Tag Archives: friends

when we’re not ok

graffiti, two people holding balloons, talking to each otherGood morning, good morning. I was up again in the middle of the night last night, and didn’t get back to sleep until probably 2:30 or so. So when my alarm went off at 4 o’clock, my body laughed quietly, hit snooze, and proceeded to sleep for another hour.

The last several days, I take a dance class in the afternoon – which consists of me watching videos created months ago.  I’ve been dancing along to a video that the instructors put together in honor of breast cancer awareness, and in the mix are two songs about okness, it’s ok not to be ok, and another one, the name of which I don’t know, but which always makes me cry: the singer is telling a friend or maybe even me, her listener, that I’m going to be ok, that I just need to keep going, keep on. (I look it up: Keep on, it’s called.) This song has been making me cry – fortunately, this song comes during the cool down part of the workout, so I’m not weeping through burpees or grapevines or something.

Something in me is grieving, is feeling a big loss. I wonder if it’s something that I’ve held in my body since 2012, when I qut my day job in order to focus my attention only on the workshops and writing, and proceeded immediately to have a huge back spasm that almost immobilized me for a month or more. Though the big pain eventually wore off, I’ve had a lingering tightness in my piriformis  or sacroiliac joint (or something) that created some numbness down my leg and into my foot. Nothing too alarming, at least for me – I could move, I could walk and run and exercise and dance, and the more I moved, the more the numbness would let up. I just figured I needed to keep working, and eventually that little remaining tightness would release. It wasn’t exactly ok, but it was all right.

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Metaphysical Fitness — Classes start soon!

Jen’s Note: Sista Nau*T is my dear friend and compatriot in the work of transformation & healing — she’s deeply invested in the work of helping us remember the importance of our bodies and connect back into these selves we sometimes forget to take such good care of:


Doshe Healing Arts in collaboration with Bushmama Productions present:
Metaphysical Fitness Training

Come explore practical solutions for common obstacles to health and wellness.
Learn to work out anytime, anywhere engaging in small daily activities that have profound life long impacts.

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Community and remembrances

(a slightly longer version of this got posted on my livejournal — katasutra.livejournal.com)

Thank you, Kathleen — thanks to your love and your consistent spirit and to the ways you have affected my life, without my even knowing it.

Yesterday was Kathleen Bolton’s memorial service, and one of the things I’d like to spend some time writing about community — community in all its bigness and struggle and frustration & magnificence. There’s been a community sustaining me here in the bay area since I moved here, though I’ve felt on the outside. There’s a community of family & the dearest of friends forged over the past two decades (and then some, I suppose, with respct to the blood family, huh?) that I’m only just now, maybe, allowing to filter into the hardened-est, most vulnerable edges of my heart. The community that showed up here in SF for the Body Heat show just about tore my heart out, it was so gorgeous and celebratory — and then the communities we got to touch into as we crossed the country: San Diego, Minneapolis, Columbia, Columbus, Easthampton, Boston, Providence, Philly, D.C., Atlanta — even those we didn’t meet directly (Milwaukee, Asheville and the folks listening to Diana Cage’s radio show there in the morning’s wee hours) — the love and support was deep and present and nearly unquestioned.

And ok, sure — sometimes, for survivor girl over here, it’s hard to trust, to believe in, that kind of presence of spirit and appreciation, that unadulterated love, that faith & yes there was trust — the kind that offers food and home to strangers, the kind that shows up to listen and offers cheers, the kind that welcomed us at each and every stop (truly).

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