The spider’s web is web of protection around art-making, around play, and around intentional community. It is an offering of spaciousness from social media. This work allows me to take time with my daily practice, with myself, and with my communities that feels easeful in my body. I hope that these offerings will bring you more ease and consideration in your own body. You can find me here, on my IG @meredithannewhite, and the market + yard sale coming up listed at the bottom of the newsletter 🤎
I have so many things that excite me these days. I want to pack up a suitcase and a box of my sewing supplies and move. I want to kiss my old home goodbye even though I love it with my whole heart and body. I want to hug my neighbors and go out into the abyss. There are sweaters I want to make and quilts I want to sew. My body is eager to weave the webs, and there’s much to do yet!
It brings me to the card of temperance. It’s a card that I see and usually feel slightly annoyed by when I pull it. Temperance often heeds to consistency in the mundane. It feels tangible to me much like the pentacles that run deeply through my chart. It reminds me that I must root back into myself, my practice, and my community when things become increasingly difficult to digest.
Temperance offers up the notion that we are in constant conversation with those around us as a means of accountability. It reminds me that things are unfolding on their own time. It reminds me that what I’m seeking most likely will not be found in the familiar places I’m accustomed to looking.
Temperance reminds me that process is just as pivotal as its culmination. Temperance offers an exchange between vessels. I like to view those vessels as relationship, as cups, as emotional regulation and awareness. It offers reciprocity with land and water and community in daily practice.
Temperance reminds me that love is the defining purpose that I pour back into myself and those around me. Temperance is a container of patience, of allowing, and of consideration. Temperance is alchemy if you let it be.
I led a meditation in the Welaunnee forest recently. I had no idea what I was going to say. I just knew that I had to offer the space for people to come and lay with themselves. The forest floor was bedded with loblolly pine needles beneath us — soft from the feet that crunched it up several times over in resistance.
I talked people through the act of breathing and holding themselves with care. What would it feel like to give yourself a big hug? What would it be like to ask the land for permission to send anger or grief there? When your mind wanders can you find noises in the forest that may ground you?
It created awareness for me in my own practice. I’ve been able to offer moments of respite to those around me, and yet I’ve been denying myself that own softness. Why does it feel easier to show up for others with gentleness and not offer my own body that care? It’s difficult to remember that I am also a vessel that I must pour into depicted on the card of temperance.
There is deep grief bubbling to the surface. Structures are dismantling all around us. We are of witness to war and white supremacist murder and threatened bodily autonomy as we scroll through our feeds daily. I do not say this to invoke fear, but I do honor the fact that we must face the reality at which the world is suffering right now.
I have awareness around the deep-seeded truth that our structures are deeply flawed. The structures are intentionally made to provide for the few. The structures make us yearn for them out of desperation and disembodiment. I often become bogged down by my own purpose in this world that is being taken apart stone-by-stone.
I offer that it’s okay to take your time in a world that asks us to rush. It’s okay to cry in a world that wants us to harden. I offer vulnerability in my practice so that others may feel called to show up with themselves in more gentle ways.
I am reminded how important my work is to come back to as solace for myself. I am reminded how invaluable this work is to feel connected to something larger.
I offer that the something larger always comes back to my immediate community. I believe that the more we dig back into our communities, the more we may be able to begin to create the realities that we want to live in.
Thank you for being a part of this one.
With love and softness,
"It feels less like tugging at the tethers and more like a rope being thrown to me every time I ask for help."
i feel this deeply - follow the rope! <3
thank you for this, looking forward to seeing where you go next