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Ash and Stardust v: The World Turned Upside Down

Ash and Stardust, a monthly column by artist and writer DHIYANAH HASSAN, explores the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. These are personal essays and articles sharing experiences of growth as someone who has recently found a deep connection to tarot. You can read the rest of the pieces here.
In the past month, I saw my childhood dream of having a conventionally successful art career – this dream that kept me alive through overwhelming traumas – die off. I made the decision to orphan myself from the biological family because they still couldn’t respect my boundaries. This country I’m in saw its first ever government change in the recent elections and despite the hope sizzling in the air, I still felt like it was trying to kick me out. Hope tends to follow change, it’s true, but so does apprehension.

These were the background noises weighing down on me for the past two weeks, as I worked through illness to meet deadlines, rummaging resources in search of plant-based remedies that could help alleviate all the gross ways stress had affected my body. I was thick in the overwhelm and it felt both familiar and foreign at the same time.

fullmoonscorpiotides_forAshandStardust.gif
GIF snapshot of ocean waves, taken a day before the full moon

Continue reading “Ash and Stardust v: The World Turned Upside Down” →

The End by C.C. O’Hanlon

This is the end.

I’m going to miss these few weeks I’ve spent as a guest editor for BHP. Thanks to everybody who submitted their works around my loosely framed theme of Place: Movement / Escape / Exploration / Architecture. With few exceptions, they were exactly what I’d hoped for.

Thanks to everybody who read them. My immediate predecessors, Florence Lenaers and Amee Nassrene Broumand, had broadened BHP‘s readership significantly and I’m happy (and relieved) that I managed to add to its growth.

I’m also happy to have maintained a similarly rich diversity of contributors. Old, white males – like me – were few.

Thank you, Miggy Angel, for allowing me to be part of this. I’ve had a blast.

I’ll let myself out.

Ash and Stardust iv: The Care in Chaos

Ash and Stardust, a monthly column by artist and writer DHIYANAH HASSAN, explores the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. These are personal essays and articles sharing experiences of growth as someone who has recently found a deep connection to tarot. You can read the rest of the pieces here.

“To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.” – from Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Last year I designed a spread that was meant, according to my earlier notes, for days when you’re “intellectually and emotionally fucked up.” I named it the Chaos Spread. Here’s how you use it:

Continue reading “Ash and Stardust iv: The Care in Chaos” →

Phrygians In The Rigging by Caroline Stockford

“I seek a place that can never be destroyed, one that is pure, and that fadeth not away, and is laid up in heaven, and safe there, to be given, at the time appointed, to them that seek it with all their heart.”
– John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

Our pilgrimage almost came to an end under the wheels of a 10-ton truck on the D650 from Istanbul to Eskişehir, on a summer night made darker by no highway illumination and no towns for miles around. The four-lane highway was flanked on one side by dry,  empty country and on the other by two-hundred-feet-tall black crags, out of which the silhouettes of pine trees leered, high up. Continue reading “Phrygians In The Rigging by Caroline Stockford” →

Jo Tinsley: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon

Jo Tinsley is the founder and editor of Ernest Journal – “an independent magazine for the curious and adventurous”. She is also the co-author of two books, The Odditorium: The tricksters, eccentrics, deviants and inventors whose obsessions changed the world and The Mysterium: Unexplained and extraordinary stories for a post-Nessie generation, and editor of Waterfront, a magazine celebrating a connection with water for the Canal & River Trust. Somehow, she also finds time to work as a freelance writer and curator. Continue reading “Jo Tinsley: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon” →

Everything by Line Toftsø

I want to be promised
everything.
My hand I am
so wet
the simultaneous breaths
are soaking
everything Continue reading “Everything by Line Toftsø” →

This Would Be The Perfect Day by Cathy Ulrich

If I were an office worker in Japan, I would take a holiday with my Japanese boyfriend to the Hachiman Shrine in Kamakura. We would ride the train together, holding hands. We would always be holding hands. I would know the feel of his grip better than anything. Continue reading “This Would Be The Perfect Day by Cathy Ulrich” →

A Believing Place by Nina Foushee

For months before going to Alaska, I thought about how six hours of daylight would feel. In California, I’d lay in bed and imagine the darkness as a hand closing around my throat. Continue reading “A Believing Place by Nina Foushee” →

Meeting Frank by Loretta Oleck

Fying from New York to Athens,

I am seated next to a man named Frank.

 

35,000 feet in the air,

high above sea level,

far from swelling waves – Continue reading “Meeting Frank by Loretta Oleck” →

Two Poems by John Boursnell

Fushimi Inari

We walked into the dark-

-er and darker red gates and long long steps

a key between my teeth

shiny shiny boots plastic

cup of warm white wine Continue reading “Two Poems by John Boursnell” →

whatitoka (doorway) by Kathleen McLeod

Crying on the threshold, waiting to step into light, waiting to step into a history of pain. I am at the doorway now. The process of healing hollows me out, a tree preparing to become a waka. Sailing back in time into an ocean of grief and love, back to where I began, back to where we first landed. Continue reading “whatitoka (doorway) by Kathleen McLeod” →

L.A. Lust by Yanina Spizzirri

This city, this big sprawling dream of a city, mighty and misunderstood Los Angeles, is often defined in terms of tired cliches and sweeping generalizations. Soul-less and a-historical L.A., they say. A city where nobody walks, they lie. A far-reaching enigma going on for miles and miles, they all nod and agree, baffled. Continue reading “L.A. Lust by Yanina Spizzirri” →

This Place is Ours by Hazel Warren

We wandered the streets
Pointing out our childhood
Every detail that remains
A teenaged memory Continue reading “This Place is Ours by Hazel Warren” →

Walking Westward, Toward Jerusalem, Across The Jordan Valley by Aiya Sakr

And once we’ve reached the bridge, we stop.
I have seen the native fellaheen* cross on bikes and motorbikes,
phones in their back pockets,
blasting music that hits like sudden hail in the country stillness,
bites,
and echoes away. Continue reading “Walking Westward, Toward Jerusalem, Across The Jordan Valley by Aiya Sakr” →

Who’d Pick A Fight With Lee Marvin? by David Dragon

Douglas, Arizona, is a border town.

I pull up outside the Gadsden Hotel around 10.15am after driving down State Highway 191 from an overnight stay in Willcox. The road follows the line of the Dragoon Mountains, where, in the 1860s, the Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise took refuge with two hundred of his people and for ten years waged a guerrilla war against the US army Continue reading “Who’d Pick A Fight With Lee Marvin? by David Dragon” →

In Casablanca by Ganzeer

In Casablanca you will expect buildings to be white, based solely on the city’s name, which translates to ‘white house’. But there will hardly be a truly white building in sight. How odd is it to call a city a house? Once you spend a little time in Casablanca, it will make perfect sense. Continue reading “In Casablanca by Ganzeer” →

Skin by Olga Dermott-Bond

“When you change the bed sheets, keep your mouth shut – you don’t want to breathe in other people’s dead skin.” Continue reading “Skin by Olga Dermott-Bond” →

Sh-Boom by Mare Leonard

Do the three blondes sipping Ombre Pink Drinks

believe they’re on break from coding at Fitbit

or know they flew the coop, birds with lonely wings. Continue reading “Sh-Boom by Mare Leonard” →

Mulure Mike: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon

Mulure Mike is an award-winning Kenyan social entrepreneur, film-maker and musician. Born in the rural town of Siaya in 1986, and raised in Kericho, he moved at a young age to Nairobi. He ended up in the city’s notorious slum, Kibera, the largest in Africa. But it was, in his words, “a blessing in disguise.” There he met someone who owned video equipment and who offered to teach him how to use it. Continue reading “Mulure Mike: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon” →

This Is Not A Memorial, And Other Stories Of Remembrance by Alan Nance

When he died, they covered his tracks and made him hard to trace. Eighty years on, he’s the talk of a frontier town. Philosopher, critic, storyteller, Jew. A father who never knew his granddaughters, born later to an exiled son in London. Continue reading “This Is Not A Memorial, And Other Stories Of Remembrance by Alan Nance” →

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