LETTER# 02

ON NIGREDO, DISSOLUTION, AND LIVING THROUGH A CHANGE WE CANNOT YET NAME

Dear heart,

Lately, I’ve been thinking about cycles and how often we expect ourselves to move in straight lines.

To keep growing. Keep producing. Keep becoming clearer.

But what happens when transformation asks us to pause? When something that once held our lives together begins to loosen, and the next shape hasn’t arrived?

As Día de los Muertos and All Souls’ Day approach, one of my favorite times of the year, my love and I have just completed a three day water fast, holding intentions together. 

Between the silence and the wind in the trees in the middle of day 02, my thoughts and past memories flooded in the dark. What naturally dissolves and what brings new life, new light?

I’m finding myself reflecting on the experiences and cycles that brought me here. Years of performing and bringing light in celebration honoring the dead. A multi-dimensional Mayan fires journey remembering sacred rituals, working with elementals and the Cholq'ij with wisdom keepers and speaking prayers to the fire with our Ajq'ij. Ancestral connection. Blood memory. Deep medicine work. Traveling to Egypt with Veda Austin last year and meeting my beloved in the Great Pyramid and continuing to follow the journey with water.

Through it all, my relationship with being an artist has been changing. Some identities have softened. Others have been difficult to release.

In alchemical symbolism, nigredo is the darkening: a phase of dissolution, when the familiar form begins to break down.

For this second letter,  I’m exploring that space between endings and beginnings, and how we might inhabit a season of change before we can name what we are becoming.

Read the full letter on THE ART OF UNBECOMING→