Welcome dear heart! I’m taking the dive and sharing my first ever musing here. This post is dedicated to the transitions marked by Virgo season. Lately, I've been swirling in questions of time travel, particularly in imagining what it would mean to transport liberated futures into our now.
When I was a little hafiza (memorizer, usually of the Quran), I began my studies, like many other Muslim children, with the last chapter of the Quran. Most of the verses in this juz (chapter) have a characteristic monotheistic sternness and are concerned with judgement, submission, the discernment between what is right and wrong, and with descriptions of apocalypse. Embedded throughout these verses is a fluid conception of time, particularly highlighting the distinctions between what is ‘divine’ time and ‘human’ or ‘earthly’ time. Among Islamic scholars, there’s great debate about what the equivalency of 1 divine day is in human terms, with speculation ranging anywhere from 1,000 to 50,000 human years. Is it possible to imagine the containment of thousands of years into a single day? While there’s so much I’ve unlearned from my early spiritual education, what I continue to be fascinated by is this anarchic quality to the Islam I was raised in, an innate fluidity to time and reality that is alive in this questioning--perhaps we are existing a single divine day. This makes me think of those Cosmos episodes that shrink the history of the known universe into the span of one earth day, which is in the billions of years, and it certainly makes my head spin a bit. It is also quite humbling though to consider how minute our human history is in relative comparison.
I imagine many of us, though, are grappling with, disentangling, and imagining into what time means for each one of us during this moment. Whether we are becoming more attuned to an authentic internal rhythm, expanding our consciousness into other forms of measuring time, or we’re experiencing dissociation with how chronological time has been over-utilized in our current sociocultural context, I believe we are all sublimating our individual and collective time paradigms.
I see this phasing, traveling, leaping, crawling time shift process show up in the growing interest and work of many folks to reconnect with their ancestral roots, a longing to be in direct connection with the earth and our more than human relations, curiosity about astrology, and in the imaginings of what the future beyond this continued apocalypse time might be. When I refer to continued apocalypse, I mean many things, but I’m particularly referencing the varying extents to which apocalypse has been enacted on First Nations’ people, Black people, and people of the Global Majority through settler-colonialism, enslavement, and imperialist projects. As an aside, I’m not about the ways that doomsday-like speech has been used as a way for some folks to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility and collective accountability to shape a world where everyone can experience self-determination and dignity in life and death. I’m reminded of a powerful statement my friend J, a Scorpio (but of course), shared in response to someone stating, “we all die,” to which she shared: “it matters how we die.” I definitely believe it matters how we physically die and indeed how we symbolically die.
I recognize then that world ending (and beginning) forms the basis of many of our cosmologies and has been a consistent force in how humans have been relating to each other and the rest of our relations for millennia. Are there stories and cosmologies outside of this apocalyptic paradigm? What are the syncretic forms of mythology-making that will emerge in this nebulous time-traveling space? I wonder what originated violent conflict, the subjugation of one another and our relations, and the weaponization of chronological time. The past six months have also had me reflecting:
Is world-ending a necessary part of human life and world cycles?
Is world-ending always destructive? Devastating?
How has the reliance on chronological time forced us into a primarily sagittal plane existence?
What do we lose awareness of when our focus is trained to only that which is ahead?
What lessons can be absorbed from the decomposition process that is a critical part of the life/death/life cycle of our plant kindred?
How do we build intimacy with death, being not afraid of death, but instead cultivate reverential, dignified, sacred deaths?
One of the ten books I’m reading simultaneously #geminilife is Walking with Trees by Glennie Kindred. I was immediately drawn to reading about Yew, a tree I’m newly in relationship with.
““Yews are always in a state of becoming...and regeneration is a key aspect of their signature picture. They might look as if they are dying, but closer examination reveals the slow development of one of their many methods of regrowth...They can survive in the most barren and harsh conditions and polluted atmospheres, and as a species have endured the great Ice Ages of our Earth’s past. Fossil remains show that Yews have survived as a species for two hundred and fifty million years, and in that time they have adapted many times to changes in the Earth’s climate. Humans have been evolving for only six million years and the present strain of human, Homo sapiens, for a mere two hundred thousand years.” ”
Ankerwycke Yew, Photograph: Julian Hight/Woodland Trust
As the Full Moon in Pisces from a few days ago marked the halfway point of Virgo season, the gifts of Virgoan energy such as devotion and service are being filtered through the Piscean imagination and creative capacities of our innermost selves. What are you devoted to? When you commit yourself to serving your dreams, what are the ways of being and becoming you must build in your life? Virgoan energy reminds me of the yew tree, the studious practice of discipline to know when to grow, when to pause, when to die to make way for new life and to create a rhythm of knowing when to adapt and prepare for transition.
Virgo’s mutability is expressed through preparation for the Autumn season, a time of surrender and decomposition. As we prepare to close the Summer and move into another state of being, I offer you all an herbal infusion blend I’m working with this season, which honors another millennia old tree--gingko and nourishment from two of my favorite nervines. Here’s an Herbal Infusion for Time-Traveling Disciples:
Lastly, if you've been wanting to attune to your natural rhythms, romance lunar astrology and our plant kindred, make herbal medicine to support your everyday well-being rituals, join me for my two upcoming classes Hearth Medicine: Herbs and Home-Tending Rituals for Immunity and Plant Magic! Herbal Lore, Medicine & Lunar Rhythms. This will be the last time I'll be offering the introductory Plant Magic class for a while, so I can focus my energy on preparing for Plant Magic Level 2 next year! So, if you've been wanting to check it out, be sure to apply.
with love,
sára