#009 Seeking internal waters
By the way, did I tell you that these drawings of the kin are mine? I always liked to draw, many different things. I used to do that more often when I was a teenager and in the early years of my adulthood. I connected with many friends along with the early 2000s because of my drawings and writings on blogs. I was drawing and writing everywhere. I started recording my stories in short comics and narratives, sometimes written on the computer that my grandmother brought home in 1994 after a trip to São Paulo, sometimes drawn in my many notebooks, I always had many sketchbooks around.
Once a teacher put my notebook on top of a locker so that I would pay attention in class and stop drawing. Time passed, and I bought magazines that taught me how to draw in manga style, a simple style that helped me refine my technique. I always felt driven to create from the images that came to my mind and not to copy drawings, although I understood that this last method could help me learn to materialize some of the forms that I was unaware of. My drawings were always very 2D, almost like pictograms that represented more dimensions of something realistic in my mind. When starting college plans, a friend said “you should do advertising”, and so it was.
I have with me the first drawing I made there. It wasn't the best, it took 5 minutes, during a workshop at the beginninf of university... But it was a comic strip about our relationship with time. Time and work, "why do I work so hard to make money but work doesn't give me time to enjoy the money I earn?" It was the reflection that the short character, half bald and with a big nose, was telling himself. This comic strip concealed a fear: not making enough money to support me independently. Drawing, at that time, seemed to be a hobby and not a profession. So I decided to enroll in Physics at the state university and thought about being a teacher, the profession that, at the time of high school, seems the closest to a young man without much reference to what jobs would be possible with my creativity and ability to draw together with my interest in the mysteries of the cosmos. When I told my mother she told me “wow, son, Physics is such a square while you're freer like a circle…". I remember her doing the shapes with her hands in the air. Maybe I still can unify square and circle, science and art, after all.
In our daily journey through different qualities of time, also called cosmic tones, we are discovering an interesting framework of being. The tones of expression – magnetism, lunar/polarity, electricity , and self-existence/autopoiesis – are like a strategist setting a plan: identifying the purpose, considering the challenge, seeing value in the service, defining the forms of action. The tones of experimentation – overtone/potency, rhythm, resonance, galactic/integrity – goes from planning to project management: empowering to command, finding the pace, channeling inspiration, remembering what makes you whole. In the tones of integration, we start using them all in our favor:
9. Intention (pulse what we want to realize, our solar quality)
How to reach my purpose?
Is not an easy task to share my research like that. If you had the opportunity to be in one of my classes, with beautifully designed slides, carefully drafted sentences, and experiences about each of the subjects we talk about, what is happening here is... something else. While in my classes the sands of an hourglass flow, here in my writing you are not walking in sand, but imersed in my internal waters. These are my inner emotions. When I was about to start writing this series, a phenomenon was announced in the sky. A Blood Moon total lunar eclipse, occuring on May 15-16, 2022. The moon was so close to the Earth, hiding from the sun and its shadow and becoming red. Remember that? I mentioned how the Tzolkin spin is always starting near some eclipse.
Elizabeth Howell
Well, the solar seal of the day is the Red Moon, in the Solar tone of pulsing our intentions. The archetype of The Healer, the regeneration that happens far from the sun light, during the moon phases. She is the queen of the waters. To indigenous cultures, she is our Grandma Moon ("Vovó Lua"). I think is important to mention, while the science says that we, humans, doesn't have water mass enough to be affected by the gravity of the moon just like the water of our oceans, we also are still starting to make sense of the invisible impact (quantum: really small scale) of celestial bodies (aster: really big scale) with fields of the physic such as the loop theory from Carlo Rovelli, that studies something called Quantum Gravity. He explains the scientifical approach as the background for that on his book "Helgoland".
Everything to say, on Earth, the moon cycles are an important part of our understanding of time. And so its interrelation with the sun. Lunar and Solar cycles are the main steps of the development of calendrical systems. (Now we are adding here the perspective of considering other stars and the galaxy itself. But lets keep talking).
Temporality Lab
While we all move another ring around the sun, 13 moon cycles are happening. In each of then we are also experiences the 4 stages of the moon phases as weeks. 13x4=52. Oh, this number insist to repeat everywhere. Remember I showed you the image of the press conference about the black hole in the middle of the galaxy with the info that Sagittarius A* "changes" every 52 parcsec? A year has 52 weeks. Our galaxy has the diameter of 52.000 light years (twice the radius of 26.000 light years from the galactic center, remember?). Just to bring again the idea of a fractal scale.
A few years ago I did a 23andMe test, discovering that I have a slightly increased genetic risk of developing celiac disease. It is a condition where consuming gluten can result in damage to the small intestine. At that time, I was struggling with horrible pain and getting sick right after eating "everything", without discovering the cause. Part of my family had the same symptoms for years without knowing why. With the genetic test, I discovered. When I stopped eating gluten and changed my lifestyle by medical recommendation, my health got significantly better. But I also discovered something else.
I am a genetic tapestry. My most recent ancestors were Portuguese and Spanish (2 to 4 generations ago), with some strongest evidence from the Azores islands. Then my grandparents born between 1720 to 1840 (5 to 8+ generations ago) were Indigenous American (the test does not show where respecting people's autonomy in the age of genetic testing. I dream about the Ashaninka warriors since before I heard about my ancestors from Acre in Brazil or my connection with Oxossi, the orixa of the forest. Also, here lies my ancestral connection from the Guarani to the Mayan people to talk more later), Angolan and Congolese (Bantu people), Nigerian (Yoruba people) Manchurian and Mongolian (still uncharted to me...). The ones born in between 1720 and 1810 (6 to 8+ generations ago) were Romanian and Moldovan (Ashkenazi Jewish), Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean (Yoruba), North African (most likely from Morocco, Algeria, and/or Libya), and, for last, Southern East African (again, I don't know specifically from where. Also around the Democratic Republic of Congo, maybe, but also could be from Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan...)
Some of these people were around the Mediterranean region in a broadly way and I could visit some places to feel the region. Others are still in my dreams and vision to go. Or to return. These trips made me understand that every people came from somewhere else before. Nomadism is in our roots. Also, I had the opportunity to connect with Bantu and Yoruba experiences during my recent trip to Brazil in 2022. Unlike the Ancestry Composition, identity isn’t based on science. I've been researching my cultural ancestrality since I had access to the information I am sharing here. Last year, I was one of the researchers in a project about Brazilian ancestralities, a project paid with private investment – since is so hard to get public funding to research in Brazil (also not part of my background, coming from business research and strategy). But I started to feel my calling about original temporalities – original ways to relate to time – from different cultures before these recent studies. What they gave me was an extra layer of meaning.
Carolina Schneider Comandulli,Apiwtxa Association
If someone asks me where I belong, the first answer always will be "Belém do Pará", the Amazon rainforest region, the Latin America. I was born there. Also from Acre, Ceará, Pernambuco, Bahia... There are bones and memories of the ones that came before me in these states in Brazil. As Latin, I am mixed race. I have white skin to brazilian standards and I am not white in Europe. I identify as cis queer man. "Know yourself." To write about my self-investigation also about my ancestrality in a more broad sense also helps to give some depth of who is this person talking about cyclical time, reading the Mayan Calendar and mentioning Indigenous American, African and Asian temporalities while understanding its own steps in European territory. It is an ongoing exploration. I am exposing myself, sharing information that is not settled in stone, because we are water. I am making myself vulnerable, because this is also the intention of these temporal letters to you. Let go of perfectionism and show you what is a work in progress. Because it always will be. Every time I learn something new about the world and about myself, everything changes, readjusts, reorders, giving space and time to what was there, hidden, already.
Something curious is that as we don't know much about the waters of our planet – we have a terrestrial bias, as I learned with my friends from Billion Seconds Institute in a recent online session – we also are in uncharted waters about our emotions as the language of our feelings. I feel very inspired by the work as the researcher and poweful storyteller Brené Brown, starting with her stories about vulnerability, and daring leadership, becoming an impressive work of mapping the way we sense the world, our emotions in her Atlas of the Heart.
If Brené helps us to navigate through the water of how to deal with our emotions and how them affects our relationship with others and with the world, another specialist that I've been following since she became the best SXSW speaker some years ago is Esther Perel, couple therapist that had an amazing podcast with real therapy sessions that we can learn so much. In the most recently season, she started to question monogamy and all the traumas it brought to humanity. As a non-monogamous myself, I think is an important matter to discuss here together.
Also, as a big fan of both, how amazing is to be able to share a podcast in which Brené and Esther are talking together (as you noticed already, as a World-Bridger, I like crossovers).
Today I woke up really early to write since I had a busy schedule during the day, but I was not able to finish writing during morning as I wanted. After this week of long days, I am happy to say #TGIF (in Portuguese we say #sextou). Reflecting on my own words, I am surprised to talk about ancestrality and the moon and feelings, and vulnerability and non-monogamy all together in more or less 2000 words. I hope it makes sense to you, in some level. If does, consider to write me back, to share with a friend, to be part of one of my courses and of our community, or just buy me a coffee. ;)
See you tomorrow.
With love (and the whole atlas of the heart),
Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes
NS1.34.11.26, Fri 27 May 2022
Kin 009 Red Solar Moon
