Align Your Orbit #88 - This Fire is for You
Align Your Orbit is a series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide intentionality and impact. Find delight in these journeys of exploration. If you would like to receive these offerings as an email on the new moon, sign up here.
We’re ripping the band-aid off. Time to come clean, hydrogen peroxide and all. There is no distinction between toolbox and personality. Co-morbidity is not causation. We’re reprogramming. Welcome. You’ve always belonged here, where everyone’s a god. The hero, and simultaneously, the villain. Let’s not even mention the whole spectrum between.
Our aim is bullseye, and we’ve been practicing. You have a system for everything.
Want to experience these experiments as a Tidal playlist?
New Experiments
1. Choose Your Own Adventure. – Commit to your choices. Mistakes always happen in the perspective. Hold yourself accountable and feed what’s not yours to the dragons. This is a ride. Oh, you want a guide? Here’s the person curating which three choices you have. Would you like prefer, human, AI, or sentient bubble? How many times have you outsourced thought labor to data collection and language-processing models?
Pick a side, any side, every side, and give it your everything for a big, short burst. The time to push is coming. It’s rare and almost too fleeting. Birth shows us we can do just about anything for 1 minute at a time. Find the secret third way like a love letter to the past and future.
Challenge Mode: Have you tried out the Dvorak keyboard? Qwerty isn’t the only option. Learn how to play with it here.
2. The Energy is Building. – Blow off steam. Dance. Move. Stim. There’s no better time than now. Reach for every corner of your capacity and wrap it around you like a fuzzy blanket. You got this, bae.
Challenge Mode: Design a character with a friend and enter a new chat together. Go for a walk and pretend to be each other for 15 minutes. Your friendships are full of energy and joy, but you must put on the tail first. Them’s the rules.
3. Even Your Flaws Sing Your Praises. – You are the invisible hand, the glue that holds everything together. You are earth, more mycelium than soil. Call it what you will: project manager, personnel, finance. You’re the ethic in every dumpster fire you ever worked for. Time to sing yourself free. Your imperfection makes you essential.
Challenge Mode: Desire is not the same as suffering. In fact, someone wants the energy you have in abundance. -*gasp*- Yes, they’re flirting. This is your sign. Complete the circuit. Ride the waves. You know how to use this energy.
4. Make Happen Every Grand Plan. – Start that new server. Indulge a new creative obsession. Your fingers are fire and electricity, every gesture a wild, primal prayer to every god. Begin that tradition. We can always reimagine culture. Social change is only a viral meme away. Everything clicks exactly into place.
Challenge Mode: Speaking of reality games, have you heard of Metachysalis? Make real-world change in exactly the way you already do. Complete with friends ready to show you the way.
andra’s Recap of Torque the Fulcrum
The experiments for the previous moon cycle included color-coded creation (challenge mode: give yourself the gift of unscheduled time), trust your own empathy (challenge mode: practice asking questions), stare unflinchingly at your superpower (challenge mode: you are everyone in your dreams), and alchemize pain responses (challenge mode: tell someone you’re tapped).
For a long time, looking at my calendar induced a state of overwhelm. I had it color-coded, but I had to remember what they all meant, and I couldn’t easily see how much time I was spending on each colored label. At a friend’s suggestion, I separated each of the labels into wholly separate calendars (in Google calendar because I haven’t migrated yet). This way, I can run statistics on how I’m spending my time and easily see what’s going on in each category for any given day. My only complaint is that, if I want to share my calendars with others, I do have to share all seven. But, honestly, that’s always been extremely privileged information, anyway. I also changed the color palette to be a natural theme with purples, greens, and oranges, which I much prefer looking at. So far so good. I feel a lot less overwhelm, and I have been extremely motivated this last period.
I only managed to make space for one wholly unscheduled day, preventing myself from making to-do lists the whole time. I focused on only doing the next thing I had a whim toward, and it was very freeing, if surprising how difficult it was. I did in fact feel inspired to do “productive” things, but I made sure that I didn’t get pulled into that mode for too long as to shut out other opportunities for creativity and spaciousness. I look forward to more experiments in this realm as I head into my parental leave starting in April.
As more people around me wake up to the horrors of the surveillance state, there’s an ever-present temptation to tell myself that I’m not doing enough or talk myself into going back down to the front lines of the fight. But, every time, I am able to re-presence myself in the knowing that doing resource distribution, networking, mutual aid, environmental restoration, and cultural ritual creation is also the work. This is where I can show up with my full capacity. It’s okay for me to let others do the angry, raucous work right now. I am building community safety net systems behind the scenes, and that’s also specialized and crucial work.
In terms of asking questions, I received some excellent feedback in a class I recently taught about sociocracy. One person said (paraphrased) I ask very pointed but kind questions that make people think as I transparently name the tensions I am feeling in my body. I have the impression that I was freer with my callouts when I was younger, but now I have cultivated the discernment to ask questions that simultaneously deescalate the situation while prompting the other person to do some introspection.
The sharpness that I needed discernment for is definitely part of my superpower. It’s not something to use lightly in the world, but I now feel ready for my inheritance. I’ve done an incredible amount of work in researching, uncovering, and ritually releasing the trauma in my lineage in this past month, free us all from the hurt and guilt I’ve been carrying for them. It brought be a greater sense of compassion for what they went through and a confidence in my ability to navigate the legacy they left me, good and bad. It’s always a mixed bag, and I’m making peace with that.
My dreams have been elusive lately, maybe because I haven’t been sleeping very well, but that always brings my sense of reality closer into my dreamscape. In that way, I’ve felt my magic more than I have in years, and more confidence in the use of that magic when it arrives. I deeply enjoyed talking to a friend of mine recently about the ways that my magic focuses on amplification rather than attracting certain outcomes. I do everything in my power to increase agency in others in thoughtful and curated ways to achieve surprising outcomes. There’s an art to the application that I trust now more than ever.
Our culture doesn’t treat pain like something that has a root cause in a way that honestly baffles me. There is very little attention or curiosity offered to the root cause, and there’s something like a frantic escapist mentality about it. As a previous long-time sufferer of chronic pain who did find a cure, I ache to help others think through where their discomfort originates from. It’s honestly an effort not to poke at a wound (literal or metaphorical), but that’s where the questions really come in handy.
There was a time this month where I experienced a big panic trigger over something that seemed small, and I did need to resource myself with my partner, therapist, friends, and others to talk myself through what was coming up for me and why I was having such a difficult time getting over it. There are some times when you really do need a mirror outside of yourself, and there’s no shame in that.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy this moon cycle’s experiments!