The Wandering Kitsune

During times of visionary based emotional healing, we connect more with nature. Looking for the dots, lines, and patterns as they knit new meaning in ourselves and new identities. This is the story of how this new understanding of life came to me…

A few years ago, I went out to play at an off-community gathering where I unknowingly met my spirit for the first time. I first met a woman who told me my spirit was a fairy, and as the night progressed, a siren, as my eyes began to glow under the colored lights. I connected with families who were creating new spaces for community to gather and to share new ideas.  I met a lifelong friend who asked if I wanted to paint with fluorescent color on a spin art bike he had made for gifting. Realizing my inner child began its healing journey through wonder and motion as the paint dripped and splattered, blending with colors I had never seen before. I listened to stories of lives lived around a community fire, living free within a divine comedy. A major attack on innocence on this evening shook our collective to the roots. It turned the comedic energy of our collective space into a divine tragedy. With time frozen for a lot of us, my friend and I continued our banter, teaching me about positive distraction. Finding light in the dark realities of our world and seeking new energies as the negativity and anxiety of the gathering began to vibrate around the space.

My new friend was a wanderer, putting his spin art on a mobile cart to welcome new people into our community, and eventually lighting the fire of flow within himself. Gifting small packages of creativity and wonder as he walked around the world. Being fresh blood in this divine space, I didn’t realize my potential to create more inspiration for those who play. The more I connected with people within the community and met more of those who were guiding and inspiring further bridges to link us all together. Many of us are lost, but those we interact with help us seek hidden truths within us all if we take more time to see our places outside of society.

Through years of experiences like these, and the experience of lighting my first solstice fire on my birthday. I found the glittering magic that guides me through the webs of societal judgment and disconnection within our modern communities. I spent many years not seeing the kitsune I collected in the forest that fateful night. I had kept his freedom of movement locked in a cage of my own anxieties. I stood frozen, left in a mess of pandemic stress, propaganda, and rage. Losing the joyful, fiery spirit that was the child inside of me. I became the fox that I had trapped, looking to design to find healing and wellness from my eternal stress.  Though the kitsune only grew angrier, as I lost my identity to fit inside an even smaller cage.

I had to find inspiration from the internet for products and consumerism that kept me lost, seeking more and more knowledge to fill the void created within myself. I was slowly filling my holes with online personas, new authorities, and mindless media. Becoming a voyeur of judgments, consumer ads, and trends, and holding all those woeful stories and negativity underneath my skin. All those cozy knits I wore to protect me from the sins of society were deteriorating. All I had was one strand of red yarn left. So, I grabbed my yarn needle, and I started to fill the holes within my rainbow socks. Trying to stitch all of us back together in my soul with joy, laughter, and movement towards building for something greater. Howling at the full moon as I was filled with so much excitement for the futures that could be created.

Though these inner spirits are guiding our bodies to connect through the metaphysical waves, guiding us to find the ritualistic performance and rhythms of the universe, we have lost to the concrete and iron of cities. Music and dance still unify us in these spaces, many now looking to events that connect and inspire us to higher states of being. These synergistic energies show us something greater within the construct of time, understanding reality, and our safe places within nature. This inspired me to create new profound identities, new solutions to urban problems, and new ways of seeing through the divine mother.

The wandering Kitsune spirit within me led me to move again. Awakening my high priestess of knowing, looking at the signs all around us and connecting the dots, and lines within nature, stirring me from the simulation. Breathing me into rebirth for a new reality for me to see with a head held high out of the matrix. To share this message of going back into the body to guide us back to our roots, rhythms, and fiery breaths.

Community in the 4th Dimension

What do you think of when you think about community? Your neighbors, co-workers, friends, and maybe even people you interact with on social media. For me, a community is built through compassion, inspiration, and skill-sharing. Nature provides us with the landscape, which serves as our guide to finding safe places where we feel welcome.

I wanted to think about the term "community" broadly and narrow it down to the pieces in which it could grow. I’ve always had this feeling of being out of place within the overall constructs of society, so I found niches in which I found a sense of belonging. For me, it started with me, the individual (a dot), mapping the lines that connect us.

I first joined my community 4 years ago, looking for a greater sense of freedom. Through my initial interactions, I found new freedom in skill-sharing with others, embracing child-like play, and small tokens of art created together. From the confidence built within these experiences, I began to wander further, meeting new faces that saw me in the newer version I was. My network expanded further, always finding people who shared moments and experiences of healing and embraced my artwork. This expanded into a version of me that had an overall sense of freedom. Within my work, within my identity, and within the overall community.

Within my thesis proposal, I outlined the term ‘close-knit community.’ It is defined in the dictionary as “bound together by intimate social or cultural ties”. For me, close-knit or tight-knit refers to communities and human relationships that are strongly linked, with intimate bonds of compassion, interests, and skill-sharing. When I think of close-knit, I think of a tightly knitted sweater with no poor tension gaps or holes, which relates to a community that sticks together, leaving no opportunities for someone to "fall through the cracks."

Large community networks have fallen apart due to digitization, leaving more holes than lines to travel through. Leading to depression, loneliness, and isolation as we try to throw our ropes to the other side, hoping someone will catch it and help us across. Digitization makes us forget the one thing that unites us all on this planet: nature. We forget we are nature living within our concrete jungles and private housing. We’ve constructed a future in which we never have to go outside. Technology isolates us from people, as we look to our phones instead of at each other. Our profiles have become our masks, hiding our true selves from the rich wonders nature provides every day. We now look at it through a screen, not seeing the webs of connection that unify all things. Our connection to nature and each other is our human power. It’s finding the flow in all things, from the grass in the breeze, how mycelium helps the trees, and how water flows through all of us and our constructed societies. Products that connect things, like yarn and cables, are made of threads, which make thin lines larger. This relates to the concept of Ikigai, a Japanese term meaning “reason to live”. You become the yarn or cable bulked up by the threads that hold you together. I found that the togetherness of all things, from what I love to what I’m good at, and finding a solution for what the world needs, is my reason for living.

How could we, as a society, mend this relationship with technology? To remind us that we all breathe the same air. I want to look at it as a tool to reconnect ourselves physically within time and space. Making technology more useful than screaming our opinions, comments, and lifestyles for all to see. I want to look at technology through a new lens. Seeing how it could create community spaces that embrace our pasts, heal our present emotions, and create safer spaces for new generations to gather and make new connections. Helping people find their inner child and feed it what it needs: healing, play, and opportunity. Through this project, I hope to rebuild the confidence lost to social media and the new ways we treat and see everyone around us based on what is fed to us online. Rebuild the network of nature and nurture unified to give people higher paths within their thinking and minds by tapping into the flow and movement of growth instead of feeling stuck where we are.

I hope to inspire more movement in work and play that could unify more communities today.

Thanks for wandering with me,

Nyx

Synchronicity Within the Universe

When you’re opening the gates of your mind, whether it be through tunnels, spirals, or caves, you can come across synchronicity within your everyday life. Those feelings of Déjà vu, repeating numbers or thoughts, and nature aligning and finding animals that tell stories when time is taken to honor them. Maybe you’ll see the magic in things not normally seen. Choosing to find meaning within it or not. Maybe we should look to synchronicity in nature as a movement. As we learn more about it, we can find more commitments to ourselves, to each other, and to our families. Not just the things we are saying to ourselves, to feel more real in isolation. Isolation is okay sometimes; it can help us feel more connected to ourselves and heal from generational and life traumas. Trauma lives in the body, you see, and sometimes all it takes is a little hug from your family to heal in the right places.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit lost, thinking it’s Christmas in July, but only because I’ve been fluctuating so much through doorways of my mind. What is it really? An optical illusion or a reality? If we go back to the allegory of the cave, we can find an uncharted system that could lead to a search for a new ecosystem and a new life, because for some reason, things are just a little funny when things seem off. I’ve been reading books differently recently, jumping around like a little jumping spider, finding new ways to tell my story. Having conversations with myself through the pages. It makes me ponder Valhalla and the ancestral heavens, and how, when we read through runes, we could find ways to write a new language to people through metaphysical spaces.

Though one thing always bothered me, why are some families only interested in money or gluttony, when we have care, kindness, compassion, and joy that brings us more wealth than cash itself. Though we can spend time with people, we are so caught up in the pleasures that we lose sight of going for a wander. To chat and connect again with each other. Maybe we just get caught up blaming our mothers, to see how much we all need each other, because everything we attach to our identities becomes our healing through self. But is healing Jungian or Freudian? That is up to you, because spirals go both ways, helping some people find ways to think and grow rich within themselves, not the current system. Though through this patriarchal society, we will always find spinners, weavers, and looms who create the fabric of our realities. It all starts as a line tracing the threads of what we desire most in life, where yarn and cables unite, in ikigai, a togetherness in all things. Looking at what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs.

 Connection is power in all the synchronicity and flow of the universe through our cities, through the grass we sit on in parks together, to the water of our lakes and rivers, to the gentle breeze that breathes new life into us, but what could be next? Maybe it’s Martians who grow from looking at our own disgust at things, even when it's just a gentle fly or a mosquito trying to heal a disease. In simulations, we are humans with brains like computers, mind-mapping our lives through our connections. It could be a best friend, a mentor, a partner, a family system, or even a spiritual belief. The world seems so much brighter when looking at smaller communities instead of all the big issues plaguing our planet. Maybe we start at home base and see the connections we have through nature sounds and musicals, Detroit city, and earthly delights to find upward movements through spirals to places like Nirvana, or is it Valhalla actually?

The Mind is a Mirror or is it a Cave?

Ask yourself this question: Is your mind a mirror or a cave? In a philosophical way or an allegory of a cave?

If we look at Plato's Allegory of the Cave, within its image, we can see 4 houses of cognitive activity of the spirit of consciousness. Within self and within cosmic connection to the liberator of self-connection to the stars, to nature. Nurturing a community, philosophy, and finding your flow within the ebbs and flows of everyday life. It is a connection to self and place within the oneness and expanse of the universe. Inspiring forward movement within self-development and growth.

Our thoughts and feelings reflect like a mirror on our faces, through our energies, and in the unnoticed tones and voices of our own minds. A reflection pool of our true selves and all the good and dark parts of it. As if becoming a character in a play of reality. The mirror can reflect us as different versions of self or archetypes we fall into, even as characters we play, night and day.  

The cave shows us there is a way out of the self's containment of darkness, filled with distractions, and of finding freedom in discomfort, through metaphors of fire, shadows, and puppets of different levels or pieces of the personal hero’s journey. Plato describes those with chains watching shadow puppets and light flickering on a wall in front of them. This makes me think of those who live a more sheltered life of repetition over exploration. How would you escape your chains?

is how you adapt in situations, as well as subconscious conditioning from past experiences, breaking free of cultural conditioning. In modern society, we have ancestral knowledge and generational learned behaviors that we are, at times, unconsciously aware of. These are some things we could dive deep into, creating more suffering by knowing the self in an characterized light.  Something that doesn’t reflect our initial character but is deeply ingrained in our DNA. Within a speculative technological future, a call for the liberation of consciousness is necessary for more utopian thinking. The human condition is suffering. (Highlight The Art of Being). Plato theorizes that the sun is the fire within the cave, the deep unconscious of liberating from trauma. The Metaphysical (add quantum entanglement and the creation and power of myth + Plato). The ominous shadows that speak of life, love, and war.  4-dimensional shapes and language to those suffering in confinement. However, some are so deep in darkness that they can only see shadows, this layer of our fractals, splitting, spreading traces and tendrils. The dark traumas within the human psyche, Traumas of life and suffering, to reach higher forms of imagination and connections within the neurological mind map. Spiraling up and down and every which way around, Plato mentions that those confined eventually find a way out of their internal darkness, a war of worlds. Did they go deeper within themselves, create an ego for protection, and become a new light for humanity? Or can we even make it out of the cave, as a new inferno of Anthropocene within our planet, seeing a new. The moon is another form of self-reflection as a mirror to the sun and a light source at night. How do we put this in modern terms?

If we look at nature, nurture, philosophy, and flow within movement, could we find our lost spirits, our ancestral powers that we collect by dancing around fires? To me, it seems that the majority of humanity has lost its internal spirit and is experiencing a loss of soul. What is sucking it away, becoming slaves to a system that doesn’t see them? Probably.  When we think about education like this, we initially think of colleges and higher education. In reality, we should look at cartoons, movies, and video games that are now raising our children, especially those raised on social media and YouTube.

According to the media, a high percentage of kids in Gen Y are unable to read. Public Schools, in general, have a shortage of teachers who care and are not paid enough to babysit kids who haven’t learned to respect people.  Have we lost education to corporations and the largest donors? The government gives out so many federal loans to students because of the rise in college tuition, but they raised those because the government would pay them, leaving young people in massive amounts of debt that the job market cannot handle paying living wages anymore. It’s the biggest crisis for Millennials and Gen X. Many Gen Z are becoming their own entrepreneurs because of this, and seeing what mistakes previous generations have made and learning from them. So why is there a giant “class” war when it’s a generational one? “ Ok, boomer,” we all say, because we are rejecting traditional values. Which religion has passed down through many different branches and interpretations of the Bible?  Maybe we are just looking at it in a completely different way due to rampant evangelical take-over, which is very Freudian in my opinion and destructive to young women and children everywhere.

Well, after reading all those facts of the world, I’ll go back to the philosophical aspect of this, which is whether we are mirrors or caves? I believe the cave is a metaphor for a downward spiral within the mind, unable to find the “sun” … Though I believe, since the sun was described as the fire that kept them warm, it actually is the moon reflecting the sun and becoming the Mirror as the upwards spiral of freedom of exploration and expression within an Earthly Garden. Some get lost in the cave, more tied up within their own experience and trauma that they cannot face due to fear.  The mirror is the freedom of emerging from the cave and seeing, hearing, and being wo[men]. For me, it’s finding freedom of expression and being your authentic self. It is a blend of both; some are trapped within their generational and personal traumas. We all have ancestors, and we should connect with them and build them up through ourselves and who we want to be.