In Priya’s instagram post she wrote one sentence that weaved everything together — the summary of my last year reflections, the significance of sharing an evening of frivolity with friends, the solution to enduring collective grief and abolishing colonization and mending the tears of political, spiritual and social divide — she said, “an antidote to horror is connection”, to which I would strip down further to say, “the antidote is connection”.
]]>Monday October 16, 2023 // Post Solar Eclipse
Yesterday was my birthday. Over dinner last night my partner (now husband as of September 21 2023!) asked me for my reflection on my thirty-third year. It was a big one when I think back: freshly back from an ancestral coming-home to Italy, newly engaged to my love of nearly a decade, I opened a shop, I closed a shop, I re-learned a lesson on holding my boundaries, I organized and produced (with the help of many invaluable hands) the most significant gathering of my life (wedding!), I got married. It was a transformative year in many ways.
And to welcome in my personal new year, on Saturday — the day of the solar eclipse in Libra, a marking of time for alchemizing old, ill-serving ways of relating — I chose to usher in a new era that shines a sparkly spotlight on building stronger friendships at an age when keeping friends, let alone making new ones, isn’t always easy: I hosted Girl Dinner. With a very small gathering of women — some old friends, some newer, some family — we together leaned into an evening for the feminine; sharing laughter, stories, and personal fears over glasses of bubbles and plates of finger foods sufficient enough to call a meal. They brought flowers from their gardens, more bubbles, homemade chocolates, farmer’s market orchids in an exquisite vintage green glass jug dug up from the yard, and in return when the candles burned low and it was time to go, I sent each of them on their way with a hug and a good old fashioned pastel pink goodie bag (but for grown-ass women).
Just before composing this, I read a post on Instagram from author and group dialogue facilitator Priya Parker. In reflection on the tragic genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, she shared a social project by Wendy Macnaughton where she lugged a table and chairs down to the SF Bart station and invited strangers to sit and draw each other for one minute. They were to draw a portrait of the stranger sitting across from them using the blind contour method which allows the artist to draw using only one continuous line and without looking down at their paper. I used to bring this activity as an introductory exercise when I taught art to elementary aged students because, as Wendy Macnaughton also knows, it is about so much more than learning how to draw what you see. It’s about process, it’s about slowing down, and ultimately it’s about connection.
In Priya’s instagram post she wrote one sentence that weaved everything together — the summary of my last year reflections, the significance of sharing an evening of frivolity with friends, the solution to enduring collective grief and abolishing colonization and mending the tears of political, spiritual and social divide —
She said, “an antidote to horror is connection”, to which I would strip down further to say, “the antidote is connection”.
I have spent the past several months while the shop’s been on pause reflecting on what Hina Luna is and what it will become. Ultimately, what I’ve come to is that the intention of Hina Luna is to inspire connection — connection to our Self, to our place, to our ancestors, to our community, to the objects we choose to surround ourselves with, to connect with our sources of personal belonging and inspire a lifestyle that both pays homage to those sources and intentionally weaves them into our everyday. There are many ways to weave those connections and the avenues of beauty and creativity that I seek I also share with you as an offering of momentary relief and slowed sense of time.
So I invite us all to ask ourselves
What in my life might be cured with deeper connection?
How might I be able to relate more deeply/honestly/authentically/vulnerably?
How can I offer more understanding, more compassion, more empathy to others?
What do I require from others for them to connect more deeply to me?
What helps me to stay connected to my humanity in times of relational difference?
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I was in conversation this week with a fellow island dweller — she a current student of herbalism and I an artist working with natural dyes and plant symbolism. More on our talk is soon to come but one of the most interesting points of connection we discussed was the ways we are in relationship with the plants. In our individual practices, both of us are experiencing a slow “getting to know you” with our plant allies, hers from a medicinal perspective and mine from a more symbolic or thematic one. Both of us find ourselves in long-term studies, meditations, and observations with a single subject of interest, focusing our concentration on an individual or small group of plant beings with the intention of revealing the many layers of their unique personalities.
My personal interest in plants bloomed when I moved to the island in my early twenties. My home for the first two years was a native plant nursery and during my time living and working there, I inevitably learned the names and personalities of many of the plants of my new island home. Learning about Hawai`i’s native cultural practices from various teachers and practitioners has also indirectly led to an authentic love and awareness of the plants here.
I think often about the abundant, readily accessible knowledge on the nature of plants that we have at our fingertips by means of our tiny computers and how that contrasts to early explorations and discoveries (growing relationships). Deciphering the medicinal from the poisonous — lucky for many of us modern humans — is now only a Google search away. It’s internet dating for us and our houseplants, being able to do a quick search online to learn about how much light and water to give to the new friends we bring home. And yet sometimes even still, something goes amiss and our once lively green friend becomes wilted. Even with access to an incredible database of tried and tested information, how do we ensure the most stable, long-lasting relationship? Time, presence, and engagement really seem like the only ways. (For people and plants).
In my creative practice, I work with the plants in a couple primary ways, each quite different from the other and yet together they make up part of the complex personality of the plants.
In the tangible, I am processing and extracting color from ground plant parts — roots, bark, leaves mostly. Through water quality, heat, fermentation, and the addition of color shifters (iron or alkaline/acidic elements), I am exploring the chromatic properties and abilities hidden within the bodies of the plants. With each seasonal collection of offerings from the Hina Luna studio and often even for the year, I concentrate on a limited palette, making the long and slow and beautiful investment of time; cultivating my craft, growing in relationship. It often feels like nothing short of magic.
On a conceptual layer, I also work with the images and energies of a limited selection of plants each season. The deciding of which plants I focus on is more channeled than chosen; an exercise in listening, observing, feeling. Sometimes it’s a scent that has me captivated in a memory I can’t explain (ancestral perhaps); a volunteer that pops up in the garden whom then pops up in conversations, in song, in poetry, and in the lives of others; an ancient symbol carrying an intention of something I wish to offer myself and the collective in a certain season of our lives. Inspired by their physical and behavioral attributes, each plant is also a representation of a symbolic energy, a divine deity, a celestial body. Folklore is rich with stories of plants that bring love, bestow luck, offer protection, and more. I can only imagine that these associations are made by drawing connection lines between the shared qualities of one to another, like a night-blooming flower to the moon.
Plant dyeing requires a commitment to a slow process. Lasting results are not achieved when rushed. Yet even more, exploring the conceptual story of a plant is the slow, slow. I balance my discovery process with both personal observation and meditation as well as the research of other experienced sources. I’m interested in what relationships ancient and indigenous cultures had and have to certain plants, the ways they’ve weaved them into their stories, utilized them in their medicinal practices, featured them in their arts.
Hina Luna’s intention is to inspire connection through beautiful means. Because the plants are to thank for much of the inspiration and literal creation of Hina Luna, most of the offerings shared through the shop are an ode to them. Botanical soaps, plant dyed candles, plant ally oracle decks — all to inspire and contribute to your growing relationship with the plant beings around us.
Magic In the Mundane: An Introduction To Connecting With Plants In The City zine
Dirt Gems Plant Ally Oracle Deck
Plant Ally Talismans Poetic Oracle Cards
Hawaiian Vetiver Incense Bundle
Plant Dyed Botanical Beeswax Altar Candles
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The new moon can be seen as the starting point of the lunar cycle. It’s the planting of the seed while the full moon is the flower in bloom. Over the course of approximately 28 days, the moon journeys toward a state of fullness (waxing) and then descends back toward its fertile, dark moon phase (waning). Momentum grows during the waxing phase and any intentions or “seeds planted” on the new moon may be gaining traction supported by our commitments and actions. By full moon, we may see our intentions and actions have reached fruition, or even more likely, it may take several more cycles before we see our seeds bloom.
The new moon is the dark, fertile soil that feeds the seeds of our intentions. As any gardener or farmer knows, the soil must be prepped before new seeds are planted and often this includes clearing the bed of weeds or temporary cover crop. In other words, the new moon offers a clean slate, a fresh start, an opportunity for new beginning. This is a prime time for taking inventory and letting go. It’s an invitation to release that which weighs heavy on your heart. Or, going back to the garden analogy, it’s the time to pull the unwanted weeds growing in your heart and mind and compost them to the fertile soil of the new moon. I like the compost analogy because instead of imagining our burdens being cut off and released into the invisible ether, it suggests that instead they are laid to rest where they will be transformed into something that feeds our future desires and dreams.
With the purpose of clearing away and clearing out to make way for the new, the following are some practices that are seemingly ordinary but, with the presence of intention, can serve as potent new moon rituals. These are examples of what I mean when I say my magic has become quieter yet no less potent.
I often send out reflection questions in my Full Moon Missive newsletters that can be used as prompts to journal to or to pull some cards to. If you’re not the journaling or oracle card type, asking yourself some check-in questions and spending some time reflecting on honest answers can be a very effective way for gaining clarity. Below are some new moon related questions that you can reflect on however you choose, but may I recommend the good old fashioned pairing of a pen to paper. The slower pace of this practice helps to pace out rambling thoughts and walk through, step by step, some big things you may be processing.
✷ How do I feel in my body right now?
✷ How am I tending to myself these days?
✷ What am I ready to call into my life?
✷ Planting a seed — an intention, a collective prayer, or a personal goal I’m setting:
✷ Three action items I can do to set my intentions into motion during the waxing moon phases:
Fire is a catalyst, an activator, a stimulator. It provides us light, it offers warmth. A follow-up practice to the reflection questions above might be to hold your new moon intention close while you light a candle. You can imagine that you’re igniting your intention, committing to your desire, sending your prayer out into the world to be fueled by the fertile new moon, growing through the waxing phases and blooming into fruition with the full moon.
This doesn’t require a performance and the only tools needed are a candle and something to light it with. The elaborateness of the act can be as grand as you wish to make it and it can all take place quietly inside yourself if you so desire.
Hair is a very personal thing. Some cultures abstain from cutting hair to preserve energetic life force which is a powerful practice of its own. I, on the other hand, hear the scissors calling at pivotal points in my life and feel no other option than to trim away. Like around the time of my thirtieth birthday as I was embarking on a new personal decade, I stepped out of the shower, waist-long hair freshly combed and (very trustingly) handed my partner the scissors and asked him to cut to below my shoulders. Luckily with some direction, he did well! A couple months into the global pandemic, I cut more.
Cutting hair can be symbolic of releasing part of the past. For example, my thirtieth birthday haircut was a letting go of some big parts of what was a significantly transformative time in my life; a cutting away of the things I no longer wished to carry with me into the next decade.
The new moon offers us this opportunity to release the weight. It certainly doesn’t have to be a drastic home-done gesture like my birthday cut, but perhaps the next time you’re scheduling an appointment for a trim or doing it yourself, consider timing it with a new moon.
Sweeping floors, washing dishes, changing bedsheets, clearing out the closets, opening windows — sounds like a list of chores but there is some really effective underlying magic here. Through Hina Luna, I explore the connections between the concepts of body, altar and home. For me, these words are interchangeable, arranged in a circle in my mind’s eye, one flowing into the next. By quite literally cleaning and clearing space in our home, we can hold the same intention for our body, heart and mind.
Taking inventory and letting go of some tangible, personal items that no longer serve a purpose in our lives can also lighten our energetic load. This practice is pushing the reset button on our home space and the new moon is a welcomed time to do so.
The new moon is a monthly opportunity to start anew. You can always decide when to mark a new beginning for yourself, there needn’t be a reason to wait for a different calendar year or birthday or moon phase. However if you’re needing support in finding your rhythm and implementing a practice into your life that is consistent, then perhaps look no further than the moon.
]]>We’re living in an age where updates on world news — the good and the bad — can be consumed in real time. Overwhelm is an inevitable side effect to this amazing tool. Our own peace, tranquil spaces, and personal joys can feel stifled when we know these feelings are currently hard to access for other members of our global kin. To turn away is not the answer, nor is to overwhelm our own systems to the point of inaction, indifference, and adrenal fatigue.
The other morning I bore witness to one of life’s great dualities. It was one moment of many that occur every second in our great world, the simultaneous omnipresence of immense pain and sorrow with absolute peace, joy and beauty. While one heart aches another bursts with love. Where war rages, somewhere else tranquility exists. “How can there be any joy when such suffering also exists?”, asks the tender heart. I don’t know but somehow it does, has, and will.
So, again, what is there to offer you during these times when the weight of the world is so palpable? Perhaps the offering of a candle to light in prayer, to set an intention to, a beacon of hope. Perhaps an oracle deck for you to commune with your own heart, to heal your own wounds so you can help heal others, a light to guide your way. Perhaps an artful greeting card to send words of thanks, to let someone know you’re thinking of them, to offer encouragement during these times. Perhaps a beautiful image to remind you that beauty still exists, to inspire you, to help make the hard stuff more processable.
A candle, an oracle deck, a greeting card are insignificant things relative to the bigger issues we’re processing as a collective. And sometimes, it’s these seemingly insignificant things that can have the power to carry us through hard times. They can offer a welcomed moment of pause to catch our breath before going onward. An invitation to ground in something tangible, something constant. They can be a point of connection. In other words, do continue to care and stay informed, to mobilize and offer yourself in service where and when you can — within the scope of your capacity — and also, continue to make your art, to write your poems, to plant the garden, to hone your craft, to share your offerings with the world. This has always been what gets us through.
]]>What is your love language? Are you bolstered by words of affirmation? Is it a welcomed act of service? The surprise of small gifts? Is it the exchange of physical touch and affection? Or maybe it’s just some good quality time that fills your cup.
Think about how you best receive love from others; how it speaks to you the clearest; when you feel the most seen, cared for, adored. Is it the same as how you express your love onto others?
Do we tend to speak our own love language — expressing to others what we wish to receive for ourselves — or might we be bilingual when it comes to loving connection? To some degree, doesn’t love require us to be well-versed in all five languages? After all, what we might be expressing as love may not translate as such. We might be gifting when what’s needed is quality time.
Now, does that matter?
As I experience more and more the complexities of the translation of love languages — whether with partners, or parents, or friends — a question has come to light, one I am continuing to unpack and admittedly don’t have resolve for. The question is, if someone is expressing a different love language than the one that we understand best, is that love really any lessened? It’s a question of intention versus impact. Similar to speaking foreign languages, “I love you” means the same in Spanish as it does in English even if it doesn’t sound the same. But is it being heard if it’s not understood? Is the intention enough or is the key to reaching true intimacy in all of our relationships understanding the individual love languages of the people closest to us?
The opening image of a tweet by Black Ashley asking “Do you love yourself in your love language?” popped up on my Instagram last week. It blew my mind and my heart wide open. What a question! And also, why hadn’t I asked myself it before? This question feels like the all encompassing tone for what I wish for us all this Valentine’s Day. No purchase necessary. Just the self-given gift of space for reflection, to come back to ourselves, to ask “how can I love me best”.
Below are a series of reflection questions for you to journal to or simply carry with you through your day to ponder. Questions for getting clear, for translating and interpreting your own needs to yourself. I’m always discovering more ways to romance myself and what calls to me is probably different for you. Like me you may also find that your love language may evolve over time. Where is your heart at this phase of you life?
1. Under what love language light does your own heart shine brightest? Acts of service, words of affirmation, gift giving, quality time, physical touch and affection. Your answer can certainly include more than one.
2. In what ways do you most like to experience this/these?
3. How do you currently express this to your self? In other words, how do you love yourself in your love language(s)?
4. When and how do you feel most at home in your body?
5. If you don’t feel like you have an answer to question three, what are some ways you would like to start expressing your love language to yourself? Perhaps draw some inspiration from your answer to question four. For example, if your love languages are gifts and physical touch, a desire might be “gifting myself a new body butter to massage my body before sleep.”
And finally, I’d like to share with you a page out of Hina Luna’s Wax + Wane zine On Earth And Color —
I am committed to radical self acceptance and love.
I treasure every part of me.
Body. Heart. Mind. Spirit.
I honor all that it means to have a tender heart in this world.
I prioritize taking care of all parts of my self.
I allow myself plentiful rest.
I am worthy and I am enough.
I have autonomy over myself and am also a mindful part of the greater collective.
I honor my body, in all of its levels of ability, as an altar to my ancestors.
I am an incarnation of all who have come before me, and I am my own.
I honor my body for all of the ways it houses my spirit.
I am human, therefore I am creative.
I accept and celebrate my life as a work in process.
I commit to keeping my heart and mind open.
I will not abandon my love and acceptance of my self, unless when I do, then I will forgive myself and offer myself my love again.
]]>That said though, I experience great joy in gifting others. More specifically, I experience joy in gifting others well by doing so thoughtfully and unrushed. Unfortunately that’s not the general message of gifting seasons. Rather, it’s often a last-minute buy now before you miss out and it’s too late.
The past couple years have only exacerbated an on-going imbalance of wealth distribution (thanks capitalism) with many small businesses closing their doors and mega corporations like Amazon making billions more. Every purchase we make is affirming the actions and choices of the business we’re buying from and how they produce their product (which includes the wellbeing of the people who work for them, the quality of their work environment, the quality of their pay, the resources they use, the materials they source). To choose to buy a certain thing from a certain source over a multitude of choices out there is to say, “I advocate for this! More of this, please!”
So who are you advocating for?
In other words, what are your values and how do you shop them?
Do you value a circular wealth system? Which I’m defining here as: someone buys from a small business which then uses that money to have their family’s needs met and also buys from another small business who then does the same. For example, I buy a thoughtful gift from Hina Luna who then uses that money to buy groceries from her friend who owns the local market in town who then uses that money to buy that new shirt they needed from a small independent designer in California…
Do you value goods that have a story? Meaning maybe you know where it was made, the name of the person who made it, the inspiration behind the design, where the materials were sourced. It makes me feel good when someone compliments, say, a pair of earrings I’m wearing and I‘m given the opportunity to share who made them and gush momentarily about why I love them!
Do you value safe working conditions and fair compensation for workers and responsible and ethical production processes?
Do you value businesses/people who contribute some of their profits towards organizations and campaigns that you also support?
Do you value keeping money within your local community so that your neighbors may live well and thrive, which in turn creates a healthy community for you too?
If you answered yes to any of these reflection questions then the way to live by these values (when making purchases) is to buy from small businesses and purchase goods that are handmade by well-compensated people. Another part that is equally important (because we may not do it perfectly one hundred percent of the time, and that’s ok) is to get informed on who you are buying from — be it Amazon or any other big box — including how they treat their workers, their impact on the environment, whom or what resources they might be exploiting, and who and what they donate to. Once you have the answers, the next thing to ask is — to quote Uncle Walter Ritte — now that you know, do you care?
And I suspect that you do, a whole lot, but perhaps you feel stuck by lack of time or money, or just really don’t know where to begin. I am confident that there exists many wonderful small businesses out there that can accommodate a small budget and ones with delightful treasures ready to ship (you can count Hina Luna as one!). To wean off of the ultra-convenience of Amazon and the like is a commitment to those values above that you said yes to. It’s an action item towards creating the world you want to live in.
I keep a running list of good gift ideas in my phone which I add to anytime I come across something unique and thoughtful in a shop or online. That way, I have a stash of inspiration for when a birthday or special occasion comes around.
Give yourself time. It’s hard to make good choices under pressure. Buying small also requires a little extra patience as some items may be made to order or there’s only a small team getting orders out and so shipping takes a few extra days. Planning ahead also gives you time to set aside the money needed to make the purchase so you don’t feel stressed about spending more than is sustainable for you.
Understand the true cost. Quality isn’t cheap, generally speaking, nor should it be. When materials are sourced ethically and when the people producing are compensated fairly you can expect to pay more than you would at the big box store. But you can feel at ease knowing that by paying the true cost, resources and people are not being exploited in the process. This goes for shipping too. Some big businesses can afford to eat the costs of shipping to offer it to consumers for free, but small businesses should not be expected to meet the same demand. Relatively speaking, considering the efforts it takes to get a package from one place to another, shipping is pretty affordable.
Buy less. The classic reminder of quality over quantity. But it’s true. Especially in the context of gifting, I find one really thoughtful fifty-dollar thing to be more special than five ten-dollar things. While the temptation may be there in the big stores to get “more bang for your buck”, the really special handmade thing will likely make a bigger impact.
Be forgiving with yourself but don’t lose sight of your commitment to your values. There’s a quote by Zero Waste Chef Anne-Marie Bonneau that goes something like, “We don't need a handful of people doing it perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.” There is always the option to make better buying choices and also sometimes we may fall flat due to an unexpected immediate need or accessibility in the moment. And that’s okay. The intention is to weave our commitments to our values into our lives, make adjustments the best we can in the moment, plan ahead when able, and forgive ourselves when we don’t do it perfectly.
A have a long mental list of my favorite makers and artisans and I often share some of them in my Instagram stories or in seasonal gift guide blogs. If you’re seeking a recommendation, feel free to connect with me and I may be able to share a good one (and you know I’ll relish the opportunity to gush about why I love them so!)
]]>Birthdays have for me become less about acknowledgment and more about reflecting on my personal new-year. I also think about the people involved in getting me here — generations and generations of ancestors. As I’ve connected more with my ancestral work, it has also become a time of deeper love for my ancestors, gratitude for the galaxy of complex humans who are the reason I am here today living this life. My thread in the great tapestry. As I age, my rituals grow quieter, more intimate, more personal, more ordinary. As I learn more about and feel into my lineage, I find magic in everyday practices like cooking a meal, spending an afternoon in the garden, or setting the scene to host a good gathering. All things that now feel like a simply delightful way to celebrate life.
Food is central to my celebrating. A great meal is essential to honoring life. On birthdays I feel it is of utmost importance to feed the bodily vessel that which brings it the most joy, the provokes memory, that offers comfort. One of my most favorite quotes (said by Mary Beth Bonfiglio) is “your body is an altar to your ancestors”. As I reflect and hold gratitude for my life on my birthday, I ask myself, what offering do I want to make to my ancestors in thanks? Don’t my ancestors want me to revel in joy? Wouldn’t it make them happy if I were also reminded of them, or a time in my life when I was the happiest? Isn’t it their greatest pleasure to know that I am well nourished? Food holds the power to transport me to all of these experiences. It is through food that I maintain the strongest connection to my ancestors.
As much as I enjoy the occasional five-sensory experience of dining out, the best meals I’ve had have been home cooked. Cooking is a big part of the final offering of food. For me, this preparation time in the kitchen is where the magic happens, where the remembrance is felt, where the ancestors are present. I feel the most connected — to myself and all that extends beyond me — when I am creating. On my birthdays, I almost always bake my own dessert. The pinnacle edible representation of the day I like to take into my own hands. It’s an ode to myself to create the thing that (quite literally) celebrates the sweetness of life.
For the past few years, I’ve been baking birthday biscotti. Not your traditional birthday treat, I know, but one that is a nod to my ancestors, a food to remember them by that brings me joy and offers comfort. For many, family recipes are a top secret thing. Or I’ve heard for some who do decide to share, they’ll conveniently leave one ingredient out. I’ll admit I debated with myself about whether or not to share this, but truly, I think the joy of something delicious is meant to be shared.
The following recipe is not revolutionary. I expect someone else’s Nonna (or great grandmother’s cousin, as Alice is to me) out there makes the same. Regardless, I think my ancestors would be happy to know that this recipe is still active and delighting taste buds.
[My great grandmother’s cousin, Alice — baker of these Almond Anise Biscotti which I’ve been making for my birthday as a way to give thanks to my ancestors.]
*as translated by my great-grandmother
Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 cube butter, melted
2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
1 shot whiskey or anise *I assume this means anise extract. I use about 2 tsp anise seed because that’s what’s often available near me and just grind it up a little in a mortar and pestle — they still come out delicious!)
1 cup sugar
Chopped almonds *quanto basta, as much as you want.
*I like to add a pinch of salt and a dribble of vanilla extract
Instructions
From here, I’ll elaborate on my great-grandmother’s notes because they are quite abbreviated and don’t take into consideration the first-time biscotti baker.
In a mixing bowl, measure out all dry ingredients and stir together. Make a well in the middle of the flour mixture and add the eggs, sugar, butter, anise/whiskey, and vanilla and mix until combined. Then add the chopped almonds and stir until evenly distributed.
Divide the dough in half and with moistened hands transfer the dough onto a greased and floured baking sheet. Shape each piece into a log approximately 12” long x 3” wide.
[above: the biscotti loaves after the first round of baking.]
[above: slice the loaves at an angle into 1/2” pieces which will then be payed flat and baked for an additional ten minutes to crisp.]
Bake for 35 minutes or until the logs are firm to the touch. Remove pan from oven (keeping the heat on) and allow to cool for about 10 minutes.
With a serrated knife, cut each log into 1/2” sections. Lay the slices back onto the baking sheet and bake for an additional 10 minutes or until golden brown.
Remove from oven, let cool for a few minutes and then transfer to a cooling rack.
[Alice’s Anise Biscotti, left, next to my grandmother’s specialty, Chocolate Biscotti — another recipe for another time, perhaps!]
My great-grandmother says they pair well with coffee or wine. I take mine with a hot cup of tea. However you choose to enjoy yours, I hope this family recipe offers some sweetness to your life this season.
]]>A micro business relies much on its community. One of the things I appreciate most about the relationship between bitty-businesses and their supporters is the understanding that good things take time — you are here because this is not Amazon. You value handmade and slow, thoughtful process. You are empathetic to the humans behind the scenes, including the mail carriers who get your package to you for relatively little. You know that you might be able to find the same book for slightly less from a corporate online retailer, but you don’t because you believe in the very big effect of shopping small.
You believe in community building and curating thoughtfully made treasures with a story. I see you and I thank you.
Supporting small businesses and working artists can require a little patience on part of the customer. One, because likely it’s just one human doing it all (👋) and two, because your goods are often times made to order. It’s not conducive to want-it-now buyers, but that’s part of the resistance, the refusal to cater to that level of grind. Much of Hina Luna’s ethos rests in being thoughtful and intentional with the objects we interact with daily, and while I value consistency and a certain level of timeliness in my own process, I am a grateful member of the greater web of the Slow Movement.
As a working artist and small business owner, I have come to appreciate the model of a good pre-order. What is a pre-order? A pre-order is an order placed for an item that has not yet been released. There are a few reasons why a business might offer this, but for small business and makers of handmade goods like myself, a pre-order supports us in understanding the level of demand before we begin creating. This helps us to allocate resources, conserve materials, waste less, be able to afford production costs, and it also guarantees the customer the thing they want before it has a chance to sell out.
For a long time I feared offering anything “made to order” because I didn’t want to make my customers wait — I was still in the process of reconditioning myself from the pressures of capitalism (more on that here…). As a customer myself though, I’ve purchased pre-order items from makers and enjoyed the anticipation of awaiting my new treasure. How exciting the day is when it arrives in the mail! I then realized that because of all the wonderful reasons I mentioned in the beginning, that my customers actually didn’t mind waiting on preorders from me either! They (you) are folks who are savvy to the road of shopping small or are new to it but value the hands and the heart behind the process over the instant gratification brought to us by the Amazon age.
As always, I feel grounded, hopeful, and held by the community that has been created through Hina Luna. Thank you for being a part of it and for putting into practice the values you hold for together creating a more sustainable and equitable world.
]]>One of our most frequent visual examples of this is the half moon, a bi-monthly reminder of the marriage between the light and darkness — equinox and equilux. Like fraternal twins, one is waxing towards fullness while the other wanes toward fertile darkness.
Are you waxing into full illumination? The seed taking root and beginning its journey up and out in a hope-full surge and commitment to growth, focus and action. Or perhaps you are waning in towards the dark, the hidden and unknown side of self, a tender time of inward reflection and rest, the post-reap rest after a full moon harvest.
Like the melting of winter’s frost giving way to the return of the buds and blooms; dormancy and hiberation turning over to a time of abundance and fertility and birth. Then the full bloom of summer to autumnal harvest and back ‘round to winter’s slumber.
What seeds have you planted?
How to you tend them?
What do you hope to harvest?
What will you leave behind? Or rather, what will you energetically compost?
We ebb and flow between these phases constantly for inconsistent lengths of time. Do you recognize a pattern in your own waxing and waning?
Living in sync with the cycles of the seasons can be a way for feeling in tune with these concepts, an innate lifestyle that our natural rhythms long to return to. Perhaps you already feel deep within your body, mind, and spirit the great shifts that occur on the solstices and equinoxes. Are you able to put it into words? Maybe you don’t have to in order to identify them. Maybe there’s another way. Establish a conversation [with or without words] with your physical and spiritual body during these times; one where you’re listening and letting your intuition lead.
The ritual of living intimately with the cycles of nature tends the garden of the self and expands our capacity for self love. It’s a self care practice that goes beyond salt baths and mindful eating and extends into the less glamorized territory of shadow work which I define as acknowledging and accepting all parts of the whole that is you. You are a record book of all your experiences and of those lived by your ancestors — the good, the inspiring, the traumatic. And, you are also an energetic recycling system with the power to transform the leftovers of the trauma into new green growth which you can nurse and tend so that your future ancestors might someday find comfort beneath its shady canopy.
Let us devote ourselves to honoring the balance and dancing joyfully in the in-between — the half moon phase, or the “equinox of life”, if you will. Let us allow ourselves to see the beauty in the light, in the dark, and in the mysticism that exists in that which is hidden and that which chooses to be seen. Let us abandon competitive negative and positive connotations attached to the “light” and “dark” sides of the self, for neither is superior over the other but rather the contrast of both phases is required for seeing the value in the other. The rain allows us to see the rainbow.
May we soak up all of the nourishment of our rains and open ourselves to the spectrum of vibrant color being reflected on the other side.
]]>I wrote this short essay a couple years ago, inspired by a memorable moment spent in the woods with a dear friend. As a brief reprieve from the current overwhelm of the world, I offer you this: a moment of pause to drop into an imaginary space of stripped down simplicity, of comforting quiet, and of safety in being a small creature living in loving connection with the great, wider world around you.
]]>I wrote this short essay a couple years ago for the second edition of Hina Luna‘s Wax + Wane Zine, Keeper of the Tides: An Ode to the Moon, under an inconspicuous first initial and last name. I was inspired by a memorable moment spent in the woods with a dear friend; a moment when I felt consciously present with the simple pleasures I was experiencing; a moment when I thought to myself “ah, this is what it feels like to live with intention.”
So as a brief reprieve from the overwhelm of the world, I offer you this: a moment of pause to drop into an imaginary space of stripped down simplicity, of comforting quiet, and of safety in being a small creature living in loving connection with the great, wider world around you.
—
I have a sister who called herself after the darkest gemstone, the one that is the color of a new moon night. She brought me to the forest once, a winding road into the hills of traditional Kalapuyan lands. It was a field trip for the wild mushrooms that bloom that time of year.
“Big Rock Candy Mountain” played through the muffled speaker of her station wagon radio as we climbed, traversing through eight thousand years of history that was lived upon this land and in these waters by the ones who were here first and then were forced to leave. Yet signs of resilience exist here in the Chinook salmon that still swim in its river and the spotted own that flies between its trees.
We found a place in a nest of tall trees — a short trail from the river’s edge — and set out our simple belongings to make our home for the night.
Bellies filled and belly-laughs over a feast-fit-for-a-queen were set fireside as the dappled light on the forest floor faded, replaced by stars above; the treetops silhouetted in the silver glow of our moon. [Why does a meal always taste better when prepared over a hand-built fire?]
Treespeak and quiet laughter from the unseen were our only company while we warmed our bones around the flames till the late hours came. Then, tucked into a backseat den of down-filled wooly comfort that any bear would happily have spent their winter in, we shared stories and welcomed sleep.
Some short hours later, in what seemed like a blink of sleep, our eyes opened with the first light. The shallow yet contented rest that comes from a night spent feral had quieted us, slowed our pace, and retuned our sight. Without words, she climbed out from the warmth of our nest first, unfurling softly like a bloom emerging out of dormancy.
Bare feet planted on a tapestry she’d laid out, she stretched out her arms with the trunks of the trees, her limbs resembling their limbs, filling her lungs with the piney morning air; a reciprocal sharing of breath with the tall elders around her.
Returning, she opened the creaky door of the station wagon and dug out a canvas bag from the rubble of blankets. Reaching into the overstuffed bag, she revealed rumpled yet carefully chosen garments and a stone, pulled from a side pocket, which she strung around her neck. Still, an absence of words, only the songs of unfamiliar morning birds, crunching pine needles underfoot, the distant rush of the river, and the soft jingling of the beads and charms that hung from her locs.
We gathered our empty teacups from the night before and walked the narrow trail to the river. Tiny fungi stood with dewy mosses at the feet of giant tree mothers and delicate ferns bowed, bearing damp morning leaves.
I squatted barefoot over a large stone, dipping my hands and scooping my metal mug into the rush of cool, late summer water. My mind was quiet amidst the soundtrack of the forest and in the company of a friend. I lifted my face to catch the sun, closed my eyes, and with a long exhale, I laid my heart down by the river’s side.
]]>I opened my first Etsy shop when I was sixteen years old, making silk flower hair adornments that catered to a niche subculture of mid century fashion lovers. Burlesque dancers and pinup models were amongst my customer base, and to this day — some fifteen years later — I still occasionally spot a photo online of one of my makes in the hair of an old supporter.
In addition to launching my first online shop, I got my first taste of setting up space at music events and holiday marketplaces and would drive down to San Francisco from where I grew up, an hour north, to sell my floral creations wholesale to one of Haight Street’s most beloved vintage shops. Shipping orders off to folks I didn’t know aside from a name and address was exciting and magical in its own way, however the desire to create and then connect with other people face to face over those creations has always fulfilled me most [and is something I’ve missed during pandemic times].
Sixteen year old me was also working my first job at a vintage general-store style gift shop. My employer became a dear friend and aunty figure who would whisk me away on early morning ventures to the city to accompany her on buying trips at antique flea markets and annual trade shows. I supported her in curating merchandise for the shop and began cultivating my discerning eye for quality and beauty balanced with functionality.
I recall walking through the many rows of vendors at the trade shows astounded at the way we as humans choose to utilize our precious and few earthly resources. [That may have been at the approximate time I was taking a course in Environmental Studies and had my eyes opened further to the urgent need to adjust our consumption habits.] Stall after stall of plastic trinkets and cheaply made figurines that were destined for a landfill, trends that would inevitably fade but whose materials would not, novelties that were good for an initial laugh then nothing more — I saw it all as wasteful and a painfully unconscious way of living here on earth.
Fast forward through the years — through more Etsy shop launches, more marketplace events, and more art-centered entrepreneurial ventures — to the fall of 2016 when Hina Luna was born. Rooted in my artistic journey into the world of plant dyes and a long time love affair with textiles, I was bridging my art with my devotion to earth and spirit. I first shared Hina Luna with the public at a local music and agricultural festival — with my community. Being early days and my stock being in its infancy, I had invited a friend to also share her botanical self-care goods to help me fill the space [who remembers Kait and Charged By The Moon from way back when?!]
Kait was the first of a handful of Hina Luna collaborations in that first year. As I was first navigating around discovering the ethos of Hina Luna, I was leaning into a deepened connection with the natural world around me. I sought out artists and makers whose values were rooted in the same as mine, who crafted things both beautiful and that served a purpose by supporting our human experience of reconnecting with the world of the seen and the unseen. I worked with fellow creative women in my town and native artists and local-to-me businesses to offer a very small, ever-changing collection of goods that complimented and supported the pieces I was creating out of the Hina Luna studio.
Not much has changed in regard to the foundational values from which I source curations for the Hina Luna shop. In the past year I have expanded these offerings to be able to share more of the good things I find and the amazing people behind them, and to elaborate on the vision I have for Hina Luna. With the discerning eye of my sixteen year old self observing the rows of trade show products, I hold no interest in offering you things that I truly don’t believe will be treasured and engaged with regularly, that don’t serve a purpose beautifully, and that when the time comes, can go back to the earth.
I often ask myself how I can, to the very best of my ability, offer “things” while simultaneously criticizing our collective consumption habits [more on that here] and its effect on the wellbeing of our planet and many of our global communities. The best way I know how to be a maker and small business owner at this time is to unify our spiritual connection to the material with a commitment to, put quite simply, choosing better things.
Well that’s a pretty broad statement, right? What are better things?
How does this item contribute to the wellbeing and visibility of my global community members who have been systemically oppressed and underserved?
What will happen to this item when it no longer serves or has been used to the extent of its ability? Where will it go?
Who contributed to the production of these materials? Were they properly compensated for their work? Are they working under safe conditions?
Who is benefiting from my investment in these products? Is this someone I feel good about giving my money/giving a voice to?
Hina Luna prioritizes sourcing products made by Hawaiian, women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ makers and artisans. As a single owner, woman-led creative business myself, it is important to me to invest in these communities of makers, to provide a platform to amplify them and their works and contribute towards more equitable wealth distribution. These are people whom I feel good supporting, who work under healthy and fair conditions and most often are micro business owners and artists like myself.
I am so excited by the growing collection of makers and artisans that are a part of Hina Luna. Amazing humans creating from the heart, tools to cultivate a relationship to spirit, odes to the earth and the elements, things to delight and inspire and serve and to connect over.
I’ve alluded a couple of times this month to a coconut rose chia “tapioca” pudding that I’ve been indulging in this summer as a not-too-sweet cooling treat. It’s creamy, it’s ever-so-lightly-floral, it’s refreshing, it’s quick and easy to make, it’s vegan [if that applies to you], and as a bonus, it’s actually pretty good for you too.
And I’ve got my recipe here to share with you — tested, tried, and very much approved!
I’ve made variations of this recipe over the years with the addition of cacao powder, which is also delicious if you’re a chocolate lover. As all of my favorite recipes are, this one is flexible and allows for the addition or substitution of whatever creative flavors you can dream up. Perhaps consider making the recipe as it’s shown here first to get familiar with the desired consistency, and then let the imagination of your taste buds go wild from there!
Made with chia seeds, coconut milk, rose water pure vanilla extract, and naturally sweetened with honey [or maple syrup as a vegan option], this tasty treat is suitable for breakfast, dessert, or a midday reprieve from the hot summer sun. Top it with juicy berries [my favorites are strawberries and mulberries] and a drizzle of chocolate if you’re feeling decadent.
4 servings | preparation time: 10 mins | total time: 4 hours 10 mins
✷ 1 13.5-oz can coconut milk
Creates a luscious, creamy texture. I prefer to use full fat coconut milk for a richer, dessert-like texture but lite works also.
✷ 4 tablespoons chia seeds
These itty bitties are packed with fiber [5 grams in just one tablespoon] and, similar to tapioca pearls, swell when combined with liquid, making them perfect for creating puddings like this one.
✷ 1 tablespoon raw local honey [or maple syrup for vegan option]
This part can be adjusted to taste. If you like it a little sweeter you may wish to add more.
✷ 1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
I’ll be honest, I probably use more like 1 full tablespoon because I love the flavor of vanilla and the way is complements the rose. Start with 1/2 tablespoon and add more to taste if you wish.
✷ 1/8 teaspoon rose water
This is a culinary rose water. I personally love the Nielsen-Massey brand, pictured below. Also, believe me when I say that a little goes a long way. The heavenly scent of roses may tempt you to use more but I’ve found that any more than 1/8 teaspoon begins to taste too perfumey.
✷ a small pinch of salt
For enhancing the flavors of all the other elements.
✷ spatula
✷ 4 ramekins [4 oz mason jars work too]
If making a larger batch or you plan on storing the pudding in your fridge for a few days, you can pour the whole batch of pudding into one, larger container that has an airtight lid.
✷ small pot
✷ can opener
✷ measuring spoons
✷ small baking tray
Combine all ingredients in the small pot and gently warm on the stove over a low flame until the chia seeds begin to swell and the pudding texture has thickened. Remove from heat and allow pudding to rest in the pot until cool enough to handle. This rest time allows the chia to continue swelling and become more jelly-like in texture.
Cluster your ramekins on a small baking sheet and portion the pudding evenly into each one. The baking sheet will allow for easy transfer to the fridge. *Alternative option to pour off into one larger container with an airtight lid. Larger container storage may take longer to cool/set up than smaller portions.
Leave to set up and cool in the fridge for at least 4 hours. Test by giving a ramekin a gentle shake — you want to see a little wobble when they’re ready.
Top with fresh berries and enjoy right away or store in an airtight container for up to 5 days.
Note: While heating the ingredients is not necessary to swell the chia seeds, I find that it quickens the process and makes them more silky and tender like a true tapioca pudding. If you prefer to skip the heating step, simply mix all ingredients together in a bowl, cover with an airtight lid and refrigerate overnight. Pudding may require some additional stirs while it sets up to keep the chia seeds evenly distributed.
May this simple recipe bring you cooling relief and sensual pleasure this summer. Enjoy!
]]>On the homepage I share some of my current inspirations and seasonal musings that are stirring the pot of Hina Luna. This feature gets updated fairly often as new symbology, sounds, experiences, and aesthetics enter into my creative field and captivate my attention. At this time of the creation of this mood board, inspiration is looking like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, picnics, naps, poetry, bonfires, the garden, and this playlist: “Songs to Picnic To”. I’ve been slowly curating images, scenes, creations, and color palettes that feel resonant with an appreciation of the slow, of good rest, of warmer days, of natural beauty, of simple pleasures.
In those moments when it’s hard to find all of the words to define why something inspires and aligns, sometimes an image — or collection of — can speak volumes. So here is an inspiration board of the visual beauty that makes Hina Luna’s heart hum.
At this spoke of the wheel, we are collectively stepping through the portal of the solstice — the summer solstice for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere and the winter solstice for those in the Southern Hemisphere. Because I am living in the Northern Hemisphere, the coming summer solstice will be the focus here, but if you are entering into winter where you live, contemplate what the opposites might be of all that is shared here; the quiet, incubation state of the dark in contrast to all that is revealed in the light.
For my fellow summer dwellers, I will share a few simple practices you can use this solstice for honoring the elements of the season and this metaphorical “full moon phase” of the year.
Summer solstice is the longest day of the year; a time when the daylight hours which have slowly been increasing since winter have finally reached their maximum. Like the face of the dark new moon [the metaphorical winter phase] slowly grows brighter with each day, come summer solstice, the moon’s face is shining and perfectly round in fullness [again, metaphorically speaking]. If you’re a visual person like me, this diagram may support you in better visualizing all of the pieces and how they relate to one another.
This time can be defined by the abundant presence of the sun, which is related to the earthly element of fire. Fire is a stimulant of transformation, movement, passion, creation, and inspiration. It also — much like the sun and the full moon — allows us clear visibility for that which has been brought to light. This might be a good time to reflect on who you were at this time last year. I welcome you to visit the card spread and reflection prompts at the end and take some time to journal or meditate on your answers.
If summer was a phase of the moon it’d be full.
If summer was an element it’d be fire.
If summer was a time of day it’d be noon.
If summer was a direction it’d be south.
The spirits of the elements are powerful, which also makes them unpredictable at times. The element of fire is certainly both of these things and caution is advised as you build your relationship with it. It is best to work with fire when you are feeling calm.
Energetically speaking, in its seemingly destructive properties, new life can arise — think, the phoenix rising from the ashes. Fire teaches us that often times a release is needed in order to move forward. It invites us to lighten our energetic load in order to allow our petals to unfurl and bloom. Fire teaches us non-attachment and reminds us that the cycle of life and death is ever-present and a way of maintaining balance in the universe. Letting go can be difficult — whether it’s of material things or people and/or memories whose energies don’t serve us well — and it can also be wildly relieving. You may even experience both simultaneously.
The following are two practices for connecting with and working with the spirit of fire. One is focused on cultivating gratitude and the other is an invitation to release.
This one is as straight forward as the title suggests it to be: light a candle. But here are some intentions to imbue into the act that will transform this ordinary action into a simple ritual.
Who or what are you lighting the candle for?
Think about your answer as you ignite the flame and touch it to the wick and watch it catch.
What intention are you calling in or sending out as you do this?
Imagine the candle light carrying your intention out into the world or filling your space.
Hand write a list of things you are letting go of. This could be feelings of self-doubt, jealousy, judgement, addictions or habits you want to abandon, unbalanced attachments to people, thoughts, or things that keep you from feeling like your best self. Anything. This can also be a release for the collective, like foundations that need rebuilding, oppressive systems that need to be abolished, limited or harmful ways of thinking that need some perspective. The more detail you write down the better. Old journal entries, letters, cards, etc. can also work.
Safely over a candle or contained outdoor fire, speak your intention for this clearing as you ignite your flame. Voice your thanks for the lessons learned and bid farewell to these old energies as you give them to the fire. Watch them burn and turn to ash; watch them transform. Visualize a new space clearing in your mind and heart space. Take a deep breath and feel this new space.
To be spoken aloud or quietly to yourself as you light a candle or sit in the presence of fire.
Fire, spirit of the south.
Place of the noon day sun and source of transformation.
Place of passion, creation, and inspiration.
The fire within.
The color red, candles, matches, incense, smoke, blades, warming spices.
Use your favorite oracle or tarot deck. Find a quiet space where you can be alone. Set the space. Shuffle well while you reflect on the past year and the path ahead. Take your time choosing each card, in whichever way your intuition guides you. Arrange them side by side in an arc face down and then turn them over one by one as you move through the list of questions.
Card 1 What is being illuminated for me at this time?
Card 2 Where do I shine?
Card 3 In what area of my life might I need more self awareness?
Card 4 What is my source of growth?
Card 5 Where might I need support moving along into the next half of the year?
What was happening in your life and in the greater collective one year ago?
How were you feeling then? How are you feeling now?
What have you unpacked and re-examined? What did you believe then that has evolved for you?
What is a personal seed, an intention or goal, that you may have planted a year ago that is blooming now?
What seed may you have planted a year ago for the collective that you have been tending to?
What are three things you are feeling grateful to others for?
What are three things you are feeling grateful to yourself for?
]]>Rest can look a lot of different ways, and in this moment it was taking the shape of uninhibited creativity. The sensory experience of mixing oily medium into powdered pigment, palette knife gliding back and forth over the glass, feeling into that Goldilocks-“just right”-consistency. The ochre color is familiar of the iron-rich island soil of home and the painted buildings and tile rooftops of an ancestral home. My body, feeling tired from sun exposure and calmed by the cooling sanctuary of my kitchen table, couldn’t care to commit to creating perfection or conceptualizing something profound. So, I paint moons.
I paint ten of them, almost a dozen little ochre yellow moons spread out to cure across my wooden table. I’d entered a sort of restful rhythm, a moon meditative state, hypnotized by the slow, gentle therapy of painting circles. Each one is a little different from the last, learning this new medium as I go along, curious how many versions of moon portraits I can make. I’m disappointed when I realize that I’m out of handmade paper and then convince myself that a table-full of moon paintings might be quite enough when one isn’t even sure what they’re to do with them yet.
A neglected cup inside me feels refilled by the mess in front of me, a part of me that needed resting that I’d ignored because I’d been tending to the fountain of my creativity in other ways. I really can’t remember the last time I created art without an attachment to an outcome — no plan, no motive except authentic creative inspiration. For the past six years I’ve been guided by an intention for Hina Luna, and before and in between I was organizing collaborative and solo art shows, and some time before that I was making art to be critiqued in school. There is most always a vision to be manifested or a grade to receive.
Over the last couple weeks on the blog [Creative Over-Inspiration and Resisting Capitalism As a Creative Small Business] I’ve been unpacking the issues that can arise when we don’t grant ourselves this unattached style of creation. The demands of capitalism have trained us into believing that rest is only earned, productivity must be consistent, and perfection is the standard. Way to break the spirit of creativity! Creativity flows spontaneously, performs best when not forced, and is most magical when the results are unexpected.
[ochre orange powdered earth pigment is mixed with a medium of walnut oil to create paint.]
To unbridle the creative self, remove the filter, turn off the monetizing mind and create purely for the sake of process is necessary nourishment for any artist. It taps into the child soul within, the part that is most authentic, wildly curious, playful, unashamed, fearless, present. Giving ourselves the time and space to create unhindered, as a child would, is the recharge we need as creative individuals resisting burnout.
As Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Once we learn how to create at the standard of “perfection” it can be challenging to allow ourselves to do anything less than. But for the wellbeing of your creative spirit, for the child within you who desires to just make a mess of the thing, for art’s sake, go paint some moons — [or your creative equivalent.]
Listening to: Erykah Badu “Orange Moon”
Tasting: Tangerine sparkling water
What creative acts do I practice?
How has my relationship to my creative practice changed over time? How did it feel when I first began/was most curious? What motivates my practice now?
How can I approach my creative practice in a way that opens up for some experimentation and play?
When/how often am I willing to commit to allowing myself to play more with my creativity?
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Last week’s post dug into some solutions for sorting out feelings of what I’m calling “Creative Over-Inspiration”. In it, I spoke of the ever-elusive sweet spot between the spectrum of purposeful productivity and rest, a balanced place that inspires but doesn’t overwork. Have you found it or does your quest for it continue?
As a working creative person, meaning you rely, to some degree, on your creativity as a means of income, there is an exuberant amount of pressure to produce and to do so consistently. As working creatives, we must keep up or risk fading away; stay relevant or be forgotten; produce new things and ideas or lose our income. So how do we, as conscious business owners and makers, resist this system while offering our things and ideas for sale?
Capitalism expects of all businesses a steady upward growth which requires an exhaustion of finite resources, both physical and energetic. It breeds an insatiable appetite to consume by fostering an illusion that consumption leads to joy and fulfillment. A hungry audience demands more to consume which requires more to be made which makes for more to consume; it’s a “chicken or the egg” question, which comes first and perpetuates the other? I suspect each is a parasite on the other and both require the other to survive.
Commerce has existed in various forms for centuries and will continue to do so, but in what ways can we participate to secure a healthy model for all, selves included? A sustainable model includes safe working conditions and fair compensation of the people growing or processing the raw materials and working in the production, it includes the intentions, actions, and accountability of the business owner to offer quality goods made to last, and it includes the responsibility of the consumer to make the best choices they can.
I believe accountability in ethical business practice is up to both the seller and the consumer — which, when over simplified, reduces down to making better choices — and also that the businesses that are doing the most damage are much bigger than the little folks working on a micro scale. While trying to run an ethical business in a capitalist system feels a bit like being stuck in a whirlpool, many folks, both buyers and sellers, are now reflecting on and questioning its sustainability having witnessed [or been victim of] its taxing effects on the planet and people. It’s the micro businesses who are both struggling to keep up in the capitalistic wheel and who are also unharnessing themselves from the heavy cart and saying, “Enough. I can’t work like this” and perusing a different path. As usual, change gets stirred up from the bottom.
Someone close to me once said “convenience corrupts” and the longer I meditate on these words, the more their truth is revealed to me. In the age of Amazon, we’ve been trained to expect the lowest possible price and fast and free shipping — we want the thing, we want it now, and we don’t want to pay much for it. But the truth is, that shipping is never free, it requires many resources and labor hours, and that quick-cheap-thing most likely means someone along the way was not compensated fairly for their labor. Small businesses stand no chance of competing with corporate incentives. The loss of small businesses impacts not only the individuals who own them and who work for them, but it affects the wellbeing of their local community.
The conversation of diverting ourselves away from the destructive natures of capitalism must include issues of wealth distribution, accessibility, and privilege. Aja Barber has some impactful advice for us as consumers, which loosely sums up as “if you have the means to make better choices — meaning you are not in poverty and better choices are accessible to you — then make the better choice; shop local, shop small, avoid fast fashion, buy from your farmers.” This stuck with me and has served as a reminder for me in moments when I’m tempted to choose that quick-cheap-thing that I have both the option and the means to choose better, and to do so is my responsibility as a consumer. It’s not any different for business owners where we’re also playing the role of consumer, purchasing raw materials or curating goods from other people. There is always the option to choose the best of what is available, and sometimes the best option can look like resistance if the alternative means compromising on our values.
Hina Luna has always felt to me like more than business, in fact I rarely even use that word to describe what it is that I do. First, and foremost, I identify as an artist, and the micro business that has bloomed from my creative work has always quite loosely played by the traditional rules of business. I work with plant dyes and pre-loved fabrics for their unique, one of a kind beauty and for their accessibility, but also in resistance to a business model that perpetuates producing more new things that take more from the planet and the people producing them. I carefully curate treasures made by fellow small makers for their ethical production processes, natural materials, and like-minded ethos. Hina Luna prioritizes collaborating with and buying from women, local-to-me creators from Hawai’i, and Black, Native, LGBTQ+ makers. While I do believe wholeheartedly that these efforts do matter, ultimately, I am still offering you things to buy [there’s that capitalistic whirlpool I mentioned].
Our relationship to things need not be demonized; there is something beautiful in our cherishing of precious tangible things and how our love for them can make them almost sacred. Through Hina Luna, I carefully consider every item I offer through a lens of intention, form, and function. Ultimately, I seek items that intersect beauty with purpose with meaning with inspiration. I consider my sources and choose from the best available to me that align with my values and mission for my business. While I seek to create and curate items that are made to last, I also consider what the afterlife of each item may look like when it becomes too well-worn to function. Ideally, it can return to the earth from which it came.
Moreover, the pace is slow, un-rushed, and undemanding. Often times my creation process takes many months before it is even shared. For me, this is how I ensure quality and heart in what I do, and I treasure the same in the items I buy from other makers. I am still unlearning the pressure to produce as a creative business, how to let go of the fear of missing out and of the illusion of needing to compete. Being aware of this as a consumer supports my business-self too. The more I resist the corruptive conveniences of the quick-cheap-and-easy, the more I am able to retrain myself away from the expectation that production needs to be fast, prices need to be cheap, and shipping needs to be free. The story is better in the slow and in the intentional and that is what I want to bring into my life and into my own shop for you.
This post does not conclude with a nicely packaged, concise list for how to resist capitalism as a small business or as a consumer; I myself fill both of those roles and am consistently on the journey of learning how to improve and practicing what I learn. I don’t think there is an easy fix-all solution beyond all of us doing the best we can with what is accessible to us. Perhaps the best guidance I can offer is this quote that I often refer to by Vivienne Westwood who ties all of this up so simply [which often is best]: buy less, choose better, make it last.
]]>Or, for another analogy, if you’re familiar with sleep paralysis, where the mind is conscious but the body is unable to move — it can be like that; the creative mind is alive and activated, bubbling over with inspiration, but the body is exhausted by all of the ideas and instead would rather shut down and take a nap.
Maybe you’re like me and have notebooks of scribbled inspirations that if you were to actually pursue them all you’d be busy for lifetimes. It’s not a bad place to be, over-inspired, but it can also be energetically paralyzing.
This morning I woke up feeling a little overwhelmed by all of the things occupying my mind space — some of it’s obligatory to-do’s, a lot of it is over-inspiration for Hina Luna and for personal projects, some of it’s heavier, bothersome human stuff. I thought for a moment about how relieving it would be to do very little with one’s day, to have just one thing to do and to do it very well. An oversimplified version of this would be having the sole responsibility of tending to a potted plant, à la The Little Prince, a small child who lives on a very tiny planet only in the company of his rose. We don’t wonder how the child got there, or what he eats, or what he does with his time — we only know that he has a rose companion who requires a certain amount of tending to. If we had but one thing to do, imagine how well we might do it, how much time and energy we’d have to pour into it to make it the best it could be. And also, how boring.
On the other side, there’s the over-worked, over-stimulated, over-booked, over-tired who’s got too many plates spinning, all in risk of crashing down at any moment. Maybe you know this person — maybe you are this person — who prides themself in their ability to multi-task? There may very well be some super-human anomalies out there who are able to tend to all the things, do them all well, and still feel rested, but with all things considered, does multi-tasking really allow for each thing to be done well or does something inevitably get neglected — like one’s own wellbeing.
There’s a sweet spot between the spectrum of purposeful productivity and rest, a balanced place that inspires but doesn’t overwork, where the Country Mouse isn’t bored and the City Mouse isn’t overwhelmed; it’s paced, it’s intentional, it’s meaningful, and nourishing to the creative soul. So how do we get there? Where is this elusive sweet-spot? I’m as much a victim of creative over-inspiration as anyone else, so what solutions I have to share are merely practices that I’m implementing in my own creatively over-active life that feel supportive and help me to clarify and simplify.
[Weekly Jotter undated planner. Minimal, simple, intentional, beautiful. Find it in the shop here]
While it may seem pretty ordinary and mundane, handwritten lists are my best friend. They serve a similar therapeutic purpose as journaling; getting it all out of the head and into a visual reference; like a glimpse into the inner-workings of one’s brain. Once the scattered collection of thoughts, mixed-up priorities, budding ideas, and distractions gets dumped out onto the page, they can be sorted and organized which may give clarity to what you want to say yes to. For me, nothing beats physically writing the brainstorm down with a pen on paper [bullet journalers, this is your jam!]. If I have a lot to purge, I’ll use different pages that are categorized, say, one for work related to-do’s, one for home, one for a vision-boarding a specific creative project. Having tangible pages that I can easily reference and sift through in my hands feels most supportive to me, but if the idea of loose paper or tucked away notebooks only overwhelms you more, then use a digital system, by all means!
Next, I take a step back for some perspective and ask myself a few reflective questions to asses my priorities.
Which idea do you feel most excited by?
Which do you find yourself spending the most time dreaming/thinking about?
What would feel the most fulfilling to explore and complete? Why?
Which feels most accessible at this time?
What do you have time for right now?
What resources needed do you already have available to you?
How much time am I willing to commit each day/week to seeing this project through?
How can I support myself with some structure for staying focused on this project I am choosing to commit to?
Is there a timeline or goal I want to set to motivate myself to seeing this project through?
What is the first step? [time to start a new list...]
When will I begin?
These solutions are simple, really, but they truly can be effective. Taking some moments of pause to check in with yourself, ask some questions, and answer honestly can help you to gain some invaluable clarity and sift the gems from the excess. It may serve you to save those ideas you’re not saying ‘yes’ to in this moment for another time. Your potentially low-on-inspiration future self may thank you for reserving your extras to revisit at another time and fresh eyes may have the ability to work some new unexpected magic.
]]>My introduction to the tarot began when I moved to Hawai’i in early 2012. My oldest friend [who was living here at the time] had recently been gifted the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. As part of her effort to help me heal the broken heart I had at the time, she settled me into a daily rhythm of pulling cards over tea every morning. The Tower, Death, and the Devil cards were frequent pulls for me back then [if you’re a tarot user you know what I mean]. Ultimately, there are no “bad” cards in tarot despite the intensity of some of the illustrations and card names. There is always opportunity for resolution, for rebuilding, for new beginning, but also sometimes things need to fall apart first.
Similarly to how my introduction to the cards happened in my state of grief, so did the creation of The Future Ancestor Tarot. Created by Filipina-American artist Alexa Toledo Villanueva, this precious set of 78 cards was born during a period of mourning over the loss of Alexa’s late grandfathers, to whom she has dedicated the deck. Using sumi ink, collage, and pieces of nature that she found around her home on coast Salish land [also known as Seattle, Washington], Alexa has reimagined the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck into a conversation with one’s relationships to the ancestors, community, and self.
[paper cut-outs of sumi ink paintings that Alexa used for the creation of her deck imagery. Photos by Lexa Luna Studio]
Instead of the typical four suits of swords, cups, pentacles, and wands plus the twenty-one major arcana cards, The Future Ancestor Tarot deck contains suits of candles, cups, needs, and seeds plus a collection of major arcana that mostly mirrors the traditional cards but with some beautiful revisions. The High Priestess, The Emperor, The Lovers and many others remain [or for those who may be enduring a period of big personal change, The Tower, Death, and The Devil are still there too], but The Hanged Man becomes Metamorphosis in Alexa’s deck, and Hierophant becomes Virtue.
[The Future Ancestor Tarot’s reinterpretations of some of the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith major arcana cards]
I found Alexa through Instagram several weeks ago; how I found her I can’t even remember. It was one of those magical crossing of paths that one occasionally stumbles upon in the little land of squares where you wonder “how am I just learning about this now?” Being on my own journey of connecting to my ancestors and as someone with a keen eye for extra special oracle decks, I immediately was intrigued by the simple, ink illustrated white box with the grieving figure on the front, the full moon adorned card backs, and of course the title; it was love at first sight. Connected by a shared creative intention that is grounded in respect for nature, Alexa and I agreed on art trade. She shared that she was soon headed to Uruguay to deepen into her art practice, so in exchange for one of my pinafore aprons that would serve her during her retreat, she sent me my own Future Ancestor Deck.
[The Vita apron I traded Alexa in exchange for a Future Ancestor Deck. The Vita apron is adorned in block printed images symbolizing personal and collective resilience and life force.]
I’m pretty sure I wept a little when I first opened the box and thumbed through the cards in my hands. Each one, a visually gentle, tender expression of the deeply symbolic messages; the figures in them feel like old friends, grandparents, ancestors. I appreciate a deck that requires little in terms of interpretation, relying mostly on one’s personal response to the imagery rather than having to refer to a code book to understand the cryptic messages. A small, brief tri-fold pamphlet accompanies this deck as guidance for interpreting the cards, and somehow contains profound messages in single sentences. Needless to say, The Future Ancestor Tarot is my new favorite deck to work with as it feels gently supportive at this time of great collective change and grief for so many things.
I chose two cards today with the collective in mind. I was intending on pulling just one to share a guiding message with us all, but two spoke to me via that guttural welling up of mild nausea I’d mentioned before, along with a new sensation that expressed itself as a tingling in my left ear (it sounds funny, I know). Working with the cards has shown me the importance of surrender, that there is no avoiding it when a message needs to come through. So I surrendered, and set aside both cards, face down, side by side, then turned them over at the same time revealing instantly that these two messages supported one another.
The Ace Of Seeds and The World. Visually, they feel like sibling cards, similar yet distinctively different, both figures tenderly holding onto things, one being a seedling, the other being the earth, one card in white, the other in black. Side by side they feel like an evolution, a story of growth, from the planting of and tending to a small seedling, to embracing an entire fertile world. The interpretation guide reads that the suit of Seeds relates to matters of the body and earth, the Ace encouraging an embrace of this moment of growth. The World card, the twenty-first and final card from the collection of major arcana, shares that this is a moment to feel the fullness of gratitude and lessons learned and that it is now time for a new journey.
Feel relevant? Collectively? Personally?
The closing section of reflection prompts below are invitations for you to process what these cards are bringing up for you. Write it down, meditate on them, carry them with you throughout your day. Surrender, and allow these messages to unfold in whichever ways they do for you. Each of our personal interpretations will be unique to our lived experiences and individual perceptions of reality and that is the magic that tarot offers.
What growth are you personally experiencing at this time?
Where do you see growth happening on a collective level?
What lessons are being learned?
To what or to whom do you feel gratitude for in offering these lessons?
What new journey do you anticipate being on the precipice of? How might it serve you personally? How might it serve the collective?
]]>There’s much happening behind the scenes of Hina Luna lately and it’s been some time since I’ve given a glimpse past the curtain. You could say Spring is having its effect on things around here, stirring the pot of ideas, shaking out the rugs of the mind, opening the windows of creativity; Hina Luna is feeling activated and inspired; a vessel open.
In a bite sized update, some truly wonderful new treasures have been found and are incoming to the shop [including two of the most precious and beautiful oracle decks I’ve ever seen, see here and here], connections have been made with some stellar makers whose work I admire and whom you may see in the shop this year, and visions for a summer solstice collection of offerings is setting into motion — all good things that I am excited to share more of with you when the time comes!
[using earth pigments to hand paint custom imagery for the new website.]
The most revolutionary of all for Hina Luna this Spring season is a complete overhaul of the website. After five years on a simple platform that served my creative baby well in its infancy and supported it as it evolved and grew, the time has now come to level up. I’ll spare you the dry details of an artist deciding to be her own DIY website builder and the many [MANY] hours she spent equally on data input as well as hand drawing custom elements and image editing [because, Libra here] and the major serving of the “learn as you go” lesson she received, and I’ll skip to the part where I say things are now wrapping up quite nicely.
[photographing new imagery for the website]
Every corner of the existing site has been swept, scoured and revised [previous blog posts included, which have now been archived until the launch of the new site], and will soon be ready to welcome you on the next full moon [April 26th, 2021]. Full Moon Circle newsletter subscribers will be the first to know!
My work with Hina Luna has always felt so much deeper than that of being an online shop. [This might be a blog post to dive deeper into at another time]. The artworks I create from my home studio and the carefully curated treasures that I bring in are the face of a bigger, whole body. The newly renovated site will center more of the greater foundation that the shop rests upon, it exposes the tender heart that is the lifeline to the entire body. My intention is that when you visit this new online space that you will receive a clear impression of the ethos that inspires this body of work, understand the concepts that are being processed and formed behind the scenes, and that something will inspire you as you’re passing through, something you can carry with you as you continue on your day.
So in preparation for being seen whole-body, I’ve been meditating on this: what is there to see when you are seen in your entirety? It begs for authenticity, for self love, for openness.
A few posts ago we explored the seasonal exercise of personal spring cleaning for the sake of gaining clarity and a post after that we considered how we can surrender to the spirit of creativity. Well, yesterday I did both. Thank you springtime momentum! For my “spring cleaning”, I have been working the puzzle of putting language to the big ethereal concepts that are my “what” and “why”, which previously has felt so difficult to define. How does one sum up their soul-work in a sentence or two? I’ve said it before — I am fascinated by language and one of the many great lessons we’ve experienced this past year is that language has immense power and words are best chosen mindfully. [Perhaps another blog post for another time as this one goes deep. It’s etymology, it’s intention, it’s impact.] So, in working the puzzle of language to be able to define the “what” and the “why” of Hina Luna, this is where the pieces have landed at this phase:
Hina Luna [noun]: a devotion to simple pleasures, personal talismans, kitchen table culture, and ancestral connection; bridging connections between the concepts of body, altar, and home.
Then, inspired by this inquiry into the body as an altar as a home, and fully surrendering to a possession of creative inspiration, I created myself a logo design for the first time since Hina Luna’s early days in 2016 — and your’s will be the first eyes to see it!
Before I reveal the new design, let’s take a trip back in time to the first image that represented this journey. It’s not often that I drudge up old imagery, for reason similar to the lack of connection one may feel to the person they were a decade ago — Hina Luna has evolved. But for reason similar to the nostalgia and curiosity of flipping through old photographs and seeing the evolution of the baby in the photo to the person in the mirror right in front of you, here is the design from 2016 [hardly a lifetime ago and yet so much so]:
So there’s the “how it started”, and here’s the “how it’s going”:
The image of a vessel came to me so clearly earlier this week, almost as if it had been spoken in my ear. As a nod to my Tuscan ancestry, I began researching traditional clay vessels and found inspiration in the shapes of ancient Etruscan pottery. The amphora, which is often seen as a container with a rounded belly, pointed bottom and double handles, was traditionally used as a storage jar that held oil, wine, milk, or grain. As part of my exploration into body, altar, and home, this vessel resembles a body, a container for harboring spirit, a giver, a receiver of varying levels of fullness that ebbs and flows like the moon’s tides. It also naturally mirrors the pear-shape of an archaic fertility relic, which feels so symbolic for honoring creative force. The moon within reflects the moon above, the same and yet also balancing forces of difference; the new and the full. From within the full vessel, life grows up and out, reaching towards the light in the darkness.
This is the season Hina Luna is in in definition and in image; this is her body. During this activated time of making connections, bringing form to visions and dreams, and committing to the “why” of this work, I have been gaining clarity as to how best to share the whole big, beautiful body of this entity. It’s ever-evolving, as bodies tend to be, and on the next full moon, I look forward to sharing with you the new phase Hina Luna is in.
]]>I joke that the longer one live’s here in Hawai’i, the more distinct the seasons become to them. Having now lived here for ten years, my body has acclimated to the seasonal nuances and can confirm that indeed it can get cold and winter is real here. But when the sun is shining, wherever you are in the world, one of life’s greatest delights is the luxury of lounging on a blanket somewhere outside with a good book and your favorite finger foods.
Perhaps its by the water, amongst the trees, in a field, in a public space for partaking in the idle pleasure of people watching, or perhaps it’s more quiet and secluded. Go there in your mind. With baskets and bags over your arms, you wander until settling on the perfect spot to rest your things. As any seasoned beach lounger, camper, or park picnicker knows, the spot is determined by an inner compass with a “you know when you know” sense of direction.
Now that you’ve found your location, you set your things down, feeling an instant sigh of relief from your arms and shoulders, and shake out the oversized blanket like a parachute until it rests on the ground in part sun, part dappled shade. Bonus points if you landed it perfectly the first time without having to work against the breeze.
You slip off your shoes now and lower yourself onto the blanket to unpack and arrange. From your basket comes small containers of your favorite finger foods, maybe a sandwich wrapped in brown paper, refreshing and hydrating seasonal fruits, a cooling beverage, a book to read [maybe one of short poems], a blank journal and your favorite pen, or a deck of cards.
[a deck of astrology themed playing cards that belonged to my great-grandmother and moonphase dominoes -- two modes of simple entertainment that are lightweight and small to pack]
All that is left to do is to recline in that sunny spot of the blanket and take in the simple, sensual pleasures around you — the taste of the snacks you packed, the smell of surrounding space, the sound of the birds, of the water, or of fellow picnickers chatting quietly, the feel of the ground below you and the sun on your skin, the sight of the patterns above you made by clouds or trees.
Call it a side effect of my cancelled journey to Italy in early 2020 but my desire for leisurely, simple dining over good food and conversation has deepened since, and with the presence of warmer weather, doing so al fresco. Something about the combination of tapas style finger foods, fresh fruits, refreshing beverages, warm sun, the soundtrack of the elements, a forthcoming post-snack nap, and a good book makes for some incomparable simple pleasure magic.
[picnic images currently inspiring me]
Once I was blessed by the Thrift Store Fairies who delivered on my new seasonal obsession with not one, but two second hand picnic baskets — one a traditional woven, double handled latch top and the other a more practical cooler style perfect for the beach — as well as some loose woven checked cotton curtains to be re-sewn into napkins. Seven dollars! The same week I returned to the same second-hand shop and found two sets of utensils in a delightfully retro Neapolitan color palette, an old wine bottle opener stamped “Italy”, and [not for the picnic basket] a used CD of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. At two dollars and fifty cents I consider this another good day thrifting.
[second-hand scores: picnic basket, bottle opener, two sets of utensils, and linens to repurpose into napkins]
It’s easy to get swept up by the temptations online or in store that are marketing picture-perfect products for this or that, whether it be for your self care routine or [in my more particular case] your dream picnic. I can confidently say that I’ve had much more fun scouring the shelves of second-hand treasures at my local thrift store and curating something one of a kind than I would have clicking “Buy It Now” on a seventy dollar set online. It’s not instant gratification but the feeling of reward is great. For less than ten dollars I have my charming picnic basket and theme-worthy linens and utensils for my partner and me — and moreover, I feel like I’ve won against the consumer industry.
So, if you’re feeling the call this season to take your meals outdoors and also relish in the joy of having something to thrift for, then consider the following for your personally curated dream picnic set:
A traditional picnic basket
An open top, single handled African basket
A lightweight tote bag
A blanket
A quilt
A flat bed sheet
A tablecloth
Reusable utensils — mismatched sets can be fun! Everyone has their favorite spoon, right?
Reusable cups and plates — lightweight is especially key here
Cloth napkins — clean, quality cloth napkins are often abundant second-hand or you can repurpose the fabric from something else [like my curtain score]
A bottle opener
A good book — a current read or book of poetry, something that is both light to read and carry
A journal and something to write with — maybe compose a series of haiku inspired by your surroundings
A deck of cards
A sketchbook or travel watercolor kit — picnics are perfect for some plein air art making
A small, easily transportable instrument to play — in the right place, of course. No one wants to be that guy blasting their music out in nature with other folks around.
Note, important attributes to consider when curating your picnic kit are weight, durability, and reusability. Using these as my guidelines, I’ve been piecing together my collection using inexpensive, second-hand things to avoid packing the items I use daily in my kitchen and risking breaking or losing them. If you have a car, you might consider making it the permanent residence for your kit so that you're prepared whenever the mood strikes.
Above all, remember that the dreamy Mediterranean inspired picnic you’ve coveted on Pinterest is accessible without the travel expense or the pre-assembled basket from that cute shop online. You may even be able to shop your own home for things you don’t use often to could contribute to your kit. Consider this an exercise in discernment, curation, and ultimately, the joy of simple pleasures. Enjoy.
To get you in the mood... "Songs To Picnic To" a seasonal playlist
]]>
Here’s what the dictionary has to say about it:
Noun.
1. The state of having, owning, or possessing something.
2. An item of property; something belonging to one.
3. The state of being controlled by a spirit.
The first two dry descriptors of ownership and assets feel like a grave dishonoring of an entity as sacred as that of creativity. But the last one, that feels more on par with the ethereal, sometimes out-of-body experience of being taken over by inspiration.
I’m reminded of an anecdote shared by famed writer Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. As a little backstory, the book is a sort of manual on how to foster one’s creativity [or, a how-to for summoning the spirit, you might say]. Gilbert preludes the following story with the bold claim that ideas have agency. “Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will,” she writes. When an idea “finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to someone else,” but sometimes, “the idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you.” To back it up, she tells a story about an idea she had for a novel but neglected for so many years that it left her — and instead, possessed her friend and fellow novelist.
I’d bet that Elizabeth Gilbert is not the only creative who’s had this experience, I know that I have; which has me nodding in affirmation to her claim that yes, indeed!, ideas [creativity] have a will of their own.
[image of an original drawing -- or, self portrait even -- tucked in as the last page of the Wax + Wane zine, On Earth + Color]
I imagine the spirit of creativity as a ready and willing collaborator that is magnetized to the potential of an open vessel, being the heart and mind of you or me or somebody else. Consider your idea as a houseguest, merely a visitor stopping in with hopes for some of your time and attention. This visitor always arrives unannounced and you may not always feel prepared to entertain them. If you’re fluttering about tending to other obligations, your guest may stay for a while but will eventually decide it’s time to show themself out — and you might even be too preoccupied to notice until some time later when you see your guest having tea through your neighbor’s window!
I just love the romantic abstraction of an idea reincarnating — something intangible living a lifetime in the universe of one person’s mind space and then taking up residence in that of another if it goes neglected. This concept is akin to some already existing old religions that believe in reincarnation, which for me affirms the philosophical comparison between creativity, spirit, and soul.
While this theory of ideas with agency teeters on the edge of new-age theories of “law of attraction”, where blessings are bestowed upon only those in the correct state of heart and mind, creativity isn’t judgmental. Creative spirit collaborates with vessels of all shape, size, and attitude. As the worlds of art, music, and poetry in particular have proven, even angry, depressed, jealous, and heartbroken people make things too; and often really, really beautiful things.
You might share in my experience of witnessing an idea that had once possessed me become manifested through another person, which is then followed by a brief period of mourning over “the one that got away”. If only I’d had more time. If only I’d had the resources. If only I’d been able to work through whatever fear I’d had that was hindering my ability to say ‘yes’. It can feel like heartbreak, as if creativity may never find you again — but hey, this is when the artists and musicians and poets really shine, right? The newly emptied vessel is ready to be filled again.
And who’s to say that the person who’d also had the idea and didn’t surrender to it would have done it better, like Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel plot — it will remain one of the great mysteries. Call it “silver lining”, but I believe that the space that opens up after one creative idea packs up and moves out, becomes an inviting space for yet another creative spirit to fill. Perhaps it’s one that you feel even more excited to explore, or perhaps the next time it comes knocking you will be feeling more prepared, ready and willing.
There might be something deeper to ponder in regards to which creative ideas we surrender to and those that we don’t make space for and thus leave us. Last week’s blog post invited us to participate in the practice of taking a personal inventory as we enter into a new season. Listening to our intuitive yes’s and no’s [and why’s] can open up space in our emotional, mental, and spiritual capacities. The tiny ember of creative inspiration can perhaps be best seen in the spacious darkness of the void. To acknowledge it is simply to take notice that it’s there, then to actually surrender to it fans its flames.
What does it mean to surrender to creative spirit? [or creative ‘spark’, or ‘wave’; yet another avenue for sensual exploration into words related to the topic of inspiration]. If we go back to the concept of possession by its third definition of “the state of being controlled by a spirit” as opposed to being the one in possession of a thing, then it means to allow creative inspiration to take control, to steer the mechanism of our human vessel.
[putting some of the plant dyed scraps from the studio to use by crafting a quilt square, made without much of an aesthetic filter, free of personal judgement, resulting in an experience that felt creatively liberating.]
So, in those magic moments, when we suddenly feel filled with or possessed by the spirit of creativity, how do we surrender?
First, make space. Clear a room in your heart and mind so that you are able to see the ember when it sparks.
Meditation can prove helpful in quieting all excess inner noise to allow creative spirit to speak.
Rest creates moments of pause and spaciousness in our lives and re-ups our capacity for giving our attention to other things.
When a wave comes, or the inspiration strikes, or the idea sparks, or the spirit comes knocking, this is when you have the opportunity to surrender, which can be supported by
Journaling. It can be so helpful to process on paper. Get it out of your head and start sculpting your idea as you write it out.
Free-writing. Like journaling, but completely uninhibited. Jot down a continuous stream of consciousness without judgement, censorship, or need for punctuation. Whatever comes into your mind in the moment, just write it alldown.
Dreaming. As you lay in bed before sleep, invite in the spirit of creativity to visit you in the dream realm. Dreams can have the powerful ability to speak from our subconscious through symbols; it may be helpful to interpret your dreams by following up with a journaling session or free-write.
Diving in. If you find you have the time, the resources, and the capacity, or if you’re just feeling spontaneous, go ahead and clear the table of all else with one swoop of the arm and become completely inebriated by the arrival of inspiration!
I have a friend who is a singer and songwriter with a natural knack for being an endless wellspring of original melodies. Years ago when I first moved to the island, we shared a live/work trade arrangement at a native plant nursery. One day while working in the potting shed, radio on, she suddenly stopped what she was doing and darted off. Turns out, the spirit of creativity had unexpectedly possessed her with the inspiration for a new song and she needed to escape the distraction of the radio noise to go and write it down before it slipped away. Needless to say, in that moment she chose to surrender to creativity by diving in.
lt may not always be the right place and time to figuratively [or literally if you’re my musician friend] drop what you’re doing for the sake of opening the door to a visiting creative spirit and shouting yes! I’m here! Do come inside!, but when we can quiet the house that is our vessel that is our body that is our life, we will be able to hear the knock at the door when inspiration does come around.
Process these prompts in a journal or read through them and then free-write whatever comes through.
What idea has been neglected in your mind space that you could bring some attention to now?
What has kept you from surrendering to this inspiration?
In what ways can you now open up space to commit to this inspiration?
To listen to while you surrender to your creativity. Click here to be taken to the playlist.
]]>
Welcome to the turning of the seasons, another gentle rotation in the wheel of the year. We are now in the half moon phase, seasonally speaking. If, like me, you dwell somewhere in the northern hemisphere, then we have reached the half way point between winter’s fertile slumber and a full summer’s bloom. Any intentions that we slept and meditated on and planted in the compost of the dark months may now be budding, and there is a sense of growing anticipation. Those in the south, on the other side of the world and the opposite spoke of the seasonal wheel, are now harvesting the fruits of their labor and preparing for the great retreat.
[image: wheel of the year diagram illustrating the four seasons and their corresponding moon phases and elements. from Hina Luna's Wax + Wane Zine Keeper of the Tides: An Ode to the Moon]
The first equinox of the year is nature’s opening scene in the north and the final act in the south. Wherever in the world you are reading this from, we are all existing in the in-between; waxing or waning. While my birds are full of song and building spring time nests, yours may be tucking into theirs, suspended in bare, gray branches. As we dwell here for a short while in this seasonal half moon phase, we may feel the sense that a personal inventory is to be taken.
What are you growing towards or leaning into in this season?
What feels like it needs to be shed?
Themes of balance are swirling all around us now; renewal and decay, emergence and retreat, life and death. As we seek ways to rebalance, it is necessary to set down our baggage and reevaluate so as to travel lighter as we journey onward into the season. So with all of your “belongings” laid out in front of you, what will you choose to take? What are the necessities? What is weighing you down?
As a disclaimer, I make an effort to be aware of and avoid language that suggests bypassing the heavy and hard stuff by only choosing the positive. While a positive emotional state and mindset can certainly be effective in transforming our unique experience of reality, bypassing our personal and collective traumas doesn’t make them nonexistent and instead can leave untended wounds to fester. I find that a more holistic perspective offers balanced self awareness and an invitation for well informed resolution.
On that note, here’s something I want to unpack that may influence how we reflect on our personal inventory this season: the commonly shared self-help concept of “letting go of that which doesn’t serve you”. What works: it encourages healthy boundary setting, it gives permission to clear our own internal paths, it’s a reminder to prioritize our mental and emotional well-being. What doesn’t work: it has the potential to be misinterpreted as an opportunity to evade personal responsibility, accountability, and consideration of anything that exists outside of ourselves. A helpful tool for sifting through your stuff in a holistic way might be to ask yourself “why am I feeling ready to let this go now?” — and answering honestly.
Seasonally inspired personal inventory taking is an opportunity to take note of it all, without the filter. You can even literally write it down if that feels supportive to your process.
That which we choose to continue to carry with us and that which we choose to let go of is personal, no one but you needs to know what you are carrying. As you sit amongst your theoretical unpacked bags, consider that there may be parts which are a little heavy and may still need to be carried — although perhaps you might find a way to pack them better than you had before.
It is natural to feel overwhelmed, intense, and sensitive during a seasonal shift and as you undergo your inventory process. After all, it’s you facing all of your stuff — your dreams and your visions and your struggles and your shadows and your joys — and how courageous you are for doing it. Or not, too. It doesn’t have to be hard to work. Whatever your experience, may you embark into the new season with clarity, feeling lighter and balanced.
Unpacking your bags
How are you feeling in this moment, in this season of the year, this season of your life?
What have you been carrying for a while that you are still working through?
What new has come up recently?
What do you feel ready to release? Why?
Be honest with yourself and release judgement. This evaluation is only for you.
Repacking for the season ahead
What have you chosen to take with you into the season ahead? Why?
How might you distribute the weight of your energetic, emotional, mental, and spiritual belongings? In other words, how might you carry them with you and not be weighed down but them?
]]>Has someone ever asked you a really good question, a simple question even, that taps into that deep place inside of you and inspires a sudden realization of self or epiphany? I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Sera of SunMoon; an apothecary and thoughtfully curated online shop of beautiful things from Sera’s ancestral land of Morocco. [personal note: I’m hooked on this, this, and this.]
Sera asked me four, simple yet really good questions about my relationship with Hina Luna and how it overlaps with my relationship to my self, the earth, and the realm of magic. The process of sitting with these questions and allowing the answers to come forth was akin to a time-lapse video of the gentle unfurling of rose petals; layer upon layer opening up to reveal the center, the heart, il cuore.
The one in particular that allowed for a deep reflection into what feels like my current overarching wellspring of inspiration was this:
My answer, this:
I became aware of the creative presence of my ancestry about just some years ago [but I have to laugh because the more I deepen into this work, I realize it’s been a significant influence all along.] At that time I was beginning to deepen into my journey of researching my ancestry, with a focus on my father’s matrilineage from Italy. Part of that has been studying the language, talking to my living relatives, and preparing for an ancestral pilgrimage in early March of 2020 [which heartbreakingly was cancelled three days before departure due to the pandemic].
But it was really at this anticlimactic point of not making it to Italy after all that I immersed myself back in to Hina Luna and consciously took my ancestors with me. In my studies prior to my would-be departure date, there were passages in books that made me cry because I felt in my bones an affirmation, a deep knowing; I saw my grandmother [who’s passed] and her way explained to me and I felt closer to her. My work with Hina Luna didn’t necessarily change because of this, but rather I just became more aware of the ethereal “why” behind my process and embraced it.
My journey into connecting with my ancestors and their homelands deepened significantly in my late twenties. For me, committing to ancestry work has looked like more talk and conjuring of memories with living relatives, asking more questions, growing a family tree by digging for buried puzzle pieces, and reflecting on what details I do have to better understand the complex humans who came before me. While excited to learn about all branches of my genetic history, my paternal mother’s side in particular has forever called me and is where I’ve chosen to focus.
Immigrating from the Bel Paese, the beautiful country lands of Italy, in the early 1900’s, my great grandparents instilled my California raised family with the culture of their motherland. Like many immigrants in North America at the time, my ancestors were victims of assimilation and yet still a glimmer of the magic from their homeland survived generations. Great grandparents, even great-great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and cousins all lived within blocks of one another if not in the same houses. My great grandmother taught my grandmother and my mother and my aunt how to cook. They tell me stories of her kitchen drawer dedicated to holding loose flour for baking and making pasta, and of my great grandfather being the designated Parmesan grater. Their daughter, my grandmother now gone, was a treasure to me and modeled a deep love for music, good food in good company, and steeping one’s life in beauty — all things, that now I realize are quite naturally Italian. Although she never made it to the place her family was from, she carried so much of its best qualities within her.
I cultivate my relationship with all of these figures through my creativity — in the kitchen, in the garden, in my home, through music, by experiencing simple pleasures. Because some of my access to information about my ancestors is limited, in an effort to know them more intimately I have been studying their language. It is profoundly empowering to speak from my lips the words my ancestors spoke, to light incense for them at my altar every evening and greet them with Buonasera miei antenati [good evening, my ancestors].
They appear through my work with Hina Luna in the forms of color palette, the imagery I carve for block printing, and the names I give to new pieces. They inspire resourcefulness through my efforts to use pre-loved linens for some of my textile work. They teach me the value of community and solidarity and collective care. They have shown me the joy of living life beautifully.
While it still feels like a heartbreak to have missed an opportunity to make the first reconnection to my ancestral homeland in three generations, the pleasant surprise was that as life went on in that new, slow paced way of early 2020, I had more space than ever before to continue weaving together threads of ancestral connection. The potential of Italy had filled me with inspired energy that now had to be redirected and after a couple of months of setting everything down, I wandered my way back slowly to Hina Luna.
To my eye, there was no dramatically noticeable visual distinction between my work pre-Italy and post- cancelled-Italy, like Picasso’s rose period after a bout with the blues. Rather, as I’d shared with Sera, the noticeable difference was personal, internal. With the change of events, I temporarily pivoted away from the reality of travel and redirected that energy I had by consciously inviting my ancestors onto my creative terrain. The creations that resulted are aesthetically consistent with my other works, but the authenticity feels deeper, and therefore so does the intention.
There are innate qualities in myself that I have inherited from being raised by the children of the children who came from this place I so desire to go to; their ancestral influence over my life is inevitable; it’s who I am. Although it’s been present in my creativity all along, by consciously deciding to invite in and welcome their energy into my space, I could begin to step into my role as facilitator in cultivating a relationship between my ancestors and my creative work. To witness magic requires presence, and I was freshly aware and receptive to experiencing my ancestors work through me.
Coincidentally, I write this on the five year anniversary of my grandmother’s passing and on the eve of the spring equinox; what a paradox of life and death, of beginning and ending. I am carrying with me today a tender heart full of gratitude for a long time together and for the lessons she likely unknowingly taught me. I experience her creatively when adorning myself or while in the kitchen, especially with good music on. I delight in remembering her sauntering and swaying about her modern black and silver kitchen, crooning with eyes closed, fingers snapping slow above her head in a dreamy state of Bossa Nova.
[La bella figura: My grandmother, always the elegant host — and also admirably unafraid of making a mess in the kitchen.]
I still read articles and passages in books about Italian life and well up with mixed feelings of overwhelming love, self recognition, and a melancholy for things I do not yet know in this lifetime but that feel familiar to my bones, my DNA, my ancestral memory. When I am activated by the color palette of an Italian landscape, the ochre rainbow of the buildings, or read a sensual description of the most delectable dessert or dish of pasta, or am consumed by an ode to the cultural admiration and devotion to all that is beautiful and to the importance of rest and a good meal, I filter it through my creative lens and into what I offer to you through Hina Luna.
[one of my Italian ancestral provinces, Lucca, Toscana [Tuscany], inspiring with its color palette of ochre, umber, and warm butter yellows and golds.]
Before there was the awareness of the thread line connecting parts of myself to my ancestral land — the parts of me that, put simply, desire to create and curate beauty and a life of quality and simplicity — there were the lines connecting me to my nearer circle of family, like my grandmother. Our shared passion for the art of adornment and the simple pleasures of food, music, and good company, have woven together with the fibers of all parts of my creative being. As I responded in my interview with Sera, ancestral influence has always affected my life as an artist, even when I hadn’t yet acknowledged it. Although now that I have, my creative experiences feel richer, more authentic, and purposeful, like a collaboration that spans lifetimes and defies linear time; nothing short of magic.
Even though it is only recently that I have recognized my ancestors influence on who I am and how I move in this world, their impact has indeed been great and constant and makes up the foundational roots of Hina Luna. And now that I see and feel the thread connecting me to them, I say my thanks by creating and curating beautiful things that both serve and inspire conversation with spirit; things for your body, altar, and home that may even support you in connecting to your own ancestors.
Where do you see signs of your ancestors in your own life?
What attributes did you inherit from them that bring joy to your life?
Consider all of the ways you are creative in your life ["creative" meaning the act of creating something: a meal, a work of art, a garden, a written piece, constructing something...]
Are there traits that you knowingly inherited from your lineage that support your creative process? From whom did you inherit these traits?
More broadly, how might your ancestral culture(s) be present in your creative processes?
I can find symbolism in just about anything; to me, everything within context means something. Enough presence and time [observation] will reveal that every little thing has a story to tell and a message to share.
The symbols and imagery that feel as though they parallel our lives or represent an aspect of our innermost selves can become sacred. These symbols serve as reminders for where we’ve come from, the things we’ve endured, the highest version of ourselves we’re working towards being, memories of things we’ve lost; they feel deeply personal.
My evolving relationship with this creative entity I call Hina Luna is a devotion to the concept of body and home as an altar. Through the work I do in my home studio to the curations I collect for the shop, I am exploring what it means to participate in a mindful practice of adorning yourself and your space in visual reminders of what is sacred to you. When you dress your self, it means choosing with intention that which you wish to embody, through consideration of color, pattern, texture, comfort, shape. When tending to your living space, it means decorating with simple treasures that inspire you on your journey and make your shelter feel like a home.
The art of adornment is a primordial, innate desire to collect and to decorate and to express what exists in the deepest parts of us. Certain colors, symbology, and nature allies can together represent our unique stories and become magical tools to support us in this lifetime.
What color evokes feelings of home?
Which plants speak to you?
Who are your animal familiars?
Which of the natural elements do you share energy with?
The ways in which you choose to interact with your answers to the above questions, the ways in which you adorn and practice ritual and mindful presence become a celebration of who you are; a reclamation of your self, your time and your personal magic.
With plant dyes being at the heart of my creative work, color holds a special kind of magic for the offerings that come out of the studio. The palettes I work with go through phases, a period of deep exploration into warm earth hues eventually yields to the deep blues of precious indigo. I work my way through the color wheel with the turning of the wheel of the year as a response to the needs of the collective.
Watery blues for Pisces season and wide open skies, verdant greens in honor of Spring and beginning, solar hues for the blooming blossoms in Summer, rich warming tones to carry us through a cold Winter.
Plants, animals, and the celestial realm lend inspiration and their image to the thematic concepts of each Hina Luna collection. They help to tell a story too big for words to hold and they offer the opportunity for varying interpretation.
Rose as a balm for your tender heart, artichoke because even under all the armor they have hearts too, fig for fertility in all of its forms, nasturtium and rosemary for vitality and resilience, a clay vessel filling another because those are the times we’re in.
Through the powerful symbology of color and imagery, Hina Luna’s works are offerings for the collective. They’re for me in the experience of creating them, and they’re for you, to adorn your body, your home, your altars with the sacred symbols that hold your story.
What colors are you resonating with at this phase of life?
What symbology [colors, elements, animals, plants] feels representative of your heart space?
How are your personal symbols present in your daily life?
What do these symbols offer you?
]]>Every turn of the season, I like to read the color reports for the anticipated trending colors of the upcoming months. It’s my preferred method of a dose of pop culture. Which hues are walking down the runways, what colors is the nation’s populace painting their kitchens — I can’t explain the appeal for me other than its a crossroads of mockery and intrigue.
While I don’t use this as a tool for formulating my own creative color palettes, I do find something very human in our collective relationship to color and these seasonal reports [although targeted to consumers] say something deeper about our desires.
One of these color forecasts predicted that sky blue would pique our interest in 2021, like new bird song and a collective desire for expansiveness. Think: open sky and the vast horizons of the sea. Ready and waiting for a deep breath of fresh air, a wash of cleansing rains, unclouded views of clear sky and a stretching horizon; space to grow. Sky blue feels honest, transparent, simple, hopeful, calming, and new.
Inhale, exhale.
I once posted an empty reply box in my Instagram stories asking my community which color is speaking to them in this phase of their life. I received dozens of replies of the most poetic and vivid descriptions of color that it reminded me of being a child, pulling crayon after crayon out of the big box of Crayolas just to read their names. Side note, this is one of my dream jobs: namer of colors. Crayons, house paint swatches... this is a highly underrated form of poetic artistry, in my humble opinion. But back to the crayon box, some of my favorites in both name and color were
Carnation pink
Purple mountains majesty
Robins egg
Mountain meadow
Antique brass
Inch worm
As you read through these color names you could see them, right? Were you momentarily transported to the places where these colors exist? Where did they take you? What did you see? How would you describe these colors to someone who hadn’t experienced them before?
I have been provoked by the terrain of dry coastal cliffs, by dusk falling over the lush landscape of home, by tinted sky reflecting off horses’ backs, and by the salty tide of the sea. We all, in our unique ways, have experienced the spectrum of color’s energetic effects. Generally, we tend to find cool colors to be inspiring and calming, warm colors to be passionate, bold and confident. Unlike beauty which is subjective to not only a culture and a community but to each individual, our collective responses to color feels mostly united. Is yellow anything but joyful?
So where do our emotional responses to color come from then if they are not solely influenced by culture? Carnation pink. Robins egg. Mountain meadow. Inch worm. Here’s my theory: through our direct observations of and experiences with the natural world around us, we as global human beings have developed a collective emotional relationship with the color spectrum.
For thousands of years, we have experienced a gentle rain, the sky at dusk, a roaring fire, drifting snow, fertile soil, seaside cliffs, open plains, desertscapes, and lush forests. We have observed what happens to the plants when the rains come and what happens to the land when they don’t, we have witnessed the effects of fire, and the quiet of a winter snow. Of course not every region of the world experiences the same natural elements or to the same degree, but I dare to bet that the sun, for example, might evoke a common feeling of hope, warmth, happiness.
So as for the results of the question I posed in my Instagram stories — what color is speaking to you during this phase of your life? — almost every response contained some descriptive variation of the same color — blue.
sky blue
morning fog
azure
dark blue
Santa Fe turquoise
sea glass
sacred blues
electric blues
deep sea blues
indigo
As I was writing this, I felt inspired to pose a part two to my community: how do you feel when you think of the color blue? And the responses were
Calm [most mentioned]
Quiet power
Transformative
Held
Deep
Meditative
Protected
Cool
Refreshing
Connected to energies of the sky and water
Vibrant
Energized
At peace
Like a full exhale
Take a few minutes to sit outside your home space. Observe the elements that exist around you [plant life, the color of your sky, what you see on the horizon, the infrastructure around you if you’re in a city].
If you were to create five color swatches of your surrounding home space, what would you name them? [This is you as the mysterious crayon box color namer. Get as creative and as specific as you can. Try to invent names that accurately describe your unique colors of home].
[a rainbow palette of plant dyed organic fibers from Hina Luna’s early days in 2016]
]]>How do you prepare when inviting company into your home? I know that maybe it's been a while since you've hosted a friend or family in your space, but try for a moment to remember what that experience of preparation feels like. In anticipation of your visitors, you might sweep the floors, wash the dishes in the sink, open the windows for fresh air, prepare some food, or have a drink to offer them when they arrive. All of these ways in which you are making ready, are an offering to your guests.
Building an ancestral altar is much like preparing for houseguests — a general guideline: tidy up, have something to offer, and make the space inviting. I will share with you a glimpse into some foundational items I keep on my ancestral altar as well as simple guidelines if you’re just beginning or are looking for ways to refresh your existing altar.
Ancestral altars exist in cultures all around the world, each with their unique customs and traditions and ways for honoring their dead. I first fell in love with this practice while observing a seasonal community altar in my hometown in honor of Día De Los Muertos [an All Souls Day celebrated throughout Latin America where families welcome back the souls of the deceased with vibrant festivities, their favorite foods, and colorfully adorned altars]. I was enamored with the garlands of golden marigolds draped over black and white portraits like little suns, with the perfectly decorated baked treats layed out on plates for the spirits to feast on, the music, the colors — this was a party.
The families who contributed to these community altars had set a joyously adorned space with their relatives’ treasured mementos from their earth-life, “stocked the pantry” with their favorite foods and beverages, dusted off and lovingly set out their photos, and arranged vases of fresh flowers. This was a homecoming for the ancestors and the scene was nothing short of inviting.
As I’ve explored the Italian branch of my own ancestry, I’ve learned that Italy has its own All Souls Day [regionally: Festa Dei Morti, Ognisanti, Giorno Dei Morti] that is celebrated in a similar way as Día De Los Muertos, with ancestral altars adorned in all of the things that the dead enjoyed in their lifetime. It’s an honoring, but even more, it’s a celebration.
And in my way, inspired by this culture I descend from, I do celebrate.
Today I will share with you the items that live on my personal ancestral altar all through the year and how I tend to this space with the intention of inviting in the spirits of loved ones now gone. I tend to an ancestral altar because it is one facet to the multi dimensional experience of cultivating a relationship with my lineage, which put quite simply, gives me deeper understanding of myself.
In last week’s blog post, we explored the wonder of remembering and what it means to be remembered. Meaning, when we think about our ancestors, what qualities or things are we reminiscing on? And as future ancestors, what might those who come after us remember about our lives? As I share with you my way of assembling an ancestral altar [which of course is just one of the many ways, and certainly not the only way or the “right” way], we’ll be focusing in on finding answers to these questions, which may be a helpful place to begin figuring out what your personal altar will look like.
Let's pause and back up for a moment to make sure we’re on the same page as to what I mean when I say “altar”. Forget googling it, because the conventional definitions you will find there are limiting in their perspective. Simply put, an altar is a place of reverence. It can be an assembly of objects that you arrange and tend to with devotion and with the intention of honoring someone or something. I have many altars around my home space, several of which might not look like someone else’s vision of an altar. For example, my kitchen is one of mine. In my way, I practice ritual here, prepare for ceremony here, and engage with my ancestors here. The preparation of food feels sacred to me and at the end, I make an offering on my kitchen table. Suffice to say, your altar needn’t look any certain way as long as what’s included in it feels reverent to you.
[some items that live on my ancestral altar: old family photos in second-hand frames, a small, cork-topped vial of wine, coins, beeswax taper candles, and a Hina Luna made altar cloth.]
Before you even begin gathering and arranging your items, you may consider jotting some things down to help clarify your vision and intention.
✷ Who do you want to honor on your altar? [not limited to just blood family — or humans, even. I have a beloved goat on mine!]
✷ What reminds you of them?
✷ What did they enjoy during their life?
✷ What might they have needed but didn’t have in their lifetime that you can offer them now? (I include coins to offer my ancestors the wealth they didn’t have while alive.)
*Note too that an ancestral altar is specific to those who are no longer living. Some ancestral altar builders and cultures believe that photos of the living should not be included. I don’t feel any particular way about this and if it feels right to you to include a photo of your passed grandmother holding you as a child, then I am an advocate for following that intuition.
After you’ve reflected on these questions, the first thing to consider is where you want your ancestral altar to live. Consider where in your home you would entertain your ancestors if they were living and build it there [maybe not your bedroom or the bathroom, right?]. Mine is arranged on top of a waist-high wooden bookshelf between my kitchen and living spaces, so I interact with it daily. Build yours in a place where you will see it often, because when you see it often, you will think of your beloved ancestors often, and that’s the intention.
[The above photo is of my in-process ancestral altar during the Fall season of 2021. I have it arranged atop a small shelf between my living room and kitchen so that I interact with it daily.]
Once you’ve settled on who to include on your altar and the right space to build it, it’s time to consider what objects you’ll use to represent and honor your loved ones. At this point, your process can unfold in endless ways, and this is the beauty of the individuality of ancestral altars.
One of the most memorable altars I’ve seen was at the entrance of my local grocery store in memoriam of its elderly owner. There, carefully set upon a black tablecloth within a circle of a fresh flower lei was his photo nestled between a bottle of hot sauce and a can of inexpensive beer. Simple and effective! And a perfect reminder to adorn the altar with things your ancestor’s spirit will recognize. This is an offering for them, right?
If you have them, include objects that belonged to them in their lifetime (jewelry, linens, a watch, cooking utensils, a book, a hat, or sacred objects like prayer beads or rosary). Other items could be plants that are relevant to them (like their favorite flower or an herb hailing from where they were from) and reminders of things they enjoyed (like a baseball, game pieces, sheet music or printed lyrics to their favorite song).
Even if, for example, you’re not a passionate cook but your grandfather was, remember that the intention is to invite his spirit to your altar space. So include his favorite seasoning or a recipe he cooked often on his altar because his spirit will be present when familiar items are present.
[above photo: my grandmother’s charm bracelet. I marvel at the intricacies and at some of the tiny moveable parts. I will set this bracelet out next to her photo when I’m building up a more elaborate seasonal ancestral altar.]
Before you begin arranging your items, think about the foundation your altar will rest upon, beyond the bookcase or the shelf or table. Is there something else you might want to lay down first? Stones, fabric, wood...? I choose to lay an altar cloth down as a central foundation to all of my other elements; for me it feels like setting the table. This can be something as simple as a scarf or a fabric devoted to this purpose.
[above image: a collection of Hina Luna made plant dyed and block printed altar cloths from Fall 2020. Shop current altar cloth offerings here]
If you're using both photos and objects, the arrangement is very much up to your personal aesthetic but the key is layering. Set the items next to the photo of the ancestor whom they are an offering for; if great-grandfather made wine, offer the vile of wine next to his image. If you're without photos but have a collection of items to honor one ancestor, perhaps keep those items grouped together on your altar. If you're honoring various lineages of your family, or including passed friends amongst relatives, consider keeping family members near to one another [like grandma next to grandpa] just as you might if you had all these folks over for a dinner party.
[above photo: from left to right — my grandmother, my great-grandaunt, my great-great grandmother, and my great grandmother. The charm bracelets belonged to my great-grandaunt and my great grandmother so I placed them close to whom they belonged to. My great-grandmother’s pasta cutter rests below her and also represents all of these kitchen matriarchs.]
To have a flushed out family tree and to be in possession of treasured heirlooms is something not everyone has access to. The histories of immigrant and enslaved peoples is often difficult to track if not completely erased from when they left their homelands. For many the necessity — or force — to assimilate meant survival in new lands and it also meant the erasure of cultural names, practices, and religions.
Many of us are doing the work to resurrect old family stories and piece together our lines and even still, gaps may remain in the ancestral tree. Or perhaps your family story includes adoption or is missing knowledge of a biological parent but you still wish to include these individuals and lineages in your altar.
You can include photos or a map of where you think they lived. You can determine this either from what knowledge you have of proximal ancestors or from your own genetic make-up.
And you could simply leave intentional space. This of it like leaving an open chair at the table, an honorary seat for those that were but are not known.
Another option to consider (and this applies for all altars) is including representations of all four earthly elements — air, fire, water, + earth. The items I personally choose to represent these elements are loosely specific to my ancestors but more so act as reminders of the beauty of this earth plane to help invite the spirits (known an unknown in my lineage) back for visits. If this feels a little abstract, for context here’s how the four elements are present on my altar:
I burn frankincense. My aunt has a drawer of my great-grandmother’s unburned incense, much of which is frankincense. She burns it and thinks of her grandmother, and I honor this by keeping my own supply and burning it daily.
Other potential representations of air: an ancestor’s favorite perfume or scent, feathers, bells, angels, song, prayer, storytelling.
I light a beeswax candle. I’ve started keeping a regular supply of tapers from Alysia Mazzella and burn them liberally. At least one taper takes permanent residence on my ancestral altar and on most evenings I light it and the incense before I start cooking dinner. As I light my candle, I greet my ancestors.
I keep a thrifted vintage brass goblet of fresh water. This is perhaps the simplest and most important of offerings and yet I hadn’t even considered it until participating in an ancestral altar workshop with Camille Langston! The intention is to offer your ancestors fresh, clean water after their long travels to be with you. Camille recommends changing the water every few days or as needed.
And from water to wine... I also offer a small cork-topped etched glass jar of red wine next to the goblet of water. This is an offering specific to my ancestors, but, if you know, you may want to consider what your ancestors would have enjoyed in their lifetime and would be happy to receive when coming to you for a visit. Most important, keep your [ancestor] guests’ cups full!
Other potential representations of water: shells, seawater.
I keep a living plant to symbolize life in the existence of death. On occasion, like last month’s yellow roses for grandma, I will buy or collect fresh cut flowers to adorn my altar. Last summer, there was an abundance of dahlias in the garden so it was easy to bedeck the altar daily with fresh blooms. Relevant herbs also make for a beautiful offering. Other practices may differ, but for me it feels important to remove plant material that has wilted or died [which is different than intentionally dried]. Just as you wouldn’t keep wilted flowers on your table when having a friend over, consider offering only vibrant, healthy plant material on your ancestral altar.
Other potential representations of earth: stones, soil, seeds, salt, food, any tangible object representing them.
[a collection of items I use on my altar to represent the elements; candles for fire, a brass goblet of water, and a small vial of wine. Not shown are the live plant for earth and the incense for air.]
I prefer to keep my altar very simple throughout most of the year so that it is easy to clean and maintain. I do a regular weekly sweep where I dust down the frames, empty the ashes from the incense, and refresh the water. Besides a few special photographs, my four earthly element representations are the only things with year-round residence on my ancestral altar. During the Fall months when my birthday and All Souls Day draw near, I add more photos, burn more candles, and bring out the family heirlooms. You may choose to elaborate on holidays or special occasions, leaving offerings of food or decorating with some of their personal belongings.
Whatever the extent of your offerings, if given with heart, know that it is enough. Most important to remember is to use what you have, just as our ancestors did. There really isn’t a need to purchase special items in order to do an altar right. As my sweet local grocer's memorial altar showed us, sometimes just a few chosen items can be quite effective in representing your loved ones.
Your altar will become a living thing and your relationship with it will evolve. Build it slowly and add to it organically over time. Allow your intuition to guide you.
]]>On more than one occasion I have found myself sitting at the end of the couch with my laptop under a reading lamp in an otherwise dark room. It’s nearing midnight and my partner is already asleep in the next room, but I am here, unable to pull myself away from following the breadcrumbs left by my ancestors; sparse clues [some bigger than others] left on the long path of online ancestry sites and search engine results. I am awake well past my average bedtime, but I am utterly ignited by each and every piece I am unearthing.
In a momentary pause in the quest for ancestral breadcrumbs, I feel the magic of the moment. As magic moments tend to be, it’s a sensation that feels undefinable with just one word. It’s a realization of how incredible this moment is: me — three, four, and more generations into the future — sitting in my dark living room in the middle of the night, scouring the internet armed with only a handful of names and birthdates, pining for insight into who my people were, where they came from, and how we’re connected to one another. I am in complete reverence of the notion of a descendant going back through time to know their people and their places, and I imagine for a moment what my ancestors might feel knowing that their great-great (great…) granddaughter — with whom they never shared a lifetime — yearns to know them.
I became seriously curious about my ancestry only some ago, and I began consciously cultivating a relationship with my ancestors only more recently. What I mean by “seriously curious” and “consciously cultivating a relationship” is that often times, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are already existing in relationship with our ancestors by simply living. Whether we are aware of our connections to them is the result of a deeper inquiry.
Allow me to explain further: the foods we eat, the leisures we take pleasure in, the places we live, the places we like to visit, the language we use, the values we hold, the spirit that guides us, the traditions we keep — may be the direct or indirect result of our ancestors lives.
Back in my community college days, I took a course on child development in relation to culture, gender, and identity. I don’t recall much from many of my required general ed classes, but this one I remember choosing with piqued curiosity and a desire to explore these concepts within the scope of my own seemingly culture-less life.
My professor assigned a sort of show-and-tell, asking us to bring an object from home that represented our culture. She sent us home with the added reminder that even if we felt culture-less [as I suspect many other Western world white euro-descended folks do] and therefore felt unable to deliver on the assignment, that we were in fact not lacking culture. She assured us that signs of our personal culture dwells within our home spaces and it may just take a harder look to see it.
I looked hard. It felt impossible to look for something when I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I followed the ancestral breadcrumb trail from the question of traditions to the answer of food, which led, naturally, to the pantry. There I found it, the ever-constant in our household: a box of dried pasta. There it was, an unassuming connection line to my family traditions, to my great-grandparents, to their families, to their homeland; an indirect, Westernized interpretation of our culture.
Over this past year of deepening into my relationship with my ancestors, it quite often still comes back to food. Evolving from the discovery of that box of dried pasta in my pantry, I now prefer to make my own from scratch using manual tools; some that were passed down from my great-grandmother; one a replica of a boxed Parmesan cheese grater my aunt remembers my great-grandfather using; the slow, slow. This, for me, is a ritual. It is an intentional practice for cultivating a relationship with my ancestors in our church, the kitchen, with our sacrament, pasta.
The journey on the path to ancestral understanding continues for me, as I expect it will forever. I am clearing the overgrown path, left untended since just a couple of generations back. Piece by piece, I am exposing bits of breadcrumbs that feel like jewels in my hands. Personal stories shared by relatives or finding a new name to add to the family tree feel like a bonus these days rather than my sole desire on this journey. I am finding rewarding threads of connection to my ancestors in the ordinary moments of living my life.
Some information that I’m longing for I may never find, people and places gone forever merely because they have no paper trail and because some descendants along the way chose not to talk about them and keep their memory alive. So, I pour this part of my heart into tending to the fragments that I have pieced together and by practicing some of the simple pleasures that I know my ancestors also delighted in, like cooking and learning their language, or feeling joy in the art of adornment. And still, I often pause in reverence for the magic of this love.
Layla F. Saad explores the thoughtful question of what it means to be a good ancestor which she answers for herself as the intention “to live and work in ways that leave a legacy of healing and liberation for those who will come after.” I am reflecting on this in this phase of my life, especially during the past some years where life has both slowed and simplified and equally become more complicated.
“Healing” and “liberation” for ourselves and future generations feel of the utmost priority. My ancestors lived their version of this and now I am examining how I can build off their work with some of my own revisions. Things that they chose to abandon, identities they shedded for the sake of their version of progression are things that I am now reclaiming as significant and valuable.
As I move through my life, I am viewing myself as a future ancestor and trying, where I can, to live in a way that makes me a good one. What stories might be told about me three generations into the future? How might I be remembered? It goes beyond an egoic vision for personal legacy, but rather an intention to contribute to a future, that I myself will not benefit from, in a way that heals, liberates, and inspires.
For healing and liberation, for equipping future generations with the tools they need to confidently move along their path, for a strong inner sense of belonging that they can return to, for a healthy perspective on one’s place in and connection to the world, for a deep well of joy to reminisce on, for the sake of keeping alive old knowledge, arts, and magic.
For keeping the trail clear and showing them how to tend to it, so that they can always find their way back home.
“There is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me — and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.”
— Utah Phillips, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere
What objects, customs, traditions, etc. in your life are connected to your ancestors?
What does it mean to you to be a good ancestor?
What will you want to be remembered for?
Is it important to you to be remembered by the ones to come after you? Is it important to you to remember the ones who came before you? Why?
Family Search A database created by the Mormon church. You are required to create an account but it is completely free. I have found some key pieces of information using this website.
Find A Grave This free site holds a large collection of member uploaded photos of gravesitems from all over the world. Search for your ancestors by name or region.
Ellis Island Records Comprising approximately 65 million searchable records, this free database allows you to examine immigration documents and find connections to your ancestry. I haven't used this site specifically but most of the records I've uncovered through other sites have been immigrant ship documents from Ellis Island.
Ancestry I have found a lot through this site, especially scans of documents, important dates that have led to other findings, and they offer hints to potential ancestors. Requires a membership subscription but they do offer a free 2-week trial.
My Heritage Similar to Ancestry, this site requires a membership subscription. But I have found some free leads here through general searches via Google. I searched for my great-grandfather's full name and his birthdate and place of birth and a result from My Heritage pulled up the names of his parents -- which felt like a major breakthrough! They also offer a free trial period which could allow you to get some key info before cancelling.
Mappa Dei Cognomi [map of last names] This is an interesting one for fellow friends of Italian and Sicilian descent: a surname map that shows the areas in Italy and Sicily where people with your surname currently live. If you don’t know where your ancestors were from, this could be a useful tool for acquiring a key detail to help you in your continuing search. I typed in all of my Italian ancestral last names that I know!
]]>These past few years have asked us to reflect on who we are, what we value most, how we move in the world and in which ways we offer our gifts. A lot of big feelings and revelations in connection to these questions have come to the surface as we’ve distilled all parts of our lives down in search of our true essence. We’ve been in a time of many unknowns and many questions, and perhaps the only way to find our peace in the current of the unknown is to come back home.
With more time at home [literally], I’ve been reflecting on this word and the forms it takes in my own life [literally and figuratively] — my body, my altar spaces, the shelter in which I live. From all the impactful words I’ve heard spoken by others that I’ve scribbled down along the edges of random pages throughout my notebooks, this one reigns:
I heard this from Dolores Alfieri Taranto on an episode of her podcast, Bella Figura, in conversation with MaryBeth Bonfiglio. Other variations of this have surely been spoken before and the concept itself is not new, however these words landed on my heart in a new way. Then follow that one up with,
spoken by Camille Langston in a presentation on ancestral altar building.
My body is an altar...To love myself is to express love to those who came before me... These potent words rang a bell inside of me, turned a light on, opened a door, and both expanded and affirmed my exploration into the body as an altar as a home; a concept that I visualize as an infinite circle of each of these three words flowing into the next.
So the next question is, considering home as our body, as our altar spaces, as the dwellings in which we live, how do we tend to these home spaces? Because how we tend to them is how we love ourselves, which in result, is how we love our ancestors.
Think about your ancestors — your grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles... Who calls to you most? What do you know about them? What did they do? Where were they from? What was life like where they lived when they were alive? What did they eat? What did they love?
Maybe you had the privilege of knowing them while they were living, maybe you know them through the stories that are shared about them, maybe you know their names, maybe you don’t. Maybe you don’t know anything about them at all. It’s all okay.
Your body is an altar to your ancestors, remember? If you have a body, you can know your ancestors. You can know them by feeling them. You can feel them by building a relationship with your intuitive self. Allow that to guide you in the practice below if you are without the details.
[my bisnonna/great-grandmother + trisnonna/great-great grandmother at the kitchen table processing mushrooms]
Do something that your ancestor[s] did or experience something from their culture. Cook a family recipe. Listen to their favorite music. Explore their favorite artist in a book or on the internet. Buy their favorite flower for your kitchen table. Whatever it is you choose, let it bring you joy.
The point of this practice is to enjoy something that your ancestors also enjoyed, to relish in a simple pleasure similar to one that they may have also experienced. In these moments, I like to allow my intuition to lead, imagining this is them working through me. This is not an elaborate ritual, in fact, it’s quite simple. For me, this is my natural way of practicing magic and of communing with the spirit realm. This is where we make connections, in the cross sections of our commonalities; this is how we begin to know something more intimately; this is when something feels like home. And when we know where home is, we know where to return to when the world gets stormy.
An important final note —I don’t believe that one needs to know the names or faces of their people in order to feel them and connect with them. You are the house of your ancestors. By simply caring for your self, by experiencing joy, you are also offering that to your ancestors.
note: a recent listen to another podcast interview has inspired me to plant an ancestral garden, meaning a curation of edibles and ornamentals with roots to where one’s ancestors lived and that they likely also cultivated. [of course it’s important to also be aware of invasive species.] for my fellow friends of Italian descent, check out Seeds From Italy and The Italian Garden Project. If anyone else has resources to share here with us in relation to your personal lineage, please leave a comment below. And if you feel inspired to share a photo of yourself doing something your ancestors did, tag @hina.luna on Instagram or do it the old fashioned way and email me [hellohinaluna@gmail.com]!
[One spring in our garden that was abundant with a small Italian variety of tomatoes - Grappoli d'Inverno. While not specific to my ancestors' regions of Italy, they felt like a small connection point to their homeland.]
[This photograph of my great-grandparents home lives on my ancestral altar. Although the house is no longer in the family, it is a place I've occasionally still visited in my dreams.]
]]>Pleasure: a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment.
One thing that brought me the most pleasure during this past year was settling deeper into an appreciation of the slow and the quiet. With a limited energetic capacity for pouring my full self into all of the things waving for my attention, I found myself saying yes to less with the intention of enabling myself to give more to fewer things. It’s that old “quality over quantity” thing, and it turns out that there’s something to it.
Choosing to take on less opens up space — in time and in energetic capacity — to commit more to the priorities. By clearing out and opening up more space, room is made for things of greater importance to life’s present moment, and invite in more token moments — simple pleasures.
In last week’s blog post, I shared one form of a simple pleasure that I’ve been practicing for myself that looks something like
stopping into the store for some groceries,
walking past the floral section and spotting a one-and-only bouquet of yellow roses,
feeling overwhelmed by a deep sense of joy because those roses remind me of my grandmother who’s gone,
feeling my grandmother present in that moment,
honoring her by taking those yellow roses home with me so that I can think of her all week.
I call this practice simple pleasure expenses; allowing myself to purchase something [usually relatively inexpensive, like flowers, or beeswax candles, or a special pantry item] especially when it feels like a portal to experiencing my ancestors.
[last week’s “simple pleasure expense” —yellow roses in honor of my late grandmother.]
Eight days later and those yellow roses are still bringing me joy on my kitchen table and on my ancestral altar next to my grandmother’s picture. I really do credit the practice of slower living for my :30 second séance in the flower section of the grocery store and for giving me the receptivity for making a point of connection with one of my ancestors.
The real magic of that experience though was the moment when I first saw the roses and felt my grandmother’s presence; the decision to buy the flowers and bring them home with me was an additional layer to that simple pleasure that extended the feeling of joy [by eight days so far...]. In other words, the simple pleasure was actually free — it cost nothing to stand in the grocery store and admire those flowers and feel my grandmother through them. The real joy didn’t come from buying them but rather it bloomed out of that split-second moment of noticing them which instantly evoked a treasured memory.
So, what I’ve come to realize about this practice of experiencing simple pleasures is that, in essence, they are magical experiences granted to us in exchange for only our presence. The beauty of simple pleasures is that they’re uncomplicated and they are everywhere if we’re open to receiving them. Although simple, by definition, they are absolutely extraordinary in that they can be unique, brief, fleeting moments — or a series of — that are witnessed by your unique senses, in your unique present moment.
If you’re a reader of my monthly Full Moon Circle newsletter, then you’re familiar with the Simple Pleasures segment which was created when I relaunched the newsletter in October of 2020 after eight long months away. The Simple Pleasures segment is intended to be a moment of pause, a joyful experience of taking in beauty via written word, or visual arts, or music, or anything sensually delightful that costs nothing. As an artist that is also, quite frankly, a micro business with things to sell you, it’s felt especially important to me to make an offering to you that is completely free; thus, the creation of the Simple Pleasures newsletter feature.
Another free offering and creative outlet I took pleasure in in 2020 was what I call “:60 seconds of simple pleasures”, which I have come to define as “visual compilations acknowledging and appreciating a series of small, magic moments”. These are one minute or less long videos [that I share on my Instagram] comprised of five-second observations of beauty and wonder in my present moment. So far, subjects have ranged from meal preparation in my kitchen, textures, shadow play, and moments in the garden, also with an ASMR auditory element of wind, rain, soup bubbling on the stove, and local bird song.
In an age where everything has been commodified, it feels of utmost importance to remind you that pleasure is free. While I find joy and connection and comfort in things and experiences that I’ve purchased [like the “simple pleasure expense” of yellow roses], there is an added sense of pleasure in the liberation of feeling joy at no cost. Simple pleasures are everywhere, waiting for you, when you are open to receiving them.
Close your eyes and acknowledge three sounds you hear right now, in your present moment.
Gaze out a window for one minute. Watch the wind, the birds, other people, the light dancing off of things. What do you notice? What feelings come up for you?
List five [things and/or sensations] that bring you the greatest sense of pleasure.
]]>Yesterday I bought myself a dozen yellow roses because they reminded me of my grandmother. This indulgent purchase is an exercise of a practice I’ve been deepening into, which is allowing myself more “simple pleasure expenses”, especially when they are a portal to experiencing my ancestors.
The key word here is “simple”, so for myself this practice looks mostly like buying a bouquet of their favorite flowers, or a special pantry item, or a set of beeswax taper candles to light their altar or my dinner table [because remember, food and the kitchen is one of the main ancestral altars I tend to!].
The inspiration comes as a surprise every time, like an unexpected but welcomed knock on the door from the spirit realm. In the case of yesterday’s yellow roses, I walked into the store and casually observed the selection of potted herbs and bouquets while I picked up a basket at the door. There, manifesting as the one and only bunch of golden rosey blooms, was my grandmother speaking to me through flowers. Oh, hi, it’s you! I recognized her instantly and it felt as though there was no other option but to bring her home with me.
It feels like a gift exchange with my ancestors — they pay a surprise visit [gift for me] and then in honor of them, I bring home with me that which they nudge my way [gift to them and also to me, who gets to enjoy said item in its earthly form].
It’s a practice in listening and receptivity. Offerings are quietly left for us, waiting to be noticed, to be received, to be accepted, but they can easily go unacknowledged if we are moving through life too quickly. It’s the fleeting magic moments — like an unusual cloud formation, or noticing a personally significant sequence of numbers out in the world, or a one and only bouquet of special flowers — that are life’s simple pleasures. This is one of the ways that our ancestors and spirit family interact with us, how they build a bridge between our world and theirs, and it is truly nothing short of magical.
When do you notice your spirit family reaching out to you?
Through what tangible items do they do this through?
How do you respond to, receive, and reciprocate their offerings?
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