on commitments

When my mind spirals and threatens to unravel from within me, I reaffirm my personal commitments as a way of walking back to myself. I remind myself why I stay and why I do this work.

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I am still committed to radical honesty even though my chest tightens and my heart races when I turn my attention to the news.

I am still committed to radical self love so I close the apps and place my hand on my heart and breathe and breathe and breathe.

I am so committed to radical self love that I do things that feel terrifying. That tighten my chest and quicken my pulse and scare the ever living daylights out of me.

I continue to leave the house even when my mind tries to trick me into never leaving the perceived safety of my bed.

I attend safety trainings so I am prepared when the very real dangers reach my town and they come to steal and beat and arrest or worse my neighbors.

I am still committed to doing incrementally small things to build my capacity to do more and more. I will step beyond only making phone calls

I am still committed to humanity so I practice my reiki under the pressure. I send love and protection to places already at war in my own country. I feed protections in my own town. I nourish myself so I can nourish others. I share that energy with the Earth.

I am committed to my practice and so I breathe into the reiki principles. I charge my water and food with the energy I cannot create myself. I invite universal love to guide me and hold me so I may be a conduit of that love for others.

I am committed to doing it scared so I eat my vegetables and drink my water so I have the energy to get up and leave and learn and witness.

I am still breathing and I am still learning and I am sad. I am angry. I am heartbroken. Furious. Terrified. Raw. Anxious.

But I am no longer shocked.

To be shocked would be to ignore that honesty I believe in so much. I haven't been surprised by any of this in a long time.

I am committed to radical honesty so I grieve the world I was told existed. The future I was promised. The past that was only available to those that looked like me and only if they followed the rules. The life that was stolen from me and my ancestors for wanting to stay safe.

I am committed to humanity so every day I break another rule even though my ridigity fights against it, even though my mind makes its own throat raw trying to tell me I'm giving up my safety. But I was never safe because I care about my neighbors.

I am committed to radical honesty and so I reaffirm my disregard, disgust, and distain for the systems I was taught to believe in that inevitably led us here.

I am still committed to my practice of silly little guy time so I can do all the scary things. I talk to the spiders in my bathroom and the birds outside my window. I water my plants and watch the clouds and greet the sun like a devoted partner every morning.

I am committed to listening for Baba Yaga. To becoming a baba. To questioning the rules. I have learned from the forest witch for long enough to know her power in my veins. I listen for her voice in my tears and my rage.

I am committed to Baba Yaga even though grief is heavy, truth can be so ugly, and her underworld shifts and transforms around me. I move these feelings through and out. My commitment to her is a commitment to loving myself and my world and I cannot move if I root myself in fear.

They destroy the earth and our water and our air and now they attempt to destroy our humanity. And this time, in the midst of it all, I can see how many others are committed to their humanity. I have hope amidst it all.

on ICE and worries and feeling not enough but saying things anyway

I grab my phone and look at news. I see headline after headline with new rising numbers of ICE detainees, many of whom are American citizens. I open Instagram. I see post after post of new and horrifying ways ICE is terrorizing these same citizens and those trying to protect them. It is hard to escape current events, not that I want to escape them entirely, but breaks are healthy.

I vacillate between posting, witnessing, attempting to create anything even if it’s irrelevant to the news, resting. I try not to beat myself up for not being good at something. I try to be realistic about my capacity to all of these things. I make myself sick with new and interesting symptoms trying to decide where to put my efforts.

I keep thinking back to when I was in high school and learning about WWII and dumbfounded about how anyone could have allowed it to happen. I think about learning about the civil rights era and how I was so sure I knew what I would do if I were alive then. Then I start thinking about all the gaps still in my learning about US History and how little I knew until only a few years ago.

I think about how the last 5 to 6 years for me have been relearning how our country was really founded (read: stolen) and how the violence abroad that I was taught in high school was actually just a replication of the way the United States treated indigenous populations, the stolen populations of Black Americans, and all immigrants that attempted to come here and achieve the White American Dream.

I have little aptitude to remember the specifics of history: dates, names, chronology. It all blurs together. Most of my last 5-6 years of study has been relearning things I already read in the hope that I could remember these things. BUT the themes that have remained clear are:

1. The United States has gone to great lengths to control the narrative public school students are taught.

2. The United States basically wrote the playbook for genocide.

3. There will always be people who would rather not learn or be reminded that what they were taught was inaccurate.

4. Privilege is a hell of a drug.

5. The goal is to overwhelm the populace so they are too frozen to act. Every time. At every stage in history.

I am watching, in real time, as the United States government, under the guidance of the Trump administration, militarizes a hyper-violent army of so-called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in what appears to be an effort to clear the streets of anyone they don't like.

According to this CBS News article published on January 16, 2026 "ICE was holding about 73,000 individuals facing deportation in its custody across the country, the highest level recorded by the agency and an 84% increase from the same time in 2025, when its detention population hovered below 40,000, the internal statistics show." Trump's goal was 100,000 detainees by this time and he doesn't seem to be slowing down. This is just one of many articles explaining the publicly available government data showcasing ICE's horrific surge in detaining civilians.

I open Instagram and am easily flooded with account after account sharing first hand accounts of ICE in their neighborhoods, their schools, their homes. I've given myself migraines trying to stay informed (not only from social media).

It is easy to freeze. To turn off my phone and pretend it's not going to reach me. But it will and it has and I refuse to let the United States government or Trump's regime silence me. So I may not know what to say or how to act, I may hesitate as my pen hovers above my sketchbook and be at a loss of how to make art at a time like this, my voice might shake while I'm on the phone in an attempt to make any sort of difference in my world, and I for sure will not be perfect in my actions, but I will say *something* ANYTHING rather than sit in silence and just watch this happen.

I keep pulling on reiki to hold me up and keep me centered so I can witness. Some days that's more than I can do. I call on reiki to give me strength to get the words out. To share the resources. To be at all visible in this fight, even in what feels like minuscule ways. I send reiki to the areas of highest unrest to support those who can physically act. I use the resources I have to contribute and I build myself up and continue to search for more ways I can help.

I don't even know if this writing makes any sense. I don't even care anymore. I keep staring at an empty document caught between the voices saying it won't matter and the voices saying anything helps. At the end of the day I live by my silly little philosophy and I'll be damned if a silly little guy sits idly by and just lets the bad guy tell them what to do.

So I don't have any answers. I don't have a call to action. I don't know what I'll do about it tomorrow. But today I'm publishing my words, my thoughts, and maybe someone will read them and know its okay to not know what to do but that doing something is better than doing nothing.

on Pantone’s Color of the Year 2026

I’ve been waffling for a long while now about sharing my thoughts and learnings while deconstructing Christianity and Whiteness and generally the real-time evolution of my larger Silly Little Philosophy. I could list all my excuses for not returning to long-form posting sooner, but it mostly boils down to: I am scared. Which is a terrible reason not to do something, in my opinion. I could get into the nuance of the whys of my fear, but that is for a different post. 

If I’ve learned anything on my unlearning journey, it’s that I will probably look at this in a week, in a month, and cringe at how little depth there is in my understanding. BUT! I know I’m not talking out of my ass about design. I know the intentionality that lives behind every decision that makes it to the final audience. 

Pantone announcing their dismal (and frankly alarming) choice of color of the year is the pebble in my shoe that pushed me to resurrect my blog and do something with it. At best, it was rage bait. At mid, it was a tone deaf attempt to stay relevant during the one time of year they get a lot of mainstream attention or perhaps it was their attempt at social commentary. At worst, it was a blatant dog whistle they felt comfortable showcasing as the undercurrent of white supremacy in the United States positions itself more solidly as an openly acceptable stance. It is hard for me not to see it as the latter.

There are three main things that came together and led me to this conclusion:

1. Pantone has always had shady practices. In fact, it’s part of the reason I decided to stop pursuing larger clients when I was a freelance brand and identity designer. For context: I worked with small businesses – mostly sole proprietors and entrepreneurs in the early stages of building and launching their businesses – zero in on the personality of their new enterprise and how they wanted it to move, look, and feel as its own entity separate from their personal selves. I lived in the nitty gritty details of color, form, balance, and perception.

2. In the last 5 years, I also actively searched out educators on anti-racism and divesting from white supremacy. In these spaces I have learned about the subtlety of dog whistles and how insidiously I was conditioned to excuse them due to the plausible deniability built into their very intention. I recognize that I only have the information I do because of my active attempts to work against the cultures that built the society I live in.

3. I spent more time than I care to admit reading Threads regarding Pantone declaring literally any shade of white as the social indicator for 2026. On one side there are those who see the underlying white supremacy calling out Pantone’s clear reinforcement of white as default. On the other side, we have the “it’s not that deep” crowd telling the first group that they’re overreacting and claiming “not everything is about race” as if this country wasn’t literally founded on the ideals of rich, white men who brutally massacred anyone who stood against them or threatened their power. 

Pantone describes Cloud Dancer as an “expansive presence” that “build[s] an atmosphere of serenity and spaciousness, providing a refuge of visual cleanliness that inspires well-being and lightness”. This immediately sets off alarm bells as this only makes sense if they are centering white as a default. What I mean when I say this is white and minimalism have long been used as a strategy to erase culture. White in design has often signified wealth, status, and class. Cultures of the global majority often incorporate lots of color. When forcing assimilation, art, fashion, and design centering the color white and minimalist trends strip these cultures of their individuality and uniqueness in favor of what those in power deem acceptable. 

Pantone is an industry standard. They are aware of their cultural impact. They are experts in color and do not make these decisions in a vacuum. Laurie Pressman, the Vice President of the Pantone Color Institute, said in a 2023 interview about how the color of the year is chosen that it “reflects what is taking place in our global culture at that moment in time” and that it “represents a global lifestyle trend positioning them as the global authority on color”. She goes on to explain that “the goal of the program is to help companies and consumers better understand the power color can have. We want to teach them how to leverage color’s power and expressiveness to influence perception.” 

Pantone already established patterns of elitism in 2022 when they removed their color books from seamless integration with Adobe (another industry standard) and put their colorbooks behind a subscription based paywall often falling on the artists themselves to pay more to keep the colors or risk them being replaced with black in their designs. To continue beyond this capitalist greed (which has roots in white supremacy as well) and claim that white is the optimal color for progress and resetting the industry for the future is worrisome. 

They are not bold enough to say it with their whole chest, though. They are sure to leave enough wiggle room to claim ignorance when accused of racism or classism. It allows for Pantone President Sky Kelley to claim they just want to “spark conversation that everyone can participate in.” They have previously been critiqued for choosing colors that evoke skin tones in the past: Peach Fuzz in 2024 and Mocha Mousse in 2025. It is hard for me to believe they did not consider the racial interpretation of choosing WHITE as the color for 2026. White as the indicator for 2026 in cultural trends ranging from fashion to interior design to marketing and business is hardly unintentional. 

The reasons they state for choosing “Cloud Dancer” include:

• Universality of looking up and connecting with the drifting lightness of clouds

• Suggestions of inner peace after clearing the noise

• Ability to be receptive to what can be and what’s ahead

• Represents a blank page to turn inspiration into reality

• A desire for a fresh start

For these same reasons, an argument could be made that a shade of black could be just as effective. Imagine for a second if this were the case (made up color name for example purposes):

Color of the Year 2026 “Star Dancer” is a subtle purple-black evocative of the expanses of space. It suggests the serene quiet that comes after rising above the noise of the atmosphere and floating, weightless, in zero gravity. It reminds us of the energy and progress of the space race, providing an ability to be receptive to what can be and what’s ahead. A fresh new beginning of exploration. It represents the blank space of the cosmos full of mysteries waiting to be discovered. 

Why did they choose white when its complement is just as strong an argument for the same things? Could it be those influences of current events and trends Pressman referred to in that 2023 interview? If their goal is to teach the industry leaders that color has power, why default to whiteness?

In a world where we are watching the rise of fascism in the United States and several genocides play out on a global stage in multiple countries –notably including Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar (Burma), and Democratic Republic of Congo– it is near impossible for me to believe that white as an indicator of white supremacy was not a factor in the decision to make “Cloud Dancer” the color of the year for 2026.

While there is always the chance that the color of the year coincidentally speaks to a complex cultural weave in one of the leading players in global economics, evidence of highly intentional choices and awareness of social impact leads me to conclude that those in the rooms where “Cloud Dancer” was chosen knew what they were doing when they chose it. As Kelley says at the launch event, Pantone doesn’t dictate the conversation, they facilitate it. We will likely not get a direct response about Pantone’s intention in their choice for Color of the Year, but one thing is for certain: they have certainly sparked conversation and everyone is participating.

April Vibes

There’s a new moon Tomorrow. A chance to solidify how we want to actively step into our highest timeline. The energies of our sun and cosmic families are already tearing away connections that won’t serve where we’re headed.

You’ve probably been noticing obstacles and blocks popping up all over the place, likely presenting as challenges or frustrations seemingly out of no where. The Tower has been present in almost every reading I’ve done this week.

We are invited in these moments to be with our whole selves in the present moment. Allowing what Is to simply Be. Big energy is moving through us, around us, before and after us, converging within our electric body/spirit/aura/energy field/however you call it. I feel my conduits strongly in my solar plexus (just below my ribcage) and at the sacral (right in my belly). Often it feels like tv static, pixellated rain moving through my system and literally upgrading the program in my cells, my inner biomes shifting and upgrading with this energy.

New Moons are powerful portals for intention setting. I find them beautiful opportunities to regroup with my spiritual team and purposely declare my growth priorities for the new cycle. In contrast, Full Moons are my opportunity to thank my team and reflect on the progress from my declarations, pivot, and continue to grow until the cycle renews.

Take this opportunity to ground with nature, whichever element works best for you! I‘m deeply connected to earth and love grounding with trees and dirt, sometimes I just play with my houseplants. Water connections could look like swimming, walking or sitting by a stream or other body of water, taking a bath or shower, washing hands, or blessing drinking water. Fire could be a candle, warm and coziness, cooking, campfire, or heavy exercise. Finding a connection with air could be riding your bike or running to feel the wind, driving with the windows open, or climbing a tower or mountain to reach the summit, sitting with a fan, playing with feathers or fans.

Regulating the nervous system is crucial if we want to continue to expand into new spaces. Change is inherently dysregulating, growth even more so. The best part, though, is we have the choice to practice self regulation and improve that skill. By continuing our regulation practices to self soothe and return to the peace and joy within our own bodies, we can move into these expansive and new unknowns with more and more grace. This practice and grace continue to evolve until it feels more natural to stop and regulate when confronted with change than to dig in your heels and stop yourself from growing.

Each of us have this power, this potential.

You got this!

<3 Ell

On the Topic of Growth and Change

I’d like to share with you an experience I had recently that provide a deeper layer to my sense of self rooted in the medicine I am here to share with this community. This was originally posted on Patreon on 3/18/2022

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I was caked in dry clay/dirt. All the black sludge i’d been cleaning my whole life were polluted energy leaks of a wounded divine masculine embodied as the patriarchy, generational trauma, past lifetimes trauma and hurt, sexual abuse, energetic abuse, the trauma of growing up undiagnosed and misunderstood - all the emotional baggage I had intellectualized to pieces in therapy. Baggage that logically I had moved past and emotionally equipped myself to manage, but never shook from my system.

I believed I had. Don’t get me wrong here. I was never consciously ignoring the physical symptoms of trauma. I didn’t know it WAS trauma. Never even realized I could LET GO of some of it instead of just “managing” it.

The beautiful cocktail of ableism, patriarchy, misogyny, being a “fat girl” at the prime of fad diet culture in the late 90s early 00s (diet culture), non identified autistic, hormonal birth control, and anxiety medication allowed those leaks to go unnoticed. I was unknowingly learning through observation and energy reading [even as a child] that those leaks were a normal part of our human experience akin to breathing, so to discuss it would be unnecessary, unwelcomed, or tolerated at best.

The tipping point came earlier this month after a series of small, yet powerful shifts in my perception of myself. Over the last few days/week/ikd? — time is weird — a small and significant, yes AND significant, event resurface from the past. One I believed to be resolved. Sacred rage arrived before I had even completely registered what happened.

This was not new. Rage has always been an unwanted, uninvited guest whom I tried to usher away as quickly as possible.

That is, until the last series of small, profound shifts in my perception. My higher self is not bound to my human brain and therefore often sends me understanding in feeling because that is a language we have used long before I knew words. They taught me about rage. This time I listened.

I invited her in. I made her tea and let her break the cups. I let her yell and felt her cry and weep with grief. We had many visitors who showed me how to hold and comfort anger. Then she taught me to listen. She reminded me of my needs when I wasn’t protecting them. I let her be angry at me for shushing her. She’s got lots of valid points even after sorting through the pride and ego’s filters.

So back to the tipping point.

I felt rage - and I felt love, not fear. Not blind, hateful spite, but a fierce reminder that I wouldn’t be here if I’d listened the first time. So I made myself known. I cut the cord and it felt true. I felt free and I love myself for it. I chose me with as much grace and love as I could manage in that place in my practices.

The peripheral angers still simmered below the surface. I was acutely aware of the polluted leaks plugged all in all over. The sludge hardening like dried clay and dirt, I envisioned myself breaking through the clay, peeling away the layers of gunk that were never mine to hold at all.

I asked Mother Earth to help. I felt an atmospheric shift: a slight increase in air pressure, a damp earthy smell entered my nose, a sense of reverent support held me. I felt her start pulling the leaking cords tight as I sliced and placed my hand on the severed wounds. Moving along my throat, I unplugged a giant cord socket. I used Reiki to cauterize and then heal the wound left by the socket. Again, at the base of my spine, I removed another node of cords, cauterized the flow, then healed over the wound. Again, this time all over my womb space, I pulled and called upon Reiki, my teachers, Mother Earth, and her helpers as we gathered and transmuted the cords. There is no time in this place. I do not know how long I was in this state of consciousness nor is that relevant information. I stepped out of that clay golem cocoon, a fully energetic being.

I am light with clean windows. I am FINALLY clean and I get to start a new discussion with myself. I was reborn that day, just I was before and will be over and over as I continue to grow.