Dystopian Flames Update for 2020

These are photographs of the photography, jewellery, and zine exhibit called "Dystopian Flames" that ran at my public library for the months of February and May 2019. 

One of the main reasons I did the exhibit was to raise public awareness and to force action on the part of government to end the toxic and deadly practise of open oil flaring. I wrote a complementary zine about this that you can read later in this article.

In the display, I wanted to show the juxtaposition of extreme natural beauty and extreme industrial ugliness on the prairies.

I was back in my home area of southeast Saskatchewan in June 2020, and the situation was even more extreme. 

Two of the neighbours I wrote about in the zine have died since it was published. The wife of my Dad's childhood friend, who battled cancer for many years, passed away last year. This was followed by our neighbour who had battery operated for a large part of his life. He had a kidney transplant about a year ago but died this June. He was only 62.

I write about the subjects I write about, as ugly and horrifying as they often are, for this reason. There are real people, people who are loved and cherished, being badly affected by these practises. People's health is being damaged, and their lives are being cut short by the toxic and slap-dash practises of the oil industry, as well as many other industries-run-amok on this planet. It has to stop, and corporate criminals must be held accountable for their practises.

There are now five open oil flares within a kilometre radius of where my mother was living and dozens of pumpjacks within a two kilometre radius. Two of the oil flares were directly across the road from her house, visible from her living room window. I've updated the photographs to include some of the (unfortunate) new developments. The photographs are from three different sites surrounding my family's property.   

The Dystopian Flames Library Exhibit - May 2019

  

Dystopian Flames Zine in the Mount Royal University Zine Collection

Dystopian Flames: The True Cost of Oil Production on the Canadian Prairies zine is now available in the Mount Royal University zine collection in Calgary, Alberta. 

A man from the university found the zine online and purchased two copies for the collection. 

I lived in Calgary for six years, which they call "the city that oil built," so to have this zine in a university zine collection in that city is a bit of a coup. Very cool and unexpected! I'm happy to spread the word about this terribly dangerous and toxic practise, going on in my home area of Saskatchewan and all over the prairies. This is certainly a practise that needs to come to a swift end before more people, animals, and environments are harmed.

Dystopian Flames was a companion zine, written in early 2019, for a photography exhibit I did at my local library. 

 

Dystopian Flames Exhibit at the Public Library - May to June 2019

 These are photographs of my photography, jewellery, and zine exhibit called "Dystopian Flames" that is running at my public library for the months of May and June 2019. 

One of the main reasons I'm doing this exhibit is to raise public awareness and to force action on the part of government to end the toxic and deadly practise of open oil flaring. You can read more about that practise later in this article, after the photographs.  

Most of the items in this exhibit (and more) are available at the Willow's Web Astrology Etsy shop.

I'm also doing a free "How to Make a Zine" workshop at the library in hopes of starting a revolutionary wave of zine-makingggggg in my area!

If you live in the wild West Kootenays of British Columbia and would like to know details about this exhibit or the zine workshop, please email me at willowsweb [at] hushmail.com

  

Dystopian Flames

"Dystopian Flames"

Photos: Willow

This five-photograph grouping, along with a supplementary 'zine, is available at the Willow's Web Astrology Etsy shop.

All photographs in this article are part of a photography exhibit I'm doing at a local library.

You can also see a YouTube video on this exhibit.

Planet of concrete challenges, Saturn, is within orb of a conjunction to Hell-ruler Pluto throughout 2019. As this conjunction tightens, becoming exact a single time on January 12, 2020, we are confronted in our concrete lives and realities with all that has been suppressed, manipulated, lied about, and buried (Pluto) within business, corporations, finance, government, and institutions (Capricorn). Things are coming to a head on multiple fronts throughout 2019 and 2020 under the slow-burn effects of this Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and the toxicity and violence inherent in many of the structures and hierarchical pyramid-schemes of power on Planet Earth cannot be denied. 

Saturn relates to what is real, what is concrete, what is tangible, and as it steps further into the murky, netherworld regions of Pluto, we are faced with real, concrete, and tangible confrontations with some of the hellish scenarios that have been manufactured for us on this planet. These confrontations will require some type of effort on our parts in order to liberate ourselves from their weight. 

Whatever Plutonic threads are being plucked in your life, I encourage you to follow them to their roots and address them, working toward concrete solutions both in your own personal life and within human society at large. The personal is transpersonal and vice versa.

Saturn conjunct Pluto in Capricorn requires that we work, step-by-step, for our liberation from the many manufactured and manipulated Hell-scenarios currently running amok. It requires that we demand something better, something more honest, something wholly legitimate, and that we do so from right where we stand.

Our efforts toward liberation from the muck and the murk are not futile (far from it!), despite what we may have been conditioned to think...

An All Hallow's Eve Re-Post: The Most Terrifying Ghouls and Goblins on Planet Earth Wear Suits and Ties

 One of thousands of oil flares releasing poisonous gases in rural Saskatchewan

Photos: Willow

The Sun entered deep, dark Scorpio this morning, and we are now entering the dark half of the year for the final time with wounded healer Chiron transiting Pisces (oil and gas). This All Hallow's Eve will be the last one with Chiron in the sign of ghosts and spirits for 50 years, and this certainly adds some extra spook factor. 

With the wounded healer in the highly-karmic late Pisces zone, representing the end of the zodiac cycle, we must now understand in no uncertain terms how we are being haunted and psychically disturbed on this planet in ways that connect the personal with the collective situation.

We see the symptoms all around us: depression, anxiety, mental illness, drug and alcohol dependence, other addictions, isolation, emotional disturbance, relationship breakdown. These symptoms and dysfunction seem so disparate and disconnected, like many, many individual cases with no common threads.

But at the root of this pain and dysfunction are the same violent and inhumane systems, the same fascist, top-down structures of power, that are being forcefully superimposed over our natural lives all over this planet.

The emotional and psychic disturbances, these haunted existences, are common and natural reactions to a highly-artificial and detrimental way of living.

With Chiron transiting the extra-potent final degrees of Pisces until re-entering Aries on February 17, 2019, we are coming into contact with some big collective karma and big collective lessons - the Grand Finale of the entire Chiron in Pisces transit.

As ugly and scary and horrifying as it may be to look at, I don't think I can sum up the (often-invisible) connections between the personal and collective situations any better than I did in this article from October 27, 2017 (with updated photographs):