Weekend Salt
a weekly round-up of beauty, revolutionary imagination, and gritty hope
“In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again”
-The Beauty Way Prayer of the Diné Peoples
My chart contains both a Pisces stellium and a Libra stellium. My Chiron is in Taurus. Beauty runs through my cosmic DNA, a breathing lifeforce. I heave with it, churn with it, crave the sensation of it, and live in the ongoing, regenerating flow of Beauty - not as a thing, but as a source.
My own unique evolving spirituality spirals around a pulse point: if there is no beauty left in the world, it is no longer the world.
And still…
Our world is burning. Governments are grappling for power at the cost of our lives, our health, our joy, and our communities.
Here on Turtle Island, women, trans men, and some enby friends are fighting for the right to the health of our bodily organs again.
White supremacy slithers through every aspect of Western culture.
Imperialism and colonialism have robbed generations of people of their inheritance, their artifacts, their land, their peace, and their agency.
Multiple genocides are happening all over the earth.
Climate change has reached disaster.
A man who raped over 100 women just had one of his sentences taken back to trial because there were too many women who bore witness against him.
Right now the internet is debating whether women would rather encounter a man in the woods or a bear. It’s a bear. Every single time, it’s a bear. And so many cis men cannot understand why.
Transphobia leaves most trans people with a life expectancy of 35 - either by despair and suicide or by murder.
Homophobia is its match and both are rising in our local legislations every day.
Boys like Brock Turner and Kyle Rittenhouse have become men with little to no repercussions and have free reign to harm again.
Turtle Island sees mass shootings and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women so often we expect to see it in the news - if it’s covered at all.
The US has stolen so many resources, stripping the land and the sea of its wealth and leaving people destitute.
The mass graves of Native children are found outside of boarding schools.
Women are dying because they cannot receive abortion care.
And still, men are in our comments saying, “Explain it to me.”
There is more. There is always more.
-The Shapeshifter, A Red Tent Class
This weekend (and always), our salt of choice is our power. It is our agency, our rising voices, our response to the roaring, gravelly death rattle of systems of oppression and domination. It is a collective middle finger raised to patriarchy and to all of its heartless gollums.
This weekend the invitation is to do what Cheryl Strayed’s mother has taught us to do, what Diné tradition has been singing and practicing for far longer than the existence of a colonial state.
We are putting ourselves in the way of beauty.
We are drawing from beauty below us, behind us, above us, and around us.
And we are asking Beauty to transform us: soil, root, spine, story, heart, and all.
“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.”
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BOOKS
- , the NYT bestseller of Patriarchy Blues, is available for pre-order now. This isn’t a book I’ve read yet, but it ships next month and I’m on the edge of my seat in anticipation. Half of the proceeds from We Alive, Beloved will be going to Palestinians and the Congolese.
“In this poetic testament, we defy the ephemeral nature of beauty and goodness, daring to clutch onto these facets of life for just a little longer. With words that stand as guardians against the relentless march of time and the ceaseless tides of change, trauma, and grief, this collection becomes a sanctuary of light in a world that sometimes seems dim.”
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.
I first read this memoir 13ish years ago in a book club (book clubs are incredible for giving us stories we might not have otherwise found. Consider joining this new one with
).From cover to cover Walls has changed the way I think about writing nonfiction. She took such a long, horrible, heartbreaking story and wrote us through with her in a way that told the truth without asking us to carry what is hers. I don’t know if it would have been possible to hear her story any other way, it is so layered and complex and crushing all on its own.
Recently I lent my copy out to a friend with instructions to annote and give it back. I highly suggest doing this with your friends, too. It’s a true hallmark of a book that has changed us in some way and a benefit to being friends with other writers and dreamers.
“I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow connected o the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. I didn't have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”
SUBSTACKS
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“These days, I’m trying to write warm sentences—prioritizing texture, taste, and emotional temperature. I tell myself not to write from the brain, but from the belly. I give myself a prompt like: write a line that tastes like dark chocolate cake. And then I write something weird like honeycomb cadence. Or I challenge myself to write a silky sentence and out pops: Ocean, lily bright with waves. I’ll worry about meaning-making later. For now, I’m following the heat.”
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“This fertile coming together of opposites—not unlike some of our most ancient myths of the Sacred Marriage—could become our new-ancient call to action. How can we use the myths of Inanna and Dumuzi or Isis and Osiris as recipes for coming into relationship pace, both within and without?”
VISIONS OF A BETTER WORLD
A TikTok influencer named Erin Hattamer has started using her platform of 1.5 million followers to divert from her usual comedy content and partner with a project that is helping Palestinian families get out of Gaza. She has even used her position of being mutuals with other large creators to DM them directly, asking them to join her and many have. It has been one of the most ground-level sources of beauty for me this week.
This poem from
“There are some days (more than others) when I feel my old snake skin like a phantom limb, and I touch my arm and shiver. The stories of ancestors, long buried and deeply held far under top soil and earthworm colonies, they shake and shed and call to me.
When the rains come, I sometimes wake and slip out through the back door and stand with my bare feet in the mud. We are made of old worlds — wisdom and bark and river rock and hums and hymns.
So many words swimming in our marrow.
Like poems sewn in.
Like heirloom jewels passed down.
‘I’ve got you. Always,’ says the Mother to the daughter who becomes the mother.
Everything is a circle.
We know who we are, and who we are is women who belong to ourselves, first.”
FOR EVERY WILD, STRANGE, AND BEAUTIFUL REGENERATING SOUL
A four-week integration series, Inanna’s Path, is beginning here for paid subscribers on June 3rd!
This is not some guy’s Hero’s Journey, wild ones. This is a step-by-step map of the goddess’s descent into The Great Below.
Inanna is one of the very first archetypes of transformation within the belly of the whale. Her loss of identity, facing of shadow, excavation of what is medicinal, communal resurrection, and unprecedented return all tell us a story about ourselves and about one another.
Together we’ll trace the goddess’s map and draw our own through overlapping myths, poetry, prompts, and reflections. I’ll also host a weekly AMA where I answer your emerging questions or lean into your brilliant thoughts every week.
All links to books are affiliate links and I am so grateful when you choose to use them. Thank you, honeys!