a seed, a silent promise
a very dreaming the dark in december dreary + decadent heartland mysteries digest
“damage isn’t […] an aberration. it’s part of the natural course of things.”
- rosa lowinger
“each of us is a seed,
a silent promise,
and it is always spring.”
“what are we to do? well, begin by asking yourself what and who you are.”
- harold bloom, ‘jesus and yahweh: the names divine’
“how
both languages, plenty and loss,
sit like warm stones in our
mouths. And how each,
regardless, emerges whole.”
drag names:
thorough soaking
women pooping
dogma determinism
will orfate
war is over
surly madam
if you want it
BBC mollusk
clean enough
serial fabulist
evocative misquote
rank incompetence
synoptic gospel
important nuance
fetal heartbeat
you need to stop
cross a line
coppola biopic
godly woman
inescapable grief
hardly imagine
crossfit avoidant
CIA superpilot
seriously wtf
‘looking back on the past i have a vivid sense of a being seeking reincarnation here, beginning with those faint first intuitions of beauty, and those early dreamings which were its forerunners. it was no angelic thing, pure and new from a foundry of souls, which sought embodiment, but a being stained with the dust and conflict of a long travel through time, carrying with it unsated desires, base and august and as i divined it, myriads of perceptions and a secret wisdom. it was not simple but infinitely complex, as a being must be which has been in many worlds and all it had experienced has become part of it. if there was an original purity of being it had become corrupted, yet not altogether for there was in it, i believe, some incorruptible spiritual atom, carrying with it maybe some perception of its journeyings with deity. it had worshipped in many houses of prayer and kept the reverence it had paid and had been in many a gay and many a ruined heart. out of ancient happiness it could build intoxicating images of life, and out of ancient sorrows it could evoke a desolating wisdom that would crucify the infant joy ere it could run to its light.’
- ae (george william russell), ‘song and it’s fountains’
all my friends have lost their leaves
so i wonder why the humans haven’t
or if we have and do why we don’t admit it
can’t accept revere and worship
death
i get it
all my friends are flying south
are flocking somewhere
mobbing leafed and leafless oaks with shrill bright murder chorus
a hundred grackles passing gossip
shrill and wild in animal purpose
i stopped eating meat
wear my watch a lot less
have the distinct, recurring feeling of a parallel nervous system entering my body from above and to the left, something healed and regrown, reclaimed from a lifetime outside myself, gold like sunlight coming home to roost
i want to find new words for grief
beyond heavy sobs, guttural moaning, beyond fear and pain and craving and loss,
this new grief is vast, quiet, strangely soft, hurts but is growth, life, joy, consciousness,
the sensation of being just one of innumerable others on the planet, in cosmos,
it is and it isn’t,
and is still, also: grief
one of those days when the dog is being extra spastic and i have to stop and breathe and recognize he is —
a. just a dog
b. my cosmic teacher in many lives past and present or else we wouldn’t be here doing this
— and make space for my feelings about all of that
and no of course i can’t prove any of it,
someone told me once there’s no unified theory of particle physics,
we don’t really get proof, we get fallible evidence which we sway this or that way
in fear, trembling, bias,
all the shamanic training in trusting my embodied metaphysical mythopoetic experience and putting form, word and image to it,
just gives me more ways to articulate my ignorance,
which paradox, this, the only way i’ve learned to trust myself.
but if it’s not a swirl of many lives, how would you describe it in your own life and speech? what cosmology are you using to make sense or demolish it? if you haven’t thought to check which gyroscope of meaning holds your body and thoughts and you do and don’t like it, where might your body point you to find one that works?
wow, when i let myself like it…
a tree sung street
geese on my right
stone wall of unknown provenance left
tell you what we saw here once:
someone driving a car with all four tires blown out
couldn’t identify who or what,
a profound resignation my only passing sense
and despair, of course.
please stop.
please just stop.
why won’t they stop.
i keep saying i don’t understand it but i do,
i get it. i’ve hurt and i’ve hurt and i’ve hurt and not seen it, not been able to stop.
please. please just stop.
all i can say — nothing else —
please. please just stop.
please. please just stop.
hello hearts.
it really is unprecedented. it really is ok to be smashed and staggered by it. it really does fucking suck. it’s hard if you’re just waking up to it (and yay, waking up!) and it’s hard if you feel the tender, stupid pride at having woken up at an earlier moment — and then some shame and some recrimination for that. because if you’re not just waking up, if you’ve been gutted and grieving and sick over genocide and displacement for potentially all of your adult life, with a lot of well-digested facts and figures and talking points to back it up, then what the fuck have you been doing this whole time, huh? just sitting here normalizing it? or trying your damndest and it was heartbreakingly not quite enough — never is, is it? or it is and it’s not, always learning, growing, uncovering a new bourgeois indulgence, willful self-sabotage, frighteningly innocent blind-spot — is there a way to say this that doesn’t stigmatize blindness? or ignorance? can we make a culture that embraces the reality that somewhere someone might always be ignorant, violent, innocent, that maybe more than we can ever know of human experience happens in realms of which we can only be somewhat conscious? no answers today, or this season or life. just a lot of deep feeling for all of you feeling and being with all of it.
if you didn’t hear — i’m taking over a studio and healing arts center! and we need your help financing the leadership transition and endowing the next chapter here at inner space. we = me, the new business owner, on behalf of our small but vibrant community of students, teachers, tenants and staff and this vision calling us to continue bringing it to life.
we/i could not have gotten anywhere near here without a truly maddeningly beautiful amount of help — i’ve been guided through this many-months-long transition by two pro-bono business geniuses, massively supported by my partner eric, seen and held and leered and laughted at by my helping spirits and the spirits tending the vision of this land and space, which is so much bigger than i can ever hope to receive on my own, thank god i have so many rad folks popping out of the wood works to collaborate in stewarding it, was able to secure a loan from a small business oriented non-profit mentioned casually by a new friend at one of the mystic fairs, which i wouldn’t have gotten if my parents hadn’t been willing to co-sign on it … it’s really an endless list, which is so meaningful to me because it has broken open my heart in a way that nothing has yet. and every donation that comes in i find myself moved to tears. every day i am learning so much from this process and don’t plan to stop.
all that to say, THANK YOU! so much! for your support. i’ll probably have a lot more to say as the rest of this fund-raising campaign unfolds. for now, just that.
and if you’re local to kc, please join us for a solstice + re-launch edition of our new series of monthly sober, family-friendly sock-hops — family really is what you choose to make of it. i hope you’ll consider joining us at inner space in some way to experiment with making family, community and kinship in this new (old) way with us.
much love, many solstice blessings of consumer resistance and cheesy, cheerful acquiescence to the true spirit of the time which is darkest,
alexis
PS if you’re feeling especially abundant, kc tenants is always advocating for all of us and appreciates any help you can offer back.
what i’m hearing is…
last month i shared this louise gluck poem, ‘first memory,’ which had struck me hard in the gyre of her work that was shared after her recent death, but i sort of poignantly misquoted it. the poem reads:
‘long ago, i was wounded. i lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was —
for what i was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, i thought
that pain meant
i was not loved.
it meant i loved.’
i had quoted the last line as, ‘it meant i lived.’ the fact that it’s actually ‘it meant i loved.’ wow. what a telling and tender and teaching mistake. thank you poets.
+
longform:
haunting, wild, i’ve never read jco at length but many times in excerpt, what i was most struck by is the fact that we live in a culture that will try to grapple with the most gemini of authors having the most gemini of experiences (the whole non-verbal disabled twin thing) without ever once mentioning the astrology, or recognizing how wild it is to cast about in the wildness of human experience without any framing myths to hold us, without relating to the archetypal nature of so much of what makes life and art. but also, how tender for that, how poignant. for some people, journalism and literary critique are the best or only tools we have to make sense of the senseless. we all try our best. i hope to get to my 80s and not be churning out the same kind of work in ignorance of its meaning, but what if … what if that’s actually the best we can ask? to still be living, working and trying to discover the self inside of the selfless? to still be living, working and trying to learn how to rest when there’s always more of the vision to manifest? to live and work knowing there’s absolutely no way, cosmology, toolkit or level of commitment that will make me immune from the vulnerability of being a human making art from a life…yep. xx