It’s two days since we’ve returned home from a roadtrip, and I’m sitting on the slanted pavement of our suburban home as my daughter selects rocks, leaves and grasses for the fairy garden she situates in the driveway. It’s a subtle magic, this one, and it isn’t until the next morning that I am captured by its magnitude. This tiny altar filled with love and hope and magic created by a 5 year old. She’s made it for the tiny fluttering beings she imagines and keeps alive with her attention. These fairies live through her, magic lives through her. This space is a collection and physical holding of that ethereal essence that IS her.

As adults, in the colonized world, we have lost touch with the simple quality of intentionally creating our local reality. We go to Target for the next Hearth and Hand launch, we are pursued by endless marketing in store and on our phones, we mindlessly grab the next trending pillow without considering whether or not it’s comfortable. We fill our homes with these untethered, empty items and wonder why we feel so numb.

I think this is why my child’s fairy garden fills me with as much grief as it does joy. The grasses will wilt and blow away, the stones kicked away eventually. It is a temporary joy to be held. I think to myself, it is my lack of reverence for death that makes me resent the trendy pillow on my couch that stays long after the magic of fairy gardens have faded.

But the beauty is my child will rebuild, she will recreate. She might feel that magical response bubble from within and she will follow its joy inside of her. She does not lament it’s withering because she is still apart of the living magical world around her. She knows there are so many more gardens to be built, so much magic to be sown. She is not separate from this knowing.

In online spiritual spaces we talk about the first wound, the separation from our mother as our first trauma. A trauma that lives on. We speak about this in a way that implies that this pain is something all people through time have experienced. But I disagree. That wound of separation from our mother is further exacerbated by being raised in a culture that glorifies individuality and separation as a construct of lived experience. We left our mom and the indoctrination of separation continued. Had we not been implicated by the colonial ideologies that encase us, would this wound be relevant? Spoken of? Present? How many of our constructs of pain, trauma and separation are curated as a symptom to a deeper, non-pathologized impact of colonized reality? How much time do we waste reflecting upon symptoms instead of causes?

In older tribal, indigenous cultures before the modern colonized world this was not such. We were always apart of something bigger than us, a unit that’s literal survival was appreciated by our existence. We had a place at all times. Our elders saw and witnessed our inherent qualities of purpose as we grew. We always belonged. All of our roots are indigenous, some older than others and long forgotten, but we all belong to the Earth. And lived within that reality at one point or another.

All ways of culture exist because they were either consciously or unconsciously enacted upon, whether indigenous or colonized. A culture/ideology/belief system exists because the dream of it was large enough that the collective consciousness agreed upon it at some point. We industrialized, innovated processes, created new technologies and advanced our knowledge tenfold. Our creative spirit was unbound and flourished. And at the same time have creatively evaded the repercussions of this quick advancement upon our living systems. Carefully crafting man made stories to cover up the damage to the animated world around us. Consumed within our own minds.

We are now born into this all encompassing dream, which has become rather nightmarish if you ask me, while disregarding the screaming intelligence of our natural systems- bodies, ecosystems, mycelial networks- all disregarded and waysided within the noise of our own creative minds and drives. Egos detached from nature.

In the book “The Spell of the Sensuous” David Abrams points to the transcription of human language as a centerpoint for our separation to the land and its spirit. This separation from the intellectual mind and the physical indigenous body was the impetus of colonized thought. Carefully and meticulously reflected upon logic compounded the mind’s separation from the animated lands we dwell upon, while also providing the environment to disconnect from the wisdom of our sensuous world. The world sensed through our body.

I once drove a hearse through Santa Fe. The hearse was my car and it carried the dead and empty carcasses of myself that were never tethered to my sensible reality. All mental constructs thrust upon me, never embodied. But these stories were connected to the locality of where I began remembering my belongingness. Where story was louder than my own physical vessel. These stories were in the walls of my home, the trendy pillow on my couch, the grocery stores, and the agreed upon reality of my neighborhood. I had anchored the physical sense of those stories in the altar of my reality, unknowingly. The tangible world around me was tethering and connecting me to this unconscious realm.

Without knowing, my body was still attempting to animate the living world around me. The intelligence of this sacred manifest form was deeply connected to the seemingly empty and disconnected reality. Everything is alive, everything vibrates. Even my trendy pillows. It is all still connected even when the busy loudness of modern society drones on.

I had to drive away from that reality, to consider and reconnect to a new one. As I drove this hearse, I happened to be listening to the book mentioned above. The temporariness of that trip was a grieving haul to be had. A loosening of threads under the weight of my distance. My friends hosted us and poured tea, they held me when I wanted to run from the grief of temporary joy. Then, a fairy showed up and walked me into a dried up river bed. The water gone, the pulsating magic still alive. I wrote symbols from my dreams in the sand, knowing the wind would surely blow them away but my spirit would be carried with them. My dream would stay. My dream was the seed of reality creation. Of tethering the cords of resonance. Of creating an altar of animated, regenerative life around me. Of seeing the wisdom of children’s temporary fairy gardens.

It was upon our return home, that I was able to witness the wisdom of my daughter’s naturally emergent creativity. A living intelligence unforced in its arrival and curation of local magic, from within. A tiny altar filled with love and hope and magic created by a 5 year old. She knows there are so many more gardens to be built, so much magic to be sown. She is not separate from this knowing. She is still apart of the magical and more than human living systems around her.

Coming Soon:

Heavenly Bodie’s: The Bodygraph as a Living System

I will soon be sharing my exploration of the bodygraph as an energetic pathway to the animated world around us. This experiment is about seeing the interconnected web of reality as a fluid river of intelligence, using the language of Human Design. We are not separate nor have we ever been.

In the above post, Local Magic, my daughter’s design is providing me a very real example of the energetic exchange and wisdom she shares, unknowingly.

She is a 4/6 Sacral Generator on the Cross of Tension. Her authority dwells inside her 3/60 channel. She also has 10/20 and 11/56. This is a child that is, still, connected to the pulse of life, creating in the NOW, and weaving stories of what she knows to be true. She is teaching me this in our energetic exchange. I do not hold these wisdoms within, however I may amplify them here in my sharing. She is conditioning and impacting me with this definition and thus sharing her wisdoms.

I am very interested in holding conversations about the open exchange between our design, the flow of information and the embodied veneration for each individuals conditioning force into the world. The way we are open and being changed by the cosmic weather, our environments and our people. I am no longer interested in staring into the mirror of my bodygraph and excavating my not-self. WE ARE NOT SEPARATE. We find purpose and meaning inside of our belonging to one another. This is Heavenly Bodies. And this is experimentation with our design.

And if you’re interested in this exploration, join my newsletter for more updates on this project.

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

Living Systems with Leah Garza — The educational space that has transformed and opened me up to a new reality.