Category: Newsletter Archive

Hello, dear friend 🌷

Here we are in the month of Mars ❤️‍🔥 nearing the end of the first quarter of this Year of Action.

Perhaps it’s a good moment to take a beat, aaand deep breath in – – – – – hold – – – – – and out – – – – – 🌬️

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From the Piscean depths, whence our beloved anglerfish arose, I come bearing gifts.

I’ve been indulging in contemplations on consciousness like a kid with unrestricted access to the cookie jar. When I began writing this newsletter, sparkly ideas & connecting-dots lured me in with their simplicity.

But trickster intuition had other plans.

Humbled once again by the act of trying to squeeze beautiful, iridescent, fractals of understanding into the two-sizes-too-small pair of jeans of verbal language.

So without further ado, and with as much succinctness as this run-on sentence-lover can muster, here is why you should care about the nature of consciousness; and how integrating our understanding of it is critical to our resistance against fascism & our return from exile back to earth.

Out beyond right-doings & wrong-doings, there is a field… of consciousness, and we’re it

I recently listened to this hour-long interview with Federico Faggin, physicist, inventor, & engineer.

While on a family vacation at Lake Tahoe many years ago, awake in the middle of a winter’s night, he had an inexplicable and sudden experience of unconditional love. In this moment, light poured out from his heart and he felt distinctly connected to a great knowing beyond his own.

In his subsequent quest to understand what this was, he abandoned his materialist view of the universe to explore the quantum field. In so doing, he developed a new understanding of the nature of consciousness. It is this theory he presents throughout the interview.

The main concepts he puts forth absolutely delight me.

Much like how a single qubit represents all possibilities, I see clearly how his theory is reflected in more than a few ancient understandings of existence—as well as my own experiences with music, mysticism, & magic.

The four key points from this interview that feel most compelling for this newsletter are:

1. Consciousness is not something that emerges from our brains or nervous systems, but is a quantum field that we observe, that observes us, & that is us.
2. Free will is expressed as a desire to know something beyond ourselves.
3. Out of a desire to know itself, Consciousness causes waveforms to emerge as “separate” entities to study.
4. These waveforms collapse back into the field once they have been observed.

Imagining for the moment that this theory is close enough to the Truth, “how many countless waveforms have we created & abandoned?” and “how can we facilitate their collapse?” are the questions that occupy the rest of my inquiry below.

Retrieving the goddess through selfless witnessing*

Demon kings are terrorizing all of creation and the gods are useless to stop them. In desperation, they’ve come to the goddess Durga seeking her help. From Durga’s brow, Kali emerges.

Using her appetite for destruction, Kali sweeps across the world killing the demon kings. But now, herself lost to her own appetite, she begins devouring everything else as well. The gods feel sick with dread and send her husband Shiva to soothe her.

Shiva cries out to her in fear, pleading with her to stop. No response.

He dances around her to try and change her mood. No response.

At last, in a final attempt to save the world, Shiva succumbs to his unknowing.

He lays down on the ground just in front of Kali, belly to the sky, so that she has no choice but to tread on him. It’s in this moment, stepping on her beloved, that Kali sees his face beholding her in all her beauty & terror, sacrificing his own existence for the sake of witnessing her completely. She snaps out of it and her appetite for destruction abates.

The waveform collapses.

Desire & doubt: two ways to seek to know the self

In a Cartesian sense, we could say that Consciousness’ desire to know itself might be expressed as a kind of self-doubt. What Descartes was trying to say with this oft decontextualized quote, was that doubting one’s existence is proof that the one doubting must exist.

This is the same spirit-logic that suggests our desires reveal to us what we already have (or had), for how else could we know the feeling of its having?

We doubt we know ourselves. So a knowing-doubter must exist.

We desire to know ourselves. So a having-desirer must exist.

In one case, the experience likely feels fraught & desperate. In the other, the experience likely feels compelling & delightful.

Like desire, doubt creates a waveform, and that waveform collapses once, and only once, it has been observed. The trouble is, doubt tends to send us into feedback loops confirming our not-rightness, abandoned waveforms multiplying without observation.

If I feel lonely, that feeling may spur a story of rejection, which could in turn, cause me to reject others in order to feel in control of that rejection and my sense of loneliness. More on this in a moment.

Retrieving the goddess through compassionate witnessing**

Inanna, goddess of Heaven & Earth, descends into the Underworld to attend the funeral of her sister’s husband. Her sister, Ereshkigal, goddess of the Underworld, is suffering terribly. One might say, like Kali, she has lost herself.

Upon Inanna’s arrival, Ereshkigal kills her for the crime of not honoring a power greater than her own (i.e. Death). She then hangs her corpse up on a hook.

In an effort to save Inanna, Enki, god of Wisdom, sends two humble & empathetic servants, down to Ereshkigal. When they arrive, she is crying out in pain. They begin to mirror her cries.

“Oh my eyes!”
“Oh your eyes!”
“Oh my sides!”
“Oh your sides!”

…and so on and so forth until they have reflected back to her, their compassionate witnessing of all her pains. She returns to herself.

The waveform collapses.

In a gesture of gratitude, Ereshkigal offers them any gift. They request the body of Inanna, and with a drop of the elixir of life, they return her back to the world of the living.

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Bearing witness to an energetic vibration creates the conditions for its collapse. In the materialist world, this is a very real phenomenon of the physics of sound. It is exactly how your noise-cancelling headphones work.

The act of observing changes the very nature of the thing observed.

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Modern-day polarization & abandoned waveforms

So what can these Hindu & Sumerian myths reveal to us of our current-day plight? What can this proposed theory of consciousness provide us when it comes to beating back fascism & building a society re-attuned to the earth?

I want to return to the idea that doubt causes waveforms to emerge.

Imagine living your life so fully entrenched in self-doubt, that you define yourself almost entirely by what you are not. Rather than embracing an unknowing that would allow for growth & connection, you cling to any certitude, even if that certitude further isolates you & disconnects you from source. Imagine how you might begin to hate anything that you are not because it unconsciously reminds you of how isolated & out of touch you really are. Imagine how what-you-are-not is now felt as a threat to who (you think) you are.

This is seriously spiritual stuff here. Without the grace of faith — and I mean real faith; a faith that demands your unknowning, and doesn’t guarantee you access into any kind of afterlife — without that kind of faith, the intensity of our life force is unbearable.

Our material bodies literally cannot weather the constant onslaught of information that exists in the quantum’s Possible.

I cannot, and will not attempt to empathize with the sociopaths who lead the charge of our disconnection and destruction. But I refuse to cast out those who follow them, compelled by their own existential loneliness. We share the same loneliness.

There is a vast spectrum of dissonance here and each of us is at the frontline.

I’ll ask again:

How many countless waveforms have we created & abandoned?
How can we facilitate their collapse?

To begin to answer the first, where is there too much self-doubt (often masquerading as cocksure contempt for the other side!)? Where is there not enough faith in letting things be unknown (so they can be truly observed)? Which waveforms do we actively resist witnessing within ourselves? Within others?

To begin to answer the second, start where you are. Throw your body underfoot, and fully, honestly bear witness to the energies moving through the world.

Can you imagine? What if our waveforms were a resonant dance of desires instead of a maelstrom of clashing doubts? This is the world I know exists because it’s the world I desire.

Our lives are the metaphor

Let me back up for a moment.

Please, and of course, do this for yourself first. And be kind.

Witness your life. Integrate your experience. Engage in the art of forgetting so that you can collapse back into the collective consciousness and be reborn. To truly [un]know ourselves, we must attend a thousand of our own funerals over the course of our lifetime.

Once at home within our body, we develop compassion for our process. The natural consequence of this practice is to offer it to others because we hear within them, our own selves.

To flip Ram Dass’ quote around, only that in me which is you can hear what you’re saying.

And we’re all of it, baby.

Make art. Give it away.
Make love. Let it go.
Digest the ego. Empty the emotional body.

The less you are or I am, the more we are.

How’s that for some Piscean punctuation on the season?

From abstraction to action, I believe in us.

Collapsing waveforms & dancing myself clean…

with love,
heather 💜

Hello friends 🤗

Please accept my belated wishes for a healthy & wholesome 2025, and my very punctual wishes for a peaceful & prosperous lunar new year 🐍🧧🎊

For reasons I’ll leave up to your imagination, I’ve been thinking a lot about resistance. One memory in particular.

My heart in my throat, my body electrified. If I could have seen myself, I’d imagine my face had blanched in spite of the soft, warm waters of the Gulf of Guinea.

I’d been swimming & body surfing for half an hour when it occurred to me that I was never fully arriving back at shore. I began to swim with more purpose, but no matter how hard I kicked, or how strong the swell pushed me towards land, I was just as quickly pulled back into the ocean.

This was the “little” riptide they’d warned us about. I began treading water to assess the situation.

While I couldn’t make it back to land, at least I wasn’t being pulled out more than 50m. Bobbing like a buoy in a watery purgatory, I egg-beatered my legs to lift up and wave frantically towards the familiar guests at the local restaurant overlooking the break.

They cheerfully waved “hello” back.

My stomach dropped.

✔️ Outside forces beyond my control making a farce out of my resistance.

✔️ Those just beyond the fray, unaware of my terror.

✔️ Forty-five minutes in the water, 15 of those in a growing state of panic.

Ocean, what do I do?

An ancient memory from Huckleberry Finn floated to the surface.

When caught in a rushing river, move diagonally with the flow of the water towards the bank.

I set my sights West and began to swim with renewed determination. After three? maybe four strokes, my shins slammed hard into a sandbar. I stood up and laughed.

One lucky idiot. One more lesson learned.

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Panic and terror are real, physical sensations. But they can dupe us into thinking we need to exert a force equal or greater to the powers pushing and pulling against us.

Sometimes, yes. DO that.

But most of the time, there is wisdom & dignity (and sustainability!) in treading water while we presence ourselves, ask the Earth for guidance, and take the necessary action to move or remove our energy in ways that disempower those outside forces.

Theme of the Year

For the past decade, I’ve cast annual themes that gently color my attention over the course of the year.

As I reflected on what the theme might be for 2025, my ego really wanted to find a way to promote my oft repeated guidance to “slow down & space out.” But clear as a bell, the response from spirit every single time I asked, was TAKE ACTION.

Launch the project. Build the community. Make the art.

For me, it’s helped to remind myself that it’s a good & right thing to make a mess. May we all be surrounded by imperfect blessings.

Which reminds me of another thing spirit’s been wanting me to speak aloud:

DON’T WAIT FOR A CRISIS TO BECOME AN ANARCHIST.

The world, more than ever, needs everyday anarchists. Anarchists take care of their communities and tend to the land they’re on. Resistance can look like free breakfast programs, little libraries, community round tables, repair cafes, safety workshops, or garden swaps.

Critically, start breaking dumb rules & dumb social norms. This will strengthen your liberation-muscle for when you might be asked to break dangerous rules & dangerous norms.

Every action you take that tends to the needs of your community is, in its own way, anarchy. Please do not diminish the power embedded in these small acts of connection.

Your life is precious, my friend.

I hope you feel that in every cell of your earthly body.

You are worth your presence of self. The earth loves you. Your community needs you.

with love,
heather 💜

Greetings from seat 33A 💺

The earth has rolled over into Pisces season, and I’m swimming in the vast sea of our collective emotionality. Join me for a moment in the deep where we’re sensing into the subtleties between grief & despair. Did I mention it was Pisces season?

Grief is a portal.

Imagine if you will, the experience of grief. What does that feel like in your body? What are the sensations?

Now imagine the experience of despair. What shifts? Where does the energy go?

In my experience, grief feels intensely physical. It’s as though my heart and inner cosmos are working through the labor of birthing new galaxies, wrestling with themselves as my heart bursts, finds a new center of gravity, and bursts again. My creature response has often been to follow its lead and get gravitationally physical. That is, I lift weights or do some type of resistance exercises. I sob and let the convulsions rock my core so my inner planetary satellites can readjust their orbits.

Despair on the other hand has always felt disembodied, as though the wind’s been knocked out of me and I’m everywhere and nowhere, and nothing feels real anymore.

I was [not] surprised to find that their etymologies hint at these dis/embodied manifestations.

Grief, from grieve, from the Old French grever (to burden), from the Latin gravare which comes from gravis (heavy or grave).

Despair, from the Old French desperer (to lose hope), from the Latin desperare (de- ‘down from’ + spearae ‘hope’). If hope is an expectation grounded in the future—the unknown place where we go when we disembark from the present, then losing hope is to also lose ourselves in the abyss that lies between. Untethered from the present, no anchor to draw us towards our becoming.

Grief is not despair.

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It may seem obvious to some, but learning to make this distinction has fundamentally shifted how I navigate persistent disruptive [collective] emotional states—*gestures towards current world events*

Simply asking, “where is my heart?” quantum leaps me back into the present. By using this bottom-up processing I can discern where I need to apply spiritual strategy in order to return some semblance of coherence in my emotional & mental realms.

If my heart feels heavy, how can I move my body to help the grief move through me? What shapes does my body want to be in? How can I support my heart & my body so that they have enough energy and rest to grieve without slipping into depletion or exhaustion?

If my heart feels disconnected or like a scattered nothingness, what small thing can I look forward to today? Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Who or what is still there, anchored in our imagined futures? Am I still there? Are you? Are we? What ritual can I return to that honors the cycle of “order, disorder, & reorder”*?

At risk of repeating myself, I want to get super clear on the strategy here. This isn’t a zeroing in on the grief or the despair as a way to spiritually manhandle it into a manageable form. Instead, I’m focusing my attention on supporting my heart & my creature body and then trusting their genius to process & integrate these emotions. They are the ones who know where we are & what we’re here for.

Perspective over perfection.

As a not-quite-afterthought in honor of the full moon in Virgo we’ve just transited through, I want to touch on the concept of perfection. I think of perfection as the shadowy twin of excellence. I don’t have any brainy reason for feeling the way I feel about these two, so bear with me as we muse.

The way I experience perfection is as though there is a future ideal at Point B, and I’m at an ever-shifting Point A, attempting to match where I am to where this future ideal sits. Until I do, I simply never arrive and exist in a low-key state of frustration, failure, and disappointment.

But excellence is an ongoing phenomenon that happens in-process. Every step in the creative process can drip with excellence. From the fully present breath of initial intention, to the final release of our creation.

Perfection is rigid & exact; like too-tight shoes you want everyone to see but don’t want to wear out lest they get dirty. Excellence is fluid & intuitive; like running barefoot in soft dewy grass as the summer sun illuminates the magical beauty of life on earth. Perfection already knows everything, excellence invites in the miraculous.

I’ve decided to work on my relationship with perfection. Try as I have to shift towards excellence, decades of conditioning towards perfection has my mind in a bit of a vice grip. Moving forward, my aim is this: in moments of frustration during the creative process of, well, everything, because life is art, baby!, I’m gonna take a moment to pause, create some psychic distance between my Point A and the Point B I’m working towards, and ask myself “how is this moment I’m in right now already perfect?” In other words, how can I soften my myopic tunnel vision to behold the miracle I’m living into?

It reminds me of a time in Java nearly ten years ago. I was leaning on the ledge of a balcony in the darkening twilight, aggressively straining my eyes to see the birds my ears knew must be in the mature rice paddy below. It wasn’t until I stopped looking so hard and softened my eyes that I could finally discern easily a hundred birds clinging to the stalks, chirping and flittering their wings. I was transfixed, no-mind, swept up in the symphony of all beings. The phrase “look quietly” echoed in my mind and seems to fit this feeling around perfection… perfectly.

Look quietly at your life, my friends. Accept the perfection of this moment and may this alchemically transform us all into miraculous purveyors of excellence.

Thank you as always for the gift of your attention.

For the next week, I’m home with my parents and feeling the fullness of a life lived in the deep 🧜🏼 I hope kindness finds you wherever you are. I hope you get the opportunity to be that kindness for someone else.

I’m praying for peace, and maybe even more, I’m praying for courage & creative love.

with love,
heather 💜

*Thinking about chaos in terms of our faith through the states of order, disorder, & reorder is a beautiful framework I recently picked up from Richard Rohr.

Greetings, friend! 😌❤️‍🔥🔮🌍

Warm wishes for an easy flow into the Gregorian new year and a happy twelfth day of Christmas.

Here in France, in these “days out of time,” we were gifted a preview of spring by La Niña; warm air spiraling up from the west coast of the African continent and pushed eastward by the Atlantic jet stream. Birdsong and flowering ground cover, the smell of pine hanging in humid air. It’s helped bring some life energy into the collective cultural practices of introspection and divining the unfolding of our lives over the next twelve months.

On reflecting how I want to move in the world this year, I returned to one of my sincerest desires for every human, and that is for each of us to be friends with our true nature. One of those logics that I decided upon in childhood—if we could live in a way that allows each of us to develop ours, somehow this would spontaneously bring about world peace (cue Jesus Jones). Soon after, I caught wind of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, and that was all the external validation my kid-mind needed. Thirty-odd years later, I’ve never felt more certain.

Befriending our true nature is to befriend nature; we are mother earth. We don’t have to look far to grasp how the planet has spiraled so wildly out of her relative stability when so many of us struggle to find our own flow with the gifts we’ve been given. To be authentic, a word Michael Meade breaks down in meaning—to author one’s essence—is to do our humble part in bringing the natural energy flow of the planet back into coherence.

What are your essential desires for the world? How will you author your essence this year?

That which we want for the world becomes the sacred offering we grow to nurture and give to the world.

I want to thank you for joining me on this adventure, your attention is precious to me and I’m grateful to have yours. Below you’ll find two playlists I’ve curated to satisfy the soul’s calling.

The first, I LOVE YOU, a reminder that love is always present, and that it’s our universal privilege as human to experience love through our bodies & senses; the second, KEEP GOING, for all the times when you want to feel like you’ve got this; to remember that many are conspiring in your favor.

Until we meet again—

with love,
heather 💜

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