A ‘back to school’ message from FEELed Lab Director, Astrida
Brat Girl Summer had its day, and Hot Girl Summer does not appeal. (Although a sardine girl summer does sound intriguing.) Forget about the trends; the real question is: was it a Vortex Girl Summer (regardless of your gender) for you, too?
I mean… did you feel it slowly … open? Maybe you felt something … shift? Did the ground feel a little less steady, or did the stars seem a little more powerful? Maybe you just felt a little … wobbly?
Back in July, I was having a conversation with Julia, our Lab Administrator (and PhD researcher) about the strange and exceptionally intense weeks we had each just experienced (independently). “Maybe it’s just the vortex opening,” I suggested. Julia’s eyes got wide: “You are not the first person to mention that!” dey replied.
Our discussion was of course in part tongue-in-cheek: Stranger Things meets quantum physics at the FEELed Lab. But like all jokes, it was also serious.
Because things are shifting, and the ground does feel wobbly. Genocide in Gaza and elsewhere is still happening. Authoritarianism is cleaning up. Ancestral lands are burning.
And when we read the news and look around us, many things that some of us have taken for granted (reasonably reliable media, some sense that justice and the rule of law have global purchase, predictable seasons) no longer hold. Yes, we always knew that they were tenuous: we have always known that laws do not apply universally, that journalism is always beholden to editorial slant, and that across large spans of time, climates change. Of course! But something feels different. Something is different.
For me, these big changes resonated in unconnected-but-must-be-connected ways that I am still processing. For example, our summer camp in early June, FEELers, was incommensurately wildly joyful and exceptionally difficult, as we had to navigate competing access needs and divergent feelings when COVID-19 decided to join our ranks. But the love I felt also made my heart explode. Maybe not for me only, it was incredibly destabilizing.
A week later, I joined colleagues from IndigenEYEZ for our second Earth Sense retreat, where the baby loons, the roses, the insects and the moonlight entered into the space with an intensity I rarely feel.
Then as June turned to July, I journeyed to Cortes Island to join a group of exceptional individuals as part of M.O.T.H.. This time included profound exchanges with truly pathbreaking scientists like Monica Gagliano and Merlin Sheldrake, lawyers like Pooven Moodley and Siva Thambisetty, and artists like Gabriella Gomez-Mont, Elena Landinez and Nina Vroemen. We were gifted with stories from Chief Dr. Robert Joseph that left none of us intact. We were ostensibly there to ‘discuss’ more-than-human-life, but … what actually happened? Owls screeched and waves kept turning over; fires were lit and blooms larger than my head kept watch over the garden. Songs emerged from the more-than-human world. Something happened I can’t yet describe.
I think it was just the vortex, opening.
August brought recurring fatigue and spontaneous poetry. I read and read and read. Heat and water. Cherries and peaches. Meteor showers. Great mullein that keeps getting taller. What is happening?
As we begin another school year (in the Northern Hemisphere), these changes start to feel like this may also be the beginning of something else altogether.
As the vortex opens (my now-choice shorthand for: things slipping out of their well-worn grooves, old assumptions giving way, or as adrienne maree brown has put – when the veil gets pulled back), what will we choose? Will we seek a passing stability that maybe never really served us, or will we find ways to keep growing … something else?
Around this point is where my 15 year old does an obligatory eye-roll. Yes, I know how this sounds, and yes, sometimes I lean into the woo-woo-ness of it all, as a kind of affective experiment. I am writing this also a bit tongue-in-cheek, as I try to figure out what my latest Tarot pull is telling me.
But something is changing.
How will you respond?
What will you need for this journey?
What advice can you give?
What protocols might help you?
Through the summer, through various channels, and by various means, two instructions kept showing up for me, in various guises:
Step into your power.
The FEELed lab 