“i thought
that pain meant
i was not loved.
it meant i lived.”
— louise gluck “first memory”
“i want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply to fill these pages…”
— isabel allende “the house of the spirits”
“darkness is not empty. it is information at rest.”
— teju cole, “blind spot”
“and did you get
what you wanted from this life, even so?
i did.
and what did you want?
to call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
— raymond carver, “late fragment”
drag names:
paris commune
riven division
incredulous public
sleety walk
adaopt amanatee
without precedent
renaissance eras
vicarious trotskyite
webmd spiral
naked barbie
i don’t know who needs to hear this
metabolic spike
binge allende
what if i’m a mermaid
dead end apparently
pretzel salt
o, great mystery, body —
what fresh hell? which curdled delight?
a lone crab apple felled on the school yard.
where did it come from? how far did it have to fall and roll with no trees to bear it in sight?
all the sunflowers died even before the first frost.
they’re tearing down an abandoned hospital i often pass,
(condos, of course)
i used to fantasize about buying + collectivizing it,
now it just makes me think what a disaster is contemporary life,
so much poison, so much waste.
entire blocks look like this. entire cities.
there is no word for this.
there is no word for this.
there is no word for this.
there is no word for this.
i want to talk to you about displacement — mine, and the ways i’ve healed and am still healing it, have found soil in my body, have found and am still finding home and place and belonging on and with and through the earth.
i want to tell you that ‘we were all uprooted,’ we walk a broken path, and the rifts we carry personally echo outward, infinite, rifting countries, cultures, cosmologies, relationships. i don’t want to imply that personal work is ever enough, just that it’s always a part. that you are not separate. our bodies know, so too our hearts. what we carry, we create.
i also want to tell you about joy, hope and sacredness. i’ve been doing a lot of deep emotional work (like, duh, pretty much always, right?), particularly around territory that, no matter how much drama and intensity and debris my process has kicked up seems to stay shut down, frozen, inaccessible, closed off. it hurts to admit it, hurts to touch into it, and is somehow more painful and shocking still that what i’ve been finding as i learn to gingerly flex this muscle, restore flow to this vital channel of myself, is, yes, more grief, more rage, more heartbreak, more terror, shame and self-abandonment, but underneath all of that is this steady, tender, pulsing, original spark of life force, of humanity, of softness, sweetness, quiet, spacious peacefulness and delight at the gift of life. i want to tell you about joy, about hope, about sacredness, about what i think i’m finally learning about humanity, about the people i’ve always looked up to the most. they cry, they rage, they react and fuck up. they just don’t ditch that core spark of wanting to be here, wanting to learn and grow and magic and mistake together on the planet, even when faced with a depth or scale of violence, suffering and manufactured chaos that devours all words and logic and still seems impossible to sate.
in my first few years of teaching i used to read this quote by joseph campbell a lot:
‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. we cannot cure the world of sorrows, bu we can choose to live in joy.’
it’s easy to dismiss, easy to condemn, easy to armor our overwhelm in judgement and righteousness even as it starves our bodies of the connection we crave and hardens our hearts to life. harder to sit in the quiet and actually ask myself: if i were living from a place of joy, what would i create? if i were honest to my life force, to my belief that we all carry a piece of the original spark and we’re all here to help each other tend and nurture this and collectively steward our capacity to do so as communities, species and planet, what would i do today? what would be my next step?
love is joy is grief is terror is quiet is rage is longing is need is vulnerability is courage is ferocity is strength is power is love is heartbreak is love is joy is grief…
please be good to yourself. please do the things you need to be good. it’s all hands on deck right. human is soil, is body, is all of us, divine is spark, is knowing, is even more so all of us, but the way you live and alchemize this confluence is yours alone, thank you for being here, thank you for doing that.
i’m mostly taking cues from local community organizations that i trust, but nationally also jewish voice for peace in regards to what i can do as an american to resist the ongoing genocide of palestinians in gaza. apparently, calling your congress people does have an impact, so if that’s all you can do, do that.
i also asked to be shown the opportunity offered by the collective this month — which, this month particularly, felt ridiculous, but that’s kind of the whole point of divination, right? to humble ourselves to spirit, to find the power in asking for help and doing our best to implement it.
i’m shown everyone walking by twilight over a blasted landscape, peering up and recognizing suddenly that the stars, the only light available, those dead or dying or impossibly distant explosions of density and heat, the stars are us. we are the cosmos which, like us, is crazed, wild, and somehow perfect, both peaceful and violent. there is order we can align with in choosing to embrace the unknown and dance with the chaos, offered most simply to each of us by the act of looking up and recognizing that we too are a part of the wholeness, and by doing whatever we each can to hold our cosmic perspective in tension with the raw, real and immediate of day-to-day life.
this is a time to wake up, and also to mutate — to soften our most firmly held identities and molt into the true forms demanded by our gifts, to learn to flow with the unfathomable, not as a way to normalize the bullshit but as a continual surrendering to the process of becoming more human, more animal, more planet, learning to live as the kind of being that, by our very being-ness resists, reclaims and reshapes the denial, delusion, dehumanization and violence, like the microbes that can digest plastic, this ain’t comfortable, pretty, but beautiful and necessary when we can choose to see and honor it. it’s not about safety or success. the conflict comes (maybe especially for those that have already crossed all the rubicons required to get added to a mailing list like this) primarily in not only recognizing this process but appreciating, celebrating that we’re losing, dying, being forced to change etc not arbitrarily but in relationship with our soul, with our purpose, as the result of our true beingness being in perpetual conversation with all other beings on the planet.
there is a massive opportunity for release, which seems to point towards the solstice — shedding whatever holds us back from the past, whatever we can’t digest into wisdom has to be purged and passed, whether personal, ancestral, cultural, karmic. and — this is also kind of the whole point of human life, this seemed important to note. it was always this much of an adventure, this heartbreaking, this dangerous. there was no garden of eden. there was no safe planet. indigenous cultures knew and tended this, in story and song and ritual and every other technology that shape the ways humans interact. it’s always been hard (that’s why there are so many rich stories documenting human hubris and mistakes), infinitely harder based on the pile of crap we now inherit, but we actually did sign up for this, so more conflict arises when we fight, repress, deny or avoid this, because we when we make ourselves unsafe for our own growth we also close that part of ourselves to everyone else. and we’re all waking up in a different place, with different knowledge, awareness, experience, maturity and impacts, so we have to be squishy and careful with that, give ourselves and others a lot of space, focus on where we’re impacted and where we have impact, but definitely remember — the spirits see us as heroic. they see the impossibility of what we’re all tasked with individually and collectively and that’s why they’re here to help. so, remember to go and ask.
what’s mine to release? what’s mine to pick up? what practices / processes / healing / support do i need to embrace the opportunity offered me by this time / by my life and make space for the forms my soul is growing me into that i could never predict or anticipate?
thank you for being. thank you for reading. i’d love to hear your questions, concerns, shares or feedback, either via email or comments and, as always, reach out if you’re in need of 1:1 support.
+ thrive — grounding, grieving and dreaming with the earth is next sunday 11/19, 12-3p cst. we’ll meet live online but the recording will be available after for those that can’t make it live with us. there is more info here in this post.
in my experience of these teachings, the earth is always there to meet us where we’re at, in the body, in the moment, no matter what. i intend this time time we spend together to be both a supportive container for whatever’s up for you, whether world stuff or life stuff, but also an investment in your growth, so you can continue to cultivate your foundation through practice, deepen your capacity to respond to the moment and empower your resilience through flow and presence even as life continues to shift.
any questions, feel free to reach out.
with all available blessings of courage and quiet,
alexis
+++ because the world always needs more poets:
I can't tell you how much I needed to read this today. Thank you.
Oh, and "vicarious trotskyite" next to "webmd spiral" just undid me.
This is beautiful Alexis. Thank you.