Stuff

Sometimes, I don’t take into account how much material things weigh on me and occupy space on the psycho-emotional level. I was reading the fabulous adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism and there’s an interview in there about fashion and feeling comfortable, pampered and confident in the clothes we wear. At one point, the interviewee talks about her experience with polycystic ovary syndrome and gaining a lot of weight in a short amount of time. Maori Karmael Holmes says: “I had been building a collection of beautiful things and suddenly couldn’t wear any of them. I moved around with bags of clothes for nearly a decade with the hope of wearing them again. Right before a cross-country move, I took stock of all of these things and realized these bags were physically weighing me down and that I needed to release them. So I did.” 

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Tears Are Our Medicine

“I see you’re frustrated when I cry
I’m finding out how sacred as time goes by
Process, purify
I am lighter, much lighter

Look at my eyes and cry with me…
Let it all out, it’s meant to be
Tears are our medicine…

I see you’re frustrated
Yeah, you don’t cry 
You’re finding out how sacred as time goes by
Process… purify
You’ll feel lighter, much lighter

Look at my eyes and cry with me…
Let it all out, it’s meant to be
Tears are our medicine”

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We’re All Going to Die

Yes. We are all going to die.

What happens in you when you read those words? Take a moment. Yes, right now. Take a moment right now to notice how the sentence lands in your body, in your heart. Where does your mind go? How does it actually make you feel?

This is, perhaps, one of the only real truths in this world. Yet, somehow, I am just beginning to turn toward my own death in an honest way. My mortality has been some sort of an implicit companion throughout my life: an entity I know is present but that I rarely really acknowledge or honor. It appears that now is a good moment to do that. And it would seem a very apt time in the story of our planet and our species to do the same on a collective level.
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Baby Hate and Other Non-Pretty Thoughts

I like to count things. Over the past four years and a half years I’ve become quite skilled at counting babies. I count months: “Oh, someone else had a living baby! During which month would he have been conceived?” I count weeks: “How many weeks would it have been since our last baby was born (if she had lived)?” I count days: “When I took that pregnancy test, how many days had passed since my period?” There’s something about counting that soothes my anxious mind; a mundane distraction from our troubled world. 

Now, let me count the number of times I’ve attempted to start writing this post: 5. The number of pages I’ve written below (without really saying anything at all): 3. The number of times I’ve had challenging thoughts about pregnant women, babies or mothers in general: innumerable. 

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Homecoming

I cry easily these days. My heart fills and overflows when I least expect it. I find tears streaming down my cheeks when songs I listened to the day after Rafa’s death come up on the collective playlist; when I read some random paragraph in a book that touches me in a certain way; when I am simply witnessing a near stranger lingering with love and intention over the candle on their birthday cake. Something about this yellow leaf floating slowly down toward the pond right now stirs a mixture of melancholy, acceptance, peacefulness and finality in me. It seems only fitting for these times we are living in. There’s a whiff of the “end of days” in the air. Can you smell it?

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Shame in the Throat

Leer este post en español.

Anyone else feeling utterly exhausted these days? It feels like the state of our world and the deep and troubling complexities of life (in nearly every sphere of my existence) are wearing me down, moment by moment. I’ve found myself recently describing my state of being as “flat,” blah,” “without a spark.” In Spanish, one might say sin ganas.

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Vergüenza en la garganta

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¿Alguien más se siente totalmente agotado estos días? Parece que el estado de nuestro mundo y las profundas y preocupantes complejidades de la vida (en casi todas las esferas de mi existencia) me están desgastando, momento a momento. Últimamente me he encontrado describiendo mi estado de ánimo como “plano”, soso”, “sin chispa”… tal vez diría totalmente “sin ganas”.

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Don’t Make Waves: Disappointment and Discomfort

I probably haven’t told you that I’m taking clown classes. Well, they’re not really classes, it’s more like a practice space where we get to know our inner clowns better. All of us have clowns within and I’ve seen how mine has so much to teach me! In one of our sessions we played with natural objects like dried flowers, bark and plants. We worked in pairs: one person pretended to be the object and as their clown partner interacted (sometimes in rude and curious ways) with the leaves or flowers, we imagined that our bodies were being manipulated in the same way. My natural object was a little succulent in an oversized coffee cup. It’s a fragile little guy and as I moved and touched it, many of its little leaf-nubs fell to the floor. Even wearing the hat and red nose of my curmudgeon clown, I soon found it impossible to be present in the exercise; I was obsessed with picking up the fallen pieces of the plant. It was unimaginable for me to leave that mess on the floor; even though, obviously, I could have cleaned it up later.

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Entangled Time

Oh Sweet Jesus! Let’s talk about TIME! I spend a relatively large chunk of my waking hours wishing that kronos would speed the hell up so that these past four years might fade more rapidly into the background of my life. All the while, I beg for time to please, please SLOW DOWN because… well… apparently, there’s a biological time bomb ticking away in my ovaries. And underpinning all of it – especially throughout these past few months – I am tormented by a constant sense that there is never, NEVER EVER ENOUGH TIME. I’m harangued by a nagging voice reminding me constantly just how “behind” I am. My inner critic looks over my writing from the past year and shakes her head disapprovingly. Just four measly blogs? And this one itself has been in process for five months?

“Tsk. Tsk,” says time. (Or at least that’s what my mind tells me that time said.)

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Charla Relámpago: VISIBLES

Read this post in English.

Tengo varias reflexiones por compartir en este “nuevo” año pero necesito pulir un poco más mis palabras. Mientras… comparto unas palabras que publiqué en Facebook recientemente y el vídeo de una charla relámpago que presenté en Octubre de 2020 como parte del encuentro virtual: VISIBLES.

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