portals

threading through Egypt; beading the bounds

I’m back.

Three weeks through Eygpt, three weeks in a time out of time, immersed in temples and tombs, and inexplicable mysteries older than time itself.

Lapping waves of portals, chiseled hieroglyphs, depictions of medical tools and medicinal materia, too many pre-dawn risings for private visits to count, five days on the Nile, endless hibiscus tea, an absurd amount of air pollution, and the deep quiet and plush comfort of sitting inside the sarcophogas in the King’s chamber of the last remnant Wonder of the Ancient World.

Vignettes, visions, glimpses, all resisting compression into a single narrative; fugitive moments, undocumented, lingering in the tethers of my neurons, my blood, my bones. They’ll excrete as they are wont to do, but not in some official report or narrative of The Trip. no. It’s a deeper sinking in, to the embodied presence, now absence, of Having Been There In Person, and in some cases being one of the less than a thousand humans to See Something Special with yr own naked eyes.

Astronomical ceiling in the tomb of Senenmut (TT 353) at Deir el-Bahri.

Claustrophobia in the tunnels, so real for me, so challenging to overcome, but I had two companions on the journey who rallied to help get me through. Pyramids have a smell, y’all. Like, you see them on TV and all over, really, but you don’t think about the funk. It’s thousands upon thousands of years of funk. With tourists flowing like blood cells, pumping throughout their veins, spilling into its heart chambers, yo. It’s a vibe. Seared into my nostrils.

Nomadic wandering, never more than a few nights in one place, that is my happy spot, truly. Returning to CAELi, this behemoth of books, anchored in so much earth, feels very rooted in ways the last month was not. The books now have to be the birds, the ba, the portals to other worlds, literal portals to the future, which we study here, as Egyptians so long ago also studied, alchemized, concretized it. Ancient futures. Hell yes.

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Concrete, and wrapping something up (a real joining of two ends to create a circle), upon my return, sitting through so many meetings after being free from all that for a brief window, I tied the final knot on the ceremonial crown (in Xhosa, called umnqwazi) I’ve been beading in the pattern of the Egyptian (Chaldean, really) bounds of the zodiac:

For this project, the correspondence couldn’t be a bead per zodiacal degree. I had to shrink the proportions down to fit human heads, so 360 becomes 263 or so (waves in Venus; she obviously loves this stuff).

If we zoom in on Aquarius into Pisces, the Sun is currently right about here:

The turquoise is Mercury, green is Venus, orange Jupiter, magenta Mars, and purple Saturn. Art, fashion, tool for orientation. This one is small, a prototype, proof of concept, and I learned a lot through making it.

I’m already starting the next one, for my husband, who is a sangoma, and who will be able to wear it regularly. To his, I’ll add the declinations of the planets in their bounds in his natal chart in ways that will display but also disguise it. Apt for this Mercurial moment, even though it’ll take me 24 beading hours to complete the crown.

(and if you look closely at the cover photo/selfie, you can spy more bound-inspired art around my neck. more on that project in a future bound report)

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So, yeah!

I’m back, I’m here, I’m writing again, picking up steam, regaining momentum after a complete standstill and immersion in another realm.

What are you making, what do you want to be making, this year?

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See you again on January 26, 2026 when the Sun hits the green zone (enters the bounds of Venus) and conjoins glorious Vesta.

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Cover photo: selfie taken on the grounds of the ancient Temple of Isis before most of it was moved to a new location in the Philae temple complex after the flooding caused by the Aswan Dam.