EP81 Portraits, Graffiti, and Dada with Lucia

This week Andrew is joined by the wonderful Lucia! A fun, and artisticly rich episode with discussions of their Art, and practice and how it can move us all forward to the future. 

Connect with Lucia on her website, and don't forget to check out the Oracle of Initiation while you're at it. Be sure to give her instagram as follow aswell: @mellissaelucia

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Andrew

ANDREW: Welcome to another episode of the Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am here today catching up with Mellissae Lucia. Who ... We've been ... I had Mellissae on ... five years ago? I didn't look it up before we started but it has definitely been awhile. And, a lot of things have changed for both of us during that time. But, as we've been going through our lives, I've been watching the amazing artwork, and the sort of interplay of artwork as magic, artwork as divination, artwork as life, that mirrors a lot of pieces of my own journey as well, and, you know, also, the conversations I had in a previous episode with Syrus Ware as well. So, I wanted to have Mellissae on to talk about this and to talk about a bunch of other stuff. 

So, if you haven't listened to that first episode, there'll be a link in the show notes. Go find it and give it a listen and freshen up, because we're definitely going to reference a few things from it. 

But, for those who haven't been following you, Mellissae, who are you?  

LUCIA: Hi!

ANDREW: What are you up to? What's going on?

LUCIA: Hi Andrew, delighted, delighted to be here! 

I am Mellissae Lucia, and I've changed a lot in the last couple years, and I'm very pro name changes [laughs].

ANDREW: Uh huh. 

LUCIA: It drives some people insane! But I'm going by Lucia these days, partially because of the graffiti. Also, when I thought about, what's my graffiti name going to be?

ANDREW: Uh huh.

LUCIA: Lucia came up.

ANDREW: Perfect.

LUCIA: And so, I am Lucia, and, the people who have known me for so many decades, if you call me Mellissa or Mellissae, it's all gonna work.

ANDREW: Mmmhmm.

LUCIA: And I am an artist, and an oracle, an empath, an entrepreneur, and I am a person who follows the signs and follows the synchronicities, and has found this ability to have courage, but also joy, drive everything that I do. And, so there's a whole variety of things that I do, from having created a visionary deck in the New Mexico desert, down in graffiti tunnels, called the Oracle of Initiation. I teach online courses, I teach in person, and adventure is the greatest joy of my life.

ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Well, so you mentioned one thing in passing here, which I want to sort of talk about first, right? What ... Tell me about the graffiti.

[bursts out laughing]

ANDREW: Like, what is it about graffiti for you? And even more so, how did that move you to change your name? 

LUCIA: [still laughing] Ohhhhh ... Well, I've had a lot of different spiritual names, and Mellissae Lucia is my pen name, and when I was writing my oracle book in ... 2011, that I was writing the book ... to go with this six-year project of making my Oracle of Initiation deck.

ANDREW: Mmmhmm.

LUCIA: And [sighs], my legal name is Melissa Weiss Steele. So, that's my father's name, and my deceased husband's name, and I like that ... There's a very traditional side to me, actually, that likes the solidness of that name. But I wanted a more magical name and I wanted a name that was going to possibly ... What I found is that mystics, empaths, whatever words you want to call us ... That we struggle with being seen. That there have been so many lifetimes of being killed for who we were that there's some really pretty serious base chakra issues about: Am I