newsletter: you x culture building x power
Revolutions, creative power, and intentional culture-building as pulling the Future into the Now.
hello everybody ✨
happy to be dropping into your inboxes. I am on the precipice (already happening) of a rebirth and am not surprised the energy came through to write you.
I come here with some juicy written musings.
and in true Aquarius fashion - an energy focused on redesign, intellect, and wide connection building - this piece feels like an integration moment where I am weaving together many ideas before you. and inviting you to take with you what feels right for your spirit. perhaps some of it your body knows and is grateful for the language… same.
to offer a preview: in light of revolutions, I offer a framework that invites each of us to remember and recenter our creative power. remembering that you/we are constantly creating culture and in creating culture, we are pulling ways of relating and being and living on this planet from the Future we desire, into the Now.
❀
so, I invite you to take a breath with me… put on your multidimensional goggles, and explore this birds-eye-view I’m offering.
mi gente. have you also found yourself swimming in questions about how to BE as a conscious person in these moments? ones where the extent of systemic violence becomes undeniable on a whole new level? like, what values guide me? how do i live those on the daily? what does it mean to let painful collective Truths change me intimately? I have, and many I love have too. this feels healthy. & I am sitting with aw(e)areness at the existential choices present for us everywhere, whether we choose to embrace them or not.
i don’t know if you know, but I’ve been studying (empirically) the practice of culture creation x power my whole life. from my youth as a neurodivergent/nonbinary scorpio kid experiencing assimilation after leaving my motherland, to literally getting a degree in culture and power building in social movements, I’ve been spiraling around some of the same questions for as long as I can remember. in many ways, I consider myself a culture worker and a cultural scientist.
& I am feeling like moments like these where where our collective is, as The Dream Mami says, “being punctured by moments of revolution” over and over again (see: Black Lives Matter, 2020 rebellions after the police murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the beginning of the pandemic, Trump election, etc.), we are called to examine the fabric of the cultures and intentions we embody, perpetuate, and create from moment to moment. I have noticed that these revolutions shine light on the many crevices that always surround/live within us. an experience made particularly haunting by the ways these dominant, violent cultures installed on the land and in our bodies are sustained by shadow and the abandoned.
& to me, what makes living through these rounds of exposure and revolution sustainable and, dare I say, pleasurable, is to place at the center of my life my true power and creativity. it is deciding what cultural ways of being my spirit longs to see more of in this world and pulling it into my current reality (in collaboration with the human and nonhuman kin my spirit is pulled to in this quest).
it is also practicing keen awareness of the violent systems I know all too well (because they are in/around me) and making different choices where possible*.
[*hack: there is often more possibility than colonial/fascist futility tells us]
it is, for me, fundamentally pulling the cultures of the future worlds I want from the Beyond, into the Now. the now being my body, my relationships, everywhere my presence touches and ripples from.
to me this is a creative act of remembering myself as a powerful, creative, prophetic being. as one who’s life is already showing what is to come. it is also a powerful antidote to immobilizing fear and despair.
with that said,
I wrote up a transmission (I know, all of this is a transmission) that I’ll close this with. it is the continuation of what I have been noticing in my coaching sessions with my coaching partners.
before though, some caveats: when I speak of “new cultural values”, I don’t mean in an artificially linear way as if we do not carry our ancestors, experiences, motherlands with us. I also don’t mean culture as it pertains to a nation-state or fabricated colonial borders and governance. I don’t even mean building new cultural values in widespread (and often overwhelming, hyper-inflated ways) — though the truths of interconnectedness inherently lead our mycelial impacts far and wide. and, though, I do still mean that exploring more desired cultural values for governing ourselves and being organized as people is wrapped in this too. this is not your hyper-individualized excuse for not engaging with the collective. I assume most of you know this if you know me, but I’ll reiterate for clarity’s sake. yallah.
credit: Cacicahonta, afro-indigenous venezuelan multidisciplinary artist
Futuristic Creators
if creativity is pulling from the Beyond into the Now…
& if culture is the collection of patterns we create relationally (practices, systems, values, ethics, processes, gestures) through our individual bodies….
then we are constantly being invited to create culture, in every time/space/relationship we enter.
& if we understand that intersectional oppressive cultures’ DNA is in the globalized water since/before we were born, then we know that if we are not actively creating something, we default to the patterns we’ve been [non-consensually] wired into.
those wirings coded towards binaries, isolation, power-over, extraction, punishment, disembodiment etc (you know them, they are implanted in you too).
wirings that put our nervous systems in a constant state of reaction. because in reaction, we are positioned on binaries where we are tempted to surrender our powers of nonbinary creation. thus keeping us in loops of Their choosing.
and so,
to build new worlds requires pulling the cultural patterns we DO want from the Beyond into the Now
& to build new cultural patterns requires intention, devotion, humility, and an eye for possibility
& an eye for non-choice. & an eye for curiosity.
an eye of our own & of those beings we trust to show us when we can’t see
to create our new worlds Now, we look into what is in the tissue of what we are practicing. and practice our power by exploring what we DO want, and making choices that affirm those realities.
to only react is to remain attached to the initiatory violence in a binary way.
to create is to embody our autonomy.
& to create is to build the ways we want, Here.
I offer these words seated in all this Aquarius energy we are swimming in. As one of my astrology teachers, Stan, shared - as Capricorn offers up ‘Form’, Aquarius offers up the ‘TRANSform’. it creates from what was inherited and pulls from the Future. this is a powerful intention. the shadow here is with Aquarius being a fixed sign, that energy that lives in all of us can bring with it its own rigidity and dismissiveness. how do we remain flexible, responsive, and devoted in sustainable ways to pulling the Future, into the Now?
phew. you felt that?
༄꩜
a note on my coaching practice
my books are currently open only for existing/past coaching partners.
in the spring, my books will reopen for new coaching partners interested in working with me.
recently, a friend described my coaching practice as an opportunity to “center your heart in liberation”. another described the impacts as fundamentally grounding, ultimately feeling more trust in themself to act in ways aligned with their integrity, dignity and power.
yummy.
more soon. for now, I’ll end by saying that arriving to this point has really felt like this:
con cariño y solidaridad,
sól.
This is a beautiful and resonant transmission Sól, thank you for sharing it. Culture is indeed that dynamism that moves through us in what has been inherited, what is conditioned, and what we actually choose as we are in relationship with each other. As we allow a curiosity about what we truly long form, investigating where it comes from, and exploring its manifestation as we relate to our own selves and to each other... that seems o be a space that is rich with the possibility of freedom. Thank you for pointing us there.