In the portal

It became clear to me today that the portal opened on 8/8 remains fully open and active for those tuned to its frequency, and will close after the full moon the 19th. I am receiving downloads at an astounding rate, sitting “only” with the medicine of cacao and hapé, two of the most powerful master plants, to be sure, but not psychedelic ones in the classic sense. That is not always necessary for communion with the astral realms; in fact, sometimes I wonder if it can block the channel after a while. Or perhaps it just depends on the preferred communication method of the particular dead who are calling.

Whatever the case, oh man, am I ever in it! It’s exciting, reminding me of when I first got injured and the interdimensional phone line started ringing off the hook, creative downloads firehosing from the heavens into my crown chakra, childhood traumas and lifelong neuroses clicking into context, karmas being shrugged off. Crying and laughing at the same time; filling up journals faster than I could even compute what I’ve written, scrawling drawings and dropping dozens of voice notes. But today, I realized something incredible about my process. I used to call all of this my “morning practice,” something to do before the work actually started, a time apart from my actual Earth day. Now that I have the framework and support of the PhD program and the way it has redefined my conception of creative practice and production, I realize that this time that starts in the pre-dawn and continues into the first few hours of sunrise, this window I’ve been calling “bonus time” from when I rise between 2:30 and 3:30 a.m. until 7 or 8, this isn’t bonus time—this is my workday.

Okay, “work” day. My creative time. My practice time. When I make my art. This is doing the work. So, my working hours are from 3-8 a.m., and what pours from my pen to my journal, voice notes, sketch pad, and occasionally my laptop, that is my work, my production, my art. Everything else is bonus time; anything else that gets made is just icing. Sure, sometimes I do have Earth stuff I have to do, but this reframes the way I’ve thought about everything.

I co-created with the dead, contextualized my entire relationship history, uncovered a layer of childhood trauma, and experienced a moment of pure enlightenment—all before 6 a.m.

Yet I still have to fight these feelings that I haven’t done enough today, because I didn’t produce a finished piece of content.

Ironic, that word. When the emphasis is on the first syllable—con-tent—it means something entirely different than when it’s on the middle one: content.

I am striving for more of the latter, less of the former.

Because there is also a difference between content and art. I guess I’m lumping journalism into the first category, which isn’t really fair or accurate, but to me, it has the same energy as those marketing articles I used to dread writing, only now I would welcome them, with their mindless assignments and soaring price tags. But that’s okay, we’re rewriting our relationship with all this Earth stuff, including money.

A sticky one, that. But we’ll get there.

In the meantime, today was one of the biggest breakthroughs of my life, on both a creative and personal level—but I struggle to celebrate the wins. As Andy shared on the Creative Pep Talk podcast I listened to today, before we can hear the voice of our True Self, we have to get those other, toxic voices out of our head. I still have to get dad’s and Marc’s voices out. That’s what next month’s ceremony is for.

In the meantime, I co-created actively with Kit today! It was so much fun. I talked through entire new structures for multiple plays, figured out that certain things I thought were plays or stories were actually events—and one of them is even a magazine, but that didn’t drop in until I met with Matt Curtis earlier. It’s all really, really exciting. I’m so grateful. I’m just absolutely buzzing, and can’t wait to see what Medicine Fest brings this weekend.

In the meantime, here is today’s outpouring. One of the most important moments of my entire life, this.

Today's altar, featuring that scariest of all the cards.

Video message to my friend Joe that ended up provoking its own unfoldings.

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