👉🏽 Next Sober from Bullshit Recovery Club is March 15. Registerhere. 👉🏽 March writing workshop is live, and the theme is “Anticipating Sunrises.” Register here (Sunday, 3/28, 10am - 12pm PST).
Lately, I’ve been hearing little whispers of intensity about the collective coming up on one year in Pandemia. We are about to hit upon an anniversary that none of us wants. It’s also almost my birthday, which means I’m a pisces, and I happen to be an enneagram 4, so yeah. It’s a feelings stew over here.
It’s also true that it’s magnolia season here in NorCal. Some of the open blossoms are bigger than my whole head. Springtime is where I’m pulling nourishment these days, so today, I want to share a poem by my dear friend and mentor, Christopher DeLorenzo. Would love to hear where you’re finding nourishment these days <3
I hope you enjoy, I hope you read it out loud, and I will see you Tuesday.
Fuck Spring no really, Fuck Spring. Fuck Easter with its little newborn chicks pastel bunnies baskets of foil wrapped chocolates and multi-colored jellybeans that all taste the same.
Fuck all of the blossoming trees: pink, pale plum against purple black branches, white apple blossoms, Japanese cherry puffs wet, white magnolia and the Victorian Box trees blossoming so sweet on a warm evening you could drink it.
Fuck the birds mating and singing building intricate nests and bees drunk on nectar orange pollen covering their black legs. Dragonflies mating in mid-air? Fuck all of you.
Stop filling lush, grassy fields with yellow mustard flower stop bursting forth from bulbs: tulips, lilies, freesia, jonquils: Fuck off lilacs.
Stop reminding me about the relentless, unstoppable, supernatural cycle of death and rebirth stop trying to pull me out of this sadness stop making me think about falling in love again.
*I share this poem almost every year around this time. I need it every time.
Love you all,
xxoo tuya,
Dani
Links!
A story about “Immigrant Blankets.” Quick story: When I lived in Spain, few of the apartments had central heating and when it got cold, real cold (colder than any winter this native Californian had ever spent) I found myself spending all my time huddled around a space heater and wearing multiple layers of clothing to sleep. My friend Abby’s apartment did have central heating, and she loaned me one of these blankets, which happened to feature her native Mexico’s larger-than-life flag. That blanket SAVED me that winter, and in addition to keeping me warm and toasty, the weight of it made it a gravity blanket before gravity blankets were a thing. I nearly shed a tear when she moved away and asked for it back! If anyone has the SF blanket hookup, please let me know.
Disturbance seems constant now, and everywhere at once. How to describe this time when the world has slipped its moorings? Democracy fragile and cracking, a global pandemic that could well be the first of more to come, a warming world. It feels as if we are living amid a great unraveling, a time when our lives are being stripped and harrowed over and over. Humanity has been kicked out of the nest of the Holocene, where we’ve evolved over the past ten thousand years, and though some say we’ve begun the Anthropocene, I tend to favor E. O. Wilson’s locution: the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness. In the midst of so much coming apart, I wonder, where is home? Where is our unshakable core, that place beyond which no harm can reach?
This article helped me deepen into an understanding I didn’t know I was lacking: What does it really mean to be non-binary? “…we must grapple with the ways in which the articulation of some identities might further marginalize others.”
5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating: How Public Health Messaging Backfired. “Recognizing all these dynamics is important, not only for seeing us through this pandemic—yes, it is going to end—but also to understand how our society functions, and how it fails.”
I recently (safely!) got a manicure and the amount of disproportionate joy it’s given me is imposible to understate. I loved this article. (Also, I’m a HUGE lipstick person, too). To all the clothes I’ve loved before: Reconciling the sweatpants-wearing me with the fashion-loving woman I was just a year ago is an existential crisis like no other.
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love that poem!
i know. i want to eat it.