Yearly Archives: 2012

breathe into what tightens

sticker art of a turtle with one bulging eyeGood morning this morning. The light outside my windows today is warm and bright, and the crows are gathering on the other side of the fence to argue with a seagull about some tasty morsel. Today I am just in the moment. It’s all I can do. It’s what I get to do.

This morning’s blog is coming to you from a standing position — I’ve adjusted things in my apartment so that I can place my laptop on top of a bookshelf. I’m typing in between walking around my apartment and stretching, in response to a terrible lower back spasm. I’ve never experienced anything like this, and I’m scared. My body is talking to me in a new way this morning. How can I learn to listen?

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releasing the transition

Good morning on this Monday — are you settling into this new time? Now the dark is earlier in the evening and the light comes sooner in the morning; the pup and I were just getting acclimated to morning ball-catching time by the half-light. Full sun is cheating!

For you Nanowrimo-ers reading, have you already reached your word count goal for today? Listen for me cheering you on from your sidelines! I’ll be joining you later this morning, pushing out my own 1670 words.

Today I am in this new life all the way. Friday was my last day at my day job at UCSF. The goodbyes felt complete and honest, and today I’m here wondering how all the pieces are going to come together. That perseveration isn’t at my surface, though. A calm has lifted in me, one that I’m not sure yet I can trust. One that feels like — like what? Faith? Is this what faith feels like? Continue reading

honoring what’s died

graffiti of skeletons holding handsThis morning it’s hard to get out of the nest. The candles don’t pull me, and I lie there cuddled in with the words from a maybe dream. In my dream, my writing persona had two parts, each with its own name. In my dream I knew each of their names. Something like Lillian and Ruth, but I don’t think that’s right. One side was more linear, or performative, the side that sat down to generate words for public viewing, the side that rafted the writing like an editor. The other part was the organic side, the part that let words flow, the part that tapped into the long seam of imagery and possibility living somewhere inside our psyche and let the writing flow from there — the side for whom writing is a swirl, a vein, an immersion, a mess.

This morning I am thinking about the personae, the selves, and the dead — and I want to know how we can honor all of it. Continue reading

the shift of our stories

graffiti detail: bright slashes of red blue black yellow silverGood Monday to you. Here is candlelight and cooling tea, here is the chill of late October morning, here is the click of keys into a quiet kitchen, here is the ache of morning. What is hovering inside and about you at this time of faeries and visitations?

Today I am thinking about story: the stories we share with others in order to explain ourselves, the way those stories, our storying, shift over time — and what those shifts can tell us about how we are healing. Continue reading

what if we stop now (just for a minute)?

This morning it’s chilly in the apartment. I watch my fingers on the keyboard,  watch the candles, watch the steam rising up from the tea, watch the words emerge. The heat of the tea candles eddies the air, moving the prayer flags that hang above my writing space.

I feel scattered and sleepy. How do I gather all the pieces back in, find our new rhythm? This is the juggling time, and that’s why all my muscles are aching. I stop. Today there’s a deep quiet inside, someplace that wants to rest.

This is what I read last night, in my revisiting of women who run with the wolves:

“To lose focus means to lose energy. the absolute wrong thing to attempt when we’ve lost focus is to rush about struggling to pack it all back together again. Rushing is not the thing to do. As we see in the tale [“The Three Gold Hairs”], sitting and rocking is the thing to do. Patience, peace and rocking renew ideas. Just holding the idea and the patience to rock it are what someone women might call a luxury. Wild Woman says it is a necessity.” (p. 329)

Have you found yourself at this sort of place, where there’s too much to do and no time to do it in? There’s always too much to do and no time to do it in, but when my energy is waned or I am reached the over saturated place, suddenly time feels tighter. How can I rest at times like these? Continue reading

results that aren’t results

This morning it’s late again when I sit down here at the keyboard and I remember that my body is always heavier, sleepier, more tired when she’s sleeping. We’re supposed to pretend like the blood doesn’t affect us, like everything’s normal. Well, everything is normal — this body is working extra hard during these days. Be unsurprised, ego-self, that the animal body has her seasons and cycles, has her rhythms and climbs, has her furrows, her sweet spots, has the moments when all she can do is lie down. Come and lie down with us. Bring a book. Now is the fallow time.

Last night was the Erotic Reading Circle at the Center for Sex and Culture, the monthly reading event I get to co-facilitate with the most-delicious Carol Queen. I am never disappointed at the ERC: last night we had stories about public-alley sex and masturbation and memoir about sex in SF in the mid-70s; we had the next installment of a fantasy piece, a story that taught me about the layers of exhibitionism possible at a nude beach, and D/s stories from both the D perspective and the s. The folks who come to the circle, both the regulars and the newbies, are without fail attentive listeners who are engaged with each piece being shared into the room — people pay close attention, give strong feedback, want to hear more. What a gift, to have a space where one’s erotic work is taken seriously. We meet again November 28 — maybe you’ll be able to join us one of these months.

Here’s what I want to tell you — the tissue around my microcalcifications came back benign. And today I go meet with a surgeon in the family practice department who will feel around where my primary care doctor originally felt around (and felt worried), and tell me if there’s anything going on that the mammogram didn’t pick up.

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what if I gave my body what she’s asking for?

stencil street art of a child sleepwalkingGood morning this Wednesday morning. How are you being fed today so far?

I started writing to you before I got out of bed this morning, wanted to find a way to write the blog directly from my brain into this space without having to get out of my warm nest and type it out with my fingers. There, ensconced in my covers, I was telling you about sleep, and about a new project that I’m formulating to think (through the writing) about how my relationship with sleep is changing.

All this, while hitting snooze on my little phone alarm for over an hour. Continue reading

necessary medicine

Good morning! After 7am and the birds are just now waking up in the live oak tree behind the apartment — I guess the rain kept them inside, too. The puppy’s not up yet, either. I think she knows what we’re gonna find when we head out into the city. Today, I’m grateful for the thick grey wet out there. Been up and working since 4:30. It’s almost time for a breakfast break.

Yesterday I had my third workshop in four days; it was a full stretch, starting on Thursday afternoon, and today I’m in a re-centering mode. How do you find your balance?  Continue reading

our bodies are not disposable

graffit of a tidal wave, painted in red on the side of a buildingGood morning good morning, my friends. This morning finds all the technology quieted because the batteries died in the night, next to me sleeping on  the couch on my back so that the (slight, ok, sure) bleeding would stop.

Let me back up. Yesterday, at about 9 in the morning, I got a biopsy in my right breast, after my first mammogram where they found a tiny gathering of micro calcifications and had no other photos to compare it to, no way to know whether this was a new gathering or a group that’s been hanging out together for awhile. And because I will be losing my insurance at the end of this month when I leave my day job, I decided to go ahead and do the biopsy now instead of waiting for 6 months for a followup mammogram and maybe having to do it then.

I woke up yesterday intending not to give the biopsy any energy at all. I didn’t want it to be a thing. I didn’t want to worry about it, because worry is negative energy and could affect the outcome of the tests. (What? This is what magical thinking looks like.) I expected to be in and out of there in under an hour, which the radiologist had lead me to believe would be the case.

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bodylove (again)

graffiti of a bird (a penguin) with the words "love me" on its round bellyThis morning the candles led me into the notebook, and I’ve got to be up and out early, so this is a short prompt today:

If you are in a place where you can, I want to invite you to put your hands on a part of your body that you have hated, that has been a place of shame or loss or embarrassment, that has held trauma for you. If you don’t want to actually rest your hands there, imagine doing so. Just rest your hands and/or energy there for a moment. Notice what rises up in you as you give some energy to this part of your body — or maybe to your body as a whole. What does it mean to deeply love and cherish your body, all of its parts, exactly as it is — as you are?

At this point, I like to invite a love letter to that part of the body that you’re cradling in your good hands (and it might be a love letter to your hands, too!) — notice what tone such a letter might take: adoring, apologetic, rueful, sweet, seductive, tender. What do you want to say to this part of your body? What does this part of your body want to say to you?

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