💫 SPELLCAST: May this vintage cast offer up whatever permission you need to allow yourself to begin again, reset, or let old ideas completely die out so new innovative directions can be formed. And so it is. 🙏🏽

Transcript

They step into the ether

Ventures unknown

Trusting the universe 

That wherever their foot lands is home.

Hola friends! 

Welcome to nepantla. The space between. The place where all the things meet. The moment right before . . . anything! A breath. A dance. A song. A decision. 

Welcome to the energy, lessons, and stories of The Fool.

And welcome to the first EPISODE of my BRAND NEW PODCAST, WOKE MAGIC. A weekly plática on intersectionality, spiritual artivism, and all things mystical, magic. 

i’m Brandi Amara Skyy, your guide and space holder for the duration of our journey together. AND I’M SO FUCKING EXCITED TO HAVE LANDED HERE. 

Where is here, exactly? At the time of recording, on the eve of sharing out my biggest, largest art project to date, WOKE MAGIC. If you combined the year of pageant prep + winning + year reigning AND my junior Olympic artist roller skating days IT STILL wouldn’t capture and emote accurately what this moment feels like. 

It’s big. It’s huge and i wanna say i worked hard for it, but i’m not. Because i’m actively working on dismantling and decolonizing my language and my life. So instead i’m choosing the words and phrases that feel most real vs. those that are automatic and habitual. 

So what i REALLY want to say and give gratitude for is this: i arted, alchemized, and attuned deeply for this moment right here . . . i worked on myself as well as this dream in tandem. And i’m really excited that after months and months of quiet work i’m FINALLY at a point where i can share what i’ve been devoting myself to these last three months–and pretty much what i’m going to devote the rest of my life to.

And so in today’s episode, i wanted to share my own Fool’s journey that lead me to this spot right here on my lime green blue snowball microphone plática-ing with you.

The galaxy of WOKE MAGIC includes so much. It’s literally all the dreams i’ve ever had about art and creating and change-making haused under one roof. It’s an online bodega of curated indie queer, BIPOC intersectional marginalized artists, a publishing haus serving the same gente, and a foundation and animal sanctuary. Our galaxy is so multi-dimensional and layered that i created a visual flow chart to help ME understand what exactly it was that was wanting to come through me. You can check out that visual + learn all about what’s coming into your orbit in the show notes of this episode (which may or may not be done by this time this goes live. No pressure on myself) but you can definitely find it on our website’s homepage at www.wokemagic.com.

So WOKE MAGIC, which i’m consciously calling my BIG ASS ART PROJECT vs. a business, was born from the intersections of my many incantations: writer, drag queen, artist, activist, and identities: queer, Brown, indigenous, two-spirit. And my deep, fire-fueled desire and insistence to be part of the solution. Since i can remember i’ve asked myself, How can i as one tiny person change the world? How can ONE person actually make an impact? How can i/we/us be a model for the “other ways we are looking for.” 

WM was born from that Fool’s idea and belief–that sets them out on the road to adventure to begin with . . . that i/we/us/the fool can actually can make a difference. Change the world.  Do something great. Create a life of meaning and purpose for ourselves AND others. 

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” WOKE MAGIC was born from the radical notion that we can model and live the solution NOW. 

And what is now a manifested and fully formed idea alive in our physical world, arose from this unsure Fool’s space. The space after, between, and before what comes next. It was born from the ashes of losing my 14-year animal soul companion, Simon, and then both my grandmothers in a span of 29 days from each other. 

It rose from my desire to walk a path to make an impact in ways that were tangible and real to not just me but to mi gente. My people. My Sun is in Capricorn i like to manifest all the things.

And like The Fool, i had NO IDEA exactly what i was looking for. How to do it or what it would look like but i made a leap anyway. I say A leap because i had no idea at the time if it was the right leap that would take me where i needed to go, but i trusted my heart compass and my desire to be the change and i jumped. And it didn’t feel like a big leap at the time–i’m not talking like off the proverbial cliff, (it felt more like a hop)–especially in comparison to all the other leaps my life has been made up of.  It was more simple on the surface more complex in-depth. This leap asked only one thing of me, that i radically trust my light rabbits. Light rabbits is my own metaphorical play on Alice in wonderland where she follows the white rabbit down the rabbit hole and discovers Wonderland . . . well in my life i’ve found my wonderlands when i followed those things that light me up, hence light rabbit. I love it it makes sense to me and i can imagine little glowing rabbits hopping around everywhere. It makes me happy.

And so that’s i did. i spent the last part of 2020–really mid to end–and all of 2021 venturing down many rabbit holes. 

But What they (and by they i mean the collective tarot consciousness) don’t tell you or emphasize on your Fool’s journey is that you will pass the sign you were looking, asking, praying for again and again on your way looking for THE VERY SIGH you keep on passing!

Why do we do that? Oh, i don’t know because we’re busy looking at our phones instead of what’s happening around us. We expect the sign to be glittery purple and instead, it’s a deep blue/black. Or our minds are so focused on this project that you “think” is such a great idea–is THE idea to rule all ideas–only to spend ½ a year bringing that project to life and while it was shiny (and still is one big glam bomb) it had no heart. And you discover yours isn’t in it either.

That’s exactly what happened to me. 

In my ventures in down the rabbit hole in the fool’s wonderland, i was gifted my sign–the actual entire art project vision and purpose of WOKE MAGIC–in an AM pages session. But i glazed over it–and actually “assigned it as a throw-away mini-project offshoot of the BIG SHINY GLAM BOMB project that had no heart. And i want to read y’all what i wrote in my morning pages on October 9, 2020. so you can get a sense of the irony and the crazy things we do not see when it’s literally staring you right in the face. Even though we think we know better.

MORNING PAGES

“There’s something there…Woke Magic, yep! Maybe that’s the name of the company. Buy it. Go buy it today. Woke Magic. That is the company. Maybe that’s the zine! Holy fucking shit! All of the BIPOC Brujas. i love it! yes. yes. yes. It’s a curation of magic. i love this idea.

Just get it for the woke, awakening, and rising…period. yes. yes. yes. that feels good. that feels like this is where it wants to be. 

And the last sentence…

woke magic. it said payment failed. i think it was the address.”

There. Right fucking there was my sign! Was the very thing i was praying for and i just shoved it off to zine-status.

And i didn’t see it. It was literally an afterthought.  

So much daily magic, possibility, miracles, and answered prayers surround us on the daily, and yet we do not see them. Sometimes it’s because we don’t look. But sometimes it’s because we are so caught up in other things that we CAN’t see it. And yet we feel its presence oh-so-close-to us. We sense it’s RIGHT FUCKING THERE but it looks so damn ordinary our eyes dance right over it. And that’s when we start to feel frustrated, like giving up. And all the emotions and thoughts of like it’s never going to happen. 

At least that’s what happens with me. 

And so i met my frustration with a tool that i always carry in my bag at the end of my fool’s stick on every journey i’ve ever gone on. . . a question. And it was the right question. And there’s a BIG difference. There’s a beautiful message about questions that i have on a post-it note above my desk by Albert Einstein that reads:

If i had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, i would s[end the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once i know the proper question, i could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes. 

And i have lived my creative life–and really all facets of my life–in deep reverence and commitment to finding the “right” question to answer. And this is a magnanimous example of why i am so damn devoted to this questioning process.

THE question that stripped my 8 of Swords blindfold off my eyes and sparked a whole new world.

And that question was…. 

What am i not seeing? 

What am i not seeing? 

What am i not seeing? 

It literally became an all-day meditation. A song i hummed to myself as i continued to frolic down rabbit holes.

And somewhere, at some point amid the mundaneness of repetition, my answer slowly bloomed like magic.  

What i wasn’t seeing was how everything connected to each other. Now i live and spout the interconnectivity of all things all the time but what i have failed to do for so many years–really all my life–was turn that lens on myself, on my own life.

Up until this epiphanic movement, i really believe everything i have been, done, and created–from drag to tarot to belly dance to writing–had nothing to do with each other. 

They have everything to do with each other.

And once i saw that web connection in my art and my life everything changed–not because someone told me what to do or i found the right book or teacher but because i had changed. i shifted. i moved the pieces and parts of me first.

And when i passed my WM sign again, i saw it as it was patiently waiting for me to see it as. 

WOKE MAGIC wasn’t a zine. It wasn’t an offshoot of something else. 

It was THE something else. 

It was a movement that wanted to be made flesh. Made real. Given bones. Blessed structure. 

A movement to revolutionize the spiritual + publishing industry to make it look more like us. A movement to recenter, reclaim appropriated medicine and magic back IN US. A movement toward a consciousness of where our spiritual tools come from, whose hands, and what energy made them, realigning all of it back into the earth while taking care of the earth and all its inhabitants. 

A movement of do no harm but take no shit. i don’t remember who said that first but mad props to them.

ANNNND! A movement towards a solution for i/we/us in this lifetime. 

Because i am the mother fucking cycle breaker. 

And so are you. 

And what the emperors with no clothes on who are ruling Wallstreet and golf courses, don’t know is that The Fool’s errand brings us back to the most powerful tool the universe has to offer us in our ventures of revolutions–agency. Personal agency and our deeply whole radical, transformative foolishly beautiful hearts, souls, and selves. 

We may be fools to believe that we can change the world through our life, work, and art, but we will never be so foolish to believe the colonizer’s lies that tell us it can’t be done in any other way than the way it’s always been.

FUCK THAT NOISE.

And so my beautiful gente of cyclebreakers, this first season (22 episodes in total) of WOKE MAGIC podcast is about this fool’s journey as in–(literally me and my journey) down all the rabbit holes and all the many magical characters,  teachers, lessons, ideas, theories–and books omg! books– that have shaped what has become the biggest art project of my life, WOKE MAGIC.

i’m excited to introduce all of it to you. 

Thank you so much for being here. For listening and for doing the work that IS creating the change. Regardless of what anyone else says. 

As you venture down your day, week, life take a moment BEFORE YOU pause to smell the roses AND ask yourself

What am i not seeing?

Pay attention to what shows up. 

And then follow whatever light rabbits come into view, down whatever holes they lead you to. 

Until next week my beautiful friends,

Mucho mas love, light, and solidarity
Contigo

Recap & Takeaways

🔮 What are you not seeing?

🔮 Review your notebooks, writings, and journals to see if there are any cliffs (ideas) that you leap from.