tackle the motherfucking shit out of love
HELLO! THANK YOU FOR READING!
Last night I ran to the grocery store after I facilitated my very chill class on watercolors and music. Somewhere between there and home, I misplaced my phone. A phone I perpetually keep on silent. I retraced my steps and when the grocery clerk said sorry, I found myself saying “no sorries, I’m free!” When I got home to face the judgement of my precious 13 year old, they just said “it’s all information.” And while they meant it as they mean all things these days: “keep your ringer on, boomer”, I knew they were spot on in the way Ram Dass says, “it’s all grist for the awakening mill.”
I spent a part of my insomnia that night thinking about how our hands have nearly evolved into pocket computers that our minds have come to depend on. A most convenient life of timers, maps, information, connections. The internet is an extremely fascinating, endless buffet of facts, data, ideas, & processes. I’m certain I’ve lost years of my life to trying to absorb it all or be the best www.friend I can be.
Somehow a small stretch of the disconnect from the machine reminded me I have a body, recently so neglected. I sat with myself, with the attention I’d devote to a dear friend. I noticed the tension in my jaw first. Stiffness in my neck and shoulders. How shallow my breaths were. How tight my chest felt. I crossed my arms over my heart and I held myself in a hug, speaking lovingly over the valid anxiety in my animal body, letting it be. If you are scared and lonely in all this violence and uncertainty, you are not alone! If you are imperfect and unproductive in your navigation, you are not alone! If you are a human focused only on staying alive in this moment, you are not alone!
Breath is medicine. Food is medicine. Sleep is medicine. Stillness is medicine. Movement is medicine. Sunshine is medicine. Nature is medicine.
We live in and are part of a wilderness that doesn’t belong to us but that we are responsible for. We are standing on a planet where narwhals are animals that really exist, bright green northern lights flash in the sky, bugs with butt lights fly around in summer months, caterpillar soup becomes a butterfly, and forests and foods grow from tiny seeds that sprout green leaves, just to name a few things that are scientifically magical. We can’t let this culture trick us into missing out on the real gift of life. I say this as someone under resourced in many ways and still here. and I say that as someone birthed, raised, and educated by others, knowing I’ve never really done anything by myself and everything about me is defined by my relationships with people, supportive tools, material items, and the land that holds me. Individualism is a lie and I am held on a gigantic web of connection. A tiny blip of a meat covered skeleton, on a spinning rock, hurling through space and time. Any of us, a drop of water in a freaking cosmic ocean, babies.
That is also the build up to say there are two realities we have access to—one is the ancient, natural world that will outlive us all—where peace, joy, love, pleasure are all abundant, mutual, & free. The other is a sick society with made up rules of fear and scarcity via the control and greed from the wealthiest men among us, who have positioned themselves at the top of this pyramid scheme. It produces tragic coping strategies of denial and disassociation in order to survive it. It harms innocent beings in its self destruction. I am choosing to believe we are all doing our best to stay informed and yet balance the hard news with the good news as we are able.
I’ve found myself quickly reaching to name perpetrators as narcissistic or sociopathic without so quickly questioning the culture that continues to breed them. Whiteness othering whiteness, to try to distance myself from “the enemy”. You’re a “bad guy” so I can be a “good guy”. Psychologically, we use tactics of dehumanizing others, separating into “wrong” or “right” to make ourselves feel better than. It’s a power trip, where our illusion of superiority starts policing others, we build walls, and we keep ourselves from the mirrors of our lineage. LET US ACKNOWLEDGE WE HAVE PERFECTED IMPERIALISM AND GENOCIDE ON OURSELVES FIRST.* WE CANNOT AFFORD TO MAKE ENEMIES OUT OF FRIENDS RIGHT NOW.
I appreciate what Brene Brown had to say on radical responsibility for our perception & behaviors in her book “Braving the Wilderness”:
“Here’s what I believe:
1. If you are offended or hurt when you hear Hillary Clinton or Maxine Waters called bitch, whore, or the c-word, you should be equally offended and hurt when you hear those same words used to describe Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, or Theresa May.
2. If you felt belittled when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables” then you should have felt equally concerned when Eric Trump said “Democrats aren’t even human.”
3. When the president of the United States calls women dogs or talks about grabbing pussy, we should get chills down our spine and resistance flowing through our veins. When people call the president of the United States a pig, we should reject that language regardless of our politics and demand discourse that doesn’t make people subhuman.
4. When we hear people referred to as animals or aliens, we should immediately wonder, “Is this an attempt to reduce someone’s humanity so we can get away with hurting them or denying them basic human rights?”
5. If you’re offended by a meme of Trump Photoshopped to look like Hitler, then you shouldn’t have Obama Photoshopped to look like the Joker on your Facebook feed. There is a line. It’s etched from dignity. And raging, fearful people from the right and left are crossing it at unprecedented rates every single day. We must never tolerate dehumanization—the primary instrument of violence that has been used in every genocide recorded throughout history.”
I do not find life in living in defensiveness and self protection, it’s a recipe to cut me off from understanding, connection, and growth. Raising a child triggers all my bullshit. Through loving another, I have learned about my own agency & the responsibility of my autonomy—rooted in healthy differentiation & sustainable relating. That also means I have learned about accountability that requires me to not only own my mistakes & flawed personality verbally, but also by cultivating tools to A) see my judgments solely as projections to help myself expand beyond them B) to withstand the discomfort of that process by being increasingly more okay with being unliked and validating my reactive inner child about it.
“IF I ACCEPT THE FACT THAT MY RELATIONSHIPS ARE HERE TO MAKE ME CONCIOUS, INSTEAD OF HAPPY, THEN MY RELATIONSHIPS BECOME A WONDERFUL SELF MASTERY TOOL THAT KEEPS REALIGNING ME WITH MY HIGHER PURPOSE FOR LIVING.” -e. tolle
This is my life’s magnum opus:
WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME TEAM EVEN WHEN IT DOESNT FEEL LIKE IT.
EVERYTHING IS LOVE OR A PATH TO LOVE
DIVEST FROM HIERARCHY & TWO PARTY/BINARY SYSTEMS
CRITIQUE THE GOVERNMENT UNTIL IT IS A DEMOCRACY FOR ALL
SCRUTINZE YOUR INTERNAL BIASES
DECONSTRUCT OUR INDOCTRINATION
REFUSE TO DEHUMANIZE
ITS HARD TO HATE CLOSE UP SO MOVE CLOSER
BEYOND RIGHTDOING AND WRONGDOING
THERE IS A FIELD, MEET ME THERE**
**last two lines are rumi because as my pal theo said, it’s always rumi o’clock
* tt user freedomfarmer bringing that truth
//POETRY
SWEET DARKNESS / DAVID WHYTE
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
//FIELD NOTES
marqeaux, of @softcore_trauma & carescapes, writes about the new “crazy ex girlfriend” trope and modern, more subtle forms of ableism we must confront in the midst of this mental health crisis :
“Write from the scar, not the wound,” I’ve been told. If you’re a non-fiction writer, you’re familiar with this injunction. I’ve always felt unsettled by this rule. And now I understand why: it’s pathologizing. The implication is that you can’t be objective if you’re writing from the wound; that the wound will make your writing too emotional, too biased. “When I write from the scar, it's harder for the patriarchy (this includes females, sadly) to dismiss me” explains Heather Demetrios. You must wait until the wound has scared over; in other words, until you’re Fully Healed™️.
Disability justice activist and author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha offers a brilliant critique of this ableist version of survivorhood in her essay “Not Over It, Not Fixed, and Living a Life Worth Living.” Piepzna-Samarasinha describes how
“The idea that survivorhood is something to ‘fix’ or ‘cure,’ to get over, and that the cure is not only possible and easy but the only desirable option, is as common as breath. It’s a concept that has deep roots in ableist ideas that when there’s something wrong, there’s either cured or broken and nothing in between, and certainly nothing valuable in inhabiting a bodymind that’s disabled in any way. This belief creates the myth of the “good survivor” who is cured, fixed, over it; and the “bad survivor,” who’s “still ‘broken.’ Still freaking out, still triggered, still grieving, still remembering. Still making you remember. They’re annoying, aren’t they? No one wants to date them. They cry, they have panic attacks, they can’t get out of bed, they’re not ‘over it.’”
Her description of the bad survivor reminds me of all the crazy exes.
Piepzna-Samarasinha wonders about a different world, one in which “crazy was really okay”: “What if some things aren’t fixable,” she asks. “What if some trauma wounds really never will go away–and we might still have great lives?” Alongside her questions, I feel called to pose some others: What if our wounds never become scars? What if we understood that writing from the wound isn’t any less valid than writing from the scar? Trauma, after all, means wound.
further info for anyone who needs convincing that the usa’s current systems are on a path to disable ALL of us: CRIP CAMP doc on netflix to start touching base with an ongoing movement in disablity rights! Heads up: capitalism holds utter disregard for mass deaths and displacement & the ways higher classes treated lower classes during a global pandemic is our preview of how it will continue to play out in climate crisis. Each of us only have rights as secure as the rest of us so take up the rights of the disabled, the global majority, the queer, and the poor AS IF THEY ARE YOURS, TOO.
holy shit “Women Talking” book / movie : a true story of an ongoing mass sexual assault that happened in a mennonite community from 2005 to 2009. After years of being gaslit by their trusted male community members, one woman finally catches them in action. The men all head to the nearest city to sort out the legal ramifications while the women and children stay back, “encouraged” to forgive their abusers in three days time and get back to business as usual. They use that time to collectively decide what they are going to do. A thoroughly educational conversation on feminism to listen in on.
somatic resiliency and returning opinions back to sender w Jean Marie Murphy via friend B
the artful BEEF series with Ali Wong & Steven Yuen on netflix showing us how ridiculous our reactions can be when we move from ego, a metaphor for how far we take our anger and fear in contributing to the illusion of divisiveness when every single person is truly trying their best with what they have.
your body is doing a great job at holding you. we perpetuate systemic bullshit by shaming our bodies for being anything outside of a very specific, narrow minded checklist of being a beautiful huemxn. Weaponizing diet culture and beauty standards on yourself weaponizes them on the people around you, STAY GENTLE WITH YOURSELF. anne lamott talking kindly about the aunties (her thighs)
Rick Rubin + On Being on Magic, Everyday Mystery, & Creativity. Been reading his book, strong appreciation. Watching him in Shangri La really helped me see him more clearly, giving me permission to find value & purpose in offering my presence & gratitude to others. He’s like an idea doula, holds a container of safe space, clear mirror, and loving kindness for receptive, creative people.
one of my poet guides, David Whyte did a three sundays (sliding scale available) with these words leading our experience: “to explore ways to become a little more creatively dangerous; to risk yourself in speech, in your art, in your actions and in refusing to participate in things that make you smaller by your very participation: to have a clear mind but a wild irrepressible heart” and i just really and truly want that for all of us.
this issue of ALICE is dedicated to author Kimberly Latrice Jones. During the summer of 2020, I heard her commentary via a viral video that re-educated me on the social contracts we have broken or continue to perpetuate. Our issues are all interconnected. If you are working on your corner, you can trust you’re working on all the parts. Let us prioritize listening to black trans & female voices. No feeling is final. Let’s keep going.