Dear Listeners, Dreamers, Composting Wonders,

The womb of the underworld is not hell, let’s restory that mistake of the intellect.

Lay your body down, lay it down on the floor, ultimately all the way down to earth for reals, or through your fecund imagination. Let’s call in the Cailleach, the Crone of Winter’s rest. Give in, give it up, open it, shut down. Get still, like a stone, like a sun-sucked bone, breathing all your breath out. Pause. Become snow covered. Become a perch for a chickadee flooding clear air with song. Invite a passing owl to land, to lend a helping hand and dig in. Become a feast. Become good earth with the holy hat tricksters of decomposition; ectoparasites, protozoans and wily helminths. Or if fire is your medicine, strike a match, catch fire and blaze with the sun’s kin until there are only shards of char and smoked bones. Above you, as ever the bluest sky welcomes you home into the non-story beyond all stories.

Welcome to a Year & A Day, our 13 month feast celebrating our cyclicity through the seasons of women lives and our changing, shapeshifting bodies!

We are arriving into the initiation of Crone - the big D. Death. If this isn’t your scene, this post is for you. If you are down getting down with death - this post is for you!

In the weave for this post, a true story from my grandmother’s end of life journey. From that sweet liminal straight to you. Also in this pod a reading of ripe words belonging to two beloveds, who when offered this prompt -My death will be…. picked up the crimson thread, courageously imagined in, and seeded their own inevitable death beds, perhaps catalyzing yours. Then (yes there’s more) a truly gorgeous response to the prompt from The Faerytale Apothecary : Elizabeth Jane Lovely.

And… all this playing out in the new moon in Aquarius, the start of the Year of the Fire Horse in the Chinese lunar year cycle, and a wildly generative astrological symphony of the watery deep, the old, old, and the spontaneous new who are conspiring to offer up the most exquisite of reincarnations. More about that from Dr. Mindy Nettifee (Everything is Changing). And this from Marina Ormes.

Thank you for your bright listening and your powerful becoming!

Tracy

THANK YOU COLLABORATORS!

Carter McKenzie (she/her) is a poet and activist, whose most recent collection of poems, The Book of Fire, published by above / ground press. Through imagined voices, often based on specific court cases, this chapbook is a remembrance and exoneration of the victims of the Scottish Witchcraft Act 1563-1736. Of the nearly 4000 accused under that law, 84% were women and girls. These poems are a bridge between the living and the dead. They serve as a way to grieve and understand our connection to those whom the forces of the Reformation attempted to erase, as if they never were.

Cybele - My voice and music across airwaves is meant to evoke an altered experience and a subsequent deep introspection of my listeners. I take them to inner perches they may have never or rarely stepped out upon so that they can remark at vast and intricate landscapes within themselves that are oftentimes as yet undiscovered. I meander lyrically into territory that explores what Love really is in its most universally spiritual and also practically lived sense. Each of my shows is a tapestry that emerges through the process of quieting the intellectual mind such that the soul’s wisdom, one we all recognize as our own innately, can come through and speak. I seek to rekindle an awareness of the extraordinary treasure that we each truly are. Cybele’s amazing music and DJing here.

Elizabeth Jane Lovely is an artist whose experimentation encompasses the written form, oral storytelling, ceremonial chant, and spell speaking, through ritual interaction. She is a Creative Arts Doctoral Researcher at Loughborough University and an English Cunning Woman of sorts. Her specialisms within and without the academy are centred around how we can cause kindly disruption through enchantment, the story as the activist, the essentiality of our bodily state as gateway to sacred creativity, and everyday imagination as change maker. She currently lives in the United Kingdom in a tiny county that does not always exist, regularly having to negotiate with the brambles and briars to access the rest of the human world. More here and here.

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Thanks to Kyle at Residual Audio for sound supports; [email protected]

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