LOVE IS NEVER LEAVING
As I type this, my child is delaying a night shower by dramatically reciting some anti-capitalist manifesto about how we work to rest and rest to work.
I can sense the collective burnout. Physical illness doesn’t help mental health. I recently heard the poet Jane Hirshfield say it is too easy to exist and too hard to live. That feels accurate. May wellness and wholeness reach you. May we each make the time to slow down and give our spirits true, connective rest. May you access your inner peace with ease.
In these last few weeks, I’ve been pretty dedicated to recollecting myself. We have been nursing our immune systems three out of the last six weeks. Mae is back at school solely because of the ways teachers step up beyond anything required of them. I’m doing some more intense somatic reprocessing with my therapist & tempering that with a healthy amount of self soothing like puzzling or long walks outside. Bodies are amazing. Enter quilt class.
This quilt instructor says we are learning about improv and the art of starting over again and again. They also say no rulers and no scissors allowed. I resist and then lean in to where i see the importance of what exists beyond my reach for perfection, which then gives way to free play. And that I am here for. Ripping the fabric is tactile. It reminds me of seeing wood spinning on a lathe for the first time, malleable like clay on a pottery wheel. Fabric now as medium. Things only your hands can really know. I rip apart. I readjust. I join together. I rip apart. I readjust. I join together. I rip apart. I readjust. I join together. This seems to be the cycle until I’m met with ironing something out or repairing it. Quilt squares, chain stitched, hang like prayer flags. Something right about that.
Everyone & everything is a teacher to the extent I am willing to really observe & listen. I am insatiably curious about processes and information. The intentional choices we’ve made in fine tuning repetitive gestures, making the slightest adjustments to each step, in service to greater ease. Leaving timid trials to become hands that move in their seasoned knowing. Like when choreography becomes dancing or how a sequence of yoga poses becomes a flow. Because everything really is a practice with moments of mastery you have to put in the time to witness yourself in.
A quilt as a practice of piecing each bit to another bit until they become a structure of many, forming for a service beyond what any of them could do singularly. A quilt as a metaphor for interconnection & oneness. A quilt as something human.
recipe for grounding yourself: borrow a car if you need to. head to the forest. the trees know you. lay down on their roots until you feel like you belong. stand in front of a waterfall, close enough that the mist sprays you and reminds you you’re alive. smile at the sun. with eyes closed, drink it up because the sun is here today and it might not be tomorrow. dip your hands in the river even though it’s the dead of winter, bring the water to your face and wake up. walk. run. march. stomp. sing I AM HERE as loud as you can, where no one can hear you but you. don’t leave until you hear you. and then bask in every bit of the deliciousness of remembering again so you may take it back with you, in living in this dominant culture of forgetting. find a ritualistic way to bottle this feeling and access it every morning until you can come back.
FEELINGS REPORT //
new moon (put your protective seeds in the dark, rich soil) in thoughtful and innovative aquarius. while each personality of the zodiac offers up specific gifts to humxnity, aquarius is one of four fixed signs, one of three air signs. fixed signs meet us mid season as sort of the workhorse of enduring whatever we find ourselves in. air signs are cerebral, think contemplative and intentional. consider the timing and the rhythms of the true new year. suspect that grief is a passage, not a destination and that empathy without boundaries is self destruction. what do you need to best support yourself while living among all of this heartache? how do we support one another in staying committed to our containers of devotion so we may live beyond existing? how can we find the balance to open our resources to collaboration of service?
INSPIRATION STATION //
That Jane Hirshfield interview I mentioned. IT WILL FEEL GOOD.
Sister Corita Kent’s rules. I think of number 4 a lot lot. Everything is an experiment. Everything is a metaphor. Everything is a practice.
One small part of an interview i listened to with Jane Goodall that reminds me we are in best service when we are head & heart. Jane was an observer of chimps, who we share 98% DNA with. She got to data no one else did because she empathically related to the animals she was scientifically observing. It was her work identifying a chimp’s tool use that gave a platform to protecting chimps and other great apes.
In my all my quilting, I thought much of local artist Wynde Dyer. Wynde gifted me a quilted tarp square (from a body of work on houselessness that included paid labor for houseless neighbors) for taking some photos of her for a quilt magazine. It’s been hanging over me as I quilt, sort of inviting me to channel Wynde’s drive and dedication to the arts for the greater good.
Mae and I sometimes watch episodes of community. one line said struck me.
From only a few days before that, I was reading some things from Sonya Renee Taylor, about how radical self love will save the world.
Love as the practice of freedom by bell hooks
This issue of ALICE is dedicated to Thich Nhat Hanh, who recently graduated to the beyond. I feel so thankful a vietnamese monk shared information on mindfulness practice as well as non violent social engagement to spread peace among the people while exiled from his home. May we learn from these shared tools about enduring suffering. A simple message, soft spoken as radical living. I invite you to take a deep inhale in his honor if you have read this far. MANY BLESSINGS. NO FEELING IS FINAL. JUST KEEP GOING.