink and purple clusters, and the act of connecting the sight of a flower with the recollection of a friend. I also finally visited Seattle’s rose garden, which boasted roses in almost every hue; many of the most vibrant varieties didn’t carry a very strong scent, but they were lovely nonetheless. I learned that the garden doesn’t use pesticides, so it can feed the flowers to the animals in the zoo next door. Apparently, the gorillas are especially fond of the spent petals.
Speaking of stopping to smell the roses … I’ll be pausing these newsletters until the next new moon. See you then!
◐ My Octopus Teacher. [I finally got around to watching this moving documentary, and cried the whole way through. I’m not sure I can pin those tears entirely on the movie and not my current frame of mind … but I loved watching the filmmaker connect deeply with a specific creature in a specific region.]
◐ Joy Generator: “Boost happiness by taking time for small moments of delight.” [I’m enjoying the blackout poem generator!]
◐ Visualization of How Fast a Ball Drops on Various Solar System Bodies: “This is an animation of how quickly an object falls 1 km to the surfaces of solar system objects.”
◐ ‘This is a food bank now’: Workers seized a McDonald’s in France: “Still illegally occupied, it has become a symbol of the social and economic rifts that the pandemic has deepened in France.”
◐ Louis Armstrong and Collage: “Armstrong writes, ‘my hobbie is to pick out the different things during what ever I read and piece them together and make a little story of my own.’”
◐ For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps: “They’ve eluded one of the most rigorous map-making institutions in the world to do so.”
◐ Simple Red Fruit Salad: "Made with plump strawberries, sweet cherries, lemon zest, and coriander brown sugar.”
◐ The Poolsuite. [I’ve been grooving to this web app’s built-in Poolside FM radio station. Smooth and summery.]
Spotlight: Alysia Brown
Alysia Brown is an artist and lover who lives in Echo Park, Los Angeles. [I met Alysia in LA over Halloween weekend, when she was dressed as a disco ball and I was in pirate attire. When I met up with her again months later, we were out having fun, and she wasn’t drinking. She spoke about it from an excited, empowered place, and, in part because of witnessing this, I found myself craving sobriety. That weekend, she tattooed a snake onto my arm, which I saw as a symbol of shedding the skin of the self who consumed alcohol. The limited time I’ve spent with Alysia has felt expansive and magic. She knows a lot about astrology, so I began the interview by asking her about the current astrological season.]
Happy Cancer season! You mentioned already that this summer, you’re having a bit of a different experience because of living alone. What has your experience of this Cancer season been like?
Well, I have to say I’m thinking about the home a lot with Cancer season and living in my own space, and it really feeling like my own space. Living with roommates, it always felt like other people’s stuff, other people’s emotions in the space, all affected me. So having my own space is really powerful. And I feel like this Cancer season, I’m very much focusing on that and trying to organize and get things like a couch and a new mattress, things that will just make this more comfortable and cozy and homey, and I really love that for Cancer season. I feel right at home in that energy.
Also, this place has a bathtub. I’ve never had a bathtub before, but that feels like the most luxurious thing, for someone like me to be able to get in water at any point, since I don’t live by the ocean anymore. I used to live closer to the ocean in LA. Being farther away from water is really difficult, so having a bath has changed everything.
Crystals, candles, music!
Oh, yeah. I have it all!
So, it sounds like baths are a ritual for you. Do you have any other birthday, or summertime, or Cancer season rituals, that you mark the season with?
Usually, my birthday ritual is to get away, go out of town. I didn’t do that this year, though. I went out of town for Fourth of July instead, out to Palm Springs, because fireworks are really bad in LA, especially in the neighborhood I live in, and my dog [Zuma] doesn’t like fireworks, so me and two other friends who also have a dog, we went out there to get away.
So, that birthday ritual kind of went out the window this year, which is fine, and I worked on my birthday. Nothing exciting. But I like to do a tarot reading for myself every year, and a bit of journaling about that, and just self-reflection. That’s really what birthday feels like to me. I’m not the type of person to go out and throw a party for myself or anything, because I really just like being alone, or to myself, where I can really reflect on the previous year and reflect on what I want for the next year as well.
Beautiful. How has having Zuma changed the way you engage with the outdoors or with the seasons?
Oh, man, definitely having a dog forces me to go outside multiple times a day. I take her on two walks a day, for sure. And also, in finding this new place, I picked out a place where we’re walking distance to a large park, Elysian Park in LA, which is so full of nature, and it’s been so exciting to be able to go hiking every day. Not so much now, with the heat, but before the heat really came, I was going there once, twice a day. I feel very connected to that land and all the plants and trees there, and the birds! The birds have been the most powerful thing. I didn’t realize that Elysian Park is a bird sanctuary, and the first month or two I was living here, I was seeing great blue herons almost every day, which is amazing to see in person. I’ve never seen them so up close. They’re pretty big, I was surprised by that. And there was also a family of owls in one of the palm trees off the main path, a mother and three “owlets,” they’re called, baby owls, they’re so cute! But I visited them every day for, like, six weeks while they were there, until they just flew off, they left the nest. That was really cool to witness and to see these cycles in nature that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen without having to take my dog for a walk.
And just having a little creature to see all the time who always, always looks at me like she loves me and I’m the most important thing in the world. That’s hard to get anywhere else, so it’s really nice to have that supportive presence.
What’s her favorite part of being outside?
So, there’s a ton of gophers in Elysian Park in a particular area that’s a grassy field. She just rushes, she wants to go there every single time, and I have to pull her away sometimes to go on trails, because all she wants to do is stick her head in these gopher holes. Her whole head kind of goes into it, and she just sniffs down there. She hasn’t caught one yet. She hasn’t even been close, honestly. But she is obsessed. It’s very cute!
In your new place, do you have a lot of houseplants? Or are you growing plants outdoors?
I don’t have my own outdoor space, but I don’t mind. My neighbor has a cactus garden outside of the apartment that I can walk to, it’s right around the corner from me, and he also put cacti and plants everywhere along the walkways, and across the street, because that’s the view from his window. He sells them to people walking down the street. It’s awesome. And inside the complex, there’s a communal herb garden — just a few herbs, like basil and rosemary, but there’s also kale growing, and celery, and carrots, and marigolds. They have so much in there, and it’s really cool. When I saw the apartment building, before I’d even seen the actual studio, they showed me the communal garden, and I was like, “Well, this is where I’m going to live. I already know it.”
When you’re out on your walks or in your neighborhood, are there particular plants that you’re noticing growing, or that you’re feeling really drawn to right now?
Yeah, I mean, all of the plants, honestly! But in particular, things that are in bloom that are attracting my eye are the plumeria. I don’t know if it’s a tree — some of them are big enough to be trees, it seems.
The community herbal garden we have in the complex, too, the surrounding is completely covered in passionflower vines, which is one of my favorite flowers. And they’re not in bloom right now, but the fruit is hanging off of the vine. And it’s not ripe yet, but I feel like it’s going to be soon, and I can’t wait for them to be ripe so I can try one that was grown next to my apartment. I also have a lot of neighbors who have grapevines, and grapes are coming in, so it’s always fun to walk by and see this big bunch of grapes just on the street in LA, you know?
I can’t even imagine that, to be honest!
Yeah, pretty wild. I love it.
I love passionflower so much, but I’ve never really gotten to be around it growing. I mean, I’ve seen it occasionally. It looks sort of alien!
Yeah, very alien-looking.
Have you used it medicinally or eaten it before?
I do have dried passionflower tea that I get from an herb place in my old neighborhood. I don’t think you’re really supposed to have it in the morning, but I have it in the morning. It’s supposed to be a very relaxing thing, and I think I have so much energy that I can have it in the morning, so I do.
That’s such a perfect example of how people’s relationships with plants are going to be so unique based on their own compositions.
Yeah, I read somewhere that passionflower is good for balancing out passion. I’m a very passionate person, and very energized and ecstatic about so many things, and so the passionflower kind of helps balance that out and calm it a bit.
Are there other plants that you use medicinally?
Yeah, the passionflower tea that I make, I use it with cacao every morning. I have ceremonial cacao that is from Ecuador. I don’t think it can grow in Southern California very well, so I haven’t actually experienced a cacao tree in person in quite awhile. But cacao as a medicine is just so beautiful, it’s so loving, it’s a huge heart-opener, and I feel that. I’ve been sitting with it almost every morning since November, and it’s just opened up my heart so much in ways that I didn’t even understand were possible. I’m feeling very loving lately because of it; I just love everything. And it’s also a gratitude practice. So when I sit and drink my cacao, I’m also thanking her for the medicine and thinking about all the things in my life that I’m grateful for, which is such a powerful practice. It seems so easy, and I’ve heard it so long: “A gratitude practice, pick it up and it’ll change your life!” And I was like, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” But now that I’m doing it, I feel so grateful about everything!
And do you mean, not just in that moment, but throughout your whole day?
Yeah, it affects my whole day. I had to travel for work for 10 days and didn’t take cacao with me, and felt the difference within a day or two. It’s odd, because I am a person who’s worked a lot with psychedelics and other things that really, really alter your perception and consciousness, and I feel that with cacao, but it’s not in the same style, I guess. There’s absolutely no visual changes, but it has its own spirit and its own medicine and it’s very strong. And working with it every day brings it out. I feel weird calling it “it,” even, that seems wrong.
I’ve been talking with a friend recently about the inadequacy of the language we use to talk about any creature who’s not human.
That is so true.
“It” feels so insufficient for a being that you’re connecting with that profoundly. My next question was about whether you have a spiritual connection with any plant, but I feel like you’ve already answered it. Are there any others that you want to share?
I feel a very strong spiritual connection to the ayahuasca vine. Ayahuasca brew, which is ayahuasca vine and chacruna plant, usually — that’s what I’ve been sitting with the last four ceremonies, at least — her spirit is the grandmother spirit, and she is so loving and has so much to teach. As you said, it’s insufficient to really put the relationship I feel into words. It’s very powerful. But also, I feel the need to say there’s a trickster energy, as well. Which isn’t expected from a grandma, but the trickster energy is strong. It feels reflective of the universe in general. I feel like there’s a lot of trickster energy to allow us to learn lessons in an unexpected way.
Do you feel like you’ve always been attuned to the effects that plants have on you, or has that grown over time as you intentionally listen to them or sit with them in ceremonies?
I definitely feel like it’s growing over time, in the last however many years that I’ve been paying more attention to plants and the spirits in plants and working with them. But at the same time, it’s also part of being. The first time that I sat with ayahuasca, after the experience, I was like, “That all felt like I was remembering something.” Like I was going back to something that I was already a part of, if that makes sense. And I grew up with a mom who always had a garden, and I would help her pick veggies off the plants and help her weed, so it was always a part of my childhood, and I feel like I kind of forgot it as I got older and realized other interests and got wrapped up in school and, after school, work, and other life things. So it feels like a remembering, going back to that. A primal remembering of essential life. I hope that made sense.
It makes perfect sense to me. And I feel that way, too, about paying attention to deeper cycles, like moon cycles. What’s your relationship to the moon and the sun and the stars? How do those cycles show up in your life?
Oh, I love all of those cycles. Also, similar to plants, where I kind of forgot it for a bit in the middle of life, but have slowly been remembering and bringing it back more and more. I feel very connected to the moon and its cycles. That’s maybe my Cancer sun, but also just an obsession with the moon and the nighttime, and the 28-day cycle instead of the sun cycle, which is only 24 hours — that feels very fast and rushed to me.
Cycles are very apparent in astrology, and that has been part of my personal practice for the last four or five years. But I also was into it as a child. My mom did astrology charts by hand. Before we had a computer, she was looking up all of the dates and the angles and stuff in a big book and drawing them by hand, which blows my mind. So I was exposed to it as a child, and then kind of forgot, and then brought it back and really started studying it more deeply in the last few years. And all of that is cycles. All of the movements of the planets and the stars and the sun and moon. So that kind of plays into it all as well, for me.
What lessons or new ways of looking at the world or yourself do you feel astrology has offered?
Well, not only has it helped me understand myself more, but it also has really helped me understand others as well. And I have to reference one of my astrology teachers, Jeff Hinshaw, of Cosmic Cousins. I took one of his courses, and a big realization I had around his teachings is that all of us have a birth chart that has every planet in it, every house, every sign. We all contain the whole. So if you’re ever thinking about a certain planet or sign, and reflecting on it, and have something negative to say about it, you have to remember that it’s in your chart as well. I have a lot of Scorpio in my chart, and people are like “Ooo, Scorpios!” And I’m like, “Well, you have Scorpio in your chart too!” It can really be used as a tool to understand that we are all one, we contain the whole. I really feel that deeply. I feel like compassion would be the one-word answer. It’s taught me to have compassion for myself and others, because we all contain it all, the good and the bad and everything.
Do you feel like it’s drawn your attention not just to the seasons, but to these shorter time frames within seasons, that are kind of unique in how they’re expressed?
It has, yeah. Astrology seasons are shorter than the typical fall, spring, all of that. It has drawn my attention to that. It’s also drawn my attention to the idea that it’s all kind of a spectrum. I mean, there’s the equinoxes and the solstices, which are the mark of shifts like that. But it’s more of a spectrum, it’s more of a slow change, and it’s a fade, kind of, from one season to the other, and not so much an all-of-a-sudden switch on or off from spring into summer. So, I feel like it’s drawn my attention more to the in-between phases, between the shifts.
That’s a really cool way of thinking about it! I do think we tend to think of things as so demarcated and separate, when actually there are these transitional periods, and everything’s so connected rather than isolated, seasonally. Are you now experiencing more heat or smoke, or is there a heaviness to your summers these days? I kind of feel that about summers here, but that might be happening everywhere, and especially in California.
Definitely. August and September are pretty hot and also considered fire season. But I’ve been here for nine years, and I feel like fire season starts earlier and earlier and lasts longer and longer every year. It’s more intense. And it really affects me, more than I ever thought it would when I moved to California. This morning, when I went out to do my walk, I could tell there was a fire somewhere; you could smell it in the air. And you can feel it in the back of your throat; it really affects the body. And it weighs so heavy on my heart just knowing that so many of them are caused by unnecessary things. There was the one caused by a gender reveal party. Why did that have to happen? And other ones that are caused by arsonists or people throwing cigarettes out their windows. Things that just could be prevented. So, yeah, anytime I drive through an area where there’s been a fire and you can see all the burnt trees and stuff, it hurts. But also, it’s a reminder that there’s cycles, and those burnt areas will be able to regenerate and even have more nutrients because of those fires. So, it’s a lot, the world we live in these days.
Are there certain ways you and your community have adapted to this being a regular thing?
A lot of people will put water out for stray animals or animals who are leaving the fire areas and coming into the cities because they have nowhere else to go, trying to help them and protect them. And recently, there was a fire on the west side, in the Palisades area, and I knew people over there and offered for them to come stay at my place that’s on the other side of town, and still smoky, but not right next to the fires. It causes people to be more community-oriented in that way, to help others out, which is nice. But it’s hard.
Yeah. It’s hard for sure. I think when the heat wave hit, I was sort of like, “Oh, I’m just really fatigued, I’m exhausted from the heat.” And I’m sure that was true, but it took me three or four days to be like “Oh, I’m actually grieving, and that’s part of the exhaustion, that’s part of the aftermath of something like that.”
That’s a very good point. The heaviness in the heart, it feels very much like grief.
To shift gears a little: I’ve been noticing a lot of collage artwork going up on your page. I love them! I want to hear more about what the process of making those collages has been like.
I didn’t share my work for a long time, so it feels different to be sharing and getting feedback and finding out people actually like it, so that’s really exciting.
Before making these collages, I was cutting up a lot of vintage maps, and really attracted to these interlocking, interconnected patterns. Which are what maps are, always, but there’s others in nature as well, like tracks on the ground, or trees, or mycelium, or nerves in the brain, these interconnected patterns.
So I’ve been really attracted to that and trying to figure out a way to use that in other ways than just vintage maps. And I’ve been getting old National Geographic issues and old books, and finding maps and patterns in them and cutting them out, but then flipping them over and using the other side of the page, where the image isn’t something I picked out at all. So that really stems from wanting to practice letting go of control in my artwork, because I’m very much a perfectionist and wanting to get everything right. And not being able to control what image shows up is hard, but it’s a good practice, so I’m doing it. And that’s where all these collages are coming from. I never thought I would make collages like this before, where I would not have the ability to control every little bit. But it’s been very interesting to see what’s on the other side and what imagery I’m working with based on what some random printer one day decided to put on the other side of the page, you know?
And I’ve also been finding a lot of flower encyclopedias. I have one that’s all roses, I have two different ones that are all orchids, and I’m hoping to get more. It’s been really fun to try to find these books that nobody else really seems to want, I guess, so I can cut them up and use them for collages.
What do you like to do with one when you complete it?
I have a serious problem about gluing. Most of them are not glued down, just because that feels so final, and I like the idea of being able to change it in the future if I ever wanted to. I mean, I’m going to have to glue some of them, I imagine, at some point. But right now they’re all just sitting in my flat file. People have shown interest in buying them, which I’m so surprised by, it’s so exciting, but also, those are my babies, I feel weird selling them. So I’m kind of grappling with that whole process. I’m still getting used to being an artist. Even though I’ve been an artist my whole life, I didn’t call myself an artist until like two years ago.
What do you think finally gave you the push or the courage to take on that label?
Ayahuasca is a big part of that. My second ceremony, down in Colombia, we each got to have a private meeting with the shaman while on the medicine, and I explained the vision that I saw to him, and he was like, “Oh, you’re an artist.” And I was like, “[gasps] What? How did you know?” He didn’t know that about me. And he was like, “Yeah, you’re an artist, and you’re about to really blossom and create a lot of work.” And at the time I was like, “I don’t know if he’s right about that.” But I realized he was totally right, and that was kind of the first moment that I realized someone saw me as an artist without me even telling them I was. So that was cool.
But yeah, it’s a practice, really. I’ve had to do a lot of inner work to accept the fact that I’m an artist and that artists can also be successful, they don’t have to be a starving artist, or, I don’t know, the idea of an artist who’s mentally unstable is a very common one. Like Van Gogh status. So, yeah, trying to unlearn all that and understand that I can do this and be happy doing it.
Yeah, I wonder sometimes about all the myths that keep us from feeling like we can be happy, that we can take on the labels that feel good to us.
Yes, definitely myths. That’s a good word to describe them.
Is there anything else you’ve been working on or thinking about that you feel like you would want to share? What’s been on your mind?
There's so many things on my mind!
Something I feel like saying right now, and I don’t know why, is the importance of food, and what we take in on a daily basis. What you make for breakfast, and lunch, and dinner — that’s medicine too, and it can be plant medicine if you’re eating enough plants. I feel very called to connect more with that part of my life, the ritual of making food, and cooking my own food, and cooking food that’s local, and really connecting with it to get as much nourishment as I can.
I don’t know where that came from. I think I might just be hungry for dinner!
What’s your favorite thing to eat?
Right now, I’m so into broccolini, I can’t stop! Every single morning I make broccolini with an egg and avocado, and it’s heaven.
You just kind of pan-fry it up a little?
Yeah, on my cast-iron with this turmeric seasoning, I think it’s turmeric and ginger. That’s my go-to right now, some broccolini!