beautiful morning, beautiful weekend. Since last week my apartment has been reset, ever so slightly, ever so significantly, like hitting the perfect note of melody. I feel it as I walk through, this moment's particular assemblage of objects, colors, senses, sensations. A bit startled (to put it mildly) to realize this November will be my fourth in this apartment. Three full years here, the fourth now beginning. Lorde talking about making Pure Heroine, and how her bedroom at that time was a work of art, meticulously created, and within which she would just be, feel, listen, create. An eight-hour art trance yesterday: painting, painting, collage, music, green tea, painting, bringing my books back to life again online, painting, LA Feelings, creating - not thinking - my way forward into the hymns. How very stagnant all that energy had been in me lately and Friday's dinner with Peter a kind of gentle massage to my creative consciousness. Nearly midnight, and the two of us back at the dining table with a candle burning, him reading me his poetry, me reading him the first section of LA feelings. And then my paintings, almost an afterthought, the artist books, even this small, chaotic mind dump of a book, there he was paging through it all, certainly being kind because that's his nature, but also feeling something acutely, that was clear. Deeply grateful for his friendship, for his humor, his sensitive heart, his mannerisms that touch me because they hold so much of Jake within their movements. An almost bashful way they both pull their dark hair away from their face. Beautiful, soulful men, how lucky I am for even fleeting moments with them. And yet: this Saturday, early autumn, how 10AM became 12PM became 7PM, effortlessly, my creative energy offering me more and more of a river on which to float myself. Even this morning I'm checking in gently: did I drain my resources, fatigue this particular flow? But no. A bit dizzy, hungry, otherworldly feeling, but as I walked into the bathroom last night to shower, to brush, my teeth, I realize this energy was - is - the first firm ground l've stood on since his death.
10/4 Wednesday. Piñon coffee. Rose incense. A blessed day where I can take a bit of a backseat with teaching. Observe. Absorb. Beautiful autumn morning. Letting myself sleep deeply these days. Letting my body rest after the exertion of the rest of the year. Yesterday I wandered the grocery store & thought, how strange all this food. The older man in white who shadowed me through the aisles. The young couple shopping together the way Drew and I once shopped together at that very store. All food seemed entirely abstract. The only thing I wanted definitively was deli meat & cheese. And as I left I thought how grateful, how relieved, how expansive it feels not to have to - not to expect myself to - care about food right now.
This morning, on the drive up to campus, remembering and Sleepy Hollow, the witch – the witch! Like a sudden thunderclap. The only time we tell stories in which a woman exists outside of a relational construct. I thought of virgin, virginal, a woman unto herself – and at the other end of the spectrum, witch.
(beautiful young man, smoking & watching me, lights on headphones on misery business & painting)
The witch, I thought, epiphanic-like. How could I have overlooked my own archetype all these years?
Saturday, 10/14
Eclipse season beginning, a new cycle. And I suppose now they truly have my attention: simultaneously finishing up the eclipse cycle that began in late 2021, first house, body, identity, self expression? Just think of it: suddenly in Florida to care for him, the beginning of the end. Hospitals, his body suddenly so fragile and yet his will as stubborn as ever. Shorn hair as soon as I return to Los Angeles. Now shorter still and bleach blonde. Regularized during that time, an achievement that seemed only to open up a deep well of dissatisfaction – deep, deep unrest – when it comes to this work identity I spent so much time and focus constructing. I gave up on my relationship with Katrina in that phase too, a fact that I’m not quite sure how it relates only that it does, unquestionably. I think this is all to say that in the last year and a half, the last two years, that while I gained a promotion, gained a sum of money (his money; I still think of it as his money… sitting in my name…), gained a tremendous leavening of my soul, my character, through the witnessing of his death, the loss of what I loved most dear… Despite all of that, what I’m realizing is that in that time I also lost the pillars of meaning around which I constructed my identity. Since July, perhaps even before, I’ve been feeling like the shell of a building now bombed out and smoking amidst the rubble. Is it possible to reconstruct meaning? I truly don’t know. I’ve never been tasked with something quite like this and very likely may not again. How does one reconstruct identity? And not just identity but soul? There were weeks when I was crying so much I couldn’t function. Lately when mom or Andrea ask how I’m doing I hear myself answer in a faintly high-pitched voice that is artifice itself: “I’m okay…” and “okay...” meaning non-answer, meaning numb. I was exhausted from the darkness of the underworld and so I convinced myself it was a journey I could simply pause. These pages tucked away in a drawer for weeks. A new notebook bought last night, sleepless dark, as if I could just start again. But this morning my inner animal instinct said: you must finish what you started. There’s no such thing as a “fresh” start. You can choose to ignore the rubble or face its mountain of destruction head on. Either way, the smell of smoke remains…
9:12AM: why suddenly sunny but dark another fire maybe but no why the birds a flutter why my eyes burning why my legs sore why my body so cold here we are, initiating.
This book has been as chaotic as I feel. And I wonder, if it hadn’t been with me when he died if I would still feel so attached to it. And yet: a record I’ve maintained in one place for now over six months feels like a fucking miracle. How I love its size. How I love its leather cover. How I love & hate its chaos simultaneously. I feel a desperate need to see things through as a way of rebuilding the overwhelming sense of identity collapse that consumes me. The struggle of courses that I’ve started started restarted myself in so many different places & that fractured record of self feels impossible to maintain. How to both finish, see it through I mean, and bring into unity? I really don’t know.
Saturday, 10/14
The eclipse has me short-circuiting. A desire for the bookstore, but a deep cystic zit on my c (CROSS OUT) jaw & anyway I don’t feel like doing my hair. So here I am still in my robe, 12:13 PM
Poems: 1962-2012
Eclipse burn
Trying to make meaning
Seven months, don’t want to give up
10/17 Tuesday. My blood woke me early this morning, 5AM. Alert, intuitive, craving water, craving warmth. A bit restless. Young sun now and I feel as if I’ve been awake for days.
Lately: deep unrest about my most basic assumptions of schedule, routine. A feeling like I’m out of alignment, like I’m missing some thing vital. A growing need within me to alter the fundamental ways in which I approach a day. Too many years now of creating a mental shell of my day – expectations, responsibilities, “professional” – and then pouring or contorting or stretching my form to fill that shape. Form, meaning the intuitive voice of the body, form meaning the voice of the soul. The fatigue, I now wear like an assumption of self feels related to this habitual way of orienting myself in place & time, (“fatigue” is inaccurate as a general statement of being. My fatigue is hyper-local, my hyper-specific, but I struggle to name it and in so ((un))doing see it as a learned & not innate part of my identity.)
Birdsong. Windows open, the tall front ones, and through their open mouths a gorgeous, cold smell of dawn. In the dark this morning I found myself pulling tarot cards almost without conscious awareness. Three, the number of magic, transformation, also of structure. Beginning, middle, end. Before, during, after. Child, adult, elderly. And in this case: morning, day, evening.
2 of Wands
9 of Cups
Death XIII
10 of Pentacles
(6 of Pentacles)
Initiating
Conjuring,
Magic, creativity
Vessel, filling
Completion
Even, circle,
Fulfillment
10/17 Thirty minutes in aisle at an Office Max in Pasadena trying to choose a notepad. Outside, my groceries car-melting in the October heat. On the roads and yelling, honking, an outlet for a rage that otherwise feels as if it’s suffocating me, a demon on my chest since 5AM this morning. Heaviest blood today. What’s revealed as that veil is lifted?
It occurs to me today that grief has descended on me again but in a new costume, this one all rage, monstrous. Didn’t Domi once say that the only way to work with anger is to bring it into the sexual fire so that it becomes a transformative force? My anger has been in my head all day, for many days, a force of pure destruction. I have work to do... real work.
Afro Psychedelica, blood & spit all over my floor.
A flickering feeling after moving that anger down into my body – that I have to get moving again. Yes, it all feels broken, all feels impossible, no I’m not ready quiet quite yet… but god I feel it coming in the distance, phoenix-like.
Feeling the kindling flame of a life reclamation, my girlhood “reinvention“ but with the wisdom of my woman self. How to help this flame grow & not extinguish it? Let it catch greater & greater fire. Fan it with the air of my imagination. Kindle it on the earth of my body. Used the spell of my witch’s words: what do I dream of now? Tune to a new frequency, a greater vision. I do not have a clear plan or even a clear destination. So it is not time for action yet. It is time for dreaming, for channeling. Unconscious, ancestral dream forces, please guide me! Send me send me food for this imaginative journey…
10/18/23 Wednesday - a brutal day yesterday. New grief, now anger, and how it took me nearly all day before I realized I needed to literally move it, move the energy out of my head & down into my body. Afro-Psychedelica. Blood & spit on the floor. Turning the lights on this morning, still dark. Maggie Rogers playing in my head while I made coffee “leave the light on…” and I felt like I could cry for something, some sliver of feeling for that song & Paris, now gone, but I have no idea what, why.
My heaviest bleeding day yesterday and I think that’s part of what troubled me. A sacred time, but also a volatile time. Notepad scratches. “Reinvention”. (I wrote that & remembered me in high school “reinvention” after coming back from seeing Darin – Darin – I wrote his name and an entire sex dream from last night quickly surfaces. Not a coincidence. The unconscious at work) (Jung’s Black Books, I’m not interested in translating the depths for surface speak, f letting the surface take over; I’m so sick of all my topside narratives repeated a thousand times, other words are seeking expression – )
What I mean is:
Multiple realities within me.
grief, anger, disappointment, confusion, creation, longing –
I tend to instinctually moralize these states of being, good/bad, but the truth is none of them are able to lead me, none of them should be given authority, & all of them are welcomed as a spectrum of experience.
What leads me forward in life? If I’m desiring a plan, change, momentum – what part of me takes the lead? In the past I believe it has been my mind, “right“ action, logical, but my mind is deeply invested in pleasing others and so my mind’s plans, my mind in the driver’s seat, has led me to a common sort of dissatisfaction, a state of adulthood my younger self swore she’d never fall into. I will need the mind to help decipher the map but mostly I just need my mind to read a book aloud to keep me company, to tune the radio. In the driver’s seat must be my soul & this is the real work I have to do now – rebuilding trust and connection with my soul. I need it to tell me what it truly desires – needs! – And so 1) I have to ask and 2) I have to listen. “I“. Ego? Mind as witness simply to interpret not to judge. I owe my soul a sincere apology – no, an offering, we’re in the realm of the divine – & then I need to open myself up to receive, to catch. That is my work right now, to offer my “self“ to the witch goddess of my soul and allow her to tell me what needs to be done now, what matters. What is the dance of the smokescreen of life. A new moon & body cycle is opening up – so let me spend it gathering as much as I possibly can
All this to say – multiple realities are alive within me:
It is time to change, transform!
I don’t feel ready, I feel blown to pieces
I’ve lost clear connection with my soul, and that is, I believe, the source of all my bitterness, anger, “fatigue”.
I know it’s time to trans change, but not just change – transformation, & that requires an offering of past self, a serious stepping up, proving my deservingness to myself. It requires entirely new strategies. And I’m ready. I was made for this, witch goddess that I am.
10/18 Dream – lost my phone on a subway platform on the way to meet Roger for dinner before a show. Had already “lost“ my cab & the phone broke to pieces with only the SIM card fully lost. A man going down onto the third rail like a performance. And somehow I made it to dinner, etc.?
10/18 Dream – as I write Darin’s name in my morning pages suddenly remembering an entire dream of us fucking exquisitely in the ocean amongst some kind of dock. Beautiful and sort of feral, unapologetic in its pleasure, just the tone I like. Maybe being filmed for something? I can’t remember…
Soul: 1. I have to ask 2. I have to listen
This moon-blood cycle, scorpio season. Witch doctor goddess. My only focus is it is to speak to my soul & listen as it speaks back. To make my living body the deepest gesture of listening it has ever been. To turn that gift’s majesty onto myself.
Pink bucket under truck
Removing any “drug”
Elevator Boutique
Remembering recent dreams – snapdragons
Deception, graciousness
“a trickster”
10/19 Dream: Los Feliz? Neighborhood. Mom, grandpa and I on bikes. Harder, him weak, and then suddenly a completely vertical passage. Mom first, and I went behind/underneath him, pushing him on my shoulders, my shoulders carrying the weight, pulling hand over hand.
10/19 Dream: Andrea in a purple gown and long, middle-parted 70s style hair. My effusion: “such a good look for you!”
Praying mantis again
Flattened dead right outside my building as I walked out this morning.
10/20 Dream: a long journey, roads, on foot, towards some kind of fitness/bathhouse with an “interior” ocean. Got there, was ready to go in, and then had forgotten some thing. Journeyed all the way back to the “house” & then back again, was kept waiting to go in.
The smell of 1975 OM
10/21
I wake up with Eminem lyrics in my head. I wake up thinking again about Jacob’s coldness. I wake up thinking how strange (strange?) I feel with the flowers I brought home from the market. Some kind of visual excess. A performative gesture. “Roses in the bedroom.” I know better. I have no time for such things. Again this week awake too early, before my alarm while it’s still dark. I make a cup of white tea and drink it in the mostly dark and realize that too is a performative gesture, conceptual. Conceptual self. My conceptual self is highly preoccupied with a kind of purity & control but once I step into it I find it profoundly boring. A dog whining somewhere outside, dark morning, voice carrying through the air. Such strange & haunted energy this week. The air as if full of spirits, somethings. I feel it in my home – something that is waking me early, keeping me restless. I suppose my job is to feel it and do the work anyway.
Yesterday afternoon I thought my energies thick & full of stubborn friction but then the simplest encounter with the work – pushing past the initial awkward painting gesture, giving permission for the “bad“ work in order to reach something more instinctual. Painting, my body aflame. There’s so little that genuinely matters & yet it’s so difficult some days to give myself permission for that kind of exclusionary focus. Meaning: I spent all day yesterday knowing I would cancel my attendance to the reading, knowing it, but still letting my politeness convince me it was a day of obligations & therefore not of deep work. A false binary. I think of Anne Truitt describing her early days of working & how she stole any available minute – minute! That’s where I feel now. And what was clear to me last night is that my performance of polite guilt must now end. From Thursday evening until Sunday Monday morning I journey deep & there is not room for anything else unless it feeds the other side – body erotic feral spirit soul veiling paint stained poetic communion. I know that to be a deep & true need – reality – livingness in me these days & it is not my place to go against it. My time is highly, highly valuable, precious & I do not surface for just anyone, anything. The outer world is for me to wear the costuming – the scent – of this deep life, to wear the magic I can’t put into words & so my god wherever I go, whatever I do it better be worth it. I’m channeling next realms.
13 paintings in 24 hours,
then quick easy rich fucking
(I want to sketch the roses)
“Commonwealth Avenue”
Dream: gymnasium. Lots of women. In a circle revealing their breasts to one another one by one. The circle getting smaller/closing in only a few women left to reveal. A sense everyone else knew the rules. I felt it was my turn to reveal.
10/23 Monday. The Bell Jar, roses, flickering golden light overhead. A quick painting just now, dawn. A visceral green feeling. The rush of sensation the words “Commonwealth Ave” elicited in me. Witch doctor. A portal. My body feels charged with a knowing: don’t build up the artificial body, the Monday body, the one to move through obligations & responsibilities: lower the veil in order to protect & contain this circuitry but don’t cut the wire. Feel it. What if this day is magnificent, all of it, a kind of great event of being. My entire body a gesture of deep listening. The lightbulbs all unstable this morning, flickering. What I really mean, directly, is that I’m not willing to set aside the erotic, the gestural, the sensual, the psychic. I’m not willing to suppress it, nor am I willing to let it burn up, too readily seen. A double agent, a spy of sorts. The clouds this morning, soft peach, like the roses.“Commonwealth Avenue“
POWERFUL POWERFUL DESTINY
ALIGNING!
I’VE BEEN WAITING AND CALLED MY WHOLE LIFE FOR THIS AND IN THAT SENSE HIS DEATH WAS THE GIFT OF PERMISSION FOR MY DESTINY
10/27/23 Friday. Second day of nausea. Reading from the Egyptian Book of the Dead slowly and aloud to myself this morning. I can’t stop thinking of words as spells – “said in the right order, with the right intonation…” Friday morning, cloudy, opaque as I speak out loud carefully, a cathedral of one. Instant, quiet magic. New thought. New feeling. The glass cleared. Shining light. How is that not witches work?
Thinking of marigolds, Día de los Muertos. Aesir, of course. Nearly 4 months now. An entire season. I thought of him last night, of my last visit to him before the end set in, of the two of us on his front porch at dawn as he pointed out the deer, so close, misty: I felt great hands of emotion seize my throat, a compression, like I couldn’t breathe. Where do those spasms of grief go? When they show their face it feels like an unbearable force, impossible to survive the crush of feeling – & yet, here I am in the grey morning light, lips dry, smell of incense. In the moment what choked me was the sense of all that as “past”, lost, the loss of that tremendous, singular love & the body that signified it. Tears in my eyes now as I write. Haven’t I been wanting to cry all week? Just to release it? Just to keep it all flowing? This morning I contemplate the assumption of having/not having, death as an irremediable binary. My home is full of his things. My self is full of his spirit. Can I still feel his love? Touch it? Shelter myself in it?
I move through this week with a consciousness of two phases of life that alternately need the light & rest. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday day I give all to the created world, topside. I offer my abilities, I exist interdependent, amongst community. I emerge from my mind, from intellect, while trying to tie those threads daily back down into my deepest, invisible being. Topside life, I am verbose, efficient. But now, as I sit here in the morning after deep rest, a kind of death sleep, as I slip into another costume of my being, I contemplate what feels dry, stiff, overworked, irritable. What does it mean to turn another face to the sun, to let the functional parts of my being, all of my rational efficiency rest? Each time I reveal this other face of my being might I embrace – celebrate – that it will be different each time? Seeking now – heat, comfort, quiet, intimacy, story. Intense longing for fountain pen on paper. The need for a new sketchbook but with that too a decision of record, form, structure. And so? My stomach unsettled – how to decode that body message? The roses are browning, wilting, and so too I feel a posture of softness, decay.
Young girl with her violin case, disappearing around the corner
Lyman Pl, The Valentino
Mushrooms in the grass
(Drag)
Mel-Rose
First waking: record dreams, look at paintings. How it dried left open to the night. What is the thread to pick back up. Incense, espresso, pink robe, blessed Saturday. I try out these words in the new sketchbook the way I imagined it yesterday and immediately it fails. It’s an aesthetic failure, that’s what I can’t get past right now. My handwriting naked on the page. And anyway – the current sketchbook has taught me form and structure. It has given me progression and deep aesthetic pleasure. I will pick up precisely where it ends. There’s some longing in me to regain intimacy & fluency with words, powerful magic that they are. Paintings are expressing my inner life & experience completely in a way that words cannot. The freedom of color vs. language. And yet – words are spells of being & becoming. Can a painting conjure me into the future? I’m not sure…
Scenes from a Marriage last night. Faint resonances of Jake but after this last interaction it seems any illusion of closeness, intimacy, has eroded completely. The resonances were as if for a stranger on the street. One part of me wants to laugh at the drama, the entire Shakespearean drama that exists between couples, between men & women. I remember howling in pain to Drew, how badly I just wanted out. I remember the longing for Stephen, the desire before it soured, perhaps I just wanted someone to spar with. The story unfolds: how the couple met & when, & how effortlessly it overlays with parts of me & Drew. And I realize now in a way I didn’t necessarily then that a relationship built at that time of life is carried forward by society to become something it’s often not. I blew it up because I couldn’t bear it anymore, myself smothered in that shape, al packed so tightly with him – but for me it now seems I was blowing up not just him specifically but an entire concept of myself – woman – within domestic partnership. And thank god I didn’t know, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been brave enough to follow through. So many of the years since like a still trying to shove myself into the dogma & acceptance of those archetypes – trying without actually trying. But I didn’t truly seek it – have never truly sought it again – because there is no desire in me no for that bond, no need for it. I watched scenes unfolding centered around this domestic space & thought how home will never really mean that for me – seeking something else entirely through space, belonging, intimacy. And yet… a shot of their faces close together &, I think how long it’s been since I felt self reflected in intimate other in that way & vice versa & what I might now have to offer & learn. So too – her character arriving in tights boots dress earrings. The stirrings lately for a dress & here it is completely – how I miss the body’s dance of seduction, that entire sensual world. This deep desire for a dress, the right dress, like Hélène Cixous writing about her primal longing for a black jumper. By which/through which we become, and so too: witch, high priestess, femme fatale. My body seems only interested in conducting archetypes of women as singular entities. But maybe I have that all backwards. Maybe I let the lover or the wife or the queen take residence in my form & and entire theater of life evolves from there…
How effortlessly we swing from one extreme to the next. Yesterday and for days before my muscles feeling full of concrete, heavy beyond comprehension. Nauseous on my feet. In bed for long hours but rarely sleeping. Peaking with the lunar eclipse yesterday, that dance my body has always done. “Milky body,” I wrote, opaque, pearlescent, glassy-eyed. And then this morning I wake and something in me is crystalline, clear-edged. I read the Yellow Journal from 2006, a spell of extremes, and encounter my 21-year-old self recalling Jay’s advice from my Dream Summer: “to catch my body up to my mind.” By which he meant to let my body be a woman the way my mind had always been a woman. I watch the old man now in the upper window across the street, push ups? I think of the little balcony overlooking the red rocks in Sedona and what it might have been like to paint there. New sketchbook beginning. Red Journal open on the table beside me. I wake up this morning and my body still feels charged with the deep alchemical need to recostume. Drama-tique. A bit over the top. Femme fatale. I used to read something like the Yellow Journal and feel a bit sad, like no matter what I did I would never be able to conjure that sort of sexual play again, like the moment had passed for late nights, up all nights, seduction, flirtation. I make assumptions that now everyone is quiet and domestic and tame and afraid of women like me. But then today I read it and it seems so clear to me: isn’t everyone craving exactly that sort of fire, no matter their age, perhaps especially at this time in our lives? What I mean is that once I was a young woman, a teenager, between the veils, and I looked out at the world as a hungry beckoning thing and the password I spoke at its doorway was one of passion. How much I wanted to feel, to be charged with feeling, experience, how much I wanted to offer myself to the world and in turn feel its touch across my whole body. How much I sought a state of awake. Spiritually awake. And how stepping into my body sexually, assuming the role of a lover, was one of the most divine experiences of my life. I’ve thought a lot in recent months how a younger me would never have allowed the claims of exhaustion, fatigue, the dryness of my tasks. Overhearing someone say this past week that their therapist told them to stop confusing exhaustion with being unfulfilled. And that’s where I now find myself. So much I caught from Scenes From a Marriage, including an off-line of one of the characters that the death of a loved one is the most stressful life experience a human can go through. The death of my most loved one. This two year cycle of dying. And now I am free. The moon has set me free. But of course I will never be free. Death is now the wet dark soil in which I plant my body and it is sacred, I want nothing else. But this morning again I felt a glimmer of after-life. Of becoming. Of regeneration. This is the jewel I am gathering my energy around. Autumn seeds. To rebirth my life into one of deep meaning (why does the world celestial jump into my brain?). That is the work that is coming for me now, calling my name. All the things I’ve deprived myself of in my thirties. Over the top. Drama. Body lust, more than I can fathom. Deep intimacy. Fusion with another. Two. The lusciousness of life. The fruit of life. How sensible my thirties, and bless that firm foundation. But how out of step, out of time. I was an old woman, a crone, and now I must age myself backwards into the maiden. A symphony of beauty. Carnality. More is more. I must renounce my functional life and welcome myself back into one of mystery, feeling, beauty, becoming, wonder, desire.
Honeybee
Honey
Hoopla
Tremont St.
1888
880-898
(portals)
The lunar eclipse yesterday, my body for days is a little unsteady & nauseous, my muscles feeling tired to the bone. Two years ago in Florida with grandpa, thrust suddenly, no warning, into a whole new reality with him. Much more bohemian then, “free spirit” with my long hair & vintage clothes. My appearance of self has gone through chopped off hair, death, Paris, bleach blonde, more death, clinging to men’s clothes & tailoring to protect me, to hold me up. Now suddenly: (no, not suddenly, been brewing) a deep desire for femme. I want to open my legs, nothing underneath.
10/30 moonlight, reflecting off all the dark surfaces as I woke this morning.
Mountain Beauty black tea & the sensual slick–pull of fountain pen on paper. Lowering the veil to return again through topside life. What does that mean? It can’t just mean losing, “forgetting“, everything I bring into consciousness when the veil is off. Black tea like a strange aggressor to my heart, a hurried beat. The sky now a soft blue-purple like in the desert. What did I discover? Hyper Dash femme body trance now, dramatic beauty, my costuming of choice, the archetypal resonance I want to strum on. “The Lover”, I’m not sure. I feel it’s actually something even deeper I’m seeking. A pure openness of heart & sacral working in tandem, a channel for divinity. But also – deep carnality, the power of the seductress, but without its black magic. Opposite pulses. These four days as a practice, femme, recharging it back into my body, filling up with sensual pleasure. Gathering richness for the paintings. Finishing books, making plans & preparation for weekend depths. A week as a year in miniature. What might be created, felt, discovered, experienced. My body telling me clearly since last night to move the energy of love that still lingers in my flesh. Move it like I moved the anger. But not because as it’s harmful or destructive – move it because it is beautiful, let it shattered to pieces and plant its prisms throughout my form.
Struggling to finish the bell jar
Mountain beauty, black tea
Jade egg/prince/moving energy
Moments today of my intuition: are you listening? Really listening? Trusting? And I couldn’t say 100%. Disappointed in myself.
Questions of free speech in these intense times
Inviting Peter to REDCAT 11/8
Yesterday & still this morning, I thought: how incredible that I’ve allowed myself sovereignty over my body, body over me. Freed to love who I want when I want. Yes, and freedom is air, space, loneliness, sometimes. But I still choose it over all the rest.
Golden
The wind-sucking sound of wings flapping overhead.
“Intense daily physical practice”
How to begin – gently, with ease, with self acceptance. Acceptance for my innumerable false starts. Acceptance for my uneven & uncertain handwriting. Acceptance for my skeptis skepticism with words. Acceptance for my imperfection, my failures, the flush in my cheeks as I write now….
Two thoughts occurred to me earlier today, not new necessarily but felt. 1) that it’s impossible, really, for me to reflect on this year, to understand it, because I have no real record. I had little bits of my self in different books, little bits here & there, fragments, feelings, versions of self, fleeting, but no clear trajectory. To attempt to reflect on this year holistically, I have to first assemble a puzzle of myself & then, of course, fill in the gaps. And today it struck me, what a tremendous disadvantage that puts me at in terms of self knowledge, growth, becoming, the things that have always been so central to my being. And 2) I’ve been aware for quite some time (years?) that I feel somehow stalled out in my life. And I’ll have swells of energy or inconsistent motivation, but nothing has really been able to catch on because I’ve only ever expected myself to fix it, instantly, to “fix” myself without ever once engaging with intimacy or care as to why I may be feeling this way in the first place.
Much of my life feels broken or stagnant – & yet also also somehow very beautiful, peaceful, because I’ve begun to accept this is where I find myself at this moment of my life. And not accepting as a form of giving up but accepting as removing a sense of failure or blame & instead allowing myself to be gently, curious as to why I may be feeling such a way & what a life on the other side of this kind of malaise might look like. What motivation in regards to work might look like, what work even is, what satisfying relationships might feel like. This year will forever be about the loss of my deepest familial love and I still have utterly no idea who or wat I am anymore… I’ve only just begun to process the loss of him, & before that the two years of his dying & before that the 18 months of the world as we knew it shutting down. And all throughout that time… I’ve gotten up, made my morning coffee, gotten dressed, gone to work, kept my body alive… But I have never allowed myself to stop – to truly stop, as much as life can possibly allow – & engage directly & with infinite curious acceptance the reality that my life as I once knew it has stalled out. And I can choose to remain stalled out, in a way there’s comfort & safety in that. But as this year enters its final stretch, I feel deeply called to reflect, to go within, to consider what has occurred, what has impacted, & where I may want to go from here….
Body luxe and care
Dinners with wine (fasting otherwise?)
Dressing, make up
Music as mood creator
Movies Cinema!
Slow year end visioning and reflection
Creative/artistic expression is holidays, my life