Exploring the intersection of identity, community, and consciousness.

 

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Defying the binary.

Hi, I’m Riordan, a.k.a Holly (they/them). I’m a queer, trans, poly, neurodivergent artist, researcher, mystic, and wandering bard. My work explores the ways we connect, transcend, and heal through altered states, exploring where consciousness, identity, and community intersect and focused on the experiences of historically underrepresented people. Educated as an anthropologist, trained as a journalist, and born an artist and seeker under a Sagittarius sun, I’m endlessly fascinated by people and the systems, substances, ceremonies, stories, and art we create to make meaning. After careening across the planet as a gonzo anthropologist, New Journalist, consciousness explore bring my keen ability to observe, analyze, and synthesize seemingly disparate patterns, practices, and ideas to the Creative Research PhD program at the Transart Institute for Creative Research, where I have been accepted, beginning October 2024.

My writing has appeared in leading international publications, including The New York Times, Vice, Whetstone Magazine, the Wellcome Collection, Double Blind, Eater Seattle, Good Beer Hunting, SOURCED, Pellicle, LGBTQ Nation, CraftBeer.com, and Seattle Met, among other publications; I also co-authored for . I write a monthly column, Altered States, for Good Beer Hunting, which explores our relationship with consciousness-altering substances, and publish a monthly newsletter, The Both-Between, sharing stories from my personal and professional experience that bridge the sensory, scientific, and spiritual realms. I have also served as a collaborative writer and editor for book proposals and manuscripts as part of my freelance writing and editing business, Bard Creative Content Services.

I am now returning to my original medium, the theater, writing a play and calling in co-created, immersive experiences; I am seeking co-conspirators in this, and am also interested in collaborating on zine production and interactive food and beverage education events, which I formerly hosted as part of Gilbert’s Cheese Experience. If you have a resonant background or feel called to collaborate, please drop me a line!

I am a native of Seattle, Washington, but as a nomad, live everywhere and nowhere.

The portal is the sensory.

Animist and nondual traditions attest that there is a sixth sense: the ability to detect the subtle realms of spirit. I propose that it is accessible through the other five, which William Blake called “the chief inlets of soul in this age.”

After all, there are only three universal human traits, according to renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, and they predate our species: a complex language; collective spiritual rituals; and the use of consciousness-altering substances. It seems we were made to transcend the sensory world to reach the sublime through the senses, then tell each other about it.

Through my practice, work, and life, I explore the theme of transcending the world of the senses through that very medium: from visual art and performance to sharing a meal or taking a psychedelic journey to reconcile wounded parts of ourselves.

Trans-cend and include.

Trans, as an identity, means different things to everyone. To me, it means to embody all of the gender identities prescribed and proscribed by the separation culture, yet fully identify with none. But to me, trans is more than that; it’s a concept, a way of being, that represents dissolving every boundary and binary, encompassing identity but expanding beyond.

After all, the prefix “trans” doesn’t mean to switch from one thing to another—it means to rise above. It’s a concept captured by Ken Wilber’s theory of Spiral Dynamics, a personal development framework that maps to the growth of civilizations, where we “transcend and include” the aspects of one stage as we move to the next. Our lives are microcosms of the macrocosm, and my personal journey and the lives of others I’ve encountered are not ones of leaving behind, but remembering.

The closer we look, the more we see that everything is interconnected, representing microcosms of the macrocosm; cyclical and reciprocal, full of countless deaths, resurrections, and transformations. Whether it’s the death of the body, a changing season, a new job, realizing one’s gender identity, starting or ending a relationship, or an ego death, it’s the transition that’s the hard part. That’s why we need our communities, mycelial and self-sustaining, supported by elders and peers—concepts many of us in the urban Anglosphere and Europe have lost touch with. Those communities are, like everything, nested and embedded within ever-larger ones, all of which need stewarding.

We all contain communities, too: wounded parts of ourselves that have been relegated to the shadows and need healing; a thousand tiny universes of cells and microbes living, dying, and loving inside us. Psychologist Carl Jung also identified the concept of archetypes, images and symbols that transcend cultures, and these live out timeless dramas through our beings. Every living thing, I believe, is imbued with spirit, and all these subtle realms are always trying to talk to us—if we learn how to listen.

Photo Credit: Hackney Church Brew Co.

Can I get a witness?

If it isn’t observed, did it really happen? It’s a question at the heart of the cosmos, and it’s also key to healing. Witnessing that which did not get voice, affirming that our experiences are valid and really happened, is necessary for reconciliation and transformation on both a personal and collective level.

My own journey has been winding, harrowing, and often difficult, but it has also been blessed with love, wonder, and abundance. My goal is to empower others through making connections: sharing what I’ve learned and the people, places, and modalities that transformed me, shining light on the truths buried so deep, even we couldn’t find them. Our bodies, minds, and souls know how to heal themselves better than we think we do, and as a practitioner of the Hermetic traditions, I believe we can enable these capabilities through direct experience.

I explore natural healing in all its forms through ceremonial and spiritual practices as well as gonzo anthropology, art, writing, and performance. I believe we are all lost souls seeking connection in a disconnected age, but I focus especially on the experiences I know best: those of the queer, trans, poly, neuro- and otherwise divergent from the mainstream mono-norm. We are not broken, sick, or stunted, as we have been told. On the contrary: Born into another culture, at another place and time, we might have been shamxn. We are natural mystics, storytellers, and shapeshifters, a necessary skill to navigate unpredictable environments and face threshold guardians; placing us at the vanguard for an era of unprecedented change.

Process as Practice

I am an artist and mystic, first and foremost. I’ve spent my whole life exploring the world’s faiths, cultures, and traditions, focused on esoteric and natural healing, visionary, and artistic practices, including cuisine and other forms of performance.

I write in journals as well as for my newsletter, the stage, and sometimes other publications. As a gonzo anthropologist, independent researcher, and New Journalist, I aim to directly experience the communities, practices, cultures I study, write about, and explore firsthand; I’m compiling punk ethnographies of natural, traditional, underground, and Indigenous healing practices and seeking to publish autoethnographic works.

I draw things I sometimes finish (and will be opening an online store), and am writing a series of plays and performance pieces, including an immersive queer psychedelic musical; I am actively seeking collaborators for both illustrated zines and performance pieces.

Finally, and interweaving everything, I explore the frontiers of consciousness, learning with respect and reciprocity from those who have forged many of the traditions we follow today through centuries of experience; combining them with my own received methods and messages as well as syncretic practices, the way human cultures have been formed since the beginning.

As Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says, “How you do one thing is how you do everything.” The process is practice, meaning the journey is the destination. As a PhD candidate at the Transart Institute for Creative Research, I am documenting and deepening my exploration of these methodologies.

Winner of the 2022 Curve Award for Emerging Journalists

Financial support and professional development cohort from the NLGJA: Association for LGBTQ Journalists and The Curve Foundation, given to writers whose work fosters fair and accurate coverage and elevates the voices of LGBTQIA+ women and nonbinary people

Recipient of the 2021 North American Guild of Beer Writers Diversity in Beer Writing Grant