Align Your Orbit #96 - In the Underworld We Are
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.
In the acid bath currents of collective unconsciousness, we’ve entered the proving grounds. Here, you discover your disaster personalities, your pressurized diamonds, your softest center. Let what isn’t you fall away and emerge purer than anyone expected.
You live in the in-between now, inviting the could-have-been to thread through the shouldn’t-be-happening. Your fingers weave the quantum narrative of is and isn’t on the weft of undiluted magic. Your very presence reveals the essence in the inessential. No need to even bare your teeth. The ancestors are watching.
Want to experience these experiments as a Tidal playlist?
New Experiments
1. stripped bare – When all social niceties, relationships, desires to help others, and context leave your soul aching and naked, name what is left. This is core, simplicity, essence, survival, personal practice. Allow this unmoving point to reorganize the rest of your life. You cannot save anyone or anything else when what you do grinds your soul to dust.
Challenge Mode: When someone cannot understand the way you explain yourself, when transparency is not enough, duck under the wave. Others can tell the story of your life when you’re gone—in the meantime, you’re living it unapologetically. You don’t owe sense-making to anyone.
2. no unacknowledged hand-holding – Emotional and physical caretaking is one of the most undervalued, spirituality demanding, and necessary tasks we undergo as members of our social species. Identify where you’ve been doing invisible labor and bring it above board. You’re not here to thanklessly fill gaps—let yourself be more than the glue that keeps everything from falling apart.
Challenge Mode: In our separation from the natural world, we have intimacy wounds we don’t even have names for. There’s a temptation to fill those holes with more human company even as your intimate relationship with the fabric of reality itself waits for you to reconnect. Fall back into the space between and offer your longing to longing itself. You have always belonged here.
3. resist the siren song – Everyone is going through it, and the temptation to cry for twelve hours in the sheets sings out from the bedroom. The grief you feel in your body is real, is sacred, but without air, it cannot alchemize. Move stiff limbs, dance your anger, vocalize your own magic. You never needed anyone else’s.
Challenge Mode: There are two conflicting truths—you are not to blame for what happens to you and your subconscious narratives summon difficult catalysts for change. What’s in front of you is here to teach you something. Playing the victim won’t save you anymore.
4. and live into legacy – Take your whole life into your hands and weave your own narrative from the tangled threads. Name what would dissolve if you were gone, what would be missed, what knowledge would go with you. Write it down. Name moments of deepest change. Name the names that have followed and left you. Open your treasure troves and leave nothing undiscovered.
Challenge Mode: Your physical stamina boosts your emotional and spiritual capacity. In your pursuit of personal meaning, your body the spaceship needs fuel, needs maintenance, needs use. Dock when you need rest but push off long before mystery calls your name.
andra’s Recap of Prune & Propogate
The experiments from this previous moon cycle included simplify & solidify (challenge mode: don’t throw the good out with the bad), fly your freak flag (challenge mode: stop settling for surface-level interactions), invite reflection (challenge mode: sink into the moment), and put your tools in your paths (challenge mode: there is no shame in calling it quits).
I spent so much time this month processing plums from my very abundant trees. I donated to two food banks, took them to six potlucks, gave them away at a tabling event, ate many whole, made two plum crisps, made several large batches of jam, invited more than thirty families to pick them, and processed over a thousand into fruit leather. Never in the time we have lived here have we had so many, and I deeply appreciated the process of working with all the stages of fruiting—underripe, half-eaten, overripe, molding, smashed after a fall from high branches.
After several years now of training in permaculture and forestry practices, I see the trees and their growth with new eyes. Rather than experience fear trimming back what is alive, I see it now as more of a haircut. I can see the wild growth and the ways the parts aren’t necessarily serving the whole. For the first time, I did the pruning myself, and I feel pleased with the outcome. I woodchipped most of the branches to give the growth back to the soil, and the whole-cycle aspect of the process was deeply satisfying.
Regarding not throwing out the good with the bad, I have been adjusting away from being a purist about anything. There are edge cases and exceptions to everything, as much as I might want to have a simple code of ethics to live by. I don’t want to overlook the nuance. I know that I am only a few steps away from doing the unspeakable for reasons I’m sure I could justify. It’s a deep practice in empathy.
Despite the constant temptation to allow my inner critic to tell me my romance stories are not worth my time, I’m still writing them. They keep me sane and keep me going, giving me something to think about when my time is idle and my mood is tumultuous. I don’t have any intentions to stop, and the primary story I am working on right now is officially long enough to be a novel. Maybe it will be a series.
Especially in the wake of beginning my end-of-life doula courses, I have even more desire for conversation topics that mean something. I don’t want regurgitated habit—I want someone to pour out their soul in the space between us. Somehow, that’s more available when I stare unflinchingly into the face of death and grief, and I’m here for it.
I had check-in conversations with several people in my inner circle this month, and it supported the process of naming the edges of what we want to be together, how we want to tell the story of how we exist together. Coupled with deep moments of intentional experience—hearing what they have not told almost anything or pressing into a rarely touched place of the neck—my relationships feel truer, more aligned, and full of breath.
It’s still a struggle to motivate care for my body, and admittedly, I’ve gained more weight than I would like. On some level, it feels like a natural consequence of having less sleep with the baby around and being at home more often, but I’m craving more care. I’ll be continuing to explore what my barriers are and gently removing them.
With considering calling it quits, I have determined that, at minimum, I need to know what the path out looks like. That’s what makes it possible for me to stay. Otherwise, I allow myself to feel trapped and fall into victim narratives. I’m ready to outgrow those.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy working with this moon’s experiments!