Notices by Siin (siin@pagan.plus)

This is a mutual aid request.

Things are extremely tight this month, and pressure is mounting as some bills come due soon. The cost of creating the infrastructure that will free us from some of these bills is high, and many things are on pause until we can catch up. As of now, we're not running air conditioning in 110 degree weather because we cannot afford to, and the grocery budget is going to be quite light for the next paycheck. I generally will not ask for things like this, but am concerned enough to humble myself and ask for support. If you believe in community support and sovereignty, and mutual aid, please consider donating to my ko-fi or subscribing to the Rancho de la Libertad newsletter at the supporter tier. We will continue to provide space for those who need it, both physically and otherwise, if we can continue to maintain this space, and to hopefully share things of value with our community and you, the online beneficiaries of our knowledge.

Boosts are welcome and appreciated as well. Support links below. Thank you very much for considering 🤍

https://ko-fi.com/sigillosacro

https://rancholibertad.com

#PleaseBoost #MutualAid #MutualAidRequest

My life is not my own.
I am no main character in some narrative opera of personal drama and fleeting desires (or even burning ones).
I am not the center.
My life is not for me.

I resented this for a long time, feared it, even before it happened. But now I am grateful, ecstatic, in love with this beautiful awareness of wholeness.
When you are not the center, relationships are framed differently. Tasks are framed differently. What am I? Not the main character, but a cell performing vital functions. Three dimensional, mutable, adaptable, but entirely irreplaceable. What are the members of my community? Other cells, with whom collaboration is vital. We all have many functions, some general, some more specialized. We share knowledge through osmosis, our personal goals and interests all relate back to the whole, to cultivating spirit, motivation, understanding. Discreet Self exists as a physiological boundary: we must care for our Selves as we care for each other, the land, the plants, the animals, the soil, the microbes.

When you are no longer the main character, the narrative is much larger, much longer, more exciting: the timescale is milennia--more! The purpose of your existence is no longer a question, a constant chronic existential crisis, a yearning for meaning: the meaning is evident. You are steward, tender, caretaker, beneficiary, listener. To be witnessed is inevitable: the land witnesses, the animals respond, you are seen, heard, known.

My life is not for me! And that is beautiful.

#Meditations

Not *officially* releasing this information yet, but I'm planning on working dream interpretation into ritual sessions - particularly for those who are seeking initiation, blood ritual, and guidance but who may be a bit lost as to which direction their energy should be focused in.

We are intrinsically and inextricably connected with All, and dreams offer a glimpse through the thin veil: a door in the wall of waking perception. Like Tarot, rune reading, and other divinatory tools, dreams can be a useful tool for finding answers to questions or gaining insight (or foresight). Unlike these other divinatory aids, however, dreams often wrap themselves in layers and layers of personally resonant symbolism, and emerge directly from Source: DNA in communication with all things.

I am also considering offering dream readings as a satellite service that could be offered virtually. Would any of you be interested in either of these offerings? Let me know your thoughts!

#Witch #SpiritualGuide #Pagan #Dreams #Occult

@mapachin @adhdeanasl Thank you for adding this -- you're absolutely right. My response was inaccurate and ignored (as many of these conversations about humanity's "shift" to agriculture tend to -- my colonized brain talking) Indigenous agricultural practices that are ignored in most anthropological discussions because they didn't always "look" the same (among other reasons).

It's interesting to consider the crops being produced and how that impacts the outcome or evolution of social structures, I hadn't heard/read that idea anywhere but am really fascinated to learn more. It makes sense, definitely, that different necessary modes of growing different foods would have different outcomes as to how people interacted with one another within communities.

Thank you!

@adhdeanasl This feels resonant, it's so difficult to exit transactional modes of thinking and depending on cultural context I think many people simply just *don't* have another framework for considering "value" or mutuality in spaces intrinsically rather than economically or in a way that's skewed towards their interests.

Mutuality has to exist, right? In an interdependent functional space? But there *should* be recognition of intrinsic human value *first and foremost* -- I feel like this recognition is the best way to create the necessary give & take within any community/system where there's also understanding that sometimes what someone "brings to the table" won't exist (because they have health issues or need space, to give some examples) and that doesn't make them a less *valuable* person or member of the group.

Ultimately though I think that social dysfunction skews towards economic or productive/production value because that's how our society would like us to measure ourselves, first of all, and it's a hard trap to remove oneself from.

@adhdeanasl It is very strange. Something that never existed until agriculture, until the "standard model" of human sexuality really became a thing (when property ownership made paternal certainty desirable)
With its far reaching implications in our lives, yeah. Weird. Interesting thoughts, thank you for sharing

White social justice spaces, and for some reason queer spaces in general, I've found, do this in a few ways:

1) Tokenism: people of color are welcome, if they're acceptable, and palatable. Points if they're "exotic" looking and extremely queer (but you have to be OUT -- if you try to distance yourself from queer labels for safety or any other reason you're unpalatable and threatening)
2) If you're mixed you often aren't given space. You aren't "colored" enough to make the group look inclusive, and you aren't really white, so there's this kind of odd communication divide that they can't get themselves to bridge because you aren't "colored" enough for them to two-dimensionalize you and force themselves to listen to you as an object that represents an ideology they attempt to espouse materialistically
3) If you're poor but you don't talk about it in a structural way, but you throw the word "poor" around in a fun, nonthreatening, non-structural way like "I'm so poor right now" then you're okay but if you start talking about growing up poor and poverty things people get really uncomfortable and shove you out (kids from upper middle class families would rather live with rats as a performance than listen to you talk about how living in a space that allows rats is traumatic because you actually had them growing up because you grew up in neighborhoods where trash was an issue)
4) Trauma porn gets points: sometimes you can edge your way into a space by validating white notions of marginalization but only if you provide graphic descriptions of the trauma you've faced in your life. This has multiple functions: it confirms to white people that they're better off and it also allows them to then later talk about you and how pobresita, poor thing, the system really *is* just so terrible, let's throw an event about it. It also confirms an ideology based around victimization and allows them to continue to avoid accountability because it's the world that's messed up and there's nothing they can really do about it

Meditation | 08-19

Small, functional communities are positive. That's it. Discussions of tribalism are often cast in a negative light: yet we ignore the reasons why people in our society are so desperate for a small, functional society that has space for them that they riot over sports teams or political leaders.

Small, functional communities are positive, when they're functional. Small, nonfunctional communities within an otherwise heterogeneous society that has no infrastructure to allow them to mediate conflict between other small, nonfunctional communities are often toxic. That's it. There are absolutely degrees of conflict and harm caused by this phenomena, but at least in my experience this always holds true.

Small, nonfunctional communities include the white, hyperqueer Los Angeles "underground art scene" and other white, hyperqueer spaces that are extremely liberal, extremely progressive, and extremely quick to speak for people of color but who will, using total manipulation that they think that they've earned by being a part of this community, that they think they've earned by finding a "seat" at the "table" of the marginalized, express extraordinarily toxic behavior towards non-white queer and non-queer people.

My relationship with LGBTQ+ communities has always been mired in a lack of a common cultural basis and awkward power dynamics that are really confusing when you consider that I'm effectively white if you don't know any better. My relationship with arts communities has also always been mired in a lack of a common cultural basis and awkward power dynamics that become really confusing when assumptions are made about who speaks for social justice and the place of an artist who learned how to paint by doing illegal street art and who learned to draw from garage tattooers. Because ultimately, that artist has no place in arts communities, no matter how much they enjoy going online or raving in person about classism, and racism, and anti-capitalist work.

So much of whiteness is narcissism. I know, because I straddle worlds. I know, because I am an alien, a chameleon who fits in just enough until you start to see the color of the skin shift and the history of the organism show through. So much of white social justice movements is narcissism, and there is a significant portion of white queerdom that is based on declaring marginalization as a maladaptive way to deal with the guilt of being exposed to education on power dynamics and critical theories without the underlying psychological basis to properly understand one's role in these systems. It's easy to repeat twitter taglines about decentering yourself and doing the work and listening to oppressed people so much that you never shut up and listen, so much that you never shut up and consider whether or not you have a good reason to be speaking about racism or power dynamics in the first place. How much of your social justice is based around attenuating your own discomfort, your own guilt, your own fear of alienation if you don't get on board the right bandwagon fast enough?

So I went to this gathering at the house in Los Angeles that acted like my home for years after I had to flee my neighborhood, and was stared at like an insect that absolutely did not belong there. A curiosity, a disgrace. The friends that live there, completely oblivious to this treatment because ultimately I've come to realize that they are the white queers desperate to distance themselves from the very idea that they could be privileged -- distance themselves from the very concept that they are not perfect social justice warriors, perfect allies, that their friends are homogeneous and cruel, maladaptive in their desperate longing for belonging that with one side of their mouth they talk about allyship and how everyone is valid and welcome and out the other side determine who stays and who goes along the lines of petty labels and elitism. A non-functional community performing poverty, adults rejecting adulthood, twenty-somethings with backup plans and trust funds leading poor white queer kids into an endless cycle of real poverty and pretending that they're all actually in the same boat. Raving about marginalization to distance themselves from the reality that they have options, that they chose this, to distance themselves from accountability.

How long are we really going to pretend that these are the people we trust to speak for us?

And white LGBTQ+ community members: before you crucify me, please take a long, hard look at your community, and make sure I'm wrong before you do so. Stop talking about "doing the work", and actually do it.

#Meditations