This is one of 12 artifacts from season 2 of Labyrinth Library. This is an excerpted sample of the full artifact, which is 19 minutes long.
Trailmarker Word: Impulse
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Purpose:
working with the ingredients of your creative fire. making the process of preparation itself — a ritual every bit as essential as actually being in the flame. create conditions for creative volatility and flammability.
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Guiding Question:
what is the nature of your creative fuel? what can you pour into the material of your process to make it more flammable? what does being creatively reckless look like for you?
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Excerpt of Artifact (5 min)
Practice Guidelines
included in the full artifact
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Hi friends, welcome to Aries season.
Our guiding word for this season is instinct. How do we cultivate and trust our innate instincts and follow our impulses?
Aries season encourages us to be in the physical, visceral, bodily responses — before the realm of thought or analysis or overthinking spirals. Aries encourages us to trust the circuitry of the body, to feel the immediate, visceral responses to things, and to use that as information to guide how we move through the world.
This is so different than what we did in Pisces season, living in the realm of the imagination, of the dreamy and emotional. Here, we're being called back into the body.
The work of Aries — as the first fire, the first sign of the new zodiacal year — is to give fire a channel to release itself and to be expressed in the world in generative ways. The eternal work is to not be afraid of our own fire, and to do so by creating the right containers and channels that allow it to be a force of creation, even when sometimes the burning or destruction or chaos is a necessary precursor to new life.
The question under the question this season:
What is your relationship to your own fire, to your instincts? How do we cultivate that as a practice this season?
Before we talk about this first artifact, I want to briefly touch on the guiding card for the first decan of Aries — the Two of Wands. In the Two of Wands in Tarot, you see a robed figure holding a globe, looking out into the world.
Aries I is very much about the themes of domination and conquest. There's the bloody work of emergence, lighting the first flame, seeking experience before there's any proof of the path. The energy of Aries is very much about being unafraid to be the one to go first, to start in the void, to make something out of nothing.
The reason why I chose gasoline for this first artifact is to work with the energy of fire, of fuel.
Before we do that, I want to briefly acknowledge that gasoline in our world is such a fraught substance — not limited to the environmental impact of extracting fossil fuel and how it impacts climate change, oil spills poisoning ecosystems, and how this extraction of resources is an ulterior motive in wars, in colonialism, in domestic and geopolitical conflicts. Gasoline, like money, somehow feels dirty because it's tied to conquest, capitalism, colonialism, resource extraction, and environmental destruction.
So why did I choose such a problematic fuel source as the first artifact for Aries season?
Because I think this fuel source — unlike say wood or paper — carries the shadow side of fire. It gives us an opportunity to relate to the ways in which we as creative beings perhaps are reluctant to inhabit our own fire.
Gasoline is one way of applying the Aries themes of domination and conquest to the creative process, in which we're not looking for power over another being, but power within ourselves to create a generative fire that can forge a new reality out of ashes. Fire power, gasoline, comes from a precious finite resource — that is our lives. How we create fire, how we make fuel, how we make things in the world, with the utmost respect for life itself.
Originally I was going to choose a box of matches or a lighter for the first artifact, but I want to bring our attention to not what lights the spark — but the act of recklessly pouring fuel, the preparation that makes everything feel flammable. There's also this cinematic nostalgia of gasoline — gas stations, road trips, movies where you see the main character pour whatever they're trying to burn, walk away, and throw a cigarette over their shoulder. This kind of shameless, almost haughty intensity is the energy of Aries we're going to play with this season.
The purpose of this artifact is to work with the ingredients of your creative fire and to make the process of preparing the fire itself every bit as essential as actually being in the flame. How do we make conditions for creative volatility, for flammability?
The guiding question: what is the nature of your creative fuel? What can you pour into the material of your process to make it more flammable? What does being creatively reckless look like for you?
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This is an excerpt of this artifact.