HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD: CLAIM YOUR URANUS, BE A TRICKSTER
While urged to go to law school or run for office in a full halloween witch costume, it's important to remember the vital role of the artist, helping us imagine...something better.
As artists, our responsibility is to change minds....to hijack peoples subconscious metaphors and compost them into better stories. Since we are fighting against centuries of a white culture on autopilot, at this point in my humble clown opinion, hijacking white supremacy may benefit from one particular tactic:
THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE.
Such effective trickstering can be exemplified in the Erickson Handshake Induction -- a seemingly laughable hypnosis trick for barbie mansion dinner parties. Basically, the hypnotist casually reaches out to shake your hand ~ and at the very last second interrupts the handshake by gently lifting your hand in front of your eyes.
I know it sounds pretty lame, but before this aikido move is detected, you are already convinced and barking like a dog. WHY? HOW? Because the "handshake" is a subconscious motor habit ---> reach out, grab other hand, shake -- when this autopilot action is suddenly interrupted, our brains are literally suspended in space. In this stupor of novel information, our critical faculty is dropped and the veil of our subconscious mind is open to suggestion.
In this way, how do we give Black Lives Matter a place to pop out of a cake - aside from physically being in the streets and voting -- how can we listen closely to the white supremacy handshake and metabolize the poison with unexpected humor, visually stark and well-placed compassion, interruptive poetic acts of utopia. How can we all become empathic tricksters?
"War is an absolute failure of imagination" - Adrienne Rich
"I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems" - Audre Lorde
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Anyone who seriously studies the stars knew this year would change history, and knew that this deep transformation would be difficult...and anyone who studies the stars also knows, this is just the beginning.
We've only just entered the red carpet of eclipse season. As Arundhati Roy has said, "the pandemic is a portal", and likewise, eclipses are a vortex of change by way of unavoidable realizations. With the eclipse on June 20 at 11:41pm PST, coinciding with the power of Summer Solstice, the portal from past to future opens like a tunnel of flaming circus hoops.
We are popping off our barbie heads and blowing up the factories that molded them. We burn away the toxic wax and thoughtfully re-sculpt ourselves and (hopefully) elect people (or witches) to office who are sentient enough to feel the pressure of our collective change.
With Mercury retrograde in Cancer (June 17-July 12), stationing right on the natal Sun of the USA's birth chart, we address our nations caretaking abilities. Like walking with an egg on a spoon ~ we wonder if the careless imbalance of the current system just needs to fall and break. What does a nourished society/community actually look like?
This will take time, constant work, constant mistakes, constant....surprises. This will demand not only courage, but ego-death acceptance of our messy, day-to-day journey to de-colonize ourselves. As we are born into this racist system, nothing about us can be left unscathed, unconsidered ~ and nothing is to blame, except the assumption of a handshake.