Grief House - Portals

In this episode Sascha and I contemplate how Gods soak through the fabric of reality. We wonder how to best maintain open, nourished portals - how to live like everything might be a doorway to divinity. 

This is another of our special, scored episodes. Our friend Parsa makes sound doors through which our gods come dancing. It's quite magical and completely good.

We hope you'll come lie in God fields with us!

This month on Portals we discuss fucking up. We talk about what it's like to make mistakes, hurt people and stay close, and what it's like when we can't stay close. We discuss the merits of a fallible God - how much we might learn from a deity who messes up and is still worthy of trusting with the care and tending of our souls.

In this episode about magic (which we recorded in-person during Sascha's visit to Portland), our friend Parsa, who makes music for our feeling creatures, joins us with his voice!

Sascha and Parsa agree to play a game where we take turns overhearing each other talk about our magic. It's like cloud gazing but the clouds make pictures of our mysteries. I love it so much I can hardly contain myself and make plans to include it at all the parties I attend from now until forever.

Maybe you'll come to a magic gazing party sometime soon!

In this episode on trust, Sascha and I discuss the importance of magic. We explore the ways we were raised to believe and where our belief grows brittle. We wonder about the patriarchy and how it got to be in charge of what is and isn't real. We decide we don't have an interest in valuing things based on the extent to which they benefit the  post-agrarian, capitalist machine and decide to lean more and more heavily into witchcraft and hope. 

In this episode Sascha and I explore what it's like  to love things that are stuck and staying stuck or moving deeper into stickiness; to know your love won't fix the thing you love or free it, and still give it well and fully, and with all your heart.

This moth at The Grief House we're looking at how it feels to be stuck - in shirts, the pharmaceutical industry, our eagerness to end all pain. We wonder how to make space inside tangles and how to lie down, trapped in confusion, and cry ourselves calm.

In this episode Sascha and I explore the path from cultivation to wilderness.

We discuss the botanical term wildering: a plant that has run wild or escaped cultivation, wonder about fenced wilderness and the wisdom of elk, and consider how long a person should sit with their dirty ferns in a sanitized lunch room before they give up hope for a meadow. We think, maybe, forever.

We hope you'll join in our bewilderment.

From the moment we occur in this iteration of consciousness we are transforming. Our bodies are lost and replaced thousands of times.

Some day you might be old. What if you are, and it is great? What if it's more like magic than anything you've known so far? 

Most likely our predictions about what's coming next don't alter the course of our glorious fall, so - why not predict the best? 

Sascha and I have decided to spend some time doing just that. We'd love you to join us. 

What kind of great do you think it might be? 

In this short episode our friend Parsa offers us his beautiful shaking in the form of piano music. It shakes out worlds and worlds and I share one of them.

In this trust episode Sascha and I discuss the experience of living in constantly aging bodies. 

We talk about deals we've struck with fear, our soft bellies, reunions with our former incarnations and the joy of declining to run in the race. We wonder how it would feel to have more models of glorious women we might some day become, decide it would feel good, and begin to invent a gallery of old ladies.

I make a plan to become good friends with a mule and possibly smoke a pipe, Sascha brings a photo of someone 20 years older instead of 20 years younger than she is to the hairdresser for inspiration, and we feel glad, in the end, that we aren't cryogenically frozen.