Ritualizing Radical Imagination - Spiritual Art Supplies Issue #6
Sound Ancestors Studio Session 2 is slated for January 28th. We will be focusing on the role that creativity and ancestral connection play in ritualizing radical imagination and why it is an essential technology right now. 9 creators will be able to attend this 40-minute container and it is still donation-based. It will not be recorded, but you will receive a follow-up email afterward if you sign up and miss the session. Get your tickets here.
2024 and Beyond
One of the resolutions I made in 2023 was to make Spiritual Art Supplies better - more useful and more robust. Like any other publication, I needed a theme to build around and the theme I chose was ritualizing radical imagination. In the CSW ethos, I outline the primary protocols for Creative Spirit Work as praxis.
Primary protocols for Creative Spirit Work praxis are rooted in ancestral relationship-building and lineage work, divorcing artistry from the confines of late-stage capitalism, alchemizing extractive technology into regenerative technologies of care, and honoring nature as an integral resource for holistic wellness.
Below you can read it in its entirety, but the parts I have bolded, in particular, require not just creativity and spirituality, but radical imagination. Radical imagination that is regularly prioritized, or ritualized.
Much like when I had the revelation that my creativity is a part of my spiritual responsibility, I also came to realize my imagination is the only way for me to make a life for myself that is worth living. For marginalized people, world-building is a survival technique. It’s the only way we will co-create worlds worth living in and holistically livable futures for younger generations to inherit.
This is deeply transformative work that requires us to be in right relationship with the inner worlds living inside us and the outer worlds we inhabit. Most of the time I show up for this work, it is an experiment. Even with the experience I have behind me and the integrated wisdom, I’m never doing the same thing twice. This time, what I’m doing differently is proposing you all join me. I can’t do it alone.
In order to conceive of worlds worth building, stories worth telling, practices that honor every part of you, and creations worth making, for personal reasons or to share with others…we need to be radical. Definitions of the word radical include:
1. going to the root or origin; fundamental
2. extreme, especially as regards change from accepted or traditional forms
3. a person who holds or follows strong convictions
4. a person who advocates fundamental political, economic, and social reforms by direct and often uncompromising methods.
We have to think beyond what we have seen in this lifetime. We have to remember ancestral protocols and update them for current and future timelines. We have to connect the modern to the ancient. We have to make decolonizing our creative expression an extension of decolonizing our minds. We have to nurture the seeds that hold the most sacred information in our imaginations and tend to them habitually.
Don’t take the inclusion of the word ‘imagination’ to mean this is about theory alone. If 2023 taught me (and hopefully all of us) anything, it’s that we are past the point of posing questions like “What would a liberated future look like?”. Words are powerful, but I am no longer satisfied with my words functioning as mirrors - they must also function as fuel for us to act in meaningful ways.
In an episode of The OA I recently watched, the main character said “Knowledge is a rumor until it lives in the body”. The questions, answers, and revelations gained from reflection must accompany embodied practices. We must prioritize taking steps, however small, to actively build in the here and now - not in some undefined distant future. This is the product of radical imagination - pushing the boundaries of what I expect of myself and what I owe to you all based on my purpose and my capacities.
In 2024, we will carve out time to imagine again and again, meeting possibility at the threshold of spiritually guided creative expression. We will see ways of existence we have never seen or forgotten and we will embody them. We will make art that acts as a portal to realities where suffering is not a core ingredient of society. We will dream and allow our dreams to guide us on how to resist the systems that exist to keep us disempowered, dysregulated, and disconnected from our authentic selves.
You down?
Spiritual Art Supplies for January 2024:
The Creative Independent - a growing resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people, published ad-free by Kickstarter.
“To create is not just to create objects … Coming up with a question is also creation—the very essence of a question is its power to elicit the possibilities of reply, to collect a variety of thoughts… I believe that the richness of thinking may be the critical resource needed to give this world a future.” - Emptiness is The Path to Creativity
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