On Seeds of Survival

Updates on Matriarch, thoughts on storytelling, lineage, and time.

Dear Community,

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve written here. Over the past months, I have been channeling my energy and fervent desire for transformation into my artwork and immediate community. I am here now to update you on these endeavors and share some notes from my past month. As always, I have more questions than answers, but I am grateful for my practices (creative and spiritual) that allow me to move through the challenges. I intend to continue focusing on hope, imagining pathways, and sharing what I learn with you all along the way.

🍯 Ongoing conversations with spirit:

Why do we tell stories?

—Because we are always searching. We are collectors of lessons. Stories are seeds buried for future generations. They tell us where to pick up when one individual lifetime isn’t enough to complete the work.

🌱 Important update:

As many of you know, over the past year, I have been prioritizing an important project called Matriarch. This Fall I was able to get some important preliminary filming done for the project, which allowed me to create a proof of concept video. My goal is to complete a short film, and, down the line, use this to secure funding for a feature-length documentary.

Matriarch is now entering its next phase of production. We have an urgent fundraiser taking place over the next ten days. This project intends to thread us back together in all our fallible humanity. Matriarch is a prayer for seeds of survival. I have been working for some time on understanding the connection between myself and my own lineages, as well as to find the connections across cultures that might help us understand one another and work together to resolve the essential issues of our time.

We are in a moment of enormous collective shift and are seeking new imaginings for how to relate to one another and Mother Earth. The scope of this project is large, as I use my own lineages as a blueprint for how we can reconnect across difficulties and come together to transform the world we live in. As a Black and Jewish storyteller, I have a direct connection and relationship to these questions, as well as a history of research across cultures, faiths, and historical contexts.

My team is seeking emergency funds for the next segment of filming — a shoot beginning in March 2024 in Aotearoa (New Zealand). We are in need of $10K to complete the shoot and estimate that it will cost $30K to complete the short.

Creatively, this next shoot is an essential moment in the story arc. I connect my own lineages to the world at large and build on the themes of intuition, sound, and water memory. You can learn more here, or click here to make a quick, seed donation.

I focus on ancient, earth-centered Matriarchal archetypes, connecting and re-centering their wisdom in our collective search for healing. Through the visual metaphor of water, Matriarch explores the waters that connect us and asks us to consider new pathways to healthy futures. 

Matriarch asks:

How can we begin to not only understand our lives as a connection to our ancestors and future descendants but to feel them as such?

How can we expand our imaginations through a courageous look at both the beautiful and the ugly in our shared histories?

As a special substack incentive, folks from my community who donate will receive a free year of a paid subscription. If you are interested in making a larger donation, or becoming more intimately involved with the project, please send me a message.

I appreciate you sharing this fundraiser with your networks and supporting as you can!

Notes from February

(Normally, I preserve these notes for paid subscribers, but this month feel called to share with everyone. This is a bit of what you’ll get if you upgrade your subscription, or donate to the Matriarch campaign)

👁 What I watched:

Killers of the Flower Moon—I was profoundly moved by this movie, particularly by Lily Gladstone’s character and her embodiment of a difficult nuance that I think many women have held. Love, grief, and betrayal—holding survival in imaginable ways. Femmes offer opportunities for redemption to the people who are the most difficult to be with. I think about time and the moment we are currently living through where so many of us feel helpless against fascist, exploitative, and violent regimes across the globe. How do we find the strength to keep moving forward when our prayers go unanswered?

Spirit pulses through me as I watch and I ask

How do we make peace with what is irrevocably wrong?

—we know that this is not the end

Why do we recover the past?

—to unearth the hidden secrets our ancestors left for us

This moment is not whole it is not complete. 

You are, we are. 

This moment is an opportunity and a possibility.

The Twilight Saga — It feels strange to talk about Killers of the Flower Moon and Twilight within the same paragraph, but hear me out. I watched them within the same week and doing so sparked some meaningful questions about the stories we tell. With Twilight, Stephanie Myers built a whole world and franchise based on fantasy from a specific abandonment, insecurity, and anxious attachment wound. I laughed a lot watching and felt tenderness towards my teenage self who was obsessed with this series. The thought after re-watching was…we really are just making all this shit up so I might as well just do whatever I want too.

Obviously, this is only part of the truth. I do feel we hold immense responsibility through our storytelling. The important takeaway, though, was an understanding of creative power, and a recognition that our imaginations can start entire movements… If we can start movements of sexual vampire fantasy, why can we not also ignite other types of movements? How can we tap into the energy of transformation and possibility that fantasy allows in ways that serve a higher purpose?

As artists, many of us are having conversations about what our roles are in the pursuit of justice. We are experiencing internal conflict and tension around “what is right” or appropriate for the times. I sense that we each have a purpose and role and that it won’t always look the same. It feels important that we speak to each other in ways that honor the individual purpose in each of us. Otherwise, I feel we miss the opportunity to fill in the cracks that our egos inevitably leave. We need one another, and we need to be able to be in conversation to be whole. Even and especially through those differences/difficulties.

🎧 What I read/listened to:

The Law of Divine Compensation by Marianne Williamson

Williamson starts off by addressing social injustice as a symptom of collective lovelessness. This resonated because it counters a thread of spiritual bypassing that seems to place blame on those experiencing oppression as if their position were a reflection of their internal negativity. This book also offered useful frameworks for how to collaborate with spirit to shift mindsets that can block our blessings. Whether you consider yourself spiritual or not, it was a reminder of how powerful our minds are, and how our mental energy can dramatically impact flow within our own lives.

My personal justice practice has been predicated on making sure that I am first operating with integrity before I try to engage externally. I appreciated how this book invited me back into a collaborative spirit with the divine and helped me to recognize the ways that the individual, collective, and intangible relate to one another. While the book specifically talks about relationships to money and abundance, it truly felt useful across the board. I will also say— it worked and I have actually begun to see my material reality transform.

And, I’ve of course been listening to my brother’s new single Space + Time. His new music has been refilling my spirit and if you need your cup to be refilled too, I highly recommend you give him a listen.

Thanks for reading, and for paid subscribers, I look forward to keeping you in the loop as I dive into these water studies over the month of March!

Until then…

I hope reading this poured a little sweetness into your cup

Love,

Reva

On Humanity

Reflections on being a human...and on 2023

PART ONE: REFLECTIONS ON HUMANITY

I have been sitting in a prayer for sweetness, for breakthrough, and for peace over the past two weeks. The honey has been slowly seeping into my cracks, sealing up all of the parts that I didn’t know needed it, offering me insight and glimpses of hope.

I’ve spent the past month sitting with what it means to be human, which is not something I’ve ever strongly identified with. I would consider myself a recovering perfectionist, and part of being a perfectionist is denying yourself the right to be human and to make mistakes. The antidote to my perfectionism has been a curiosity about shadow work, and practices that allow us to integrate all aspects of ourselves, and become whole. I started writing a bit about this during the pandemic and an initial inquiry piece that I wrote is going to be published in early 2024 (there’s a link for this towards the end of this reflection if you’re interested).

The past few months have been particularly horrifying, painful, and challenging for many of us. We have been confronted with the reality of some of the ugliest parts of humanity, and are being asked to reckon with them both personally and collectively.

Recently, I had a chance to see Ava DuVernay’s new film, Origin, which is based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste. I was deeply moved and highly recommend that everyone sees it. DuVernay brings to life pivotal moments throughout recent human history, collapsing time and space to connect us. The effect is haunting and humbling.

Though the film directly depicts these painful historical shadows, Origin did not feel at all like trauma porn. Instead, I left feeling a resounding connection to the bigger picture of humanity. It renewed in me a sense of responsibility to stay rooted in this human project by leaning into my own humanity and by trying to see myself reflected in all fractals of the human experience, including negative ones.

To varying degrees, we all carry aspects of the things that we wish to reject. We are each born into the same web of unhealthy structures. We experience different aspects of the same wound, our individual experiences reflecting our positionality within that web. Even with these differences, our illnesses are collective. I wonder these days what it would look like if we each could acknowledge that we’re all a little bit sick in the head, inherently flawed, and at least partially wrong.

I think about Thich Nhat Hahn’s book How to Love, where he claims that to sustain love we should know that even when are right, we are only “partly right”. To me, this speaks to an attitude when approaching conflict that allows us to sustain connection, evolve, and transform together. Humility can bring us closer to one another, rather than separate us. I am leaning into the idea that connection is the only way through the mess.

Stills from Matriarch footage I shot this Fall.

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief and emotional regulation. How can we make sure that as we push for radical transformation, we are not perpetuating patterns of harm? (This makes me think of Triangle of Sadness—which if you know what I mean, then you know what I mean) Is it possible to nurture genuine, radical transformation if we have not yet processed the deep emotional impacts of the things we’ve been through?

To what extent are our imaginations muddied by the waters of our unexpressed grief?

Even so, mud can be filtered into clay, and clay can be used to create new forms. The earth offers us materials for alchemy even through impossible situations. I tie a prayer to this image. I imagine a soft bank decorated with clay sculptures interpreting the many stories, beautiful and ugly, of humankind. I look back at the once muddied, now clear water, and it offers me a more accurate reflection of who I am—who we are.

PART TWO: REFLECTIONS ON 2023 ☯️

I did my best to reflect on 2023 with this vision of humanity and these questions in mind. There has been both light and shadow in my year. Looking at them together allows me to embrace the reality of my own humanity, which somehow helps me to accept and later alchemize the challenges. I continue to search for understanding. I continue to aim for presence with the messiness of the process. Knowing that I am incomplete and always in-process gives me full permission to just keep trying. This somehow fuels my vision and purpose as I move forward into the unknown.

Below are select highlights and lowlights from my year.

Light 🌕:

🌕 I received my first print publication, When Language Broke Open, An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent, featuring my essay Remembering.

🌕 I traveled to Rio de Janeiro to archive the album production process for some prolific musicians that I deeply admire

🌕 Despite some fundraising difficulties I managed to shoot the first segment of Matriarch. This was a huge feat because I was afraid of how deep, timely, and relevant the project felt. I was avoiding seeing things through because I knew it was going to require intense shadow work (my intuition could not have been more spot-on about that). If you’re interested in making last-minute tax-deductible donations you can do so at the end of this post, which would help immensely in getting us to the next stage.

🌕 I participated in the Oaxaca Art & Ecology Workshop through Poco a Poco. (Paid subscribers will receive an in-depth post about this experience very soon ✨)

🌕 I participated in a business and design incubator with Burntsienna Research Society

🌕 I produced demos for my first album, and explored my voice as a producer

🌕 I expanded my photography and multi-media practice through a series on femininity, safety, and sensuality

🌕 I was accepted to the 2023-2024 Soho House X Creative Futures Fellowship

Photos of Ashley Blanchard for Love 2.0, shot on medium format

Shadow 🌑:

🌑 I spent time in an ancestral land that I have a complex relationship with, and unexpectedly experienced the trauma of being in a war zone. I very intimately witnessed the shadows of humanity in a way that has also been very public, making it incredibly challenging to process. It feels strange and wrong to simplify this to a bullet point, but that’s honestly the best I can do at the moment.

🌑 I shed relationships that I didn’t expect to. As I leaned into my values I realized aspects of myself and life that some relationships were no longer aligned with

🌑 I tried to move again and was disappointed when it didn’t work out

🌑 I sacrificed my well-being for my creative projects and felt the impacts on my physical body through chronic neck/back pain and stress-related gut health issues

🌑 I got rejected from several film festivals, incubators, fellowships, and grants.

🌑 I undercharged for my work and realized that I sold myself short

Alchemy 🌕🌑:

I started calling myself a creative alchemist a few years back when I realized that anything could be spun into gold. One of my favorite Ifa sayings is Tibi tire eji wapo, which means that good and bad always come together. In good there will always be a little bit of challenge that comes with, and in bad there is always the potential for us to extract some good or make it functional.

If I can treat my life like art, and my art like alchemy, then everything that happens holds the potential to be transformed. My intention is not spiritual bypassing or blind optimism, but to locate a reservoir of internal power that I believe each of us holds within us. If we can each locate that internal vitality, and hold ourselves accountable to keeping it healthy and unmuddied, maybe then we will be able to weave it together to dismantle these dangerous, life-sucking power structures.

Life is a precious gift, and lately, I feel somatically aware of the fact. It is a gift I intend to care for through my daily actions, even as I stumble through the inevitable mess that is being human. I pray that my 2024 will be fueled by those actions in service of personal and collective healing. Signing off with an affirmation that I wrote for me, but offer to you to use (or not) as you wish 💗

—I am a creative alchemist. I have learned that I am resilient beyond belief and that my superpower lies in my ability to dive deep, confront difficult truths, and alchemize them for my personal and collective healing. I tend to myself first because without my cup full, I run the risk of misaligned action. By tending to my own waters, I naturally offer healing, alchemy, and beauty to the world around me. My life is my art. My art is alchemy. My relationships are my reflections. My community is my hope and my compass. I belong to the world. I belong to humanity. There is nothing to be ashamed of or afraid of if I am as strong, loved, and capable of transformation as I know myself to be.

🐚 Support Matriarch:

Charitable contributions can also be made for this project through non-profit CreoChangemakers (FEIN# 47-2520723) via check, Zelle (info@creochangemakers.com), or Stripe. Please indicate that the funds are for Matriarch Film Project.