Tag Archives: radical healing

can we have delight even when we’re so rightfully angry?

greybrown sandy beach and a brown dog in a red coat with her white paws pressed to a ball  - over the beach, a blue and pink sunrise sky

The puppy doesn’t care how pretty the sunrise is – she has her ball

CN: talk about rage and reasons to be enraged and also some not-rageful sex talk toward the end

Good morning, good morning. The puppy got me up, accidentally, at 2:30 or so, and I haven’t been able to fall back to sleep since — so we came out through the rain (the puppy walking close to me to stay under the umbrella) to the little house and have the candles lit and she is comfortable tucked in her chair under one of the blankets that I bought at Ikea when I was furnishing the office I had in Oakland for a little while and the tea kettle is on and the space heater is churning at my feet and we have an astonishingly perfect morning place. The ocean is so loud I could hear it from the bed, which is rare — it’s been warm the last couple of days, but windy, and there’s clearly a storm coming or influencing us from somewhere. 

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unsolicited advice for a survivor

Rockridge HeartsThis is what I want to say: It won’t end. You won’t get fixed. You won’t reach a place where you name is Healed and incest doesn’t feed you breakfast anymore. The people who tell you You’ll get over it don’t know what they’re talking about, because they live in their own closed cage of denial. You have been transformed. You are not the same as you were Before. And you will never not also be who you were Before — but it may be some years before these layerings of yourselves can sit in the same room with you and have coffee in the morning. There is no such thing as getting over it. There is the business of living through. There is learning to breathe again, there is learning you are worthy of the air you breathe, there is having to breathe when you know you are not worthy. There is you, just breathing. You will have years called Night and years called Drunk and years called Weep and years called Frozen and years called Broken and Fuck. You look at this and think you can’t bear so many years of pain — but what’s true is that all those years are also called Freedom.

You will not always be in pain. Your heart will harden and soften at the same time. You will forget all the names you ever had, you will climb into a skin so different from the one you were fucked into that not even your mother — especially not your mother — will be able to recognize you. This may or may not be a cocoon. It might just actually be the true face of your new eyes. Every stage of healing is a phase, like this breath you are taking is a phase, like this heartbeat is a phase, like a single kiss is a phase is an instant an instantiation of your personhood. Phase means nothing except you are still alive. Ignore them when they tell you that whatever you’re experiencing now is just a phase. Ignore their relief, if it comes, when you enter a different phase. They do not sing with all the tendons of your body and they can’t speak the truth of your soul. Sit with the people who can hold your surfaces and your undersides.

One day you will say yes to your skin, yes to sex, yes to the feel of your body alive and inhabitable. The next day you will wrench up with No again. There will be years like this. There will be two yes hours in a row. There will be days when you don’t say his name, nights when the dreams in which you cannot move begin to stretch and taffy in your psyche, one day inside you will take the knife he brandishes and turn it on him. That will be a good day.

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songs from the deep inside of our bodies

A short write on this chilly Monday morning — the puppy’s getting ready to be out in this frost. Myself, I’ve finally broken out the hat and gloves. I hold out as long as possible, every year, building up my tolerance, not wanting to give in to the actuality of winter. Sink into the dark, sure, but wear clothes enough to really protect my body from the elements? What do you take me for — a wuss? (That right there is a survivorprompt for another day)

How are you caring for yourself this morning? How does the candlelight find you?

What’s up for today? The Winter’13 workshop sessions are all officially underway; the last one, Write Whole, begins tonight, and I am looking forward to inviting this final workshop into my Oakland space. My body is in a state of what I am calling healed — though my piriformis and I continue to have daily conversations involving stretching, spasm-release and fluttering. It feels like she’s winking rapidly at me from within my backside, which I would like to take as something as light as flirtation rather than the profound release that she’s allowing us to settle into.

I am aware, on this morning, that I have had, over the last couple of months,  the experience of re-learning how to walk. Sometimes in this healing we (or at least I) have to break all the way down in order to come into consciousness around what we know, how far we’ve come, and to get more deeply into the next layers that need some laying on of hands (whether psychic or physical). Continue reading