no one belongs here more than you
One thing I looked forward to about moving was that I would get a second spring. It’s my favorite time of the year, those first signs. I hadn’t anticipated how jarring it would be to come back to winter. Every day, I go outside and walk the yard, looking for clues about what is here, too. Each green sprout, each bloom. Its like christmas morning meets a study in ecosystems. Botony and Arboriculture. Herbal medicine and food growth. Many an herbalist will tell you that what grows near you is what you need. Patches of violets are supportive for depression and fatigue. I imagine what we are building here, with this land and the potential of what sanctuary it could become. And it cannot be hurried, only witnessed and supported. Just listening.
Parenting is one of the most interesting challenges and another type of listening. If you can move slowly enough in it, it cycles you through your own childhood from a more objective perspective. There is a moment before you parent your child that you have the opportunity to parent yourself. In this way, I find children to be clear mirrors and gentle teachers. The kind of parent I strive to be creates an environment where my child not only doesn’t have to fear who they are but they also have space to experiment with who they can be. We stay present with our feelings. We investigate our beliefs and patterns. We dialogue. I hear them. And the only way I can offer that to them is by first offering it to myself.
Almost nine years ago exactly, my child Mae was about to turn four, persistently asking me to shave their head. I resisted. For weeks, I unknowingly entered discussions about gender identity with a preschooler. “What if someone thinks you’re a boy?” I’d ask and Mae would answer “then they think I’m a boy, I don’t care.” I went to bed considering what my need for Mae to have long hair was really about, what structure created this “I” that “needed” this “her” to have a certain length of hair. At four. Ultimately, my desire for liberation and love won out and I cut all of Mae’s hair off. And in a way, an invitation to cut off fear, namely control I tried to excuse as loving concern. Loving others can make you cycle through investigations of your own biases in the way rumi talks about how our only work is to seek the barriers within ourselves that keep us from truly loving another.
I learn how to dance in my own queerness from watching Mae so boldly embrace their own. From that initial conversation, I would go on to shave my own head, in my own discovery/liberation journey beyond this story i inherited from a sick society about who i’m supposed to be. And now, moving away from a physical place where queer felt pretty normalized, moving into a physical place where being queer feels a bit dangerous. I long for the queer spaces I didn’t feel queer enough in, now in the contrast of not blending in enough, though its cultivating a new kind of clarity in purpose. This ongoing work of undoing all the labels assumed for me. How being in this body seemed to welcome everyone’s input but my own, pigeon holing me into performing for belonging.
I think a lot about something bell hooks said in this panel, “… queer not as in being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it) but queer as in being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live. i think that its so crucial that trans people are at the forefront of that because that is where—among trans people— that imagination is called forth in the reconstructing and the reenvisioning of self and possiblity so that, to me, is one of the positives of the focus.” hooks goes on to say that the journey of freedom is really the journey of imagination. So let’s use our imaginations to continue insisting on the world we can see and create for our children.
*everything I mentioned about my child was written and published with their consent.
FINDINGS FROM THE FIELD //
1. “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” dalai lama
2. mantra by song, peter tosh’s I AM “I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations, neither are you here to live up to mine. I said, I am that I am . . .”
3. banner of heaven on hulu has hooked me, fundamental religious abuse meets true crime drama + spiderman
4.
5. sometimes i like to pretend the celebrity drama of pop culture is an apt mirror for mainstream culture. while the johnny depp/amber heard trial doesn’t feel like my business, i came across this article on the power disparity in relationships and how it plays into abusive dynamics that i think is worth considering in the spirit of nuanced harm reduction.
6. house favorite musical: the greatest showman is totally about : this is me
7. dr. robin wall kimmerer on harvesting
8. mae, mom, and i have all been watching modern family. this scene written for my heart
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10. We are all deserving of our own love. I am so encouraged by all the people leading us & heeding the calling of their lives in that future we can now imagine in contrast to our reality. DARKNESS HAS ITS TEACHING AND LOVE IS NEVER LEAVING. this issue of ALICE is dedicated to Alok Vaid-Menon who is offering the world a heartful education in the radical act of acceptance.
GO OUTSIDE TODAY, drink some water, take some deep breaths. Repeat often. Not even trying to be positive. The darkness is sometimes hard to move through and this is my shortest version of a checklist to getting to okayness in the not okayness. I love you all and you were meant to be here in this time and I’m happy to remind any of you of that. Reach out any time. Thank you so much for reading and staying in touch in this way. KEEP GOING. BIG LOVE.