Happy winter solstice, beloveds. I greeted the birth of the sun this morning with some others, even though it was a cloudy and rainy dawn in San Francisco. As we prepare to welcome the changing, growing light amidst ourselves here in the Northern Hemisphere, the time of the year is also asking from us inner wakefulness, inner reflection, and inner preparedness. I'm beginning my own work of taking stock, and am sharing here a few journal prompts and suggestions you might find of benefit too.  

Here are a few prompts from Kimberly Achelis Hoggan: 

Look Back

Name at least 3 obstacles you overcame in the last year, and reflect on what lessons you learned or what qualities of character were strengthened as a result.

Name up to 3 challenges you are working on that you feel stand in the way of you reaching your highest goals and intentions.

Name at least 3 positive shifts you made in the last year. Give yourself full credit for forward growth, even if they were just little steps (little steps add up to big changes in time)

Name your three most powerful moments or special memories from the last year.

Look Forward

Name 3 goals or intentions you have for the next year. You might pick one in separate category such as Relationships, Career, and Self Development, or you might pick three to work on in one single area of your life.

Now list 3 obstacles that you think might stand in the way of you manifesting your intentions and counter each of them with a solution.

Name 3 qualities of character you want to cultivate this year to help you embody, or manifest your intentions.

Reflect on, and name, the desired outcomes or feeling states that you will experience having realized your intentions. Allow yourself to really feel each outcome in your body. Take your time with it as the more you can not only visualize but also feel where you are going the easier it is to get there!

And, a few prompts from Namaste Yoga + Wellness in the East Bay:

What new things did you learn new things about yourself?

What was a favorite trip, local or far away?

What inner strengths proved to be most valuable this year?

What new people entered your life? Who is no longer here?
​
What, or who, are you most thankful for?

Utterly grateful for the ancestors, for Spirit, for community.

It is amazing what can happen when they come together in ritual.

Thank you for making yesterday's Community Healing Divination Ritual possible, CIIS Office of Diversity and Inclusion! May we ring in a more beautiful world together.

"The event will bring together people of color at CIIS within the container of a healing divination ritual. Divination is an ancient mode of communing with the ancestors and the elemental natural world, and bringing ourselves in harmony with them. Our ancestors steered their lives in partnership with the wisdom of these other worlds, but such non-rational calls to partnership are devalued in colonial modernity. As we continue to decolonize ourselves and our maps of the sacred, we take back our power to walk hand in hand with living ancestral ways and practices. 

During the divination ritual, we will come together in community so we might talk to Spirit and the ancestors about individual and collective resilience and empowerment, healing and transformation." ​

It is my honor to be​ bringing divinations in the Dagara way at Serpent's Kiss Magick Shop & Botanica in Santa Cruz. When I think of magickal teachers, elders, peers of faith, wisdom, power, and integrity on the path, so many of them converge in the community Serpent's Kiss creates. Beginning this Saturday, September 15, I will be there every third Saturday of the month.

​Please schedule your appointment by calling (831) 423 5477! 

((Love, Monica))

When those belonging to disadvantaged and vulnerable groups have an experience of shame (or suppression of voice), expanding the lens of analysis to include power and privilege might reveal that the shame individuals carry as their own is the shame of the powerful and/or the privileged within the system.

Watch the YouTube video here.

Small actions, sacred actions.

During this week of Global Climate Action, we head to Yemaya's altar.

We who are born of the waters make our annual pilgrimage into the sea.

Our activism is to remember who we are, to remember the sacred swirl of energy the circle creates, our very bodies create - are created by. So we may take that swirl outward to our kin, those we see and do not see.

Women are walking, ancient rhythms open bodies, leading the way into a new world, making all that is change possible.

We are relearning our stubbornness. We are flexing our capacity to nurture ourselves.

Kahuna Leilani reminds us that there is no away, nothing we throw away really leaves the planet.

What can we do to change the patterns of unconscious consumption, the ease with which we waste and throw "away"?

Every drop matters. Save the waters, living waters.

She who is the beginning to which everything returns, she who commences and completes every change.

My body is still recovering from a cold. My elemental body is waking up again, filled with cries the unformed star matter earthsky and grief.

This sacred life fills me with awe. That I get to invoke three elements in community, in circle, this past week! Ancestors, Fire, Earth, Water. We are magic, we come alive in nature.

This sacred life has a meaning beyond known meaning. Soul humbles me again, I am rivers of grief, liquid substance that shimmers in a time that is coming as joy.

We are bringing the joy.

To live with an other who is a crystalline part of you.

I am beginning to realize what it means to be initiated to kontomble. (Oh, tricky Spirit!)

You experience the deepest wounds of humanity. You are torn apart, until you find the spark of Spirit within. The wilds of human nature make contact with, and bring form to, all that is holy. You begin to transform reality grids. 

And this is how the river flows through you. 

​Dear tribe,

I've long said that attachment wounds are the invisible earth wounds of our times. Many of us have come to understand that empathy, nurturance, attunement, caring, responsiveness will show us the way into a culture and future of mutuality. 

Trump is now ripping away children from their parents—from their felt-sense of security, safety, and trust in the world. Can we imagine what this is doing to the nervous system of the collective earth body? The shock. The terror. Severance from connection to the Mother—connection to the living web of relationships—in turn affecting the capacity for cooperation with and to be there for others. 

These actions based on domination/dominator values are perpetuating trauma that is yet further perpetuating the domination/dominator paradigm. 

Predatory patriarchy.  

This is beyond sorrowful—beyond the blackest rage possible. 

We have known that this U.S. administration will drag us to the very ends of hell.  
So we must redraw our capacity to create heavens.  

How can we be relationally present to this that is hanging loose, this flapping skinless raggedy wound—this hole in the soul of humanity?

One answer in the face of utter heinousness is to soothe, more than ever before, our nervous system. Become sovereign over it. Our sensitivity becomes our strength, as we learn how to de-alarm ourselves, each other. Take responsibility. 

We will not let this terrorize or terrify us. We will defy and rise above, defy and rise above.  

I want to offer a gesture—collective psychomagic or ritual—by which we may join our wills and offer up protection to the children. Just one candle. Light a speck of light and leave it out on your window sill, as long as it stays lit. Light one after that. Imagine the flame joining with other flames into a great big ring of fire and protecting the children that need protection. 

Let us ask for help, even as we take other steps.

​A few years ago, elder Alwyn Thomas demonstrated an extraordinary feat of speed divinations.

After full days of teaching divination, late into the night he divined for us. He read for more than a dozen of us in succession - each reading surpassing the earlier - incisive, accurate, wise, steeped in intuition intricately connected to the ancestors and to the divine feminine.

Today, in that spirit, I will be taking my divination cloth to La Promenade Café on 38th and Balboa, and offer speed divinations. 10 min, 15 min, or longer combined slots from 7-9pm! Come by and get a reading, come get a cup of tea, come say hello.

Brigid claimed me three or four years ago. This Celtic goddess of inspiration, healing, justice, and the waters feels so familiar in essence. This year, I found myself astir with a strange energy before Her ritual. Feeling my heart, feeling the world. As I sat down for a breath, the poem I share below arrived, almost as if it had been waiting for me to pause. And listen. Here, for you, an early version.
​

Visiting Brigid

​I'm almost too hot to come to you tonight, Brigid. 
Or is it cold I feel—your fire burning in a village whose 
center has retreated?

My own center is turning around & around 
& I, dervish, uncombed, undone 
in the whirling center of my world

let birds fly out of my mouth 
black birds 
whose messages may be read by our darkest skies--

surely there is light out there to read them by— 
surely the light that burns in the center of our universe is bright 
enough to bring us home.

Bright like your name, Brigid. 
Bright like your songs & spells & forge. 
Bright enough to forge darkness into home.

It is dark tonight. 
This night, night after night 
repeats & we wonder 
after light, lament, fire.

I stumble around for resolution, a neat way 
to part this hot & cold night.

For surely—it cannot but be— 
there is a place where all that draws closer 
draws the color of its own heart into light.

Surely, Brigid, you want me there tonight 
& together we will turn 
hot into cold 
then hot again.

Day after day the wheel turns 
& there is a day that will come 
when day will follow night. 
Surely, your name will draw in the bright 
stars, bright waters 
where dragons still tend to the central fire 
of our village, its linked heart.