share your spiritual biography in 10 words, or less:

ex-Evangelical / Trans f@ggot wizard / loves Jesus (as an anti-empire ancestor)

where are you turning for soul nourishment / joy / aliveness?

Taking naps, deepening friendships (including with my dog, Jack), dancing alone and with others, making and seeing theater, writing and listening to music, breathing with the river, walking in the woods, trying to read the entire Ursula LeGuin canon (it’s vast!), watching and re-watching Queer TV shows (currently re-watching “Fellow Travelers” and “Sort Of”)

what is a text you hold sacred?

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

what is a spiritual practice currently sustaining you?

Deepening in relationship with trees near my home, especially one specific old old hickory

how would you describe the work you feel called to do in this world (even if it is not the work you get paid for)?

Every breath is a prayer, every word is a spell, and theater making is a sacred collective act.

From the time I was a child, I have known that collaborative storytelling and singing together are some of the most powerful (and most ancient) technologies of transformation. Disrupting and transcending systems of dominance requires resilience with discomfort – resilience with bearing witness to pain and violence and also, equally as powerfully, resilience with tolerating joy and possibility.

As a theater director, composer, and culture shaper, I am devoted to creating sacred containers to support our resilience with the discomfort of transformation: theater as ritual and sanctuary, theater as space for collective action and collective healing. I am currently co-catalyzing the Slow Theater Movement and writing RISK HALLELUJAH: an unapologetically Queer musical about Jesus.

In collaboration with Queer kin throughout all of time, I also hold space for love rituals (inclusive of weddings) and beyond, and I have a decades-deep coaching practice centering on intimacy, vocal freedom, and space-holding.

knowing that none of us “has it all together,” what is one question you are wrestling with, or bit of wisdom you are struggling to enflesh in your daily life?

I often feel constricted and scrambling within the lived realities of capitalism, struggling to make ends meet and connect to the ways that that there is more than enough time and resource. I understand scarcity, urgency, and precarity to be imposed lies connected to the calculatedly cruel conditions through which systems of dominance try to wield power, and so I know this tension is not ‘my fault’, and also, I am staying curious about a different enfleshed relationship with all this.

who is one elder / ancestor / mentor whose guidance you draw from? what is one piece of wisdom they have offered?

Bayo Akomolafe: “Do not pray exclusively to the ancestors of the land; make room also for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through cracks with the first musical notes of worlds to come.”

what’s one oppressive untruth you are practicing unlearning / divesting from?

Breath by breath, I am unlearning the conflating of “quality of life” with autonomy and mastery, which I understand stems from death-phobia and ableism. It is humbling to notice how deeply entrenched this old conditioning is for me, and the book “Die Wise” by Stephen Jenkinson has been a huge support.

what is one thing you wish were required listening / viewing? (please link to the song, poem, art piece, podcast, etc.)

God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot, by Buffy Sainte-Marie: https://open.spotify.com/track/4K3glAui6GSMQfYWxC0qy9?si=e7c7866337584b44

any of your website and/or social media handles you’d like us to include / highlight?

WEBSITE: orionjohnstone.com
IG: @orionjohnstone 
FB: orion.johnstone
RISK HALLELUJAH on Bandcamp