Posted on by d

night blooms

Photo by Fabiano Rodrigues on Pexels.com | petrichor, cyclical release | sanguine meander

here we are again. this cyclical expression of reproductive desire manifests in all sorts of strange ways. i have no desire to be out and about, but i want you to come to me. with me. in me.

my bookshelves and my seed bank are really organized but domesticity has never been my strong point. i am a person of regimen about many things but I often leave the vacuum in the middle of the living room floor. i have three dogs. i walk on land. my feet reflect that. i am grounded, rooted to the earth. I have befriended the soil and sometimes it comes inside. i have a child and a cat and a small population of spiders who reside in busier corners. Together, we keep the home and the ecosystem as balanced as we can, so leave me be, leave me to my motherhood, my books and words and spiders and dirt, plants and animals. these too, provide harvest. i want our love to be an interlude, the stuff of a troubadour’s song. i need to yearn.

there is thunder, such a joy to listen to but even so, where lightning strikes there is often fire. this rain is blessed, extra welcome during this driest time of year, yet the fear strikes, always, and today the sky filled with smoke. It made for spectacular sunsets here while two hours away, 4500 acres of grassland burned and was 0% contained. Here, midnight summer rains left crystal drops on glowing tobacco flowers which exuded the most utterly intoxicating scent (to be present for this was to understand the origins of every cliche that just happened). The tobacco plants are beginning to go to seed. I have saved some and I have scattered others. Even through this long, dark winter there is a future of infinite opportunity, just as long as it all doesn’t burn down. Now we fear the storms.

We cannot learn to fear this wet necessity, the most natural and encouraging delivery of life. Sometimes now, water here rumbles and burns and people scatter. Water, she’s been in our deepest, darkest places, washing off the leftovers and sending them on their way. She has announced her arrival with rolling booms and flashes of light and we have danced in her court. It’s a blessed and ancient ritual. If only it were simply power to respect, but it engages all our senses. Dangerous territory. We don’t always know what kind of magic we really weave when we draw down the moon.

Posted on by d

oxygenate

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash | oxygenate | sanguinemeander

i love pain – not necessarily the surface-infliction of it, but the bowel-deep pain that stirs emotions and kind of throws them all together as they start moving their way out. catharsis ache. i used to resort only to orgasm for this until i discovered that this kind of  pain makes orgasms even better. it takes a little longer, but longer and deeper is the point (girth is nice too — if i’m going there, i am definitely a size queen).

other expressions like this: on an evening last week when i was writing,  shit was getting serious and i was there in that zone when a large and strange spider crawled across my lap. i lost myself and everything went flying with a shriek. there was a moment of limbo, my 1940s art deco coffee table with its original glass panes and a chromebook and time stopped but then nothing connected. the little laptop landed in a papa-san chair full of pillows and the spider jumped or fell to the floor and wandered off to a less chaotic part of the living room and then i collected myself and sat back down, lighter.

another once had its place here in this paragraph but i lost it while writing the last.

ah yes, it was that time my car went spinning on the highway. a friend and i, on a day trip from Portland to the Oregon coast, were coming home when i hit a patch of black ice with near-bald tires. the car spun in circles in slow motion and Ben and i looked at each other calmly as if we might be about to die. the car came to a standstill with its ass stuck in a snowdrift and before i could even call AAA, a Mexican guy pulled over in a very large pickup truck and winched us out and we had faced death with the utmost in resolve and acceptance and ten minutes later we were continuing on back to portland and it was like it never happened and it also changed everything.

i breathe more deeply after having suffered a little. the process of catharsis is a birthing process. the end result, that great release, is where our focus lies. it makes it easy to forget how much it can hurt along the way but somewhere in the trying of that, i figured out how embrace the pain. i learned to love it. it became ecstasy.

Posted on by d

where the roots of it lie

i decided to mess with her head this afternoon. i’m not a violent person, she was telling me, but someone had made her very angry. blew the top right off of her.

but i didn’t punch her, she said. i could have, but i didn’t. i’m not a violent person.

we were sitting by the river and i was high and so was she, and she’s savant-smart so i went for it to see if we might be able to talk philosophy and so i said yeah, there are people i have wanted to punch too but i didn’t do it, but i still thought about it. so what is it that makes a person truly nonviolent? is it when you simply don’t think of punching someone anymore when they drive you to rage, or is it the choice you make not to act on impulse or to indulge that rage? the latter would suggest that violence and rage are innate, instinctual things that had a point when our amygdala served more of an upfront purpose.

If the latter is the case, then more than likely some of this fear is imprinted in our genetic expressions, our limbic systems, and originating from a scarcity fear that turned us from peaceful garden dwellers in fig leaves to the warring, post-Saharasian tribes that may have given us our first real, violent inclinations. it’s one theory, anyway.

i liken this particular question to that of freedom versus determinism. i find great comfort in determinism, of course. it gives me purpose and meaning to look for and stay focused on. i am here with a purpose and that purpose is… bam. done, kinda. i will just go and do that.

freedom seems terrifying in comparison, like the difference of being in a lush and comforting forest versus facing a great wide open plain. it is easy to see which i prefer – the forest is as a womb to me. the field has nothing to hold up the sky and is too full of too much possibility. and again, i’m likely operating from my amygdala. i’ve done a lot of work the past several years on rewiring some things around that, but at one point in our evolution, we shifted to bipedalism so we could see over the grass and better keep ourselves fed and out of danger, so… it’s in there, that fear of the hunted, and it’s more about collective species damage than individual trauma (add that to our united misfortune, though, and that person suffers even more than most. they are always watched). It might do me some good to channel the raptor, to fly over the plains searching for prey, but i am not really interested in hunting anything, and I do not want to kill.

what i want is trust, strength and indulgence and a consciousness that has a very sharp eye. i ask myself what it is that i want from other people. the next step is to cultivate those things in myself.

when i remember to do this, i’m forced to be honest about what it really is that i want from others and what is mine to fill. what comes next then, are those joys that can only be shared through conscious communication with others, endeavored and indulged in with a much higher level of clarity, sincerity, and courage. and maybe some dirty words (actually yeah, definitely some of those. i’m a fan of spoken word).

oh, courage. one sometimes needs so much of it to be vulnerable. shame is maybe the biggest curse to befall us; it cuts us off from joy and catharsis and the sloppy wet sounds of life. we lose out on the answers to questions we don’t ask.