I have always loved fairy tales, old stories, Aesop’s Fables and Greek myths. When I was very young and first read about Cassandra’s curse - she could foresee and speak IMPORTANT truths, especially about the NEAR FUTURE, but was cursed to never be believed.

She was the one who warned Troy not to take the horse.

Increasingly, due to geopolitical events, I feel I’ve become more and more Cassandra.

We’ve all had the feeling where we can see where something is heading, but those around us can’t. Due to the network effect, it feels like going on a ride that you know you aren’t going to like, but you have to take it. And it is also like your fellow riders grinning and smiling as you try to tell them what this ride is really about.

We are now entering now into an experientially surreal time.

And the Cassandra that I am, wants to contribute.

Obviously my only choice is to make Cassandras out of all of you too, so we can keep company.

Because the most healing thing for one Cassandra is to say her piece and have another Cassandra nod in recognition.

We un-gaslight each other.

You all are the only ones I want to save anyway.

I wanted to present an alternative story for Cassandra - one freer from the long arm of misogyny.

I started to work on it, but it started to depress me HOW MANY THINGS I would have to change.

So instead, let me further Cassandra-ify us. Let’s use this weird power. Let’s use our niche skill to see what is coming.

This Cassandra (me) invites you into the near future, not in order to control it - but to see it as a big story arc we are in (nested within ever larger arcs).
This Cassandra (me) also invites us all into a deeper relationship with symbols - we are living in a confusing time with many bad actors paying good money to confuse us further. BUT THE SYMBOLS ARE ALL THERE, TELLING THE TRUTH.
This Cassandra (me) made a little video tour of the energetic flavors we can expect over the next few lunations; I hope you enjoy it.
Until next time,
Jess

“one horse alone doesn’t know there’s another one

ten miles down the road.”

- Mary’s Danish

Soon

the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,

will enter his life from the tiny egg.

On his delicate legs

he will run through the valleys of moss

down to the leaf mold by the streams,

where lately white snow lay upon the earth

like a deep and lustrous blanket

of moon-fire,

VI.

and probably

everything

is possible.

- Worm Moon, Mary Oliver, 12 Moons

”Healing takes time, whether that’s personal, collective, or the healing of the land. We cannot easily undo generations of harm. But it feels so good to undertake the work of repair. And is a gift and an honor to do what we can.

The Cowachin are a gift-giving nation. Potlatch is core to their traditions. They understand the truth: that giving is a gift to the giver. When you give you feel good about it yourself. You feel like a person of value, who has something to offer. When you receive, you also feel good. Someone has thought about you, cares about you, values you.

This year, in preparing for the trip I made a gift for the orchard, an embroidered hanging, to envision what it might look like once again thriving with fruit, standing above a river filled with salmon. Creating it was a gift to myself, for it opened up something I hadn’t realized I was longing for: a chance to make something beautiful. Writing has been my vocation, but it doesn’t offer the same kind of sensual pleasure as putting colors together and struggling to create form.

I always loved making art. One of my earliest memories is gazing with great pleasure at how pretty my green crayon and my pink looked together. I was an art major in college, but I didn’t think I was particularly good at it. I enjoyed my classes, but I didn’t have the talent some people have for recreating reality.

But making the orchard hanging, I could let go of all that, and experience the deep pleasure of creating something for its own sake, to make it as beautiful as I could not because my anyone would judge it, but because it was an embodied prayer.”

-Starhawk

“You are held within the web of life, within flows of energy and intelligence far exceeding your own.”

—Joanna Macy

"Meditation is the freeway to enlightenment. It helps us get in touch with the teacher within. It opens us to higher energy sources and recharges body, mind and spirit. Perception depends on our energy level and meditation is the way to keep energy at its highest. Meditation can help us to be more fully involved in life because we learn to watch how we set up our experiences. Meditation changes your life because it changes you."

- Bethany Bethards

“'Inside each of us, even if we don't see it - even if we never see it - is a mandala, a castle that shines with a soft purplish light, sometimes cracklings of orange radiance from its core. It is not a castle in the sense of a building; it is a cathedral only in structure and complexity.

The mandala sustains our existence and supplies us with fortitude, with a mysterious and inexplicable hope, a sense of inviolability, even during the most dire or miserable of circumstances. It is the candle, invisible, indivisible, that is you, the golden flower that makes existence tolerable.

As I wrote earlier, toads and muskrats and even gnats have this mandala inside them too.

I see it sometimes as a gift, but, more than a gift, a surety that things are all right, that the pilot light is still on despite all transgressions and betrayals. This mandala is about as kind and unassuming as anything I know.”

- Richard Grossinger

Will you be at the harvest,

Among the gatherers of new fruits?

Then you must begin today to remake Your mental and spiritual world,

And join the warriors and celebrants

Of freedom, realizers of great dreams.

You can’t remake the world Without remaking yourself.

Each new era begins within. It is an inward event,

With unsuspected possibilities For inner liberation.

We could use it to turn on Our inward lights.

We could use it to use even the dark

And negative things positively.

We could use the new era

To clean our eyes,

To see the world differently,

To see ourselves more clearly.

Only free people can make a free world.

Infect the world with your light.

Help fulfill the golden prophecies.

Press forward the human genius.

Our future is greater than our past.

- Ben Okri

“And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.”

- Joanna Macy

"There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny."

- Pablo Neruda

“In this country … if you’re an artist, you’re guilty of a crime: not that you’re aware, which is bad enough, but that you see things other people don’t admit are there.”

- James Baldwin

“The powers that momentarily have gained ascendance in our culture know how to manipulate our fears very well. They know how to try to turn us against each other. So a big challenge is to not buy into that, and to be able to look at each other with trust, saying, “Here is a brother or sister, brought by the intelligence of Earth, to be alive at this moment, then this person can also deep within them have a care that life can go on.”

So there you have something in common right away. Instead of contempt and judgment of them, and we practiced this recently in our work…moving that contempt into curiosity, which is very helpful.

We’ve got to use our wits, and by grace re-knit and find our way into some solidarity with one another.”

- Joanna Macy

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower
Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,

from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,

sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;

elect an honest man; decide they care

enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

- Sheenagh Pugh

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

- Annie Dillard

"A mind fed on words such as heaven, earth, dew, essence, cinnabar, moonlight, stillness, jade, pearl, cedar, and winter plum is likely to have a serenity not to be found in minds ringing with the vocabulary of the present age - computer, tractor, jumbo jet, speedball, pop, dollar, liquidation, napalm, overkill! Who would thrill at the prospect of rocketing to the moon in a billion-dollar spacecraft if he knew how to summon a shimmering gold and scarlet dragon at any time of the day or night and soar among the stars?"

- John Blofeld

Cassandra's lament