Hello Lovelies,
I am returning to this forum after a pause spent focusing on other creative pursuits and being with reality of winter’s effect on my brain. As I move into year two of this publication I feel excited to continue offering a blend of essays about creativity + embodiment = liberation, memoir musings about living with autoimmunity, excerpts from my Living Language book, and poems.
In line with the insights I shared in my post about Softening Urgency, the timing for publication will be a bit more spacious and fluid. I intend to post at least 2 free and 2 premium posts per month, prioritizing quality and self-tending over quantity and chronos time, with more frequency when the muse and my fluctuating capacity allows. Thank you for supporting and engaging with this work as you do.
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Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters. —Rev. angel Kyodo williams
What if it never gets better?
Learning to love this body, as a grounded and mature experience, continues to be the practice of a lifetime. I’ve explored so many spiritual paths and wellness philosophies, wandered through the marketplace of pyramid schemes disguised as self-help empires, sought escape through substances ecstatic and sweet, and I keep being gentled to see self-love as a kind of deep sobriety. Simple, mundane at times, and quietly brilliant, like sunlight rippling on a flowing stream.
I have seen up close and for too many years why the institution is called the wellness “industry,” and like most industries in this fraught overculture it’s bent towards stirring discontent to sell products. It wants us to believe, like other forms of colonization, that there is a promised land of perfect personal health we can reach if we are pure enough.
It seems powerful because the desire to be healthy is probably an innate human impulse, but it intercepts people on the way towards the interdependence that longing calls us to and dazzles us with shiny promises: the idea that health can be bought, that there is one standard of health, and that there is an individual capacity for wellness independent of one’s ecosystem.
This illusion of separation foments a feeling of isolation and lack of empathy that enables people to justify genocide while they go to the gym, or poison groundwater through conflict mining while using a wellness app to track their hydration on a phone made of those minerals.
We’re all thirsty, my love. All tired. All at least a little bit scared. There’s no place to hide from the web of which we are woven. There’s only a membrane between us.
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Self-cherising
One of my current core navigations is with the distinction between illness and adaptation. Discerning when something can and needs must heal, and when something is an adaptive condition, either caused by or helping me deal with my body’s response to an imbalanced world.
The well-hidden gift of carrying multiple adaptations labeled as incurable diseases by allopathic medicine is that I can’t self-improve my way out of having them. There is no pyramid tall enough to let me escape them, no product I can buy to make them go away.
We can’t change the way the wind blows, or how much rain a season brings, or when a tree limb will fall.
We can listen, we can tend. We can practice cooperation. We can ride the waves.
Through the waves that have been sweeping me under, I cling to small moments of connection as life rafts. Letting kindness be what peels back the veil so I can peek at the Mystery in the space between. Loving myself as a verb, as accommodation and appreciation. Opening towards growth, not as perfectionism but as co-evolution. Intentionally participating in the spiral of flowering and decay. Shaping the inevitable constancy of change while releasing gripping onto the idea of a particular, self-serving outcome.
In the past month I applied to a few graduate schools and completed the evaluation process to be diagnosed with ADHD. It’s been a fascinating exploration of the nature of institutions, and the tension between wanting to access the resources they enable while not wanting to be contained by them. Seeking greater understanding while rejecting the limits of labels, compartments, reductions, and the idea there is such a thing as normal.
We are fluid and irreducible, our concrete and intangible pieces ever dancing in concert with the other limbs of life intertwined with us. And whatever benefit treatment might provide requires the holding of community.
I often play with the metaphors of metamorphosis. Maybe this is a coping mechanism, but it comforts me to think of humans as a kind of pollinator, awaiting our inevitable transformation from caterpillar-esque consumers to generous flying delights. The evolutionary transition to carbon-based lifeforms was a response to catastrophic changes in the environment. Oxygen was once toxic waste.
Even the symptoms we feel in a standard disease process, like fever or coughing, are often not the result of the virus or other pathogen but our immune systems’ defensive reactions. Many different stimuli, from bacteria to bacchanalian drinking, can trigger the same responses like inflammation and purging. We, both the we of our discrete bodies and the vast we of the entire planet, are constantly changing and constantly seeking ever-elusive homeostasis in the face of innumerable stimuli. Still only ever for the space between exhale and inhale, at most.
Perhaps we, the we to come after us, will learn to metabolize methane, and plastic, and radioactive iodine, and white phosphorus. Perhaps some part of the confusion in this one limb of the collective immune system I propel through space, what I am learning to less and less call “my” body, is adapting already, and the imaginal cells within me show up on a microscope as confused B cells. Perhaps the Mystery we seek lives in the space between synapses, bridged by something beyond dopamine. A self bigger than one body, or rather, a self-body as wide as the world.
If we can’t get well as individuals, perhaps we can make good primordial ooze. That’s a messy, fertile myth to inspire us through these times.