For just a moment, please consider the people you know beyond your experiences with them, not just how they make you feel or the needs they meet for you but who they are as people walking around in their daily lives. Enduring sadnesses we know nothing about. Sharing kindnesses we will never witness. An autonomous mosaic of all their experiences outside of our best intentions or grabs at control. At another time these people were strangers in your world. Upon first encounter, you never could have imagined the golden warmth you noticeably felt after sharing time together. To be seen. In boring errands or meal prep made fun. Lengthy text exchanges. A sweet treat drop off. A porch beer. A podcast recommendation or a song they thought you would like. An unexpected letter in the mail. A small gift because they love giving gifts. A string of words they happened to say one time that your memory recorded as a sacred message.
The little ways people extend themselves might seem like a small part of life but it's certainly what sustains us. Doing so simply because they're compelled to. The same impulse to smile at babies we don’t know in grocery stores or the urge to care for a lost dog on the street. We sort of get used to all these complex, lovely, sweet, interesting, funny, caring, tough people moving in and out of our days. The friendships you have--the people that choose to be around you --are living and breathing miracles. They are holding mirrors that can show you parts of yourself and you are doing the same for them. Intentionally using the reflection as fodder is where the money is at. We can learn from anything depending on how we look at it. We can make the best or the worst of it. I want us to make the best of it.
Someone’s harshness might reveal to me where I could potentially firm a boundary or conciously offer tenderness. Someone’s soft compassion might challenge growth in my own, for myself and others. Love helps us see what really matters in all these fleeting moments. At the beginning of a soulmate level friendship I have had for a long while now, I remember this beautiful, funny, sensitive, deeply loving human had one day a week dedicated to themselves. So dedicated that though my only free day for years was on that day, they did not falter in meeting the commitment they made to themselves. At first reaction, I took this personally and saw this as an inconvenience to me. When faced with my compulsion to love them, I have grown to see this behavior as wisdom for my friend who I care about to stay balanced, happy, and at peace—which in turn only makes our friendship richer, too. I wouldn’t have arrived at the latter vision—which gave me permission to make like commitments to myself— if I hadn’t allowed love to expand my perspective beyond my previously held belief. (note: don’t believe everything you think) Lin-Manual Miranda via Moana’s grandmother is absolutely correct that the people you love will change you, loving them is a portal to expanding beyond your limiting beliefs/anything that is not love. The real power practice is deliberately using it all as grist for the awakening mill, in becoming more of who we are meant to be.
By ways of magical thinking and feral generosity, I will be in Portland OREGON this summer. One thing I’m doing is guest curating a show with The Morale Department about Reflections in Relationship called BEING SEEN. This visualization is in the study and celebration of another particular soulmate level friendship I have, the ongoing agreements we have formed within a shared dedication to the path of love, and how the archetype of their wildly riotous vessel of a personality has both annoyed the shit out of me (literally the bullshit out of me) and inspired so much growth in me.
I met Jen a decade ago at a Hannakuh party she showed up late to. She walked in and immediately self-recruited to stand on a wobbly chair and perform a charade. (shout out to Leo rising) What Jen didn't know is that the entire room had all smoked weed maybe ten minutes before she came in. Making zero guesses did not deter her performance. All of us mouth agape, mesmerized by the amusement. We later found each other in the kitchen but for a brief moment to exchange numbers. It would be another year before we silently became friends over tearfully witnessing a mutual friend in a hard moment. A felt, known sense of camaraderie.
Between us have been 10000 hours of conversation and endless text exchanges. She has held me. I have held her. The first stretch of the pandemic, she would come and dance outside my window with a giant sign that read GOOD MORNING I LOVE YOU, every day. She has shown up no questions asked when I asked her to do crime with me. Came to my rescue in a matter of minutes to work it out for me when I locked all my groceries in a car2go and had to go feed my child. One morning when I woke up with part of my eyesight gone, she took me to urgent eye care and voluntarily sat vigil on a hot day in the parking lot for over six hours of tests so I wouldn't be alone when I got my diagnosis. She was the first person I ever told the hardest and most unhealed parts of my story to. She was the first person who truly treated me like what I said mattered, always giving me credit for what I was offering. She connected me to resources, freedoms, and pleasures that I—as a traumatized, brokeass solo mother—would never have had access to without her influence. I have seen her in bliss and in fury. I have seen her fiercely strong and watery soft. She epitomizes the air dancer outside of car dealerships—an open spectacle as a first gate of entry. She embodies putting your oxygen mask on first before helping others. She is a radical revolutionary, an entertainer, an advocate, a workhorse, a yogi, a sponsor for joy. And much more. She is a boldly independent student with moments of practiced mastery in interdependence, lovingly devoted to her Higher Self, which is a dedication to the interconnected Oneness. She is you. She is me. She is everything.
It was year two or three when we came to understand our dynamic as study buddies. Rooted primarily in codependency recovery and shared sagittarian revolt, we sort of unfolded into clear mirrors for one another. One book we read together was bell hooks’ ALL ABOUT LOVE. hooks made mention in several of her works that "love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Love is an act of will. We do not have to love. We choose to love." In many ways Jen is the opposite of my personality and we found value in the potential reflection of that for our individual growth. We worked out that her particular ways might influence me to sharpen my edges while my particular ways might influence softening some of her own.
We have disagreed and misunderstood one another and we have remained within tender connection and direct communication throughout. I have been frustrated by Jen for not reacting to something like I would have wanted her to and had to work out my own understanding about love being flow not force. I assigned needs to Jen that she was unwilling to meet, which is also to say unresourced and incapable of meeting. Through Jen, I have learned to relieve other people from being responsible for my happiness and realized with real eyes the responsiblity of my uncommunicated, unmet needs. I have been uncomfortable in reflection she shared from a worked out liberation, which challenged me to offer some light to places in myself that needed it. I have been legit frightened by Jen because before Jen, I thought anger was always violent and now my heart hearth keeps warm with rage.
Jen as a dazzling euro-centric standard of beauty in a giantly tall and energetically large container has made me reconcile comparison as a thief of joy, deepen my understanding of real beauty unthreatened by another’s, and to trust I could take up space and still be loved. Because the punk scene of her teens had already started this deconstruction work in her, I have known her as a woman who is often-but-not-always unafraid and uninhibited which has been an invitation into my work removing barriers that kept me from my own light. We have had enough flow to honor the ebbs and we seem to keep finding each other in these seas. I accept that Jen is no one's caretaker, certainly not mine. She has the freedom to walk away at any time. And I am better because of all of it. In seeing Jen—beyond all the projections we place on one another— I have seen myself. Maybe that seems narcissistic, but I tend to think of it more as responsible. Loving others invites us to change and I’m choosing love.
Choose it with me and come see us for the opening reception at The Pretzel Factory on June 22. And a strong recommendation to check out their current spectacular show WHERE DID YOU GO? Objects after Absence.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING MY STRING OF WORDS !
I LOVE YOU ALL !! LETS KEEP GOING !
ON FRIENDSHIP // KAHLIL GIBRAN
Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the “nay” in your own mind, nor do you withhold the “ay.”
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery us not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.
And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
FIELD NOTES //
watch all of ted lasso please and you’re welcome.
drink your water babes
a podcast for textile art nerds
the emotional process of doing creative art/work written by a creative therapist
free 30 days of a centering practice that changed my days
I will also be guest teaching in pdx with the reframe collective during a july camp for toddlers (pls reach out for interest) and an august cosplay camp for teens
biologist janine benyus who i remember reading “life creates conditions conducive to life” years back and this was such an anticipated on being interview. thank you beth
“a love ethic makes this expansion possible” bell hooks, love as the practice of freedom
this line from absolute trust in the goodness of the earth by alice walker
this issue of ALICE is dedicated to Jennifer Margaret Batchelor who’s dedication to the radical, invisible, and emotional work of loving and living with vitality inspires me nearly every day I’ve known her. In all her forms, facets, and idiosyncrasies, I celebrate and could not be who I am today without this intentional connection— in spite of lack of frequency or proximity—of knowing and being known. ALL OF US TRULY ARE NEVER NOT CONNECTED.