Field Notes for Spring (a partial glossary entry)
Gleaning (verb) From Old French glener. To gather grain left behind after the harvest. To collect what others have missed, discarded, or overlooked. To survive by noticing. To create by salvaging. To ritualize what remains.
Spica (noun) From Latin spīca. An ear of grain. The brightest star in the Virgo constellation, held in her left hand. Associated with fertility, prophecy, and abundance. A fixed star of gifts.
There’s a star in Virgo’s hand: Spica. A spike of wheat, a glowing seed that is suspended between myth and meal, goddess and gleaner. Spica gleams in what remains after the scythe has passed. The thing you stop to pick from the dirt because you recognize its worth. This is a star of survivors and for those who know how to make something from the remnants.
Spica is also my personal heliacal rising star, the first star to rise at the moment of my birth. She’s always been with me, even when I did not know about her. In the tradition of the fixed stars, Spica is linked to gifts and talent, but also to precision, harvest, and timing. She waits, and offers what’s ripe when you're ready to receive it.
This spring, I’ve been paying close attention to the ground. To what’s sprouting, and also to what’s been dropped, buried, or left behind. The great Agnès Varda understood this. In the film The Gleaners and I, she walks alongside those who collect the forgotten: oddly-shaped potatoes, abandoned food, images of her own aging hands. Her gaze reveals a hidden abundance, stitched together from waste and tenderness. It’s its own kind of fertility. A chthonic feminism, rooted, unruly, generous.
Demeter moves through this season too. The Goddess who cracked the world open in mourning. She who taught that grief feeds as much as food can. Who carried wheat like a weapon and gave us both agriculture and the mystery rites. Her story is not linear because when we follow it, we can see that it spirals underground and back again, full of rage and hunger. Hers is a story of return.
What I’m drawn to now is the punk that may live inside grief. Not the aesthetic, more so the attitude. (though we can argue that attitude is aesthetic). The instinct to improvise, to forage, to resist the lie that we need anything shiny to be alive. The punk part of you already knows how to survive with less, it always knew. How to feed yourself, clothe yourself, care for others. That part of you who never trusted the systems. Who can find beauty in ruins. And if you are thinking something along the lines of: “punk? me? It is not my vibe at all” I suggest that you start playing around with it. We are speaking beyond the music here, but may I suggest playing a very loud song while you are alone in your bedroom moving your body? See how that feels.
I recently came across a video from the BBC of an elder woman walking the streets with her pockets full of weed seeds, scattering them with a calm determination. I thought to myself “This is a modern day DEMETER!” A guerrilla gardener invoking return, hope and action. This is a punk rock queen right here. Her name is Jessie Wainwright and she is a gem.
At the same time, I’ve been holding two images close:
Ithell Colquhoun, (artist who I am currently in deep obsession with) photographed with a heavy bundle of wheat in her arms, and Agnès Varda, carrying a sheaf like a joke and a spell at the same time. Those Varda eyes!
These portraits feel like modern myth in motion. Artists playing with their own symbols.
They hold the wheat like they’ve always held it. Like Ceres statues, modern-day goddesses of harvest and memory, of ritual and grit. These photos are actually what brought this whole piece into focus. I could feel their gaze like a signal. A story trying to come through, a story being told to me.
For some time now, Ithell has been coming to me in my dreams, asking me to pay attention. She sends me colors and strange vagina-like shapes that are landscapes I can walk through. (I have a deep dream practice I have been cultivating for years, perhaps one day I will write more about this)
There is a lineage here, a line of women who have held the grain. From the constellation of Virgo to the statues of Ceres, from Demeter’s golden sheaf to the arms of Colquhoun and Varda, wheat has passed hand to hand like a wand. A symbol of fertility, but also of knowledge, sustenance, mourning. At some point in the Demeter-Persephone story, Demeter traded her wheat wand for a fiery torch: a gesture of descent and fury. But that’s a conversation for another day. One we’ll walk into together in my spring course, where we can linger with the symbols and the stories long enough to let them move something in us. What happens when we trade the wheat wand for the fire wand? Is it the same wand?
Colquhoun’s paintings, which we’ll explore in the course, blur boundaries, between body and stone, myth and moss, sex and soil. In Gorgon, she reimagines Medusa beyond the image of the destroyer, she is a germinator. This is the language of myth rewilded. Monstrosity and transformation in the same breath. And this is exactly where I feel myself most alive and sharp.
This whole vision: gleaning, gathering, myth and rot, tenderness and rage, belongs to a kind of worldview I’ve been calling punk pastoral. A muddy, holy hybrid of the wild and the worn, where the sacred is low to the ground. If we could just lie down, press our ears to the dirt, we could hear its humming calling for us.
And in a time when the world is rearranging itself under pressure: famine, genocide, inflation, eroded safety nets: this earthy wisdom becomes more than symbolic. The punk parts of yourself already knew: these systems would never be able to save us. But we would.
This is a time for mutual aid and for tenderness with teeth. Punk has never been just been a scream of despair, it has also always been a call to action, a call to compassion, the courage to care loudly, to feed one another and to find joy and inspiration in the muck.
And so it is, and so it is, and so it is!
A New Spring Offering: Chthonic AF (Taurus Season)
This is the mood I’m carrying into the spring edition of Chthonic AF: Rooting into Myths of Pleasure, Monstrous Fertility, and the Ecstatic Earth Body
A mythic field experiment.
A ritual of return.
A sensual study in what sprouts from below.
We’ll walk with Demeter, Baubo, Persephone, Venus, Dionysus, the Minotaur and other unruly deities and monsters. We’ll trace the Taurus–Scorpio axis as a mythic compost pile, where grief feeds pleasure, and matter becomes living myth.
Runs April 19 – May 20 (Taurus season)
Includes 3 live Zoom gatherings on Wednesdays
Includes audio meditations, rituals, myth deep-dives, artist highlights, tarot spreads, and creative contemplations
Designed for slow engagement, deep listening, embodied inquiry, and play
Come press your ear to the ground. We will do it together.
Join Chthonic AF (Taurus Season):
Greece Retreat: Only 3 Spots Left
This spring also opens the doorway to something physical, earthly, and shared: Our astrology, myth, movement, and ritual retreat in Greece, happening this June.
We’ll gather for yoga, ritual, myth, astrology, rest, and creative work on sacred land.
When: the week of the Full Moon in Sagittarius (June 5th- June 12th)
We will also welcome Jupiter moving into Cancer and Venus moving into Taurus during our time together! Holy sweetness!
There are just 3 spots left.
If you’ve been longing to return to your body, to community, to ritual, this is your invitation.