Everywhere debris that made me;

Wading into the water, sun hot on my skin, the reflection of clouds and sky on its surface didn't reveal the currents and life forms swarming underneath. Maybe the moon similarly reflects the sun's light, a diversion that keeps its intentions and secret lives hidden from being known.

An astrologer explained to me once that since my moon (our emotional life) sits practically on top of my rising sign (what you present to the rest of the world) - both of which I have in Leo, ruled by the Sun, the Father Principle - then often my encounters and relationships face a confusion at their core: others will often see their own light reflected back at them, their own desires, priorities and truths, insecurities and fears, and that inability to see past their own reflection means I don't get seen at all.

Sometimes it is an immensely useful circumstance.

A book I read a long time ago described a telltale sign of a witch - when a man can see his own reflection in her eyes. A man can drown in his own reflection, and she knows that, was born with that knowledge. There is no truer love spell.

When Odysseus lashed himself to the mast of his ship and had his sailors plug their ears with beeswax, he was seeking to bear witness to the song of the Sirens without meeting his demise, and he found they too sing of the glory of whoever's ear receives those sounds. As men clamor towards visions of their glorious futures - they drown in it, are consumed by it.

Therapists and parents provide the mirrors we need to be able to see ourselves clearly as we develop a sense of identity and moral grounding, but my mother could only see herself and her needs when she looked at my face. Everyone's face, actually. Like Narcissus, we are all reflective pools for her to get lost in, an ocean of moons in orbit around her desires.

I met a man recently whose presence could almost seem innocuous, if it weren't for gentle, specific questions that seem to fall innocently from his mouth. It took me awhile to realize they were arrows, because I couldn't ever see what he was aiming at. There was no heat of judgement, or clearly discernable facial reactions to give away his thoughts or feelings, and I watched myself unspool in front of him. I listened to the things I allowed myself to say as we worked together, and I started to see the character I play in my life, the stories that I have clung to as definitions of self, I let emotions bubble to the surface that would normally never see the light, and I voiced them for his silent consideration.

I'd met another mirror.
Turns out we were born on the same day.

I usually have such easy access to other people's emotions that I wasn't sure how to respond at first. I tried a few different approaches - being expressive and searching for clues in his body language - then being blunt and straight forward - I even pried gently a few times, but he dismissed most of my attempts to peel back his reflective armor. I'm still bothered and I'm not sure why. Maybe because I don't know what character he is meant to play yet. Or maybe I've anchored myself with a sense of control over everything around me, so the unknowable is naturally disconcerting. Maybe I don't know who I am when I'm not being someone's mirror - I know how badly I want to be seen, known for who I am, but I can't assume he desires the same.

The tide pulls me in, coaxed by the moon, and the undertow tugs me out. Back and forth, rocked by the ocean. Micro-currents and vegetation caress every single part of my body with equal force and focus, as well as complete indifference and no hungry expectation, I know myself along all of those surfaces, wrapped in informative sensation about my unique volume and texture, sculpted by those fingers reaching shoreward and back again. This is how I always want to be held, received as what I am, no more and no less. The ocean doesn't seem confused by me. But human hands have always seemed too focused on very specific parts of me, and I am confused as to why anyone would touch those delicate places with the kind of relentless lack of care that they would never use to touch my face, the hollow of my back, the soles of my feet.

I doubt the ocean is pretending to be the sky, or that the moon has a deep fear of being misunderstood. But humans are full of stories, and maybe I play a mirror in the movie of my life as a way of being the thing that I need because I don't trust anyone else to do it, and maybe I touch others with the insistent gentleness I crave - since it means in some small way that I am being touched back, that my hands on someone's body is a two way street, and their skin might yearn towards me subtly, beyond their awareness.

Wading out of the surf, waves coalesce into foam around me, the sand melts away under the sturdiness of my footsteps. It is so easy to forget myself in the ebb and flow of other people's stories, but in the gentle indifference of the water, everything I don't need is washed away, and clarity is all that's left. I know my birthright as I wring water from my hair and a faint salt crust sparkles on my sun-warm skin.

I will wear that salt as long as I can.





Aphrodite is consistently portrayed, in every image and story, as having had no childhood.


In the most famous version of her myth, her birth was the consequence of a castration: Cronus severed Uranus' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea. The foam from his genitals gave rise to Aphrodite (hence her name, meaning "foam-arisen"), while the Erinyes (furies), and the Meliae emerged from the drops of his blood. Hesiod states that the genitals "were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with it a girl grew." The girl, Aphrodite, floated ashore on a scallop shell.


Aphrodite's husband Hephaestus is one of the most even-tempered of the Hellenic deities, the god of blacksmithing/ironwork.

the proprietor of the china shop in the time of the bull

Nathan's Famous Hotdog Eating Contest - July 4th, 2016

I have been supervising the staging build of this monstrosity since 2011, except for last year, when I didn't need the money and ditched it a week before it went up. That has been my 4th of July ever since I moved to nyc, and it seems too sharply on point as popular event/commentary on the de-evolution of what America was supposed to stand for, once upon a dream.

Some of my boys from my first steel shop arrived to supervise with me, the richness of their love for me outshone the nature of the event. One of my favorite people in the world, my shadow brother, wide and dark and stronger than anyone I know - taught me an enormous amount about the physical world and the laws of physics, I still wear his fearlessness with steel, I think about it every single day. In our current cultural climate, I am afraid for him, his big, beautiful blackness, for his wife and children who are loved by this bright human being. Once, years ago at the shop, he came back late from grabbing lunch, because he was stopped outside of the Chinese restaurant to be patted down by bored cops under the premise of a robbery nearby - apparently he fit the description, but he knows they stop black guys regularly with excuses while they check their backgrounds to hopefully snag someone over peanuts. Like me, he hasn't ever smoked, is pure and good, we are even the same age, born weeks apart - but he has already been held at gunpoint by cops more than I will ever be stopped by a cop and questioned for my existence on a city street. He lives the dystopian reality white people have been writing about for decades.

I am strong, but only as long as the adrenaline is coursing through my body, in those moments where my Meyers briggs type flips from INTJ to ENTJ, extroversion as a necessary mechanism to function at the level that comes so easy for him. For a lot of them, actually. I'm convinced none of them would recognize me if my system weren't flooded w that adrenaline. It's taken a long time for me to realize that I may be taking someone else's place in the labor world and leaving vacant the place where I should be, utilizing those things that come naturally to me as well. To realize what I have to give is important too, and denying that expression IS a rejection of self. Watching my friend move, I am stung, as always by his ability to move his weight through the air with such grace compared to my clunky ineptness. Seeing his face across Surf Avenue, I can read his frustration with the other guys. I swing in to work with him, to show the other guys how its supposed to work, and I notice in my hands the familiar lightness of objects when we are working together. The ground moves through him, I now realize. He radiates the support of the earth underneath his feet out through his hands, which is why he can fly through the air, and up on to the back of the truck like its nothing, his weight. Maybe he doesn't even know the nature of his gift, this resonant rock, transubstantiating ground to a force that flows through him into the relationships around him - but it has dawned on me, clear as day.

After two days of flipping decks and tossing screw jacks and unloading and reloading carts of pipe and crates of scaffolding clips, waking up is rough. Walking to the dog park, my low back is so tight my pelvis can't move, and since it can't shift around the ball of my thigh bone, the connections on the outer edges of the hip joint are screaming as simply walking asks the joint to overextend itself on one side of the relationship, struggling to articulate from the frozen mass of my pelvis. The movement travels up my body and leaks out via a sway of the shoulders. The shape I make echoes a traditional masculine gesture, a walk that is associated with power, strength, intimidation. This is how I naturally move when walking alone at night, losing the feminine glide of pelvic halves sliding with and around the thigh bone - the lumbering and stone like expression sends a message to would be assailants, much like stances signal aggression from one dog to another.

I was trapped in that shape. I see now how so many of the aging men I know in the labor industry have developed their ways of maneuvering. How joints fall apart after a lifetime of accommodating a self induced lack of mobility, and in the familiarity of that shape, we have formed a stereotype, a flavor, a style of man and movement, and I am trapped inside of that shape - suddenly all I can see is the damage it is doing. I don't feel strong anymore, I feel crippled.

Patterns are important, because they streamline processes, so the body can move faster and more efficiently - but the patterns I have when dealing with weight are useful in the short term due to their familiarity, but damaging in the long game. Seeing my future flash in front of my eyes, I reach back to the beginning, with my spine. Since all I can hear is the groaning of my back body, I look instead for the shadow, listening for what is silent. Walking with my dog, I locate a sense of the front of my spine, trying to shift where movement is emanating from - almost instantly my low back lets go and my pelvic halves feel individuated, begin to wrap around thigh bone. Chasing that awareness in both directions, I feel for the first time the front side of my sacrum, and as I follow the front of my upper spine, my shoulder blade release, sliding forward. My back is quiet.

I still can't fully extend my left elbow, and the fingers of my right hand refuse to extend past anatomical neutral and send pain shooting up my forearm, but at least I can walk without my lower back screaming. It takes constant vigilance to keep looking for the sense of the front of my spine in daily movement, but the back pain is a quick reminder to look inward, to invite the front of my spine into the conversation so it isn't like living inside of a constant monologue of having my back up, a chip on my shoulder, a lonely soldier, a shield protecting the soft insides. Its an invitation for the rest of my body to experience supporting itself, for all of me to be strong, not just the outside edges - like thick skinned fruit that draws predators due to its energy packed sweet soft insides. If the rest of me is involved, my back doesn't have to go it alone, but since that's all I've known, it is an arduous task to keep that invitation open.

On the train, I think a lot about force traveling through the body, I think a lot about my friend and his fluid relationship to supportive contact, the idea of transmitting the support of the ground up through the body - and it quickly becomes clear that I freeze my shoulder blades the way I freeze my pelvis with an all consuming back body response, which asks the head of my arm bone to overarticulate which causes pain I feel almost every day, and the remedy is the same. When I find the front of my spine while holding the bars on the train, my shoulder blade shifts and I can feel the relationships that allow for the force in my hand to reach my spine, to flow down to the sacrum and split, pass down my legs and out of my feet. It's a glimmer, but I get it.

I've had strange and intense experiences over the past year, studying the body - first I woke up to a fierce vibration flooding the length of my spine, almost to the point of calling out for help, except it wasn't painful as much as deeply stimulating - as well as weird electric zaps between my shoulder blades and along my body. Last night I woke up to a humming electricity, but instead of just my spine, there was a clear line of energy along all of my limbs. I felt like a Pisces symbol sculpted in neon. It flickered on and vibrated softly like flourescents flipped on by a light switch. The phrase that popped into my head was 'coming online'. In the light of day those words remind me of local networks being connected globally. It felt like I must be glowing in the dark, like I was a character in TRON.

The picture shifted, or maybe access to the light I was using to look at it with - everything just got a little clearer.

Under the ice, the future stirred.

 

 

 

 

 



what could possibly be the evolutionary reasoning behind the subtlety and vastness of human emotions? It seems like a tide we are constantly helpless to be pulled into and rolled under.


In my anatomy class I have finally discovered the anatomical/emotional distance between my hands and my heart. There is a deep disconnect in my shoulders, pain I have always known and ignored for as long as I can remember - turns out the head of my humerus is struggling to stay in its socket, against all of the heavy things I ask it to do, ignoring its needs, disregarding its connection to my body completely.

I couldn't do certain things the other kids could on the playground, like the monkey bars, I remember the breathlessness of my frustration. After years of doing labor professionally, I stack an inhuman amount of weight on my shoulders, but can't manage a single pull up. In an emergency I could probably save everyone but myself. In a class on early developmental movement, we discussed what happens when a young child's hands are held over their heads as a way of teaching them how to walk, and something struck me about the question of agency, a child's ability to follow their desires or change their direction/level/methodology are mostly removed, a prop in a larger picture, possibly pulled up into more of an adult plane of existence than they may be quite ready for. Something about how fighting for agency often gets expressed by full body release we see children do to their parents reminds me deeply sharply of how I have responded to almost every sexual encounter I've had. When your hands are being held against your will, how can you catch yourself when you fall? How can you learn that your hands will support you when it is time to move through the world on your own?

I've run out of fingers and toes to count the generic, vacant men who have decided they wanted something that only lived inside of my body that I couldn't seem to communicate NO clearly to, no matter how specific my words, or cold and dry and still my body might have been. Why couldn't my hands rise up to protect me? I would put a man in the hospital for anyone else over less then what I have watched myself submit to, and like everyone else in my life who has failed me, so too have my own hands.

No wonder I struggled with feeling paralyzed after I graduated from art school. All I have ever known was how to give other people what they want. In the overwhelming deluge of life outside of school and its rules, homework assignments and seasons, I didn't know how to trust or rely on the power and skill residing in my hands. And since my hands have never been connected to my heart, the idea of moving from a place of love or desire is like hearing a foreign language that my hands can't speak, because they are dumb and blind to it.

I am dumb and blind to it.

I am not blameless in my sexual encounters. Something about the intensity of these individuals and their desire for something that momentarily wears my face, I find incredibly curious. When I witness a certain kind of glance, a heat, a catch in someone's throat, a flush, I become fiercely attuned to it, laying a magnifying glass onto the poor creature caught in my gaze, slowly setting them on fire. I have torn through labor crews, been inappropriately accosted by aging men who were my employers, I have had more than one loaded teacher student relationship, and my mentor in college, well, I crushed him. The only relationships I've been in, one with a man who was exactly twice my age (my 19 to his 38), and the other with a girl my age, and more destructive than I - were born out of this curious distraction, a way to get close to this feeling of wanting and pull it apart to see what it had to do with me. Having never had a sense of really being turned on or attracted to someone, age and gender didn't seem like adequate reasons to say no to someone's passionate interest, so I let the current draw me along as I studied them.

I have pulled the legs off so many bugs/people in my scientific investigation of the human heart. Nothing is colder then being in bed with me, or the lack of texts you will receive after I've locked the door behind you. My friend mentioned to me earlier that she isn't feeling a sense of need or longing for the person she is currently dating, and I am completely confused by ever wanting to feel those things for another human being. How exhausting and lonely it seems.

I don't understand desire, because I don't know if it is something I've ever felt. I don't think I've ever felt safe enough to have strong feelings about almost anything in my life. Maybe that's why I am so habit forming, so responsive to being inside of a Role or a Shape. It is defined by something outside of myself, and if I didn't have that to rely on, I'd be paralyzed. At least I can feel myself inside of the current. I went to art school because I spoke the language, riding on something that came naturally just like I rely on the connective tissue to hold my shoulder together. But language is useless with out something to say. Are hands useless without something to reach for?

I've noticed recently as I go through my daily motions, that there will be moments where the spaces around me suddenly seem intensely dimensional. Walking to the train the other day, it felt like my clothes were distinctly sitting on top of my skin, and my skin was sitting on top of the thing perceiving and thinking about it. In an exercise involving our hands exploring the ground around us, eyes closed, I had an experience I am still struggling to describe - an intelligence living in my hands took over for my eyes, and I felt/saw/perceived the edges of my sketchbook, its pages, the grain of the wood floor underneath me in a way that felt like I was seeing aspects of it that couldn't be witnessed through my eyes, a selfness that I hadn't been previously aware of. Everything feels different about being in my own body, and as the Roles I've been playing continue to be stripped away, and as I consciously give some of them up because they are no longer true... maybe I am able to see more of what I'm looking at, outside of what I need to survive within it. I am turning the magnifying glass inward, to set myself on fire - since no one else can do it for me. I wish I had understood that sooner, how much simpler that would have been, how much less bloody and frustrating.

It was a TV show about the Devil that helped me clarify the question I've been seeking the answer to. I stayed up all night to finish the entire season, I was transfixed - and I hate watching TV. The Lucifer character draws out everyone's deepest desires, his world circles around what lies underneath our intentions and how they drive our reaction to different circumstances.


If the Devil asked me what my deepest darkest desires are, I am afraid I would have no answer for him.





'You were born out of greatness and you will go back to it. In between those two events try to remember it.'

Not a sentence, but a breath, a caesura.

 

 

'Was it a bittersweet goodbye?'
'Happy to see your brother but happy to have your space back before the next person?'

My friend sent me those texts as I sat on the bus after dropping my little brother and his friend off at the airport. Part of me was deeply offended that I could be so misunderstood, that someone would blow off something that lived its deep rich life inside of my blood, beating inside of my heart and flowing through my veins and his at the same time, in a sympathetic rhythm, more resonant than almost any connection I have in this lifetime. I thought about where that hurt came from, as I flipped back through the twinges in my heart, equal parts emotion and image anchoring them to physical sensations, concrete places that reside in various corners of my body.

A midnight phone call this last year, his voice heavy with tears. In his final year of college, his future bright and clear as dawn breaking and he had broken up with his girlfriend of four years. They had grown so much and so different from high school to then, and he knew it was time. I remember being like her, scared of the unfamiliar, clinging to a person to sustain me because I didn't know how to sustain myself. But he had someone to teach him how assessable the world was, he had me. I had no one when I was his age, so I felt for them both, in different ways. Unmooring himself to prepare for leaving our hometown, the womb of his university, the familial warmth of his childhood friends to be an advocate for his own future, something about leaving her sent him reaching out for me.

I know when it is time to be a mother. I know who he was calling for. Me and more than me, because our mother is unable to hear us or relate to us, lost in a world of her own construction that has no room for anyone else's needs. I saw what he couldn't, he has so embarrassed deep down, because he didn't want to be with her, but he didn't want her to be with anyone else. His childhood and his manhood lived inside of her memory, he had given all of it to her with time and circumstance, and I could feel his fear that those parts of himself might evaporate when she holds another man's hand. That they wouldn't mean anything anymore. That like a breadcrumb path in the woods, a rejection of his past might make it hard to find his way home. So he called me. Of course he called me.

Bittersweetness is the knowledge that I was receiving these midnight moments that belonged to someone else, that this rush of love and tenderness belongs to the person who birthed the voice on the other side of that phone. Bitter because I was doing someone else's job, Sweetness because of how much I loved doing it. Anger at the incompetence of our mother, coupled with the fierce Joy of knowing that unlike me, he had someone.

'How is your visit with your brother going?'
'How did it go?'

Another friend, another text asking me to qualify my experience with my baby brother in superficial terms. Both individuals I was texting with are people whom I share intimate, intellectual relationships with, whom would never want to hurt my feelings, yet seemed to have inadvertently thrown a punch that landed. I'm still out of breath from rereading that last text in particular. 'Good' is a stupid word that has no place in my experiential vocabulary. It isn't true or real, its a label, a box, a dead end.

That is the opposite of what this past week was for the both of us. His visit was a celebration of leaving the last bits of his childself behind, a specific rite of passage into his future. I knew he was coming to me, because I was Mother and Father, his degree in Construction Management may have something to do with my own career path, and he had no one else to talk to about learning how to use tools and gaining favor from the various trades working around him. To honor his passion I sent him a gift to help him build his first tool kit. My mother is trying to start a business doing reiki and tarot readings, feng shui and meditation, promising to help people find their 'authentic' selves. She has never been curious about who her own children are and what makes us our specific selves.

Years ago, when I tried to communicate to my grandmother what my mother is underneath the character she is playing, my mother got to her first, and no one will answer the phone when I call anymore. She tells them whatever she wants, and no one is curious to know me or about me in my own family. Like I have no childhood, like I was always an orphaned adult, I watched my past evaporate into artificial constructs my mother uses to support whatever her current character happens to be. My grandmother is telling everyone that I have an undiagnosed mental illness. But amidst all the yarn being spun, my younger siblings have managed to cling to my back as I escaped, thank god its so fucking strong. My best feature, really.

I knew he was coming for the mother part of me, but I didn't realize until the moment I saw him that he was coming to slay her.

After this previous summer working on his first construction site, he had developed a thickness in his chest and arms that will eventually become a barrel containing his beautifully articulate heart. There is a quickness of response and a depth in his awareness that tells me that my job here is mostly done. I am released from holding myself inside of an archetype that I have been forced to wear, and even though I have loved wearing it, my little brother came to set me free from my own real life fairy tale. To meet the person behind the Mother.

He is like pure sunshine, he could have stayed with me forever if he wanted. But I am not sad that he left, because I am something different now, because I was sending him out to be in his clear, bright future, and thankfully, neither of us are afraid of this dawn.

I guess it was a good visit.

Maps lie, but they also organize how we see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

its been all day, so it's getting a little fuzzy. I was on the subway, which always looks like a roller coaster in my dreams. there was some confusion about the train I was trying to switch onto, and whether I should wait, or take whatever came and simply adjust my route accordingly. In my hesitation, I didn't make it to the train I was trying to take when it came, so I decided to walk the length of the platform to kill some time. The platform went on for at least a mile, and it was grassy and filled with bodies milling about like the Coney Island boardwalk in high summer.

The sun beat down on us, but the mood was festive, and there was a path that turned off the grassy knoll of the platform. Somehow I knew that I was still inside the world of the train, so wasn't worried about having to pay a new fare, or the inevitability of my train eventually coming. Just up the path was a massive dog with a long greyhoundish face. He was as large as at least two horses combined, and rolled around on his back in the sunshine as a regular sized dog nipped and bounced around him, playing like siblings. A woman in gypsy trappings with strange, heavy lidded eyes - eyes that whispered a thick, hard to decipher language of their own - stood in the dappled shade of a tree nearby, watching the dogs rolling around in the grass. She was about to teach a class, and she invited me to join. I don't remember even noticing the other students, but was cognizant of a rich discussion taking place about the link between fortune telling and psychotherapy.

I don't know how many classes I took, but I found myself alone with her in the sepia toned house she lived in and taught out of. there was only natural light, and I couldn't tell if her eyes had a color of their own or simply reflected the surroundings, muttering to themselves. I remember washing dishes in her sink and asking her questions. She listened with coy amusement, but her eyes listened too, and the rest of her. It felt like multiple creatures inside of her also listened, to my questions, to the underlying earnestness that filled my body, the awe I felt at being allowed to exist in her presence, how desperately I tried to gulp in all of the information I was taking in around me - including her answers, which weren't really answers. I asked how she came by such a large dog. She described to me the dog's process of teaching himself to grow, first the spine grows long, next the back legs or forelegs, but always paired front or back together becomes large. It was the same process for him to shrink himself, and he writhed beside her as she spoke, obtaining the low-to-the-ground shape of a daschund. I glanced over my shoulder at the other dog, and looking into the shadows of the couch arm it was perched on, backed into the wall next to a closet, I realized he had become a cat with black fur except for around his mouth and paws. Maybe I was looking at a cat that had taught himself how to be a dog, or maybe it didn't matter what his shape was, I would have recognized his selfness no matter what. He glared at me fiercely, trying to melt into the shadows as my eyes tried to define his shape as a separate shade of darkness.

My dreamself was starting to suspect that She was actually Me and I didn't want her to know, so I allowed my sudden hunger to flood my senses. The only food she had was a bunch of miniature hamburgers, but before I could poke fun at her about the strange sizes in her house full of shape shifting things, a pressure in my bladder brought me up through the layers of sleep into the early morning light. After taking care of my needs, I knew my own dog must feel similar, but I had been sad to leave the presence of that woman in my dreams and jumped back under the covers, trying to meet up with her again for a few more moments, or to see if my train was going to ever come.

My dog snuggled her nose against my feet and fell back to sleep with me.

 

 

 

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. 


 

colonizing a star is tricky business

*Logo process 



 

*Final logo design

 

 

 *Rough Album Cover Design

 

Post class reflection for Process Work on Conflict in a Relationship @School of Making Thinking:



The movement exercise began with the left hand, which embodied a relationship we were in conflict with. Letting the energy of that individual fill the gesture of the hand, we facilitated the movement that arose, allowing it to grow larger, more specific.

It was clawing and grasping, my whole torso was a hungry mouth that my hungry left hand was trying to feed and it was filled with a muscular and bottomless possessiveness. It couldn't cover enough space in each sweep, so my left hand grew frantic, trying to pull from everywhere at once, ripping my body through space to find, to feed, to claim, calling more and more of my back body into action to fill the yawning cavern of my front body. Grunts fell through my clamped teeth, my lips in a thin, frustrated line like hers, letting my sense of her fill me completely, controlling my movements, motivating my breath, senseless with the helpless, blindly destructive quality of her existence.

Slowly the action dies away, coming to a stillness from which our right hand will eventually move from. There is a way in which embodying that dark force makes clear the feeling and motion called up in my right hand.

The right hand represents Me in the relationship, and yawns open like a flower unfurling towards the sun. I always end up seeing a little girl, when I do explorations of my self-definition in this particular class, but in the exercise, I AM that little girl, not just leaning down to talk to her as she stands in front of me. Focusing on the feeling of BEING this right side selfness rather than reacting to my left side darkness, I radiate cool white light as I turn my face up to some imaginary sunshine, and I scoop up what is inside of me, offering it up, reaching my right hand out hoping to put my hand into someone else's, curling my fingers one at a time around the hand that is not there to receive the gift of myself.

Letting the right hand expression slowly diminish, the left had is invited back in. As a conversation begins between the two sides we are asked to alter the intensities of right and left to explore the ways in which these essences overlap and respond to each other. Eventually my two different gestures begin to register in a dance that moves with the rhythm of breathing - the grasping consumption of my left side seems to be what give my right hand the ability to reach out, to offer myself up, to desire connection to other that lives just beyond my fingertips, just beyond my faith. The taking in and the giving away eventually lost their sequential relationship and like respiration at the cellular level, became a constant function of being alive, in and out from all directions at once, carrying me fluidly through space.

In the stark contrast I can see how I filled in the blanks for my first, most primal relationship, developing reactions and awarenesses in the places where my mother was blind or inefficient, so became a hyper functioning half of a Unit that could never allow me to sustain myself as a singular Whole. In the toxicity of my relationship with the Mother Principle, the only way to stop everything from being taken from the endless exhalation of my spirit was to sever the tie completely. So I cut it out. But without those unexpressed muscles in the form of another person, and a protective shield built up around that tender, bloody part of myself, I can only remain a hyper functioning half of a person, until I reach into the pulp and scar tissue and find a way to push the blood through, to inspire movement - to allow myself to be hungry instead of ashamed and embarrassed by it, so I might one day know fullness, so that I may give because there is plenty, not at the expense of myself. to learn how to inhale for every one of my cells crying out for breath. to inhale because I deserve to. because I need to, NOT because I am selfish. Because it is part of my job on this planet, in this moment. right now.


In a different class earlier that day, I had encountered a similar edge, but having spent most of my life proving to myself and the world that most boundaries don't actually exist - I slammed headfirst into a wall I didn't see coming. It seems I function the best inside of a fight response, it is pushing against these walls that taught me what I am made of. To counteract the boundary-less form of my mother, I have become a wall, a vigilante force, the boundary that no one else will give her. Constantly braced for impact, but without purpose when I am not going to war with a person, an idea, an edge, I throw myself into storm after storm, a necessary call to arms to fill me with adrenaline and bloody precision, only to lose focus and determination in the calm. In class the attempt at reaching out to explore with hungry fingertips disrupted my ability to function. Caught between a push and a reach something broke down in my sense of my self, which I had thought was limitless until I found this internal barrier, this wall of shame and fear, this place where I was not allowed to go and it took all of my body to contain the snot and the sobs that wanted to fall out of me.


In a developmental movement class this morning, watching babies roll around, and considering the different constellations created between caretakers and the infant axis they rotated around, it became clear to me that if I can only see my own troubled childhood in their little bodies and faces, than I cannot possibly see them, their individual expression of selfness. I must detangle myself from these life myths and elaborate defenses, or I won't be able to see past the colors of my experience to what actually lives inside of every creature that falls under my gaze. I don't want to wander forever in a field of my own ghosts.






"Interpreting the past is like trying to sketch a picture of the Grand Canyon from space."

As if all the stars you've seen have been busy looking back,

                                                 *sketches part of early design process for a logo/brand/identity



Nausea, in the space above my belly. Am I making 'stillness' up, by holding my muscles in a certain way?

Allowing the effort to drain away, everything starts to gently shift on its own, eyes closed, as I listen to the muscles negotiate with each other. Rolled and buffeted by space, her voice  washing over me like being inside the belly of a wave, far out past the break, swells of potentiality that subtly shift the direction of the ship of my body. Anchored in space and time, moored by my feet engaging with the surface I stand on gives the rest of my body permission to get lost in the drift.

Internal currents, muscular chatter like gulls on the breeze, hard to tell if I am an object at the mercy of the ocean, or if I am the ocean itself in this metaphor. Sea sickness subsides when I allow my frame to rock with the waves of information and sensation rolling through me. Sunshine pours in the windows, I can feel the brightness against my closed eyes, and after what has felt like a lifetime of winter I can almost smell the salt.

I finally recognize you, Priestess.




Walking my dog to the coffee shop, on our way to the park one early morning, the sun was just kissing the tops of buildings with its blushing warmth. Glancing up at its trajectory, I noticed a small square bit of fabric on a long stick, swinging in wide arcs from a rooftop, upsetting a large body of pigeons that were taking up residence on that roof. They wheeled around it, a wide ribbon of birds moving as if of one mind, like rippling fabric, or an intelligent wave, and alighted right back where they had taken flight from. The flag disappeared, and a face materialized at the edge of the rooftop. He saw me see him, so he waved. I waved back.

I've only seen that flag waving and the birds responding a few more times. But the pigeons are always there, obviously comfortable in their multitudes, and I wonder what the nature of the flag is, what his relationship to those birds might be.

Pigeon Lord(e) was the name that came to me.

Once, last summer, I saw fireworks outside my window, in the late afternoon. Confused, I watched for a few minutes, and finally realized that it was those birds, that mass of pigeons moving together, the deep pinkish gold light of the setting sun bouncing off of their wings in flight.


*A week after I wrote this piece, a massive fire destroyed these buildings and all of the pigeon coops on top of them, the existence of which I discovered in articles writing about the events as they unfolded. Walking by the aftermath, in the light of day, I am distracted by the calls coming from a few pigeons circling above the twisted walls of the buildings, possibly crying desperately for their home and companions who couldn't escape the flames.




On a gig recently, working an impossible amount of hours was overlapped with a huge amount of hours taking classes, and the shift from inward to outward looking manifested abruptly, the seams beginning to show. Like a computer trying to function with too much material on its hard drive, I had little control over my output, and I could see  at one point the artlessness of my responses reflected in my boss's face.

There was a handsome man on the labor crew I was supervising that persistently angled for my number, smoothly uttering promises of sexual delight, euphemisms that quickly began to repeat themselves, no matter how firmly I refused.

But he was engaging in a different way than most of the guys. His sexual banter was focused around the idea of taking care of me, rather than taking something from me, and maybe in the midst of not taking care of myself, it struck a bizarre cord, one that is never quite so exposed. Following that subtle thread, I laid down next to him during lunch, on the floor underneath the structure we had built together. I asked him random questions, considering him as he chewed on his responses. It didn't take long for him to shift toward sexual references, and I asked him 'What if I don't like sex that much?'.

His eyes may never have been as beautiful as that moment when he turned his head to look at me, seeing through his projection to what was actually there for a single, solitary second, realizing that everything he had said had been the wrong thing. I may have proof in that glance that I am more than just a figment of other people's imaginations, a mirror, a ghost.

I understand now, how the seams we try to hide are the places where the identities we've crafted break down, because they are lines we have drawn onto a thing without lines, boundaries we make to contain our own potential, a way to know myself as SUPERVISOR to make up for a lack of knowing who I am beyond that context in any scenario.

I understand now, that what I am looking for is other curious people, and that curiosity lives inside of people from all walks of life, not just in either the intellectual or the physical planes and the people that inhabit them - the mind body split isn't a split, but a series of mismarks on the map, a confusion of languages at the intersection of material and immaterial. Curiosity is the thread that connects us to each other as sentient beings, it is the blood that flows through the veins of the creative beast that lives inside of all of us, however it chooses to manifest, if we let it.

I gave him my card as a reward for the look in his eyes, for the possibilities it made me aware of. Lets see just how curious he is.

a seated figure with a sword in her hand,

 

 

The other day I received a text from the mother I haven't spoken to in almost 4 years. Usually I'll receive something whiny or conniving from her, trying to figure out what would be most effective in inciting a response from me.

I opened the text, and it was simply a photo of a man sized purple rooster sculpture.

I had no clue why she would have sent that, maybe she was trying a new tactic, maybe she had lost her last marble. It wasn't until I was describing it to my little sister over the phone that its meaning finally struck me.

Purple Chicken.

Years ago, my mother would load up my younger siblings into the car and prepare for a road trip to different Podunk towns to go visit my step father in one of the many penitentiaries across the state of Florida. As a repeat offender, he ended up in places we would never have traversed the flat ribbon of road and scrub brush to stay in for a few nights, for a few hours of visitor time on each day of the weekend. I went to watch over them, my only family. I stayed awake as we drove in the endless darkness of night, a large worn atlas in my lap, my younger siblings (his children) asleep in the back of our massive 78'chevy nova, the one with 8 cylinders and no speedometer. It was practically a boat. My little brother and sister fought like cats when they were awake, all claws and teeth and slaps and screeches, but in the back seat together, the always slept shoulder to shoulder, head leaning on head, looking so similar they might have been twins.

The freckles on my little sister's sleeping face will be forever merged in my mind's eye with the stars in the huge, indigo, bowl shaped sky that we drove under, dwarfing us against the landscape. Delilah kept us company on the radio, listening as people called in to ask for a song, and to tell her their lovelorn stories. I learned so much about sadness and longing and the pain involved in loving someone, on those midnight drives, and about these individuals living their entire lives in little spread out towns with less than 500 people and only one church to gather in, that loneliness can seem as vast as that sky at midnight sometimes. How perspective and priorities can be engulfing or freeing, depending on the context.

We began to notice, my mother and I, that almost every gas station we stopped at had large photos advertising a fried chicken bar inside. The Florida sunshine had bleached away the yellow shades needed to make brown tones, and had left washes of blue and pink that pooled into dark purple in the crevasses of the fried skin of the pile of drumsticks. Once when she came back out from paying for gas, her nose wrinkled, she told me that the photos weren't lying about the color of the chicken in that particular establishment. It became a joke, asking if anyone wanted any purple chicken before we ran inside to pay, even years later on other kinds of road trips.

Its a tangy sour memory she brought up with her text. Its impossible not to feel a sharp twinge of almost nostalgia, for childhood where we laughed so we didn't have to feel the horror of living our specific reality. Impossible to ignore the intimacy of that shared experience, something that no one but the two of us could really fathom in its fullness. What I find unfathomable is that she probably cannot conceive of the images it calls out of my body even now: of my then-newly ripe, pubescent body, terrifying in its stark sexual suggestiveness that seemed impossible to hide in the baggy clothes I draped myself in, being offered up to this adult world I wanted no part of. Shaking my bra out for the guards, rarely women, before we could pass into the room full of inmates and their visiting loved ones. The stepfather I hated, openly talking about my budding body, how large my breasts were getting - to my mother, who giggled inanely, unwilling to make the boundaries I could not, unwilling to protect me in any way. Right in front of my young siblings, embedding god knows what into the brain of my baby sister, about her body and its boundaries. Feeling naked in that prison visiting room, undressed by the words and eyes of the one person I hated most in the world with no one to defend me, while he stuffed himself with Hot Pockets from the vending machines, since the prison food was so bland.

Since I had to construct my own shield, without parents to protect me, I am finally starting to see how the truth of my upbringing bubbles up and chokes me as I wade through deep and thorough intellectual territories. As a creature living in between worlds, my inheritance is unclear, everywhere I go I feel like a little bit of an imposter. I can't tell what character I am in my own story, so I don't know what my boundaries and freedoms are composed of - that my background will invalidate me in a room full of thinkers and theorists, realities of a brutal animal existence that dispels the beauty and symmetry of so many ideas; that I can't possibly be as experienced as I am in the labor world because I am white, college educated and female, everything I have must be from my privilege made manifest, rather than the blood and sweat and tears and rage and hunger of my human body.

What is my domain, my territory, my home? How can I be defined by the sad, gross, backwater world I was raised in? And how does denying relationship with so much of myself hinder my relationships with others? How has this shield become a wall, this shield that has defined me for so long, who will I be without it, but that voiceless, pubescent girl, naked in a room full of strangers?

silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes,

 

 

dreams continue to surface, now that I am stepping farther and farther from the place where I worked my body ragged and fell easily into deep and dreamless sleep. The past two nights have felt like a waste, like I am doing hard work even when unconscious, and there is no rest in my body when I open my eyes to the murky winter light.

alone in a house that's under construction, but there are so many different houses, a long miniseries of moments before it is a different house and different circumstances. Sometimes I've been running from someone, but I only know that because of the foreboding feeling as I build a small nest of blankets and pillows on the frame of a couch and turn on one light above that space, to protect me from the overwhelming darkness contained in the walls and rooms around me. Twice I was avoiding the windows, the eyes of people looking in. I surveyed a space that didn't look or feel like me, its trapping unrelated to things I would value, but felt my only choice was to hunker down and wait.

Sometimes there was a man trapping me in, a slender gangster who barred all my exits, surrounding me with the innards of walls, the insulation foam spilling out, the studs exposed. In one episode, I talked to him, throwing my arms around him coyly, bargaining for my safety. We both knew what I was doing, but it pleased him. every time I put my arms around him, he doused us in clean, clear water escaping from a broken pipe. As he walked away, I wrung my hair out, fat drops of water striking the floor.

In the last episode I only spoke to him through the wood of a caution taped door, and while it felt as though I could make the wall give way with little effort, I knew he would see, so paused to consider my options. As I looked around, I realized I was in my childhood home, and suddenly saw my only escape route was out the window in my mother's room. Still staring at the piece of door in front of me, I saw down the hallway to those windows, the colors of her bedroom, the blue sarong draped over one particular open window blowing in a breeze. It was the window with the gardenia bush underneath it, and the pear and apple trees that never fruited, a few paces away, and it was sunny and refreshing and free outside of it.

When I opened my eyes, the fabric hanging of the windows in my own room let just enough light in that I could distinguish the pattern of the wind as it blew snow back and forth, weaving as it fell.





A few months ago I dreamed I was on a construction site that had torn everything down, but the foundations of a house. In the dirt, I came across a vessel, a pot like those we dig up in roman ruins. Inside, sticking out of the hole in its side - was a fish, stiff from using all the muscles in its body to try to breath. I picked it up, filled with respect for this creature managing to stay alive in an environment where it couldn't even breath, and I knew there was water underneath the foundations I could put it in. The foundation resembled a roman system for radiant heating - small columns at regular intervals sustained the weight of the building, but allowed heated or cooled water to be poured underneath, to suffuse the floors with the temp of the water. As I let the fish slide from my hand, I suddenly understood that it would move towards the source of freshest water, possibly finding a current it could follow to a more habitable place. Curious to watch it feel and respond, I lowered myself into the narrow crevasse between concrete and dirt. My pelvis got stuck for a moment, I had to tip it sideways to fit. Underneath the concrete slab, my fish was following something it could taste or feel, but it passed other fish like it, suspended in animation, mouths wide as if gasping for breath, frozen in place. Something inside of me knew that since my fish had been so long out of water, this little bit seemed rich in something that suddenly had been too little for the others.

I don't know what ever happened to that fish, but I do know it is the same one that has lived in my chest for years, the one I never notice until I am asked to commit to something, and it begins to flip around in desperation, as if it suddenly doesn't have water to move through, to breath in.