For the Birds: Bird + Bug Oracles for the new year!

Plus: A healthy creative process *is* an enchanting one

Thanks for reading For the Birds! These letters are born of my own artistic vision, but they carry the hope of encouraging you in yours.

Today’s letter is written for my paid readers, but I’m sharing a preview below. You can gain full access *and* support the labor of writing by upgrading your subscription:

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Some thoughts on creativity + process + magic

If you’re new to my Bird + Bug Oracles, welcome!

The short version is this: I used to be afraid of bugs, and now I’m not. Now I love them. This change is the result of three things: choice, extreme patience, and devotion. When combined, these ingredients create palpable magic.

Now bugs show up in my dreams, in my house, in my tattoos (soon!), and in the writing—almost always with allusions to the good stuff that simmers below the bubbling surface of words and their obvious meanings. Bug wisdom is especially potent, I think, as a result of their traditional status as something to be feared, creeped out by, or reasonably avoided.

I’m here to advocate that it is not reasonable to avoid bugs! That it is in fact quite reasonable and valuable to have an active relationship with the things that we are afraid of or bothered by because we learned we were supposed to be. Plus, bugs are part of a strong and sustainable ecosystem; how could they not carry magical-emotional lessons, too?

Soon after I wrote my first series of oracular bug messages (←lol, this phrase) the birds started getting louder, asking to be included not only in the poems, where they already show up often, but in the more mystical stuff, too. Today, I’m including messages from both creaturely classes.

A note on what it means to write oracular messages

You can read the below entries as written just for you (you! yes, you), meant to be discovered in a moment when you especially need them, because this is in fact how I wrote them, and because it’s also how creativity functions. It’s all divination + timing + chance, things that can be accounted for, like craft, alongside things that cannot. It’s me making choices, and me letting creativity make choices through me.

Said differently, it’s you making choices, and you letting creativity make choices through you, too.

Said differently still: you can read the messages below as lyrical expressions of what happens when the surface of me bumps into the surface of things that aren’t me—creatures, ideas, images; phrases that arrived as if from elsewhere. Because I allow this revelatory bumping (←lol) and the friction it causes, I may then use that friction to make a series of artistic choices that are both mine and more than mine. This, too, is how creativity functions.

We conjure and we choose, conjure and choose, conjure and choose. Here’s what I see inside my head right now:

Creative equilibrium is that enchanted and enchanting state of inclusivity, when the self is both full and fully present, but not at the expense of the other, the everything else-ness, the weird, or the mysterious. It lets us be on both sides of the veil at once.

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Bird + Bug Oracles