over the Graynbow Podcast

“INTERVIEWER: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.JOAN DIDION: It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”I don’t want to be understood, I want to be experienced. I want someone to peel back my skin with their bare hands. I want someone to finger my arteries and make love to my entrails.I want other people to cut me open like I cut them—I want to be vivisected.I want each of my parts weighed—not by a machine, not in digits and dots. Not in units made by man the moment that he thought better of himself. I want Eve before the apple. Before she knew she was naked. Before she knew that Adam was separate. Ex ante mitosis.I want to be weighed with the instruments given us when we wandered out of the primordial goo; with eyes and ears and hands and noses and teeth.I want to be felt with the senses that god gave you.Because every time you put me into words, you split me in two.When you name something, you cut away parts of it. You separate concept from phenomena. And the moment that you do, your relationship to that entity changes, concretizes. A new meaning gains density—moves from energetic materia into physical matter.Neuroscientist and armchair historian, Iain McGilchrist understands this to be the function of the left hemisphere of the brain; its job is to take the raw, experiential, gestalt data of the right hemisphere and summarize, structure, and systematize that data so that it is usable and storable.I love thinking of the human brain like a computer because, in a sense, computer architecture was modeled after our cognition in a facile and highly simplified way.It was modeled after our understanding of human cognition. Not consciously, but unconsciously. Not intentionally, but intuitively.The only thing that the computer can’t account for, that AI (or as I like to call it, the reduction machine) has yet to mimic, that even neuroscientists can’t quite wrap their heads around is the esoteric, ambiguous, and labyrinthine right hemisphere.A caveat: the wyrd and mystical functions of the human brain can’t simply be boiled down to right versus left—they work in concert. And they are both far out as f**k. I could open a whole can of worms about the temporal lobes. But I’m not a neuroscientist and I’m not here to talk to you about neuroscience.What I’m interested in is the binary relationship we have with language, the way that language both enervates and extinguishes curiosity, language as a Trickster technology……and the way human meaning making, the schemas and subroutines that make us functional—that shore up all of the malleable, ineffable, arcane, and illusive contents of our psyches—can be a tool both for transcendence and devolution.I want to talk about how language can be thought terminating, thought provoking, and downright violent.“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”― Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean: An Essay CollectionThe thing about writing, speaking, putting things into words, is that you are interpreting a phenomenon. You are pinning the butterfly into the shadow box, casting a light on it, and saying “this is the thing.”The silent implication, the responsibility that the writer so keenly wriggles their way out of, is that this is the thing as you see it. As it is right now.It is a fundamental and somewhat philosophical rejection of every other manifestation of The Thing, of The Thing as it is to itself, of The Thing as it is ontologically, teleologically, existentially.And this is true whether we want it to be or not because words, labels, and identifiers anesthetize the brain.Imagine having to explain a chair to an alien. Or better yet, some interdimensional spirit who has never inhabited a body. The moment the word, the label, the meaning-making device you apply to an object is removed from your vocabulary, you are forced to come into direct contact with the details of your own experience, with your knowledge of other people’s experience, with your intuitive sense of what might possibly be true about that object, and most erotically, everything that you don’t know and cannot verify.Without language, we are forced to contend with reality as it is. And that is painful.Presence is painful. Deep awareness is exhausting. It is energetically intensive and often transcendent—it challenges our subjectivity and, if actively surrendered to, pushes us towards higher states of consciousness. Transcendence itself is energetically expensive because experiences of Divinity have to be processed and integrated intellectually, emotionally, and somatically.Which illuminates one of the most important functions of language—a resource management tool. A technology of expediency and efficiency.To try and capture every aspect of The Thing would be an exhaustive use of language as a technology, a colossal waste of one’s energy, and it still would not, could not capture the actual phenomena—The Thing as it is. You are inseparable from your own perspective, no matter how many perspectives you try on.And language is the practice of perspective.Language, an extension of the Logos—the higher logic of the anima mundi—is, in my opinion, a lefthand path to spiritual transcendence. It is the Trickster path. Why? Consider the mechanism: If writing, speaking, thinking, mythologizing and poeticizing, is a practice of trying on different perspectives, it is a game of faces and performances.But eventually the Trickster, the alchemist, the cunning one, comes to realize that his experience, his identity, and therefore his worldview are not fixed. They are all affectations of the universal consciousness, necessary for the channeling of energy into matter on this plane of existence. He has been playing a game within a game within a game.And while that may be how the technology is built to function, there are many ways to use it. But my favorite way is the way Didion employs it—I want to embrace the violence.I want to use language to elucidate and obscure, to play with light and dark, to lure someone into my perspective, and then casually remind them that I’m a liar. Because anyone speaking is a liar. Anyone cutting down the flower and forcing it into the vase is a thief and a murderer and the Plutonian, amoralistic, aesthetically inclined Divinity of the universe is madly in love with them for it.“Cinema Verite confounds facts and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” — Werner HerzogI don’t want to teach everyone; I don’t want to offer tidy little explanations and clarifications for every thought—I don’t want to show my work. I want to speak to the alchemists, the curious skeptics, the lovers of mystery. I want to be the wandering mystic and leave the interpretation up to you.I don’t want to force my truth on anyone; I want to speak from the masks I try on, the perspectives I put into practice. I want to keep playing the game of faces and document that Self-study here because that is the major thrust of Self magick.¹I am an artist and a folk philosopher; nothing less and nothing more.But I am also an opportunist and an irritant. I am a mad scientist and a vaudevillian. I am a lover and a fighter and so many other things that are lovable and contemptible in equal measure. I am a complicated person and one that history will judge just like everyone else screaming into the fiber optic lines that weave us all together on this digital highway. But that, in its own way, will be just a single facet of who I really am.That’s why Joan Didion’s words about the dream have possessed me, have knit themselves into my ideological framework, have become a form of shorthand when I find myself editing and overexplaining and cutting gashes in my own lip so that the words I most feel moved to say remain locked inside me. The dream is your reality, your mythos; the one that you’re constantly co-writing with fate. The dream is the world you create and the fantasy that gives structure to your psyche, your experiences, your energy. The dream is that thing you’re trying to spread like a virus. Not because of any agenda, though we often have one, but because you are possessed of something, some energy or entity that is determined to be born—that is moving through your body like a tapeworm regardless of whether it’s good, bad, or ugly and simply because the universe wills it.If life is a game within a game within a game, that is the game I’m playing.I want to force people into my dream and lay booby traps for their projections. I want to embrace the Trickster technology of language and storytelling, of splicing up the beauty of the world and warping it into something strangely handsome for all its grotesquerie.And I want to accept that I will be illegible to most, reprehensible to some, and hopefully eye opening to many.I want to accept that bargain and I want to leverage it to my advantage in every way possible, just like my no good, violent, thieving ancestors before me. My ethics and my methods will not be theirs, but the spirit will be the same.I am melting down the family sword and shield, making a pen, a wand, a knife. I am righting the wrongs, winding down patterns, closing loops. I am melting down old stories, but they’re still silver at their core. They still capture the moonlight just the same.It’s time to embrace what I’m made of.The Graynbow has been permanently sealed. That part of me remains in my inner council, but is no longer in charge of the proceedings here. It’s time for a new iteration of my Godself to drive the car.Welcome to fade to gray.Footnotes* Self magick is an approach to Worldbuilding that covers a wide range of archetypal, energetic, narrative, and embodiment technologies and uses the theater of the Self as the primary site of magickal working. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Like many others right now, I’m starting to feel caged in by social media.I’ve got a bad case of digital zoochosis because I’ve been relying too heavily on my online spaces to feed my need for connection and help me spread my creative chaos to all the little chaos gremlins and creative alchemists looking to sprinkle some fairy dust on their own inner and outer worlds.So I’ve been looking for ways to break out of these pixelated bars, feel more connected to my own community, and feel more creatively expressed in the world.I’m just trying to locate the energy I want to feel more of in the world, pull it down deep inside my body, swish it around my sacral like a fine wine, and find ways to propagate that energy in my external environment.I’ve gotta cast more art spells.So for my first trick, I decided to make some Oracle Art and spread it around my city. It’s a project I’ve seen many versions of from many creators and I’m putting my own spin on it. I’ve even documented the process in the hopes that I infect some of you crazy kids with the bug of High Strangeness and maybe you steal my idea or concoct your own wild and wyrd experiment.In today’s podcast and YouTube video, I’m talking about that experiment, why I conducted it, and what I feel creatives most need to hear right now.I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to help artists be more resourced, more connected, and more active in their creative practice. Because it’s not enough to just think about things and feel about things, you have to take that energy and put it into action. You have to take that theory and develop your own praxis.You have to get real messy in the laboratory and start churning out prototypes and ponderings and start actively engaging with your own ideas.We all know it, we just don’t know how to do it. When the cage door opens, we find ourselves struck with a peculiar paralysis. We don’t know how to step across that threshold and walk out.As for my cauldron, it’s bubbling with all these thoughts and more.In the near future, you can expect more videos, podcasts, and other ramblings from me about creative process and the messy, rewarding work of fertilizing and propagating your own inner world.And you can also expect more livestreams from me about these things and more in the new hangout I’ve hatched, which I’m calling Office Hours.Unfortunately, Instagram might be cutting me off soon, because livestreams are now reserved for people with 1,000 followers and I’m sitting at a cool 566. But never fear, Substack is here! If I get cut off on IG, I’ll just take my toys and come home to the Graynbow. No one can stop me from chilling with my fellow creative alchemists and yappin’ my yap!But if you would like to see these on the ‘gram and want to help me meet my goal, feel free to go follow me on yonder hellish hills.You are also warned to be on the lookout for my Sun cult, because enrollment begins again soon. But you’ll hear all about that in the pod. ;)Other honorable mentions are my latest course, The Magickal Art of High Strangeness, which you can purchase here. But the Handbook is available for paid subscribers here if you want to take a peek. I’d say you won’t regret it, but I’ve known many a’ magickian to collapse under the weight of the alchemical whoopin’ they called in, and this one is a doozy. 😈Enjoy the ride!Watch the videohttps://youtu.be/OGYiKQNWPEcFollow me on Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/graygarland This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Today, I’m releasing one of April’s YouTube videos, ‘So you want to become god.’In this episode, I'm sharing with you the legend of the Digital High Priestess, my Godself.The Godself is a personal archetype of self that emerges when you begin to connect with and embody your desire—an organizing field that draws the most creatively efficacious parts of you forward and magnetizes inspiration to help you create your most electric and resonant art.In my book, Birthing the Godself, I present a number of rituals and exercises to help you summon and enter relationship with this part, using hypersigil magick to draw more of their energy into the material world so you can see it expressed in your 3D life.It's been my experience that the more you relate to the Godself, the more a specific mythological ecology—the ecology of your inner world—begins to coagulate around them. Over time, you get to know their 'story,' which is really just a symbolic representation of your life and the events—real or imagined—that inspired you to make art. it's your creative origin story! told through the metaphorical language of our subconscious.So let's talk about what it really means to mythologize your life and why you should try it.Watch the YouTube video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbsedWy50A&t=4s&ab_channel=GrayGarlandBecome a paid subscriber for $5 a month and keep an eye out for bi-monthly releases of my 5-part pamphlet. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Today, I’m releasing one of April’s YouTube videos, ‘Just me and the everything.’I've been sinking into deeper levels of flow than I even thought possible. today I talk about learning to balance the active and passive aspect of creativity, meditation, stream of consciousness, and how to get the most out of those juicy receptive states so you can make your most inspired work with ease.Creative work doesn't feel good and easy all the time. It's not supposed to. Every experience is essential even when it triggers our inner perfectionist or concerns about whether we're 'doing it right.'But with a little practice, you can learn to create from flow more often than struggle and kick those persistent creative blocks you might be wrestling with.Watch the YouTube video here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNq4ycRl9c8&t=350s&ab_channel=GrayGarlandBecome a paid subscriber for $5 a month and keep an eye out for bi-monthly releases of my 5-part pamphlet. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Today, I’m releasing one of April’s YouTube videos, Eat the Flame.Here, I’m talking about learning how to slow down, rest, and let my imagination unfold.I had an emotional breakthrough in meditation one day when my mind was resisting rest but my body was crying out for it. It just reinforced for me that learning how to relax and do nothing—truly nothing—is mission critical.Many of us wonder why we aren’t more prolific as artists, why we don’t create more, but it never occurs to us that a space needs to be cleared to build something.If your mind is constantly cluttered with other people’s genius—the brilliant things you read on Substack, the incredible movies and tv shows you watch, the books and scientific studies you read—your foundation is rocky and cluttered. You have to harvest what’s there, store it for later use, and begin preparing the ground to plant something new. There is no art without emptiness. You have to clear your worktable if you want to work.Watch the videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIJdsmwgM8g&t=44s&ab_channel=GrayGarland This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

How did I become such a spectacular so-and-so and god's favorite art-making underdog? Today I'm gonna tell you all about it.In this here podcast, you're getting the full download on how I got into art and embodiment, the inspiration behind my art, how I approach visual art as psychic channeling and some of the messages and visions I’ve divined from my drawings, and some tips and tricks for dealing with your inner critic and unleashing your creative energy.If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re getting access to the intro and overview early. But you can check back on May 12 to watch the video where I flip through all my sketchbooks and all 3 editions of my hypersigil journal. Yes, ma’am! You’re getting a rare peek into my magickal practice, the book where I incarnated an ancestral deity, how I manifested my dream life in only 6 months, and almost my entire visual art oeuvre!For the free folks listening along, here's a link to the vid:https://youtu.be/rmb-6yrEAzc This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Hypersigil magick? Astral travel / active imagination? Becoming the source of inspiration? Building a habit of creating? Being exclusionary as a form of magnetism and rizz? Aspiring to Greatness as an artist? Being insular—detaching from people and politics and identity groups—to preserve your creative voice/vision? We'll talk about all these things and more in this episode of 'deranged woman rants incoherently about the intersection of spirituality and art, consciousness and creativity, magick and the mundane'!And if you want to watch this episode complete with my goofy dance moves and silly facial expressions, you can do that here:https://youtu.be/TjZZJcnmUjE This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

from Substack:I find myself growing extremely weary of most creativity coaching and content that I see. Regularly, I happen upon articles and posts promising to relieve you of blocks and obstacles you have only convinced yourself are there.I hate to spoil the whole article for you right at the outset, but what is actually stopping you from writing a random collection of words and images into your notes app? What stands in the way of you and scribbling the textures you see in a random piece of bark lying on the ground, or trying to copy the work of one of your favorite artists, or drawing a diagram of your bike giving all the different parts made up names? Why not put on some music and dance around your kitchen while you make yourself a late lunch or early dinner or just-because snack? Why not address a letter from your future self and imagine what they might say to you?Why not search around within you and alight on whatever tiny spark of curiosity you can find?Why not go out of your way, diverge from your regular routine, and find something to feel inspired by?I’m not saying these things are easy. They’re actually incredibly hard. They’re hard in the same way that meditation is hard—because they require you to cultivate a different type, intensity, and duration of focus. As an auDHD person, I’ve spent the greater half of 7 years working on this project with many long fits and starts in between.And what is distracting you from doing this work is reading the 10,000th listicle about how to be more creative. How to write a book. How to learn to paint.Just f*****g start.How ‘bout that?“But—! And—! I—!” I hear you stuttering your excuses. And don’t worry, I’m not telling you to stop reading and learning about creativity, exploring different exercises to help you upend your old perspective and see something new. I’m not even necessarily saying we should do away with sharing insights on creativity; how to deal with the dreaded inner critic, how to handle comparison and jealousy, etc., etc. Why, that would be antithetical to my entire existence!Rather, from one airy motherfucker to another, I’m warning you not to live in your head. And not to neglect your own Genius because you’re too busy pedestalling someone else’s.Maybe try discovering some of your own insights…the old fashioned way…by f*****g around and finding out!Ah. My bad. I forgot no one wants to do that anymore. Because it’s not always as exciting as the TikTok girlies made it look.Making art isn’t an aestheticSounds paradoxical, huh? And quite a 180 from the person who keeps telling you to romanticize, mythologize, and, yes, aestheticize your creative practice.But look, a lot of creative work looks like, well, work. It is labor. It is unglamorous and sometimes not even that fun. Honestly, it’s kind of like exercising. If you’re not in the habit of going or haven’t been in awhile, it’s going to feel like a royal pain to drag your ass to the gym and fire up that treadmill. But then, once the endorphins start flowing, you start to notice it feels really, freakin’ good. You sail home feeling productive, accomplished, and energized.That’s what it feels like to show up and write your morning pages.Or carve out the time to sit in the emptiness and spend quality time with yourself and your thoughts.Or go out into nature and extend your cognition into a new environment.If you try to grab your journal and go post up under a tree like one of the TikTok girlies, having never spent time regularly practicing and honing this sort of focus, expecting to feel like you walked out of a Godard film, you’re going to be royally disappointed.You’re not going to be able to buy into the aesthetic because you haven’t developed a taste for it. I hate to break it to you, bestie, but you’re like a 12 year old sipping on 50 year old wine. (And you should really put that away because it’s bad for your cognitive development.)Trying something different to get different resultsDevotion is a lovely concept until you need a little willpower to back it up. Eventually, you’re going to need to learn a little bit of discipline if you want to derive deeper levels of enjoyment from life.If you really want to feel inspired and turned on all the time, you have to actually practice that. You have to build the muscle.You have to actually try something new to get different results. Stop worrying about how to write an article to convince other people that you’re the voice of your generation and start being the voice you need to hear right now. Say what’s on your mind—I know it’s not all tumbleweeds up in there!And I mean literally stop trying to write an article. Stop thinking of it as something you’re even going to put out. Stop thinking of it as art at all, if you have to. (I certainly have.)Step one tiny toe outside the circle of salt you’ve trapped yourself in and do something a little scary—whatever that is. Stop trying to make the art you think you’re supposed to make and make the art you think you’re forbidden to make. Write one, tiny 300 word article exposing how deeply uncool you are (hey, I’m just quoting the voices in your head), and try publishing it just to see what happens. You can delete it later! The internet ain’t that forever! Newsflash, diva, no one really cares that much about you!I have seen too many creatives get absolutely, life-haltingly constipated because they want to discover the art that’s going to make their heart sing and their ego rejoice, but they refuse to spend the time finding it, and they refuse to release all the imperfect results along the way.DO NOT DO THIS!!! RELEASING YOUR ART INTO THE WORLD (if that’s the journey for you) IS PART OF THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS. IF YOU DON’T SHIP IT (however that looks) IT CAN NEVER BE COMPLETE, IT CAN NEVER BE BUILT ON, IT CAN NEVER GROW BEYOND THE TINY POT YOU’VE PLANTED IT IN.There is a magick in putting out your work. A sort of alchemy. Refusing to release your work is like leaving the baking powder out of your cake, that b***h is never going to rise!In summation, folks, I’ve said it a thousand times and I’ll say it again:I need you to take the work of materializing your consciousness so very seriously and also so very unseriously at the same time.I need you to stop reading about how to create and just start doing it badly.I need you to stop worrying about what you create and just start creating something.I need you to stop acting like the art you make rests solely on your shoulders and your reputation and realize that you are co-creating that s**t with your Genius and all the energies that want to move through you.And once you start getting that, you’ll be the one writing out advice to creatives and filming cute, aesthetic TikToks of your artsy morning routine. Won’t that be swell??Special thanks to Adriana Michelle for supporting this publication. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Article for over the GraynbowAugust 25, 2024I saw the house in my dreams. It looked exactly like I remembered it and nothing like before. It was larger, more broken down. I walked on thin boards, suspended below high ceilings, cracking beneath me. I felt my ghosts. And then I awoke and saw him—a green flash, tall and large as the bedroom door he stood in front of, the sound of a human voice in the room with me.I am remodeling the dead. I am recreating a faulty blueprint. I am carrying these ghosts with me.You are destructive to what came before you because this is the nature of reality—to be constantly creating atop demolition.I scratch at the pages of my journal, scratching like a rodent trapped in the walls. Trapped in the walls of the house I grew up in—or at least the one I picture when I think of where I grew up. I was full-grown at 12 years old when I threw away all my stuffed animals before moving into the new house. Discarded everything that tethered me to the powerlessness I was eager to leave behind.I would never get that spaciousness back. All the room I had on the second floor of that old farmhouse where the adults could easily forget about me. Where no one could see the light on late at night when the darkness pressed in too close for sleep. Where I could live in my own imaginary world, leaving poems and fairy maps and sketches of beautiful girls in a puddle all around me. Portals to other worlds.I dream of that house because part of me never really left it. Part of me never recovered from what happened there. Or what happened afterwards.I dream of that house because it’s the end of August, on the precipice of my lunar return, and I feel adrift.I’m right smack in the middle of writing what has turned out to be my magnum opus. I had no idea when I started it—I never do. The only way to make great work is to stumble upon it in a fit of discovery, a state of play. And that’s what I was doing when I started the blog. I had just left the biggest project of my life—one that was not my vision but where I had made my best work to date—and I somehow found myself with everything and nothing to prove.I was ready to share all of the experiments and ideas I had been holding back; the stuff that previously had no destination. I was teaching people about the magick spell (my hypersigil) that had virtually changed my life overnight—winning me tons of new friends, a rapidly growing following, and the recognition of people I had spent years admiring from afar.But something has changed for me. I’ve started to think too much about making “good” work, providing value, keeping people interested. I’ve lost connection with my desire.I want to run but there’s nowhere to go.If it’s not this then there’s nothing.If this isn’t what I want, I’m want-less.I don’t understand life without craving. I don’t know what I’m doing here if I’m not chasing something—grandiose or idyllically simple, esoteric or mundane. I don’t know who I am in the world if I’m not following some impulse to create.But in the last few days, I’ve been finding it again. I’ve been re-reading Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer for the first time in 5 years. Something had been calling me back to it. Call it Cancer nostalgia or something else, something deeper—searching for reconnection. There is magic in these pages I don’t quite understand. It’s funny how a spiritual awakening has less to do with the trigger and more to do with what it interacts with inside the individual. When I first read this book, something in me, long-dormant, responded. A chemical reaction occurred. Life around me began to dissolve—the callused identities that formed around a Self I barely remembered.I will be this way forever. Layers deep beneath new skins. The callus that collects around me, a stranger you never knew. Would you recognize me still? Wrapt in memories that outlived you? Would you see an old face, sandpaper soft, beneath the new?Yet instead of becoming something older, the pieces of me fused together with something new. Something I had been carrying like a trinket slipped into my bag by a stranger.Thank you, stranger, I think as I stare out across the winding striations of time to the part of me that exists in all of them. My Genius.My eyes skate across the last line of the book, “I am not returning home.” Tears travel down my face faster than I can catch them. I think of October 6, 2017—when I first read it. I get the startling sensation that the last 7 years have not been real.My entire life was ripped out from under me at that time—the foundation of everything I thought I knew. But I couldn’t get enough distance to see that yet. As if the weight of the change was still bearing down on me, pinning me to the ground. Pinning me in place where I surely thought I would die.I became possessed by this idea of my own death—by cancer or calamity. Nothing could exist beyond this point. Not even me.Not even me.I think of the last decan of Gemini, where my moon finds its resting place. “Cain must kill Abel.” And so Abel fell. I killed the part of me that understood something about the world. And that something became dimmer and dimmer in my memory until it existed only as the ghost of a stain.How could I leave that cult of doom and live to tell the tale? How could I be sure I had even left?But I felt what was missing in me like a book with pages torn out—stubby shreds stuck in the binding that I could almost run a finger over. I felt the absence of operating instructions that had once held me together, kept me moving in a single, unified direction. Animated by a relentless, gnawing imperative to never remain still. I felt it like the mournful echo of life in a now-barren place—however mutated and distorted that life once was.It twitched and writhed in my brain like a cancer, like an infernal malignancy. Something undiscovered and undiagnosable but no less known to me and the others I’m sure have perished from its pox.As I let it all flood back in, I want to sit vigil with this sensation. This strange collapse of time. I have to be in a specifically open and yielding place to time travel like this now, so I find myself savoring the experience even when I am washed up on shores of bad spirit, cursed times. It’s like part of me lets go of the steering wheel, abandons the helm, refuses to look forward or even back.I rest my eyes for a moment and I am somewhere else.I know it deep in my bones.And while my mind might know when and where I am, there is no convincing the soft animal of my body that knows the truth.I am somewhere else.Sometimes I don’t know where I’m being lead and it makes me not want to go. But the beauty of the unknowable calls to me—glittering in the folds of space and time—and I always end up back here. Right here. In this way I have always had more courage than most. More courage to plumb the depths. To touch the edges of my reality and see them disturbed. To watch things change.To watch the known become unknown.I don’t know how many more catastrophes I can handle before I break. But I know if they keep coming it’s because a part of me willed it. And when I am inside the devastation they have created all I can see is its perfection.This is the thing in me that responded to Annihilation. The thing that understands mutation—even when it violates our human senses of the “natural” and the “normal”.Life finds a way.And I’m not clinging to old paradigms of life.If my destruction is what nature demands of this next evolution, I will be glad to have been a part of it.Compost me into something new, I beg the moon as it drifts into Gemini. I want the sun never to rise. I want to stay out here forever in the belly of this change—in the warm night air where I am a denser patch of the fertile darkness. The melancholy is indescribable—euphoric and terrifying—and I have forgotten who I am inside of it. The forgetting feels like freedom.What I dread is to remember—to be given something new to cleave to. Some new identity to claim. But that, too, is part of the cycle, and I can’t bring myself to reject any of it.So I take myself back inside, feeling finally ready for what is to come.Surrendered to what is before me.Ready to be the Digital High Priestess again. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Finally releasing this podcast I recorded a couple months ago on the magick of making random, unpolished, intuitive art and opening yourself up to other ways of knowing, other modes of processing, and the ineffable aspect of your internal alchemy.We think of the process of developing ideas as being exclusively intellectual, rational, conscious. But when we think of the creative process that way, we cut ourselves off from the magick, from the ritualistic, intuitive way that we feel through an idea. We end up trying to make art with one hand tied behind our back.And if you want to get the magick going, you’d best start engaging your ideas directly and indirectly. You’re going to want to develop other methods of getting to know what’s bubbling in your inner cauldrons. And in order to do that, you’ll have to get a bit abstract. I recommend trying tools like somatic dialogue, meditation, automatic drawing and writing, weaving rituals—the only limit is your imagination. You never know what might connect with your individual subconscious, what practices and processes might bring forth your Genius. But if you don’t start thinking a little experimentally, you’re going to be stuck in your cozy little creative rut forever.Get a little weird with it! What’s the worst that could happen? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Ranting at you about how your art is a magick spell.This is a voiceover from my latest Substack article. Head over to overthegraynbow.substack.com to subscribe. Become a paid subscriber for $5 a month to unlock episodes early. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Today I’m talking about the non-linear, sometimes lengthy journey to a consistent creative practice—the long living and dying process it takes to get to regular communion with Spirit by way of your Genius. The way your creative practice itself actually transforms and terraforms you—killing off parts of Self that oppose your aims and recycling them.Because you didn’t think you were just gonna burst out of a cake and start some creative monkhood, did you?Do you think that I would even sign up for that? No, babes. I’m not made for the monkhood. Neither are you. (Maybe a very slay, imaginative, playful monkhood. We’ll workshop it.)In my experience, getting to the level and quality of creative engagement you dream of takes a lot of small steps along the way. Learning how to be in alignment with your Desire is a Process. You’re going to have to get in touch with some body signals and begin expanding to hold that highly sensational energy.And by the way, for a long time, I was scared of my lifeforce energy! After too many years of overfunctioning and a couple seasons of burnout, I realized that I felt baseline threatened by my own sacral pulse—by my desire! So today, I’m telling you all about how I began acclimating to being in my own energy and moving that energy without sending my nervous system straight into freezey-wheezy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Today, I’m prattling on about why you shouldn’t bother waiting for “inspiration” when you can ignite your curiosity. Let’s talk about how our tiny, boring, “unaesthetic” fascinations—explored through creative media—can lead us to our larger purpose.And your purpose isn’t some kind of static, compact mission statement—it’s a felt sense, it’s your evolving desire, and it has a million different expressions in this lifetime. When you’re in contact with that felt sense, you don’t even have to worry about what it looks like or what it means—you just show up and BE it.We spend a lot of time casting about for a concrete, verbalizable purpose but almost no time actually following the breadcrumbs of our curiosity to experience it.We spend a lot of time fearing that we’re wasting our life and not enough time honoring our daily desires and how the collective consciousness is itching to live through us.So let’s talk about what’s keeping you from following your curiosity and how you can drop back into it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Today, I want to talk about why all the ease and flow girlies are dead wrong about discipline.Discipline, to me, is a process of reconnecting with your internal fuel sources. It’s not about suppressing your emotions and getting to work because Daddy Capitalism said so. It’s about being in alignment with your deeper desires and feeling through the resistance that comes up around creative work instead of avoiding it.Because here’s the thing, creativity is self-connection. It’s where we get to engage parts of our Self we don’t often spend time with. It’s how we process emotions, alchemize wounds, and build our dreamworld. Creative engagement and expression is an emotional need. So you’re not doing yourself a whole lot of good by repeatedly neglecting it.Check out my merch This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Today, we’re chatting about why your art practice isn’t about making art at all. I talk about what it actually means to fully absorb into your inner world and how hypersigil work can help you build momentum and energy to actually do that art-making part you’re all so crazy about!We’ll also discuss a little bit of how breaking up with your healing journey and embracing your “unhealed” present through expressing your creativity can actually—you guessed it—be healing.Giving up on the belief that only the most healed version of me can exist happily, holistically, and make mind-blowing work—giving up the identity of being a “traumatized person”—really slingshotted me forward into what I now believe to be, ironically, the most healed version of me. Embracing a life with wounds and allowing myself to revel in the lushness of my own grief has not only vastly improved my mental health, it’s enhanced my creative capabilities and increased my desire to express myself.And honestly, there’s no place I’d rather be.Check out my merch This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Gray gabs about the Void—what the Void is, different ways you can work with the Void, microdosing vs macrodosing the Void, and how making friends with the emptiness and flexing your imagination muscle can supercharge your creative practice.If you want to really absorb into your inner world, you have to receive and appreciate the art you’re constantly co-creating with the universe. You need to get comfortable playing with your own consciousness.And if play feels difficult to you right now, some Void surfing might just do the trick.Check out my merch This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the OTG Podcast! Subscribe for $5 a month to get all episodes 2 weeks early, delivered straight to your inbox. Otherwise, keep an eye out all your fave podcast platforms. ;)Prepare for a massive lore dump in this brief history of how the heck I built a relationship with my Genius (daimon, higher self, etc.) and discovered the archetype I reverently call "the Godself."We'll talk about how my acting background instructed me in channeling and embodiment and how I began applying that to visual art and writing.I'll also outline how living in my imagination to escape trauma (no direct discussions of that trauma here) made me a creative powerhouse. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fadetogray.substack.com/subscribe