“life will break you. nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. you have to love. you have to feel. it is the reason you are here on earth. you are here to risk your heart. you are here to be swallowed up. and when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
― louise erdrich
“how would you describe the man whose wisdom is steadfast? how does the wise man speak? how does he sit, stand, walk?”
— bhagavad ghita (trans stephen mitchell)
“if it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant.”
- jane kenyon “taking down the tree”
“once i built a tower
to the sun,
brick and rivet and lime;
once i built that tower;
now it’s done.
brother, can you spare a dime?”
— yip harburg
drag names:
deep fake panic
irrefutable evidence
canoe trip portage
obamacare hoax
science diet
pandemic flashback
truck-eating bridge
foodie craze ditch
is decker a replicant
assume the worst
kennedy center honors
become your parents
mostly water
american multi-instrumentalist
irredeemable oligarch
unremarkable pop
through mist
through gray
through air that licks
wet roads with dirt
through the white plastic nativity scene zip tied to your porch
plastic angels herald light
two kids inside me
shame and delight
given me to raise, to raise me
feeling and knowing
express and contract
times i watched you post from family holidays and envied hated and judged you for it
now i post from christmas myself and wonder how you judge me for it
and i wonder at the ones who won’t or can’t gather or celebrate and i pity and judge and judge myself
we want what we want
i wanted you to know that i hurt
i wonder sometimes how much of the world boils down to just that —
please see me. please listen. please know that i hurt even if knowing can’t fix it.
family can hurt. gifts given hurt.
but i can’t say i don’t prefer the hurt to the lack.
thank you so much.
you may know who you are.
you also may not!
you may never read this —
you may never hear thanks
but it’s there if you listen, there in each breath.
if receiving health is essential to health, how can i honor, cherish, commit more to that? to make more the world in which asking / needing are strength, in which i give and receive without considering value or weakness? in which help is freely given without being taken for granted for that? understood as vital for the movement of resources from person to person, place to place, animal, plant, need to excess — this is life. life is help — blood rush to bruise, cells to sickness, child’s deep need for a world of adults — is this why we starve? is this why we hurt? because we’re ashamed and we shame for our needs and our wants?
— we watched a documentary on the destruction of the american buffalo, and i saw my bristly goattee on every white man’s face, herds of millions reduced to wandering ghost herds of motherless calfs, that was me, that is us —
your hunger is power. your fatigue is your strength. refusing support means blocking the flow to all who we could then go on to share it with. thank you for giving and taking and asking for help.
every morning in december i entered a giveaway contest held by my silly budgeting app that i don’t even really keep up with. i thought, if only i could just win this, but turns out i didn’t need it, don’t necessarily prefer a windfall from a corporate blank — you all have faces, names, your gifts are a sacrifice. every single donation that pops up stops me in my tracks, asks me to stretch a little further, to humble myself a little more to receive it and trust that i’m going to do good by it, and will continue to make mistakes! will continue to react too quickly, thoroughly mess and muck things up! but i know i’m accountable because i couldn’t have done this without you (literally) and that is a gift that is truly priceless. every sunrise, every sunset, every kiss, every trip to the market — so much being given in support of the promise of me just living my best life. what a precious challenge. i honor and promise to do my best to rise to it.
thank you so much.
so, we are actually still fund-raising! every little bit sincerely helps. to put it in perspective — we raised about enough to cover the building deposit. one big ticket item we’re looking towards next is being able to put in disability-accessible front doors (we already have accessible bathroom, super grateful to the previous steward for that). we also need economic cushion so we can actually take risks on new classes, teachers, workshops and stuff. one example — i’m teaching a ‘recovery flow’ class oriented towards folks working to be sober in partnership with the incredible supportive living campus next door. it’s free, to present as few barriers for entry as possible, but we still gotta pay the rent and bills, right? but that’s the kind of work you’re supporting when you donate. thank you so much.
want to know more about our studio?
peep the new website + join the mailing list — so much new stuff afoot, it’s really been such a joy to take on, i am learning to let myself really enjoy that <3
and i’ll say it again: THANK YOU SO MUCH! i literally could not have gotten through december without your support — the amount of admin required to manage even a relatively small business is so intriguing (sometimes infuriating) especially in a state whose politics are supposedly predicated on ‘not regulating’ business, in a country that spends so much breath using ‘small business’ as a talking point. i feel like my entire adult life has been preparing me for this and i have an incredible amount of resilience, focus and bandwidth and damn some of this shit is fucking nuts. at the same time, i’m grateful for regulations! definitely wish the giant multi-nationals were more regulated and the little ones less, but hoping this huge personal leap will put me in a place not just to cultivate the growth of this community and space but make a regenerative impact on the cultural fabric and policy / politics etc by participating and doing our little part and sharing openly about what we learn in the process.
i also welcome and embrace restriction — in a personal, time-space-energy-sense — i read this blurb from a swedish sports car maker saying how he’d have so much more time to design more sports cars if not for the daily rigors of running a business. totally fucking get that. but art should be hard! daily life shouldn’t be onerous — there are people working literal slave hours for slave wages even in the united states, to say nothing of the supply chain that props us up, that’s not healthy restriction that’s just economic violence. but in the best of times, with the most spacious of schedules and abundance of resource, art is still hard. if i could push a button and have a novel in an instant i know in my heart it would not have the messy divine human perfection of the book i am now beginning to shop (so i can hopefully sell it for some money, prop up the business a bit and have enough time in my schedule to start drafting the next one, which will take years i expect! but who knows, because art will sure surprise you sometimes, especially, when you’re preparing for a slog or a fight…). so… yeah.
thank you for supporting me / us / doing life on this planet. i always thank you in some way in every newsletter and i always mean it. you give more than you know and are more loved, known, seen and appreciated for it than any of us could ever fully grasp. <3
xx alexis
energy body mastery starts january 28th!!!
taught by my colleague and mentor langston kahn of last mask center online.
he held a free webinar today called ‘love like a forest’ which i am late on sharing the link to but you can still register to receive the recording and i’d encourage it — i’ve been working with langston for 7 years and have never not benefitted greatly from every interaction. the quality of care and presence he brought to our very first meeting stopped me in my tracks — turns out he’s not just a weird angelic saint (i mean he is) but it’s actually also a quality he cultivates through practice, and energy body mastery is the core of all that we practice in this work.
i truly cannot overstate the enduring impact of these practice on my life — every season i find a new why and way to circle back to the basics of energy body cultivation and hygiene as a tool for focus, presence, resourcing and joyous inner adventure and the profound self-development and holographic whole life transformation held in the depth clearing tool available inside of this system which gives us the capacity to integrate literally anything — current life trauma, inner or outer relationship conflict, past lives or elemental imbalance. it’s all contained in this bizarrely, beautifully simple system (which accords really clearly with pretty much the core practices at the heart of all mystical traditions, we just don’t usually get that far in, say, a 60 minute yoga class, lucky for us we can pop it out in this class and weave it into the practices we already know and love!). and obviously i just love it, and actually look forward to my daily practice — because i know why i’m there, i have so much clear muscle memory of how exactly i benefit in life from doing it, i know the tools i have to support me in the work AND i never have any idea what exact form or path each sit with myself will take. it’s so supportively structured and sooo surprising and mysterious. anyway, i’ll stop gushing, just check it out.
if you’ve been doing a ton of healing work for a long time and still find yourself triggered by the exact same shit in a way that all your growth flies out the window and you’re having a panic attack about, say, artichoke dip (true story) — or you’ve done and are doing ‘the work’ but you’re still fried, exhausted, chronically ill or depressed — these practices are you for baby. we just don’t know how to heal fully, truly, to complete the recovery process and move to the next step (integrating the new state of health into our life) in the contemporary west, or how to really be in health day to day. but the trees know, and the rocks and rivers and ice floes know, and they continue to show us. you can love like a forest, you just need the right practice.
also, POETRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!$#*()!$(!#
aka what i’m hearing is…
‘as long as love flourishes in the center of your heart you are young. so long as you radiate beauty, hope, cheer, courage to your fellowmen, so long you are young.
the continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight; but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past — flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.’
— john greenleaf whittier
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