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“The Goddess is the energy beyond mind in the void of the cave of the yoni ,” says the Yogakhanda, and that nascent void of womb space is mirrored throughout the natural world. It is the pause at the bottom of the exhale, before we draw another breath. It is winter, a fallow meadow under a blanket of snow, the darkness beneath the dormant forest loam. It is the humming singularity of a universe before it bursts into form.

Every minute, Dears, every second…we’re being initiated. Into what? Old way or new way? Fear or Love? Separation or Connection? 

It’s strange what the mind constructs in such moments. Moving fast through the legible possibilities—our reclusive neighbor? a hermit come down from the forest access road?—my discernment was also lurchingly slow, in retrospect. The light continued to move, but what was it about that sway? Then, about a hundred feet off, the light stopped moving. It settled into what we suddenly came to understand was a stare. The fixedness of its glowing cast an unmistakeable halo around the head of a creature now according us its full attention. Or, I should say, we were now giving it out complete attention; it would have been behind and aware of us all along. 

I’ve been thinking a whole lot about the notion of an us lately. What does that mean now, in an orphaned culture such as ours and one so obsessed with the self? What happens when connection via one glowing rectangle or another comes to stand in for connection? What becomes of our commons?

As we contemplate the darkness that surrounds us today, what if instead of collapsing we fashioned our own imaginal discs? Blueprints for something not only beautiful, but wildly different, winged, life-giving.

Imaginal Discs was recorded and produced by Alexis Gideon and myself in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during three extended pre-pandemic visits.