about me

what I write

Every approach to why is an intimate to how. Yet, both why and how are loud cousins who are lonely without their more reticent what. So I want to befriend what.

Before you know kindness are the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
—Naomi Nyes

The size of the cloth holds multitudes. Because the size of the cloth is not in the measurement of who has done things and the histories of causation but actually in the meeting of the sorrows of the world. And what a invisible cloth this is when we have named sorrow as an allergy of the soul. A flaw, a glitch, and something so infinitely unwanted in the processes of the "normal."

Because the most I have learned living the culture that is the East coast of America in the years of the 2000 is how, more often than not, the most another will do when meeting sorrow is to be the tissue giver. To hold what comes from forests clear-cut out in the sprawling strip-mining, cutting, killing, and concretization of the world and to almost directly say: "Sorrow is not a home but something to get over."

Thus, sorrow has become homeless and we have become house-less. These wanderers in this place, like the orphaned Oliver Twist in London, that could be considered tourists. To speak to Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place:

If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see.

To not get into the weeds, though I do find that weeds are where the cracks in our concrete are, Kincaid knows the depth of the act of seeing. Of spectacle. Of gawking and of glancing. That what lays hidden in our eyes is a murder. Not the sort of murder that flies through the news often in that stumbling, frenetic, and feverish way that the news is today. The culmination of the cries of the north, east, west, and south in that fraught way of Paul Revere on horseback^[1] calling attention, of course, to what we need to hear. Because in the inconvenience of peace yet also in our worship of it, violence somehow instills this sense of relief in us. That, somehow, there are actually Bad Guys out there. In that inscrutable sense where somehow if we make public this, often under the premise of shame, that a constant preoccupation and persecution of that pain in punitive systems would allow us to right our ways. To turn the wheel of our collective Titanic away from that iceberg of how if criminals, naysayers, cryptic creatures of the dark, of demons and dragons were not punished then somehow crime's sporiferous nature would become the mold of humanity.

What I have gleaned is that the allegory of the Titanic provokes something deeper. The panoramic iceberg we see in the distance is more telling of how we are in this collective Ice Age: of frozenness, of a stiffness, of strictness, and severe sterness. In the approaching of the glacier, of course, we have become the age characteristic of deep anxiety, angst, depression, and anesthesia because in the reflection that is clearing up. That ice berg that we say we are on a collision course to (apocolypse, disaster, war, famine, economic collapse), is actually a reflection of ourselves fraught in a apocolypse, disaster, war, famine, and economic collapse on the homefront.

Homefront as in body, corporeal form, of indigeneity to our senses. As to the system that speaks of captial, of residing in the rational, and of exchanges based upon class and privilege, these "homefronts" are all consistently convenient to the works that have industrialized the self. As the Byung-Chul Han, Korean-born philosopher, has noticed this in his The Burnout Societythrough someone in Greece:

And yet in this, someone has spoken to its negative: we have become so preoccupied with living, that is living well, that in this immunological approach our immune systems are under immense stress. Because we have left the immunity of a culture that lived in reverence to mortality. To impermanance, change, and residing the currents of life that are unpredictable, unruly, and beyond even the wilds we can conceive of in our small minds. As any work of a system that steps out of its immune system is to concretize exactly that which it is doing. The act of severing, of leaving, and of distance.

We have grown close to the narrative that we think, there we are. Thought, reasoning, and logic this monarchy and holding this totalitarianism on our souls*. David Loy once put it how we experience life "as a collection of discrete objects (one of them being me) causally interacting in space and time." Then writing how in our collecting and creating life as objects, we have become objects, casually interacting with one another, with no space or time for feelings, presence, and of witnessing.

To go back to Antigua, we have done so much spectating of life that we have become mere tourists of our bodies and thus, of this Earth. As what is characteristic of a tourist is that they only visit when they want to. So, it is no shock that we choose to only want to inhabit our bodies when pain is most quiet. Those are the moments of arousal that what we typically call "happiness." What a system we are to write documents about obtaining, achieving, and maintaining such a things, as if life could fall into the catergoricity of duality where our worship of one thing will allow us to overcome its other side. We live to be Good to overcome Bad and under circumstance of weapon and aggression this leads to war, though its more dangerous cousin is how under the circumstance of the reparations of war in our psyche is how this plays out in "making a living."

As Francis Weller points out:

Heartbreaking is one way to put it. Though I feel heartache reading these works and the breaking is still present because I can see the broken glass that is our system leaves no one unwounded. Weller calls this the workings of the "machinery of culture" where our souls have been shattered in the "industry of self" that allows no space for grief.

Grief this thing of sacer of a sacristy and of ordinary absent. As I can name grief to be sacred only because of how jejune our culture is to only speak of it in a few dialects. Typically exclusive to funerals, small group settings, psychiatric practice, and small private moments before we sleep (or as we struggle to sleep). Since something I want to return to is the touristing of self. Of how in tourism, often it is reserved in a privilege. That privilege that comes from the privatization of the world; only certain people are to do things at certain times and under certain settings. What is so privy to privatization that under certain conditions, it can be considered the highest form of gratification in this world.

In this culture obsessed with others (who I am not and what I don't have), it is conveniently obsession with the immunological approach. Of self-help, of self-help, and of self-improvement. Because the deepest shame a person can have is simply to be human. Messy, inordinately vulnerable to clumsiness, and wildly aware of its own creation and sometimes very resistant to it (all of which I would consider the richest gifts). As that is what our industries have taught us: what we are is not enough and thus we live out live in this lack-project to fulfill the holes punctured deep within us. David Foster Wallace characterized this as the condition of "the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

These are times of loss. And a requirement of loss is turning towards it, otherwise in our avoiding of it, we lose ourselves^[3]. And our psyches are making this clear in its subtle resistance. Days off, longing for long drawn out activities that are in touch with the pace of brush, cloud, rock, and squirrel, and this tendency to feel deep emptiness in the spaces deeply eroded by the modern that we often fill with more of its blood..

I have becoming aware in waves, ripples, and occasional tsunamis how there are these frictions, tensions, breachs, and itches consistently not spoken to. I could go to how in most relationships with my elders, there is this hurt that comes from a millenia of silence around who holds power, who somehow gets exclusive rights to respect, and who is allowed to teach yet not really learn.

As the wound of age and the agentile choice to choose to allow those with more experience to be the ones with absolute holding on bearings of life and Truth has made us only bear life and only touch truth. Because there is a trauma not spoken about: parents only being able to relate to their younger halves are children (thus, childish) and children only being able to relate totheir older halves as elders (thus, never quite developing intact and whole).

Because much of what we teach and learn nowadays leave us torn. Stripped bare in the spaceships of individuality, we have joined an asteroid belt that is consistently in conflict and gravitational pull to bring us together. Yet, we relent. Because our culture tells us to "do it alone" and even if we do it together it means "getting what we want" or "compromise" rather than to emboson collective solutions where all needs can be met.

Someone once observed how in the emergence of children, parents get parented. Yet, I can see how the crises we find ourselves in that somehow in the millennias of generations that much of our development has not been reciprocal. We collectively want what is best, yet somehow we twisted, entwined, and coiled that into whatever best is right. Now the spring—the one that holds the suspension yet also contributes to a life stuck, under pressure—that has been culturally inherited is longing to be relieved.

I am in sorrow to how we can call other "childish," "brutish," and even "ignorant" and somehow think we are doing a service to another. In the culture of shame, we already have heard these words millions of time, perhaps even over the course of generations, that they have no longer become tools to characterize reality but the reality itself. The uncomfortable truth is how that in by calling others these things, these qualities of evaluation that entangle with their identity, we often become them in utterance.

What I have seen is that though some may say we live in a "power over" rather than "power with" system, we also live in this a "put down" system where deprecation, diminution, and denomination dominate. Within those it is commonplace to call others by names, judge them, and to approach them as these strange, poor things. Perhaps that panoramic glacier is getting closer, though I am still unsatisfied by it. Because in the Ice Age culture everyone is urgently freezing. Simply because it is becoming clear how each of us is reflection in each other.

We live in a culture of loss. I find that a culture of loss—a community woven with gaps, breach, rifts, and fissures—continually creates loss even when their longings to create, renew, and restore are present. Out of the many things I could name, of the loss I find deeply distressing is the loss of gratitude, of sharing, and of community. Since all of these are inconvenient to the strip-mining of the soul, the plundering of the Earth, and the possession of bodies. Because that is another obsession we have: to have things. Many things in fact. Of them the birthing of many deadzones in ecosystems. Which many have extensively studied yet not also the deadzone of our culture to place nature under glass. Only to observe and to take from.

So all that is to say, I write about loss and find that with the loss amounting, there is no use recording as much metabolizing and feeling it. Otherwise, we get caught up in the numbers rather than anything else. So, I say lose the numbers yet still hold the multitude of textures that come from naming, touching, and sharing the few and many.

I want to end this with the deepest what of where my writing connects to:

The fundamental mistrust and fear around our basic human experience is deep: we have had religions that have told us certain emotions are to be honored and some to be repressed to a tiniest register of acknowledgement. Science, too, has lost its sensuality of adventure and alchemy that comes from the knowing that in our knowing of the world, we become it. As Parker J. Palmer once said, "We know the world, as we are known." And economics, the child of the deepest mistrust and fear, has totally collapsed any living relationship to the world because under the premise of economic, every thing is a resource.

Yet even in this acknowledgement, there is nothing that resourceful about the register of equality. This means that. I do this, so that can be. As in every equation there is an equivocation. In the depth of our souls this wild felt sense that though we can say something is something, that every character evades characterization. Perhaps that is what life for those in touch to it: learning to be born, again and again, in the curious gaze of "I still do not know you" despite, again and again, facing the familiar and facing that silent urge to say things are this way. Static. Concretized. Devoid of fluidity. In that range of the ordinary, of truth and worship of it, is where we have become this culture of deception. Of not knowing we have left our bodies when we started to sacralize truth. Though, I am also not quite interested in lies. As in lies lays, again, the obsession with truth, the supernatural, which again and again, devalues the ground we stand upon, which is quite ordinary, I would say.

So, though truth has almost this clenching hold upon our society, what I want to enter is the suggestive of space. Of obliquity. Where uncertainty is the principle and the unknown is guardian. As what calls to me now is to step out of the ivory towers of "intelligence," "truth," "thought," and the urge to be rational and reflect on where that has brought us. Because that may very well be the most irrational thing to do in a system of collapse where surveillance has become embedded in our own psyche.

Many people have spoken to how we are between stories. And how we are in desperate need of new ones, as we are coming to face to face with ruins and ashen of the current order in collapse, recognizing how in every brick that falls our own face within what has been created. We are recognizing the depth of collapse. The one story that has brought me live is how these times now are not just some collective "Ice Age" but the absence of the ordinary. The ordinary is leaving us and is not holding our hands because it knows that we need to be released from our ordinary forms. Our ordinary formulations of fixing this world toward feeling it.

Which, once to my surprise yet now not so much, is how this hurts. Because in naming this world hostile, our systems have mirrored what we named. So, when the ordinary leaves us, the return to sensuality is a lot like the pins and needles that come from when your arm sleeps. Yet, I do wonder, how haystacks have we established?

I do want to acknowledge the trauma of the writer. Off on their own whim, the writer can write a world of imagination that no more echoes reality than ripples it out onto pages in this paranormal way. Yet, when their pages are stripped, words fall flat to touching this living world, there comes the deep sorrow to see how writing can be this form of loss. Losing who we are when we write what we want rather allowing what wants to emerge.

So, I mourn every writer who sneakily knows how everything written is embedded in loss and choose not to write. To be hurt in seeing what emerges. Longings, yearnings, and secret quirks and gnomes that are the makeup of reality. Every writer practices emergent. To see what is unspoken to that somehow their grief, the sensuality of love facing loss, compels them in this wild splendor to energetically write. To create the pages to then be created once again. Writing is the act of renewal. The ritual of regeneration in its deepest form. Because in writing we allow ourselves to be changed. In expression, the waxed crescents and waning navels of the invisible is made invisible. What was once unsayable somehow becomes said. If writing is anything but this, then the writing is thoroughly dead, and I am attending the funeral.

[1]

I recently learned how Paul Revere may actually be a myth but his depiction still stands, though I do find some humor and lightness from the dramatization of history that comes from a culture that wants to raise its reality from the drab lowliness of the ordinary. Yet also a hinting of sorrow for how some have a longing for recognition and find that through the stretching and aggrandizing often reality that often leaves life unflexible and able to be seen clear. (Back to text)

[2]

Modernity could call this condition alexithymic or a depressioned despondency, though these diagnoses are helpful at simply naming conditions, they do not honor the full loss latent within. Not to mention of how much of the depth of the loss is lost in the context of modern psychology. Indigenous cultures would call this "soul loss." Francis Weller wrote about this after naming the "Fourth Gate of Grief" which is the grief that comes from a life inside us not being lived. The outcast wanderings and silenced, crouching parts that has banished from our lived experience:

The idea of soul loss is ancient. This old intuition says that the soul can fragment, be stolen, break or flee. It happens for a variety of reasons: physical or emotional trauma, a prolonged sickness, extensive neglect and shaming, and (a common reason) the chronic assault of the mind-numbing existence that stupefies, dulls, and renders our lives empty.

(Back to text)

[3]

Francis Weller shared a story about this that went a bit like this:

In my practice, this has come up many times:
"If I go there, I am never coming back!"
To which I say:
"If you don't go there, you will never return!"

(Back to text)

[3]

Preface XIX, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller (Back to text)

why I write

Changes alters its course in the absence of expectation.

When we are born, we are the change we wish to immediately see. The wailing, protesting, and expressing sensing abilities we have are so fiercely vulnerable.

And through a reciprocal environment, we develop, grow, and feel most fulfilled when attention is shared. When needs are met as feelings are honored.

Many speak of the magic of undivided attention. What could also be considered magic is how change, fully unknown to us, is magical.

And with my experience of writing, expressing change through reflection. Where I am bemused in clarity reading back what I wrote and revealing the mystery that I am and continue to be. I have had this felt sense of grief.

A love for the loss of expressing. With how talk, speech, and writing have been lost their sensuality and authenticity in how we can go about days without expressing what our souls so deeply long for and feel anguish to.

I then realize change diverges expectations from reality enough so that a prarie of clearing can open our mind so wide sometimes our hearts stretch so long we break. Only if there is this brittleness that comes from a paltry, partitioning mind that divides space from time. One from another. Good from the bad. Ugly and the beautiful. And how we can so easily follow the amnesia and anesthesia of this time and forget interdependence. How our inner worlds are so deeply starting to reflect this outer world. Burnout literally expressing how we are burning up all that brings life under the premise of progress.

And how if I connect to the magic of learning and writing, I see that magic is not found by fully comprehending my experience or even by fulling controlling all is within my ability to control but in releasing. In releasing all expectation and diving in a falling in gravity's caress. Pencil kissing paper not because of weight but because of how leaden and dimming it is to not write. To not marry the broken and the beautiful together in sensitivity to how both often compliment each other.

To fully attend to my experience without expecting even something 'new', 'novel' or 'original' knowing how mountain stream, ocean, lake, puddle, and sewage all hold the emergence of life. Emergence that escapes anything time-bound. As Francis Weller put it (and many others): what we are now living through is an absence of the ordinary. And it is up to our choosing to embody that. To alter courses of generations beyond by crossing thresholds in choosing life. To live in reverence to life and the Dark Mother of creation so hidden in our culture.

Is there not such a binding spell in unraveling the mysteries of change? And bleeding the pain of becoming who we so fear by reflecting in tree, ink, and heavy metal? Perhaps not as all things spellbound are not as much binding but breaking, opening, and fissuring.

I resonate deeply with Alex Dawson's longing to write:

Why I Write

Because when I was a girl,
maybe seven or eight,

already so battered by this
life, I realized that a pencil

looks an awful lot like
a witch's wand.

As through writing, I touch the rooted magic of feeling the contour of language in its coarsest quality.