US-American Crystal Grid is an ingredient to a larger ritual, Resurrect Extinct Vibration. The crystal grid was designed and constructed in the early spring of 2018, the first poems resulting from writing inside the grid came in May.
The grid's ingredients: Four solid copper 16-ounce water bottles, each containing 9 crystals of 3 pieces of amethyst, 3 pieces of carnelian, and 3 pieces of rose quartz. Each bottle was then filled with crystal-infused water and sealed.
The grid is a triangle connecting Minneapolis, Memphis, and Cheyenne. The copper bottles of crystals are buried at each location. The fourth bottle is buried inside the triangle in Omaha, which is the seat of the grid. (See the map at the bottom of this post.)
How the grid works: I sit on top of the buried copper container of crystals in Omaha. With a compass, I align myself with Minneapolis. Once I have aligned myself I eat a small amount of dirt from the Minneapolis location and listen to ambient recordings of the site. After meditating and tuning into Minneapolis from my seat in Omaha, I begin taking the raw notes which are later shaped into poems. I then face Memphis and repeat with eating dirt and listening to sounds from Memphis, then after that, I do the same for Cheyenne. I repeat the whole process a second time, then again a third time. It is almost exclusively from the third round where most of the harvested notes become poems. The grid winds clockwise, winds tighter with each turn, the first round making the base of a pyramid. The second round is the midsection, then finally the third round brings the peak of the pyramid, and the feelings of writing are a most extreme euphoria during the third and final round.
The grid crosses and touches eleven different states: Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming. The Mississippi River touches the triangle three different times, charging the eastern wall of the triangle as the water and the grid's energy pushes from Minneapolis to Memphis.
Minneapolis gets its name from the Lakota word for water, "Minne," fused with the Greek word for city, "polis," Water City. Memphis is named after the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, a dozen miles from the Sphinx and pyramids of Giza. Memphis, Egypt sits at the mouth of the Nile, while Memphis, Tennessee sits at the jawbone of the Mississippi. Both Cheyenne, Wyoming and Omaha, Nebraska were named after Native American tribes and named so at the time when all migration of native peoples and the seasonal routes of the many herds and flocks came to an abrupt end by the white colonial genocide and theft. The footfalls of millions replaced soon enough with barbed wire, motorways, giant shopping plazas and many miles of genetically modified monocrops grown by mega-corporations with pesticides and fertilizers poisoning the air, water, and soil.
My sleep after performing the ritual and writing inside the crystal grid has been a deeper state of relaxation than normal for me where I wake revitalized and feel happy. My dreams these nights have centered on life inside the triangular frame of the grid, especially on my birth city of Topeka, Kansas. I was born on the Forbes Air Force Base where my biological father Dennis McNeil was stationed. The base was built in response to the start of WWII, then later became the home of the 90th Bombardment Wing during the Korean War. When I was born during the Vietnam War the Titan missiles had been decommissioned and the base was being used as a Tactical Air Command facility. These mornings waking the day after time spent with the grid are filled with meditation and writing focused on how the grid crosses the direct path of Manifest Destiny: that 19th-century belief of the white supremacist power structure that they did not need to share the North American continent with native people. My birthplace later became a home for the military industrial complex to take the premise of Manifest Destiny and spread it beyond our borders to kill and thieve in other nations of people of color. I may wake relaxed and happy, but I insist I keep a close focus on the crimes that made my life possible.
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