Gypsy Fires

Dr Russell Patrick Brown
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Decolonize your body with dance history, embodied knowledge, and inherited Romani wisdom. Hosted by Dr. Russell Patrick Brown—PhD historian, Bashaldo Gypsy fortune teller, technologist, and dancer—Gypsy Fires merges deep-dive research with ancestral storytelling to restore your body and soul through movement, memory, and time. newsletter.gypsyfires.com

  1. 5d ago

    A Jig at the End of the World

    To be a Bashaldo Gypsy is to remember fallen civilizations. It is to carry language, music, stories, technology and dance that have witnessed the ruin of empires across continents, oceans and ages. It is to carry a repertoire that continues life amidst settled people whose memories can easily be turned hostile overnight through the influence of volatile state archives of borders, labels and laws. It is to know that loving a country won’t save you from being kicked out of it, but when they do you travel in the steps of those who walked this before. You move in the steps of dances like the jig. Dear Traveler, there is much that has been forgotten. There are entire worlds few recall, and in Gypsy Fires I’d like to help you remember them as we dive further into history, tradition and what it means for us today. I don’t offer my memory because you need to be like me and do what I do, or because the past was a better place. I open my dance because I have found among many other Roma and Sinti, we tend to remember who did what, where they did it, how and why they started moving that way. This certainly covers dance, but also how people comport themselves in their communities. What do they value and how does their language, business and pleasure reflect that? We remember what used to matter, and that’s helpful when chachepen goes into hiding and xoxanipen stalks the land: when lying becomes culture, the nation and the self. I am biased, but I think Romani and Sinti dance is very good at getting through disaster, especially that which is caused by greed and deceit. Growing up, calamity was already assumed to have arrived, and our eyes were always open. So there wasn’t even a sense that “oh, crisis is here we need to act” or a sense that anyone was going to care about our struggles, although I am stubborn and keep believing that people will. Whether times were good or bad we were always working through what my mother called, “Plan A, B, C and D.” This is also the shape of many jig, hornpipe and reel dances. As the borders of the world as we have known it shift to reveal what was always there and more people fall through the system’s cracks they thought they were safe from, dance was made especially for those who don’t have anything to hold onto. It’s not made when we steal another’s dance or covet things that aren’t good for us. It is made in remembering who you really are as life itself. L'Ancien Régime of Louis XIV and his high gilded court has been revealed to us all on social media. Just like it was three-hundred years ago, we are witnessing the contemporary version of masses of French proletariat shoved at gunpoint into poverty, factory brutality and sabot—wooden shoes—while genocide and war continue to ravage and loot the worlds of Black and Brown people. A few billionaires stand in their Hall of Mirrors, and we are all reminded that they were never referring to our “freedom” or making our lives “great” again. Regardless of how you have landed in the fall, if all that you have left right now is the cage they put you in, tap, slap and bang upon the system itself and make that your dance. You do not let them defeat you, erase you or, worse, make you one of them. You look at the consequences of the road you and your ancestors walked, learn your lessons and you continue. But first, we have to understand how capitalism, nationalism and middle-class values tried to change our memory of the jig. A Game of Cut & Paste As I wrote in my last letter, What Dance Really Is, up until about the 1930s our world once looked very different. At any given time, large portions of the global population were at sea and on rivers, lakes and canals, and many lived there full-time. Cities we would consider small or remote were busy trading ports with direct connections to the world through migrants, sailors and travellers. Indigenous roads of the world weren’t just on land, they carried culture, trade and lives through water. Piroska is the best Romni and Sintitza archivist and researcher I know, and many years ago she shared with me a video documentary of Gwyneth Thomas’s preservation of Welsh clogging—dancing percussively with wooden-soled shoes. In the beginning of the video we see a teenage boy clogging in the square of the small fishing village of Porthmadog while the narrator gives us three important pieces of information: * The village was once a port within a booming North Atlantic economy stretching between Newfoundland to Russia. * As a young girl she watched from the windows as sailors or “Gypsies from the nearby encampment [danced] their jigs” and “the jig over a broom were a great favorite both at sea and in the Gypsy encampments.” * As this economy died so did clogging as it had been done then, and you would never know it had existed as there were only a few fishing boats around. The documentary then goes on to talk about how Gwyneth revived the clog dancing of “olden days” from being lost by teaching it to schoolchildren. It’s really a lovely documentary, and who doesn’t want schoolchildren to learn and preserve folk dancing? The documentary of course leaves out that under Methodist control of Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, clog dancing and harping were banned, with almost all ancient harps of Wales destroyed. It was the Welsh Kale exclusively who kept these traditions alive, and Frances Roberts Reilly is from one of these families who has faithfully preserved both traditions. Also, w e are not told that sailors were often Black or Brown, and that they shaped dance, culture and identity in the Atlantic world. As we see Gwyneth in her beautiful, fine home telling stories to her grandchildren of bygone days, we do not see the lives of those affected—Gypsy and gadjo alike—by the collapse of an entire economy, way of life and the culture that went with it. We do not know what has happened to those people by 1959 after two World Wars and a world made over multiple times by industrialization—an act that is never as naturally occurring as we are made to believe. All we know is what the film tells us and shows us, and it was broadcasted around the country during the “folk revival”. In the case of Welsh clogging, its creation and history were summarized as the “old traditional dances of Wales, and they added to them many of the steps they had learned in their travels to foreign parts.” But this is a memory whose boundaries were re-written to suit middle class conformity, belonging and aspiration at the cost of those who actually created the practices who were facing increased discrimination, hardship and aggression. Further North in Scotland, we have records that help understand the other end of the history—a beginning in the 1700s: Dance and music probably played a larger part in the social life of the Scottish people in the eighteenth century than ever before….the Highlanders of the parish of Moulin, Perthsire […] abandon their customary racing, wrestling and putting the stone for what their minister called the “more elegant, though less manly, amusement of dancing, which has become very common.” George S. Emmerson, 1971 How did the dance come to be in many parts of Britain as well as Ireland? Primarily through itinerant dancing masters—people who carried dance upon the road. People who changed their names to sound French. People who relied heavily upon Gypsies and sailors to get their moves and show their new steps off on stages and in town squares. It is a memory erased entirely from contemporary Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English folk dancing history and practice. But the dance is patient, and it goes on regardless of who says they own it. I have no doubt people will continue to nationalize, commercialize or grant-ify dance that created and carried by people who were on the move. But they give themselves away when call it just “freedom and fun” and part of their national identity, while those of us whose parents gave us our steps and taught us what they’re really for carry on. Throughout white communities in Europe and the Americas I find stories of dances that arrive and depart. Meanwhile in Roma, Sinti, Indigenous and African communities, we remember dances that continue. In Gypsy Fires we’ll be recovering more of these histories on every continent, and they tell a story for us today that no dance manual, gym-class folk dance or social media influencer is ever going to tell you. And we need to hear this now. Many today are perplexed to see what is called Artificial Intelligence destroy the world as we know it—putting millions out of work, re-making the landscape and re-writing civilization before our eyes in order to benefit the few, but clogging, jigging and other “low” or “vernacular” dances remember this has happened many times before. The People on the River Are Happy To Give When John Fogerty wrote the hit song, “Proud Mary”, he had never even seen the Mississippi River. The song’s inspiration began in the summer of love in ‘67, and the paddlewheel boat came later in inspiration from television and Mark Twain-Americana. Just eight years after Gwyneth’s appearance in the documentary, John capitalized on an old memory of river-life and people who were indeed, “happy to give.” Roma, Sinti and Traveler culture were ripe for the taking as we had just endured the Holocaust and Jim Crow laws in the USA kept dark-skinned families like mine on the margins alongside Black and African Americans who were the real target of those laws. When Tina Turner took Proud Mary, she did more than make the song a timeless hit. She breathed life into a culture that modern capitalism tried to erase. A highly mobile people with access to resources on land, trade on water and people from around the world possess far too much independence and abundance for an economy built on enclosure, extraction and expulsion. They’v

  2. Sep 18

    What Dance Really Is

    As usual, I could not afford studio space. Five years ago the historic, run-down and very affordable Fazil’s Studio in Hell’s Kitchen was torn down to make way for another pointless tall glass box. As a result, percussive dancers of all styles were out of an affordable place to practice. But I knew a secret. Along the shores of Manhattan was ample wood to pound, space to leap and free breezy air conditioning to cool me off as I practiced my jigs, hornpipes and reels—I went to the piers. In preparation for nightlife gigs at venues like the Box, Dixon Place and Suzanne Bartsch’s parties, I became a pierdancer. One afternoon in June 2013, as I pranced around and beat out my rhythms careful not to trip on the gaps between the planks, I noticed two mysterious people were sitting, watching me. In this picturesque location, I was accustomed to people gathering and recording my dancing or that of the voguing pierdancers, but this was a reciprocal connection. Something inside me called back to them. Eventually we began talking. They were two dancers from the House of LaBeija, which I had never heard of. One, a mother of the House, would introduce me to the world of pier life, and for a summer I would become a “pier child”. In the 1980s, Christopher Street Pier stood as a relic to a maritime world long gone from the world. In turn-of-the-century sketches and photographs, the edges of Manhattan were once thick with the mooring of ships—tall mastheads holding up the lofty aspirations of a city booming skyward. To think of ports like New York, London, Seville, Kingston, Benin, Halifax and Cobh was to think of a city just as much at sea as on land. As the century progressed with the abundance of air travel, what was once the point of arrival in a booming metropolis now became the forgotten wreckage of a bygone age. As a result, harbor life slipped out of necessity, out of gossip, out of the news and out of the anxieties of the state. For four centuries transoceanic colonialism needed to tolerate a professional class of people who lived between land and sea, made their own rules and saw the world for what it is. They were sailors, Gypsies and travelers. They were often of mixed and non-white backgrounds who, as the archives show, were in many cases more tolerant of homosexuality and transsexuality. Now, this meddlesome society that created its own counterculture in music and dance that inspired theater, novels and entertainments could be disappeared. While the public might have moved on, some bodies remembered. In the 1980s, Queer and Trans folk still returned to the Greenwich Village, and to the pier. Centuries of fluid sailor and traveler culture, an imperfect oasis for many, was not so easily forgotten. There returned to for community, joy and sex. Together, in the tradition of sailor’s hornpipes, busking and dancing for eels, they did a dance called Vogue that fused together high fashion in Trans Ballroom culture, martial arts, African-American and Latino culture and the poses made famous in Vogue magazine. But the story goes, you had to be careful as you moved through the collapsing structure of the pier—you could fall through the cracks. Throughout the ‘80s, Reagan’s neoconservative America delighted at stepping back and letting the HIV/AIDS epidemic swallow this community whole. Colonialism frequently relies upon plague to accomplish its objectives, and from the Yellow Fever to HIV to COVID, New York is fluent in the business of getting people sick for profit. If that wasn’t enough, by 1998, gentrification saw the opportunity to pave over this history for good and establish the Hudson River Park. Amidst the cozy grasses, dog parks, overpriced cafes and children’s playgrounds, to this day there is still no commemoration for these “deviants” who endured centuries of all-out assault. Dance, which had carried traditional societies all over the world through the ups and downs of life, had also been the fabric that held humanity together while colonialism and racism ripped it apart. Now, fiber-optic cables were laid on the ocean floor, forming a new, disembodied and highly controlled method of circulating information and culture through the graveyards it so recklessly created through slavery, colonialism, economic and ravaging privilege. Here at the pier in 2013, people still held on to dance. From early hornpipes to Vogue/Ballroom House, a temple of culture kept its worshippers. It was a dance of shared survival, and one I understood well as a Gypsy who not only learned music and dance from my family, but from my father who made sure I practiced and studied intensely in case I ever needed to busk for money on the street, which I regularly did with my harp, song and dance. We weren’t just returning to a tradition, we were practicing for the perilous voyages most certainly waiting for us ahead. Today, the dance is still holding on, even while developers all around the world desperately try to make their mark through greed and genocide. Where history of loss, tragedy and resistance once stood at the pier, now wealthy white collar professionals and tourists gaze out at sea unaware that they are now trapped on land. But still by some unstoppable miracle, I see people of all ages finding possibility through the cracks of an empire. We are no longer willing to be the mortar in the fractures of a system that doesn’t care about us. We’re letting it rip open to reveal the sea of humanity surging up the coast. A Dance Revolution Dear Traveler, over the next three months of Gypsy Fires I invite you to challenge what you may have been taught about dance, our bodies and what it means to be “us.” For the last three months we sat together while I shared maro chachepen—”our truth” as the famous Sinti-Manouche Gypsy, Django Reinhardt, called it. Now, it is time to start keeping time together, and when you’re ready, get up and dance next to the flames. Most of us have come to understand dance as a fleeting amusement to be enjoyed in one moment, gone the next. Many scholars liken dance to ephemera: print materials like political pamphlets, tickets, postcards, broadsides—the internet before the internet. Some of them argue this is dance’s power: that it resists capture, that it escapes. I agree that dance resists domination in ways other art forms cannot. But it is not fleeting. In the time I’ve had in a small, rebellious corner of academia, I have come to understand that dance is the most enduring act we perform. To dance is to shake, stomp and jump at the very foundations of who we are. And we have been doing it for a very long time. As we ask who we are and where we are going, the study of dance asks these questions in motion with all that it is to be human. As we explore how to live sustainably and with kindness and fairness upon our Earth, dance has always known the way. It gives us tools to investigate our most pressing challenges and our most pleasurable pursuits. It does not “form in the cracks of empire” as so many scholars claim. It is nature itself coming up through the pavements that will never, ever cover it completely. As we turn deeper into dance and the body, I need to call out that this knowledge came to me through a quiet, profound road I never intended to follow: recognizing my Romani identity and what that means for how I have lived and continue to live my life. The ongoing suppression, appropriation and erasure of Romani lives and Romani culture is an unforgiving, unescapable teacher. If you want to understand the colonization of dance and the subjugation of its power, heart and wisdom, study the colonization of Romani culture. In intellectual property law, arts funding and academic research, dance typically receives few legal protections, small resources and little respect. This would seem to suggest the limited value of dance as a whole. I know from being Romani that knowledge that is misunderstood is, in a way, protected. It is not a good form of protection, but when there are no paths for liberation, few methods of self-preservation remain. For centuries, the study of our culture in academia has been a colonial endeavor called “Gypsy Lore” studies: an exotic field of study preserved mostly for white, English-speaking men. Othering, misinterpretation, racism, superstition and lust obscure fields of view for colonizers. These fantasies allowed many of our traditions and values to remain unexploited however, even as we ourselves are exploited. This house of horrors has been a stern, stalking lecturer, mentor and witness to my research and to my life. In my travels in North America and Europe, I have found many people who share experiences of oppression, though their ways of resisting, surviving and thriving can differ in response to the many methods of dispossession and annihilation that continue to shape our lives. Our small conferences of hope, on the edges of academic symposia, theater lobbies, crowded cafés and protest marches, have been a refuge and a method of freedom for me. In gratitude from my little corner of the Romani world, I invite you on a journey through real dance history and its potential to world-build a future we can all move through. For so many of us, violence is not distant, it is intimately applied by governments, businesses and schools of hate to our lives and to our bodies. So many dance forms I study and practice that weave through and with Romani dance—Irish Step Dance, Flamenco, Ballet Folklórico, African-American Tap Dance—have been and continue to meet this abiding terror. If this is new to you, I call you to explore it. If you have known this for as long as you have been dancing, I offer Gypsy Fires in solidarity. Your work—your dance—shakes our earth. We need it. The Timedancer I claim that intimate violence echoes throughout all times. I do not refer to time-traveling cruelty, but to the power of those who are

  3. Aug 28

    Hollywood Colonized Intuition

    One of my mother’s most important lessons on psychic reading came from the back of the room. Unlike the reading of people, parties and love lives, this lesson on seeing more than what’s there was about understanding something much bigger and more complex, yet completely obvious when you know where to look. We were in my school for a town hall meeting, and instead of being front and center like most, we lingered on the edges of the auditorium. I always hated this as this meant if I wanted to sit, I had to on the floor. As a result I often stood with her, and in time I learned what she was actually seeing. There was what was being said, written and counted—and then there was what was actually happening. My mother and father taught me that if you want to understand politics, you need be quiet and watch what’s happening between people, feel where the power actually moves and listen to the gap between what the institution says and doesn’t say. The truth might be harmless or dire, but when you’re from a people who are always pushed to the side, it’s always better to know. There’s a misconception that Roma and Sinti want nothing to do with gadje politics, when the truth is we are part of it whether we want to be or not. It wasn’t our idea to create governments with borders and armies. We didn’t invent control of the masses through ideas of racial, ethnic or cultural purity while positioning those who remember where they are from as outsiders. We weren’t the ones who decided that people who know how to leave are dangerous. Our choice is to keep going—with both eyes open. We don’t need crystal balls to see what’s obvious, we can just make use of our perspective, our senses and our memory. What people see and don’t see about us reflects the viewer’s biases, not us. But even our silence and discretion won’t protect us. For those who want power flowing one way while the public looks in another direction, those who can see the choreography for what it is are a problem. My training at the back of the room prepared me to see how propaganda works in popular media, and how magic tricks blame innocent people for the crimes of the powerful. The Silver Screen’s “Sleight of Hand” Towards the beginning of the film, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy (the protagonist) stumbles upon what appears to be a Gypsy-style caravan offering juggling, sleight of hand tricks and fortune telling “acclaimed by the crowned heads of Europe.” Here we meet Professor Marvel, who Dorothy turns to for hope of liberation from a life of poverty and hardship on the Kansas plains. Marvel and the viewer can see that a big storm is coming, and so he tells her through his crystal ball “reading” to return home to her Aunt Em so she can be safe. The interaction seems fairly benign, producing almost a lovable deceit designed to keep Dorothy safe. But it never existed in the original 1900 book by L. Frank Baum. The verda and Professor Marvel are nowhere in the book. The crystal ball, which we see later as the Wicked Witch of the West’s terrifying surveillance tool, was also added to the film and replaced the book’s telescopic eye. All of this was made up in a film studio forty years after the book was written. The story goes that MGM thought that audiences would not want to see a fantasy film made from a children’s tale, so in spring 1938 screenwriter Noel Langley decided that Dorothy’s visit to Oz would not be a visit to a real, alternate universe but would be a result of dream from a head injury from the tornado that strikes her house. This anchored the film in reality, but also saved the studio money on casting: the farm hands became the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow while the mean neighbor, Miss Gulch, became the Wicked Witch of the West. In summer 1938 Screenwriters Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf took over. They still needed to come up with a real-world counterpart for the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, that great swindler living in a palace in the Emerald City. Despite the book’s clear references to the perils of capitalism in the Gilded Age, they did not put the origins of the Wizard in any of era’s culprits: a banker, landlord, salesman, politician or “Robber Baron”. Baum’s satire was left on the cutting room floor. Instead, they decided the real-world basis of the Wizard of Oz should be found in a Gypsy wagon on the edge of town. Witnessing the Wicked On August 25th, 1939, The Wizard of Oz premiered at the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to critical acclaim, an Oscar award for Best Original Song and a legacy as the most influential US American movie of all time. A week later, Hitler would invade Poland and begin World War II. By 1933, Germany had already begun formally discriminating against Roma and Sinti and sending them to concentration camps such as Dachau, a suburb of Munich. By the end of 1939, the SS had permission to shoot Sinti and Roma on sight while mass deportations were underway. The samudaripen was cruel, brutal and remains largely unrecognized to this day. Across the water in the USA, Roma and Sinti had already survived four centuries of danger and a country determined never legally recognize us outside of “Gypsy laws” designed to criminalize and expel us. By the 1910s and ‘20s, the little we had—our culture—was in the middle of a massive looting spree by American consumer culture. From the Greenwich Village “Bohemians” to a Gypsy craze in the 1920s, the foundations of today’s American digital nomads, “boho” styles and psychic readings took root. In 1924, Gypsy Fires in America was published and families like mine that traveled through Southern Ohio to make a living would be preserved for the next century as child-like con men and seductresses. The appropriation of our verdas (caravans), our intuition and our peril was not without consequence. Repackaged as non-Roma liberation and mixed with sinister stereotypes, our culture was commodified while actual people were excluded from meaningful representation in 20th century politics and media. Meanwhile, the state got a useful, idealized “bohemian” traveling culture it could deploy at will—to either romanticize insecurity for those who have lost financial independence, or demonize those on the edges who see the truth. The Wizard of Oz arrived in 1939 when a broken, Depression-weary America was desperate for escape. The 1920s Gypsy craze had long faded after the 1929 market crash, and our culture was ripe for theatrical repurposing as a warning to a public told, “there’s no place like home.” Right as genocide ravaged Roma and Sinti families in Europe and families like mine fought to survive in Jim Crow America, our lived reality became permanently bound to cinema’s most famous charlatan. The Illusion Continues When I moved to New York City in 2005, I won a lottery ticket for the hit musical, Wicked (2003). These were $20 ticket raffles for the front row, which in a theater are undesirable seats. Up close the magic is ruined by things like spitting singers, sweaty dancers and the raw mechanics of a stage. Like the back of the room, illusions can be exposed for what they are. The musical is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 bestselling novel, which transforms the Wicked Witch into a young woman named “Elphaba” with green skin and an extraordinary magical talent. (Spoiler alert.) When she discovers that the Wizard is actually a deceptive showman who uses segregation and genocide to colonize Oz, through propaganda she becomes the scapegoat for his crimes. The story becomes a powerful allegory on how white supremacy and authoritarian power manufacture enemies to distract from institutional corruption. The massive film adaptations in 2024 and 2025 showed that filmgoers had gotten over their disdain for fantasy films, and confirmed that while the Gypsy caravan of Professor Marvel would not make a re-appearance, all the sleight of hand that created him would remain intact. The failure to interrogate this trope becomes glaring given how persistently Hollywood continues to create fear and mistrust of the Roma and Sinti in such films as The Wolf Man (1941), Thinner (1996) and Doctor Sleep (2019). In Wicked, those who move with boundary-crossing skill and showmanship are still preserved as the most dangerous figures of all. Whether I’m in the front row or in the back of the theater, I can see the choreography clearly. Due to Hollywood’s long history of deception, our ability to see the truth of what’s happening and provide this in readings for gadje now lives somewhere between cheap chicanery and magical fantasy. Broadway’s “gypsies”, the art world’s “bohemians” and modern influencers who appropriate our divinatory tools rarely respect real Romani people or what was stolen. Regardless of intent, the impacts are undeniable. A Roma colleague and I met with the producers of the 2024 revival of the most beloved American musical of all time, Gypsy (1959). We asked them if they might be open to including a brief program note on the history of the word “gypsy”. Even as the production sparked widespread discussion about race in American theater, the producers declined. They knew that we knew that no one would hold them accountable for brushing us aside, and so they did. Through dramatic sleight of hand, the outsider, the Traveler and the Rom are firmly associated with “stranger danger”, while actual perpetrators are celebrated in plain view on podiums, statuary and in history books. It’s a preemptive smear campaign designed to create distrust in dissent: label innocent people as threats while powerful men use the state to steal futures in broad daylight. For the wicked, projecting public anxiety onto the vulnerable is the oldest trick in the book. However, this is not the end of the story. In a strange way, that which is misunderstood remains protected. As w

  4. Aug 21

    Prayer for a Young Man

    A Young Man Goes in Circles May you find strength in every gentle touch. May you find your voice in listening to those who have not been heard. May you find wisdom in forgiveness. May you find your heart in the boy inside you. May you find the man in all that you are to become. Gypsy Fires is completely independent and depends on support from readers like you to continue. Please consider supporting at just $6 a month. Dear young folk, I wrote this prayer for a young man I knew who was lost, and all the more so because the same problems in his life just kept happening again, again and then again. He had elders in his life, but the gap of lived experience was just too damn wide for the wisdom to flow into his life where it needed to, and the elders were too far away to see what was happening to his world around him. And somehow, it was all his fault—or so it seemed to him. That young twenty-something was me. I know you don’t know me, but I don’t need to be your grandfather to tell you that I care about you, your hopes and dreams, your future, and—one day—the young people you will help. I wish I had more decades (I’m 43) before writing something like this to you, but things are changing quickly now. The threads that have traditionally connected us together through the generations are no longer just cut, they’re being forgotten. I’m a lifelong carrier of what many call folk culture and a dance PhD in the embodied history of us—that is I study how being human has changed for the last 500 years. In my work and artistic life I am seeing really important things go missing from our lives every day at a faster pace. People used to sing when they worked with the land. They used to dance with their toddlers. They used to hold each other and sing love songs in public. They used to gather at night around the kitchen table or fire and tell each other stories. Men and women alike had visions from beyond while doing household chores. Things may not have been perfect, but we had this—and it was everything. It may not seem so important right now, but as you get older and need some guidance, folklore is that compass, wheel and watch to help you down the road of your life. Many peoples all over the world are resisting this silent erasure, but there is no mistaking that there is a war on our humanity, and we need you right now. There are a lot of people who want to control you who do not have your best intentions at heart. One of the ways these heads of business, media and government manufacture control is by creating tech-enabled youth cultures that keep you away from and mistrustful of those who care about you the most. Some will just say this is how it has always been, and that’s a lie. In so many cultures throughout human history, your desire to forge your own road in a new way doesn’t mean you must be cut off from family, community and tradition. Just because you want change doesn’t mean you no longer deserve the same love you received when you held your parents close all through the night. Wanting new things doesn’t mean you can’t also learn from and benefit from the old. And if you haven’t had that, well, I know myself and many, many others are here for you. So, for today, we don’t have to solve all the world’s problems. I just want you to know that yes, you’re being robbed of so many things, but you don’t have to let them take your love for nature, your body, your community, your family, your creativity, your voice, your art, your ingenuity, your hope or even your tech on your own terms. As a Gypsy, I can say that in the worst of times this inheritance is what gets us through, and in good times we’ll need this to rebuild and remember what really matters. I don’t know how you need to solve the problems you are facing, but I know how much harder it feels when you’re alone. I know how hard it can be to make connections when you don’t have what seems like everyone else has. I know what it’s like not to get all the guidance you need from your family and have to look for adopted elders to help make you whole. In the face of all these things that can leave you feeling like you’re not enough and it’s all unfair or even impossible, there is some age-old wisdom that can help. It’s very simple and cuts through some of the b******t: What tables will you sit at in your life? Tables are important but transient spaces. Some of the most valuable things you will do in your life is at a table, but you also must be invited to sit at them. And most of the time, you’re not looking for tables you’ll sit at just once, you want to come back and—importantly—you want the other people at it to want you to come back. Some people spend their lives dreaming about tables that they might one day sit at, while throwing away the ones where they could never, ever be replaced. Some get there and realize it’s not what they thought it would be. Others are strategically invited to some tables, where their presence is symbolic and their voices aren’t welcome. Then there are those who force themselves upon someone else’s table, or coerce others to sit at theirs. Tables can get very complicated. So maybe you have tables you already sit at, and you don’t appreciate them yet. Perhaps there are tables you should leave and never come back to. Or maybe you already know what it’s like to sit and share a meal or cup of tea at a table with friends on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s time to teach it to someone else who might have never had a table to sit at. Maybe, that table-less person is you, and you can’t see that there people right now waiting to sit at a table that you’ll put together one day. Looking back, what I’d share with the young man I wrote this prayer for is that the circles he was going in were the returning and returning to a table of his own making. One that he had to forage, harvest and carve alone—a traveling table that one day he could invite his family, elders, peers and youth to share in, and his heart would be fed with a love he never imagined possible. I can’t promise my table will be here forever, but you’re welcome to come back. I hope you do. Lacho drom, Russell Thank you for joining me by the fire. If you had someone in mind when you read this, please consider sharing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  5. Aug 14

    KALIPEN: Darkness in Sinti and Roma Culture

    What happens when we see color not as a map of hierarchy, but as the world in time? At a summer camp on water ecology in high school I had a friend who was taught all the wrong names for colors by her older brother, and purple-for-orange haunted her into adulthood. I know it sounds poetic but it really was not for her. I did learn the standard English names for color and how to see them, but my interest in visual arts education stopped there. Puce, teal and ochre remained fabulous, unpainted words to me. Over a dinner of Daire’s tacos, Jackie—holding up a glass of champagne to the light coming from Daire’s edible fairy garden—showed us a tawny pink that could not be captured in paint. Like when Maria taught me to dance with the yellow of gorse blossoms, it just seemed to happen. I began to feel color. This was not however the first color that Jackie showed me. In early August of 2025 as famine began to set in on the people of Gaza, she drew a red line. Perhaps the mark across the white page could suggest that good and bad were either side. But genocidal famine became the watercolor stroke itself—bleeding through the page. The fading, pressing and splattering of a brush dripped a massacre without beginning or end. When murder, theft and greed engulf self and society, the primordial fear of falling stirs. Will we plunge into catastrophe? Will we rise above? For millennia, there have been maps ready to explain who is allowed to fall, and who is destined to ascend above all. These colors are drawn onto my family’s skin. Gypsy Fires is completely supported by readers like you. I have been waiting for immigration to process for a year and have been unable to work. Please consider a paid subscription of just $6 a month so that I may continue this work. Inventing Light Supremacy When the Normans sought to cement their rule over Britain after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, they relied heavily on ideological propaganda. The most famous example, the Bayeux Tapestry, presents a heavily sanitized narrative that favored William “the Conqueror.” A century later, the crown continued to gather power and took aim at the local Church, culminating in the 1170 murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket under Henry II. It was within this climate of elite consolidation that the aristocratically commissioned Winchester Psalter (c. 1150–1160) visually reinforced these rigid new hierarchies. Among its most famous illuminations is the “Hellmouth,” which scholars interpret as a demonic vagina dentata swallowing souls into primeval darkness while an archangel locks the door. Paired with medieval cosmological maps ranking Heaven, Earth and Hell, this imagery confirms that to those in power, blackness, femininity and the earth were framed as chaotic forces to be demonized and subjugated. This visual coding was matched by an audible one. In the medieval liturgical imagination, Satan was painted black and stripped of song. In The Play of Adam, a 12th-century church drama that helped stage the Christian cosmos, Satan enters “niger et deformis” (black and misshapen), unable to make music. The absence of melody marked his distance from divine order; blackness became both a visual and sonic shorthand for separation from grace. Through these visual and theatrical performances, the Church taught that to exist outside divine light was to exist outside harmony itself. Centuries later, European empire gradually translated this theology into secular philosophy. During the “enlightenment”, the medieval framework of “divine light versus chaotic darkness” was reframed through scientific rationalism. The “light of God” became the “light of Reason,” placing white European men at the pinnacle of a global hierarchy while categorizing non-European peoples, lands and traditions as also dark, irrational and subject to mastery in the form of colonization, slavery and genocide. Rather than dismantling medieval theological dualism, modernity gave it nonsensical “scientific” authority and globalized it. These re-coded binaries culminated in 19th-century scientific racism and eugenics: pseudosciences engineered to rationalize violence that continue to shape modern institutions and algorithms today. It reflects how numbers can be used to quantify self-serving fiction in order to elaborately hide nothing more than the greed, lust, ignorance and vanity of lesser men. It takes blackness, darkness, African-ness, “others” them and relegates them to primitive “beginnings” found below, wrapped in disparaging or exoticizing tropes. Kalipen in Sinti and Roma Culture The fear of falling into nothingness within a system engineered to benefit the few at the expense of the many haunts us still today. And there are those of course who were never allowed to get up in the first place because we were put outside the system entirely. A recent popular narrative among gadje (non-Roma) historians is that we, the Roma and Sinti, were India’s Untouchables who were so low we were cast out of the caste system to wander the world in abject poverty. As I will continue to write in pieces such as the history of medieval Roma and Sinti print and what we have created in our culture, these narratives of low caste have been crafted exclusively by non-Roma to hide their own ancestral history of impoverishment as medieval peasantry while obscuring the richness of our culture. Modern “gypsy science” and eugenics enclose our entire identity in a colonial understanding of Indian history where we have nothing, which easily facilitates perpetual, everyday looting of our culture. Meanwhile, many Roma and Sinti remember our deeper roads that reach through the trade networks of South Asia and across the waters to East Africa around what today is Somalia. Even still, I am not immune to misinformation with a thousand-year head start. When I confront this history and injustice, I can feel my insides stained with that inherited shame and internalized racism, while a bright, blinding fantasy tempts me to believe that if I just perform enough "good deeds," I can somehow earn my way into the light. I hear echoes of my dark-skinned grandfather teaching my mother how to survive racism in the United States: by dressing impeccably, having money and keeping backup plans and a shotgun close, just in case. Yet as a Gypsy, this internalized self-hatred for not being perfectly white is not my truth, it is just a gadjo dream I am experiencing. My truth is that darkness is not a curse or something to be understood in rigid doctrine, it is life and who we are. Quite literally, it’s what we call each other on the road: Calé in Spain, Kale in Wales, Kaale in Finland and so on. It is our kalipen: darkness or blackness. Kalipen certainly refers to our skin tone and features, which have survived even the most racist and white supremacist eugenics, slavery and genocide. But its history predates modern race theory, and also the medieval European construction of the Hellmouth that sealed away the dark, earthly feminine. We can find evidence of this in the Sanskrit, which Romani and Sinti language thread through. The ancient word Kāla (काल) holds concepts of destiny, death, the color black and darkness. It also refers to counting and calculations, or the perception of time itself. It represents both the dark, black or blue-black of time, the universe, origins and endings, but as well how we perceive, confuse and limit this as death-bound beings. When we speak of the wheels, the chakras in Sanskrit and Romungró (my language), we connect to the Kālachakra or “wheel of time". This is not the evil “dark one” of Robert Jordan’s Whee of Time. It is the experience of existence . It is what I know when I choose to close my eyes and sit in silence. In playfully naming each other kali and kalo, we are stating the obvious, but we are also enacting the courage to do what so many fear to do—remember deep time. It is the confidence to remember before the borders were laid down, before the caste systems and before the hierarchy of a light heaven and dark hell were even formed. It is a memory through time. It is a word that does not create a map of hierarchy, but one of how to move, understand and embody in the world that holds the rich hues of the earth and vastness of the universe in our very skin. Kalipen does not need a pedestal, a monument or center on a map. It’s simply what we call each other on the road. It holds a wide, decentralized memory, destiny and reality of South and Southwest Asia, of threads through Africa, of the night sky and of the brown earth that feeds us. Kalipen carries no lineage of sin, rank or formal theology. Blackness in our own tongue is not something to be counted, assessed or centralized, but the fluid movement of time, memory and relation. Kalipen restores space and time between all people and things. It is what reminds me to resist owning anything with my own presenting whiteness and instead guard peace, allowing and deliberation. It has always lived beyond the eugenics map and acts as a living, felt choreonavigation. Kalipen does not co-opt the specific history or political reality of Black folks of the African diaspora, but orients in solidarity and reciprocity with them and all people of color, and away from the pale vampires of our lore that drain our life. Many Sinti and Roma traditions, especially in France, traditionally honor Sara e Kali (Saint Sara the Black). She is not elevated onto a cathedral altar; at her shrine in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, she arrives by sea alongside the Three Marys as a companion. Her dark face is not a warning of damnation, and she offers no ladder to climb. She stands as a living refutation of the Scala Intellectus: proof that the divine is always present. Unrecognized by church and empire, she will endure in the earth itself and medallions over our hearts if necessary. She dances with the Godde

  6. Jul 31

    Bankers Always Use New Tech To Burn Books

    In early 2023 I was working in engineering for America’s largest publisher, and I could see something was going very wrong with the publishing industry. For years billionaires had already consolidated ownership of almost all US American presses and news outlets, an obvious conflict of interest as journalists are supposed to expose bad dealings in business and politics. Now “Artificial Intelligence” was gaining mass popularity after a couple decades of floundering under the much less sexy name of “Data Science". While my colleagues were excited, I went on our public AI enthusiast Slack channel and threw water on the party: * This is not AI, it’s just algorithmically brilliant machine learning, or glorified N+1 math * They’re using the term “AI” to hide that they are scraping all our content, training their models on it and then stealing our customers! I had learned how to use Machine Learning years ago, and knew that the models themselves don’t know how to do anything other than predict—they’re worthless without content to train upon. While I received silence from my colleagues, months later the primary owner of our business, Barry Diller (famously the inspiration for “Mr Burns” in The Simpsons), sounded an alarm that publishing and print were in danger from copyright violation on a massive scale. Now, Anthropic has been revealed in their secret Project Panama to be buying millions of books—especially old and rare—scanning them and then destroying them. Anthropic’s apparent ethical advantages over scandal-ridden OpenAI has not only collapsed, but revealed solidarity with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman’s desire to create “a future where intelligence is a utility.” Suddenly, the original open-source dream of AI and a world with more access to information becomes a dictator’s dream of paying for access to machine-curated information. The destruction of the books after ingestion by bots has the internet particularly up in arms, and with good reason. This is an old playbook to enclose knowledge, put a price tag on it and destroy anything or anyone that isn’t in line with the propaganda. But the pattern goes much further back than people realize, and reveals the power of the alternative libraries of the body and how they resist and survive consumption. The Machine Behind Gutenberg When the story of the European Renaissance and Age of Discovery is told, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press in the mid-15th century is typically cited as a reason for the “Enlightenment” from the Medieval Dark Ages. But this myth hides a much older story of theft of technological innovation and the banking strategy that would be used to enclose this technology, enabling centuries of book burning, genocide and the suppression of human memory. Kristina Richardson’s groundbreaking text on the Roma in the Medieval Islamic World confirms that the Roma had been using print since the 10th century. We had this technology thanks to our highly-valued work within Asia, and the technology had been developed earlier still in China. As Roma and Sinti crossed into Southern Germany in the early 1400s as “Gyp-sees” (from Little Egypt), German medieval monks came into contact with our block printing presses and the diverse religious texts we were printing with them. The deep irony, of course, is that the technology we helped pioneer would later be turned into an instrument of our own erasure. Now is the second part of the history of print most people also do not know. To pull off his invention, Gutenberg took on enormous loans from Johann Fust, a wealthy goldsmith and financier. When the press was finally operational, Fust sued Gutenberg for debt repayment, foreclosed on the shop and seized control of the enterprise alongside Gutenberg’s foreman, Peter Schöffer. Fust used Gutenberg’s press and amassed a large fortune from scaling it up. One of his earliest and most profitable enterprises was the morally bankrupt process of mass-printing letters of indulgence (paid forgiveness of “sin”) for the Catholic Church. When the elites saw the Roma and Sinti bring ingenuity, they saw not only profit but the possibility of control of all forms of knowledge. Gutenberg’s bible did not bring a new age of enlightenment of knowledge and democratic learning as we have been told, but one of global censorship and a transfer of knowledge and wealth. It created a centralized version of the bible so that other bibles and texts could be cast out and destroyed. Pedro Berruguete’s 1490s painting of Saint Dominic was commissioned at the height of the Spanish Inquisition and visualizes this exact doctrine of erasure. “Heretical” books burn in a public bonfire while the approved text miraculously floats unharmed above the flames. In the eyes of the Church, fire cleansed the world of blasphemous texts leaving all competing knowledge and many of the people who carried it to ash. This ideological violence was immediately scaled through banking’s support of the printing press. Texts like the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”) in 1497 were mass-produced, quickly becoming European bestsellers. The manual was weaponized across Europe and exported to the Americas to identify, torture, extract knowledge from and execute “witches.” Hand in hand with inquisitorial blacklists and imperial decrees, print technology systematically outlawed folk medicine, herbalism and indigenous codices worldwide. As feminist scholar Silvia Federici observes, this was not mere religious fanaticism; it was the enclosure and colonization of embodied, female-led medicine, ecology and community health. Indigenous libraries around the world were looted and destroyed. Centuries of localized wisdom were forcibly stripped from autonomous practitioners and extracted into the institutional hands of aristocratic, ecclesiastical and mercantile men. The Eye of the Machine This data-driven enclosure was not limited to medicine. The 1824 Ordnance Survey of Ireland—the most ambitious mapping program in history—demonstrated how cartography and print could be weaponized for imperial surveillance. But in the 19th century the obsession with observation turned to eugenics. By the 19th/20th century, British and American "Gypsy Lore" scholars were indexing Romani skulls, lives and lineages. In the 1930s the Nazi Racial Hygiene Research Center would take the colonization of our culture to an entirely new level. The Reich studied Roma and Sinti lineages, languages and social networks , and provided that data to IBM’s Hollerith punch cards. These cards were fundamental to the development of computing in the 20th century, and they were used by the Nazis to target, round up and kill at terrifying speed. They confirmed an ancient relationship between bankers who buy technology and despots looking for the power and financing for authoritarian rule. Today AI companies like Microsoft partner with OpenAI and seduce us into digitizing Romani languages in the name of “inclusion”. Meanwhile, Meta’s smart surveillance glasses offer real-time translation tools that ICE agents can weaponize during deportation raids of innocent people who are disappeared. In the United States, Roma and Sinti remain legally unrecognized and unprotected, leaving communities vulnerable under legacy “gypsy laws” designed to criminalize and expel. We cannot even count the crisis as European Roma and gadje academics remain focused almost exclusively on Europe. The Library of the Body How does knowledge survive when the state indexes information and industrializes deletion? It lives where it has always lived: in the body. How does it protect itself? By staying unwritten. When the Druids were invaded by the Romans, they continued to keep their most sacred teachings private and unwritten. They saw the machine for what it was—something coming for their resources and entire way of life. Their choice to withhold knowledge and resist led to the long-standing myth that they were barbaric and illiterate—a claim disproved by Julius Caesar himself, who recorded in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Book 6, Chapter 14) that the Druids could read and write for everyday matters. Their rich oral culture did not prevent their stronghold on the Isle of Mona off the Welsh coast from being sacked, their sacred oak groves cut down and their lands torn up for copper. (Sound familiar?) Yet, it did protect their wisdom so that it could live on as embodied, lived knowledge that people still carry today. This tension between written state records and unwritten survival lived directly in my own upbringing. When my mother was the first in our family to go to university, she wanted to study journalism. Along with my father, they read books at incredible speed, reading entire novels in a day. We had a computer in our house before almost all of my classmates, and we always believed in the power of what I call embodied engineering. This means to intuit and move with machines on their own terms and adapt their use in order to communicate through hostile terrain. A couple decades later I ended up doing just this: managing websites for America’s largest publishers. We did not know the written history of our ancestral connection to print. It was our ingenuity that carried this knowledge—a lifelong practice of translating our somatic intelligence into something the world might understand. This allowed me as a software engineer to understand code as choreography and choreography as code and work in the complex world of online publishing for brands like the Fortune500 and People Magazine. As I will repeatedly argue in Gypsy Fires and in my post on the practice of Timespinning, knowledge carried in our bodies can never be destroyed so long as the longing remains to remember it and the morals and values to answer the calling through y. To put it simply, we remember more than

  7. Jul 24

    Taking Back What Was Stolen

    It is never too late to dance with your father while listening to the songs of your mother. Who is allowed to fall? What is the repertoire of the risen? What secrets are hidden in the silent, violent archive? What vampires guard their vaults, and when we meet them, will we know the truth? What, then, is the courage of the dancer, and what is the dance? For the last year, I have been returning to these questions in writing and in rhythm, and I invite you to do the same. As this project has moved from our community in Ennistymon, County Clare, to Spain—with my family, my digital mahala, and alongside activists and resistance movements around the world—my answer to what my dance is (and what I can teach others) has become crystal clear. Now is always a good time to sway to a lullaby, have your toes and fingers counted in song and bounce across the ballroom floor in the arms of someone who is half your whole world. If you bear with me on this, you have permission to do it—even if it never happened for you as a child. In fact, we need you to do it. And then keep doing it through time. When I first heard academic circles speak of decolonization, I wasn’t sure if I was listening to theory or practice. That is: are we actually going to do something about this, or are we just talking about it? If things were taken that shouldn’t have been, who is accountable to give them back, and to whom? As so many are observing online, what does any of this mean when the colonization never actually stopped? I doubt the ability of the academy and most NGOs to do anything other than use “decolonization” as just another tool for colonization. Like many children in marginalized families, my parents helped me understand from an early age that things were deeply wrong in our society. They taught us that we need to hold onto our humanity because no one is coming to save us. It seemed to me that the only thing any of us can truly do is hold ourselves accountable—and, if possible, hold each other together. When I began my PhD in a small, rebellious program in Ireland, I received confirmation of this. While I may not be able to stop colonization as a whole, I can rigorously examine my own life within it with humility. I can see what’s really there once the accounting is done. I can let myself be stripped bare to the beams and rafters, and then dance. I can study the choreography of our civilization to see which traditions I will, in sober truth, carry forward—and notice the impact they have upon others. This has led me to one truth I can stand by: the power of dance as a decolonial method. In my research, the ancestors in the archive brought me repeatedly to the reality of how Roma, Sinti and other oppressed peoples were subjected to bondage of all sorts—including being transported in fetters or wearing heavy wooden shoes at gunpoint to perform hard labor. Yet, even in these horrific conditions, dance allowed a reclamation of body, time and space. As I wrote in my PhD: Our percussive dance tradition is a creation like no other. Even if we lose it all tomorrow through some disaster or unfathomable new evil form of body control, someone would find the rhythm of life in their body again. They would tap on the futuristic cage around them, and no matter how many times they were stopped—the pulse would spread. Gestures are contagious. Rhythm propagates. When we are down or when we are gone, the weights we carried in our dance now carry us. I would go even further now. I have learned in this last year that impact-driven dance isn’t just decolonial or pre-colonial. It continues in a world where colonialism simply does not exist. Body rhythm is the world where my father woke me up every morning playing the tin whistle and carried me around the ballroom floor; where my mother taught me to walk around the house on the balls of my feet, just as dancing masters had centuries ago; where my grandfather sat in the kitchen playing his accordion for anyone entering, while my grandmother sang, painted and sculpted. This was always my land. It will only be colonized if I let it be taken away—or if I turn into an occupier myself, standing in traditions and timelines that are not mine to move through. The liberation so many of us are seeking is, if we are honest, so often a longing for that innocence of connection to our parents—that increasingly forgotten world of play in music, dance, nature and community. We can bury this longing and pretend it isn’t there, or we can finally be hospitable to it, let it in and give it a cup of tea. If you give this a chance, even for a moment, I think you’ll find that the longing is the evidence. The play of life was always there, waiting for you to accept it. Regardless of your relationship with your parents, your desire for this intimacy—for the truth of your body in dance—is proof that it has always existed in your ancestry, your lineage and your blood. All it needed was for you to start tapping, quite literally, into it. I created Gypsy Fires because I want to share my researched path through Romanipen, so that I might help you see what was never taken away from you. I aim to do this through these letters, inside the Timedancing Lab where I teach embodied liberation theories, and through micro-dances designed to help you make movement the primary method of your life. The courage of the dancer, then, is to keep dancing. What that dance will be, where it came from and where it is going—that is something only you will find, and we are all discovering it anew in every moment. Whether this choreography will decolonize our destiny or perpetuate harm is entirely up to us. We have the moves. We have the heart. We have the dance. I created Gypsy Fires to help you see what was never taken away from you. Subscribe to get free letters in your inbox every Friday on dance, living archive and embodied liberation. Ready to take this work off the page and into your body? Upgrade to a paid subscription to unlock full access to the Timedancing Lab courses and the new Micro-Dance School somatic toolkit. Thank you for tending the fire with your support. If these words and rhythms resonated with you today, consider sharing this letter with someone who needs it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  8. Jul 17

    Male Loneliness

    Despite building so many roads, drawing powerful maps and driving much of the transportation, men are lost. Endless guidance on the importance of “strategy”(Seth Godin), the brilliance to “start with WHY” (Simon Sinek) and the promise of fulfillment if men just “build things that matter” (Simon Squibb) isn’t helping: Fires are burning in Wales, the Arctic winter has risen to 20C (68F), 150 Pacific Gray Whales have washed up dead on the American Pacific shore this year and Banda, India saw temperatures of 48C (118F) last month. As we turn up the heat from our consumption of fossil fuels to enable a world where private jets can be labeled green investment, endless compute for AI ambitions voided all climate agreements and endless consumption rips up and poisons the earth, we are returning to an era of the dinosaurs where the middle of the planet was uninhabitable, sea levels were 170 meters higher than today and temperate rainforests could grow in Antarctica—but now it’s a lot more toxic. Where’s the TED Talk calling out all this absolute b******t? We have been scammed by lust dressed up as virtue. The familiar faces of journalists and truthsayers risking their lives for a better world have been replaced by obscenely wealthy people draped in calm professionalism, podcasting headphones and frameworks that promise prosperity. As the world burns, influencers on Substack, social media and the press still promise “abundance” (Ezra Klein). Abundance of what? The call of a trillionaire(!) to colonize Mars isn’t the nobility of some male urge to adventure forth and find sustenance—something that in so many species such as lions is actually done almost entirely by the women. It is the grift and make-believe invocation of an old archetype of the male wandering alone into the wilderness without any of the demands to actually risk their own lives without the support of the 99% who are keeping them alive. It is impossible to live on Mars, and furthermore: If you or I got on a time machine, hit the buttons at random and went back to some point in Earth history, 90% of the time we would die as soon as we opened the airlock door. — Edwin Kite We are being called forth by the most powerful people on earth to venture forth and explore our annihilation. Even the most earnest of pleas to reset masculinity are mired in the same ambitions of desire. Scott Galloway gave us the reassuring “Protect, Provide, Procreate” from his Notes on Being a Man (2025), which reads as “what role play to expect of others in your relationships.” And critiques of this still say “why we need something more.” No. Enough of “more”. Dear Traveler, I return to this tired writing trope not only because I’m a Gypsy and I’m reclaiming it from people who do not know actually how to travel and only know how to be tourists and colonizers. I return to it because the condition of traveling is to, obviously, not be at home. To not have the entitlement that you can do whatever you want when you’re in someone else’s home. It is to admit that you are guest. It is to give yourself the permission to be lost. It is to free yourself from selfish demands that always end in pain, and instead give yourself the gift of allowing yourself to be found. Found by freedom. Found by people who might need you. Discovered by the world. But that’s jumping ahead. That’s getting back too quickly to a framework that’s going to allow us get busy again and avoid hopelessness along with confusion, uncertainty and fear of nothingness that comes with being alive. Throw out the podcasters, the think-tanks and the PhDs with all the answers. The “manosphere” is the womb we all wish we could return to where we’re magically just taken care of while we don’t even have the courage to admit that we occupy women’s spaces, bodies and thoughts already. I have been given the best education of feminism my entire life (and I’m gay), and I still cannot resist this pattern sometimes. But knowing this isn’t just my stepping back from my expectations to be seen, heard and loved. It’s my own permission to go into the wild. Let’s go into the wilderness together. While lots of institutions are going to lie to you right now about the history of Tarot and claim that cartomancy is just something people have always done, that is an exaggeration. Meanwhile, the divination of cards has always been part of a Roma, Sinti and Gypsy woman’s work and practices. The women in my family have known this for centuries and carried it quietly for our own safety—a lesson many gadji (non-Roma women) are learning right now as fascism threatens their influential intuitive voices online. But like astrology—another profession known well to Roma and Sinti although not exclusively—Tarot has gained mass popularity through extraction especially by turn of the 19th-20th century occultists, and gives us shared language right now for the archetypal. It is how I want to invite you to consider the Hermit—the wizard-y looking old man with a lantern and staff going into the night alone. The figure of the wizard is an old one, and much of his magic and insight was inspired not just by imaginations of Celticism and its Druids, but by the wandering minstrels, sages and travelers that are part of my people—the Gypsies. There is a lot of stereotype and misunderstanding around this, including the belief that we are free, careless people. This is not true. Our history in the world is thousands of years old; we did not just stumble out of India a thousand years ago by some tragic accident as you might have been told. Things have happened to us, but we have always carried within and between ourselves our truth of humanity, non-violence and independence from systems that harm others. It is the vulnerable position of being alive that is missing in these man-stories, and is summoned in Victor Frankl’s timeless Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). But even his choice to choose attitude gives us back that hope that we’ll get it right. We can get the band back together, fix the machine or get back to the arms of those we have outgrown or lost. Our minds are terribly clever. But returning to the Hermit, what I notice in the face of the old bearded man is his youthfulness. His hooded head cast down shows us a softness, a gentleness we tend to only associate with the young, naive and hopeful. It is his submission to death of his ego, ambitions and, one day, his life that softens his face into agelessness. In old age, perhaps, it is not hope that we need from our elders. It’s surrender. It is knowledge that things did not, in fact, work out. It is the willingness to return to what has been unknown and the liberation that all things one day go away. The Hermit is not just losing himself in the world, he does what so many men of forgotten mystery schools have done. He vanishes into the real frontier—time itself. He reveals to us not nihilism or black-pill defeat-ism, but the truth we are all hungry for. I’m almost 43, so I cannot speak for young men, although soon I hope to share a prayer I wrote to myself as a young man. I can speak as a person looking ahead at what I was told would be my era to lead and shape the world for the better. The only leadership, right now, I seem to be able to offer, is a responsible form of retreat. To do less. To touch the world lightly. To be grateful to be fed and safe. To let yourself be received by that which is being rejected by almost everyone who wants to offer you certainty, especially when monsters are lurking everywhere. Unfortunately, I have no powers of organized or violent resistance to give you, but I pass no judgement upon it. There is sobriety in his journey. There is wisdom. De-occupy masculinity from modern demands. Maybe try letting go of what you’re expecting out of manhood and maybe, just try enjoying it for once. Notice when others actually truly enjoy it, and what that reveals about you. All of these men telling us what it is to be a man all seem to have one thing in common; despite having it all, they’re profoundly unhappy. So stop and rest. I’m not saying men, especially the powerful who are living in the wealth of other people’s labor, should shirk their responsibilities. If that’s you, you have a responsibility to recognize the world has always been able to exist without you and will continue to. It is you who need it. Also, that the foundation of human civilization has always been women and children, and if we study history, it seems as though it’s almost always been men terrorizing that civilization. But I know none of these men are reading this or have read this far into this piece. I am speaking, I suppose, to those men who have had their hopes and futures taken from them by a system that tells them they are not enough and ensures they have even less than that. Men who have been told that baller lifestyles are what they need to provide. That being lustful and lusted after is accomplishment. That being defensive or attacking innocents when you’re hurt and scared is bravery. I know more and more of you are alone. You don’t have people to care for or children of your own, and what to do now is a big, scary question easily buried by distractions. I don’t know if there is an answer or framework for what men are and what masculinity should be, whether divine, ordinary or dangerous. I do know looking at the Hermit that perhaps we are also looking at a young person who must bear a burden and a wisdom far beyond their years. But to quote one brave wizard who went into the wild of his own imagination amidst the slaughter of the trenches of the First World War while colonial genocides spread around the world: All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. — “Gandalf” in The Lord of the Rings I think in Gandalf, JRR Tolkien gave us the wise man and leader who had braved hi

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About

Decolonize your body with dance history, embodied knowledge, and inherited Romani wisdom. Hosted by Dr. Russell Patrick Brown—PhD historian, Bashaldo Gypsy fortune teller, technologist, and dancer—Gypsy Fires merges deep-dive research with ancestral storytelling to restore your body and soul through movement, memory, and time. newsletter.gypsyfires.com

Information

  • Creator
    Dr Russell Patrick Brown
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Russell Patrick Brown
  • Show Website
    Gypsy Fires