The absence of an electron where there should be one

The year before I went to college I had my first full on psychic reading. It was long ago enough that she recorded the session on a tape, and I haven't owned anything that plays tapes in quite some time. But there are pieces of it I will never forget, that keep rolling back into my periphery, since psychic time is differently related to us than our own fabricated concept of its passage. One of the images she described started with my wading into a pool of water, but before I got too deep, I stepped on something extremely sharp and backed out the way I came. She saw me circling many pools as time unspooled in front of me, never moving deeper into any of them than just barely getting my feet wet.

From my place backstage, blue lights painting us all like ghosts in the preshow calm, I pressed into the pain in my foot. An old injury that has awoken with a vengeance in recent body study, it has been a constant note sung in the background of every weight bearing moment. I was thinking about weight passing through, and realized that feeling the pain was different than engaging with it, and pressed down harder. Like my toes had words to say to the floor, I let the bottom of my foot whisper about gravity and the force of my weight to the stage underneath me. The full length of my toes, all the way up to the metatarsals were clearly illuminated in the conversation between my body and the floor. What had previously been a blind ball of pain with fuzzy, bright edges contained underneath my outer ankle became a network of splinters, a burning spiderweb that spread out along the underside of my foot. The pain has begun to dissipate in the days following, and I can feel my feet talking to various supporting surfaces sometimes, chatty and just a little bit vulnerable. In my anatomy class earlier that week I had a similar awareness rise up, of a multidimensionality of experience that is always happening, but I had always been lost in such a spacial/temporal immediacy of attention. Our attention has a history too, whether we can hold all of the threads in our gaze or not.

I noticed myself getting worked up on the train ride to my current gig, picking fights with people in my head and filling up with the steam I was going to cruise in with. Its not the first time I've watched this happen, preparing myself for the battles I might potentially face and triggering an adrenaline response before I even walk through the heavy doors of the Armory. Like modulating poisons in my body, the clarity and speed that manifest in my anger are a dangerous alchemy that make it hard to settle in non work circumstances, but that shaking rage has helped me unload countless trucks of steel and wield construction vehicles and crews of men like a knife, like an extension of my own hand. In building truly beautiful things in a massive scale, as well as weaving a fleshy tapestry of love with the guys I'm in charge of, I have always felt blessed to have such a profound outlet for all the anger living in my body, that I had a place where my voice could boom so loud it filled the city-block-wide space when I can't even make my own mother hear me. Maybe I always thought I would eventually be drained of that feeling, that I would run dry of rage, but I'm starting to wonder where I got that idea in the first place. I watched my calm, cool boss pace and writhe after a confrontation with an impossible employee, as he tried to speak to me through the blood in his eyes, he admitted how enjoyable he found those moments. He is someone I resonate pretty deeply with, and I know the feeling he described, that same beast lives in my blood, a dark pleasure in proving to an invisible someone that I am not powerless. Only now I am wondering about that conflation of pain and pleasure that makes ease and comfort without a fight seem like it is undeserved, like I am vulnerable somehow for experiencing it. Something I thought I was getting rid of, like emptying a bottle... may only be carving deeper and deeper grooves, burning away my other choices, making it less and less likely I can engage in other ways. Not modulating anymore, but eventually becoming an addiction to accessing these superhuman parts of myself, at the cost of losing access to everything else.

"This pain is not your karma", a wise-woman told me recently.
"I see", said the blind man, after he stared into the sun for too long.

In whispering conference in the dark with my closest counterpart who supervises builds with me, we talk about the unique us-shaped hole we've dug for ourselves, and what it might mean to stop digging and consider climbing out. Five months prior to this moment he had sustained a massive blow to the face while on a jobsite, and the back of his left eye as well as a line down the back of his skull continue to give him serious pain, he is terrified that one of his eyes now lives farther back in its socket. After CAT scans and doctor's visits, they finally told him to come back in a year since they can't quite discern what's happening. As he looked at me through massively uneven pupils, he encouraged me to follow this alternative body-focused path, even though I was scared about affording it. I can't NOT take this eagle-eyed man seriously, hearing the momentary tenderness in his Ukrainian accented voice. I forget sometimes, how much he has seen me grow in the past half decade, two superhuman beings guiding the ship of this space, and I already miss the depth of his awareness, the subterranean knowledge that underlies the language we use with each other. If I choose a different path, will all of the fighting, the boundaries broken by me as a woman in a man's world, the power I've wielded, will it be like it never even happened? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did I ever drive a forklift and work with steel? Will I just be another long haired artist girl who draws to get by? Who could I ever trust to know or witness the wholeness of me in the world beyond ours?

A man I loved working with a few years ago asked me once,-"Could you imagine showing up to work and not having to fight?". At the time we were renovating parts of buildings under construction, the other guys we worked with hated him, with his loud bossy temperament and Taurean strength, but I could trust him to help me finish the job no matter what - the guys henpecked him into finally leaving the city completely, the way my sibling's chickens killed and consumed my chicken in the backyard as kids, only leaving the feet behind. I was regularly the only woman on these jobsites - the snickers and sneers from the other construction crews slowly turning into respect were my lifeblood for a long time. Men from vastly different cultural backgrounds approached me with questions about why I was different from the women in their lives. I was fighting the good fight in the only way I knew how. But as my body falls apart under the pressure I constantly put it under, I am starting to wonder why I am so afraid to do the things that come naturally, afraid of that particular kind of ease and comfort, like it was something I haven't earned yet.

And I wonder how much of my potential power leaks out into a million pointless, futile battles, if there is not a better way to participate in cultivating those things I believe in and want to be a part of.

Roll Jordan, roll.

Conversation between my estranged mother and my little sister.

trying to manufacture a myth from the materials at hand

A woman comes to greet me.

Dragons wind their ink drawn scales around her fierce little body, laughter crouches at the corner of her dark eyes, and in the accented syllables that escape from her mouth, equal parts music and brusque staccato.

Leading us down the hallway, she pauses to point at a variety of looms, young people crouched over them, working patiently. Some small swatches of fabric tests are pulled out, and while she talks about the weave as experimental structure, I am distracted by the regular patterns they display. Clearly their intention was manifesting an architecture, but I suddenly had a sense of the development of fabrics like Scottish plaid, or the various patterns claimed by small African nations, how that architecture became a symbol for bodies of people, of a culture. It seemed vastly important, this idea of strength underlying aesthetic value, driving our instinctual relationship to form and function. Like a kaleidoscope I suddenly saw the relationships between weaving and community, how everything in our built environment is an expression of that from cell walls and bone tissue to cityscapes and culturally distinct neighborhoods.

We were documenting the deconstruction of a woven installation piece designed by two young Latin American architects, to be taken to a group in Oaxaca by the tattooed Filipino woman, and all around us are accents and cheek kissing and this ancient art form they all were involved in various aspects of and I could feel so clearly my lack of connection to history. My history. My profound lack of cultural presence.

The oldest known cloth that's been unearthed came from ancient burial sites, and death rites are some of the earliest distinctions between human and animal in our anthropological history. The 'patterned sky' we helped to disassemble was designed around a similar self awareness, of life after being a canopy, it was made to lead multiple lives, just like it tied into preexisting holes in the concrete wall it was threaded around. Histories layered on top of each other, meaning arising and dispersing as that wall falls under new eyes, gets viewed with a new lens. Our tattooed loom master brought a bunch of handmade cakes for everyone to break bread/cake together before tackling the walls with tools, and it felt like communion, like a ritual that was necessary to take part of. I took a bite of something out of respect for some underlying sacredness, but might have had more to do with my hunger for connection, the void where my roots should be, those internal pathways I never even knew existed.

My parent's generation who came of age during/right after the civil rights movements and the draft and the Vietnam war and the slaughter of MLK and JFK and the student riots - they were doing the hard work of tearing down the walls and institutions that were holding America back, but as those same people move towards their twilight years, they have less communities to feel apart of, have formed their lives around fearing and distrusting the desire to be connected for what might come with it, and I've come across articles and statistics about an age where loneliness is largely becoming the thing that walks our parents and their parents through the threshold at the end of their lives. In older cultures, still living closer to the earth, age is a highly valued part of the life cycle, and the rites and rules they keep are still connected to a sense of why they are doing them in the first place - but I live in a reality that covets newness, youth, where an accumulation of history is a Cardinal Sin. Even my grandmother communicates care through a scattering of 5 or 20 dollar bills we've all been handed throughout our lives, and I wonder if she feels like she has nothing else to offer us. As we continue to succumb to capitalism's appropriation of our individual traditions into seasonal profit, how does it erase the histories that created them, those grooves in time and space through which we have carved our existence, our identities, our path? As our relationship to the harvest fades, do we distinguish 'Fall' by a pavlovian response to the smell of pumpkin spice in the air? How many Pumpkin Spice Lattes will it take to fill the void in my memory of when my grandmother used to hand-make pumpkin pie, but gave in to the ease of the grocery store? What would happen if the moon suddenly stopped rolling along its samskara? How has its steady weaving across the night sky and through our bedtime stories and in our blood helped us to know ourselves?

If our species evolved out of nomadic family groups who weren't anchored to a specific plot of earth - then maybe we aren't creatures with literal roots and childhood homes, maybe it was always stories that connected us to each other in the river of time. Maybe we have confused the transubstantiation of idea to flesh as brick and mortar, as something permanent, a monument, rather than bearing the warp and weft for a spell, until we can pass it those younger than us. As we spin the yarn of our lives, shaping the fibers and coloring the thread with our individual fight for space and sustenance, shelter and connection, the care with which we craft our social fabric is what builds the walls and pathways we walk along, and I am becoming aware of the cut threads and gaps in my transmission. We are all momentary manifestations in a multi-generational artwork, claiming that responsibility might be our birthright and burden as a member of this human collective. The threads falter earlier in my family history than I can quite reach back into, but maybe I've been fumbling most of my life looking backwards, against the arrow of time, to figure out what threads are mine to bear before I can turn around and move into my future.

If something has no history, how can you prove it exists? How can I prove I exist?








The spider, along with its web, is featured in mythological fables, cosmology, artistic spiritual depictions, and in oral traditions throughout the world since ancient times.

Traditionally, the stories involving Spider Grandmother are narratives passed down orally from generation to generation. The Hopi have the creation myth of Spider Grandmother. In this story, Spider Grandmother thought the world into existence through the conscious weaving of her webs. Spider Grandmother also plays an important role in the creation mythology of the Navajo, and there are stories relating to Spider Woman in the heritage of many Southwestern native cultures as a powerful helper and teacher.

Although accounts vary, according to mythology she was responsible for the stars in the sky; she took a web she had spun, laced it with dew, threw it into the sky and the dew became the stars.


The Fates were a common motif in European polytheism, most frequently represented as a group of three mythological goddesses (although the numbers differed in certain eras and cultures). They were often depicted as weavers of a tapestry on a loom, with the tapestry dictating the destinies of men.

i glow the way unwanted things do,

 

 

 

like the charge of electricity in my body last night, humming so fiercely it woke me up

the crackling, static filled line that draws a new connection in the vacuum
from one shoulder blade to the other 
after exploring ancient reflexes together, as we unburied them in our bodies

I am discovering that I am a conduit

Shortly after yoga teacher training, I woke up in the middle of the night and knew I was about to be touched somehow. there was a buzzing at the base of my spine, the sound of water rushing in my ears, and slowly like the humming vibration of an instrument gradually increasing in tone, my entire spine felt like a faucet of water being slowly turned on to full blast, humming heat rushing through the spinal column and I was paralyzed. it didn't feel bad, but I was scared of the intensity, scared that as it grew more fierce, I might not be able to handle it, and that there was no one for me to call out to for help

right as my fear peaked it began to dissipate. god doesn't give us more than we can handle. I am full of walls. I am a labyrinth, and I am lost inside of it

I can feel the edge of that energy right now as I write, a low hum that will eventually express itself, but this time I am ready, I recognize the electric vibration in my sacrum that has nowhere to go but up, to ride the roller coaster of my spine and I can feel a response in my palms, static, like a storm rolling in, charging the air. there is no question, only clarity

My hands. pathways I was too scared to allow in are like the invisible map drawn by a negatively charged surge of electric potentiality from sky to earth. when negative and positive collide against the ground, the hull of the vessel, my body, electricity takes every path available to it. a lot of time is lost in looking for the route, the root, territory that needs to be mapped out so the energy knows where to flow like water without losing the spark, the light, the power - instead of wandering, searching for a path, exhausting itself

 Like lighting that rises up from the ground, I am a conduit

All I need to is find the shortest, most efficient pathways in
the electricity already knows what to do

 

“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”

― Warsan Shire

 

Lightning happens when the potential difference between the clouds and the grounds becomes too large. Once the voltage reaches a critical strength, the atmosphere can no longer act as an electrical insulator. First, a stepped leader is created at the base of the cloud which is a channel through which electrons in the cloud can travel to the ground. But while moving towards the ground, it searches for the most efficient (minimum electrical resistance) route possible. It does so by traveling 50-100 meters at a time then stopping for about 50 microseconds, then traveling another 50-100 meters. In this process it also branches out looking for the best route. As the stepped leader gets close to the ground, a positively charged traveling spark is initiated on some tall object (trees, towers etc) on the ground. The traveling spark moves upward and eventually connects with the stepped leader. Once the stepped leader and the traveling spark have connected, then electrons from the cloud can flow to the ground, and positive charges can flow from the ground to the cloud. This is known as return stroke. But this flow unlike the flow from up has a well-defined shortest route now. This massive flow of electrical current occurring during the return stroke combined with the rate at which it occurs (measured in microseconds) rapidly superheats the completed leader channel, forming a highly electrically-conductive plasma channel. The core temperature of the plasma during the return stroke may exceed 50,000 K, which makes it shine so bright.

 Lightning is also known to occur in dust storms, forest fires, and volcanic eruptions.  Particles such as sand, smoke and ash, which exist in these environments, can also become electrically charged and create atmospheric conditions similar to that of a thunderstorm.