The Moon Tarot Card: A Meditation
In The Moon Tarot Card:
In the land of dreams — when your intellect is illumined by intuition — two dogs bark and howl — these are your natures. One of them is tamed and one of them is not. Which is the one that you feed?
In the distance the two towers symbolize Intelligence and Instinct. One is man-made, the other divine. Most people live in one tower and not the other. Very few live in both.
The Moon is eclipsed and the face in the moon is a projection of your face. The droplets raining down are what cause waves in your subconscious. Sometimes they feel like a disturbance, but they are meant to stir you awake.
In the foreground there is a pond, where a crayfish lives. The crayfish is YOU — boxed in by your own five senses. The pond is rigid and stagnant and nothing new is ever born there.
But you can crawl out, and walk the path past your dogs — your submissive self and the one who revolts. And past the towers that paralyze you with paradox. Because you know there is something beyond what you are told. And you know there are more lands than just this one land.
Because you are primordial, made of angels and stars. You are not just a crayfish. This is a shell and you have choice: Retreat into the stagnant pond or leap beyond everything you know.
Inspiration: Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism
Illustration & Animation by Olga Goriacheva
A New Temple
A New Temple is the completion of a three-month psyche project. It is a short, small book of poetry, dreams, visions and animal spirit messages. It is a quest for healing ancestral trauma and it is dedicated to my bloody, muddy ancestral mothers who made their entrance in the middle of my life and said, “You wanted aliens, but instead you got us.” It is available here.
A form of cord cutting is becoming a new creature. This book was a quest to heal and to honor my mothers by building a temple with my words. Their blood is my ink. Completing this was a form of soul recovery. Now that it’s out of my system, my psyche has more room to play and imagine and create something new.
The book itself is 5 x 7 inches and 54 pages long. A New Temple begins somewhere in the middle and the rest is a visual journey through dreams, visions, poetry and animal spirit messages. Below are some pages from the book.
The resurrection of Phantom Kangaroo
More than 10 years ago, I created an online poetry magazine called Phantom Kangaroo. Its birth could be described like this:
Strange occurrences of kangaroos appearing in areas where they should not be are sometimes reported. Often they appear ghost-like, disappearing or hopping through walls.
Some speculate they are aliens, or spirits haunting us from another dimension. Someone suggested animal teleportation, maybe they bounce in and out of existence. Whatever they are, these phantom kangaroos are an omen. A cryptic warning that you will soon be falling into the unknown. They seem to say: I am real and I am a hoax, and so are you.
Sometimes poems seem to say the same thing. Sightings of these poems can be found here.
I was in my mid-twenties, poor and living in a studio in West Oakland. Phantom Kangaroo was a passion project that, at times, couldn’t sustain itself. Like the cryptid, it hopped in and out of existence. At one point the domain was held hostage by algorithms wanting thousands of dollars to give it back. So I waited it out.
This past year of sheltering and cocooning forced me to rummage through my inner cauldron for all the things that bring me life. Creating a space for poetry is one of them. For the past few months, I worked late nights and weekends to put together something that was long overdue — Phantom Kangaroo: The Anthology. It is a 296-page hardcover book of 300 magical and paranormal poems published during the past decade.
Now that it’s complete and no longer haunting me, I have resurrected the magazine. Issue 24 will be published on June 13, 2021, along with the first ever print magazine. Phantom Kangaroo remains an eerie place for poems. The door to the unknown is now wide open.