Align Your Orbit #90 - It's All Fire
Not as metaphor—as consumption. As friction. As the texture of waking up in the world right now. Fire doesn't apologize for this. Fire says: do it before it's not funny. Open the window to let the smoke out or close it to keep it from coming in. It’s your choice. You can feel it in your chest. That's not a warning. That's ignition.
You are not the same person who started any of this. The next step forward belongs to the version of you who is here now—not the one who made the original plan. Step in. The fire knows you’re indestructible.
We are taking a month off making a playlist on account of andra’s parental leave. We’ll be back soon with music to match!
New Experiments
1. the timing is now, and now, and now – There is a moment when the impulse becomes historical. When what you could have done curdles into what you didn't. You know the line. Stop tripping over it. Go on the trip, make the call, say the thing. Fire doesn't wait for consensus reality to catch up. Whatever is it, do it while it still has heat and humor and the particular electricity of a thing not yet ruined by hesitation.
Challenge Mode: Pick one thing you've been orbiting for months and give it a deadline of this moon cycle. Not a soft maybe. A date. Tell someone.
2. trust what bonds to you and vice versa – Your body knows before your mind does. It knows in the chest, in the caught breath, in the particular weight of a hand. The physiological bond is not soft science—it is the oldest data you have. Trust what pulls toward you and what you pull toward. Trust what loosens in your body when someone walks in the room. Trust what tightens when something is wrong, even when everyone around you is calling it fine. The relational landscape is seismic right now. Let your nervous system be your compass.
Challenge Mode: The next time you feel something shift in your chest—ease or tightening, warmth or alarm—say it out loud before you explain it. Not "I'm worried because—" Just "my chest just did something." Name the sensation before the story. See what that changes.
3. get to know every hour like a friend – You've been fighting your own rhythms to perform normalcy for systems that were never built around what your body needs. Stop. Get to know every hour like a friend with its own personality, its own gifts. The midnight hour has things to tell you that noon never will.
Challenge Mode: For one week, track when you actually feel alive versus when you're just pushing through. Don't change anything yet—just observe. You might be living someone else's schedule. Let the data radicalize you.
4. those of us who can do it will – You cannot be everything to everyone in a wildfire. Other people's limited capacities are showing up everywhere right now—in how they parent, in how they love, in how they break and reassemble. Some people are not in their right minds. Some are building walls at thirteen and need you patient at the door. Some are making choices that ripple out into children, into households, into you. You cannot fix the physics of other people's lives. What you can do is show up as the person you actually are right now—auntie or anchor or open hand.
Challenge Mode: Identify one relationship asking more than the system between you can sustain. What would it look like to renegotiate, even slightly? You don't have to leave. You just have to stop pretending the weight is evenly distributed.
ash’s Recap of All You Touch
*I’m happy to be limelighting as the primary writer of this month’s Align Your Orbit while andra takes family leave with their partner to welcome a new-to-this-world being into their lives.
The experiments for the previous moon cycle included alternative anarchy (challenge mode: peer governance templates), you feel this before anyone else (challenge mode: seek tough love), sink in rather than shut down (challenge mode: find kinship in those who sing your songs), and rest rest work rest rest (challenge mode: make your own myths).
Our practices of anarchy cannot be abstract anymore. I feel it in the particular way certain systems have stopped pretending to work—and in the way I've stopped pretending to be surprised. What I've been sitting with instead is the question of what non-hierarchy actually looks like when the people involved have wildly different capacities. You cannot flatten that into equal participation and call it liberation. I'm still working out what I actually believe here.
When it comes to seeking tough love, I spent a long weekend traveling with my nieces neé part-time kids (11, 13, and 16) for their state dance competition. A competition weekend is something. Taking in how your once-sweet-toddler kiddos need you differently at each age, how the social and emotional regulation support matters more than you'd think and less than they’re able to admit right now. The kids are the most real people in any room. The teenagers give it to you straight. I'm taking notes.
In my experience, when is some quadrant of a family’s landscape not seismic? This month a sibling of mine has been navigating an ending relationship, the start of another, and pressures on their living situation. My parents want the best for them but don’t have the best ability to treat my sibling as what they are: a grown-ass human with agency and their own attachment issues and needs. I've had to sink in instead of shut down and sit with what it means to show up as the calm one—the reasonable daughter, the understanding big sis—while also navigating my own feelings about it and sharing, when it’s appropriate, my hard-earned wisdom I hope my sib can hear. None of it is a contradiction. It’s just all things to take in stride on a Tuesday.
I began writing queer romance novels last spring, and it’s been a driving creative force for me over several seasons. I lost the thread for a while as my month was unfortunately more like work work rest work work, but what has returned this week are the stories. I’m grateful for the time I’ve got to spend with my characters and the glimpses they give me into a reality that I’m hopeful we can collectively pull ourselves closer toward each day.
I have yet to meet the fresh-on-the-scene little one (who shares my name as a middle name! *swoon*), but I am already feeling how my auntie heart has grown another size. I’m grateful for this in an intense transit of external strife, chaos, and ongoing suffering in the world.
May this moon cycle’s fire be one that burns precisely and only what needs razed as it throws warm light on all that sustains.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy this moon cycle’s experiments!