healing Archives

Dominions

With Time and Space and the Babies.

Time’s madness had its origins in a wrong story, the flaw magnified by the velocity of its spin. We were about to lose him. He was losing himself. His voice broke and its fragments arguing inside him were a constant racket.

Still, it seemed possible that their dissonance might resolve into music, the birth song of a new Adam, wizened by the bitterness of the strange fruit of experience, to taste with less abandon and more care, his assurance of righteousness tempered by the memory of storms that still quaked in his muscles. Any pointing he did now was a movement akin to wing-flutter or ecstatic dance, hand in flight like the feathered messenger of history blown forward by the heat of the accumulated blasts as it looks back with sobering understanding of the danger of the spark that so delighted when it came.

We liked him better this way, the wilding rhythm of him in pulses we could recognize.

“He can play better now,” Space assured us.

“How?” We had reason to doubt.

“Look,” she said, pointing downhill. “No history that justifies those rivers of blood can hold. If that was his organizing principle, he’s better off making less sense.”

It was true. When we laughed, he would not take offense, but would laugh back, singing our new names. He didn’t even think to tame the voices quarreling within him, and because of this they grew fond of his presence, and would sing soft songs to him when he tired of his own chaos.

And then she breathed into us, her eldest daughters, and bathed us in the waters that knew our origins and our future wombs, and it was then that we heard we, becoming.

Grace

Approaching.

When the saints go silent, and the church doors are shut,
and the hum soaks up your hearing and the minutes
you meant for keeping spill a mess at your feet,
as the engine grinds another skull––

When something floats a hand from the hollows
of the day’s drift, may you reach for it.

Neither Happy nor––

But here, happening how.

What would it mean to suspend belief in happiness as universal will? My allegiance is to the wretched, so I stand with the stranger, the exile, the banished. The despicable, the miserable. The sorrowful. And weep in defiance of the engine that would equate my fitness with an ability to maintain a distracted removal of my body from its cares. Let us weep together, and then. Let us join the children that they may not lose their capacities to be awed by the wonders and joys that will nevertheless persist, and must, for our continuance. In these we may delight often in concert with our griefs, as the salt of tears returns to laughing mouths. The range of this chorus of connection will not be boxed, packaged, sold, or theorized into anyone’s ten steps. None of these will hold. Only love. This is not the love of salvation by removal from pain. This is the love of immersion: in shit, and grief, and the stink of bodies, the relentlessness of our collective need, and the tedium and immensity of tending well.

***

The italicized opening line comes from Sara Ahmed, and has echoes across time and geographies, in Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, and throughout the Gospels.

Tracing Against the Grain

Re-visioning histories.

We returned to touch, to reading texture to see what we could learn about thinking well and by well we meant in a different direction from the killing machines. To the speech of our bodies, to save them––ours, and any others still here.

The End of Seeking

An arrival.

It’s fair enough to speak of perpetual mourning and mean it, and to wonder if keys were made for losing, but there is nothing of fairness, nothing deserved about finding at the end of any of these losses neither keys nor answers to any of the questions about where they went, but here this sudden hand, its open offering, the press of its continual pulse.

What Dawn May Bring

To the missing.

Dawn, and time slides down the ache of long sight. Not blind, only blinding sometimes, having offered the eyes one at a time to visiting creatures while still unripe, like here, take it, finding relief at being done seeing what we thought we knew, finding in it only the too-muchness of what is not. But this is about how life when it grows will vine and bud around and through and within the spaces of our missing parts. So, sight returned, and our hands, holding as we walked back into this our lives, still unknown, on the unsteady limbs of newborn foals still wet with the flood of our birth.

This Dark Abundance

Life among lichen.

To find the gnarled bend, its dripping hush, the moss-encrusted gathering space for unruly congregations of ferns, witches’ whiskers, and hazel gloves––and be enchanted to protect the wild, wet, crawling danger of this womb with hope only to be near it––and know that if there is anything here to be tamed, it is in you.

***

Inspired by the ongoing movement to protect the temperate rainforests of the UK and Ireland.

A Day’s Lesson

Enough already.

What is today our objective isn’t one and the materials needed are no more than what we already hold, and much less, and the words for the hour are only favorites including those we’ve never said, and the challenge is to find it in us to do one small thing or better yet, no single thing, not one, so that when they come to ask us to account for ourselves any one of us might respond, We are––, and leave it there?

In the Breaks

After a wreck.

Once when I was stuck, a dog came to sniff at me, tail wagging with interest. The old woman followed, calling after the dog. She laughed to see me.

That’s not very helpful, I said to the old woman, adding that I could really use some help.

Then the dog barked and ran off after something else. Still laughing as she followed the dog with her gaze, the old woman shared an opinion. This was not the sort of thing I would have found helpful in ordinary circumstances. However, stuck as I was, I had time to think about it after she left.

When nothing will let you go, she offered, what if you let it, and go? To catch what would bud and break from the remains?

That is how I came to be here, still breaking from remains.

First Light

In the wake of the storm.

The world after the flood, in suspension. The weight of its waters. How to hold. How to. How. We ask until it breaks. Flutter of dove, the rush of your wings: now. Now. Now the weight of the long wait cracks against the break of this sun, light into mourning. The song of its reach a single note, like Come.