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.

Kainos: the thick now, which extends into many kinds of time, into presence.

It was a job, like any other. In the armory - a massive space filled with dysfunction and confusion - was an antique show, or at least the early skeleton of what would be walkways and Grecian inspired booths for people to wander, with their thousands of dollars to spend for their private collections.

My fierce, feminine little self faced a wall of tired, surly, uninspired men, with a Union mood and Union attitudes I would have to battle to get any work done, while they related to me in the only way they know how to relate to women. The first thing I have to do is size up the skills and temperaments of the individuals in my crew so I can affectively play them off each other and assign responsibilities they might prefer. There is always a Rooster, he is usually taller and better looking than most of the other guys, and often wields the most power to set the pace and productivity, and he is the one that I must convince to align their purpose with mine. The Rooster on this crew still has mostly dark hair, resonates with an old school nyc cop vibe, painfully good natured, even when weighing the combative desires of the crew against the venue's needs of speed and accuracy. He is impossibly tall with large carpenter's hands and a thick nasally accent, a direct manner of speech that is easy for me to catch and twist and trap him inside of. His desire to prove himself to me as both a competent carpenter and as a man is the currency in which I am dealing, a system that sits outside of the monetary one, invoking a kind of ancient exchange.

I always think of old Celtic rituals, where the priestesses represent an eternal female god, and the seasons are marked by the choosing and eventually consuming of her consort, after he has served his divine purpose of inspiring an act of creation.

It is rare, on my own, to have a sense of my femaleness, I often feel completely genderless until I show up at work. The ability to flip on that character has become a unique signature that I get hired for, when the floor thunders with my footsteps and the power of my voice reaches the rafters of the massive armory. But I have to make that space to be filled with something greater than myself, and it leaves me exhausted by the end of the day, and in the moments when it slips, someone always comes up to ask me if I am ok. Finding the male energy that calls her out of me is vital, my approach to this work is almost ritual, I even fast to keep my messy vulnerable selfness out of the way, to maintain a clarity of the overarching vision and all of the elements involved in the manifesting I've been hired to orchestrate.

I read once that to cast a truly effective love spell, it necessarily affects the one doing the casting in equal measure.

This particular Rooster was keenly interested in the selfness that I set aside to be a crew chief. I watched him as he tried valiantly to penetrate my Cat Mother mystique, with my sharp and sometimes loving tongue. 'She's not so tough under that hat' he kept saying when I was in earshot. I wore a winter knit cap that covered most of my head, containing my hair has been a method for removing my sexuality from most situations, ever since I started working with steel, and I saw his sheepishly hungry glance when my hat fell off at one point.  He had daughters not much younger than me, and I suspect he was trying to reconcile his frame of reference with the character I played. I appreciated his attempt to see the wholeness of me, so I started to call his interest out by suggesting I would answer his questions over beers. I heard him call me 'his woman' when he thought I wasn't nearby, and the other men joked amongst each other that he would get angry if he saw any of the other guys talking to me. Its a game they all play, I pick and choose when I think it is valuable and when it is problematic.

On the final evening of the build he hung back in the lift as I surveyed the room, so I asked him flippantly when we were getting drinks. He turned towards me and asked me how old I thought he was. I had assumed around 48 or 50, but lowballed, partially in hope, and a little bit to flatter him. '42' I responded. Right in front of my eyes, I saw the energy leave his body. I suddenly realized just how grey his hair was, noticed the slightly sunken flesh around his eyes. '58' he said back. He climbed down from the lift as if he were 1,000 years old and slowly walked over to me as if he were too exhausted to find the movements, and extended his large hand to engulf my small, childish one in a farewell salute.

I barely made it to the train before I started crying, and I didn't stop for 3 days.

For the first time in my life I had a clear sense of my relationship to time. I could see the ship that was myself with its wide vista full of possibilities and potential paths, and his ship, far out, so close to the horizon I could never catch up, his Union world and sense of place holding him fast to the direction he probably chose when he was my age. Asking him to spend any time with me was kind of like asking him to be in two places at once, in his current worn flesh and in his memories of when he was my age, and possibly introducing the weight of regret in choices made ages ago that cannot be unchosen.

In this primal confusion of the role I play in time, perhaps it's a question of being a Daughter. Before we are almost anything else, we are formed out of a relationship to a parent, it is an identity that defines our connection to history, a way of knowing ourselves and our place in the world. I realized I didn't really know what it felt like to be one - I've never had a boundary I wasn't able to dance across with anger or laughter. Maybe I have been clinging to the earth, pouring myself into places of contact between self and other, wheeling around the axis of that contact to compensate for the lack of clarity about what holds me together in an ocean of relationships and feelings and exchanges and unwritten social expectations. It was bizarre, this strange feeling that something huge had happened, yet I had no clear sense of what - I know it's related to that missing Daughterness, and this overlapping of timelines that may resemble Father, but I have no idea. I am starting to understand that I must make a choice and begin following some sort of path, even though it will necessarily move me towards the horizon. I can't live forever in the pregnant space of possibility, and I first have to let go of the anchor point through which I have been clinging to the edges of the earth, the Mothership. I can't avoid entropy, I can't live outside of time and society and the place waiting for me inside of it. I have to learn what it means to be bound. Tamed. Claimed by something.

One of the other men on my crew was retired, I was told. Apparently he keeps showing up anyways. With so much of his lifetime devoted to this work, how could he not desire the purpose, the usefulness one feels on a team? And after so much time amongst this brotherhood, how is it anything else, but a social experience that is vital to his lifeblood? I'm starting to notice how many of the people I work around have become the source of family that we used to go home to in the past. Our blood families often pull us away from the vibrant communities and deep love and trust we have come to know amongst the people we work with.

At the end of the month I was back running the same crew to break down and pack the pieces of the event we were responsible for and send into storage for next year. As I was assisting the forklift load the last of it, my crew's Union Rep called me over and sent me inside - my men were waiting in a lopsided circle and they declared that none of them were leaving until I had hugged each of them goodbye. In the history of Union jobs, I doubt a hugging circle with the crew boss has happened more than a handful of times, if at all.

These men, from all these different crews, have taught me so much about myself, and I have found a voice I didn't get to have growing up. Because I see them as Men, let them be strong for me, they care about their work and they give me what I need. I love them for it, in the face of their eroded knee caps and calcified lower backs, grumbling ancient attitudes and beer bellies. Someone has to love them. I have only just begun to understand the depth of their affect on me and my relationship to the world. This too is my family, this ragtag band of old habits and weathered flesh, these silly, misunderstood, idiosyncratic men.

Maybe I'm not an orphan.




The word yoga, from the Sanskrit word yuj means to yoke or bind