Tenth of February is the day I have connected with the most in my lifetime.
I celebrated it, I said it out loud, I wrote it on papers, I wrote it on forms, I sang its songs, I wandered, I made wishes, I aged, I blew candles for this day. It is the answer of a specific question and it is a question, a riddle itself.1 It is the day I entered this world with my big head and bushy black hair, screamed, cried and was named as Gizem (Mystery in Turkish). There is no day like February Tenth to me and that is when I received my bundle of mystery.
Everybody has that one day. Some may not care for it. Some may care for the time and alignment of the stars. Some may not know it, like I suspect my paternal grandmother probably did not know her calendar birthday and yet, perhaps, her mother was under the stars or the Sun and knew where they were when she birthed her. Still, there is a time when we are born into this planet, none of us is exempt from that just yet. We get a day to be born into a planet, we get a day to die from a planet. One known, one unknown unless it happens all at once. Yet another commonality amongst Earth-bound humanity.
The Aquarius Moon has just kissed the Aquarius Sun good new moon and begun the new lunar cycle.2 The new moon is the time when the Sun and the Moon come together in the sky. Today also happens to begin the Chinese new year, the lunar year. A dragon year, they say. A wood-influenced dragon, an Earthly Dragon apparently. That brings all sorts of imaginations along. Especially after calling for a cease fire for more than four months. May the dragons steal all our armed force fires and trap them in their mouths.
A dragon who contemplates its own fire’s consequences on Earth, is one imagination.
A wooden trojan dragon another.
All these may have gotten Gizem and Gizegen a tad bit excited, I must admit. It must also have something to do with the dragons I imagined, drew and wrote3 with. Moreover this new dragon year, I wish to welcome Asian imagination and creativity more into Storyteller Stone and Gizegen. That is also why I am sending a newsletter called Tenth of February and opening up this new conversation window with this day.
Here let me address a curiosity. What is Gizegen? Is it my first name? My last name? Pen name? Artist name? This is a curiosity I encounter especially if the person does not know Turkish and does not understand my made up word. Still, one may understand the name but not quite get what it means and why it exists. I am well aware there is a “silliness” that covers my personhood in the public eye, when I sign my name as Gizem Gizegen. Let me own it further.
Gizegen is my imaginary planet.
Some people have imaginary friends, some have planets, what can I say. And some can have imaginary every-ones and every-things, I happen to be one of those.
Gizegen is a word play where two words gizem (my name, which also means mystery) and gezegen (which means planet, wanderer in Turkish) merge and become Gizegen. We can roughly translate it as Gizem’s planet and/or mystery’s planet. In its essence, Gizegen encompasses my creative journey.
In the year Two Thousand Nine, I had this growing need of a place and a name to explore Earth’s planetary imagination and creativity, as well as mine. I opened a Wordpress and a Tumblr under the name of Gizegen and began to communicate sharing words and visuals. I was in Los Angeles, studying filmmaking and working. Writing a Turkish blog was helping me to keep in touch with my people back at home. Back then, I was also building a fantasy world called Dünya and the story was so otherworldly that it was inviting my imagination to stretch to its wildest, to its most mysterious borders. Dünya was my imaginary story and my wild storyteller connection to the universe. I was taking the point of view of this planet and their story so much that I was genuinely losing my connection with reality, being re-enchanted and ungrounded at the same time.
I am not a biologist, I am not a geologist, I am not an anthropologist… My field of work is imagination and creativity.
I needed to have a curious creative connection with the Earth, with our planet, with our gezegen in my own way. Gizegen became my whisper to this need. I began to imagine Earth-related creativity through Gizegen and let the planetary creativity lead and muse my becoming and unbecoming. I had no idea what I was doing. I just followed my crumbles. And there my apprenticeship to the planet, to the planetary imagination and creativity begun. I did not know that yet.
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.” Ursula K. Le Guin
These days, I am using Gizegen in place of my last name, my paternal family name, which does not feel right for my imaginative and creative endeavours. It is a bit like the old times when people said where they were from with their names… Gizem of Gizegen. It is my artist name since I have been signing my drawings and paintings as Gizegen for quite some years now. When I do so it feels like the drawings and paintings are a collaboration between me and the Earth. It feels right because that is what they are, a co-creation.
I did not note the day Gizegen was born so I thought we could share February Tenth with my own bundle of mystery and imagination. We are all born with a planet, with a universe within after all. That is one of my wild wishes to remind us.
It is also my wild wish with this new dragon year to become less of a lonely planet and more of a planet who dances with their other planetary siblings.
Life gets hard, life gets hostile, life gets impossible sometimes. Being born on a planet, being a human come with all sorts of risks and dangers. We need our world wild wide communities to respect, to relate and to participate to the world-making.
Happy Birthday, Tenth of February, the one who heard my first cry, smelled my first breath… From my first cry to yours, let us make this dragon year more planetary, more wild, more respectful, more just, more free, more imaginative, more creative, more connective and more relational.
Welcome Dragon Year. May you be filled with more participatory and relational creative fire. May you cease the destructive fires.
Gizem of Gizegen
© Gizem Gizegen, 2024 Istanbul, ☉ Aquarius ☽ Aquarius ♇ Aquarius, Chinese New Year, Dragon Year, Gizem and Gizegen’s Birthday
When were you born? is the question it is an answer to and I will keep its question self to myself.
I wrote something about the lunar cycle and the journey of the Moon, if you wish to read:
The Dragon Ate the Sun is the first short story I wrote and shared. I wrote it thanks with an eclipse, a dragon and a stomach.