What this blog is (briefly)
*Liberatory Poetics, DeathPractice, Deathclown*
Aligning with the unknown and unknowable, the cycles of time and the nature of nature.
Mapping out decolonial, nondual animist alternatives to social justice; teaching the teachers, helping the helpers.
The home of deathpractice & deathclown methodologies & animist approach to addiction recovery.
I employ improvisational methods to animist and nondual frameworks to help community leaders obliterate the boundary between artmaking and artbeing.
How this blog works, 2024 edition
I am writing more and more for premium subscribers who support my work and wish to learn how to use nondual animist/daoist wisdom in their daily lives.
Premium subscribers can access this material in many ways, but I try to organize under the tab at the top labeled Premium Subscribers, which is accessible when using a browser.
Included in this are monthly live zoom calls (at least one, 3 hrs long) which are archived, that go into the details of how to align with the cycles of time/seasons from a daoist animist perspective.
I also talk about how to deal with ancestral issues such as ghosts, hauntings, addictions, biases, “bad luck”, and personal misconduct stemming from colonial education.
I come at this from an artistic background as well: poetry, visual art, theater & hybrid, mixed media forms.
In September 2024 I made this welcome orientation video:
TLDR Free subscribers get:
Access to over 100 complete posts that are not paywalled
Access to dozens of videos, audio podcasts, etc on spotify & youtube
Occasional free livestreams hosted on substack app
Partial paywalled posts
Access to my notes feed where I write a lot of snippets and share links etc.
TLDR what you get as a premium subscriber:
Everything in free tier
At least one monthly 3-hour recorded lecture that you can attend live via zoom
Access to the archive of livestreams
Access to all previous recorded lectures
Early bird pricing on series, small group containers or other workshops
Commenting privileges on premium and paywalled posts
Relevant Links
when you view this substack in a browser you will see a host of top-row tabs that bring you to multiple hubs of information & media
patreon.com/animistarts (help support the work via patreon or by being a premium subscriber via substack!)
dare’s blog the nightgarden (you are here)
I am available for online sessions (daoist astrology & divination) which you can read about under the SESSIONS tab at the top of the page.
Bio
Dare (they/them) is a nondual animist, multidisciplinary artist-facilitator and educator, heavily influenced by their long and ongoing practice of Daoist arts and related philosophies. Their work explores the integration of animist practices, liberatory anti-oppression principles and multi-modal theater arts, which can be pithily summed up as Death Practice & Deathclown.
They are based in Chinook Lands aka Portland, OR, USA.
Briefly, part of my work here is to tell people that the spirits are real and to help folks figure out how to tune their instrument (whole self) towards that larger, more diverse, more multi-plural conversation called Death (Dao). I do that through various modes of narrative art practice - poetry, writing, singing, movement, theater... I have a podcast called UNDERWORLDPARTY, a collaborative vocal project called Rhizomatic Choir, and various trainings in nondual theater arts (Theater of Precarity, Deathclown). These are rooted in and informed by my long practice of Daoist arts (polestar astrology, yijing divination, daoist dream yoga, etc.)
I design my art with and through lenses such as Queer Ecology, Disability Justice, trans-species animism, Dreaming and Deep Time Ancestry. Being of mixed-race heritage, chronically sick and poor (these labels can become prisons) has been a wisdom path, poison and medicine in this life and informs all my choices. Pain, Fear & Hunger are Wisdom Teachers, not necessarily problems to be solved.
Animist Arts (Directed by Larissa Kaul and Dare [sohei] Carrasquillo) create from a nondual animist lens, which means we treat all phenomena as beings and living systems that have inherent spirit-full capacity and agency and exist outside of human concepts of good/bad or right/wrong. We understand all beings to be interdependent and impermanent, compound parts of ecosystems and collective bodies that arise, transform, and decay at varying scales and timelines.
We engage with artistic expression and creativity as ancestral technologies around which diverse social processes can aggregate, mutate, and distribute according to specific needs and contexts. This can range from individual research projects, devising works of art, shifts in organizational structures, bringing balance into relationships and communities, and creating deeper awareness and adaptation across networks, human and nonhuman.
Play-as-Learning, Indigenous wisdom principles, queer ecology and disability justice show us ways to ethically manage our human desires, pains and fears as we work towards harm reduction and equitable social systems–while simultaneously cultivating our personal and collective death practices for the benefit of all beings, seen and unseen; known, unknown, and unknowable.
