The Beauty of Decay

An update from Anya

Hello friends…

Coming to you live from my bed, where I’ve been struggling to recover from a nasty cough/cold/sore throat situation for the past week.

In late March, Chris and I left Colorado for the California desert to attend the Bombay Beach Biennale, a renegade celebration of art, music, and philosophy that takes place on the edge of civilization, on the shores of the Salton Sea. The Biennale was co-founded in 2015 by our dear and brilliant friend, Tao Ruspoli. (You can listen to conversations between Tao and I here, here, and here.)

I first attended the Biennale in 2018, and year after year, it’s served as a beautifully strange portal through which to connect with humans who, like me, are passionate about creating beauty, art, pleasure, and love amidst the grief and devastation that defines our collective reality. Bombay Beach poignantly proclaims through art, philosophy, and community-building, that beauty and decay are two expressions of the same thing — a willingness to live our lives as fully as we possibly can.

There is no love without grief.

There is no grief without love.

Everything is beautiful and dying.

Grieving is a sacred art, not an art whose products should be sold or seen objectively. Grieving is an art that when it is fully known and made to actively happen in all its grandeur and integrity, is the backbone of all real peace. It is the art of all arts; it is the art behind all real art.

- Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust

Bombay Beach, circa 2018. Sculpture by Alexandra Sand.

Back in Crestone, we are finally moved in to to our new house, although there is still a lot of work to be done. If you’d like to follow along on our journey in building a lifeboat, a project we’ve named “The Crestone Conglomerate,” please follow us on Instagram, and subscribe on Youtube.

In other news, Chris and I will be joining Cameron and Melayne Shayne for the second year in a row to host a Sex At Dawn-themed retreat this summer in Whitefish, MT. We will be diving into a myriad of controversial topics such as cultural identity & ideology, sexuality, relationships, monogamy/non-monogamy, sexual orientation, desire, eroticism, empowerment, power dynamics, and self-expression, and exploring various movement practices such as free-form movement, dance, Budokon Yoga and Mobility, as well as martial arts, all designed to break through limiting beliefs and cognitive patterns, and bring us into greater self-expression and self-awareness.

We can only accommodate 20 people, and this retreat tends to fill up fast. If you’re interested in attending, please click here to learn more and to apply.

Group photo from last year’s Sex at Dawn retreat.

If you’re looking for other ways to connect more deeply with the MGSW community, I encourage you to participate in our monthly book club. This month, we’re reading Open to Desire: The Truth about What the Buddha Taught by Mark Epstein, and I’ve announced five more months of books as well. You can learn all about our book club and sign up to receive updates by clicking below.

The MGSW Book Club Continues!

Until next time…