There is a tug in every creative being to move to the rhythm of something much bigger & beautiful than yourself.

More than an observer of life, an artist is a cherishing onlooker. The aficionado that could spend hours staring at one painting. The mystic lost in ecstatic visions. The lover mesmerized by their beloved’s eyes.

The artist is hungry to get on their knees for something, to make their life itself a prayer to the fiery thread of aliveness that runs through all things.

As pretty as it sounds, this fierceness can easily direct itself toward destruction as much as creation.

Enter obsession. Limerence. Addiction. Fantasy. Escapism. Perfectionism.

The moment you can’t stop fantasizing about a three-part romantic saga with a person you just met.

The moment you’ve compulsively eaten a whole bag of cookies and feel like you just stepped out of a trance.

The moment your hand reaches for the bong before you’ve even consciously decided to smoke.

The moment you squeeze another undertaking into a suffocated schedule because maybe, finally, you’ll get the applaud or validation that hits the spot forever.

All seemingly endless cycles with the same core: misdirected devotion.

That artist’s innate muscle of reverence is hijacked.

Perhaps hijacked by outside forces, like a beauty industry manufacturing insecurity that keeps you in obsessive loops about your looks; or the slew of unrealistic romantic stories convincing you the next prospect you meet is your savior.

But it may also be a part of you doing the hijacking. The inner child that says: what if someone’s love could save me?

The good student inside that says: who am I if I don’t achieve?

The overwhelmed one inside that says: it’s just easier to dissociate/tap out/give up than actually feel the intensity of life.

The answer, though, is not to shame this part of you, because that devotion that’s been channeled destructively is also your super power.

All that’s needed is a series of choices.

You choose, one step at a time, to redirect that devotion, even in small ways.

You sit with yourself instead of picking up the phone to scroll.

You channel your sadness into a song instead of eating your feelings.

You pause your romantic fantasy to redirect that pure imagination into a story.

Chop wood, carry water.

The part of you that gets lost in these endless addictive cycles is not broken, it just needs a new altar to kneel at.

This fall I’m leading a creative container meant to help you build this devotional artist muscle: DEVOCIÓN, a 6-week virtual artist immersion for the artist ready to get on their knees for their creation above all else.

To harness that devotional energy toward the creative ideas that light them on fire❤️‍🔥

If you know you have big creative energy that’s ready to be channeled into sacred creative devotion, step inside.

We start September 10. See you there?

Much love,

VM

In a world of laughing elmos and collectible dolls, Cas Holman sets out to create play experience that actually meet children where they are at, seeing the world through their eyes, and empowering their ability to think, innovate, and collaborate. Unlike the typical toys of our consumerist world, Holman’s toys put kids to work, inspiring them to make decisions and invent their own play as they go.

The argument? That giving kids the tools to create the play experience they want rather than a flat object that’s already been labeled, named, and figured out, actually makes space for more fun.

In the documentary, Cas Holman gives a peek into her process for the toy Critter, which consists of different parts or “doodads” that children can connect to the main piece. The point is to keep the purpose open-ended. Will the child design a mailbox or create a creature or build a house with the parts given to them? While toys like legos give you full instructions on how to make a set product, Holman’s toys don’t make it possible for you to get it wrong. You just…create.

When play makes more room for in-the-moment emergence, the children come up against more obstacles, like with Holman’s flexible, magnetic toy Geemo. While some magnets attract, others repel, and Holman does not use visuals or obvious indications to let children know this. Instead, she values the moment of discovering two magnets are mismatched as essential to the play experience. By coming up against a mismatch, a child is forced to process the information and reroute. That moment, in and of itself, inspires new ideas.

Like Holman says, “easy is not fun.” It is through the obstacle, it is through the friction of the challenge that children can meet the edges of their creativity, spontaneity, and intelligence. Naturally, this leads to fun things: surprise, curiosity, awe, satisfaction, pride.

This is a profound opportunity to offer children in a world where technology is aimed at making everything more convenient and frictionless. As a collective, our ability to enter the present moment and allow things to emerge in the moment is being severely eroded by our idea of what an “easy” life looks like, and we see this seeping into one of our most sacred play spaces: creative process.

I recently came across an instagram post from Ethan Tran (@ethan.uncurated on IG) that started with the words, “The biggest lie generative AI companies are trying to sell you is that ‘creating should be easy.’” That’s the catch, that’s what pulls you. What if all the challenges you face when creating just….went away? What if you didn’t have to struggle to reach for that idea? What if you didn’t have to face your resistance, or muster up the focus, or confront all the places you don’t believe in yourself?

What if, with one good prompt, one small expense, one “easy” alternative, all that could go away, and we could cut straight to the chase: the product, the ending, the conclusion.

Prioritizing the ending or completion is based on one assumption: the most fruitful thing about a creative endeavor is the outcome. Is this actually true though?

Think back to a time when you created something that took effort and time. Something that asked some of you, that challenged you and lacked the “ease” automation is offering us. Chances are that experience not only shaped a final product, but also shaped you back. The challenges it presented you, the places where it brought up the most friction bore fruit not just at an external level, but at a deeper, internal layer as well.

I don’t believe the creative process is a means to an end. The creative process is the point. It is the container in which we actually get to meet ourselves, all the way. We meet both our gifts and play styles as well as our limitations and edges. We will metaphorically grab two mismatched magnets and it’s not so much about the fact that something went “wrong” as much as it is about how we react to the mismatch. How we meet the moments when we are lost, when we are stuck, when we are blank says so much about us and how we live our lives.

The creative process is not just a method of production, it is a place we go to to actually get real about our capacity to surrender and the effort it takes to make life meaningful.

Because, at the end of the day, we can make our creative process as clean and frictionless and pristine as we want, but the mess and the edginess will always make their way into our lives. Life itself does not guarantee us that ease; creativity gives us a chance to practice meeting the friction that is inherent to life.

Every place in creative process that we succumb to collapse, only commit half way, or try to force an outcome is a mirror for how we engage with the process that is our Life. And, because of that, we get to practice shifting how we meet challenges in real time, through the microcosm of our creative process.

The friction in creative process is a gift. It’s an opportunity for alchemy that has ripple effects beyond the project we’re working on.

When we lose this playing field, are we really creating “ease” in our lives? Or are we just postponing, pushing, fighting the messiness that is bound to rear its head in one form or another?

With artists like Bad Bunny and Karol G officially graduating into global sensation status, with Spanish-language music & Caribbean beats taking over the whole world, it’s clear that there is something in the rhythm & spirit of Latinidad itself that’s providing necessary solace in historically isolated, dissociative, & hyper-mental times.

As a Dominican/Cuban-American steeped in both American & Caribbean Latino culture my whole life, I know very well the dance between a culture of overwork, individualism, & consumerist mindset vs a culture of gathering, romance, and family-centered structure. I’ve spent my whole life digesting both, trying to find the balance between the part of me that loves to fuel my ambition, my search for individual glory & achievement vs the part of me that longs to swim in my pleasure & connection.

These past few months I’ve made an intentional effort to connect more with my family and culture, spending more time in South Florida and the DR, dancing more, soaking in the sun more, visiting the ocean more, speaking Spanish more, giving myself the permission to meet parts of myself I had tucked away, parts that felt too vulnerable & tender to the past version of me that chased safe ways of being seen—career, achievement, work, independence.

Perhaps because I struggled to feel “Latina enough” or because at some point early in life I internalized a belief that outright pleasure & social expression were somehow too dangerous or risky, I locked away my desire to connect to those very traits I witnessed when surrounded by Latinos, the same ones I secretly longed to retrieve in myself. Maybe, also, it was my familiarity & comfort with a more American context that held me back. Success through the lens of a hierarchal ladder allowed me to cover up my insecurities & tender longings through a societally accepted mask that kept me at a distance from others, & from myself.

This undertone of distance is felt not just in me, but across my whole generation. We are in a time where people are increasingly less social. Even as we experience huge technological innovations meant to increase connection, we have never felt more divided & isolated. Our attention has never been more vulnerable to addictive streams & avoidance.

The truly alive aspects of life that get our blood flowing are gaining more and more of a sense of perceive risked & danger for a generation that consistently seeks emotional regulation from devices, feels a strong aversion to “cringe,” creates strict codes of what it means to be “good” or “cool” in a hyper-connected social media age, & has gradually lost a connection to the divine & sense of spiritual meaning. This is not our fault, but a product of a world that has fed us these tools, likely because it makes us all easier to control & numb. And though it’s not our fault, it is our responsibility to confront this wiring & dare to reweave it so we can finally build the nervous system capacity to welcome the er0tic aspects of life & their inherent risks again, because they are what makes life worth living, they are what makes us human.

These are the very aspects of life I feel Latino culture not only welcomes, but prioritizes. Bad Bunny’s hit album Debí Tirar Más Fotos, for example, is not just a call back to home, but a call back to what it means to be alive and present in a human body. From tracks filled with grief and longing, like Bokete & Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii, to tracks of unabashed joy, pride, & felt sense of community like La Mudanza and Café Con Ron, this is music you can’t help dancing to & also can’t help crying to. The full range of what it means to be on this strange and beautiful ride of being human is captured with deep love.

It’s a common stereotype that Latinos are dramatic, expressive, & extremely romantic people….and, honestly, it’s true. There’s a simultaneous fire & deep watery sensuality weaved into Latino culture, a passion for soaking in the ups and downs of being alive. There’s a reverence for what it means to yearn, to love, to have your heart broken into a million pieces. This is medicine for today’s modern landscape.

In this Pluto in Aquarius age, we will be confronted with the cultural impulse to dissociate, to reach beyond the human. We see this quite literally in inventions like AI or the increasing coldness & distance in social dynamics. Aquarius’s opposite sign, Leo, is going to be a key archetype to guide us through this reckoning. It is the counterbalance we need these days.

Leo is the sign of the sun. Of course, then, we are being inspired by Caribbean Latino cultures that are no strangers to the sun’s heat & abundance, people who are in touch with what it means to step outside into the light, to feel & cultivate heat.

Leo is not afraid to shine. Leo is the yearner who is not afraid to shout his love from the rooftops. Leo is the performer who will make a stage for herself anywhere. Leo is the campfire that lights the way for all to gather.

Leo is uninterested in the objective perspective & certainty of the outside spectator. Leo wants to be fully in the drama, on the field, on the stage. Leo understands that just as much wisdom is gained when sinking into the subjective, the specificities of our own lived, unique experience. Even the title of Bad Bunny’s album itself, which translates to “I Should’ve Taken More Pictures,” encapsulates both a profound nostalgia & an experience of having lost oneself in the moment, of having been in so deep that the act of stepping out to spectate was lost. The irony is that perhaps the moments were so sweet because there was no urgency to capture them, and yet the longing to return to a time when aliveness sunk deep into the present moment is still there.

Latino culture is complex & comprised of many archetypes and values, but I think the Leo archetype covers a lot of its most magnetic qualities: a commitment to being alive, an audacity to speak & express, a prioritization of pleasure.

In these times of much despair & isolation, it’s easy to get pessimistic, to promote a sense of doom, but I have hope. Every time I’m dancing with my family, or listening to an unapologetically emotional salsa hit, or letting myself receive the pounding heat of the sun, I have hope. The tools are out there, the instinct in us remains. We just need to dare to tap into what we all know deep down: we are here to be alive. Who are we to transcend that?

I decided to bring this question to a well-known playwright during a writing workshop who not only had proved her artistry & mastery through several acclaimed plays and productions, but also emitted a deeply wise & oracular vibe. Listening to her speak felt like going to a prophetess for guidance. With an open & aching heart, I offered up the tender question: “What do you do when you’re not sure if your play is even worth writing anymore? I just feel so lost.”

I watched her as she looked up, as if toward some other, divine source, her mouth not forcing out the perfect intellectual answer, but shaping itself slowly as she felt for the message that wanted to come through, with a life and knowing of its own.

“Lost….lost….lo….l…l…” the entire room waited silently as she searched for the word that would make everything click. “Love.”

I needed to rekindle my love for my play, she told me. I needed to step away from criticizing it, forcing, attempting to make it “easy” for me, and just love my play exactly where it was at. Find again why I fell in love with the idea in the first place, or find a new way into loving it. And if, ultimately, I didn’t feel the love was possible, then perhaps only then would be the time to reconsider my process with it.

In a moment that I now consider a deeply embodied way of grounding me back into my profound passion for my play, this playwright encouraged me to reach out my arm as she reached out hers, as if reaching for my play, like Adam and God reaching for each other in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.

The archetype of Venus was alive in the room at that moment, facilitating a deep reconnection between me and my creative spirit, between my creative soul and the play, between my human and the divinity that wanted to speak through my creation.

I realized in that moment that, similar to The Creation of Adam, creative process is a meeting of a human vessel with the divine, a willingness to follow a deeper pulse that is impossible to grasp, predict, control. Creativity itself is a relationship you cultivate, a relationship with the unseen which moves you to bring the heavens down to the Earth. Like any other relationship, consistent & fruitful creativity takes commitment, acceptance, and willingness to show up even in the most trying moments.

This is what Venus teaches us: at the very core, creating is an act of love. It is not just a sole endeavor, but one of inherent relationality. Not only is creation founded upon a relationship between the creator and the unseen, but it also requires us to develop intimacy with our lives in general so that we can receive the unseen’s messages and guidance in the first place. Creative process asks us to look into the mirror that is the world around us, to learn to be moved and brought to our knees by our love for it. Venus teaches us that creativity is a way of speaking with our own Life as a living, breathing, unfolding mystery that can reveal symbols, open & close the appropriate doors, guide us, and essentially talk back.

Venusian creation acknowledges creativity as an act of reception. We cannot be inspired or moved to create without first receiving others, receiving our experience, receiving the world around us. When we are able to receive our felt, emotional, & physical experience completely, without judging it or needing to change it, we can then respond wholeheartedly, willing to open fully and put our hearts on the line with our response.

This is the medicine contained in Venus’s home sign Libra, an archetypal landscape which speaks to the power of the mirror, the other, the response. Libra’s search for balance and desire for harmony offer us a deeper wisdom around creation: not only are our creative endeavors relationships we tend to, but they also hold a mirror to ourselves, reflecting back to us our own inner landscape and capacity for opening & love. In the case of my being stuck with my play, what my inability to unconditonally love my own creation pointed back to me was a place where I couldn’t accept myself in my messy phases, in my imperfection, in my own process of becoming.

On the other hand, Venus’s home Taurus shows us that the creative act is sensual and felt. It is by touching, tasting, hearing, seeing that we can receive the world, receive ourselves, and receive our inspirations. The Taurus side of Venus teaches us that to create is an embodied practice. It is not solely a venture of the mind which, although it can be a useful tool, is limited in its ability to allow art to transcend logic and touch Truth at a deeper level. This is why many of the most influential artists are also perceived as weird, illogical, whimsical figures, unwilling to follow the limitations of the collective mind, because what they sense must be created is something they feel, something their bodily instincts & senses receive as inherently aligned and true.

Taurus’s associations with the body’s senses and with the grounding material of the Earth affirms that alchemical love is a process rooted in our felt, sensory, earthy experience. So, if we are seeking to create in order to transform ourselves or the world (an act of love), we must allow our creative process to hit at the visceral, bodily level. We need to feel the Truth we convey hit us with a clunk, we need to let the crunchy material it stirs in us come out through our body & emotional experience, we need to be willing to go there in the most physical, raw way. To truly have our creations land in others, we need to let them land in ourselves at the bone-deep level. When we limit creation to solely an endeavor of the mind, we limit the entrance of its true vastness, which can’t be fully wrapped around or contained, because what we convey through art, particularly alchemical art, is inherently ungraspable and understood fully only by a deeper gnosis that transcends logical understanding.

Encapsulated by her emphasis on a felt sense of Truth, the Taurean Venus also teaches us about the relationship between creative process and pleasure. Creative energy and sexual energy are one and the same; the pull of desire which gives us the urge to merge with another is similar to the pull which calls us to create something new. Through a Taurean connection to our embodied knowing, we build trust in the ideas and people we feel attracted to. We feel our pleasure & desire as vital internal resources which feed our ability to trust our felt, bodily intuition even more.

As a collective culture, however, pleasure is deprioritized, and in many cases tabooed. Many have a fraught relationship with their pleasure, harboring a deep sense of shame over it, or extracting from their creative-sexual energy, reaching for the orgasmic release without landing fully in the sensation, and allowing pleasure to open slowly & unforced. We want our creative endeavors to grant us grand, climactic results, unconsciously eating away at the inherent pleasure of the slow, sensuous process. We chase the metaphorical orgasm of results, validation, pay off, arrival. Right relationship with the Taurean Venus invites an awareness of the subtleties of pleasure, both before & after its peak. She asks us to meet our creative spirit with all of ourselves, with all of our presence & attunement, in every moment of the process. In this way, we not only love our creations, we allow them to love us back. We circle back once again to Venus’s wisdom about reception.

Venus reminds us that the act of creating and seeing a creation all the way through can be one of the most profound & alchemical forms of love, just as a romantic connection, deep friendship, or intimate familial relationship can both open us & deepen our own intimacy with ourselves. To completely receive & love our creative projects allows us to more deeply meet ourselves, receive our own life experience, and step into life-affirming transformation. We can’t create without Venus - at least not in the way that shows us how deeply alive & connected we are.

Anything that emerges from the void-womb of our creative spirit automatically rearranges our reality through its mere existence. As we make something new, the reality that existed before it dies. Creation requires destruction; destruction makes way for new creation. This Life/Death/Life nature of creation is why creative process is so transformative. Change is inevitable. This is the truth at the core of creative alchemy, whether we’re creating a work of art, a community, a brand, an offering, or a Life: over and over we cycle, evolving and becoming, slowly but surely, creating to be changed and changing to create.

Contemplating the mirror of ourselves as creators and the Earth as Mother Creator, I see parallels between the Earth’s transformative tools and our own creative toolbox, in a microcosm/macrocosm dynamic. If the four elements (fire, water, earth, air) are colors in Earth’s alchemical palette, how can we map their wisdom onto our own creative capacity? Inspired by this thought experiment, I’ve broken up the creative process/identity into “parts” of us that we call in when bringing something into being: the catalyst, the vessel, the builder, and the pollinator.

I. The Catalyst (fire)

Through fire, we feel the heat and potency of creative vision. As a catalyst, we feel how necessary our creations are, despite the potential disruption their existence might cause. We are in touch with creation as aliveness, as the natural movement of erotic energy. The catalyst in us is turned on by the reality we want to remake through our creations; we are brought to life by the call to become who our creations will turn us into or require us to be. We feel the spark that initiates process, the passion that sees it through, and the fire that radiates outwards as we share it, inspiring a similar contagious spark in others. Our catalyst feels the life-affirming potential of creative process and fuels us with the energy to embark on its transformative journey. This part of us knows that we will never be the same, that the creative fire will both shine light on new possibilities and burn through what is in the way, a sensation that can inspire both empowering activation and paralyzing fear.

II. The Vessel (water)

Our watery side makes us vessels for our creative-emotional life. We allow the sheer force of our ideas to reshape and rearrange us like water molecules adjusting to their container. We surrender and flow in honor of the life that wants to be created through us. The fire of our creative drive melts us into malleable creators and we allow ourselves to be moved. We are in full union with what wants to be created, and therefore pulled by its current, immersed in its womb-like waters. Our water parts merge with the dream/vision, utilizing imagination to see it in all its potential forms, like reflections dancing on water, ever-shifting and ungraspable, enchanting and alluring. As the vessel, we trust an intuitive knowing that is deeper than logic or convention. We allow our sensations and feeling nature to guide us through the mystery of the process, trusting every impulse, every “detour,” every hunch. We release control and let the idea lead us.

III. The Builder (earth)

Earth represents the most tangible and dense part of the process, the ability to fully embody and bring our ideas into a real form that can be witnessed and felt. We get our hands in the mud and shape it. As the builder, we go from fully merging with our idea to a slow and steady separation, allowing our creation to have a life and form of its own. We negotiate how our creations come to form by confronting the real-life limitations of time, space, and circumstance. We experience setbacks and put in effort. We make necessary sacrifices and discover new possibilities as we engage with our creation’s raw materials. Our builder experiences both great humility and great reward as we part ways with a purely imaginative relationship with our ideas and face what is required for them to fully manifest.

IV. The Pollinator (air)

Air breathes life into the form of our creation as it becomes something that can circulate and be shared, critiqued, or even imitated. As pollinators, we utilize the tools of communication, strategy, socialization, and technology to send our ideas out into the vast matrix of collective thought. Our creation spreads about freely like wind, like a message blown through the rustling trees. No longer expressed in isolation, what we’ve built joins the chorus of creation, another bird contributing to the song of the forest’s sonic ecosystem. Our air-like capacities also allow us to take in others’ ideas, listening for what will inspire us and echo a call deep inside of us, bringing us back to an initial spark, ready to initiate creation once again.

Like the elements of Earth, the elements of our creative spirit each have their own range of forms, limitations, and cycles to consider. Water, for example, can manifest as fresh or salty water, as ice or mist. What does it mean for them to combine as well? Like the mud that arises out of water and earth’s combination, or smoke, the child of fire and wind? Considering how these elements come into play through the astrological signs, which archetypes they are assigned to and why, also has its wisdom to ponder.

Like the elements of Earth, the elements of our creative spirit work together to bring down what is unseen/divine/mysterious, making creativity an incredibly magical, relational, transformative, and natural process. Although I’ve presented the elements in a specific order, this order is not set in stone. Some artists may relate to this number order, others may engage all of them at once or bounce between them according to the flow and demands of their process. However these parts manifest, contemplating which of these capacities is easiest for us vs. which seem to pose a challenge can provide us with clarity and deeper intimacy with our creative nature, or even shed light on our needs for fruitful collaboration.

Deep dives on each of the elements coming soon. :)

much love,

VM

Before then, I had an obsession with filling up any silence as tightly and compactly as I could with constant podcasts, music, TV. I found myself in this sort of overstimulation trap. I wanted overwhelm, complete overwhelm, and then I would wonder why, when I would go to sleep, I would feel inundated by thoughts - which were suppressed for hours through this constant playing of distraction - or why new ideas weren’t trickling in and my creative process felt flattened.

Up in the mountains with someone I loved, it was so easy to let the world speak, and to have a conversation with it, and in that way my thoughts didn’t become annoying things to push down, but holy things that rose up in response. Ideas came, not from stuffing myself with information, but from honoring emptiness enough to let it be filled naturally.

The idea of sacred silence and the magic that emerges from it reminds me of the very beginning of the journey of the Tarot - when we go from 0 The Fool to 1 The Magician. The Fool sits on a mountain, in a moment of waiting, in a moment not too dissimilar from sacred silence, in which you are in total receptivity mode, ready for what comes, even as the next step seems uncertain. The Fool isn’t asserting or distracting, but listening, waiting, open, curious. This, I think, is the mode we enter into when we embrace a sacred silence, when we dare to do the dishes or eat our breakfast or ride the train or take a walk without anything playing the ears. When we dare to receive and trust that if something is meant to emerge, it will. Like the Fool, there is no forcing in silence, in emptiness. There is only being and a willingness to follow wherever the wind might take us.

In silence and in nothingness, ideas, visions, inspirations, things emerge. Thus, the natural progression from 0 The Fool to 1 The Magician. The Magician is often associated with the creative process, with the act of channeling, with the translation of the unseen into the material. The Magician shoots his wand up in the sky like a conductor, ready to receive the lightning bolt of inspiration that might strike from the heavens, ready to shape it into being with his alternate hand pointing down to the Earth. The receptivity and healthy recklessness of The Fool opens up our capacity to receive subtler message and nudges toward what we might make manifest through our lives and creations. The Fool and The Magician together are potential and kinetic energy, yin and yang, the calm and the storm, reception and creation, feeling and expressing, merging and emerging.

You don’t need the imagery of cards to understand this sacred binary though. Even just contemplating the numerical symbols of 0 and 1 is rich with archetypal meaning.

The symbol 0 stands like an open void, a pit of emptiness, a wide ocean of potential. When I contemplate the symbol of 0 and its numerological richness, I think of the bagel in Daniel Schienert and Daniel Kwan’s 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once. In the middle of a world where so many realities can be danced between and manifested, lies a chaotic and magnetic center, where things both die and reunite. The Everything Bagel collapses all of existence into an infinite black hole. In 0, like the Everything Bagel, everything and nothing co-exist.

0 is the state we’re in when we dare to stare into space, when we sink deep into the subtle depths of our being without trying to get anything out of the time that passes. 0 is the well of grief we all hold. It is the part of us that can continuously ask over and over, why? Where are we? What is this? 0 is the dissolving of the self. 0 is coming undone. 0 dares to hold both the immense vastness and mystery of being at once. 0 is life as a process of death. 0 is our collective oneness. 0 is pussy - wet, magnetic, dark, receptive. It’s the chaos and longing we perceive when all the distractions fall away. 0 is the eternal cosmic womb of existence containing both the waters of creation and darkness of the void.

And from that place, we can surrender. We can see what Life has in store for us without gripping for control. We can let inspiration find us instead of chasing it down in order to meet our expectations. When we embrace the power of 0, every present moment becomes erotic because we are sensing, receiving, feeling, and merging with All That Is.

Then, emerging from the blackhole, comes the 1 - phallic, assertive, pointed, singular. 1 is our capacity to penetrate into existence itself. It is our right and will to self-actualize, to be one of many, to be. Instead of surrendering to where the wind may take him, The Magician quite literally takes the magic into his own hands. He proclaims himself capable of creation, a fractal of a wider divine presence with a responsibility to wield his power fully and wisely.

It’s no coincidence that the magic wand itself is a physicalized 1. The wand’s symbolism hints toward our ability to harness the power of All That Is toward our own purpose and passions. We don’t just exist to receive the world, we are also meant to create it, through our desires, through our beliefs, through our work.

Associated with the archetype of Mercury, The Magician and 1 also correspond to the power of words. Speaking, writing, communicating - these are all forms of everyday magic that aim to assert our selves and our path into being. When we state a desire, express an idea, confess an emotion, or literally incant a spell, we are calling in the manifesting powers of the Magician. We emerge from the well of 0 to claim an individual path, to choose our own will and power with gusto. We emerge as a 1.

1 says I am. 1 is our drive, our will. 1 is our deep knowing that we are on this Earth with a unique purpose. 1 is our singularity, our singular essence, our is-ness. 1 brings our visions to life. 1 is carving out a space for ourselves to express authentically and fully. 1 is the fire in our belly driving us toward our destiny. 1 asks us to walk a path that is wholly and undeniably ours. 1 calls us into being.

But the magical process of singularity, creative individuation, and expression represented by 1 cannot exist without first acknowledging all that is contained in the void of 0. A beat isn’t a beat without the silence in between. A space can’t be curated without its vacancy. A conversation can’t flow without moments of listening. We can’t bring our vision into being without first making space to receive it. This dance is present everywhere, every day, whether we acknowledge its sacredness or not.

Many of our struggles with relating, creating, overconsumption, overworking and dissociating can be traced down to our misunderstanding and warping of this fundamental dynamic.

When we become addicted the drive of self assertion without integrating the wisdom of 0, we push ourselves to produce tangible results in our lives without honoring the need to slow down and perceive the subtler pulses within and around us. We demand Life give us the answers, give us the outcomes we long for without making space to fall into its mystery, surrender to the embrace of 0’s unfathomable vastness, embrace the fact that the more we reach for certainty, the more the ungraspable waters of existence will slip through our fingers. It is by ignoring our need to receive Life as much as we direct it that we force onto ourselves and others cycles of disembodied labor and hollow achievements. We desperately fling ourselves into existence to force it all to mean something. Run fast and long enough away from 0 and you’ll fall off 1’s steep cliff, plummeting down into an ocean of disillusionment, forced to reckon with the hole covered haphazardly with avoidant aims.

On the other hand, when we deny the fact that expressing ourselves through creation is not only fulfilling, but necessary, we let the emptiness of 0 swallow us whole, drown us in patterns of collapse and hopelessness. Existentialism goes from a liberating framework to a weighted and cold lens. We are washed away by the tragedies of the world to an extent that renders us purposeless, dissociative, deflated, and unable to connect to the unique role we’re meant to play in collective liberation and world-building. We dishonor the miracle of our very existence and feel victimized by Life, by God, by Everything. We give our power away to our understanding of the “powers that be” and ignore the reality that is dying to flow and be created through us.

Life, however, always seeks to rebalance itself. What seem like opposites are actually elements craving integration and equilibrium. We often don’t find ourselves solely on one end of the spectrum or the other. Overworking naturally pendulum swings into collapse and burnout. A deep, ungrounded sense of hopelessness can drive us into a Sisyphean trap of self-exploitation. When we cultivate a healthy relationship with one, we heal our relationship with the other. Grounding our work in a more expansive purpose and humble awareness of impermanence enriches our experience as creators. Choosing to create and interact with reality despite its weight allows us to hold our inherent existential longing with maturity and devotion.

When we make space for both 0 and 1 in our lives, we begin to truly allow ourselves to both shape and be shaped by Life. We don’t harden against it or over-control it. We don’t collapse in the face of it or feel victimized by its inherent grief. We hold and honor our life experience as something holier, wiser, and vaster than we can comprehend, but touchable and malleable enough for us to co-create with.

The dance is alive in the foundational binary code used in computer systems. Sex in all its forms embodies this interplay. Our mouths destroy and ingest as well as express. Volcanic rock melts and accumulates slowly in a magma chamber before the resulting lava is pressured and triggered to burst forth. A caterpillar literally dissolves into goo in its chrysalis before reconfiguring itself and blooming as a butterfly. Winter strips and humbles the Earth into a mode of reception before Spring grants the world permission to sprout and emerge.

When we dare to hold both 0 and 1, every step we take becomes a part of the dynamic dance that permeates all of existence.

There is something uniquely transformative and visceral about writing a piece for theatre. At the core of it for most playwrights is the desire to tease out and explore an issue, feeling, or observation, not through a singular narrative, not through a poem, but through a cast of characters who all relate to each other and deal with conflict.

Writing a play is different for me than anything else. I’ve written songs, poems, essays, short stories, screenplays. Nothing quite initiates me into full emotional alchemy like writing a play does. In a play, characters come together at a specific point in time, pushed along by the subtle beat of truth that thumps in what the character don’t say or don’t face, initiating a process of slow eruption into revelation and a new normal. I find that I, as the playwright, am always moving through a similar confrontation and establishment of a new equilibrium as I attempt to build this dramatic tension.

There’s just something about writing a story that’s meant to be embodied, that’s meant to hold multiple voices, and that isn’t fully complete until it’s witnessed, live and in the moment. It brings you to your knees and it asks a lot of you.

Not so different from the undertaking of shadow work. The commitment to seeing your patterns, your shadows, and the multitude of parts that exist within you, trying to protect, hide, and comfort you in ways that likely have zoomed way past their expiration date, like uncovering a whole drama at play in your system.

Trauma is an experience of sudden twist and upheaval. It is a breaking through of your system into different understandings of reality based on how you had to respond to cope or survive. Trauma fractures you.

This is not to say you’re not whole if you’re dealing with trauma (which, we all are), but often when core beliefs are ingrained due to highly charged life experiences, new “parts” of ourselves emerge specifically designed to keep us from reliving the traumatic event. Parts that we often play out unconsciously and lead to our core patterns.

This is the idea behind Internal Family Systems, an approach to psychotherapy founded by family therapist Richard C. Shwartz, who also authored the incredible book on the subject, No Bad Parts. IFS approaches trauma healing through understanding and relating with these many parts within us, approaching them with equal parts curiosity and compassion. It allows these parts to really come into focus and have a voice, so we can better identify when they’re running the show and what their presence is asking of us.

I find with my plays, sitting down with the characters and having conversations with them is one of the most effective ways to thaw any “blocks” I may be sensing. It’s not a forcing, it’s not a squeezing, it’s not a reach for perfection. It’s attuning to them, listening to them, so you can hear what they’ve been through and what they need to work through. Just like relating to your parts, relating to your characters can be deeply confronting, surprising, enlightening, and slow. The ability to see and witness your characters’ suffering, needs, and voices is not unlike the skill of stepping back and sitting at the table with your parts.

Also: you have to love your parts. There is no “bad” part, no part that you need to “get rid of.” In No Bad Parts, Shwartz writes, “Basically, what I found is that love is the answer in the inner world, just as it is in the outer world. Listening to, embracing, and loving parts allows them to heal and transform as much as it does for people.”

The goal is integration, seeing the parts fully, empathizing with them, similar to a writer’s duty to fully see all characters, wherever they fall on the villain/hero spectrum. It’s said in writing and acting training spaces alike: you can’t effectively engage a character without seeing their humanity, their fullness, where they’re coming from. It’s only then that the “bad” characters gain nuance and offer the story enough perspective to build up to catharsis, preventing the conflict from falling flat.

I find with both writing characters and parts work, a major block in relating to them is my refusal to fully accept them and take them as they are. It is only with full acceptance of who they are that I can understand what they’re searching for, what they’re moving through, and what their purpose really is.

Playwriting and healing processes alike require us to crack open the questions we are grappling with and see all the parts that come tumbling out, embracing the messiness and rejecting the pressure to reach an answer or create something “pristine” so that the question can be embodied and lived fully.

What if the characters I channel are perfect mirrors of the parts I’m wrestling with inside of me? Disparate pieces of an internal puzzle coming together to play out their dynamics fully, inviting me as a writer and the audience as witness into an intimate journey towards truth and meaning-making? Playwriting, then, becomes an admittance of the fracturing, of the parts of us that haven’t quite integrated, or are seeking to. It’s a way to pour your heart out in all its raw and shocking multitudes. Maybe that’s why it feels so excruciatingly vulnerable. It’s a willingness to show the shattering and allow something beautiful to come through as we put the pieces together. It’s a deep knowing that all our parts deserve their moment under the spotlight, deserve embodiment, deserve ritual, deserve witnessing. It’s a reclaiming of our wholeness, our knowing that within the sea of voices is one pulsating, ever-evolving story waiting to emerge.

A similar astonishment came through when I first started working with divinatory mediums like tarot and astrology. Suddenly, there was another path to the other side, to conversation with that mysterious partner I always sensed, but could never truly name. When I first started pulling cards every day to start developing an intimacy with them, I was struck by how much it felt like a budding relationship. Through showing up consistently, magic arose once again, and a dynamic with its own patterns, inside jokes, questions, and challenges began to grow.

Writers, psychics, and creators are archetypes that have often been perceived as solitary, but are we actually alone? Was it really just 9-year-old-me and a pen? Or inanimate cards before me and my own psychological projections?

Who or what is that voice, that instinct inside me that knows, by the time I finish one word, which word will come next?

That is the magic of creativity and divination, where they both intersect: they offer paths to a direct communication with the Mystery, the Unknown, to Life Itself.

To create and to divine is a dance between showing up fully and surrendering completely. In short, both require the cultivation of a relationship, a cosmic collaboration.

What if this collaboration does not just occur when we are creating or divining?

Maybe we are always chatting with the Mystery, flirting with it, dancing with it, but creation and divination offer a deeper intimacy, a more visceral reminder of this dynamic. What if creativity and divination are more sensational proof of a deeper flow, erotic peaks of a conversation that is ongoing and ever-present?

What if at the core of creativity and divination is a relational dance that we carry through every step of our lives? Life, then, becomes inherently relational, even as we sit seemingly “alone,” and Life Itself is our primary relationship.

How many of us loop into stories about being victims of our Life? Or put effort into controlling or dominating Life? How would we look at these patterns in the context of a relationship? If you saw your Life as a partner that only wants to be seen by you, that wants to support you wholeheartedly and is interested in offering what’s best for your emotional and spiritual evolution, how might you show up differently? Put in more effort, listen more closely, exert less control, take more responsibility?

What if moving with our Life, with Mystery, requires the same love, patience, work, and unlearning as a “real” human relationship? If our relationship to Life is a courtship, how are we treating it? How have we not yet sat at the table with Life, open to its ideas, and responsible for our part in it?

A lot of us automatically absorb this idea as shaming, as an accusation that we are dong life “wrong.” That part of you that assumes shame is intentionally taught, lodged in by a society that insists Life is something to win, something you either do “well” or not, and if you don’t win Life, there must be something wrong with You.

Modern culture and the systems of power benefit from this severing, from convincing us that the world is basically human beings vs Everything Else. The Unknown becomes a fabrication of the mind. Our intuition becomes a delusion at odds with the superior intellect. We supposedly thrive on believing that we are the only intelligent and alive beings on Earth, yet we are lonelier and more hopeless than ever, severely struggling to relate to each other both on the one-on-one and collective levels. What if at the core of this struggle to relate is a wound around the primary relationship, the creative and divinatory endeavor of our Life, our trust in and openness to the Mystery?

Astrologer and historian Richard Tarnas does a great job at painting a picture of the history and development of this collective “disenchantment.” In his book Cosmos & Psyche, he writes, “What once pervaded the world as the anima mundi is now seen as the exclusive property of human consciousness. The modern human self has essentially absorbed all meaning and purpose into its own interior being, emptying the primal cosmos of what once constituted nature.”

By collapsing under the weighted idea that Life is unalive, cold, and simply happening to us as an objective, soulless force, we project the very same systems of power we live under onto the fabric of Life Itself. We deny our own agency, and succumb to the allure of hopelessness instead of acknowledging our own internal power, our own relationship with Mystery.

Tarnas later goes on to write, “A world of purposeless objects and random processes has served as a highly effective basis and justification for human self-aggrandizement and exploitation of a world seen as undeserving of moral concern. The disenchanted cosmos is the shadow of the modern mind in all its brilliance, power, and inflation.”

What if the most radical act in modern society is to surrender to this mysterious relational dance and take responsibility for our part in the collaboration?

The relational string of life is ever-connected, ever-present, ever-evolving, and creativity & divination offer the ultimate mirrors. As more overt and loudly erotic moments in our dynamic with Mystery, they can help us win more clarity on how exactly we talk to and relate to our Life and, by extension, how we relate to others in general.

For example: I shudder with fear at the wisdom the cards offer me and beg them to give me a different answer, anxiously pulling over and over. At the same time, I attempt to contort and control the people I love, hoping to make them different, more comfortable mirrors. I demand the same certainty and control over my own Life, refusing to abandon myself to Life, and only making comfortable decisions I can reasonably “predict.”

Or: I avoid creating what I feel called to create because it’s too vulnerable. A the same time, I struggle to own up to my feelings for someone, shutting them out in the process. On a larger scale, I don’t own up to my actual desires for Life and so I feel constantly unable to fully access its fullness, telling myself a story that I’m being shut out from my own experience, when really it’s me pushing Life Itself away because I’m scared of what truly living might ask of me.

The manifestations and parallels are endless.

To see this is incredibly empowering, but not necessarily easy. Just like any collaboration or relationship, relating with Mystery can bring us to our edge, hit our egos in uncomfortable ways, bring up confronting questions, and—most of all—ask us to release the need for certainty so we can be touched and surprised by the experience.

And that’s where the dynamic dance begins. Desire and surrender. Action and release. Agency and trust. Like any kind of relationship, the aliveness and quality of the dance relies on your willingness to show up for it, over and over again, learning about your partner and letting your partner learn about you.

Creativity and divination, then, become sites of profound transformation, confronting mirrors, mediums of soul surgery that can help us open up this cosmic line of communication and reconfigure, remake, and remember what we’re really here for, what our growth edges are, what Life has to teach and offer us, and how inherently worthy and powerful we really are.