Asking: Cody Cook-Parrott
i asked Cody some good questions.
We’re in this really interesting Gemini storm. There are a few more days of the whole world (basically) living in Gemini. Until Monday morning we’ve got Jupiter, the Sun, Mercury, and Venus in Gemini. As of Monday morning, we’ve got Mercury and Venus moving into Cancer.
In the meantime, enjoy the chaos. We’ve also got Saturn in the mutable sign Pisces, so really it’s just Mars in a different modality, speaking from the fixed sign Taurus. The Moon, of course, is bopping around, moving through the signs rapidly. We’re feeling extra mutable (gay) when the Moon is in Virgo on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
I bring all this up to point out the joy of a little Gemini chaos, a little Gemini delusion. There’s nothing wrong with vibing out on your most mercurial instincts, your most mercurial feeling, on occasion. Especially when the situation calls for some going a little too far, twisting yourself up in your thoughts a little too much, or running up that hill1. Wow, what a great time for the interview below…
It’s a lovely configuration to be starting Pride month. Go throw a brick, but don’t get caught. You deserve it and they do too. XOXOXO
I’m trying another thing with the newsletter, also involving questions.
I love interviews. Always have. If you give me a chance to eavesdrop on two people talking about almost anything I will do so and I will be thrilled.
My goal will be to talk to interesting people about their views on spirituality and god and religion and to let their birth charts contribute to the conversation. Hopefully I’ll also ask my own good questions in addition to the good questions the chart always asks. I’m going to shoot for an interview like the one below at least once a month.
For the first edition of this series, I spoke with Cody Cook-Parrott.
Cody is a phenomenal teacher, writer, quilter, dancer, podcaster, artist, and Gemini tornado person. I took their quilt class a little more than a year ago, in the window between when I got fired and getting hired at my new job, and it did a lot to help me situate myself in the tradition of queer fabric art. I’ve also been a big fan of how they’ve navigated sharing publicly as they’ve dealt with significant debts, home ownership, and out-earning their parents—some of which we discuss below.
You can read all about them on their website here, and I highly recommend checking out other places they’ve shared their perspective in interviews, classes, and their own weekly newsletter.
Here are a few highlights I recommend:
Newsletter about their gorgeous name Cody
This gorgeous interview with Zak Foster
Their book, Getting to Center, which is gorgeous
We started our conversation after some schedule shuffling due to a lot of busy life stuff happening. Cody recently announced the opening of their art residency, Window Place. Applications are closed for this cycle, but keep an eye out for future opportunities. Eventually Cody and I were able to reconnect to have the conversation below (edited for clarity). The conversation began shortly after they gave me a peek at the dusty gold kitchen cabinets they’d recently finished painting.
Cody: I grew up in a totally non-religious home. My dad was raised Methodist, but then left the church when he was 18. My mom didn't really grow up religious at all. I had some dabbling in youth groups as a kid. Just friends who would do the Wednesday night thing. It was just a reason to be social. I did find myself really attracted to it, Christianity specifically. Then, especially as a young queer person, I was also really questioning the political parts that weren't making sense. But I always had this beautiful affinity towards God and reading scripture. I loved that. I really loved the Bible. I was like, "This is beautiful. This is beautiful writing."
Fred: Do you remember what your first encounter with the Bible was? That was an area that, as a Catholic, I feel like I did so little scriptural reading, honestly.
Totally. Somebody's mom gave me an NIV teen study Bible or something. It was fun. It had fun quotes in the sides and stuff. Then in high school, there's a very radical, cool Unitarian Universalist church in Grand Rapids where I'm from in Michigan called Fountain Street Church. It's actually where my parents originally got married.
They have a… I call it a "youth group" with quotes because it's just not very Christian-y, but it's called Fountain Club. That really changed my life. I went my junior and senior year of high school and it was just the first time I was really introduced to this very spacious, beautiful version of God. Then my freshman year of college [laughing], sorry, I don't know if I've ever shared this publicly… I joined Campus Crusade for Christ.
Oh… wow……..
Because I just needed friends. I was like "Where the hell am I?"
Yes, of course. That's how it happens!
Yes. My friend Bobby, who is still one of my best friends, was like, "Cody, what the fuck are you doing?" I was like, "I don't know." They were like, "Stop going to Bible study. What the hell?"
That was the end of the Christian side of what I do. Now my understanding and appreciation of God is very much based in 12-steps-meets-the-artist's way, just a really big “spirit of the universe”. I do use the word God a lot in my writing and my work. I love God. To me, God is just everything. Magic.
Could you tell me, with the 12-step approach, with The Artist’s Way, your connection to that version of God, is it more daily in a way? Do you feel like that's a more daily version or a more local version of God or is it more global? Does that distinction make sense?
I think so. I try to touch in with God every single day. Maybe that's the answer. I have a lot of daily practices that I don't do perfectly every day. I really try to do my journaling every morning. I do Daily Readers. I'm doing a project right now where I write a prayer every day. I'm really in my daily God era right now.
Another question, it's a little pivot, but I think it pulls into this. I remember from quilt class you always said, “no rules, no rulers”. It feels like that goes with this idea of Getting to Center, which is a book of yours that I really appreciate and go back to. You talk in the book about having daily practices that you don't do every day, but you can always come back to them.
Something in the no rules, no rulers piece feels resonant there for me. When you think about not following a pattern for a quilt or you're sitting down to just let it take you where it's going to go, how far is God from that? Do you think about God when you're doing the tearing and the sewing?
It's interesting. I think my instinct is to say I don't really think about God that much in my own practice, but I just went to the Gee's Bend Quilt Retreat with China Pettway and Mary Ann Pettway. They sang the whole time. Worship songs to God. It was the most spiritual experience I have maybe ever had.
Hearing them sing while I was quilting and snipping and ripping and no rules, no rulers was truly… We did show and tell, and I started by saying my two favorite things are God and quilts. It was the first time they came together.
I don't feel like I usually bring my spiritual practice into my creative practice so directly. It's such a part of the container of journaling or praying throughout the day, but I don't really think about it as much. But I did when I was there and just talking to you about it now, it's a nice invitation to be like, "Maybe I'll see how it incorporates more now".
Singing with the Gee’s Bend Quilters is amazing. I've been thinking a lot about that other piece with quilting too, that it's often so communal. Were you working on your own project in that space or was there any co-quilting?
There was a little bit of co-quilting which was beautiful. I was just sewing quilt tops but a couple of people moved on to start hand quilting their quilts on frames. There was a really sweet vibe of, "Yes, just try it on mine." No preciousness about it, which felt really cool.
That plays into the foundation that I wanted to talk through a little bit while reviewing your birth chart. [I pulled up their chart so we could look at it together.]
God, the amount of shit in Gemini is so crazy.
Truly. I added in the four primary asteroids in addition to Chiron. I don't know if you've ever looked at those. This is an area study for me, the asteroids. The asteroid goddesses is what Demetra George calls them.
I just knew I had Sun, Mercury, Venus, Chiron, and Midheaven, but I didn't know the other one.
That's enough, honestly. That's more than enough in Gemini.
Sure. That's plenty of Gemini.
So you have a very Mercurial chart. Obviously, we know you have all this Gemini, but then you've also got a Virgo Rising.
At a high level, we think about Mercury being this boundary crosser, knowing the boundaries, and, in myth, being the god who can go back and forth between the underworld and the heavens. They are always the one sharing the message with people. In your chart a lot of your life is governed by this entity.
My first thought is: I'm just, I think, a boundary pusher. It has become more and more important to me to have friends who have really strong boundaries, because I will push up against them sometimes and I need people in my life to be like, "No, that's where the boundary is." When someone really says that, I am of course like, "Got it. Cool," but I'm pushing against that, and I think my work does that too.
I think I'm here to both give people permission and push their boundaries a little bit, what they think they're capable of. I'm also here to just challenge people's ideas of what's normal.
I think even being non-binary pushes the boundary. Being queer pushes the boundary. These are just parts of who I am. I don't necessarily choose those. I think “mercurial” is a good word for it.
I think some people look to spirit or god especially in the context of a religion for structure and boundaries. Boundaries can be seen as a helpful tool. There's a structure, there's a floor to stand on. But there's also being walled in.
When I think about my morning pages or my walking or my swimming, different practices I have, I think of guardrails. Guardrails are coming up for me. My most spiritual task, really, is to be sober and to not drink. So I think there's that guardrail.
I'm also thinking about plants. Thinking about the tea and tinctures and flower essences and how much those are a part of my spiritual practice of touching in with God. They also give me parameters to work within.
I use this phrase for myself, tornado person, which I came up with many years ago. It's my quick way of being, "I have bipolar and ADHD and I have six things in Gemini." I'm such an air person that I move really quickly, I make big messes and then clean them up which also makes sense as a quilter as well.
I taught a class years ago called From Discipline to Devotion and something I think about a lot is “How do we move from needing to be so disciplined and making these extreme containers toward devotion?” In the class, we asked “What are we devoted to and how do we use that as a starting point rather than, "I'm going to be so self-disciplined?"”
You mentioned the air side of things, which is a lot of your chart. I'm also curious about the earth side of things for you, because you have this very rooted place with Saturn and the Moon sitting there in Capricorn. This is a lot of material, physical energy.
You mentioned that God isn’t necessarily always a part of your creative work. If it's not spirit and the God component, what is driving you to make things?
It's so funny, I recently asked a friend who is a musician, and he was putting out a new album: "Why do you write songs and put them into the world?" He looked at me, and he looked stunned. He was just like, "Because I have to." I was just like, "Whoa, yes, okay." That is the God part of it, the indescribable feeling of making a physical object.
I grew up as a dancer, it’s what my undergrad degree is in. Dance and movement is just so ephemeral, and is a really spiritual practice for me. There's a spiritual component to it. You can't hold it. I think what brought me to quilting was I felt like I could improvise in the same way that I do as a dancer, but I could hold something and that felt so powerful.
I do really feel God in the finished object. I do really feel a sense of spiritual completion when I finish a quilt. I think it's fun to unpack this a little bit, I’m thinking like, "Maybe God is in the mix even more than I think it is.”
Saturn brings discipline and discipline can often feel more like judgment than it feels like devotion. Do you ever feel a sense of judgment in your art or have you worked through a sense of judgment? Was that something that came up in your Saturn Return?
Judgment from other people?
I think that would be in it. I'm curious all the kinds of judgment in the room.
Is judgment in the room with us?
Lol, yes, exactly.
I just had such a classic Saturn Return. I got divorced, I closed my shop that I had for four and a half years, I moved to California, I came out, I got a girlfriend. I wrote a book.
You checked all the boxes.
I checked all the boxes! And I experienced a lot of judgment in that time.
My marriage was open and being poly in the community that we were in was really weird. The community we were in was Christian-adjacent in some ways. Living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, it's hard to escape that nature.
My Saturn Return was filled with… it's a mix of an internal judgment and something that intuitively I feel projected onto me sometimes. I think being an artist and figuring out how to make money, I felt and feel judged sometimes.
It was years ago, but I remember some people who make quilts, and I literally don't even know who they are or remember their name, they were just making some comments on their own pages that someone alerted me to. They were like, "I can't believe this person charges $300 or something to teach how to make a quilt."
That stuck with me. I'd like to think that I'm a person who's like, "Whatever, fuck it," but money judgments really stick to me as someone who comes from a poor family with parents who are disabled, who still live in poverty. It's really uncomfortable for me to be a higher earner than the generation before me. I feel judgment around that.
It's so funny because it's also like part of my boundary pushing is to show other artists that it is possible for them too. If you want to learn to quilt for zero dollars, you can fucking go to youtube.com.
There are options for that.
There are options for that! Or you can come to my class and have it be one of the best investments of your life and have it totally change your art practice and your life.
So many options out there!
So many options out there.
Thank you for sharing that. I really relate with this kind of judgment. I think where it comes together for me and another Saturn Return thing is just the debt-ing of it all. Working out how you navigate earning more and not punishing yourself with debt or with the unrealistic expectations about where the money should go.
I've talked about this a ton publicly, but I'm really appreciating that you said the word “punish”. It almost feels like I could cry. Punishing myself with debt is what I did.
Now my debt is so high that I pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to just pay my debt off. I used to not even make that much money a year. Really not that long ago. I'm in a hard place lately where I punished myself and now I actually make so much less. I bring in more money technically, but I'm making so much less because I’m paying my debt. I punished myself.
I relate with this deeply. It's also very interesting to me that the judgmental whispers were coming from other people inside the creative community, even if they're not in your community exactly. Does that question of other people's judgments… does your spirituality and your twelve steps/artist’s way experience of God connect with that?
Yes. In a big way. There's a phrase that you hear in Al-Anon that's, "What other people think of me is none of my business," which I love and needed to remember today.
I was at this art opening last night and one of my dear friends just had this amazing painting on the wall that I was just like, "Oh my God." It was $3,200 and I am nowhere close to being able to buy that right now. But I actually had this really beautiful feeling where I was like, "I want to make enough money so that I can walk into an art opening and see that and be like 'I'm going to buy that for my home.'" Not in a manic, urgent way, which is part of my debt-ing problem. I don't even necessarily have a goal to get out of debt as much as to just manage my spending and earning.
Now, as soon as I just said that, my brain was like, "Really the answer is God because I'm trying way too hard to manage it on my own." It's the same thing with drinking. I don't manage my alcoholism by myself. I manage it with other people and with my higher power. I want to start thinking about bringing God more into my debt-ing and my money.
I love that and I really need to hear that. With the debt piece, trying to manage it yourself, where I run into trouble is when I overestimate my own control.
I’ll start like: "Okay, there's this plan, I've worked it out, I have some humility and I know it's just going to take its time," and then when I'm like, "Actually, maybe I can speed this up, I can do it faster if I just do this and this." That's where I tend to fall off the tracks, when I try to be omniscient, omnipotent. I try to do myself what I think is actually just time's job.
What are ways you’ve found to not kick God out of God’s seat in your life?
I love the mantra or the saying, "God is in the pause." For me, some of my spending, I would put into an addiction category. That has come up for me around sex before, around food, around spending. If I can have one of something, I want 100.
I've had to do a lot of this work around everything in my life, not just alcohol. I feel like when I really pause to ask myself "Is this action going to bring me closer to God or farther from God?" it’s helpful. I've just been trying to do more pausing before I spend, before I text someone, whatever it is. That's really helpful to me.
That's helpful. That makes sense. I've got two more questions based on the chart. The first is again looking at the Moon and, at your time of birth, it's just a little past that full Moon phase. It's beginning to lose light. It’s entering the disseminating phase, which we can imagine as though it’s beginning to disperse the light it has, giving it away.
One teacher I had associated this with teachers and evangelists, people who go out and share a message. In that image, your moon is still bright, it’s still lit up, but it’s depleted a little bit. I would love to hear about teaching quilt class, teaching other classes, if this idea of disseminating resonates?
I love teaching. I feel both things almost at the exact same time. Quilt class specifically, I love teaching it more than almost anything in the world. And, when a class is done, I am often just empty. I'm just like, "Oh my God."
Especially because in a lot of my teaching, I'm holding a lot of stories and feelings and what comes up for people. I feel like I have pretty good energetic boundaries, but it can definitely wipe me out. I'm always learning to do a better job.
It can be as simple as making sure I have water, making sure I didn't have four cups of coffee before I teach, maybe one is enough and then I can switch to decaf. It's setting myself up when I teach, especially because I'm teaching digitally, it's so easy to just dissociate from my body and be like a talking head, especially with all this Gemini.
It's part of what is, I think, the gift of my teaching, but yes, I do feel that I get really tired. It's really hard for me to do anything on the same day that I teach.
Last question from your chart: I mentioned the asteroid goddesses earlier. This one here is Juno, very close to your midheaven. That's the one I'm most interested in. Juno is the consort, the holy spouse.
Demetra George talks a lot about how the symbolic meanings can be understood in an ancient sense and in a warped, modern sense. She says of Juno that on the one hand she represents union, the equal merging of a pair, but that she also represents the sublimation and codependency that come as a result of merging in modern Western society.
This idea of union or commitment or connecting with the other is closely tied up in your MC, which is career and purpose and actions in the world. You've talked about codependence and commitment and all these things quite publicly. Is that a part of your work, your “capital W” Work, or is that just your life and your life sometimes shows up in work?
My first thought was like, "I'm married to my work. I'm in a monogamous partnership with my job," literally. That's so interesting.
I share so much about relationships. I literally got divorced and then three years later moved back in with my ex-husband to run an artist residency. I think it's a huge part of my work to publicly talk about relationships. Definitely healing codependence and healing relationship addiction and validation addiction. It's interesting. I haven't really been in a relationship in a while and it feels like… it's like I'm at a loss for material.
I don't really think we can heal our attachment wounds outside of partnership. It's not like you suddenly aren't anxiously attached anymore and then you find someone. You find someone and you have to face it in the relationship. I definitely see that in my work and it definitely feels like a part of my life's work.
I was saying this to someone the other day. I didn't mean it as a sad thing, but I really don't think I'm here to have a life partner that I'm with forever.
Maybe that's easy to say as a currently very single and celibate person, but I don't know. I feel like I'm maybe here to have many beautiful, committed partnerships, but maybe I don't… It's funny that I just made the joke that I'm married to my work, but I'm so much more interested in writing and being with my dog and being outside.
This could also be being a divorced person and, not just that, even my last long-term relationship that ended, we lived together and had a life together and a dog together, but I don't really live with the fantasy or desire of growing old with someone. I just don't really have that. Maybe that's because I trust I will grow old with the people that are in my life that are my friends.
I do miss companionship. I do desire companionship, but when people are like, "Do you want to get married again or see yourself growing old with someone?" I'm like, "Not really." It's not like I’m definitely not going to have that. I don't feel that way about it. I'm just like, "I don't know. It's not on my manifestation timetable right now."
No, that's beautiful. I love that. It makes sense to me too. You've done a lot of companionship in lots of different ways. It makes sense to me that there'd be some nuance and expansiveness around what you'd expect from a partnership.
Last little question here. When you're making quilts for people that you love, what does it mean in a relationship? Do you give quilts to people as gifts very often? Is that something that means something to you in relationship? How does it feel to be able to give a completed quilt to someone?
Oh my God. I love giving completed quilts to people. It's interesting. It goes both ways. Sometimes I will make a quilt just to make a quilt.
The quilt I finished in class a couple of weeks ago, I finished it and was like, "Oh my God." It was like I finished it and I was like, "Oh, this is for Bobby. This is for that person," which is fun sometimes when it reveals itself to me of who it's for. It's actually for my friend who got me out of campus crusade for Christ. Full circle.
The one I made most recently for someone that really ties the whole chart story of commitment together is my ex-husband, John, got married again and I made him and his wife a quilt for their wedding. It felt so special.
It was so special to work on it and really think about me and John's beautiful love for each other and how much it's transformed and thinking about his beautiful love for his wife. That is where God was absolutely in that process and that quilt of just thinking about the spiritual nature of love and connection and then getting to give it to them.
I always say that no one ever got a quilt as a gift and then said the lines aren't straight enough or there's too many threads coming off. No one ever said that. If you give someone a quilt as a gift, they are blown away. It's such an amazing, amazing gift to give someone because it's art. It's an original art piece that's also going to be used, as we talked about. I love making quilts. I'm going to work on one later today.
Me too!
Nice!
Awesome. I appreciate the time, Cody.
Yes. It was so nice.
