Issues 07 and 08 are available in ONE print-on-demand booklet.

Issue 07: Balancing as a creative act

In our modern day, we often think of balance in the context of productivity and achievement: work-life balance, juggling responsibilities, setting appropriate boundaries, or weighing options like the juggler in the two of pentacles Tarot card.

But balance in the Mesoamerican cosmovision is different. Balance is not a state to achieve. Balancing is a constant and creative act.

According to James Maffie’s Aztec Philosophy—a book that I’ve found especially valuable for its in-depth descriptions of Mesoamerican metaphysics—the concept of “balancing … belongs alongside becoming.”

Maffie writes: “Western theologies and philosophies overwhelmingly equate balance and equilibrium with peace, serenity, and harmony. Aztec metaphysics does not. The unity of agonistic inamic pairs [abstract pairs we tend to think of as opposites] is neither peaceful, serene, nor harmonious.” Such abstract pairs, Maffie explains, are in constant transformative interaction with each other, and that motion, that fluid tension, is itself the sacred reality of the cosmos.

A metaphor for the balancing act is weaving. Weaving, in Mesoamerican thought, is a nepantla process: a sacred and wholly natural act of merging or transforming two into a new whole. As Maffie writes, “The cosmos is a grand weaving in progress. Nepantla is therefore ordinary—not extraordinary. The ordinary is not interrupted by nepantla; nepantla is the ordinary. Becoming and transition are the norm—not being and stasis…. For example, nothing is purely being or nonbeing, purely male or female, or purely ordered or disordered. Inamic partners are interdependent, complementary and mutually arising—not logically antithetical and mutually exclusive.”

In this issue, we invite you to widen your understanding of balance. We invite you to contemplate a variety of meanings, including weaving, harmony, and self-care. We invite you to expand, to transform. Ultimately, we invite you to pursue balance as an act of becoming wholly you.

Marcy Carbajal, Editor in Chief

Issues 07 and 08 are available in ONE print-on-demand booklet.

Issue 08: Nourishing Ourselves and the Earth

Nourishment is not only the food we eat, but the ideas and words we consume, the care we extend to ourselves and others, the people we gather around us, and the connections we have to the earth and home. Querencia. Comfort. Fullness. Belonging.

This issue centers ways we can nourish ourselves and the earth with intention and love. I hope that it sparks ideas and inspires you to care for yourselves and others. 

And to those of us who are working to interrupt intergenerational traumas, the traumas we carry in our lineages, I gently encourage us to remember that our self-care and self-love is the foundation of nourishment we are able to extend to our children and those who come after us. Take good care of yourselves. Take good care of those around you.

Marcy Carbajal, Editor in Chief