Solaria Divina

Tag: Philosophy

  • Spirit of a dress

    I thoroughly believe that objects, buildings, and things we find in nature can have either organic or aggregate spirits. The ladder especially applies to things that people create: clothing especially if made with natural fiber, glass and ceramic pieces, wooden furniture, buildings. Metal and gemstone jewelry, leather goods, and artwork also do this. The spirit of the creator, the energy of the materials, and the experiences that object goes through, create sentience. For instance my old college dorms, which were active for 50 years, probably had massive, well developed personalities thanks to thousands of students and visitors, many of them there for long periods of time. It’s really tragic in my mind that no one took last pictures or created a memorial archive of stories from people who lived in those dorm towers before they were demolished. I’m trying to do something in a smaller way for a much more personal object.

    Part of how I self identify is usually wearing a dress or a skirt and top combination. Many dresses and skirts come and go. I wear them out or I resell them because they didn’t work for me or I was just over them stylistically. A few stand out. A sleeveless sweater dress I had for a few years, had a really beautiful ivory and black snake print and a full skirt without any annoying seam at the waist. I wore this until it developed a very strange white stain that we couldn’t get rid of. I was sad to see it go. Another that I wish I could have memorialized but was actually stolen was a short sleeved oatmeal sweater dress, with a skater silhouette and brown button appliqué. I meant last summer to create a photo shoot with it before retiring it as the buttons were coming unstitched. But someone took it from the dryer. There have been others. The oldest, and the one most deserving of memorialization, I purchased in the spring of 2010 from Lane Bryant. It had a beautiful floral print, a relaxed waist, long skirt, and a double layered bodice giving a graceful layered texture in the front. This dress was with me through multiple moves, service trips in college, parties, moments when my life collapsed or dramatically shifted. I started noticing signs of where seven or eight years ago and decided to cut back on how often I wore it to preserve it. Last year I took a photo of it folded up with a note card giving the date I bought it approximately, and then the date of the photograph. A series of things are about to happen to this dress, which feels like a friend, feels like it has its own spirit, but feels like something that has reached the end of its life cycle. I’m going to take one last photo wearing the dress, with full hair and makeup, even though the dress is clearly falling apart. A piece of the dress will be cut out to be framed on my aesthetic archive shelf. And then the dress is being cut up into ribbons and turned into a crocheted basket. There is an actual grieving process for me with this. But I am trying my best to translate the memory and the energy of this dress into something that still lives beyond its original purpose. This has seen multiple versions of me, and it has all of those contained within it, from festivals and shopping days to days when I was really sick, to days when I was working for good or just having a good time. It has seen beer spills, paint splatters, endless crumbs, dirt and blood, long bus rides on hot summer days. Yet it always made me feel like I looked great. I didn’t decide to completely take it out of rotation until I noticed one of the shoulder straps was coming apart. Not when the little bead that kept part of the front weightted so it folded down disappeared. Not when I noticed minor separation in the seams under the arms. So now it gets a new job, a new life cycle, because the one thing that this dress does not deserve is being discarded. I’m not going to discard a dress that felt so light on hot summer days, that looked amazing when I wore my hair down my back, the summer sun turning it red. It had a soft silhouette and a skirt that actually moved with your body, and got me so many compliments. Sometimes the things we own integrate into who we are to a point where they are no longer just possessions. They become complex pieces of us and everything we’ve been through, and I belive their next life should honor that. 

  • Sacred Service pt1: rituals of self-care and love

    Many traditions contend that we have divinity within ourselves and I fully agree. These rituals are comforting, indulgent, and personally devotional, and for nourishing our inner flame. Nature and the gods live within us, and through them we have inherited a divine spark.

    Keeping a small altar to self, and incorporating elements of who you are into a larger spiritual shrine are good ways to get started. On my altar there are candleholders, offering cups, and crystal plates assigned to the divine feminine side, on the left, and divine masculine side, on the right. But the elements that are there for me are a third centered candleholder, a small heart shaped jewelry box for love manifestation, and another rectangular small box for money manifestation. The overall color scheme is warm and inviting. I chose materials like bone, crystal, ceramic, cut glass to fit my aesthetic. Then my nightstand is somewhat of the altar to self. You can put a favorite scented candle here, a photograph of yourself from a moment that makes you proud. Mine currently has my favorite hand lotion, a vintage glass dish in a warm amber color, and a jewelry box where I keep my spiritual pieces. The glass dish frequently holds crystals I’m working with, a few pieces of chocolate, lip treatment.

    Taking care of your body is an ongoing act of devotion. Working out releases hormones that make us feel good. Even just a meditative walk can do this. Consuming foods that nourish our bodies, as well as those that help us emotionally regulate, or just enjoy the day, is also part of this. Bath products with fragrances you enjoy for your shower, daily skin and hair care, fragrant body lotion, even your initial morning cup of coffee, are ways to physically nourish that internal divine spark. Sing in private to your favorite music. Dance for fun.

    Ritual baths, with relaxing music, scented candles, fragrant bath products, water safe crystals for energy work, and a lack of distracting phone notifications, are one of my favorite ways to work on myself. this is about giving yourself a safe space focused on nothing but your sensory indulgence.. some people bring in a glass of wine. I like a bottle of Perrier mineral water or a thermos of hot chocolate. I will often play an instrumental harp or piano playlist on my phone, which has been set on do not disturb so no one bothers me. The candles or wax melts I choose are usually scented with things like oak, cedar, suede, and musk. My bath products usually have things like sandalwood, Amber, vanilla, sugar and caramel. I turn off the lights and distractions, use the stones I’ve brought with, which are personal favorites, to do cleansing and recharging work in the water, and just enjoy the ambience.

    Another specific thing you can do for yourself every morning is a glamour ritual. This doesn’t have to mean makeup although for me it does. I want to encourage you to read into color psychology and color theory, how it has been observed that colors affect the mind, and how colors are actually scientifically defined. The thing is, you should wear colors based on how they affect you. I tend to choose softer or more mellow colors when I’m in a cozy but functional mood. Deeper more vibrant shades and black come out when I have bigger social engagement to deal with. Your wardrobe choices should first, be physically comfortable for you to wear. Second, they should suit your aesthetic mood and how you want to project yourself to the world around you. You build from the baseline outfit with jewelry, bags, favorite perfume or cologne, and makeup if you wear it. This is emotion based dressing, with an eye toward the kind of power and influence you would like to have that day.

    Let’s talk about your morning coffee ritual. More often than not for me this is a cup of hot chocolate, or a cup of cold sweet tea. Take your time with this. Sit by a sunny window, acknowledge the positive things that you look forward to in your day, maybe give thanks to your God or gods for what you have been given. Even just that moment of peace is valuable. If you are inclined to Journal, this is when to do that. If you want music, it doesn’t have to be the soothing reset music you used for your bath, it should be something that reflects your current mood in a stabilizing way. I really like acoustic singer songwriter type music for this, which I often find on unplugged rock albums. Depending on my energy and the atmosphere of the day, this can shift from thoughtful melancholy to warm and relaxing.

    We forget to love ourselves. That’s how the world is designed. But we can reincorporate this in everything we do. That’s why self-care becomes sacred service.

  • Late night thoughts

    One conflict I’ve always had a hard time with is feeling that different aspects of my nature just don’t make sense together, and it’s not a great feeling. I try to be self-aware and that’s difficult when you feel somewhat internally disconnected. Too edgy to really feel like I belong in elegant spaces. Two elegant to feel welcome in occult spaces. Too loud, opinionated, and conventionally unattractive to really feel socially validated as feminine. But all of these are genuine aspects of my nature. I love silk or cashmere when I can find it secondhand, but I have tattoos. I write poetry, paint and sculpt, but if you knew me in person you would know my conversational style could be called spicy. I am a student of the occult, but I have a somewhat materialistic nature. Because I am all about the richness of life, getting all I can out of this experience since the universe and the gods are going to guide us where we need to go. We have to take agency, that’s our gift and our responsibility simultaneously, but they will get us there. In the meantime I think it’s absolutely fine to try to live for the purpose of enjoying the experience, creating a legacy that made your world a better place, and moving forward with as few regrets as possible.

    Here’s the revelation that hit me a couple of hours ago. I used the phrase your world. What this means is the social structures that are relevant to your experience, not necessarily the big arbitrary ones that have been set up for us all. This means your people, your gods or lack there of, your values. How you frame yourself within your world or your reality. You start with a foundation. Those people you have a genuine connection with. A moral compass that is based on experience and not whatever comes down the ladder of hierarchy we are supposed to climb. I was thinking about how I used to sort of be known as the pagan church lady because I had a very reserved, conservative style. Thinking about this made me realize that it’s not really about how your world sees you. It’s how you see yourself in your world, your framework. So if I want to be that practitioner with spiritual tattoos and a fairly elegant sense of style, then I create that space for myself to exist within my framework. And then all of those pieces can be united potentially, because focusing on your own framework, building your own world around that framework for a visual metaphor, means that the wider, careless, anonymous reality we all share, has less relevance. It’s reclaiming your power, ruling your domain. Then you can do two things. you can refuse access to your world for certain energies, whether that’s people or currents or experiences that you think will negatively impact your personal growth and happiness. And you can begin to manifest what fills this world of yours. I am currently exploring how daydreaming, intentionally living out those experiences in your head, can serve as a basis for manifestation. I know lots of us daydream to get a break from whatever personal circumstances we wish to escape, creating other versions of ourselves to live other lives. But what if it was an idealized version of yourself, with your knowledge, all your good points, with an appearance you actually like, living out things you desire, moments you want to see happen. Perhaps building in a little bit of focus to help channel those daydreams into energy you can put toward making your desires part of your external reality. Maybe it’s a big city condo somewhere warm. Maybe it’s travel. Maybe it’s family dinners on inherited China with children you haven’t met yet. Build yourself into your daydreams so they can be part of your world build.

    A lot of us worry I think about how we are perceived. But I think it might be more important to ask how we want to be perceived only by those who are actually relevant to us and impact our lives. And before that, how we want to perceive ourselves within our own Framework. For me it’s important that how I present actually matches my genuine nature. I believe most of us are scared of who we genuinely are, and so are more willing than we should be to accept messaging that tries to feed on our insecurities and get us to obey Certain rules. And when we are scared of any aspect of ourselves we project that onto everyone and everything around us, so that anything straying beyond what we perceive as normal or right becomes a problem to us. Honestly my thoughts on how to get past this are you have to grow a backbone, look your naked ass in the mirror, be real about the good and the bad of who you are not just by physical appearance, but asking yourself questions like do you trust yourself, what actions have been mistakes and what have you intentionally done wrong, which are two different things, are you willfully choosing to ignore truth in favor of your own opinions, and what’s good about who you are. And then, just stop minding other people’s business. Those people who are personally relevant to you, their valid experience plays a role in how you let them exist within your world, your understanding of reality, because you cannot ignore their truth, and should not ignore your own. You have to find a place where you can both live if there’s conflict, or it’s time to make some space. Everyone has the right to agency, to building their own worlds, and have who they are respected, as long as they are not infringing on those rights for others. You have a right to finding your own happiness, building your own world and identity within it, but so does everyone else. Meanwhile, now that you focused on doing your own internal work, you can enter those parts of yourself you rejected, reckon with the choices you’ve made, and maybe start to build self-respect that is not based on surface level social perceptions or standards set by others. If you are focused on your own happiness and growth, your identity within your world will make sense beautifully, and maybe won’t feel so contradictory when dealing on the outside. Internal contradictions are human, sometimes we can integrate those pieces into a hole or at least figure out how to balance them, but I think the deeper issue is a question you might not have found the answer to about yourself as a hole. And that’s why I think about this stuff at three in the morning.

  • A few things I have learned

    Most skilled magic practitioners and spirit workers are not going to share methods in depth. This is because it is actually a good thing for people to earn their own knowledge, and because there are many people in these online spaces who will try to mess with your workings For an ego trip. I’m here to share the lessons I learn through my efforts. Not necessarily how I came to understand them.

    We all need deep, mutually respectful, open connections with one another. But many people are quite shallow and overextend themselves, through a sense of entitlement, demanding too much of us without building a trusting relationship where boundaries are respected. This can be emotionally invasive or abusive communication that makes us uncomfortable, invasion of personal space or physical contact that is unwanted, among other things. What this does is put us on the offensive, where we are trying to repel any potential threat and we are stuck in that state of mind. This behavior is often rooted in a sense of superiority.

    On the flipside, sometimes the people we love give us a sense of being able to trust them and we pour into them, but they don’t give back. They don’t open up to us. So we’ve shared our emotional and spiritual resources with them, and left ourselves with less than what we need. It has to go both ways. Then we shut down in order to protect what we have. In our own minds we become both the giver and the receiver. We literally feed on our own energies while we are closed off from everything else. This is stagnation. This lack of natural flow of energies between you and those who genuinely love and reciprocate with you actually undermines your ability to manifest. You want to protect your resources from those presuming to take from you. That’s wise sometimes as I’ve talked about in other posts. When you create a new connection with someone you start off giving in small ways and you see how much actually comes back. Be honest with yourself about what you are experiencing. another difficulty arises when someone pours into you so much that you are overwhelmed, literally your energy shrinks to accommodate how much they are giving you. So you want to watch for those who drain you, those who demand too much from you, and those who overwhelm you. These issues are all talked about in psychological spaces, but they affect you on a spiritual level as well by creating blockages that make it hard for you to grow, evolve, and manifest.

    The other thing I have discovered recently is the way you want to be perceived can very much undermine your own growth. Within certain parts of the broader occult community, even among the so-called left-hand path practitioners, a hierarchy of purity and virtue, of power, of ascendance, is pushed, even subtly. even when supposedly we are forging our own paths, there are still prescribed ways we are to go about magic and spirit work. And most people don’t seem to realize that they are allowed to experiment, be authentic, and question what they are taught. Sometimes there is wisdom, but sometimes it is OK to create something new and evolve.

    What I discovered about myself is that even though I considered myself somewhat of a dark magic practitioner, even though I mostly rejected the conventions of western magic practice or so I thought, I still really liked it when I was perceived as friendly, digestible, someone to be looked up to. But I like every other human am messy, gray area, random and chaotic. And because magic is fundamentally about sentience, that’s how magic is as well. Magic is about forging relationships with spirits of open communication, respect and honesty. It’s about dirt, blood, how we feel in our bodies, and bringing together the parts of ourselves we have lost or disregarded. Even the parts that suck. Because the worst in ourselves is usually based in experience that has to be acknowledged and healed. And that’s messy work.

    The best of your magic comes through when you are honest with yourself, neither trying to force an external perception of your value, nor looking down on yourself. It comes through when you are able to listen to wisdom but also be authentic, intuitive, and experimental. And it comes through when you are able to forge relationships where there is a mutual, respectful, and deep seated connection based on trust and open communication. Because you starve when you only have yourself to feed on.

  • Material self-care is a spiritual prerogative

    According to many religions we all contain some aspect of divinity. Whether that is incarnation, a divine spark, a pillar, or the potential to ascend to the level of a God or goddess. At this point I feel my beliefs are a combination of the first two. We can incarnate some aspect of gods who have taken a hand in our creation and growth. For those who believe in one particular God, they say that people are made in his image. Which could be interpreted as the same thing. And we all have divine energy within us, those little gifts and moments of intuition beyond the physical.

    In my own personal practice I ally with, work with, and give offerings too, many different types of gods and spirits. So what if when we give without expecting anything in return to other people, we are in some ways making offerings to their spirits? And what if when we initiate an exchange of labor or material possessions, we are allying with that person’s spirit the same way we do with the non-physical entities we work with? Sometimes those human spirits in living bodies aren’t necessarily deserving of what we give, and sometimes we give with ulterior motives, but that’s a topic for another day. Most religions would say it is good to be selfless. But I think a healthy amount of selfishness is also a good thing.

    If the only food you have in your home is a plate of cookies, and there are five, and three people come to your home asking for food, are you going to give away all of the cookies? We have to take time to physically restore our emotional Resources, our sense of comfort in this physical reality, so that we have enough abundance to share when others need it. We do this in three ways. We are careful not to give to those who only seek to drain us. Community means that when you share resources, there is an unspoken promise that when you need support, others will share with you. This goes for emotional and spiritual resources, not just physical. You protect what you know you need. This means that the three people who came to your house wanting food can get a cookie if you know you are going to have more food in the next few hours. But if you don’t, then maybe sharing isn’t the best idea. Maybe they promised to bring something back in return. You don’t know if they will keep that promise.

    The third way is self-care. Actions that bring you a sense of well-being, contentment, and security start in the physical, boosting your emotional resources, giving your spirit space to heal. For some people this is cleaning or working out. For some people this is a rare steak and red wine. Of which I approve. For some people this is a luxurious bath involving fancy special occasion products and scented candles. Also lovely.

    How do you practice self-care?

    I personally engage in self-care in a few stages. I will enjoy a nice bath, to remember how to love the body I am in. I might bring a mineral water with me. I will listen to a favorite book. Then when I am done, I make sure to take care of my skin, put on fragrance, and throw on a favorite dress. I get ready as if I am going out on a date or with friends. But instead, I order a pizza, put on a favorite show, and acknowledge my gratitude for how much the gods and spirits I am aligned with due for me. And how incredible life is. Or if this is too much of a production, I get a mineral water or a coffee, maybe a brownie or a few pieces of dark chocolate, and I find somewhere quiet to just sit and read. I still might throw on a pretty dress though. I have put myself in a better state of mind to make it easier to handle whatever life throws at me next. And be there for the spirits of those I care about.

    I offer two courses that relate to this topic. Right now they are live for $30 an hour, and they are one hour courses. Later this year I hope to have print download options. They are glamour magic and self empowerment. You can read more about these on my courses page. 

  • The solar feminine

    I go against Western grain in that I regard the sun is feminine. Most goddess archetypes are tied to creation or destruction, abundance or decay. So is our Sun. Yin is warm and life-giving, and so is our sSun. But she can also destroy, not in a temporary aggressive way, but as part of her process of evolution. I believe that we as women can embody this cycle of entropy and growth as we become the most powerful versions of ourselves. The sun has her own cycles of expansion and diminishment, daily and annually. She plays the long game but with absolute intensity.

    If you’d like to read about goddesses associated with the sun, check out the stories of Hathor, Sulevia, Lakshmi, and Amaterasu. And if you want a few fiery goddesses to read into, Pele, Ognyena, and Sekhmet.

    Every time you dress up to feel beautiful and spend time in the summer sun, you honor the divine solar feminine.

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