again & again
Two weeks ago, a black swallowtail butterfly entered the home of a friend in North Carolina. It was roughly calculated that an earlier form of this butterfly must have snuck in via a house plant. It was too cold to release her to fulfill her butterfly life path, her wings kept her from flying anyway. My friend made sure she had moments of freedom outside on sunny days. Sending me marco polos and photo updates kept me invested in the celebration of this impermanent gift of a presence.
For exactly 11 days, she would come hang out at the dining room table to share meals and tea with my friend until she did not want to eat or drink any more. Her little butterfly hand reached out and touched the very end of a human finger as she drew her last breaths. My friend met and welcomed in an unplanned arrival closely followed by a sudden departure. Rituals supporting grief. Grief revealing love.
Four weeks ago, a sweet and beautiful friend of mine from massage school went missing in an Oregon forest. Teams of people and dogs and horses looked for her everyday until they found her about three weeks later. She was gentle and good and believed the best in people in spite of the evidence piled against them. She was slow moving and intentionally safe. One of very few people I learned much by and with via therapeutic touch. Our first meeting involved us taking turns cradling each other’s heads and that feels apropos. I hadn’t talked to her in close to ten years but that didn’t change how the sun went dim for weeks or how the fog still hasn’t yielded to the early morning light just yet.
In the quiet of my wintering, I do not look to anything to cure my weariness, because I have learned to simply allow myself to be weary. Acceptance carries me to emotional regulation and helps me see that heartbreak, too is a type of sacred devotion.
//Hymn for the Hurting
by Amanda Gorman
Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.
Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.
//FIELD NOTES
my dear friend Caitlin from the reframe collective (highly recommend their camps/classes!!) interviewed me recently about creativity for their podcast, Colorful Conversations. Caitlin is a highly intelligent educator with an enduring vision dedicated to creating the future spaces we dream about for our children, in our current now. You can listen to our particular episode here.
learned this week with my 8th grader that hitler’s rise to power was years of groundwork. in the 30s, the nazi party first targeted trans & queer people at a book store owned by a jewish queer man—gender variance was a gateway threat towards a larger method of purging justified by eugenics. they banned and burned books affliated with sexual or gender expression, marxism, communism, socialism, anything written by a jewish author. the nazi party would go on to destroy anyone and anything that did not uphold the delusional thinking of white aryan german supremacy. There have currently been over 2500 books banned in the last school year in 32 states across the USA. 41% of the banned books address LGBTQ+ themes. (41% also have a protaganist or secondary character who is a person of the global majority, 21% directly address race/racism)
PSA: ironic misogyny is still misogyny and coercion is assault.
kurt vonnegut: stuck in time documentary on hulu is a little forehead kiss
adults with autism are leading the way towards new understanding of ASD in terms of diagnosing, managing, and speaking about autism. more on autistic burnout as well as samantha craft’s autistic traits checklist.
FYI to anyone neurodivergent: slowly adding in additional magnesium and fish oil has been supportive this week. my future additions may include b6 and l-theanine.
this issue of ALICE is dedicated to poet and activist, Amanda Gorman. As the first person to be named the National Youth Poet Laureate, she shared her own words at the 2021 presidential inauguration, ending in, “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”