Blood-Red Berries + Wild Fire
Dear Friend,
Since I last wrote to you there’s been a shift from Scorpio to Sagittarius season. Autumn deepens, and the day I love most – the winter solstice – is coming into view.
This time of year is breathtaking in its beauty. Blood-red berries gleam stark against the evergreens, lit by the low winter sun.
This autumn brings to a close a year that has been very strange for me. I talked about this a little in Writing Isn’t Always Safe.
In every story, there is a ceremony that adds intensity and colour, and that turns the story at just at the moment it needs to turn.
My theory is this: once you have the ceremony, you have the story.
The ceremony is a fractal of the whole: you have the fault lines and the desire paths, the connection and the conflict.
Almost everything about this year has been coloured by sending that letter. The months before were about crafting it. The months following have been about dealing with the aftermath.
I have found myself utterly exhausted and completely euphoric. The experience of feeling after being numb is psychedelic and it comes with crashes and highs.
What I was really doing was giving myself permission to step out of the chokehold of the past, and emerge, wobbly, into the liminal space of the future. To do that, I needed a way to ritualise that movement from one state to another. The letter functioned as my ceremony.
The fire in me is spreading wildly. I can see it curl at the corners and catch light. For a long time, I have disavowed this fire, this martial spark of aggression.
I am inflected by the mutable fire of Sagittarius season. Fire that isn’t held in a hearth or found in the spark from a match. Wild fire that cannot be contained.
In sending my letter, I wanted to show how I felt. I wanted to allow the flame to burn bright and clean.
I have been writing a story for the last few months about an astrologer who is in the process of unearthing her complicated family history.
Often, I think I am writing about a subject, but it turns out that I am writing about myself. Perhaps you find this too?
Maybe you find yourself deep in a research rabbit hole about something apparently neutral, only to discover, a little later, that you were learning something new about yourself. Or giving yourself permission to be a certain way.
I thought I was writing a fun story about psychics and horror films and parties and rituals. But what I realised was that this was another portal, another staging post.
What I was writing about my own relationship to astrology. Which is really my relationship to storytelling and seasons and the symbols that underpin the collective meaning-making that we do across time and space.
🜁🜃🜂🜄
Thank you for being here with me, in the ether, where the wild fire leaps and the berries gleam blood-red.
Love, Laura
🐚 this is microdosing ceremony, a weekly-ish letter from my artist’s cocoon to yours.
🌺 find out more about rituals and writing on the ceremony podcast.
🐇 explore creative rabbit holes on my website.