#7: The Poetics of Migration
Sept 2026
Offerings by Joak Tekolotl & Lotus Dreams, mukhtara ayọ̀tẹ́jú adékúnbi yusuf, and Karo Carolina Salinas
If you are a sentient, feeling person attuned to human suffering, you have probably, at least briefly, fantasized about leaving the United States. But if you are a migrant, you know that leaving home is not as easy as it seems. In addition to the paperwork, the visas, the job search, there is the emotional journey: the feelings of longing, loss, uncertainty, and hope.
I migrated to the United States in 1990 and received my United States citizenship in 2000. The following artistic offerings emerge from my conversations with a constellation of fellow queer people of the global majority migrants. They invoke divination, diagramming, dreaming, and above all, art making as a way to navigate uncertain and nonlinear journeys.
If you are a migrant, or considering migration, we offer this Vital Conversation as a balm and a North Star.
—Carol Zou
Oracle Deck
By Joak Tekolotl & Lotus Dreams
As we plan for our move to Joak’s homeland with few possibilities of returning due to the constraints of empire, connecting with our ancestors has become a central part of our lives. Our ancestors know what it’s like to uproot themselves, transplant into new soil, and give forth seeds in lands far away from their places of birth.
It is through our shared reverence for the divine, that we decided to put together a tool to walk alongside us for the next stage of our journey — serving as a conduit for whatever guidance Spirit seeks to share with us and others on a similar path.
The process of collaging each card allowed us to say “yes and” to each other’s vision every step of the way, a practice that will serve us well as we make home outside of what has become known and familiar to us. Repurposing photographs that we have taken on our walks and travels on this part of Turtle Island also helps us honor the spirits of these lands, which we hold close to our hearts. We share this piece with love and hope it will bring guidance to others as well.
This deck of oracle cards is part of a lineage of divination practices, which provide guidance when you are feeling at a crossroads.
Click the button below to digitally pull a card.
Download a free printable copy of the Oracle deck here.
Diagramming as Creative Practice
mukhtara ayọ̀tẹ́jú adékúnbi yusuf (instagram)
Diagramming has become a powerful creative healing practice for me, shepherding me through many transitions including the migratory one of relocating back to my home country after US COVID stay at home orders began to lax in 2022.
Migration is translation, a sliding of every point of the shape that is you in a new direction.
I see diagramming as a way to locate myself in migration, even if the moment my diagrams are completed also marks my movement from the space and process they indicate. Translation takes more than a map it takes, a willingness to surrender to the un-translateable, to approximations.
This started in grad school over a decade ago, my architecture professor encouraged me to mind map, and my mercury-ruled psyche was off to the races. Then, years later compassion based neuroplasticity, which asked me to map relationships and patterns of my inner world.
I diagram how I am feeling, the origins, what happened, what it brought up.
I diagram realizations about sensation. What sensations feel like others, I diagram lifeworlds and relationships I am building with indigenous kin, mapping both the immaterial and the obvious matter they hold.
It has allowed me to reclaim for the wild and unknowable parts of reality, a form of drafting and meaning making I previously felt was reserved for white male colonial oppressive circumscriptive logic.
Diagramming is its own abstract space making, I draw a line with my hand– I gesture towards.
I situate, if only for a moment, things that are otherwise suspended in air.
Dream to Remember
Karo Carolina Salinas
The instinct to migrate is natural, seasonal and cyclical. External factors can also create circumstances making migration necessary. My family avoided exposing my developing mind to the realities of war in our homeland, so it was explained to me that I was born abroad, en el estrangeiro, because my family sought opportunities. And this subsequently gave me a passport with significantly less travel visa requirements, than the one from my ancestral homeland.
When I was four years old, I went to my native homeland of Nicaragua (Nic’Anahuac) for the first time. My grandparents brought my sister and I to visit many lakes and volcanoes, where I encountered places I had been before, places I remembered from my dreams. Speaking with my elders, I would learn that some of them uphold the belief that the dream world and waking world are two real and valid places.
“Throughout my life, dreams have played an important role in illuminating my life’s path. I noticed my dreams contained insights to my inner world as well as indications about situations in day to day life.”
Throughout my life, dreams have played an important role in illuminating my life’s path. As a child, I had many recurring dreams. When I noticed things happening in waking life that I had previously dreamed about, I started to practice writing when I woke up. I noticed my dreams contained insights to my inner world as well as indications about situations in day to day life.
As an adolescent I grew curious about developing my connection to the dreamtime, and through personal research and experimentation, I found ways to strengthen the clarity of dreaming. As a young adult until now, I continuously deepened my relationship to the unseen world and the dreamtime through herbalism, spiritual fasting and meditation practice.
The result has been a dreamtime that enriches my awareness of what is currently happening and what is on the path ahead. I should emphasize that the practice of writing upon waking is integral for being able to recall and reflect on the messages and symbols offered.
“Integrating the dreamtime to waking life has been a practice of recovering my indigenous ancestors' ways of knowing. My dreams offer me a place to explore, resolve matters from day to day life, and remind me how to live.”
A year and half ago, I dreamt that I was walking through a forest next to the sea. A familiar place, whose name and location I would recall after waking and writing down what I could remember. A year after that dream, I moved near that forest by the sea, in a country that is neither my birthplace or my ancestral homeland. A move that has been equal parts trust in my inner compass and guides, intellectually justified, and a huge leap of faith.
Integrating the dreamtime to waking life has been a practice of recovering my indigenous ancestors' ways of knowing. During this current migration, my dreamtime and writing practice helped me to navigate the many demanding changes and challenges of living abroad, learning a new language, and an overhaul of my personal and professional life. My dreams offer me a place to explore, resolve matters from day to day life, and remind me how to live.