i have been making devotion videos to the seasons

i often notice that november can be a challenging month for me. the season of fall brings a lot of letting go, of slowing down. a surrender to darkness as teacher. akin to the luteal phase of menstruation, my energy starts the turn inward. I move a lot slower. My healing is heavy with letting go of anything that I do not need for the bare, silent wisdom journey of winter. 

i get panic attacks more often in the fall. my nervous system tracks the descent into colder, darker days, and my soma slows down. My body gets more heavy, I want to sit near fires and not do as much. i’m interested in how i have been taught to believe that my body is not mine. as a body that has been invaded, i am curious about how my body becomes a war zone. how me against myself has been implanted and fed in me by social forms and systems of oppression. i am so interested in how the ancestors teach me about beauty amidst struggle, outer or inner. kindness and gentleness towards myself, truly, holding space for myself and being in a state of compassion. 

i am healing from my childhood trauma. who else is with me? i am learning how to be there for myself. i feel like so many of us were not held, loved, mentored, seen, respected, celebrated in the ways we deserve. it then becomes hard to have healing relationships with ourselves, know how to hold ourselves, when our first primary relationships couldn’t and were frought with anxiety, abuse, trauma, neglect. 

i feel like this is a part of what compels me to make these videos. to hold myself, love myself, see myself, and be mentored by my own creative process. this video is a surrender to fall. to the lessons of fall. the ones that slide in underneath our doors after the sun has fallen and the moon kisses our lips as we sleep. this video is an offering to a threshold, to the circles and cycles Life gives us. a mentor, Bhanu Kapil, once taught me about making offerings to thresholds. speaking to them. acknowledging their existence. this has changed my life. we are taught in oppressive culture to rush through liminality, fear hybridity, never making offerings to the threshold spaces.  as a liminal/non-binary being, i feel intimate with threshold spaces, and my life is an offering to the liminal place of transition. I am constantly transitioning. i feel so alienated and misunderstood by cis-ideas of transition having an end place of “static gender experience”. it honestly does not fit my experience of gender or reality at all. i am constantly transitioning. every moment i am dying and beginning again. 

this video was filmed with the beings of fall in the traditional lands of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past and present. i am grateful to the duwamish, dxʷdəwʔabš, the People of the Inside, and to the land for collaborating in this video with me. 

the music includes a collaboration track produced with Silen Wellington from a time we visited the TANK Center of Sonic Arts (https://tanksounds.org/). the lyrics to the stanza i sing into the camera are: come slowly, start the journey within yourself. 

thank you for being witness to this offering of my soul. may my own process of documenting my healing journey be of service and in solidarity with everyone on a similar path. may it be so. and blessed be. 

still image from the devotion video to Fall

vv :: click below to watch::  vv