The ephemeral beauty of two sacred datura blossoms, unfurling at midnight on a full moon wedding night, marked a profound moment, blooming for the first time from seeds sown a year prior. This unexpected and striking display from the typically toxic nightshade felt imbued with a mystical quality, perhaps orchestrated by the hidden forces of the earth. The previous year, the spiked capsule of Datura wrightii had been cracked open, its deliriant seeds scattered with the hope of future growth in the garden.

The morning after their brief, vibrant nocturnal display, the deep-throated flowers drooped, their brief encounter with countless sphinx moths concluded. Amidst the lingering remnants of a celebratory evening—flat Mexican lagers and sticky churro sugar—a poignant scene unfolded: a juvenile cottontail, its chest bleeding, lay as if offered in sacrifice, a likely victim of a newly hatched rattlesnake that had perhaps overestimated its prey. Though offered water, the small creature had passed by the time the last of the chairs were stacked. A tender ritual followed as the kit was transported to a wash basin, its eyes gently covered with dried chia seeds, a small memorial formed from quartz-like granite and datura leaves. This act of tending to deceased nonhuman neighbors, guiding them towards the spirit world, was a practice deeply ingrained.

Weeks later, the lingering imagery of the luminous white blooms and the departed cottontail coalesced in the mind’s eye as my husband and I descended over 4,000 feet down the Twentynine Palms Highway toward the Palm Springs Art Museum. The museum’s current exhibition, "A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit," presented a compelling survey of over a century of LGBTQ+ artists who have explored these potent themes through painting, sculpture, performance, and photography. This exhibition is part of a growing trend that highlights alternative spiritualities, following similar explorations such as "QUEER MAGIC" in Santa Fe in 2023 and "Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A." in Los Angeles in 2024.

A significant number of the artists featured in "Queer Arcana" share deep connections to the American Southwest and California, landscapes characterized by their powerful vortices, expansive boulder fields, and exceptionally dark skies, which have long drawn seekers and mystics to regions like Joshua Tree, Sedona, Arizona, and Crestone, Colorado. These evocative spiritual landscapes often serve as a backdrop for intensely personal and fantastical imagery, a visual language that seems to pierce the perceived veil between the physical and spiritual realms.

Ingo Swann, a native of Telluride, Colorado, offers a glimpse into this nexus with his 1986 painting Proto Adam, depicting a galactic go-go dancer emerging from a desert river. Clarity Haynes’s 2022 work, Altar for Laura Aguilar, is a pastel offering for the late photographer, incorporating imagery from Aguilar’s celebrated nude desert self-portraits. Eric-Paul Riege’s chestplate [3] (2026), a more understated yet profound black-and-white textile, intricately weaves traditional Diné beliefs with his own lived experience of queerness. The exhibition further delves into potent visual narratives, featuring artworks that explore cosmic sexuality, clandestine occult gatherings, and fantastical alien figures with exaggerated anatomies that possess an almost sentient quality. Alongside the visual arts, a collection of magazine archives documents the historical practices of witchcraft and New Age goddess worship, offering a broader context for these spiritual explorations.

As curator David Evans Frantz articulated in a press release, "Queer artists, activists, and cultural producers have long sought spiritual practices outside the mainstream to affirm their identities, build community, and envision new ways of being in an often-oppressive world." Upon entering the exhibition, a prominent inscription on a deep wine-colored wall referenced the influential work of Gloria Anzaldúa, a queer Chicana poet and theorist. Anzaldúa described herself as a "spiritual mestiza," viewing spiritual seeking as an inherently queer method of engaging with the world and the infinite.

A particularly captivating piece within the exhibit was Edgar Fabián Frías’s 2017 video, Give Us Home Spider: Ritual 5: TXI Cement Quarry, Bloomington, CA. As I sat, headphones on, the open portal of the video drew me into its immersive world. Frías, who identifies as a brujx—a gender-neutral Spanish term for a practitioner of magic—and is a descendant of the Wixárika people, orchestrated a series of rituals across Southern California aimed at addressing environmental racism and health disparities. Frías grew up in close proximity to the quarry depicted in the video, a site that exposed their community to hexavalent chromium, a carcinogenic chemical compound linked to cancer and autoimmune diseases. In the ritual, Frías and thirteen other vibrantly dressed healers engaged in a performance involving the resonant drone of a pipe over techno music, while simultaneously digging into the earth, vocalizing, and consuming pomegranates.

This ritual, performed nearly a decade prior to my viewing, felt remarkably prescient, especially as smoke from the Lineage Fire in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights drifted across Southern California, carrying toxic fumes from a sprawling food-storage facility. Frías’s ritual serves as a powerful reminder of the necessity to confront historical harms in the present to cultivate a more intentional future. Regardless of individual spiritual paths, acknowledging the damage inflicted upon both people and the planet is crucial. This recognition can offer solace, combat denial, and catalyze meaningful action against injustice. At its most fundamental, it can involve simply pausing to honor the brief, precious existence of a creature like the desert cottontail.

The emergence of "A Queer Arcana" and similar exhibitions is not an accident of fate; rather, they represent deliberate convergences of ancestral wisdom and contemporary community. These gatherings serve as vital conduits, whispering from the liminal spaces between worlds, urging listeners to connect and to actively resist not only queer repression but all forms of oppression. Today, these artistic expressions encourage us to challenge decisions that harm our communities, such as city councils approving data centers, and to create protective circles for our creative spirits against the deluge of algorithmically generated content. They advocate for building solidarity with our nonhuman kin.

My visit coincided with another significant ritual: the observance of the Summer Solstice. Within the museum, displays of queer tarot decks, including the work of trans activist Rachel Pollack, offered guidance. Much of my own spirituality is deeply rooted in nature—observing the Milky Way, practicing grounding Qi Gong, listening to birdsong, and participating in ceremonial river cleanses with friends. As a Libra Sun with a Scorpio Moon, however, I’ve found quarterly tarot readings to be an invaluable tool for navigating chronic indecisiveness and long-held grudges. The MotherPeace deck, a pioneering feminist and queer creation from the 1970s that significantly influenced the evolution of tarot, is a cornerstone of my personal cosmology.

On the longest day of the year, I drew a round, moon-shaped card from the deck. It revealed the "Son of Cups," a card described by one of its creators as representing "meditative awareness." The imagery depicted a naked man floating on the sea, playing a flute with his legs crossed, accompanied by singing seagulls. Below him, large datura flowers unfurled like sails, echoing the very blossoms that had graced my wedding night.