imperfect / technicolor / beyond-binary

a lil mythology & three questions for the year of the snake

before I begin: please consider becoming a member of the Transgender Law Center’s Trans Liberation Circle with a monthly donation of as little as $10. learn more about their vital work to protect all trans and gender non-binary folks in the U.S. here.

Gung hay fat choy, and while it feels off to generically stick a “happy” before “Lunar New Year” with (gestures widely) everything going on, I’m beaming you love and encouragement for this year of the Yin Wood Snake.

The snake itself is a mystical legend in nearly every culture, a metaphor for how we can release and shed, move in flexible and adaptive waves beyond rigidity, find new shapes. I was inspired by what the astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat wrote yesterday that brought a new angle and interrogation to my intuitive understanding of the snake’s significance, and took me down a gratifying rabbit hole of Chinese mythology; you can read their post here.

In their post, they reflect that the Chinese term for “snake person” translates to “migrant,” and that snakes play a vital role in ecosystems by softening and dispersing seeds. Sparkly Kat writes, “Snakes help plants move great distances. They bring medicine around with them and are also medicinal.”

They go on to evoke the story of Nüwa (depicted throughout this post) who in Chinese mythology is a femme goddess of creation: half-woman, half-snake, she descended down to earth from the Celestial Realm and molded the first humans from clay. Among other myths, Monica Chan tells the story of how Nüwa saved the world from the destructive fighting between the God of Fire (Zhurong) and the God of Water (Gonggong).

They were enemies since time immemorial, so of course, they fought, each summoning creatures of the waters and fire. Crabs, turtles, and troops of fish fought dragons and phoenixes. The God of Fire eventually prevailed. In frustration, the God of Water butted his head into one of the pillars that held up the sky. The pillar broke and a large portion of the sky came tumbling down. A flood followed as waters of the Celestial River came pouring out. Broken pieces of the sky rained down as fiery meteorites, setting woods on fire and cracking giant craters in the earth.

Nüwa went to the God of Fire and the God of Water and yelled at them for their reckless, selfish behavior. Next, she had to mend the hole in the sky. She melted down five colored stones to mend the sky. They were red, yellow, blue, white, and black — the primary colors from which all other colors on earth are derived.

While Nüwa is able to rescue the world, it is a bit askew; tilted, not exactly as it was before. Sparkly Kat writes: “Nüwa repairs the broken sky but does so imperfectly. The old, perfect world was black or white but the new, imperfect world is colorful.”

In the face of authoritarianism, of constricted capital and power, of the squeezing and uprooting and displacement of so many, we are being dispossessed of and made to suffer for our color and our multitude of expression. Feminine power is being punished, criminalized, denied. Like perfect machines, we are expected to toggle on and off, be exactly one way or exactly another, to fall in line or be banished.

But we know that the world – that we – cannot fold to a mandate to flatten ourselves, to hollow our agency, to swallow and stay silent, to freeze what’s fluid and needs to flow.

Sparkly Kat writes: “Because our world is colorful and imperfect, it is one that can be mended.”

As so many things break open before our eyes, we recognize in this new year that our power comes in our vibrancy, our creative responsiveness, our more-than-one-thing-ness, our acceptance of the imperfect. Like the sky that Nüwa patched together, to heal what is ruptured is not to return it to its previous state but to advance it beyond what it had been before.

So in the spirit of Nüwa’s multiplicity and generative activism, here are three questions to inspire reflection.

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Imperfect / Technicolor / Beyond-Binary

Questions for the Year of the Snake inspired by the Chinese deity Nüwa & astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat

• How can I reframe what I’ve seen as personal flaws or shortcomings as imperfections to be embraced? Try writing out a sentence: “In the past, I’ve resented my __________. Embracing it looks like ___________.” How would that specific release of self-scrutiny shift how you show up to yourself and to the world?
  

• What domain of my life feels muted, in need of a vibrational shift? Where in the next week can you create space and time to pour into it, to amp up the vividness and vigor? What’s possible when you offer directed and intentional energy towards that which has been lying dormant, in the shadows or in the background?
  

• Where in my life do I feel tension – or tethered – being a “this” or a “that”? Whether in spaces internal or in the world, intimate or professional, where have you unconsciously succumbed to a fixed-ness or stuck-ness in who you are and your place in things? What would it look like to tease or play with that which has felt immutable, to lovingly agitate that which has settled? Where can you push against, poke holes and peek through the walls of who you’ve been?

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with love, <3 hollis