It’s 2:22pm and about four and a half months since I left the Women Of Earth Bridge-House in Brazil. Since leaving the house of ten women where we took a stand for creating Next Culture outside of Patriarchy, and where we were (and still are) on each other’s teams to create new projects/Gameworlds based on the endless supply of Non-material value every Being on the planet inherently holds, I’ve been nomadic and bringing my Culture with me wherever I go.
The shifts that I experienced in my ability to hold my Center, to come closer to reality and out of Fantasy, and to reveal my inner Life and the commitments I made to my Life being about something bigger than me, created totally new grooves. The new grooves are like new never seen before paths for me to travel along.
From this place I spent time with my community planting and foraging, while nourishing my bodies at Sol Farm, and participated in an in person Rage Club held by Meredith and Daway in Northern California. I participated and cooked for the first ever Expand the Box training in New York. I journeyed to Poland to spend almost a full month at the experimental temporary Possibility Management Village (shown above). And now I am in the North East of the United States experimenting with Radical Simplicity, while focusing on building a circle of Edgeworkers who are ready to practice new ways of feeling, listening, and relating; with the purpose of shifting cultures from numbed out to fully alive.
These four plus months have been spent deepening those new grooves so that I can become a space through which Evolution, Empowerment, Love, High Magic and Simplicity can pour out into the spaces I traverse.
I am currently researching the massive—or possibly microscopic—prismatic doorway of High Magic, and how it can be opened through Radical Simplicity.
This came after a month of not looking at myself in a mirror or in photographs, a possibility offered to me by Gabriela during an incredibly rich online Women of Earth space where over 20 women met to radically be on each other’s teams. It’s really like this, to be held by the context of Women of Earth.
Stepping out of Patriarchy gives us so much space and possibility to stand with one another, to deepen in our purposes, and to heal together. In this no-reflection experiment which I called Jumping the Puddle (since Gabriela is full of non-linearity and suggested that even if it rains I commit to not looking at myself in a puddle), I experienced myself more from inside myself, even on the physical level noticing the sensations of my face skin from within.
Less of my attention was spent on trying to figure out how others considered or perceived me. I shifted from 80% attention on how I look to about 30%. This is a significant amount of freed up energy. Life got and continues to get simpler. I live in more inner and outer space. I even opened a space for other women to journey with me in this, and three people were a yes. We started a small group to share how it was for us, and I got to meet one of the women from New Zealand, Renee, for the first time in person in Poland.
Poland was a transformational three weeks of villaging and training, and I’m glad to write that it became clear that one of my Being’s missions is to appreciate and call forth other Beings to radiate and come fully into presence, with their non material value at the center of their lives and their offers. Non-material Value is simple, because there is no physical or energetic weight to it. It is. As it is. Non-material Value is what my Being brings, what your Being brings.
What happens to people when they come into your presence? What shifts in them, and what becomes possible?
There are plenty of books and musings about minimalism and simple living, none of which I’ve read, and I doubt many consider Non-Material Value as something so precious. People often say “less is more,” but less of what and more of what?
I am currently with the questions:
What happens, in my Experiential Reality, when I choose this evolutionary path of Radical Simplicity?
What do I have access to when I become lighter?
Who do I need to become to be moved by Archetypal Forces?
What changes in my world as I hold Simplicity as the culture I inhabit and am?
My experiment started with shedding things, some people call it “stuff” or “belongings.” I took out my two nose rings, both of which I got for different purposes nearly two decades ago. The first, to individuate and look edgy, and the second, so that people would know I am a “medicine person” or “witch.” I can remember that young version of myself saying to myself, “now they will know.” At the same time as I got the second piercing, I had two shaved sides of my head, so that people would also immediately know I was “queer.” What will happen now that I do not have these symbols on my face to prove something, and now that my hair is all one length? What if I simply become more of what and who I am?
I am also giving away clothing and “supplies” I’ve been holding on to for “future” projects. I am feeling a lot of fear about the dissolution of my identity as an artist and someone who has a lot of plans to keep making stuff, or the part of me that has identified as really into crazy fashion, who has designed and produced large bizarre costumes and wearable art that is now stored in bins in the basement of my sister’s house.
After the most recent Met Gala, as I was looking at some of the images from the event, something shifted in me. When I saw the people posing in their absurd or lavish gowns, with their serious made over faces like masks, all my Gremlin Atmos could see was Gremlins. In my twenties I collected dresses with the fantasy I’d someday wear it on a red carpet, not to be confused with the 1960’s red shag carpet of my childhood home. A number of people took to social media posts Met Gala to put up pictures of the celebrities playing dress up adjacent to the horrors going on around the globe, like children in Gaza after bombings, and I found this angry juxtaposition of Hollywood to the Capital in the Hunger Games accurate. I feel angry at the use of so many resources for such decadence, and this is how it goes in the art world as well, a world I’ve been clinging to the corners of.
Last December I was in Miami for Art Basel and an artist built a “sand” labyrinth on the beach. I was most looking forward to this because of how it was described, a maze where every path leads to the central meeting point, meant to encourage connection and intimacy! The maze was not tirelessly shaped out of actual sand, but was some sort of sand mixed with concrete painted over wood. When I got to the center of the maze, there was a vodka bar. Two days later I stood on the beach watching a team of people spending hours tearing down the labyrinth, and putting the splintered woods into giant trash piles.
The question of how I am using resources relates directly with the quest towards Radical Simplicity.
Even now I observe my identity, as someone who needs to take many days at a time sorting through my precious artifact collection, to get rid of “stuff,” dangling raw in front of me: it’s not the first time I do a major downsizing.
So how can this time be different?
Laura, a fellow Women Of Earth, held space for me as I felt the sadness of not having the cottage on the lake that I thought I would, where there would be that one weird museum room for guests to have an experience. Who am I if I do not have that vision for myself? If I do not hold on to the artifacts? Or if the people I choose to be with and grow old next to in Life are people who would not be moved by something like that one way or the other? What happens in me when I loosen my grip about how I thought things were going to go and what things I needed for them to go that way ? Did any of these visions originate in my Being anyway? Or did I copycat or collage all of it together? And how have I changed, since being in a band where my role was to play bizarre objects as instruments, all of those objects that now live in three vintage suitcases I am still storing in a closet as if they will one day be commemorated? Or since spending thousands of dollars on art school where the weirder and more obsessive I was, the better?
I am currently reading the book, Cavitation: The Emergence of Archiarchy. About half way through, one characters says, “I used to use my identity as a heroic rescuer to give me secret background powers, thinking, I am the one that can save the day by making things better. If you start to give up your ‘I have secret powers’ identity because it is delusional, then who are you really? What is left? What is your role? How can you contribute to other people? But if you do not accomplish this huge dis-identification procedure, you remain several dimensions away from reality.
A mage needs one-on-one connection with reality to do her work. Even combing or brushing your hair can remove you from reality. You look at yourself in the mirror to arrange your hair the ‘right way.’ But the moment your hair is the ‘right way’ you slip into a familiar identity that cuts you off from the aliveness of reality. Reality does not look nice or pretty. You are an evolving Being.”
What he says resonates.
For one, this part about slipping in familiar identity relates to defensive and expansive learning, and defensive and expansive creation. In defensive learning—which I’ve been on the look out for to catch myself doing it and pivot—something new comes into my field and I automatically map it onto something I already know. I bring in something from the past, either an experience or information, and compare it to that or may even say, “Oh, it’s like this other thing.”
The same goes for defensive creation. I, or someone else, creates or proposes something made to fit into an already known framework. It’s like arranging your hair in the right way in the mirror, or safely proposing something to relate to someone that you already have heard they “like.” Both shut down possibility. Expansive learning and creation, however, is radically simple because there is no need for reference and comparison. The thing I learn or hear or observe or notice is simply the thing I learn or hear or observe or notice. This allows me to simply move forward to a new space from there, rather than backward and be anchored into the known so I can have more predictability or make myself more comfortable. Then, that which I create comes through me from source, not from any method or to please or fit into an already agreed upon or existing structure or realm.
Secondly, as I move towards Radical Simplicity, I too am starting to give up my ‘I have secret powers’ identity, although I’m totally liquid about it right now, with some of the baggage dropping off in chunks, and some of it slipping through my grasping fingertips. In my case the ‘secret powers’ were me being complex, unusual, hard to pin down and special, with all my statues and dolls and beads and shaman tools and fancy clothing that I carry with me from city to city.
What if I am simply an ordinary Edgeworker?
What, in the small here and now, is my Being’s deep longing?
When I close my eyes and ask those questions, I touch something else, and it’s simple.
I sense the shift in my field since committing to Radical Simplicity, and I can also sense the heaviness and drainage that comes as I sort through and experience uncertainty about what to keep and what not to keep. Ownership is Patriarchal. None of it is even “mine.” I’m doing this to become unified within, and to serve my Bright Principles. How I spend my energy, time, and money, how I am with the ecosystems and in relationships, and how I tend to my bodies and the Earth has an everlasting effect.
Radical Simplicity can be considered an art and a science.
Radical Simplicity is a doorway to new questions emerging in the gaps.
Radical Simplicity is a move towards flight.
Radical Simplicity leads to Radical Flexibility, bends time, and shifts the shape of the morphogenetic field.
If this research lights something up in you, come to feel, come to declutter, come to sharpen your Sword, and step into the spaciousness and High Magic of Radical Simplicity.
I will be delivering a worktalk and discovery space as I continue in my experiment.
Love, Beth
