April: Stand Brave
Last month, the depths rose to meet us. This month, we find ourselves on precarious footing—stretched between worlds, carrying our precious ones with us—not yet in motion, but poised to take a mighty big step. Mountain goats spend their lives nimbly scaling treacherous terrain. Navigating nearly vertical cliffs with dizzying drops to the valleys below, these animals are at home in their bodies and their edgy world. These days, we humans are moving through a world we are not yet adapted to. Constantly aware of the drop beneath us, we call on the mountain goat’s surefootedness as we struggle to find a safe foothold.
About this Spell
Our spell this month comes in the form of its own creation story. Every year, we make these calendars in collaboration with unseen forces—allowing our creative work to emerge from within a circle of ancestors, spirits of the land, elementals, guides, spirits of time. Last year, as we began to make the 2020 calendar, our process opened us up to bewildering difficulties. We’re used to feeling occasional stuckness or frustration within a process that is otherwise full of trust, joy, excitement, and flow. But in making this calendar, we were surprised to find powerful grief and fear. Our creative process stalled for about a week as we processed these powerful emotions, both of us struck by how big they were. These feelings also felt surprisingly regressive—incongruous to where we thought we were both as collaborators and friends. Gradually, we began to understand that we were feeling into 2020, getting an intimate sense of which spells would be needed to offer assistance through the coming times.
We didn’t know we would be facing a global pandemic this month, but we did feel into the difficult energy of these current times from our creative process last year. If we were to continue to trust our process despite surprising disruptions, we had to accept that trust was part of the medicine needed. If 2020 was going to bring us fear, and so many other big emotions, we knew we’d all need courage to get through. We offer this image to you (and to ourselves) as a focal point for this courage, that we may stand steady in the midst of danger, and trust our path through the unknown—grateful for whatever connections we get to carry with us. Bravery is not the opposite of fear. Rather, it’s the choice we make to keep moving into fear, feeling it for what it is, and continuing to choose the course that will do the least harm and the most good.
**Stay tuned - we’ll be sharing some spell work specifically crafted for this pandemic very soon**
Meditation on Stand Brave
For this meditation, please find a position where you can connect with the ground - whether it’s through your feet, your seat, or your spine, try to find a stance that will allow you to feel your connection to this earth. Settling into this posture, begin to notice your breath, and let it be as easy and as free as can be. Notice the way your abdomen moves with your breath, and the different qualities that inhale and exhale bring. Gradually, and to whatever degree is possible, drop into your breath as though it was the only thing carrying you through time. Like a hammock, slowly rocking, let the movement of your breath hold you, as you rest. Then, begin to notice where your body meets the earth or ground. Feel the firmness, the utter hugeness of the land below you. As best as you can, perhaps ignoring the thoughts that get in the way, fill your body with the feeling of belonging, to your being, on this planet, in this time. If you can, imagine that this is the resounding message that gravity brings to the open intelligence of your body: belonging, a rightful place among the living beings of this world. Imagine yourself in an unbreakable bond with life on earth, an unbreakable bond to gravity and connection. Let these relationships fill you with the strength and fortitude you need to either rally your energy to meet a challenge or rest your system during these trying times. Let this strength be merely an inhale or an exhale away at any moment—let it come in the simple turning to your body as it is held in place on this loving earth, carried through time by your breath.
About the painting:
Corina: I have an irrational and abiding love of stacked animals. It might derive from the picture book of the Bremen Town Musicians that I read as a child, where animals hopped on each other’s backs and formed an unruly chorus. Whatever the root, it brings me great joy to see animals standing on top of each other, but for this joy to be pure they must stack themselves willingly. You can plop an unwilling smaller dog on an unwilling larger dog, but that’s not true stacking and no one will really enjoy it. But when I come across images like the source image we found for this—where a baby hitches a ride on top of a parent mountain goat, the joy is real.
Jocelyn: This image was all about triangles for me - the most stable form. There was a strange dissonance between the stability of the composition and the wild textures that were coming through of goat fur, jagged mountain, twilighty sky. I felt as though I wished I could sculpt this image, etch and carve it rather than make it out of water and pigment. I had to surrender to the softness of my medium and let the dance happen between contrasting qualities.
This month:
We’re going to send out a special spellwork offering to meet this pandemic. We’re also going to restock our etsy store with a bunch of new stuff and launch a massive sale so folks can more easily access supportive artwork at this time. Meanwhile, we’re working steadily on the 2021 calendar and other exciting projects.
As always, you can follow our shenanigans at @abacuscorvus on Instagram. And you can find out what each of us is up to by following @corinadross and @jocelyncorvus
