For those of you who are new:

I’m Bri.

I’m a queer animist witch who makes artwork and spiritual tools for other radical witches,and any folks that live an ethic of feeling deeply, toward relational authenticity with All-That-Is. I believe we all deserve to know love, reckon with grief, and embody joy in our lives.

Every month I publish this newsletter, kind of like a digital zine. It’s divided into four themes- Art, Magic, Earth & Action. This is the framework I use to ground my own creative and spiritual practices. And it’s my hope that this provides some grounding and context for you, reader, as you walk your own unique path.

The Art section is devoted to creative exploration and expression. Sometimes I’ll share an art ritual practice. Other times this is devoted to philosophy, how I think about expression, or a conflict I’m working through artistically.

Magic is the space I devote to discussion about communication with the Otherworld, transforming Self, making changes and manipulating energy in our lives. It is the place we use to touch into threads of fate; put in our two cents into the universal formations, so to speak. Witchcraft, simply put.

In the Earth section I talk about sacred ecology, relationships with flora, fauna, and fungi both materially and spiritually. There’s often a little folk magic inevitably sprinkled in here.

And in the Action section I talk about doing; courageous acts both large and small that we can take, that other folks are taking. Spreading good words and good deeds. I recently heard Kelly-Ann Maddox say, in an interview with the Chaos & Cunning podcast, that she doesn’t have a lot of hope, but she has a lot of fight in these times. Yes to that. This section is always dedicated to the fight.

With that, here’s your May 2026 missive: may it be to your benefit!

Art:

In my visual art practice, I come to the language of color first. I was just speaking to someone a couple days ago, who was watching me doodle with my watercolors. He mentioned he makes art too, or used to, but it was always only in black and grey. And that use of color has always confounded him.

I revealed that I’m the opposite; I have a hard time rendering value and depth without color. It is my technical weak spot.

I have also loved the conversations I’ve had with a musician that has synesthesia. We used to be baristas together, with free reign over the shop Spotify. We’d talk about songs or musical artists as they belonged to feelings of color, and played around with mixing color playlists.

In consideration of color and music, there’s always the host of musical albums named after colors, specifically. As famous as The Beatles White Album; Weezer’s Red, Blue and Green albums to lesser known indie classics like my favorite Blue by iamamwhoami. I don’t have synesthesia, really, but color and their “energies” simply make sense to me. And these can relate to all the senses: sound, taste, texture, etc.

from the album Blue, by ionnalee/ iamamiwhoami

Where in your life does color have a sound? Drop a link to your favorite color-related musical artist/ album/ song in the comments!

Magic:

Color magic is (in my opinion) the most accessible form of glamour magic. Glamour magick is sympathetic magic that uses like objects and attributes to attract similar objects, attributes and energies. We do this by dressing or adorning the self in a way that will literally alter others perception of you. What I think is more important here is altering your own perception of self, even if only temporarily.

For example,

If you need more protection on a given day, or need to exude a sense of authority, wearing black, red, or burgundy will do this. These colors have depth, drama and reflect the colors of void, of blood, and deep tannic flavors.

If you need assistance with grounding, wear greens, browns, or, again, burgundy or oxblood. For the past ten+ years I wear (and wear out, repair, and repurchase) oxblood leather boots. Having a tool that protects my feet and also happens to be the color of blood is super grounding. Boots are literally the intermediary between my feet and the earth, so glamouring the use of my everyday footwear is powerful. I’ve been relying on this little bit of repetitive glamour magick since 2014.

Color, first, is an excellent way to get in touch with your own desires and reaffirm them for yourself. Next time you have trouble picking out an outfit, consider the way you would like to project yourself and let the foundation of how you choose to get dressed be rooted in color magick.

Apply color in any way you see fit; fingernails, face, neck-wear, head-wear… You may emphasize your glamour by significantly choosing where on your body to apply what color. Like wearing a blue scarf if you want to amplify your voice, for example. Or a pink scarf if you want to emphasize sweetness in all your communications.

Note that color and associations are subjective, and usually culturally reinforced. It’s worth deconstructing any associations you have with color that don’t reflect your values or personal alignment. For example, I’m gender queer and I don’t associate pink with femininity (anymore.)

Patriarchy doesn’t get to steal a beautiful color from me, just because I’m AFAB and a nonbinary person. Femmes can be thems, it’s true. For some of us, even that can change from day to day. I do associate hot pinks with fun and a bit of salaciousness. So when I’m looking to have a hot time, I put on hot pink, which I usually like to pair with orange, for an added flavor of humor and quick wit… “Orange you glad? ;-)

Hone in on your own associations first. The energy you exude will take care of others’ perceptions.

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Earth:

Mytho-poetically, I see color in the natural world as a representation of yearning and desire. Flowers use sensual messages via color and scent to communicate with other beings like insects and humans. I love the idea of adopting this methodology as a human to get my needs and desires met (hello glamour magick ;-)

I invite you to think about the colors you’re drawn to lately, and where you may find them in the more-than-human world. Does this color show up on a certain plant, or animal? And if so, what is the spiritual message this being might have for you? How does that land in your own life?

Let this be lighthearted, and don’t take yourself or this assignment too seriously! Optionally, you can take a walk outside, holding this intention in mind: to notice what colors jump out at you, and to say hello to whomever is hosting that color.

For example:

Lately I am obsessed with swampy greens; matcha, absinthe, chartreuse. Whenever I encounter a moss or a lichen sporting these greens, I’m immediately drawn to say hello.

I’m also attracted to sulfuric yellows and lavender purples.

That last one is easy: the color is named after the lavender plant. I can seek to celebrate lavender or any flower I see hosting this shade of purple. I’ll offer water and say hello. I’m lucky that my mom has a lavender plant growing outside our back patio that I can water, talk to and smell as often as I like. My attraction to lavender feels like a yearning for peace, and for sensual pleasure; homey goodness, and scent as magic.

I haven’t come into contact with mineralized sulfur in about a year now (I used to work at a science center where I had access to an extensive mineral collection!) But if I barely research sulfur, the element, I know that it is the 11^th most abundant element in the human body, and the 6^th most abundant element in seawater. The spiritual medicine I’d intuit from this feels like an emphasis on “life force energy” and the medicine of necessary taboo (sulfuric acid is not a pleasant smell; culturally sulfur is associated with hell and the demonic.)

Also, the interior of several species of Hellebore strikingly sports an acidic green and/or sulfuric yellow; a powerful and poisonous witches’ plant related to banishment and spiritual transformation. The hellebore I’ve seen most recently at a friend’s flower farm had those yellows inside. Yes, I’ll take a does of that medicine, please and thank you.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with this bit of comedy. I stand by it. ;-)

“Through our ceremonies and our rituals we have witnessed firsthand the awesome and vibratory power of color. We experience it as alive and constantly shaping our experience.” - Laurie Boehner, A Mighty Wind.

Action:

To say our world is overwhelming right now is an understatement. I’m constantly seeing lukewarm takes on how it’s all falling apart and the things we all should have been doing yesterday/five years ago to prepare for imminent doom.

In many ways we need a certain type of collapse to occur for Life to continue unfettered and unoppressed. But trying to capital-P “Prep” for apocalypse is not the answer. For one, it’s a net zero for the nervous system.

Flexibility in mind and spirit will go further than you think in these times, and practical preparation for collapse should remain simple. You don’t need to do ALL OF THE THINGS right now, or even tomorrow. Choose a small thing today that is accessible, and choose a thing that feels in alignment with preparing for living your life well, in general. This will help you feel resourced in the near future, as well as within a hypothetical collapsing timeline in the future. (not trying to say that collapse is hypothetical, but realistically, there are some ways in which we don’t know what we need until that moment arises.)

I’ll share what I’m doing right now, in hopes it inspires you to start small. Let your ability to respond to your life in this world radiate from a sustainable place. These ripples will continue to exponentially build on one another.

A list of (small) ways I am practicing self-care and collapse awareness/ resilience right now

• Growing Potatoes.

  Thanks to the work of Growing With Beccalynne I’m in consideration of growing my garden to supply my Winter pantry. I’ve never grown potatoes, but they are a staple in my diet, and in the diets of so many humans! So this year I am learning. Emphasis on learning. I am learning to grow potatoes. So far, I have planted russets and Kennebac golds, and I see little leafy shoots!

  I am also growing sweet onions. And I’ve planted drying beans (pinto and purple hull peas) for the first time ever as well. We will see what happens. Plant, grow, fail, (succeed?) learn, repeat. I won’t be feeding my whole family with only home grown food this winter, but growing food is a skill that needs regular tending. And it’s worth it!

• Stretching my body regularly.

  I’ve decided I need a regular movement routine, and to focus on strength and mobility I’m doing simple mat pilates in the floor of my bedroom. (Funny story, this all began because my back started twinging after I planted my potatoes. Action really does unfold into more action!) I’m keeping it free via the generosity of instructors on Youtube, and so far I’ve kept up with this practice every-other-day, for two weeks. That’s a huge deal for someone as routine-averse and exercise-phobic as myself.

• Mending my clothes:

  My favorite pair of heavyweight linen trousers have holes in the inner thigh. I recently found holes in my black linen summer shorts. And… tenderly, I’ve been mending the patches in the art-pants my late brother made.

  These art-pants are one of several pairs of jeans he had bleached, ripped, and cut graphic patches from t-shirts and sewn into the pants with orange thread. Some of the patches are loose, so I’m adding my own orange stitches. And I’ll add an orange “Spirit of Mugwort” patch I’ve printed for myself, to give the jeans a bit of my own energy.

  

  These pants happen to fit me very well. When I am finished mending and tending this piece of clothing, I’ll wear them in honor of my brother, who left this world last August.

  I do believe that learning to mend clothing is a collapse-resilient skill, and carries some kind of intimacy with the daily facts of our lives as we wear, wear out, and repair our beloved textiles. The skill here lies in the actual knowledge and implementation of repair, as well as within the practice of noticing that repair is possible. Cultivating a mindset of reuse, repair and upcycling will NEVER go out of style, in any timeline, collapse or not!

  The threads of grief and joy will always run, too, through meaningful clothing; favorite sweaters, blankets, scarves… Slow intentional hand-stitching happens at a pace that feels meant to trace these pathways of love. It’s a repetitive physical motion- the stitching- that feels magical to me. A way to embody, over and over, the love we have for self and others that never goes away, despite ever-shifting life circumstances.

• “I am an embodied fractal of nature.”

  Right now I am taking Starhawk’s online class Rituals for Resilience: Ritual Skills 2026. On our opening class we deeply touched into grounding, and how important this is for the foundation of any ritual or collective undertaking. In guided meditation we were prompted to notice the part(s) of our body that feel like the center of our self and safety, to imagine a sound or sensory experience that feels deeply like self, and to consider a phrase that also feels like self/ safe/ home. Putting each of these aspects together, by touching the Self part of our body, while invoking the sensory perception and saying our phrase, we created personal touchstones for a quick grounding ritual to use at any given time.

  My phrase is “I am an embodied fractal of nature.” I touch my gut and heart simultaneously, and I imagine the sound of creek water rushing over rocks.

  Consider for yourself what this trifecta of your grounded self may sound/feel/ smell or look like. Try coming up with an instant grounding motion and phrase for yourself.

• Ritual Bathing and Sacred Spirit(s) of Water

  Before I was even aware that I am a witch I was a ritual bath-taker. By way of a candle, a book of poetry, and a cup of hot tea and iced water, I’ve been taking ritual baths since I was a teenager. I’ve since then become a full-blown self-identifying witch, so my baths have happily become more involved. Herbal bath teas, cleanses, enchantments on my exfoliation materials… When life hands me a lemon, I crawl into the bath.

  Bathing is a mundane ritual of life that can be emphasized to create more positive self-regard. You can apply intention to showering or bathing of any kind. Even the ways we wash our hands can create a small moment of tending ourselves and acknowledging the Other. Handwashing is a small act of cleansing that brings wellness our bodies and nourishment to our spirits and we cannot do this without water.

  Truly, the experience of having clean water, and heated water at that, pumped into our homes and woven freely into our lives is a privilege. Clean water, to drink and to bathe with, however, is RIGHT. And it is a right under threat. It should not be.

  Start small. Say thank you to Water. Then rest and wait and witness what unfolds. You may find, as I have, that as you deepen your relationship to water, opportunities will arise to align your spirit-in-action with Water Liberation.

Thank you so much for reading Art Ritual: Art, Magic, Earth & Action.

If you enjoyed reading this, it would help me so much if you commented or shared this with a kindred spirit.

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Go raibh maith agat/ May you all have goodness.

Love love,

Bri

I’m Bri (they/sidhe), writing from Art Ritual. This is your Art Magic. Earth. Action Missive for the month of April, 2026.

A lot of you are recent subscribers, and to that I say: well-come! Thanks for consenting to connect with me here. It’s my intention that what I send to your inbox serve you well in your own creative/spiritual practice and connecting with the web of All That Is.

I have a commitment to myself, and to Spirit to only ever write when I have something to say. Sometimes, that will not warrant a whole newsletter. I also have a commitment to the Spirit of Art Ritual to show up and see if anything pours forth. This missive will be brief, but potent.

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Art:

The art and craft I am immersed in these days is very focused on production. This can be hard on my creative nervous system; I have to be sure I make space for play, and colorful meandering, doodling and general artistic daydreaming. Or I risk falling out of love with the process of being a maker.

I am making a series of block printed linen pieces out of found, vintage, and thrifted table dressing. These pieces are inspired by Hedgerows- those liminal spaces between human-settled notions of a fixed landscape, and the portals at the edges of our domains that we just can’t tame. These rubber blocks I’m carving feature friends like the House Sparrow, Garter Snake, Nettles, Eastern Cottontail Rabbit, Bramble Blackberries… I may add Poke Berry. Because Poke is always there. <3

The enchantment I experience at the edges of the known landscape provides endless nourishment. Endless, because it’s not known and therefore makes room for that other kind of knowing, that my ancestors would have called “kenning” or cunning. Eyes in the soles of my feet, the eye in my gut…

Magic:

From 2022 to 2024 I lived in a pretty old rock house on some land in rural/ small town Western North Carolina. This house was on land that was culturally and officially known by a name that was rife with colonial history. Without giving away too much private information about my life and where I’ve lived, just know it was one of those names. Not “columbia” or “columbus,” but you get the idea. It was a name based on the action of removing Indigenous peoples, not even named after a specific colonizer.

That context made clear, I spent those two years introducing myself to the land, especially using an offerings and consent ritual I designed for such reasons. I’m a descendant of colonizers, and I am also a spiritual worker; I rely on my embodied relationship with Land and non-human spirits. I can’t do my work or be who I am without them. This ceremony is one way I am able to connect with spirits of land that helps me make sense of my context here.

The ritual is HERE if you’d like to learn more about it, do it, or have access to it.

As I was making offerings and introducing myself, I began to receive messages. They weren’t always clear at first. But here is some of what I learned about the flora/fauna/fungi and spirits there:

• They had a discomfort with fire. I think it had not always been used responsibly there.

• The gigantic Tulip Poplar was the heart of the “boundary” that the “property” I rented was drawn upon. I would pour honey-water, and gift flowers and food here. I also found a large jawbone of an animal tucked right up against Their roots. It was confirmation that another person (human or non-human) also recognized this Poplar, this Heart.

• The Hedgerow was an integral part of the Land here; the wild bramble, poke and other “weeds” deeply nourished lots of beings; birds, rabbits, pollinators and feral cats. The ecology seemed “small,” but the impact was truly immense. To curate, or cut down this wild space would be rude at best, and more likely, a cruel act of human insanity. I added to this hedgerow by planting Nettle and an Elderberry bush. And I also ate from the nettles and enjoyed the tart small wild blackberries. There was enough for everyone.

Earth:

The Tulip Poplar was also lonely for its kin. There were no other large trees nearby; just a couple modestly sized japanese maple trees, so far away from the Poplar that they couldn’t possible touch. Every slightly windy day sent the poplar’s branches wildly shedding. They also put off so many seeds that sprouted in my garden into little saplings. I regret that I never planted any of its kin to take root. The Tulip Poplar is still my teacher. They would have flourished among more of their own friends; trees are not solitary people. Not really. Their roots and limbs are meant to touch, intertwine and be strong together. This lonely Poplar lost so much because they had no kin to lean on, to buffer the winds when they got high.

Huge limbs came crashing down any time it truly rained or stormed and myself and my then-partner ended up building a “snake-bird” nest by dragging and piling their many arms in a circular/ spiralic fashion. This installation was beautiful to me, but our landlords fucking hated it. Which I am okay with, in retrospect.

I still have a journey stick I made from a shed limb, courtesy of Tulip Poplar. I have since painted markings with my hands and fingers, and used it to hang a paper curtain of channeled symbols and sigils for one leg of the Banshee in the Bible Belt project.

Action:

Try letting something “be,” in the world outside, in your life. Let grasses grow taller. Let weeds get bolder and set seed. Do less. There is magic there, after all, in doing less and letting things go to seed.

Why go to the trouble of hauling off the fallen limbs of a tree when you can gently stack them and build a snake pit? (I am mostly sort of kidding.)

I offer this suggestion more so to pique your interest in asking: what is healing for a space? And how is this different than (or the same as) what human beings prefer? How can our human animal selves be involved in ecological mutual aid?

Between the years of 2021 and 2024 (I moved literally five times in four years, ugh…) I found myself in a pattern where I’d end up only living in rentals with landlords more interested in visual homogeneity and landscaping rather than, say, permaculture. What’s even more strange about this is I was living in a part of the world that is revered for its natural beauty, and rather known for its alternative culture and having more emphasis on environmental awareness. A lot of it appeared to nod to the idea of such awareness, before it actually addressed the needs of our shared ecology. It was still, for example, normalized to get rid of so-called weeds even when they weren’t choking out a garden bed(Roundup? Really?!), and to have a lawn, or landscaped property over food forests and habitat.

*side note: here’s a link to wonderful, hilarious and FREE anarchist pamphlet called Make the Golf Course A Public Sex Forest. You’re welcome.

I learned a lot in those years, trying to garden and surviving nonsense landlords and their strange fixations on respectability and the optics of their properties. They seemed to carry a lot of guilt and shame that I was supposed to take on as a proxy.

In truth, having a hands-off approach can be just as detrimental to Land as acting with imposition; I learned that the hard way too. The Kudzu across the street from my rock house taught me that, and so did Nettles, when the two small plants I planted began to take up ALL the space they desired.

Being a human animal isn’t about never making an impact. It is honoring the responsibility that being in a body means making an impact. And listening and moving accordingly. As humans, we are “allowed” to (we must) have boundaries with the other-than-human world, but it behooves us to ground ourselves in a context that

1. removes hierarchy from our relational field

2. so that we can express real boundaries rooted in this relational place, in a respectful way. Boundaries that are focused on real needs, not superfluous preferences.

Anywho, that’s my take on this. Sometimes action looks like “non-doing,” and that’s brilliant and radical.

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This monthly missive will always be free.

Thanks for connecting with me here.

Go raibh maith agat/ may you have goodness.

In warmth and gratitude,

Bri (they/sidhe)

Spirit has no limit. Bodies, vessels, channels, and containers do. And I am grateful this is so.

Hello,

Thank you for reading the Art. Magic. Earth. Action missive for week of March 16th, to March 22nd.

This week I’m addressing an intimate part of being an artist in this world, something we all come up against, and probably always will. We can, however, shift toward letting the feeling of not enough-ness help us persist in our practice. It is, they say, the friction within oysters that helps them generate their pearls.

ART:

“Not enough” in an art practice can costume as discipline: “I don’t do enough.” It can costume in the cloak of quality: “my art isn’t good enough.”

It can wear what I consider the ugliest mask of all: false altruism. “My art is unnecessary in the context of [insert human rights, ecological, spiritual or moral crises here].

Self expression is not selfish. Making art for your own pleasure and joy, and to simply spread more beauty in a harsh and complicated world, is worthy in and of itself.

One of my most esteemed creative ancestors- very beloved to my creative practice- was a founder of Aestheticism. At one point in his career, Oscar Wilde was philosophically and practically devoted to “art for art’s sake” as a stance against art with “meaning,” for political statement or social criticism. And yet… his life works are political and socially critical. By the end of his life, Oscar Wilde was still an aesthete. Additionally he was a sage mystic, writing divine revelations from a jail cell in a hard labor prison, where he was being held after tried and convicted for “gross indecency” (homosexual relationships.) Hardly non-political. These are the rich paradoxes a creative life will demand that you embody.

You will make abstract work that “means nothing,” and it is still a reflection of your zeitgeist. We are all a part of this world. We do not get to be exempt from that, and our art isn’t exempt either.

Particularly in my ritual performance art practice, the work that I make has politically very sharp teeth. These works have been the kind of political that has become so personal that it is actually universal. In performance, I am often “asked” by Spirit, or “called” to design and make a piece. This always happens before I know where or when I will share it. I am “asked,” and when I say yes, the how-when-where-who clicks into place.

These works have teeth, I say, because they have a distinct point of view. In my performance art, my body becomes a part of the display; an installation which I am then able to lend an aura of disgust, confusion or (dis) credibility. Works like Banshee in the Bible Belt,” in which I am a paradox; unsettling death harbinger for the colonial project which makes my very existence on this Land (and that of my recent ancestors) possible.

Or as in Slowly, Painfully, by Poison,” in which I spiritually whither away in response to a fracked-gas pipeline, covered in plastic jugs and water bottles, weighted by chains of “life-as-proxy” and life as commodity.

These works are visually and mytho-poetically straightforward. Why I make the work and what these types of artworks have to say are quite clear.

When I make abstract and mixed media pieces they come from a place of my own joy and curiosity. The process is still spiritual, but I cannot say it has political resonance, aside from the situational reality of me, all my parts, and the things I am (queer, a womxn, feminized without my consent, racialized as “default/white) and things I am not (masculinized, neurotypical, racialized the way people of color are, etc.)

However, any act of generating or claiming AUTHENTIC JOY (as opposed to any manufactured facsimiles of joy re: consumption, exploitation of plant/animal/human bodies) is inherently political. These days, in late stage colonial capitalism careening into fascism? yes, authentic joy is political. Joy is inherently a stance, taken.

That said, when the philosophically and spiritually active parts of my creative practice are not directly running my process, I tend to feel a little lost. Or worse, guilty and self-indulgent. But those are feelings, not facts.

Just showing up to my creative practice is always enough. And when opportunities to use any platform that I have to SPEAK, I do that.

Removing or hiding the part of my art-self that plays in shapes, splashes and colors will not make me a better artist. It will not make me a more impactful artist. I am not more “whole,” as a witch or an activist if I only make work that is directly about liberation. For one, purity culture is definitely white supremacist culture, and it’s colonizer culture. And for two, as Bayo Akomolafe- amazing post-activst and thought leader- says:

“These times are urgent. We must slow down.”

Amid the rise of fascism in the US, and globally,

Amid I*C*fuck*E, amid collapse of empire,

it can feel imperative to give 110% of self to liberation movement work. The issues with this tend to crop up and compound when we reduce the myriad kaleidoscopic visionary aspects of building liberation down to what’s typical, expected, and easily labeled. I’m not the first person to insist that movement work isn’t just boots on ground, front of line, feet in streets; it’s not new.

I do want to specifically advocate for ALL us folks to focus on making the work we already do a part of liberation movements. Part of the work.

I hear much these days from mostly folks who are white (as am I) and closer to my own age, about “not knowing what to do” worrying that they are not doing “enough.” There are a few things at work here. I’ll name them.

One: overwhelm. Simple. Nameable.

Two: Actual self-awareness. Knowing that now is the time to step up and in; knowing that yesterday was also the time, and tomorrow will be too. But this usually develops into looking ahead, sustainability and stamina.

Three: White guilt. This is actually whiteness at work- the belief that “it’s down to me,” down to us, centered here around white actions and white thoughts.

My response around this has been to emphasize that what we do as people, as a collective matters (across racial, class, gender, ability lines) that liberation is a COMMUNITY PROJECT. The actions of one individual right now are not it. This has happened in at least four conversations I’ve had over the last two months.

**side note. Ohmigawd, what does this have to do with art? Everything, everything, I’ll circle back real soon.

So the white guilt and personal integrity issues are ours, white folks’ to deal with, in spaces of unlearning whiteness.

But movement work happens IN community and our capacity to show up in community relies on us white folks to tend our demons. It’s time to unlearn/ tend our guilt, to make room for actual sustainable ways we can show up.

Anyway, what does this have to do with art?

White supremacist capitalist culture is responsible for imbuing within you that feeling of not doing enough. It skews relationality and it skews the cultural collective ideal of who is at center. It also emphasizes “victim/ rescuer” and “perpetrator/ innocent” dichotomies that atrophy real responsibility, that is- ability to respond.

If you, in your own integrity, show up as you are actually able (not from a place of guilt) you will find your capacity will increase over time. You will find it easier to accept that showing up as you feel called and are able is enough. That is why there is room for artists in the resistance. And that is also why the resistance needs artists. Because we are here. And we will show up as ourselves, with our unique way of doing liberation work and being in community.

MAGIC in EARTH

In my astrological makeup, I have significant placements in earth and water. I also have a stellium in a fire sign, but it’s taken me these thirty odd years to start to

court fire.

I call it “courting fire,” because it felt like I needed to woo fire, to devote myself to learning from, and learning to love, this elemental. Our Sun is life; it is quintessential fire, literally a ball of flame. But I have had to use my familiarity with Plant People, folks that literally digest solar energy, to understand how much I also need the fires of my own digestive system, both physically and spiritually.

Enter Stinging Nettle- the spirit of Green Fire. To my delight, as I began to write this missive, (and as I designed a new linocut that features Nettle) I have encountered Nettle in books! I have encountered other writings on Substack and beyond singing the praises of Urtica Dioica. It may likely reflect our seasonal time in the northern hemisphere; it is nearly the Spring equinox, and Nettles (with Dandelion, Chickweed, and others) are some of the first nutrient-rich fresh greens to make their presence available for soups, quiches, or wilted into salads. Nettles are in our cultural milieu, and they have been for centuries!

Nettles are, in my mind, Earth and Fire. They are iron-rich, full of earth’s ancient blood, which makes them a wonderfully nutritive tonic- something that gives the bodies that ingest Nettles a big boost. Before their preparations, by either cooking or in tinctures, Nettles are fiery and full of sting. In spite of our skin’s inflammatory response to their initial sting, medicinally, Nettles provide relief.

Nettles are astringent,tightening the mucous membranes and the skin, relieving inflammation. Another way Nettles relieves inflammation is with antirheumatic properties, nipping away at musculoskeletal discomfort (arthritis, for example.) I knew a leather worker who would encounter a tender elbow from all the cutting and tough sewing she engaged in. Occasionally she’d go down below the studio we were working in at the time and rub both her arms in the Nettles patch. The preliminary burn would provide a pathway to endorphins and an internal relief from the tension built up in her working arms.

You may work with Nettles physically, and internally, to court fire. Or you may work with their Green Fire Spirit, to engage consciously with any creative or spiritual inflammation. Fires will burn away excess, they will charge the new life waiting dormant in the brushes of the overgrowth in a forests’ understory. After an initial burn, the cooling down in a hearth of coals reveals something (anything and everything the fire touches) transformed. Released.

Any worries about “enoughness” in your creative practice will yield itself to transformation; alchemical digestion revealing the inherent value of joy as an act of rebellion. Request the help of Nettles to de-escalate. Let the fires of change in action devour any guilt you have surrounding taking up space with your art and creative practice. You belong here. You belong in the revolution.

Gratitude to Nettles:

Thank you for your sobering sting,

For the reminder to pay attention, always asking

Who all lives here?

Thank you for your medicine, in my body and in my spirit. Gratitude to Nettles, and all the beings that make up the liminal hedgerow ecology. Human, Woodland, Otherworld, beyond the veil.

ACTION:

Making art is not the only way that artists do liberation work and take action. Many of us make the art we make, and alongside we attend the grassroots Rights of Nature function. We volunteer our time at the library to share our craft with future generations of creatives. We show up for each other, and weave webs of connection and accountability.

One important distinction to make, in our age of oversharing, the surveillance state, and what happens when wokism is skewed into being cops to each other,

is to define the work you do in service to community by the relationship you have with yourself and with your community. Do NOT fall into the trap of defining this work, your sacred service, by what can be qualified by social media, brownie points, or visible impact. You do some of this work in action without posting about it! You do the bulk of your liberation work by showing up to it, and doing so with intention. Any documentation that happens frankly isn’t the point.

You might share so that others can take up the work too; it may become part of story of your work organically. We aren’t invisible, after all! No prescribed rules. Just beware of the pitfalls of the “hero/victim/villain” story that white supremacist colonial capitalism thrives on. We are no longer running that script!

Consider something that feeds your art practice, and then consider ways you can participate in the support/ protection/ conservation of that thing. For example, if you’re a ceramic artist, you may consider (financially or with your labor), supporting Indigenous artists surrounding preservation and protection of access to traditional clay deposits. If you’re a wildlife photographer, you may link up with the Audubon Society, or become very active in land conservancy. As a musician, you may give of your time to teach young folks the basics of recording and production. A real life example would be the needlecrafters in Minneapolis who raised $400,000 from their “Melt the Ice” hat pattern.

Again, we revel in enough-ness. We celebrate joy as rebellion. We show up in ways that make sense for who we already are, because we already belong. And we sure as hell don’t need external validation to make our service in the movement worth it. Because movement work is the reward. We vision for a future we will not live to see; its for the collective, not for an individual.

Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to this newsletter; it really helps!

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In other news:

If you’re also a fan of Oscar Wilde, or simply enjoy queer camp and social critique, the National Theatre has made The Importance of Being Ernest, a satirical play by Wilde, available to watch in its entirety on Youtube:

Ways to Work with Me or Buy My Art:

• You can view some of my wares, including the linocut note cards featuring Rabbit & Nettles HERE at Hand Over Hearth, my virtual shopfront.

  I’ll be expanding this soon, with home goods and apparel, all one-of-a-kind, upcycled with fine textiles, hand-printed and hand-dyed.

• You can book a Tarot reading or learn about my Art Ritual offerings HERE

  And I’m working on offering land-tending and home-clearing services as well. Stay tuned.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-The Second Coming W.B. Yeats

How do we short-circuit control?

How do we drain the power sources of the forces that are ceaselessly trying to keep us in their grasp? Even those forces within ourselves?

-Nonbinary by Genesis P-Orridge

Hi, and please tolerate the dramatic and sobering introduction here. It was just the full moon in Leo last night, as I write, so I am leaning into All Things Extra. And also,

The center cannot hold.

It can’t. And it shouldn’t. Because our cultural “center” has been defectively skewed for a very, very long time.

We are in a pivotal moment in humanity’s reality. We’ve seen time and again, via creative revolutionary movements like the Zapatista,the Movement for Black Lives, ACT UP,

and specifically artistic movements that deal in disparate parts - like dadaism, surrealism, Fluxus, Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth,etc. that:

-getting weird with it

breaking shit apart

rearranging the good stuff

and making something new-

Is how revolution happens.

The center cannot hold and things are flying off the rails in any case. Grab what you can use, and repurpose that shit.

Activists and movement workers are the most creative people, full stop. And so artists design revolution. We play with revolution, mess around in the voluptuous chaos of it all,

(I believe in beautiful chaos.)

Before the changes solidify.

We are not afraid to get experimental. In fact, we enjoy it.

Collage with imagery, with sound, or in any way at all is a direct line to upset,

literally, to take what is typically perceived as set or fixed and, using known images and symbols, transmogrifying them into a new thing.

Collage is working with what you have, and what is known, to conjure the unknown. Collage is the medium of art-monsters. Collage is psychedelia, and when it hits, it’s a dose of creative of transgression.

Welcome to Art. Magic. Earth. Action; missive for the week of February 2nd to the 8th, 2026.

ART:

This week, our art practice deals with collage.

When I was a kindergartner, I loved only two things about going to school. One of those things was the cut-n’-paste table. Scissors, paper scraps, glue, all laid out on a table. It was magic. I lost time there. It was a place for me to process my overstimulation,to be physical and generative; let go, destroy, and put things back together again.

As an adult, one of my first re-entries toward my own creative spirit was via collage. I got back to the cut n’ paste table, and gave my inner child their sense of wonder, experimentation and control back. Then everything else came tumbling out pretty easily.

***Practice***

Grab any paper at all, scissors and a glue stick, and go to town. Get after some magazines, old books, pamphlets, catalogues from in the mail. I love junk mail for this, I really do. Food Lion sales papers, coupon books, weird local magazines, glossy free publications that feature galas, golf courses and have multi-million dollar real estate in the back… grab those free things. We also have the internet, and search engines now. And the New York Public Library’s Public Domain Collection. Have fun with it.

A lot of us are familiar with the “vision board,” and I’m a fan of those myself (they’ve worked for me. I also sometimes make what I call “shadow boards,” and that’s a conversation for another time.) Instead of vision boarding, go at this collage activity with the attitude of a trickster god/demon designing your own strange universe. Who belongs? Who doesn’t? Why and why not?

This is your opportunity to create that which requires no explanation.

MAGIC:

In the first few chapters of their memoir, Nonbinary, artist, musician, and visionary occultist Genesis P-Orridge writes about their first visit with William S. Burroughs. (Here’s an interview of Genesis talking about that same visit.) The two artists connected over mail- art, a shared love of images, and collage practice, which they called “cut-ups.”

In the book, Genesis writes about Burroughs’ use of collage in order to enact his will on his external world.

At one point, Burroughs apparently felt jilted by a local restaurant:

“I used to eat at the Moka Bar on Frith Street,” he said. “But they were always rude to me, unfriendly, so I had to curse the place.”

Then William proceeded to tell me how he had cursed it using his cut-up magic technique. First, he walked back and forth past the Moka Bar, again and again, with his TEAC cassette recorder slung over his shoulder, making a recording of all the ambient street sounds.

Honking horns. Shouts from passersby… Once back home, he began to “cut in” by randomly recording what he called “trouble noises.” Ominous, negative sounds recorded from his TV. Gunshots, police sirens, warfare… buildings being demolished, screams of fear, crying, fire engines…

Once he had cut these sounds into his original ambient recording, he went back to Frith Street. He played his edited trouble tape as loud as possible while he again walked up and down past the cafe.

William had also taken a photograph of the row of buildings with the Moka Bar in the middle. He made a print, sliced out the cafe with a razor, and burned the removed rectangle image of the Moka Bar while gluing the remain two parts of the photo back together in his journal, minus the cafe.

It paid off. Within weeks the Moka Bar was closed and suddenly out of business, never to reopen.”

-from Nonbinary; Genesis P-Orridge

EARTH/ACTION:

Consider the use of collage as spellwork. Or rather, consider any spellwork or magical practice at all an act of multi-dimensional collage. Energetic rearrangement.

How can you utilize what you have

-materially (time, season, lunar cycle, day of the week; location, geography, landmarks or points of interest, atmosphere)

-intellectually (mindset, ambition & goal-setting, inspiration, artwork, or pulling in the wisdom of creative ancestors who are not necessarily related to you but do inform your sacred work)

-spiritually (ancestral magiks, spirit allies, non-human kin, your own intuition, your creative practice…)

-emotionally (rage, grief, ecstatic joy, laughter, sorrow…)

to deconstruct and reconstruct your reality?

You can simply make a collage. I’ve made several collages that were neither vision boards, nor art made for the sake of making art. They were, however, an expression of vision I hold for myself and the collective.

I’ve made a collage binding r*pe apologists in judicial positions of power. I've made a collage bestowing my solar plexus with the love and compassion of Rose plant medicine. I’ve made collage in honor of the spirits of my formative creative ancestors, to signify my willingness to be more intimate with their legacy, their memory, and carry their work forward in my lifetime.

You can also use collage as one part of a larger art-ritual. You might give something onerous a bit of the William S. Burroughs treatment. Though I reckon most of us reading this would reserve such powers toward larger causes. Then again, William S. Burroughs was a gay man living in the time he lived… were the staff at the Moka Bar rude, or were, they,

you know,

R(homophobic)ude?

***

On the sacred (to me and my wayback people) day of Imbolc, at the beginning of this week, it snowed. Imbolc is the quickening of spring. It is historically a celebration of Brigid, of fire, the forge, poetry, healing, and the home. It was a pretty magical time for snow.

I gathered a handful and made a snowball, and took it in the house to melt in a ramekin at my sunny window, near my altar. I put a piece of honey calcite and rose quartz in the snow, and waited.

Now I have some consecrated water to use for springtime healing/ cleaning

and/ or…

to amplify the signal of melting ICE.

This is still collage, just very multi-media.

I hope this missive leaves you feeling resourced to shake things up a little, as you so desire. Let your collage, and your creative/ magical practice as a whole, be as gentle or as stimulating as you need it to be.

As art-witches, we shift, change shape as needed. And our practice accommodates that for us! Collage is an excellent tool for an art practice, and a magical practice.

Amplify your signal, or go dark. Whatever you need.

All blessings be. And may you know love, reckon grief, and embody joy.

Warmly and sincerely,

Bri

I celebrate you, your broken heart, your grief, and your fierce dedication to justice and the best that humanity has to offer.

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The veil of distortion and catastrophe we are all living under in globalized late-stage capitalism/ collapse is painful. And the joy you may feel in, say, witnessing your cat companion deeply soaking up their own endorphins in a patch of sunlight is still very real medicine. Every time you celebrate your own freedom, you cement your resistance to the surveillance state. Every time you make art, you can choose to make that act of creativity resonate with justice. You can, in your own privilege, acknowledge the power that comes from that, as well as

the power inherent in your being as a material human on this planet.

You can, within that power or privilege, demand a more whole and just world. Start in your own neighborhood. And for some of us, yes, we have ICE patrolling our streets. Be safe, and be brave.

Some of us in the United States are experiencing the tactics of secret police for the first time, (click the link for a brilliant short piece by Seanfhocail.) while some of us in the US have ancestors who have been through it all before. It is no wonder our nervous systems are flooded; we are, in one way or another, living out centuries of compressed energetic relational trauma.

Even in these times, yes,

art.

Especially in these times, definitely

ritual, ceremony and fierce spellwork.

Art:

Please continue creating and making. And if you are feeling particularly creatively blocked, or are having (incredibly valid) feelings of nihilism or pointlessness related to creative practice, give yourself the time to feel those feelings. Don’t force yourself to be where you are not.

I am not here to convince you to make art while the world is burning. I will advocate for creative practice as a holistic part of wellness and self-care. Often, the art that happens during revolution becomes, itself, revolutionary. Sometimes we are asked to get out of our own way. It is not selfish to make art in dire times. It is selfish to shrink away and avoid giving of that which we have to offer, just because some others may judge your service as self-indulgence. There is a reason for a pattern in history, that fascist & authoritarian governments come after queers, sex workers, and artists first. Please fight back.

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When we stay with the trouble, and when we do it in the way that makes sense for who we are as individuals, we hold the line, and keep the fire burning for others to meet themselves and be who they are, even amid abject horror. (if you’re an artist, you make art. If you make art, you are an artist, and so on…) When ten, fifty, hundreds and thousands of people are empowered in Self, and then collaborate, major things happen. Culture shifts.

Magic:

A couple of years ago (2024 to be exact) I first encountered Laura Tempest Zakroff’s sigils for protection for the rights of transfolx. I was honored to be reading tarot at the House of Black Cat Magic in West Asheville, and this sigil was on their sandwich board outside. One of the proudest moments of my career was seeing that sigil on the sandwich board outside, with my name listed as the day’s tarot reader on the other side of that board. May my work in the world always be synonomous with cats and queer magick!

Here’s a sigil LTZ has designed to aid in the protection of protesters against ICE. Use it judiciously, and prolifically. Write it on everything, everywhere. Or put it on a piece of paper, set a candle on top of that paper, and light it once a day in prayer, sending energy to folks that need protection as they interrupt systemic violence as it is unfolding in our country. Consider designing your own symbols or sigils that carry deep meaning to you.

Earth:

In dire times, consider your best most direct connection to Earth: your own body. Celebrate yourself as an embodied fractal of what the colonial project calls “nature.” The word “nature,” in my native English language, almost defers the human part of it; like, the word creates a dichotomy rather than emphasizing parts of a whole.“Nature” implies there’s the realm of either human/ civilization, or nature/wild. This is just a warped perspective.

Rest when you need to rest, if you can. Eat when you need to eat. Feel the wind, sun, rain on your face. Go outside even when the weather is uncomfortable. Simplify as much as you can; strip your life down into its basic form of being a human animal. Here is a podcast episode I published in 2023 that touches on how the systems of oppression that currently control “Western” ways of life rely on a human species divorced from our own belonging to the web of life, or, so-called “nature.” May it provide fuel for the fire of your spirit, and guidance if you need it.

Action:

I do not know very much about the life and word of William Wordsworth, English poet. I do have the first few lines of one of his sonnets perpetually on track through my psyche. The one that goes:

“The world is too much with us, late and soon-

Getting and Spending we lay waste our powers,

Little we see in Nature that is ours”

The world is too much with us, but you are enough. Whether you choose to persist, and keep making art, or you opt for some sigil work, spellcraft, or you donate to your local food pantry, or bake a loaf of bread for your grieving neighbors…

Maybe you are the one who needs the bread. Needs the pantry. Needs to be held.

You are enough, you are doing enough. Trust the rhythms of your life, your body-as-nature, and trust that you will show up as you are able. The revolution is happening now, and all are needed. Fuck ICE and

May we all get free. May you know love, reckon grief, and embody joy.

Sending you as much peace as you can manage to experience,

Bri

It is 2026, for what that’s worth! As I’ve said to a dear friend of mine, if this year is even incrementally kinder to us than this past year, that will feel like a big deal.

However, it’s actually okay- nay, HUMAN, as in having an INTACT HUMANITY- to feel poorly. Feeling bad sucks, but living inside an autocratic government that kidnaps people and calls it “the law,” “legal” and “just” is a frightful nightmare that we must stay present with. And that’s just one piece of the nightmare.

There’s no waking up from this until we move the needle of our humanity forward into actionable protection and liberation for all beings. We fight on; imperfectly, we fight.

Here’s the Art.Magic.Earth.Action missive for this coming week: Saturday Jan 3rd to Saturday Jan 10th.

sometimes these “weekly” bouts of writing are published on Friday, sometimes on Wednesday, sometimes Saturday. Life is life-ing.

We’re going out of my usual order this week (if you say “art, magic, earth, action” out loud, it’s pretty catchy. Just feels good.) ,

But this week we’re starting with “Earth,” not “Art”…

Earth:

In any given rotation of the Earth around our Sun I celebrate no less than 4 “New Years.” I acknowledge the Gregorian calendar new year- the most common one in my Western USA culture- as an act of quiet acceptance.

Okay, I’m here. It’s 2026.

The threshold between December 31st and January 1st is relevant… but only in the linear calculation of time we humans are currently so fond of.

Otherwise, I celebrate Samhain as the Celtic New Year, happily also known as the Witches’ New Year, per my spiritual practice. I celebrate a new year at the beginning of Aries season, Spring Equinox. I also celebrate Imbolc, in February. It’s a traditional Springtime celebration (considered by the Celts to be the beginning of Spring even though equinox is like a month away) Imbolc is in devotion to Brigid, creatrix goddess of craft, poetry, art/inspiration and the home and hearth.

I don’t necessarily celebrate Imbolc like a new year, but I do devote my time that day to celebrating my creative passion, consecrating my art-tools, and dusting off the cobwebs of my psyche. I am more likely to make resolutions, naturally, at this time, rather than at Gregorian New Year on January 1st. Now this brings me to

Art & Magic:

We are combining art and magic this week to feature The Compost Tarot Spread!

Many of you who are subscribed my letters, here, have already received a digital copy of this zine I made, which depicts a tarot spread I designed called The Compost Tarot Spread: Inquiry for Enriching Your Life Soil.

I still really love this work; I’m very proud of it, in all its imperfection.

I’m sharing this here again, now, because I am the kind of witch who feels groggy when January 1st rolls around, even though it’s a “new year.” I tend to still feel like I’m emptying out all of my psychic excess; processing emotion, and sorting through the ephemera of my life. I imagine that I’m not the only human who feels this way! In my world, this is a time for sorting, composting, and letting my dreams cure in the dark to fully root (and rot!). Exposing my ambitions to light too soon is a surefire way to extinguish their potential.

Here at Art Ritual, and in my larger project at Mugwort Media, I make it a point to celebrate decay. I do this to literally bring attention to unseen forces that our daily existence relies on. I also do this to symbolically uplift all marginalized parts of the All That Is, or Life Force, or Creation,

parts that seem messy, unclean, or literally and metaphorically “beneath” human consciousness.

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And so, without further ado, here’s the Compost Tarot Spread

(*this gallery option on Substack is going to truncate these images. You’ll need to

1.) click to read on substack, outside of your email, and

2.) click on the first image in the gallery to scroll through)

When you click on the images from Substack, there should be a little download button in the upper left corner. Feel free to keep this and use it. It is for the commons, for us all to use!

Action:

One action is to give yourself this Compost reading! Inquire and see what resonates.

Another action is to do less. Do one less thing. Resist the urge to plan, coordinate, and manifest before you’re ready. If you happen to be at a natural place in your inner world to start enacting great change, excellent!

But remember to listen,

Listen to yourself and the world around you. Listen to your allies in the natural world, and spirits and allies in the Otherworld. Do this kind of checking in before you capitulate to any external pressures to perform, to generate, to produce, to change, or “be better.” Self improvement is not a villain, and nor is the human ego. However, ground yourself in natural cycles, because

you are

I am

We are

also embodied fractals of nature. Ground yourself, and then decide.

Cheers,

Sending love through the ether. May we all know love, reckon grief, and embody joy. May we all get free.

-Bri

Ways to work with me:

Right now my books are open for tarot readings. Click here for more information on getting a reading with me.

We live in strange times, and this includes our economic reality. I would argue that nobody needs a tarot reading. But you may want one if you are looking for insight in your personal trajectory right now, or if you’re curious about what supports are waiting for you outside of what’s observable and physical. We all have spiritual supports and we are all capable of accessing and receiving wisdom from allies beyond the material veil. Tarot readings help us read our own stories, and they can help us intentionally access those numinous perspectives and spiritual supports from Spirit(s).

You can adopt some artwork:

Here is a link to my online shop. There’s just one thing for sale right now (an awesome paper garland depicting magickal black cats!) Soon, I’ll have some more garlands, prints, handmade pillows, and I’m developing a little sleeping charm, to amplify dreamworking. More details on that soon!

If you’ve read this far, thank you for being here! And if you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

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I hope you’re taking up space for heart-centered pleasure in your life! On that note:

Here’s the weekly missive on Art, Magic, Earth, Action.

Art:

I recently read a gorgeous queer novel called The Palace of Eros by Caro de Robertis (highly recommend!) and now I’m reading The Ethical Slut for the first time. These days, I am loosely holding the threads of eroticism, art, and life-force-energy in new ways.

As an artist and spiritual worker, I’ve often felt that creative and sensual energy go hand in hand. Our human capacity to experience grief and joy are in correlation. I think our capacity to be creative and make space for erotic energy are similarly connected. Being creative and being in touch with our own eroticism both rely on a specific type of safety- a safety we cultivate within ourselves that allows us to be vulnerable, authentic, and take positive risks.

Likewise, a lot of us are exposed to shame around our bodies and sexuality at approximately the same period of life that we receive our first creative wounds. If you are queer, you probably extra remember (or have particularly blocked) memories and parts of self and creativity that you had to cordon off for your safety.

For some of us, creative wounds looked like being told we “aren’t good” at art. Maybe something we made that we were really excited about didn’t get the response we were hoping for. I have heard too many stories about so-called “art-teachers” who have no stomach for curiosity or raw expression. I don’t comprehend what exactly they thought their role was in the lives and development of their students…?

So many of us got into trouble for taking a sharpie marker to our living room couch, windows, and walls. To be criticized for drawing on our walls isn’t harm. But we may have internalized problematic messages about our “too muchness,” or how “dangerous” our creative impulses can be, nonetheless.

In The Ethical Slut, the authors write that the antidote to shame is curiosity. That must also mean that those of us who dwell in shame cannot be drawn to life-ways that require our expansiveness. Creative practice and art -making require curiosity and a willingness to experiment. Shame is a blocker of eroticism, and of creativity.

For a moment, let us separate eroticism and sex. Let’s retire the word “sex” as it pertains to physical acts, and focus on eros, desire; that which pulls us, that which we long for. Let’s use sensuality to denote that which provokes our senses, the signals we process within our body.

Art-making is a sensual act. The smell of crayon and pencil shavings. The way paint feels on our fingers. The scratch of a brush or ink pen dragging across weighty paper. The metallic sound of scissors as we slide them through slick silk. And music… gah, musicians live a life of sensory immersion and development on a constant basis. Delicious stuff.

Then, there’s the ability- the commitment of the artist- to living a sensual life. To notice and be sensually tuned in to our bodies and the world around us, translating beauty through our own filters. In our modern landscape, this is not an easy thing to be committed to. Our culture encourages bodily dissociation by way of flooding our nervous systems, and perpetuating harms that are fucking hard to be present with. But we must remain present! Artists commit to remaining present, to the best of our abilities, at any given time.

All of this presence- the noticing of beauty, and reveling in the sensory acts of art-making itself- all of this can work to dispel shame.

My filter is not the same as yours. Your filter is different, still, than your neighbor living across the way. And all of us, whether we practice art-making or not, have our own antennae tuned into what thrills us, pulls us in, makes us pause, catches our breath.

Our own physical responses to the beauty (and the grief and pain) we encounter is ripe for the artist to translate into radical self-expression. There is no wrong way to be in an animal body. Making art helps with the range of physical responses to Life- to All That Is- that happens in our bodies.

Magic: Art Ritual Spellwork for reclaiming your own creative innocence.

***I have personally practiced this bit of spellwork with success. I wish I could share the results here. the piece that I rendered from this art ritual is in storage, beneath stacks of boxes, and… yeah. I’m a witch in transition over here.

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Time: 15-30 minutes (but you can begin this at one point, and finish it later!)

Materials: Paper, pencils, markers and crayons; glue stick, scissors; pictures of yourself from your youth

Atmosphere: Play music that makes you feel mystical and whimsical. For me, this would be something like CocoRosie, Of Montreal, or Pearly Drops

• Gather materials and put on your select music.

• Center yourself in your space by noting the cardinal directions in your space. I tend to use my phone’s compass to do this.

• Casually (or elaborately, however this may work in your tradition) acknowledge the directions, and request spiritual support from any allies you work with.

• Begin drawing using big marks. It may help to use your non-dominant hand or extra chunky mark-making tools. Choose the colors that stand out to you most. Don’t overthink this; let your intuition, your inner child, grab what’s most appealing.

It’s good here to rely on symbols that kids like to use. Stars, hearts, clouds, suns, moons, etc. Just go off. Stay curious. Close your eyes. Smell the crayons, the markers. Let yourself revel in the felt-body sense of pushing pigment around on paper with your hands.

• Cut out pictures of yourself and glue; cut and paste and decorate your piece. Understand that as you do this, you are releasing any creative shame and any hesitations about making art that is “good enough.” You are sending love to that little child.

***Also, also, also: if you don’t have photos of yourself on hand, don’t use them! Just focus on making symbols or marks that may have been important to you as a child. When I was a kid, for example, I loved to read, I had a nature collection, and was obsessed with marine biology. So adding pages, books, leaves, and fishes into the drawing would call in my child-self really well.

That’s it!

When you feel your piece is complete, when you feel yourself slowing down, pause. Give thanks to your allies that showed up for you. Give thanks to yourself. Acknowledge the cardinal directions again, and give thanks, to release any energetic container you’ve put together to hold space while you worked.

Do what you will with your piece; hang it on your fridge (classic!) or file it away. If you feel called to dispose of it, do so with respect and love. DO NOT throw it away in displeasure with your product. It really helps to revere the process here.

Earth:

Introducing Motherwort: an herb for heart-opening, erotic, creative wonder

Over the years of my creative spiritual practice, I’ve developed a relationship with Motherwort, Leonorus Cardiaca, as a heart-opening, body-balancing plant. I take Motherwort in a tincture that I made in 2023, presently, though I’ve considerably lowered my dosage from half a dropper thrice a day to once per week. I’m not sure if physically, that ‘once per week’ has any effect, but energetically, it absolutely does.

I highlight this herb as a healing artist’s ally precisely because of her courageous, uplifting properties. The translation of her latin name literally means “lion-hearted.” In that sense, I associate her astrologically with all things Leo, and the Fifth House; childhood + being among youth; blood and the heart; the type of creativity that is raw expression of the heart.

*I am not a clinical herbalist, I am a folk medicine practitioner. I neither recommend nor discourage the use of Motherwort as medicine.*

I have recommended Motherwort to a trans-femme friend of mine who was having heart-palpitating anxiety, occasionally, amid her transition. Rather, I lightly mentioned Motherwort, as she is known to be good for the heart, as well as gynecological health. Taking Motherwort seemed to bring my friend comfort.

I have used it for myself, as I was having excruciating anxiety related to my own menstrual cycle. Whatever this mystical connection might be, between the heart, anxiety, womanhood, and grief,

Motherwort has covered me. She’s helped me stay fluid through loss, with enough flexibility to remain connected with my own creative spirit even when I’ve felt adrift.

*Please read about Motherwort; note any contraindications, and otherwise, may her mythopoetic medicine help bring you into creative balance with your own heart, eroticism, and dropping your shame. You don’t need to take Motherwort in your body to benefit, energetically, from her medicine.

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Action:

Maintain an openness to unexpected conversation. Consider curiosity, and how that can play a role in social situations. How much more comfortable can you feel into yourself, in public or semi-public spaces, if you stop labeling and start getting curious? Consider posturing yourself socially from your heart. How will that change your interactions?

Recently at a holiday gathering in a public space, I had the pleasure of having conversations with several folks who I barely know, on topics ranging from aliens and cryptids, sobriety, art, climate justice work happening in our local area, and historically digging into the colonial structures of the economies and cultures of Central and South American countries. This was fantastic; a lovely way to spend my evening, and incredibly rich and nourishing, in an unexpected way. This highly sensitive introvert had a great time socializing. I think it was fun because I didn’t pressure myself to do anything; I simply stood around and listened, and responded with genuine enthusiasm to things that arose that compelled me. Just being me.

You deserve that too! And it’s not going to happen all the time, every time, but dang-

maybe the next time you are socializing you’ll be able to en-joy yourself.

***

Happy holidays, and blessings to you on your path. May you know love, reckon grief, and embody joy. And may we all get free.

Love love love,

Bri

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This is Art Ritual, a weekly zine about art, magic, earth and action. You likely subscribed to this newsletter when it was named Mugwort Media.

Some things to know now:

1.) The content and thematic elements of what I will share here will be similar but more pointed, direct, and categorized within the realms of

Art,

Magic,

Earth,

&

Action.

2.) I will be sharing more theory, folk magick and history, more self-directed opportunities for ritual, more “tutorials,” and the like.

3.) This publication will be weekly! That means more stuff landing in your inbox. If you’re at capacity with what you are willing to receive via email, I totally understand! Just unsubscribe. If you use Substack’s Notes app, you can opt to follow me to read when you’d like, but unsubscribe to keep your email inbox less flooded.

I personally know what it’s like to get too many newsletters. Even too much quality content is still too much content. I also know what it’s like to get newsletters that I receive weekly, and genuinely look forward to reading. I will endeavor to be a letter you look forward to!

Now all that’s out of the way,

Happy Holy Days, happy Solstice! I hope you are soon in joy, celebrating the longest dark, and the incremental return of the light. I begin celebrating Yule and Winter Solstice on December the 20^th. We also have a new moon coming this week on Thursday the 19^th, which is a lovely way to celebrate the darkness coming back into light.

Here in Art Ritual, we don’t denigrate darkness. Darkness is holy, and the dance of the absence of light, shadow and depth,

with the Sun, Moon, Stars, and watery reflectors of light-

this dance is the sacred journey that All Beings who live embody in this life. Whether or not we humans choose to see this plane of reality is a different matter.

Here are some Art/Magic/Earth/Action prompts and ponderings to inspire your celebration this season.

Art:

This Yule I am intent on making gingerbread cookies. Tomorrow I will be baking cookies to share at my bio-family’s Christmas gathering (they celebrate Christmas, specifically. In this way, Christmas is part of my periphery, though it is not a holy day for me, the way that the turning of the seasonal wheel into Winter is holy).

I’m especially feeling inspired to bake cookies because decorating them feels like a joyful way to spend time. I’m drawn to the full sensory experience of what this will be like: the scent of spices, sugar and butter as it permeates the house; rolling out the dough and cutting it with cookie cutters. The visual stimulation I’ll get from whipping up some bright white icing to pop in contrast on the brown ginger cookie. All of that is exciting. I’m drawn to make something beautiful, and temporary. If all goes according to plan, these cookies will disappear within the week.

All of us will come up against obligation this holiday season, in one form or another. Take a moment to find art in your everyday life, right now. Instead of adding one more thing to do on your seasonal platter, consider what you can revel in, in a sensory way. Cooking or baking are easy ways to settle into a gentle creativity.

If you are on a long drive, or a flight, consider what beauty you can add to your commute. What music, audiobook, or handcraft can delight your senses? Maybe the right nature documentary can carry you through an overbooked crowded flight. If you are overwhelmed or overstimulated at a big gathering, consider finding the nearest child in the room, and pull out a coloring book. Find a non-human companion, like a cat or dog, or rabbit, to hang out with, and make Art of Play. Just see what happens.

Magic:

To be honest the magick of Winter Solstice is challenging for me. I have a hard time separating/ reconciling my evangelical Christian upbringing with a celebration of Solstice that feels good and authentic to me. I still love a tree (pagan in origin) I still love candlelight, and bringing greenery like cedar, juniper, and holly, indoors to lighten up all the Wintertime grayness that permeates the modern landscape. I love baking! And I enjoy watching old Christmas cartoons.

When I celebrate Samhain, it feels so right; an unequivocal good, ancestral, and subversive to colonizer religion and capitalism in the right ways. But during Winter Solstice, there’s so MUCH happening. So much STUFF; packed schedules, consumption of goods, and excesses of food and drink, all gearing up for the overculture holiday that even secular atheists celebrate: Christmas. All the Christmas and New Years’ Eve stuff feels so loud to my sensitive psychic palate. I long for the quieter spirit of Solstice, where all goes dark, and human animals learn a thing or two from our four-legged and winged kin. We do a little foraging, a little hibernating, a little storytelling and singing. So… it feels pretty inaccessible sometimes. And that is okay! I’m trying to let it be okay…

I might be the wrong nonbinary gal to ask about Winter Solstice magick. But here goes what feels real to me:

Be around people you love. Do this even when it is complicated, inconvenient, or hard. Sometimes what is hard is good for us. However,

Hold fast your boundaries, and don’t put up with bullshit just because everybody’s doing it, or because of bullshit expectations placed upon you, non-consensually.

Up the ante on your psychic hygiene by grounding, centering yourself, shielding your energetic field as needed, and cleanse

cleanse

cleanse.

If you need to simplify, just ground and cleanse frequently. And say the word “no,” like it’s a complete sentence. The rest will take care of itself.

Grounding exercise for the Holy Daze:

*do this as needed, like after attending a Social Event or after an exhausting bout of travel.

Sit in a totally dark room at night, with just one candle lit. Set a timer for ten minutes. Focus your gaze softly on that candlelight, and breathe. As you breathe, lightly feast your heart on that candlelight, by envisioning and imagining a current between the flame, its gentle natural swaying, and your breath as it enters and exits your body.

Any candle will do. But if you happen to have a beeswax candle, enjoy lighting that for extra honey-tinged sensory pleasure.

Quickest Possible Energy Clearing Ritual

You’ll start and finish by washing your hands. That is it.

But do it this way:

Find a quiet sink.

Remove or roll up your sleeves, so you can really focus on the experience at hand (pun absolutely intended.)

Choose instinctively whether cold or warm water is your energetic friend. Don’t overthink it. But choose the temperature intentionally. Lately, despite the recent 17F degree mornings we’ve had in these parts, I’ve still enjoyed a bracing cold water wash for my psychic hygiene purposes.

Begin your wash by thanking Water for Their cleansing and healing properties.

My gaelic ancestors worshipped and practiced healing at sacred springs. Goddesses were named after rivers… heck, those Goddesses used to BE the river Themself.

Thank water, and mindfully coat your hands in water.

Get soap and lather up, all the way up to above your wrists.

When rinsing, hold your hands wrist up, and let the water from the tap run directly onto your blood vessels there, below your skin.

Envision and know that anything that is not of you, anything that doesn’t belong to you, is slowly dissipating, drawn down into the drain. Water is a cleanser, earth is the great recycler. You’re doing no harm, but receiving all the good in the gift of cleansing yourself this way.

That’s it. Those are my two practices for staying open-hearted and aligned with Self during this holiday season. As far as Winter Solstice in particular, there’s a practice in the Earth section of our zine here that I hope resonates well.

Oh, AND

Earlier this month I was called to do a collective tarot reading and record it. I so very rarely do general readings like this; my tarot practice is like, 99% one-on-one readings. I’ve shared it over on my twin sibling channel Animist Activist podcast. It turned out to be a reading relevant to the next couple of months. If you want a deeper excavation of some of the energetic weather that’s in play this holiday season, give it a listen.

Earth:

An incredibly healthy human animal way to be with the changing of the seasons is to witness the sunrise on Solstice. Use your weather app to look up when sunrise will be, and set your alarm to wake up just 30 minutes prior. Peel yourself out of bed, make some coffee, and watch the sun rise.

Years ago, in one of several trance journeys with my ancestors, I received this message:, in the form of a request. I had asked what would be a good offering for them. Among other requests, this was one response:

Feel the wind on your face.

This was in the “dead of Winter,” in the Land I live on that experiences “four seasons,” when the wind was not a gentle Summer breeze. In my life of modern convenience, I’d all but forgotten what it was to have an animal reaction to the season’s changes.

Go outside, even when it’s freezing. Bundle up, hold a hot cup of something, and feel all the inconvenience and discomfort in your body when it is exposed to the elements. This is LIFE! This what it is to be in a body. Perhaps you live in a warmer climate, in which case, enjoy!

Action:

In alignment with Earth we take Action. Understand that feeling the cold and having somewhere warm to retreat to later is a privilege that an alarming amount of people do not have. We are in a time of year that our capitalist economic system amplifies its usual refrain of extraction, consumption, and disposal. Under capitalism, even human people are extractable, consumable, and disposable. We are, after all, part of the “Nature,” that our human overculture seeks to dominate.

If you are blessed with significant material resources, consider redistribution.

For example:

If you have too many coats, or clothes you’re planning to donate, consider specifically gifting them to shelters, warming centers, or your grassroots local organizations that will distribute your gently used items directly to individuals that need them, rather than to a thrift store who resells them.

Consider stocking up a local food pantry with really quality delicious fare. Your direct actions make the most difference in your community.

I’m proud to know folks who are donating their time to keep people where I live and work safer, and warmer. So I also make sure that I tell them how much I appreciate their commitments therein, whenever the topic arises. Sometimes I simply check in, and ask how it’s going, or ask what they need or if they could use a hand.

Pass on the good cheer. Even just a “hey, I see you,”

To folks on the front lines

Or to folks who’s full-time job right now is survival,

Goes further than you think.

These days, it’s well known that folks are likely to be more prickly, and more irritable. Grief is high, and largely unprocessed; particularly triggering this time of year. Just keep this in your mind-heart context as best you can. Let things slide off your back, rather than ripple through your being, when you can help it. Whatever “it” is, it’s 90% likely that it’s not about you.

And also, you matter! What you say and what you do matters so much.

Thank you for being you, thank you for reading.

***

I’ve overhauled my website. New hosting ,new platform! Check it out here:

https://www.mugwortmedia.com/

I’m planning some Art Ritual workshops for 2026, starting in person, in Charlotte, NC.

Learn more about my facilitators’ philosophy here. I haven’t yet developed any programming that’s virtual or digital, but I plan to.

In Celtic tradition, sunset is, in fact, the start of a “new day,” and so the dark half of the year, marked by Samhain as the day between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, is

The New Year.

Traditionally, this is also a day when the ‘veil’ or, that which separates daily living human life from the Otherworld, is very thin. A portal is opened easily on this, the day in between the equinox, and longest night.

Samhain, or Halloween, is my favorite holiday. I feel more real on this day than any other. Witchcraft is no longer simply folklore, or “woo-woo” fluff stuff on Samhain. Being a witch on Samhain means that I am solidified in concert with my corporeal form and my spiritual path.

This year is different, though. On a personal note, I will be honoring a new ancestor this Samhain at my altar. This is the first time I honor my younger brother as a member of my beloved dead. So that is both really hard and laden with grief, and also rich and potent with an opportunity to celebrate love as it exists on several planes of existence. There is the brother I remember, in the physical form I was used to experiencing our relationship within. And there is his radiant spirit self, likely similar to that who visited me in a dream a week or so after his death.

Samhain gives me the presence and the structure to honor all of that. And I will celebrate all of my ancestors on this night.

Samhain art ritual prompt:

If you’re interested in celebrating your ancestors too in modern Samhain style, here are some considerations:

-make an ancestral altar. This can be as simple as you need it to be. Choose a space (not in your bedroom if possible) and place a candle, a bowl of clean water, and a few chosen objects or photos of your ancestors. Do not place a photo of any living people on the altar. On Samhain night, make other food offerings if you like, especially of foods your beloved dead enjoyed, or foods that are significant to your family history or ancestry. Over the next few days, dispose of the food accordingly. Do not eat it!

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The Art Ritual:

If you’ve made an altar, do this art ritual nearby, or energetically connect to that space when you practice this little art ritual. If you do not have an altar, no problem. Your altar is in your body-mind-spirit.

Materials:

Paper- anything will do. In this instance bigger is usually better, because having more room to move will feel good to your hands.

Pigments (all OPTIONAL! Use whatever you have on hand that you like to use) - pencil, red marker/paint/ink, charcoal, blue or purple marker/ paint/ ink

Candle- ambiance, atmosphere, setting the sacred container

1.) Set the mood. Light a candle or incense, choose special music. Here is a playlist I will be using for this exercise:

Consider your attire: are you comfortable? Do you feel like yourself, wearing what you are wearing? Need any accessories to heighten your self-regard and feelings of personal power or connection to Spirit? Set your tone.

2.) Sit near your altar, or close your eyes and connect to your stomach and heart space. Breathe, and feel your stomach, your seat, and rub your palms together, like you’re trying to start a little fire in your hands. Feel your power.

3.) Say a little prayer: Dear bright and well ancestors***, I love you. Happy Samhain; tonight I honor you. I am open to receiving messages specifically during this time and place as I begin to make marks on the page. May what comes through be healthy, well and good for me to receive. Please protect me as I create, and may this offering of my attention and my creativity serve you well.

*** You are specifically praying to your well ancestors. Hungry ghosts and inherited family trauma are serious matters, and ancestral healing takes a lifetime. To go slow, and keep things manageable this Samhain, work with your well ancestors for this ritual. On your altar, you can honor whoever you like. For the ritual, work with who is healthy and ready to show up for you, without manipulating your life-force-energy toward their own agendas or unfinished business. You’re already contacting the dead; no need to get more intense here!

My well ancestors are excited to step in on my behalf, simply because I am doing good work for myself and our lineage in this lifetime. They just want to see me succeed- no caveats. Your well ancestors want the same for you!

4.) With your paper and mark making materials, simply begin. If it helps, close your eyes and let your hand move. Graphite for mineral/ crystalline form of carbon. Charcoal for fire and earth. Red ink/ paint/ marker/ballpoint pen for the red thread of blood that flows in your lineage. Purple or Blue ink/ paint/ marker for your creative ancestors. These can include members of your beloved dead who are chosen family, folks who have inspired your artistic practice or people whose work in liberation and resistance continue to bring you blessings. (i.e. Oscar Wilde, Mary Oliver, Octavia Butler, Genesis P. Orridge, to name a few)

Cover the page. Really breathe into your belly. Let marks get repetitive, overlap, and use both your hands, regardless of the hand you usually feel is dominant. Let this happen until you feel the work is “complete,” or until you feel signals from your body-mind-spirit to finish. Honor your boundaries! If you are tired, you are tired; your well ancestors understand, and want you to set these limits.

3.) As you finish, thank your ancestors and any helper spirits that showed up for you. Give gratitude to yourself. State that the process is complete; you are no longer channeling/ receiving messages at this time. Blow out your candle. You may choose to reaffirm that you will “visit” again soon.

You can review your mark-making for anything that sticks out to you. What looks interesting? Do any marks look like something to your eye? If not, that’s okay. The work is in the process- the energy that you meditated with, the spirits that visited you and moved your hand.

You can display this artwork on your altar, or in another significant part of your home. You also don’t have to keep it! You may choose to let it go, via burning, composting, or tearing it into pieces and rearranging into a collage. You may throw it away, but do so with respect.

I hope any of this feels good to you, to explore, connect, and celebrate your beloved dead this Witch’s New Year. The ritual looks like a lot, all typed out, but can (and should!) be modified to fit your circumstances and time constraints. If you have just 30 minutes for this process, that is enough! And if you don’t get to this on October 31st, do it November 1st, or 8th, or 10th, or whenever!

Let it be easy.

Let it be easy.

Let it be… easy. <3

You deserve to invest in your own rich inner life and spiritual support system.

Happy Samhain, happy Witch’s New Year, and happy mark-making.

Bri

***

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Life is perpetual art ritual:

Here is a thing I am developing on art ritual and facilitation: nothing to specifically offer yet, but you’re welcome to catch the vibe.

A friend of mine recently had a birthday, and openly reflected on their “9” portal. Lots of 9s in the numbers of their age, the month day and year they were born, and when I calculated the card of their year, using their birth date plus this year, 2025, it is indeed going to be a 9- Hermit- year for them.

My own solar return came and went early last month. It also closely coincided with a full solar eclipse. This birthday was marked with very obvious beginnings and endings for me, which isn’t always the case. These marked changes were incredibly all-consuming. The turning points were obvious. I did not even calculate my own card of the year until two days ago, in response to the small exchange I had with my dear friend as aforementioned.

So as of early September I’ve initiated a World year. Card 21. XXI.

Here I’m going to share a bit of the journaling I did to extrapolate this for myself. Verbatim. My hope is that this helps you in providing a sample of reflection, of how to deepen into a tarot practice that can reflect your own life’s journey.

***Scroll to the bottom if you want the formula I tend to use when I calculate my card of the year. ***

Here’s what I wrote to try to integrate the beginning of my year with The World:

"I calculated mine (card of the year.)

The World. XXI. It feels like nothing less. Yesss, my last 12 months was a XX:Judgment year. Oh my…

I am grateful for ALL of IT. I am grateful for Now.

The World.

Even reading the entry for The World in 78 Degrees of Wisdom, author Rachel Pollack discusses what cannot be verbalized about this card- this mystery initiation, endings, beginnings; inner union with outer, hermaphroditic non - dual magicks. After stepping through this birthday portal- turning 34- and then immediately full solar eclipses. There are several layers of my persona that did not survive the burning. My inner world is closer, again, to meeting my outer circumstances in ways surprising and hard to place. I’d do better to describe how I feel. This may or may not reflect The World XXI:

-raw. Sensitive. But I’m not fighting it.

-honest. Inside, outside, with myself, with others.

-my mind and insecurities therein that have remained intact are easy for my Self to witness, and are therefore present, but have less sway on my attitude and actions.

-I am in love with myself and my life. All is far from “perfect,” but I am feasting on it all, digesting everything. I make the time to do so. When I am sad, I am exactly that. When I am eager, excited, and in joy, I am that.

-Psychic energy flows incredibly easily. When I am called to perform a devotion, make an offering, or gather an herb, water, make a tool… I am in flow. The actions are not harried, laborious, or intensely premeditated. I go through these stages with ease. I receive messages with ease. And I am not in a hurry. I think this aspect of my life right now points to living in alignment with “Spirit Time.”

-Similarly, my creative energy is flowing very easily. And not just the acts of art-making itself (which I typically do not struggle with.) but even the acts of distributing and sharing what I create, and explaining what I make; talking about my art practice- all is becoming more easy to do, lately. And the more I do it, and let myself be in flow with it, the momentum continues. Showing my work, submitting my writing; applying to calls for art, for artist residencies, for art jobs.

-Finally, as like an amalgamation of everything above listed, or maybe all I’ve listed is a result of this- I am just not in the habit of questioning or doubting myself- my core essence. I am not in doubt of my own integrity. Again, not because all is perfect. But my self trust is the highest it’s maybe ever been. And it is hard won. So I’m very grateful. I feel united within myself.

So many parts of me, once disparate, are moving powerfully together. And this feels like the result of a spiritually LIGHT (non-grasping) hand. Presence? Being present. Something like that. I have generally more peace with all of the textures of life.

In the last 12 months of my existence, I really have been stripped. That which I had relied on for security was removed, piecemeal, board by rotting board. And finally when my young brother suddenly died- so suddenly became an ancestor, a week before I was going to “come home” and see him again,

My heart, my soul, my psyche snapped into my body-socket, and in comprehension. In EMBODIED wisdom and knowledge of the life-death-life; chaos, order, beauty, disintegration dance of earth existence. There is NO TIME but EARTH TIME (which is not the same as human time.) There is no reality but the cycles of it all. And that is still nameless. Because it is everything. And it is microscopic and universal. And, bah, even writing that is like, no. Not it. So I’ll leave. Leave it to live it.”

Typing this out again, I’m also reading lots of the result of card 20: Judgment. Which is less about moral judgment, or Western Christian associations with puritanical exactitude. Judgment in tarot has more to do with self-awareness, particularly the kind that has to do with boundaries, and what we will or won’t tolerate as individuals or a collective. Judgment is often indicative of a homecoming, either spiritually or in a very straightforward kind of way, in my personal experience, and in witnessing the experiences of clients I read for.

But this is the beauty of the path- life flows into itself in non-linear, sometimes cyclical, spiralic (but even so- madly unpredictable) ways. I thought I knew Judgment, and then it lived through my vessel. And I learned to value perspectives previously unknown to me.

Being a human, I am a meaning-making animal. And being neurodivergent, I am a pattern seeker. Cosmic systems have been of interest for as long as I remember.

I hope any of this inspires you to make meaning in your own life. This is not a weakness! Lots of things inherently don’t happen “for a reason,” but much of what our psyche would like to categorize as “random,” is simply the result of our fear of bearing witness to that which we cannot control.

And, thank you for taking time to bear witness to this nonbinary gal’s path. Thank you.

If you’d like to calculate your card of the year, you can use this formula:

month+ day + {2025} = your card of the year (reduce as needed)

Example: If you are born on February 14th, then you add

0+2 + 1+4 + 2+0+2+5 = 16. The 16th card in the Major Arcana is The Tower. So you will have been having your Tower year since February.

If your card of the year result doesn’t lie between cards 1 and 21, (for example: 32) then add those two numbers together, and get your card of the year that way.

• Until October 13th, I’m raising funds for Binx’s Home for Black Cats using tarot. Click here for more info on the important work they do, and why I’m invested in getting more resources their way: https://www.mugwortmedia.com/fundraiser

• If you’d like to work with me, tarot-wise, you can get started by clicking the link here: https://www.mugwortmedia.com/services/tarot-readings

• Also, if you’d like help calculating and interpreting your card of the year, we can apply the same pricing as one of my 4-card readings ($30) and meet up for a half-hour to flesh it out. That would be fun, I think! I love nerding out about occult philosophy. Email me: bri@mugwortmedia.com

Hello dreamers, visionaries and creative world builders; hi to all you animist activists out there.

This is a quick invitation. I’ll try to be brief, but that’s not my strong suit.

I’m raising funds for an organization devoted to the care and community surrounding black cats, called Binx’s Home for Black Cats, in Asheville, NC. Black cats are more likely to be euthanized, and less likely to be adopted. Binx’s are a group of community builders, witches, and rebels that saw a need, and they are meeting that need with compassion.

I first opened my tarot practice to the public because I visited the storefront of Binx’s, a cat cafe/ pagan supply shop called House of Black Cat Magic, and inquired. They said yes to a young witch, and my world has opened up tremendously because of it. They are gorgeous people who are community-driven and kind.

This past kitten season (the first post Hurricane Helene!) has left them out of breath, and extremely low on resources. See this link for a letter from Hannah Soboleski, Executive Director: https://www.mugwortmedia.com/fundraiser

Until OCTOBER 13TH, I am offering virtual tarot readings for $20. All of that money will go straight to Binx’s! This is a discounted rate, as I wish to donate some of my time, as well as all of my “income” from these readings to lend support.

As always, my readings are holistic, candid, compassionate, and they channel through an anticapitalist, queer and animistic lens.

If you’d like a tarot reading and have love for cats, and want to see them thrive, click here! https://www.mugwortmedia.com/fundraiser

That’s all!

I’ll probably write just a couple more letters about this in the coming weeks. I know that there are so, so many types of community supports needed right now. I know that our world is on fire. I know it is overwhelming, and it feels like there are so many ways our attention is held hostage these days.

This letter today is not that. It’s simply information, and an invitation.

Sending love and sweet cat blinks,

Bri

It is September. Forgive my silence here at the Mugwort Media/Artemisia Studio news outlet. Grief has me in a stalemate with aspects of my creative practice.

My practice itself never ceases; it is in the way I pick okra with my Nana, in the way I watch the only yellow rose on a bush dance in the breeze, speaking to me. My creative practice is in the paint I push around a page, just to see myself make a mark. I don’t need to love what I make, but I do need to make it.

My practice never ceases, but the first thing to go when being a human in this world overwhelms me, is the sharing of the practice. It’s a hard thing to be an artist without sharing the art. It is a lonely thing.

And I know I write about grief all the dang time. But this one was different. This time, my brother died at age 24 and, insomuch as nobody is prepared to lose a loved one, we- my family and his friends- did not see this one coming.

It’s been about a month and I am still learning how to miss him.

I painted a series of pieces in March of this year (one of which is shown above), in the few days building up the full lunar eclipse in Virgo. And just this past weekend, this eclipse cycle rounded itself out with a full lunar eclipse in the opposite sign of Pisces.

When I painted these, it was in March/Pisces season, during that first lunar eclipse. I was on a performance art retreat, but I still found myself often painting down by the creek, absolutely enamored with the Shale as it cracked under foot, water gently coursing by and sending light across the rocks, brightening all of its variant natural color.

In Appalachia, Shale is the indicator of the nearby presence of coal, industrial veins of the region. Coal is one way the Land speaks of ancient plant bodies that pile and compress until a compact form of energy is formed. Human beings have been notorious for extracting this.

Shale, the Being, sings a song of oneness and the fractaling self. It is a strong and large formation of so many geological times and places layered and layered upon one another. Yet Shale relents to any pressure put upon it to split and fracture, rendering itself infinitely: Omni, Multi, Shale-person. Shale fractures off, and like the medicine of all stone, still belongs to the time and place from which it comes.

Shale breaks so easily. Shale comes undone. Shale does not need to “hold it all together” in order to be strong and sure. Shale shifts with ease in the art of letting go. The magic is in surrender, here.

After these paintings, I designed a performance where I took one painting, and while singing the old Irish song “Parting Glass,” I slowly and intentionally cut the painting into pieces. Like shale would break along its faulted layers. I handed one piece to each person in attendance of the performance.

The response was interesting. One person said: “it’s hard for me to critique this in any way, because it so personal. There is so much of you in it.”

And I wondered for the hundreth time if I toe the line between ceremony, ritual, and art a little too informally.

I couldn’t make it through the performance very well. I cried. And while I was certainly nervous (I am always a little nervous during performance) I was overwhelmed by a wave of sadness-as-beauty-as-truth, singing this song and suddenly, without warning, transmitting this gnosis:

we always belong to Place and people we love. We exist for a time, and we are marked. Changed forever. Changing always.

Under a specific frame of time we live our human lives; we meet, we depart, we are affected by the meeting and the parting. And we always belong.

Oh, all the money that e'er I spent
I spent it in good company
And all the harm that e'er I've done
Alas, it was to none but me
And all I've done for want of wit
To memory now I can't recall

So fill to me the parting glass
Goodnight and joy be with you all

Oh, all the comrades that e'er I've had
Are sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e'er I've had
Would wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not

I'll gently rise and I'll softly call
Goodnight and joy be with you all

Goodnight and joy be with you all

This Virgo (Sun in the 10th house, for those interested) has a heart that’s fully broken open.

My grief has been psychedelic and arresting. It requires that I am fully present in my life.

My sensitive and complicated brother was a double Pisces (sun/moon). He was so, so bright. His heart was sore in this world. He self-medicated with alcohol, and had all the requisite behaviors and relational problems of someone who did so. He numbed. He tried pharmaceuticals, but I am not sure that he trusted that process. He had very persistent and disruptive anxiety, and oscillated between self-isolating and reaching out for support from family. He was, in fact, quite sick. None of us realized the extent of just how firm a grip his disease held on him.

He was very devoted to our grandparents, and he loved and cared about animals. He once nursed a dying jalapeno plant back to health, and when I asked him about it, he shrugged and said: “someone had to do it.”

The night he died, he called my mom to ask her to bring him a phone charger and some herbal sleep supplements. And she did.

In the days following my brother’s death I flipped through my sketchbook. I tried to paint a photo of the last time we were together. But I couldn’t. I didn’t like it. It was too early to do something like that in my grief timeline. I found the Shale Kin paintings in my sketchbook though, and I cut a piece out for him.

“But since it falls unto my lot that I should rise and you should not, I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call, good night and joy be with you all.”

It’s as my mother said, he “simply left the party first.” My well ancestors welcomed him, and he has visited in Spirit just a couple times to a few of us members of his surviving family.

I am constantly seeing butterflies, moths, and carrion birds everywhere. Sunflowers have a particular flavor right now. When I see them, the core of me aches in recognition and gratitude.

It hurts, and it is life happening, and we left living are in the flow of it.

***

I have moved from Kentucky back to North Carolina. The plans I laid underfoot about three or even four months ago feel particularly necessary now, in ways unforseen. For the next two months I will stay in Charlotte-area of North Carolina, dividing my time between work-exchange on a farm, and being with my family.

I am still wayfaring, still stepping through a portal of change after twelve prior months of a long dark, a dark night of the soul, or whatever it’s called these days.

***

Thanks for reading. Writing this helps me process, and your witness here is not taken lightly. Truly, thank you, if you’ve read this far.

I am looking for connection, and for exchange in these ways:

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1. *** Right now through October 13th, I am donating 100% of the income from my 3-card tarot readings to Binx’s Home for Black Cats, a 501c3 non profit that rescues and houses black cats in WNC. 3-card readings are discounted to $20, to get the ball rolling on sending them some much-needed support. Read more here:LINK

2. Subscribe! Or share. That’s cool too!

3. Work with me: here are the services I offer. Tarot readings, energetic/ spiritual support, and home clearing and Land spirit consultations. I can accommodate anybody anywhere, virtually, but I am physically in Charlotte area NC, and if you are too, let me know!

4. I’m working on a written piece about liberatory Food Ways for Animist Activist Podcast. I intend to publish it this week. If you’re into essays and audio about social and ecological justice through an animistic lens, you’ll enjoy it over there.

This is my lack of an explanation for simply quitting my live-streamed Grief Vigils without notice.

I am not consistent.

Grief is not content marketing.

I am an unsettling, anti-capitalist anarchist. I’m also neurodivergent, and have a pathology that kind of resists the “if you do this, input ‘x’, then you will get ‘this’ out of it” formula. I will never build a “brand.”

In other news, I am deconstructing the entirety of my life as I have come to know it, to become nomadic for approximately 8 months to a year. As my ancestors might would say: I’m going on a ramble. For an indeterminate amount of time.

I need to relearn livelihood. Or unlearn what I think that means. Or both.

The past thirteen years of my life where I have exchanged labor for money in order to pay rent, buy groceries, and maybe afford a visit to the dentist (usually not) is failing my mind and body. I have occasionally succeeded at this scheme, but on more than one occasion I have failed. Rather, it has failed me.

To put it more truthfully: this way of life has been exploiting my mind and my body and it is actively disabling my mind and body.

I am ousting myself before I am rendered sicker than I already am, or killed by the absurd drudgery of the so-called “modern life.”

This system is designed to squeeze the breadth of our entire beings as if we were lemons-

lemons that we take for granted will always be on the island in the middle of a grocery store, clustered together in those plastic nets-

that are then immediately discarded in the garbage a few seconds after we get the juice out. Not to mention the eventual life cycle of those plastic nets…

This system of colonial capitalism is designed to extract and discard.

But lemons are a miracle, actually. And so are human beings. Regardless of our ability to be productive or purchase goods.

*** On Following the Sun***

I’m interested in live/work-exchange opportunities with permaculturing land-tenders, other witches, herbalists, rural queers, artists, other anarchists, intentional communities, etc. I’m not giving up on money, (I still live in this reality!) I’m not giving up on running my business as an artist. I am still going to do good work.

But I can’t do the

wake up go to work go home recover from work rinse repeat

anymore.

If you read this and you know somebody who needs an assistant and has a room, or a barn, or even space for a tent, please pass it on. I’ve also got a membership with WWOOF and I’ll be using that resource.

I’m not delusional: I know this way of life will challenge my mind-body too. But it will be less hard than the constant clocking in and out and people-pleasing my way through life on threat of having my security and income revoked. This experiment will be nourishing to my Spirit. And therein, I will take better care of myself because I will be resourced to do so.

The great lie of capital is that this way, the capitalist way, is the only way to do life. That this is “how it is” and “how it always was.” And that the choice is to capitulate to extraction, to be extracted, to extract and exploit

or die.

The truth is, no matter our income level, our class status, we are all living hand-to-mouth in this system either materially or spiritually, passing off the ways we are extracted always onto someone else. Whether that person is a cook at the fast-food restaurant, a line cook at the fine dining establishment with a Michelin star, the driver of our Uber, the person picking our organic vegetables in California or a factory-farmed chicken whose flesh now graces our table. In capitalism, someone, somewhere, is exploited.

The truth is that the extraction kills, even and especially when you play by the rules. And yes, people are killed and die by this system when they fall outside of it. A recent executive order has literally criminalized the failure to keep up with this bloated sick disease-ridden economy. Disabled folks die by the hand of capital all the time. The people of the global majority are consistently extracted, used, and discarded by “western” industry, and the “western” consumers of that industry.

The fact that I am choosing to experiment in ways that side-skirt, side-eye and move sideways around this systemic structure easily points to the privilege I do have. More on that soon.

The lie of capitalism extends to: only money/ capital = security. And your security is your responsibility, personally, individually. And you better get yours, before someone else does. And that private property ownership is necessary, socially positive, and inevitable.

This is simply not true, historically. There has been more human history without capitalism than with it. We used to make things, live in relational currency and BELONG: to Land, to villages, to communities. Nobody owned land, but we all belonged to Land. Or as one of my long time witch-teachers says:

“Some say the gods left these lands long ago,

but I say THE LAND IS GOD.” (Danielle Dulsky, on Macha.)

I recognize the privilege that I have in being able to conjure a living in an experimental way for a while. If I truly fall and fail, I have a mom to call. We don’t have expendable income, but we have love for each other. And while living with my family in a multi-generational housing situation isn’t an option,

because many of my home-folks are not safe people for a queer like me,

I love and trust my mom. And she would have my back if I were truly up against the wall.

I don’t have any dependents: no pets or children. Just house plants. Most of which I will rehome with loving plant people before I move house. (I am traveling with my Mother Aloe plant, and my Petra Croton who has been through it all with me!)

And though I am experiencing chronic pain and fatigue, and living on the edge of an anxiety attack in my daily life, I’m nearly certain this is a symptom of my urban clock-in-and-out-rush-everywhere-service industry lifestyle. The normalization of the violence of the commute and the errands; driving cars everywhere and trying not to die, is actually terrifying to me. Always has been.

I’m willing and able to experiment with putting my body’s labor into Land that I know loves me back,

Land that I will tend to like a lover

Land that I will introduce myself to,

Make offerings to,

Land that houses spirits I will endeavor to get to know

I’m willing to put my energy there and see what happens.

Lastly, I happen to be at a particular threshold in my life of having almost nothing to lose and everything to gain with an experiment like this. Just quitting this city and creating my fortune elsewhere, one day at a time. This is both a privilege, as well as a hardship. Indeed, if I didn’t have the creative strength of mind to see that there might be a place for me, but outside the traditional box,

this total lack:

of a living wage

of a salaried job with benefits

of healthcare

of affordable housing

coupled all with:

chronic pain and strained mental health

a queerness of my being that suggests “going home” isn’t really an option

all this would just equal loss, rather than

“having nothing to lose.” Two sides of the same coin. A matter of perspective. A fine line, depending on the day, whether this will evoke grief or joy in my being.

Again, my ask is that you pass this on to any pertinent parties.

And my hope-prayer-spell-wish for you,

comrade on the other side of the screen,

is that you also experience more beauty, more lightness, and more freedom in whatever capacity you need that to happen in your world.

The way we each need to “get free” may look differently. But we can collaborate, stand together, and defend to the end, what is sacred.

Oh also: this is the part where I reaffirm I AIN’T GOT IT. Ain’t got it. Don’t have it. I don’t have the answers. But I have new and more interesting questions to pose about my own life, and this requires lived qualitative research and gathering of data. And I wish the same for all other seekers, lunatics, poets, artists, witches and magickal queers out there, surviving fascism and putting one foot in front of the other to plant seeds for our future generations. Small pieces of vision. Breadcrumbs through the apocalypse.

Sending love and joy your way, in these times of collapse. This shit is heavy, but we are strong. Certainly more resilient than the terrorist billionaires supposedly running this country. It’ll be their fragility and ignorance that bites them in the ass. We’ll all be waiting with knives out, teeth bared and sharp. I myself am partial to a nice blackthorn shillelagh.

The new world has no place for moribund wealth. It does, however, have room for folks who are willing to redistribute and be in repair with a healing society.

Take care, goddexx bless, & Liberation for All Beings!

Go raibh maith agat/ may you have goodness.

***

This essay was written and published without the use of AI in any part: neither in research, nor concept, composition, editing, use of images or illustration. All work is by me, bri. :-)

***

Some life notes and ways to work with me:

Book a tarot reading: This year I had the honor of teaching the foundations of tarot at my local library system’s “How-To Festival.” I gave a 45-minute talk and answered emergent questions. I’ve been reading tarot for ten years, and I always do this work like I do any other: through a liberatory, anti-capitalist, animist lens. Clickety-clack here for more info.

Take an art class: my last teaching engagement at Preston Arts Center will be on Saturday, August 23 at 10:00 AM. Click here to learn more!

Subscribe using the button below! You can do so for free, or starting at $5 per month at a paid level. And please consider sharing this work, re-stack, spread the word.

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Hi Animist Activists, dreamers & do-ers,

Lately I’ve been contemplating the very real sacred acts of mundane life. Some of these include the way we feed ourselves and how we approach sleep. Especially, lately, I’ve been struck by the seemingly innocuous niceties of being a human with other humans we barely know.

In my daily life, I go to work as a barista in a local cafe. There are a lot of “have a good day” ‘s and “You too!” And “Enjoy!” etc. And because I have a heart full of grief and love for this earth and life; because my heart breaks for the sheer magnitude of resilience and stamina it takes to keep going in times like these

I’ve been experimenting with putting a little extra emphasis on my “have a good rest of your day” and “thanks for coming in,” and “it’s good to see you,” and

especially:

“Take care.”

So my hypothesis is this:

If we, humans just trying to get by in this world, trying to survive capitalist colonialism as it turns into fascism,

If we look each other in the eye, near-strangers, and say, with actual meaning:

“Take care,” and/or “I hope you have a good rest of your day.”

This is a blessing. This is genuine well-wishing. This is a decision to imbue our own energy, however slight and temporal, into hoping the best for someone else. Someone real. Someone we actually see in front of us. Not online. Not abstract.

Over time, I do think that “Have a good one!” and “How are y’all today?” has become abstract as to be meaningless. In fact, I know this, as someone that works behind a counter. I can’t even count how many times someone approaches me this way: “Hi how are youletmegeta medium black coffee.” Or something to that affect. The “How are you?” is not a genuine question.

The experiment I propose is that now, especially now, we go around genuinely blessing each others’ days. We refuse to treat one another as machinery- we refuse to see one another the way capitalist culture sees the human body: a means to an end.

It’s a radical thing to look someone in the face (eye contact is hard for some of us!) and say, for real: I hope you have a good day.

You, who are reading this, even as abstract as this is: screen to screen, humans communicating across time and space-

I sincerely hope you are well. That you are held. That you feel and experience love in your life every day. I hope you notice the evidence everywhere that you are supported. You are wanted. You are blessed with the love and awareness of so many species of earth-kin and spiritual support beyond the material realm.

I hope you have a good day.

***

Other tidbits:

• Here is a link to the Grief Tending Zine! And join me for live Grief Vigil most every Wednesday and Saturday nights, on the substack app, at 8pm EST. As post-activist thinker and writer Bayo Akomolafe is known to say: these times are urgent- we must slow down.

• I read tarot and offer spiritual counsel through cards, always through a queer, liberatory lens. Read about it here.

• I’m teaching local art classes at Preston Arts Center here in Louisville, KY.

Dates (Saturdays) are as follows:

June 21

July 12

July 26

Aug 23.

• If you’re interested to explore more of the depth work I do as an art-witch, visit MugwortMedia.com and poke around. <3

***

Consider subscribing to stay up to date with new podcast episodes, class offerings, and gifts of art-magick and grief practice guidance.

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Authenticity time:

I cannot let go of my need to be fixing these days. Overwhelm and uncertainty in our larger social and political climate, plus uncertainty in my own personal world, in my home, leaves this Virgo feeling like:

If I’m not doing something to prevent the next catastrophe, or working to figure out “what’s next,” then

I fail. I am bound for failure.

No matter what I do, I can’t seem to release this knot of tension in my world. It lives in my stomach- the core of me, the center of my will. Interestingly, it won’t budge with willpower alone! The center of me is connected to heart, tissue, lungs,(breath), the eyes in the soles of my feet (earth) and the heat in my body coalesced in liquid, my blood-as-water.

The core of me: fire power. But lately, either too hot to touch, or in serious need of some flame-tending these days.

I breathe. I pause. I make art. I make art and remember something key:

Failure is not a flaw. Failure is a necessary experience. Failure is what we wish for.

I wish for ultimate failure of the violent nation-state that I live in; undeniable fascism breeding fear and surviving on oppression. I hope for the failure of capitalism. It is untenable.

I make art, and I make bad art. I make bad art and I make bad art.

I occasionally love what I make. Sometimes, I really love bits and pieces of what I make; one corner of an entire painting holds a pristine world of my own design. And the rest exists to highlight what it means to tussle with being human, being creative, being in the throes of a practice.

I hope for failure in my creative practice. And I hope for success too.

I implore you to

Pause.

Make art.

Remember that you’re creative, and vulnerable, and at one with failure and bliss and flow all at the same time.

Pause and make art and remember you don’t need to fix anything. That’s not on you!

Your art practice is for yourself, first. Your creative practice is an act of being a human- when you sit and write or paint or stack sticks, you are participating in an ancient custom of meaning-making, failure, learning, adapting, changing, growing, and ultimately,

making beauty.

It is more challenging than ever before to feel empowered to create for creativity’s sake. These challenges, stacked against the libertine nature of rebellious and edge-dwelling people, are myriad. They might include:

• The upsurge of AI generated imagery and text, which can feel like a deluge to the senses of people. Already, this aspect of our culture is retraining the human eye, psyche, and sensibility to “prefer” cleanliness, homogeneneity, texture-less, perfectionistic experiences. Experiences without creative struggle, without the push and pull of the muses, of dogged research, of community-sourced information and input, without critical though processes. When artists see this playing out, it’s incredibly disheartening, and that is valid.

• Nearly 20 years of so-called “social media” platforms that encourage constant sharing. (I’m basing this decade range off the year that Myspace launched into existence.) Rather like AI, these platforms, run by algorithms, also manipulate the collective (and individual) human psyches to prefer production over creative experimentation. This hyper-normalization of a refusal of privacy makes us forget that we don’t have to share anything we don’t want to. And we are allowed to make things without mastering them. We are allowed to have a sketchbook that is devoted to what a sketchbook is for: trying shit out, learning about our process, and deciding what we like and don’t like as creators.

• Capitalism and constant commodification. Hobbies should become hustles. Messages abound that, if you are a hobbyist, if you don’t make money from your craft or art, you’re “not a real artist.” If you’re not financially successful as an artist, you should probably stop making art. “Don’t quit your day job,” would be the refrain, as if having a day job negates a creative practice.

• Surviving late-stage capitalism. The pace of capitalism is sustainable for no one, for no being. I will keep saying this until we all, collectively, understand this. CAPITALISM IS SUSTAINABLE FOR NO ONE. Between that day job, that work, self-care (like, the literal acts that keep us going, re: food, shelter, hygiene) and showing up in family and community, providing care for others- all this makes it hard to remember that making art is a crucial facet of living a whole life.

  Surviving capitalism right now means doing it all faster, more “efficiently,” with an emphasis on individualism, rather than learning to ask for help, or provide support when that’s feasible. The price of everything is rising. Housing isn’t scarce, it’s just too expensive. If everyone is burnt out, struggling, with a short fuse; if everyone is afraid; if everyone hasn’t touched the creative part of their own soul in decades; if everyone is culturally bereft of the ability to kindly know and cooperate with one another:

  all the better for the beast with infinitely insatiable hungry heads to keep feeding on our energy. And all for what? For capital. For a select few to continue hoarding the resources of our good green earth. If you have not had time to know your own creative spirit, that makes sense. No wonder. This is on purpose. It is by design. You are not at fault here. It is not on you.

There’s so much more I can say about the reasons we all might find it hard to visit with our creative practice. But I implore you to stop fixing or fidgeting. To replace your scroll with mindful (or mindless!) scribbles. Let it be nothing. Let it be everything. Draw a line and see where it takes you. What do you hate about it? What do you love? Painting is so fun! Just splash some color about on page. Or on your body. Or on some fabric. Just for fun. Put on some music and dance, alone at home. Let your dancing turn into drawing or photography. Grab your phone just for some selfies that you will not post.

Making time to be creative and to recognize our own creative power is good for the soul, and good for others. Creative practice increases our stamina to show up as citizens in our world. Most importantly, you deserve to know yourself as a creator. In a world that is CONSTANTLY serving disempowerment, fear, oppression, and overwhelm,

you deserve to know your own power. That mark on the page wasn’t there before. Not until you made it happen. Many marks make a whole piece of work. Being a beauty-maker isn’t easy. And art isn’t always pretty, but it is always beautiful.

You can be done fixing, just for moment. Pause. Make art. Be human.

***

Some tidbits:

I’m teaching Creative Collage class at Preston Arts Center, here in Louisville Kentucky. The next class date is Saturday, June 21st, from 10am-12pm. I think collage, especially using found imagery, is an accessible and fun technique with high potential for experimentation. Just what the art-witch-doctor ordered. Click the link above for more details.

Every Wednesday and Saturday Night, at 8pm EST I host a live Grief Vigil for processing personal and collective grief and rage, toward accessing stamina for resistance, and expanding capacity for joy. Just tune in on the Substack app, called “Notes”.

You can get a Tarot reading with me; we can emphasize your creative work, where to begin your creative practice, or how to show up for Self and Others in these challenging times. You can also simply get a reading about anything/ check in and ask “What do I need to know right now?” As always, I read through an anti-capitalist, queer, animist lens, with a focus on liberation as a way of being human.

Here are some good art-vibes, things I make.

And if you haven’t subscribed yet to Mugwort Media Muse-Letter, consider doing so. You’ll get a digital copy of my art-zine (hand-painted) the Compost Tarot Spread, delivered to your email.

Subscribe now

Happy New Moon in Gemini. It is fully Springtime, and Summer Solstice is nigh. Life is perpetual art ritual, unfurling with seasons changing. Spring is often soft in our imaginations- the vague idea of so many buds and blooms gently opening. The flood of green after the harsh grays of winter feel so, so good. And the unbearable cuteness of all the baby animals. And yet, there is thunder. There are fierce winds, and sideways rains. It is tornado season. Birth is actually a bloody affair. Maybe Spring is not the soft-spoken maiden we believe Them to be… Not in these times.

I hope you are as well as can be amid our cultural excess and veritable feast of fear, in this time of pain coming to the surface of the collective, to be reckoned with.

I hope you are finding ways to access joy, and to take care of yourself. I hope you are being taken care of by others. I hope you are loving, and being loved.

Some of you folks are new here, and so I’ll briefly introduce myself.

I’m Bri. I am an animist, an artist, and a witch. Here at Mugwort Media, the focus is art-as-magick, toward liberation for all beings.

Notably, since May 5th, I have been holding a live Grief Vigil (almost) every night, from 8-8:30pm EST.

I am currently thinking on how to make Live Grief Vigil both consistent and sustainable for my energy levels. I have started a new job that is intense on my body, and I am also getting used to a new schedule that either has me up at 4:30am to get off work mid day, or starting my day later and getting off work at 7…

Isn’t that always the way? Being an artist and a spiritual worker, plus holding down a day job… it’s a lot. And I find myself cancelling and rescheduling Grief Vigil. So- here’s to balance! And all the foibles we make along the way to finding the sweet spot.

If you’re interested in deepening your own grief practice and joining myself and others live in Grief Vigil, you can visit the link to Animist Activist Podcast. Subscribe there if you like, (I am working on new episodes) but you can also just visit. And, as mentioned, you can join me at 8pm EST on the substack app, almost any night to practice live.

Here’s more on Grief Vigil:

Every night I use the same format- I introduce the space, I read a statement about why we gather and what we grieve in the space, and then I hold the room at my altar for anyone to drop in, name their personal grief/rage or even joys, and just be. It is a time for slowing down. It is a time for processing the feelings and experiences that we don’t know where to put in other parts of our lives. It’s my hope that this work nourishes those of us in resistance to oppression.

We are all trying to survive late-stage capitalism now. And for some of us this is more burdensome than others. But regardless, we all need time to acknowledge how deeply painful (and ecstatically joyful) it is to be a human in these times. And so I hold nightly vigil.

Until we are all free, until we witness liberation in our reality, we are in revolution. In revolution, we are witnessing the collapse of empire, and of capitalism. And revolution is messy, collapse is scary. There’s a lot of loss in collapse. But there are things we can do to build our stamina and tone our nervous systems to witness, accept and create change. So we hold vigil.

I hope you’ll join me.

In honor of grief and joy here is a link to a playlist of music I’ve been working on for years and years now, called Love Warrior Mixtape. I made it for me, to support myself in my spiritual work and when I have been overwhelmed by challenges in my personal life. It has been medicine, and balm for all of that every time. Now I hope you’ll find some comfort here too.

Other tidbits:

I teach a monthly collage class at Preston Arts Center, in Louisville, KY. Here’s the link to learn more. The next class is on:Saturday June 21st, 10am- 12pm.

I am a space-holder, facilitator and a tarot reader. When I read for folks, I do so through a lens of liberation, anti-capitalism, and collapse awareness. In a reading I make a conscious effort to respectfully connect with other-than-human wisdom, in hopes of broadening our human perspective to include any and all Others who want to come through and connect with you. You can request a reading and find more details here.

Thank you for being a deeply feeling human, thank you, go raibh maith agat, or- may you all have goodness.

Workers rise, peoples unite! The fires of Springtime sun and fervor are cleansing! There is no justice in a racist, capitalist, colonial system, yet that is where we live. It is also possible to to live into this: LIBERATION for ALL BEINGS. Beltane/May Day reminds us we are building new worlds. Right. Now.

I have been quiet here at Mugwort Media, because I am overwhelmed- so many of us are overwhelmed! But overwhelm is a feeling that needs tending, lest we freeze and do nothing, because we believe we must do everything in order to do anything.

Sending love to all experiencing overwhelm, fear, pain, & burnout. I am you. You are me. We are here.

To speak to this burnout:

I have been having several days a week where the too-muchness of trudging on with life in the affect of “business-as-usual” has become impossible. It’s almost as if I don’t have room for cognitive dissonance or compartmentalization (for better or worse.) Alongside the heaviness in the collective, the obvious and fast rise of fascism on a global scale, and some climate disaster trauma, I am also going through neurodivergent burnout. Masking isn’t working. “Pushing through” (my old standby) has become untenable. Indeed, I recently had to leave my job early because I couldn’t stop crying. I’ve been having meltdowns more frequently than I’ve ever experienced in my life- not since I was a wee thing.

I was having a kitchen conversation with my partner; I was cooking and they were sitting at the countertop while I chopped an onion. We often speak with each other- process with each other- on the state of the world, how things feel in the collective, and where we are as individuals, as artists, and as chosen family with aligned values. Usually these talks unfold quite naturally in our kitchen (kitchen conversations are magic!)

I finally said: “I just feel like grieving is a full-time job for me right now; it can be, should be, for many of us. But our culture isn’t built for this, doesn’t acknowledge grief, let alone support it. Like, there’s no room for non-stop rites of grief right now in the overculture.”

And my partner’s reply was: why not? Why not do it anyway?

So, starting May the 5^th, 2025, I will be streaming a grief vigil live from 8:00pm to 8:30pm, here on Substack (from the Notes app). I encourage anyone who needs to tend the grief and rage in their heart-spirit-bodies to come and be-

just be-

in space devoted to processing the tough stuff, toward embodying collective healing and visioning a liberatory future for our world. We can no longer afford to build our social reality upon unprocessed trauma, pain, and hierarchy.

I’ll have an altar that I tend for this working, with a beeswax candle, a bowl of (lightly salted) salt water (composted and refreshed daily) and some grief and rage objects.

I won’t be facilitating much, if at all, rather, I’ll be holding space. More details will be revealed at the first vigil. Just know you can show up however you are. Whatever your authentic experience is putting you through-it is welcome in the space. Bring just you, or a journal, or some ritual objects of your own to energetically add to the mix. It will be held space, ritually protected (I’m a witch; I’ll be calling in protections and implementing an energetic grounding rod) and it will be emergent space-whatever comes through, comes through.

You may call this Grief Vigil performance art, ritual, or protest, and all would be correct.

Here are the details:

A Grief Vigil for processing pain of the nation state, in What’s Currently Called the United States. A nightly broadcast from 8-8:30ish.

Why we grieve:

1. To activate a ripple effect of deeply feeling people. This system counts on our overwhelm, our inability to process, acknowledge, and respond to constant tragedy. We must take the time to actually feel the pain-loss-fear so we can RESIST, STRATEGISE, PLAN, AND ACT with dignity, clarity, and from a place of fierce love.

2. To broadcast the truth: at times like these, SOFT HEARTS ARE NOT A LIABILITY. Soft hearts are changemakers. And you are not crazy, not too sensitive. All this happening in the US is seriously fucked up, and has been for a while.

3. To activate folks who are like me, who are not able to be “boots on the ground” in protest inasmuch as we would like to, as frequently as we would like to. There is other work to be done. Here is some of that work.

4. Our administration, at home in and a symptom of this extractive colonial white supremacist system does not recognize soft power, or new paradigms of strength. An ability to sit with pain, acknowledge death (without running from or denying it) and be unflinchingly heartbroken IS POWER. The ability not to run from discomfort IS POWER. As such, we are cunning, and gathering in grief, we are changing “the game.” We do not need to hoard. We do not need to extract, or produce, in order to be powerful. And WE DON’T. NEED. HIERARCHY. We are powerful in how we FEEL, RELATE, and CONNECT. We midwife empire unto its inevitable death.

5. Grief is adjacent to joy. Our capacity to grieve is directly in relationship to capacity for experiencing joy. These are dire times. We must still access joy. A people who can access joy can never fully be controlled. A people who can grieve and access joy will always have something to fight for. Our grief, and our joy, is unstoppable.

What we grieve:

1. HUMAN RIGHTS CRISES: as it pertains to US immigrants’ unlawful (without due process) and violent kidnappings and imprisonment; LGBTQIA2S+ erasure, and state sanctioned and culturally normative violence against us; incarceration and for-profit prisons; abject abandonment of people who cannot “reliably” produce and consume- I’m speaking of mad folks, frequent drug users, and disabled folks here, and I’m speaking AS a mad person- someone who is finding myself on the other side of a mental crisis that, without certain privileges and loving relationships, would land me shelterless, and abandoned by this system. Period. We grieve the violence continuously perpetuated against indigenous peoples- a violence that bears the weight of our real heritage as a nation state. We grieve racialized violence against nonwhite people, and the cultural anti-blackness that still permeates places of power in this country, and around the world. We grieve people dying from exposure, hunger, and lack of access to basic medical care.

2. PATRIARCHAL VIOLENCE Including colonizer religion, namely, Christianity, and its dogma against non-male, non-cisgender, non-straight people. We grieve the ever -eroding rights of women, and people perceived as non-male or non-masculine. We grieve the abused. We grieve the fear-mongering. We grieve sexual violence. We grieve the perversion of eroticism as a weapon of control.

3. CLIMATE CRISES

We grieve the billions of deaths, human and non-human, related to natural disaster and disease, brought on and amplified by INDUSTRIAL CAPITALIST EXTRACTION. We grieve, that, despite the scientific knowledge and mass social cultural awakenings to our global crisis, our elected representatives in government cannot or choose not to bring corporate giants to accountability. Our system refuses to get off the wheel of enterprise. We grieve the extinction of whole ecosystems and species within these ecosystems. We grieve the poison in our water, the chemicals in our food, the plastic everywhere, the tumors in our bodies and the pain in our lungs.

4. EXTRACTION EVERYWHERE We grieve the extraction of people, animals, of stone, and of land; of bodies of water, plants, minds, and

we grieve the industrialization of health, food, home, creativity, and of spirituality. We grieve the colonization of our minds with addictive technologies that only serve to fatten the pockets of tech oligarchs. We grieve the relationships we will never have because we have only been taught to extract, rather than relate. As we grieve, WE ARE IN REPAIR. We begin to relate. We know that within true relationship, extraction becomes impossible. So we process, grieve, rage, and get ready to relate.

***

Please do come, whenever you can for however long you’d like. I’ll be here every night at 8, holding space and a bowl of saltwater.

Thank you for being human, for fighting for your own (and others) humanity, in a world where just being in a body, as a human is increasingly difficult.

Sending fierce love and power this May Day,

Bri (they/them) (sidhe/her)

Deeply feeling human.

Hello readers,

It’s been a quietly busy week here in the Mugwort Media studio. A lot of making room in this modern life for art is designing ways for it to be sustainable. This means there’s a lot of operations and administrative work: marketing, grant research and writing, submitting work to be shown, to be sold, and pitching artwork to publishers, etc.

There can also be lots of financial instability- a strange and sometimes grotesque dance of doing just enough to survive capitalism, refusing to capitulate to forms of work and extractive labor that infringe upon basic human rights & creative freedom/ time freedom, and hustling to get your needs met. Therein, I started a new part-time job this week.

Because I’m neurodivergent

And because my new job is big, with lots of people, big sounds, (and even every room has a different smell. The fact we share the building with a Subway restaurant is particularly problematic for me)

I am very tired!

I’m still finding time to work on the Liberatory Earth Medicine Oracle Deck. I am still producing the Banshee Project.

And everywhere, there is snow.

Just two nights ago, a thunderstorm thrashed so hard right outside my living room window, the walls and floors rattled and lightening lit up the entire sky. Later in the night, the snow fell. The roads stayed clear. But last night more snow fell. And I’m unable to drive confidently, missing a day of work.

I feel about as erratic as the weather. One moment, I am confident, and willing to keep choosing connection over comfort- to keep pushing into new ways to share my creative practice and generate spaces for others to do the same. And the next I am crawling into my bathtub, with tears on my cheeks, praying for hot water to hold me the way I wish I could crawl back into the mother-void-of dark loamy soil. Pretend I am spore of fungi, waiting to fruit.

This line by William Wordsworth is on a banner streaming in my mind:

“The world is too much with us, late and soon…”

And it is. It is too much with me, and many of us. In between retreats, I fight: for creativity, for Spirit, for the rights and liberation of all beings, for queer folks, for the rights of people to be people on any Land,

and against a hierarchy of being based on arbitrary signifiers of worthiness, like skin color, material wealth, status of “citizenship” or categories of gender based on biology that informs literally NOTHING about how one chooses to express their being…

Retreat, rest, gather resources, heal, show up. Ground, Center Shield, Cleanse, repeat. Defy linearity by being a messy human. Take care of yourself. Love yourself. And share this with others, when and how you can.

Upcoming Events & News:

On Sunday, March 2nd I am teaching a Beginner’s Tarot Reading Class, at Aurora Gallery in Louisville, KY. I use the tarot as a self-reflective and intuitive tool, and as always in my magick, I do this through an anti-capitalist, queer, animist and non-hierarchical lens. The court cards, then, get very interesting!

On Saturday April 19th, I am teaching a creative collage class at Preston Arts Center, here in Louisville. In my own practice, collage is something dear to my heart. I feel a kinship with the inherent play, and ready symbolism available when cutting up shapes and arranging them in space.

Remember that you get free access to a digital copy of my hand-painted Compost Tarot Spread Zine when you subscribe to Mugwort Media Muse-letter. Otherwise, you can grab a digital or physical copy for $7 on my website shop. It’s a beautiful art-tool for earth-liberation enthusiasts.

Share Mugwort Media Muse-letter

It is just past Imbolc. In the northern hemisphere this is a time to celebrate the halfway point between Winter Solstice (Yule) and Spring Equinox (Ostara). At Imbolc, we honor the lady Brigid, keeper of the flame. She has many associations as a daughter of The Dagda, in the Irish tradition. Some of my favorites are her associations with poetry, healing, smith-craft and domestic animals. In my personal practice, Brigid is this feeling of fire in my belly. Steady, neither dwindling nor all-consuming. A warm hum in my lower cauldron of being. It is like a feeling of home inside me.

It is timely, actually, to take a day (or several) to honor this. It’s a good time to ask: what keeps my inner flame alive? It is 2025, and if you are heartbroken, that is apt. I am too. If you are caught in a fever of rage and anxiety, I see you. This too, is sacred fire.

We are beholden to protect what needs protecting, fight for justice, and process our responses as they emerge in light of the absolute dread circus that is the state of the world.

Even so, I remind myself of this:

there is a lot of good in the world.

There is a lot of good in the world.

There is a lot of good in the world.

There is also a lot of pain and chaos in the world, but this does not dispel the good in the world.

Here at Mugwort Media, much is brewing. I’ll share a little about that, but first I’ll share a list of things I am doing to take care of myself- practices I am finding and allowing to keep my lower cauldron humming. Life is change, and it takes everything I have in me to focus on presence. The present is the only place where life is happening.

Things I am doing to take care of myself: (I hope you are inspired to let yourself be where you are)

• Eating a lot of comfort food. very nutrient- dense food, and also chocolate, and cake, and things that feel like treats.Potato soup is very grounding. Chocolate chip cookies inspire the sensory receptors in my mouth to expand and communicate pleasure to my whole body.

• Cooking and baking. with intention. Letting myself really put my energy and attention into cooking. Rather than treating cooking like a task that needs to get done (i.e. the very familiar rush to “get dinner on the table”), I approach it like something I am going to enjoy. Kneading dough to make naan, or a loaf of sandwich bread is very meditative.

• Crying a lot. Letting it flow.

• I have found affordable access to therapy, and I meet virtually with an amazing counselor every week. This counselor is queer, gentle, and insightful. It’s hard to find the right and accessible resources for therapeutic support. I’m just adding this here to remind you that 1) you deserve therapeutic resources that work for you and 2) you can and you will find what you need at the divine right timing. You’re worth it.

• Taking naps whenever I can, whenever I feel like. This is a luxury. If I feel like lying down in the middle of a weekday, I’m going to do it.

• Staying home when going out feels too hard. This means ordering instacart or door dash to get my errands done, with no shame. I’m neurodivergent, and so is my partner! Sometimes living our life means putting aside the plans we’ve made to embrace our energetic reality for the day. We pivot as needed, emphasizing nourishment and prioritizing what actually needs to happen vs what external ideals of productivity might say about how to be in the world.

• On the other hand, taking advantage of my “good days” to venture out, take a walk, browse a book store, go to a local city garden. There is no obligation to go out when the weather is nice. There is no obligation to stay in on a rainy day when you feel restless and ready to get out. And when one of your good days coincides with the most comfortable weather your eco-region has seen in months…well, enjoy that slice of magic. Embrace the warmth of the Sun as if it were a gift personally offered to your Spirit- because it is.

• Reading books. And reading them with no-holds-barred, dipping in and out of some as I please, reading others cover-to-cover when that is the vibe. I’m reading physical books I own, and I’m reading digital e-books from the library.

  My helpful reads have been “Unfuck Your Work,” “Braving the Wilderness,” “The Universe Has Your Back,” “Women Who Run With the Wolves,” “Art & Fear,” “Burnout From Humans: a little book about AI that is not really about AI” and “Nonbinary” the memoir by Genesis P. Orridge.

• Listening to whole albums of music. The albums Demon Days by Gorillaz and Little Dark Age by MGMT are strikingly prescient for these times. And also anything by The Bengsons, and Nick Cave’s Wild God are very medicinal.

• Of course, making art. Especially for pleasure. You’ll see some works from my sketchbook practice sprinkled throughout this letter. These are not my “best” works, but they are my “blessed” works. I’ve enjoyed playing with bright and bold colors, stark black and whites, and using repetitive mark-making to stimulate my own sense of Creative Power. If you need the invitation to make a colorful mess, this is it! Go play. We all need to play. And playing with art is super cathartic.

  

*** What’s up in my art practice:

Banshee in the Bible Belt:

On January 17th, I installed some ritual artifacts and an altar at Eastern Kentucky University’s Fred Giles Gallery. I’ll be performing Thursday February 6th at the public reception for In Commonwealth: Kentucky Art, Craft, & Design. My piece is called Banshee in the Bible Belt, a performance art ritual designed as land healing work through ancestral spiritual practice. Here’s a link to explore and learn more if you’re interested: https://www.mugwortmedia.com/banshee-in-the-bible-belt

I’ll be posting pictures here later, with some video documentation of this rendition of the performance.

Tarot Class:

On Sunday, March 2nd, I’ll be teaching a beginner’s tarot reading class at Aurora Gallery in Louisville. If you’re local and interested in learning to read cards, click here to learn more: https://www.mugwortmedia.com/tarotclass

This class will emphasize a radical anti-capitalist and queer perspective on the cards. We’ll be focusing on absorbing visuals cues as a way of strengthening intuition. This has been my approach to learning the cards, rather than rote memorization. I’ve been studying Tarot as a magical system of gnosis for over ten years, and I’m looking forward to nerding out with some people in real time about one of my favorite subjects.

Thank you for reading, and if you’re interested in staying in touch with Mugwort Media and our happenings, subscribe, if you haven’t already. Likewise, if you’re more audio-inclined, consider subscribing to Animist Activist Podcast.

These are challenging times to be alive, and even so, the world is filled with wonder. I am grateful you are here.

Happy halfway-to-Spring; I hope you see something beautiful and know it as a reflection of Self. May you know love, reckon grief, and embody joy.

Gratitude, gratitude,

Bri (they/sidhe) queer animist witch.

Happy 2025.

It’s pretty snowy and icy where I am, so I’ve been tucked in at home for nearly five days now. Fortunately, folks in my home and my city were well-informed, and we were able to prepare adequately.

I wanted to share the beginnings of an ORACLE DECK PROJECT!

Introducing: the Liberatory Earth Medicine Oracle -or- the Animist Activist Oracle (I have a podcast of the same name; for those interested, you can check it out here)

The main thing to know is that this card deck is an artful tool for the discerning practitioner of earth-based spirituality. Each card holds a portal sacred to the liberation of all beings. Themes like: “Offerings,” “The Eyes in the Soles of Our Feet,” “Decolonize/Unsettle", and “Omni- Lichen Beings” to name a few. Right now there are 43 cards, but I’ll confer with my Guides to add one more… because I like the idea of an even 44.

Here’s a link to my blog where I’m going to be posting the work! I’ll always cross-post here on the Museletter, so there’s nothing new to subscribe to. You’ll be able to see the artwork as it comes along.

I’ve decided to share it in process, for these reasons:

1. holding myself accountable to publishing it this year

2. demonstrating one of my most sacred creative values: process over perfection, or, what I affectionately refer to as “beautiful chaos.”

3. to hopefully inspire you, dear reader, to begin your MASSIVE project with small actionable steps. Because that is what this is. A project that is super achievable, but feels really big.

Also, I’ll be putting the deck into practice here, by “pulling cards” even though they aren’t finished yet. Just to get a sense of how this tool operates.

Here’s the first ever “pull” from the Liberatory Earth Medicine Oracle: a reading for the collective

The Tender Hearts! (a mood board, not the final card image)

The tender hearts are more commonly known as rodents. And some rodents are looked upon more favorably by humans than others. We have more of an ease with rabbits or squirrels, for instance, than mice or rats. But all of our tender hearts have wisdom that human people need. Tender hearts have extensive family. They know to spread their connections far and wide. Their survival depends on familial consciousness; they know their community can accomplish what an individual cannot.

I call these ones Tender Hearts because rabbits are especially known for their sensitivity. But all rodents are sensitive, and incredibly resilient. This is a reminder to stay in your sensitivity, because it is a gift. The wisdom of rodent Tender Hearts encourages us to choose connection over comfort. Or, to seek comfort in connection. To offer help, to ask for help, to gather, burrow, go deep and self-tend as needed.

Here are some questions we might ask ourselves, in the light of Tender Hearts:

Where can I safely ask for, and receive social warmth? And how can I offer it to others?

How can I participate in mutual aid? If I have an abundance of resources, how can I best redistribute? If I have needs that are not getting met, how can I ease out of self-reliance and individualism, and toward community to source my strength?

In what ways do I experience hypersensitivity? How can I celebrate that, and self-tend as needed? In what ways do my sensitivities subvert old paradigms of power?

***

I hope this reading is helpful, and brings a little beauty your way. Community is a big issue right now, culturally. And in my personal life, I have had a recent reckoning with belonging, and fear and pain surrounding that very basic human need. I know it’s hard work. Perhaps being in community and sensitivity is the hardest work of our time.

I know a lot of folks are feeling more dread than hope for this coming year. Perhaps deeply feeling it all is one little bit of medicine toward visioning and taking action on a cultural revolution of healing.

Here’s to connection over comfort, 2025!

***

Other Happenings:

• I offer tarot readings both virtually and in-person, and I’ll usually throw a little herbal ally oracle in at the end, so you always have a friend in the Otherworld you can rely on for help in whatever you’re working through.

• Otherwise, I’m hard at work conjuring Banshee in the Bible Belt for an upcoming art show later this month, through February 2025. I’ll be releasing a mini-episode of Animist Activist Podcast as a companion piece to this work next week. Subscribe over there if you’re into soul work, ecology and social justice.

Thanks for being here. Seriously. You are a miracle.

I hope you know love, reckon grief, and embody joy, this year, and all years.

Take care,

Bri (they/them/sidhe)