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