Updates from Thee Otherworld

It's Thursday night, and I am writing from the small office area within my studio for the first time since we began working towards opening this space almost a year ago. Hello.

I fully intend on continuing our series on entheogens, and sharing more useful information in due time. However, going out of format a bit, it felt pertinent to share some updates that inform what I'm doing here in this online space, and what that looks like moving forward.

The last few months have been incredibly busy, and I've been focusing much more on ensuring that I stay relatively up to date with the Ranch newsletter in my limited spare time, as this is the newsletter that seems to resonate with a larger audience and generally bring in more income. While I try to not over-emphasize on profitability when considering how to spend my time, it is important at this juncture that we continue to try to find relatively passive avenues to bring in income so that we may reduce the strain on the person who is currently financially supporting the Ranch and better support our community here.

At the same time, the efflux of effort put towards the Land has been incredibly grounding: I feel as though certain important questions I've been oscillating between the answers of are coming into focus. It feels as though direction is becoming more clear. As we've spent most of our time within the community here and not outside of the Ranch, and as we've prioritized certain behaviors, practices, and thought patterns and pruned others, I've felt a renewal of the creative spark and spiritual connectedness that was feeling dim this past year. Room to breathe has been incredibly important: our family has gone through huge changes, and we're finding our footing, optimizing our days, finally falling into a rhythm after one full solar cycle.

In addition to simply falling into better step with the Land and community, I've begun a deep dive into Qabalism, not necessarily in an Initiated kind of way, at least not yet (and I'm not certain it will lead down that road), but the meditations I've been engaged in have likewise supported this feeling of clarity and re-invigoration. I hope to share more information on this soon, both from a theoretical perspective as well as how this informs my Practice (and perhaps a deep dive into what that Practice is, also, as I realize I've yet to fully elucidate this beyond vague commentary).

All of these things are coalescing in Ways: first, I've long planned for this studio, Thee Otherworld, to be a kind of private enclave for me to host tattoo clients. I've longed for a "private" studio for almost a decade now, and have been working towards it in some capacity for at least six years. For the last three years since moving on this Land it's been frustratingly just out of reach: there was always something more important to do, and I understood that, but it was still something I pined for occasionally. However, in the last few weeks as we've been working on finishing up our new living space and getting the studio fixed up and ready to use, it struck me how silly that was. Every other structure on the property is communal property, now including the main house since we've moved into the new domicile. I realized that I was still holding on to a desire that was ultimately rooted in the kind of individualism and selfishness of our broader society, that this was an opportunity for deeper collaboration, that we could kill many birds with a single stone, so to speak, by allowing this space to be communal: my partner can have an office space while he's at work, our musician residents have a place now to store their instruments and work on music, visitors can borrow art supplies and leave their mark on the place also. It opens up more opportunities for me to teach skills like candlemaking, or for our resident seamster to share tips on sewing, that otherwise may not really be happening if I was just sequestering myself in here to work and not letting anyone else in. This doesn't mean we can never book the space for solo, focused work, of course, but I'm incredibly pleased with the result of this decision. Last night for the Full Moon myself and another resident worked in parallel without speaking on very different projects, but the synergy of silent collaboration was palpable.

This decision to make Thee Otherworld a collaborative space, as well as epiphanies related to this community and my spiritual Practice and study has also influenced the way that I plan on conducting Tattoo moving forward. While I recently responded to an inquiry for a paid session, and while, as mentioned above, we're always looking to bring in income, I have decided I must move forward only giving tattoo away, and never soliciting this service. This means that I will tattoo less, and that is difficult also because I love it, and it means that I am foregoing what could be a solid source of income (if I were better at marketing, perhaps), but the community is in agreement. Ultimately what is being offered is a deep and transformative experience, one that requires quite a bit of pre-work, and one which is lessened when that work is not done. It requires that we share context, at least somewhat, so that we may be working together magically, speaking the same metaphorical language, Practicing the same discipline (not necessarily the same spiritual discipline, but the same agreed upon efforts to make happen what we wish to make happen), to avoid calling in chaos and emotional turmoil. We must work from higher principles, and I cannot guarantee that if I am selling this as a service or a paid experience, if I am soliciting clients to come to me (and therefore manipulating them, no matter how good my intentions are, for this is what marketing is in any capacity).

I have been shifting into a period of doubling down on Practice and discipline, of ensuring that I can fulfill my role here within this community which is ultimately broader than only tattooing or only making art. Most of the shifts that are taking place are illegible to you, my reader, and invisible to you as well. This is not an insult: you simply aren't here. Though I do hope that in some capacity this discipline ripples outwards to you, as I share more fleshed out theory and recommendations for Practice, more useful and interesting information, and perhaps more art as well.

Finally, though this feels more like a footnote to the rest if anything, part of the shifts that are occurring have been apparent in the deletion of my social media accounts. There was a moment where I realized that this is where I wish to expend my energy, and that the work on the ground is what matters most. The few people who I feel I've created lasting connections with online I already have tenuous pen-pal type exchanges with, and it started to feel more and more like a useless distraction, one that left me more concerned with what others were or were not doing. I wish to embody a kind of being wherein I can accept others for who and how they are, and I was finding it difficult to truly embody that and engage with the format of social media. I hope that I can do better in the future, though even if I do I'm not sure that I plan on really reintegrating into online communities in that way again. It would be more lovely to meet anyone interested in meeting in person, or to have the opportunity to understand them through longer-form kinds of communication rather than the parasocial, fleeting methods of communication on the Fediverse or other forms of social media. I guess with all of that context, if you're someone who is missing my presence online or who is just generally interested in having a more two-way relationship, feel free to reach out via email or otherwise. My email is: artofsiin@proton.me and can be found on the contact page of this website.

Thank you for reading! I cannot promise when I will release the newsletter on Kava, though I hope to do so sometime in the next two weeks. I hope to hear from you, be it comments on this post or an email, and I'll be sending you all blessings from the sweet Mojave this beautiful autumn.