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listen to mindy tell a story at the moth

OPEN THE MOTH AUDIO PLAYER

watch mindy perform poems at westside school for the desperate

Upcoming Shows & Workshops

May 2020

May 27 2020

Western Mystery Schools Study Group

Online

May 28 2020

Spring Storytelling Intensive @ Literary Arts – Portland, OR

Online

June 2020

Jun 06 2020

The Write Bloody Reading @ Awful Good Writer’s Heavy Hitters Festival

Online

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The Feed

The new moon arrives today, May 22, 2020, at 10:39

The new moon arrives today, May 22, 2020, at 10:39 a.m. PST, in 2° of Gemini. The Gemini archetype is represented by twins, or in the tarot arcana, the lovers. It’s mutable air, associated with fertile ideas generating even more ideas as we communicate them, a kind of mental pollination. Whatever house in our charts it styles, it brings a strong need for multiplicity, for taking multiple opposing positions and both/and-ing them, being many selves at once, and then communicating from the constant flux to discover something new - some new, non-binary, nondual truth. Gemini teaches us how evolution works. Two opposing poles come together, produce tension and possibility, then * ! - a transcendent third is born.
We’ve never had more tension to work with than we do now. Venus is retrograding through Gemini, bringing us into contact with our relationship shadows, all our unconscious stories and defenses and behaviors that have kept us from revealing ourselves fully or allowing real intimacy. Mercury has joined the conjunction, bringing its facility for language and navigating the in-between. The worldwide pandemic rages on, exaggerating existing inequities. The Trump administration continues to abuse its power to dismantle the rule of law and dissolve the social safety net. We’re feeling grief and fury and joy, often at the same time. New identities and polarizations are emerging as we grapple with uncertainty, pry news from propaganda, and try to discern what the right actions are for us personally.
This is f***ing alot.

New moons are chances to reset. To start again. We can use this moment to pause, and breathe, and pull all our flailing arms back to center. A new way forward is struggling to be born. We can’t see the future, but if we get still enough and quiet enough to observe the fertile Gemini currents of the mind, connect to the yes/no towards/away pulses from the body, we can feel the now – we can see the five feet in front of us clearly. What do we need now, for exactly where we are at in our process? What healing or support or change can we call in? What new story wants to be told?
Art by Stanislaw Fernandes for the book The Futurological Congress 🙌🏼

The last time Venus was retrograde in Gemini, May

The last time Venus was retrograde in Gemini, May of 2012, I had just finished writing Glitter in the Blood, which came out later in the year. I was a full-time touring poet, finishing up tours with The Last Nerve and The Whirlwind Company. I came home to Portland and had to immediately move out of a painful living situation. Exhausted, I still then flew to Long Beach to spend my birthday at gay pride and a Queen Latifah concert with my dearest @maewesterly. I came home and bought a gold couch from an astrologer off of Craig’s List for my new apartment and started napping and dreaming on it almost immediately. I was just beginning to realize that the way I was living and working was unsustainable. In the whirlwind. On my last nerve. But I didn’t know any other way to do it – I spent all my magic all the time and then would be sick and drained. I wasn’t connected to my body. I was on the edge of a proper nervous breakdown, one that would finally properly scare me enough to make me face the shadow work and healing work. I thought I knew what Jack Hirschman meant by “broken-heartedness is the beginning of all real reception,” but yeah, no.

Venus retrograde in Gemini begins again today, 8 years later, and I just got the news that my dissertation research on the voice-as-sense, the impact of trauma on voice and the role of voice in trauma healing, has been approved for print – this means sometime in the next six weeks, during this retrograde, I will get to defend it, virtually of course, and finally officially become a doctor, during this collective heartbreak and trauma, when we are all on the proper edge. The timing feels exactly right. Whatever happens now, whether I ever get to formally graduate in robes and sashes, this is my greatest labor of love to date. If you want a copy, DM me, it’s time to start sharing it.

And if you have ever felt called to work with me there are 2 chances coming soon – a study group devoted to the Western Mystery Schools that first meets on May 27 and a four-week online storytelling workshop through Literary Arts that starts May 28. Links on my website. Image is of Queen Latifah / Venus as a glowing goddess of light from May 2012

The moon will be full at the hinge between tonight

The moon will be full at the hinge between tonight/tomorrow, ‪at 3:45 am PST‬ at 17° of Scorpio. Scorpio is fixed water and the full realization of feeling. Ruled by Mars and Pluto, feelings in Scorpio are raw and intense and primal, the way feelings feel when felt directly, without the protection of defenses like humor and irony and perspective. Scorpio initiates the healing transformation that’s only possible when buried memories and feelings surface and we are suddenly able to feel our unfelt feelings, those that were too dangerous or strong or painful to feel at the time.

Because of the intensity of what we are going through right now collectively, many of us are consciously focusing on the grounding activities of working and gardening and caretaking and beautifying. Not only might we not feel ready for more waves of intensity and vulnerability (fuck!) or the uncovering of old wounds, we are basically freshly burying our current feelings for future processing. That’s more than ok – whatever we do to survive, that also does not harm others, is officially holy. But tonight, on the Scorpio full moon, in the middle of spring, as the light grows and our impatience grows for this to be over, we are receiving an invitation from the queen of descent.

Maybe some of our old/early coping mechanisms resurfaced to get us through in the last few months, but so have their unwanted effects. Maybe we’ve had to put our own feelings and needs aside to serve others, and now feel the stress, strain, and unsustainability of it. Maybe we need to face and process and honor what’s happening right now, for ourselves and for others, a little more than we’ve felt able to. Maybe we could use the help of a therapist or emotional support witch or deep friend to get safe enough to tune in. If there is a way of being that is not-really-you, something you’ve done to survive but that is hurting you, and that you would like to put down now, Scorpio is calling you home to yourself.

This full moon is really just a prequel to the Venus retrograde that begins one week from today – deep breaths everyone. Stay sane, stay in love, use your talismans. Art by the incredible @lacabezaenlasnubes 🌕

Today we celebrate the union of the goddess and th

Today we celebrate the union of the goddess and the Green Man, the path of the Empress, all the trees and bushes blushing and flowering full pink flower skirts and them dropping them to the ground very sexually, one at a time, in the burlesque of evolution. We are now halfway to the summer solstice, and it’s a good day to soothe our broken hearts with colors and kitchen dancing and plants and loving on whatever or whoever we love.
I don’t you how you’re doing, or how I’m doing even, but I’m imagining our vibrant health, and I’m imagining the death of greed and scarcity and competition for basic resources, and I’m imagining we all have the strength and surrender it takes to keep feeling anger and sorrow and joy and shame and pride all at once, and to develop our gifts fully and enjoy them and give them away. Before the fruits, before the branching out and leafing even, we have to be brave enough to flower and expose our gorgeous hearts. Happy Beltane poets and witches, I love you.

The new moon comes tonight at 7:26 PM PT at 4° of

The new moon comes tonight at 7:26 PM PT at 4° of Taurus. Each new moon is a moment of darkness and maximum contraction. Metaphysically, it’s the zero moment, a pause in the nothing, the beat before the expansion, which is an opening, a portal. After the initiating fire of Aries, Taurus season is a steadying, stabilizing force. Taurus is fixed earth, and it knows that for change to last and new life to endure, it needs strong fat roots, tapped into well connected root systems; new neural pathways and networks need to be used and tended repetitively, myelinated lovingly.
It accomplishes this deep rooting by bonding the spiritual to the material, energy to matter, meaning to form. It slows us way down, concentrates our attention, and enlivens our senses, making everything we have and do feel extra. Taurus wants us to really taste this bite of taco. Like, really taste it. And once we’ve properly appreciated this taco, it wants us to build a temple in our hearts to this perfect taco, to worship this simple taco for giving us energy and flavor and life. Under these circumstances, one taco becomes a whole way of being. The Taurus archetype might be an antidote to overconsumption, or a teacher of right relationship with the material world, healing us from the soul-deadening fantasy that the natural “objective” world is separate from us, and has no sentience or real meaning.
Since today is also the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, and we are living through a time of illness and death - the death of many precious lives and loves, the death of expectations for our lives, the death of old ways of living, the death of systems that concentrate money and power at the expense of life itself - I think this new moon is an invitation to slow down and make contact with the material, earthy world. Like, the garden of Eden is everywhere. It’s a Taurean state of mind, an innocent passionate loving of the sensual experience of being alive in the material world. When we are in this state, we are crazy rich. We have enough. And enoughness and sufficiency - as opposed to scarcity and greed - is the way forward 🌿 amazing video by artist Timo Helgert @vacades

These works by #emmakunz. Magnesium (Calm + Epsom

These works by #emmakunz. Magnesium (Calm + Epsom salts both). Morning fires. Watching the sun set from the top of a hill. Finishing a book. The mango pyramid at the grocery store. Soft pants I never hemmed. The foam roller. Calling people unexpectedly because you’re thinking about them and they answer and it’s like winning the lottery. Crying. Fuming. Hot sunshine on bare legs. Making a bed on the living room floor and staying in it for a whole Saturday. Finding an old fancy soap gift in the way back of the cupboard and it still smells strongly like lilacs. My mind coming back to me.

Tonight at 7:35 pm PST the full moon blasts us wit

Tonight at 7:35 pm PST the full moon blasts us with light at 18° of Libra. Full moons signal a peak, completion, ending. Full moons also illuminate or recall the shadow energy of the current sun sign, in this case the Libra shadow of Aries. If Aries is all impulse and agency and commencement, Libra is all judgement and empathy and finish. Aries is the rising up of the individuated self, and Libra is the drop into intimacy and relationship. This face off between agency/empathy or self/other might feel collaborative and generative, and it might feel combative as hell. We might feel both at once, generous and defensive, trusting and wary. Forming a square with the Jupiter/Pluto conjunction, this Libra full moon will also heighten tensions, raising the stakes. (Could the stakes be any higher? Fuuck.) In the northern hemisphere, Libra season arrives with the equinox and initiates fall, rebalancing and adjusting, readying us for harvest and bonding and banding us together to face the rising dark. I think that’s what it wants to do for us now. We are reaping what we’ve sown, and more challenges are on their way. The way we show up for eachother now is seeding what will grow next. We are the initial conditions for a new world. The tensions between self and other, agency and empathy, cannot be resolved, only outgrown. It’s time to grow up.
Wherever you are at today, take some time to intentionally witness yourself and others with love and warmth and a sense of humor. Let the freak out peak if it needs to. Turn the volume up on your process. Then feel into anything that wants to shift. Is there anything you can move into deeper and more loving acceptance of? What might it be time to let go of? Are there values you can work on unlearning? False beliefs or old expectations you can more fully release? What can you give up and give away that will help end the war inside? If you want more cosmic guidance or just to be social on this Libra moon, I’ll be joining Yvonne Perez from @themakeandmary today at 5pm pst for her HIGHLY INSPIRED series on Instagram live. We will be clinking teas and talking about wtf is going on with the astrology this year. You’re invited 🌕

Remember back on the 12th of January, there was th

Remember back on the 12th of January, there was this big deal Saturn Pluto conjunction that meant huge cycles were ending and beginning and astrologers were predicting that a worldwide paradigm shift was being initiated? Neither do I. Time + space have basically collapsed or dissolved as so many of us get ill and the rest of us worry and care and live and grieve. This is what a paradigm shift feels like. I’m sometimes calm and resolute and sometimes terrified.
Today Jupiter is forming a conjunction with Pluto. Jupiter conjunct Pluto is a major moment, occurring every 13 years. (It’s all major moments all the time right now, stacked on top of each other like tectonic plates colliding etc.) This conjunction will happen three times in 2020, all in the later degrees of Capricorn: today - April 4 - and then again on June 30 and November 12. Pluto is the heavy. It’s death and rebirth, transformation and power. It’s also underworld god stuff - hidden power, shadow knowledge. Jupiter is expansion and growth, generous sky god raining down abundance energy. They both have a tendency to amplify whatever they touch, so when they align, it’s - well, we will have three opportunities to learn what happens when they align.
Today’s alignment might feel like a portal opening, or the eye of a needle. More people might be forced to tune into the seriousness of this spreading emergency. One thing feels sure - whatever trip you’re on personally with this, it’s going to really start spinning its god wheels. A call has gone out for a million people around the world to meditate on this alignment and opening at 7:45 pm PST and call in support. I’ll be visualizing hot bright disinfecting light pouring over the earth, and glowing, singing, psychedelic white blood cells surging through everyone’s immune system. I’ll be praying for everyone I know, and everyone I don’t know, and asking for divine intervention, like maybe a god or three could help this rogue viral RNA relax and return to formlessness, and also end poverty and inequity and greed, amen. Maybe I’ll see some of you on the astral plane. (Anemone art for all of feeling extra sensitive right now, and for the great @gretamerican)

How’s your grieving going? My friend @amberrose

How’s your grieving going?
My friend @amberrosetamblyn texted me an article this morning from of all places the Harvard Business Review called “The Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief.” It’s an interview with David Kessler, a coauthor of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. It helped. Like, right, grief. This foggy pain that also sometimes takes specific shape or becomes suddenly acute. The feelings that occasionally replace the anxiety and hoping and doing. It made me go to bookshelf and pull out Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow. He talks about five gates of grief: “everything we love we will lose,” “the places that have not known love,” “the sorrows of the world,” “what we expected and did not receive,” and “ancestral grief.” Reading them again, I felt something get seen and then soften in me. Sometimes naming things helps.
Also thank you everyone who signed up for the donation based/can-be-totally-free remote sessions with me in the last week. I can’t really overstate what a pleasure it’s been to connect. Sometimes we do some somatic experiencing work to help nervous systems come out of hypo or hyperarousal, sometimes we just talk about it all, or name specific fears or difficult experiences and work with them. Sometimes we look at star charts or we activate new tools and ideas and powers. If you’re experiencing any dissociation/numbness/loss of focus or time or trouble eating/sleeping - like to a degree you know for you is worrying - I hope you reach out to someone with trauma support skills. We are social animals, and really don’t have complete nervous systems on our own. We are going to need eachother to get through this, or rather - I’m going to need you. I’m leaving the link up in my bio for the time being (it allows for bookings up to 14 days out) and I hope some more of you take me up on it. Also big thanks to the illustrations by #MarieNeurath that are like blood pressure medication to me right now 🐳

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