Mutable fire: emergencies, cinematic glimmers, glowworms

The dark spools forward and I grip the branch. I lunge into the deep mud and my holy communion dress is ratted at the hem.

Fixed water: unfinished business, deep emotions, divination

We record this by leaving the work unfinished and unresolved. The absence is a space for grief.

Mutable fire: wild fire, contamination, neon.

Anna and Melissa ate with some ceremony, taking tiny bites and washing them down with tea.

Fixed water: death, mourning, transformation

Her body is a miracle in the house. Copper sulphite leaks from her. The sink blooms with a little mould, a little sparkle.

Mutable air: the inner sky, imagination, psychosis

The water came in waves and washed gold summer through her bones. He was above her again, his hair deep silk on her face.

Fixed fire: the gurlesque, luminol margaritas, glow-in-the-dark rosaries

shrines, quinceañera parties, holy communions, and seances of this book are all stained luminescent blue.

Fixed fire: incandescence, blue flame, eerie glow

As anyone who watches crime television might already know, luminol is a substance that emits an eerie glow when it comes in contact with human blood.

Mutable earth: wild foxes, psychedelic spores, deadly forests

On Christmas night, a small girl is crowned at a pageant, before stumbling into the snowy darkness, alone, to meet her greatest fan

I really like reading a book where character’s got an obsession, almost, and you start to learn a bit about that obsession when you read a book like that.

Hard- boiled fiction is also really afflicted with this twisted, and very American, casual bigotry. And it makes me so mad because there are so many great lines and so much extensive writing that Chandler did, and these movies just have so much beautiful writing in them but just have these big problems.

Welcome to season one of Ceremony, a podcast about storytelling, seasonality, rituals, and dreaming new worlds into being.

Cardinal air: new ideas, pleasure, play, obsession

Scheele’s Green: the story of arsenic-laced wallpaper and the most gorgeous colour ever to exist.

Mutable fire: flickering light, limit experience, neural reactions

Like the experience of being on a psychedelic trip, whether you perceive bliss or horror is down to your state of mind.

Mutable earth: big mood, the mundane sublime, weird landscapes

Weird landscapes tell us so much about making the hidden aspects of life visible, and, about our interconnectedness with the natural world.

Mutable water: the unconscious, hallucinations, psychic plane

Rachel Pollock writes that “in divinatory readings the moon indicates an excitement of the unconscious.”

Fixed fire: sun, bright colours, festivities

The bare tree still looks pretty.

The reindeer glow.

Cardinal air: signals in the dark, secrets coming to light

A creative block is so often about being in the liminal space where something new is waiting to emerge.

Cardinal air: prayer, holy visions, visitations

In Catholicism there is endless creativity in the naming of patron saints. Some of the more obscure ones include St. Julian the patron saint of murderers, and St. Lidwina, the patron saint of ice skaters.

Cardinal earth: initiation, deep future, building

When you have been inhabiting a world so deeply, it can feel like a loss to turn it into something that other people can perceive. In some ways, the more fully-realised your imaginative space, the more difficult to let go of your vision.

Mutable water: liminality, precarity, recklessness

Emma Cline’s novel The Guest is a thriller where nothing much happens. The tension and dread are evoked from the seemingly impossible drama of trying to live from moment to moment.