epiphanies

unedited oracles from Christmas to Epiphany.

Or we can call this scattered lyrics across a page (I wrote this sentence last, just so you know).

Does it matter anymore? What it’s called? 

Everyone is always trying to say something. Teach something. Prove something. Sell something. Edit things down to empty space. Or edit things down until there is no space left.

Can we just bring back some messy who gives a fuck kind of art?

If I sat around here and waited until I had something to say, or if I decided to triple edit anything, I would never write.

If thought every time I published something it had to give you information, some kind of detailed research, or refined version of myself — I would not be here. Not now. So bare with me in this one. 

I am 49 years old and could have written much more, made so much more art, not cared about “getting it right” so many more times.

I could have unrolled and threaded words and sewed together a million pieces of fabric by now in the form of stories. I could have let art breathe.

But time. And time again. I waited until there was something better, or something smarter, or something that definitely won’t get hater backlash. LOL NOT LOL. Or waited until I had “fine-tuned” it until it is out of tune. No tune. Lacking song completely. 

But here is my first epiphany. 

Art does take time and patience and showing up. 

It takes practice. 

It takes hard work. It really fucking does. Do you think my eyes are this fucked because of my lack of screen time?

But it also takes the ability to not give a shit and share the fire of it with the world as it is, when it asks to show up. It may need specific conditions, and that’s ok. The cosmos informs.

But it takes the ability to not grasp. To know you have a channel. That you are a channel. And to let go long enough to let things live outside of you without owning and controlling them.

Art, like everything else, is a spirit. 

A sentient being asking to be born from us (among other beings). 

Writing, like everything else, contains the spark of life. Each of these words, I would like you to see, has a breath about them. Breath and spirit are in love.

Each one that I spell is a spell that dances, takes life, is named. Is a part of a larger ecosystem. 

I am here to just keep them all alive. I am just here to make sure we tend to the spirits, ok?

As much as this is a “colonizer” language, I write in, what if it didn’t have to be? if we say each word, each sentence as living, growing, evolving, force, of it’s own accord.

What if our grandparents' dialects formed in between the english. What if our english was just a little weird, just a little queer? A little old country and peasant? A little broken and bruised in the most vulnerable ways? And we tended to each form of them. Each letter, each curve, each word.

Tended to them with eyes, gut, bones. Our breath.

Be part of breathing them with me.

You are just as much in this now as I am. 

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You know what they say about when you feel like you have no idea what is going on/what is happening —— they say you are inside an epiphany. 

Literally nobody ever has said that. Except me. Just now. I said it. 

I told my friends the other day. I do not feel “witchy” inspired at all. And then I said, without knowing really what was going to come out of my mouth: 

 “but during those times so much is moving through me.”

Time is, when we soften into it, the most magical thing we can allow to drip in and to drop out. Time is such a witch.

Time is nothing and it contains all the particles of magic that ever have existed and will ever exist. 

I have no idea what is happening but I feel like I am a vessel for time. And it’s all moving through me. That is enough, I think.

I am bleeding. 

Bleeding, liquid, is the first form of time keeper. Of meter. Of rhythm. 

Drip drip drip. 1 2 3 

How many drips has it been since I took my first breath? How many drops of time are in 49 years?

Drip drip drip how many diapers from me being fertile to now?

Drip drip drip from until I am a dried up old creek of a woman wearing electric blue eyeshadow and smoking rolled tobacco right on my couch. 

Drip drip drip until I take my last breath

How many drips when I am dead?  Do the dead keep time?

The blood dripped, the moon changed, the ocean swelled. The drummers drummed. The wheat grew. The mother’s fed. Milk drips. 

This is how it all began.

This liquid keeps my time. All our time. Our time keeping is a bleeding mother. A bleeding is a rhythm. I am really close to being done with bleeding. How will my body keep time? Who will I be without my time? What will my rhythm be? 

I hope these words will take the place of my blood. 

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I am going to practice love more this year.

 For me this means a lot of things. I know this seems cliche. Simple. So early to mid 1990s warehouse rave era on what we called ecstasy but the kids these days call her molly.

But the more I grieve (which is also something I will be doing more of), the acutely aware I become of how much more I can love.

Loss will not make me stop loving, even though at times it’s easy to just give up on it and harden myself away from everyone else. Remove myself. Staying hard can be easier for a while.

But I will let Loss fertilize and water my love.

Even in the grief or the feelings of betrayals. I will love softer, not harder. I will love more in the present, less in the past, less in the hope of some fake future that does not even exist yet, that I trust Time will take care of for me.

I will love like the dripping time keeper I am with love being the one thing that can and will stop time. 

I will drip love. 

The color red love. 

And also the color dark blue love. 

Sometimes I will flood love. Clearing away everything from a dirty street. Clearing away the smells and the garbage and the cigarette butts. I will flood love to everyone in the town will have to remember love. 

And sometimes I will keep time and love with gnarly clots of what blood, what blood will become at this age, when love changes her phase of time. Love is blood.

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What are the things that seem to stop us from allowing that delicious, pollinating feeling of love to drop seeds in our cells? What stops me from breathing in and breathing out the love? I know, I sound like a white lady yoga teacher, which I once was. 

But it’s a good visual, right? We hold our breath from love. We close our bodies from love. I want fucking love. I want to fuck love, yes. I want to breathe love. Breathe it in. Breathe it out. It’s not a dumb thing to say. I feel it. Then we have to live it. Become it. Not just say it. 

I can choose love with my children so many times and instead I choose something else, something I would not describe as love. I would describe it as closing off. Holding my breath. Holding my ego. Closing my pores. Words from the throat. Clenching my ass. Clenching time. Clenching.

Mother is breathing.  Mother is a meter. I will drip. I will keep time for them. Drip drip. Time is a container. Inside it we can all flood. 

I am going to practice love this year. 

Gently wrapped, like soft dough, around my grief. 

And then I am going to bake it like a puff pastry with brie inside. 

Or maybe I will bake it with an apple, like in my dream.

I had my first visit from my father the other night. It was love. It was so much love.

Dreaming is such odd timekeeping. Night drips. Night rhythms. 

There we were, my dad and I, together, in the exact room I was sleeping in. He was wearing the exact thing I always envision him in. The red plaid shirt. He was in his more heavy-set time. Which I liked better than his end of life thin time.

In the dream, I read him a book with a puff pastry apple recipe written within it, written by my sister. And then I told him how much I missed him and he said to me, with that look on his face, like I’m the crazy one, not him, but me:

“What do you mean? I am here with you everyday.”Maybe the dead don’t keep time. Or maybe they are the keepers of underworld time.

Maybe the puff pastry around an apple was a symbol of the time we will have together again. Soft pastry around the delicious magical fruit. Baked and alchemized into a puff. The apple (besides the pomegranate) is often known as the fruit of the underworld. 

Some mythologists say it’s the apple that binds the daughter persephone to the underworld during the winter, during these days. During this strange drip of time, the days of oracle.

Maybe I dreamed of this apple puff pastry recipe and my dead dad because I am bound to the underworld.

I am to wrap soft dough of a puff pastry around the fruit, holding it, warming it. Serving it to those I love. Apples are love.

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The other day I noticed I was having a hard time breathing.

 I was just making the filling for stuffed homemade crepe manicotti, but it got so bad, I had to walk away. (recipe for manicotti filling? See below). 

Drink some water. Sit down. Deepen and slow my breath. Put the bottoms of my feet against the face of the fire. 

I was on the edge of a panic attack or a stroke, I don’t know what, but I realized it was not either of those things and that it was grief stuff in my chest. Stuffed inside me.

Grief swelling my gut. Grief smashing against the hard wall of my bowels. I needed to move with Grief. Move down with grief. Down to my feet. Dance with it down. Breathe like a witch. Open the bottoms of my feet. Let it move down and out into the fire, out into the soil. Remembering: grief cannot be constipated. Grief, like time, need to move.

 Grief must be eaten, digested, and shit out like everything else. 

Grief is love from my feet to the soil. This is how I become part of the microbes. This is how I become part of the place I am trying so hard to root deep into. 

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I don’t know when, but let’s say billions of years ago, pollination was a crap shoot. 

It’s so funny to write that, because on a side story, that is really not a side story, is that my father probably supported us for decades at the craps table. 

His magic was the die (is that the plural of dice?). That his love was a crap shoot, in many ways, depending on the day. But, it kept us alive. Fed. Sheltered. 

But back in the day, like way back, a billion years ago, it was a crap shoot with plants. Plants barely could get a seed planted. The environment was hostile as fuck. Or it was just patient. The wind had to be exact. The water, perfect. The temperature, ideal.

And then maybe some seeds scattered and made some life. But it was rare. 

Then during some the liminal space. The liminal era, otherwise known as the Cretaceous Period, in geologic time it was the  last moment of the Mesozoic Era, a moment, a threshold, that lasted from 145 million years ago and ended 66 million years ago, took place.

What this period is known for best, for me at least, besides being the liminal times on Earth?

 It was the era that flowers were born. 

Flowers are born in crap shoots and liminal spaces. Do I have any idea what the difference was during this period of time to make the flowers seed? No, I don’t. Someone out there, some smartiepants, just go ahead and tell me. I imagine it means that when things are ending but not yet beginning, the environment is best for growth. But.

This year, I am going to be like flowers.

Flowers came during a hard time, when pollination was a gamble, when life was at a threshold, and they made furry, soft, silky, thistle-y, lady-like, stalk-y, blankets and waves and dancing meadows all over the land and perfumed the air. Sticky sweet. Fierce. Covered in dew.

You know when a specific flower-born scent perfumes the air, there is nothing but oxytocin style love pumping through you. You get so turned on to life. Full of gratitude. For me it’s neroli and jasmine and hawthorne flowers, which smell like the best kind of dirty sex.

And because of flowers. Fruit was born. 

And because of fruit, some kinds of animals got hungry and knew the sweetness of nectar, and the sweetness of energy, and the sweetness of love. 

They also learned how to convert energy into protein and from there, the mammals were born. 

Listen, I am a not a poet nor a scientist. You all know that. 

I read things and then scatter them here and hope something fertile and poetic arrives. 

But what if we can wrap our heads around Flowers being god, making us, making beauty and love for us, making us fall in love and want more love. Making us convert energy into whatever is next. Evolving. Change. Something fucking good (please).

 And of course the iterations of god that came before flowers. The salt, the waters, the lava, the wind. All bringing the soil exactly what is needed for seeding. Over time. A messy stint of art making. 

Bringing us the sweet fruits, that brought us warm-blooded life. That brought us, us. 

I am sure I could stretch that out with better words and more descriptions and I am not saying anything new or unknown, but for me, right now, it blows my mind. 

Why don’t you take a moment and think of the miraculous love in this and bring your own words and visuals to this moment. Amen.

When flowers were our grandmothers. 

And how flowers are still our grandmothers. 

I will love flowers more this year. I will love myself like I love a flower. I love all the grandmothers. The keepers of rhythm. Of time.

I will also love my art like I love a flower. 

I will make it until the conditions are right, I will air out the soil. I will pray for the winds. I will sit here and just pretend it’s a seed catching the soil and somehow each of these words, a spell, for something called writing to be born. Yes, I know it’s a crap shoot.
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(considering a free-writing session for my paid subscribers. we can gather, free-write, talk about it all, and then say goodbye. let me know whose interested).

Manicotti filling: 

• 2 pounds ricotta

• 2 cups shredded FRESH BUFALO mozzarella 

• 1 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese

• 1 tablespoon minced fresh flat-leaf parsley

• ⅛ teaspoon grated nutmeg

• some salt

• some pepper

• 2 eggs

• Mix this all up together until smooth.

What do I use this in? I make simple crepes, and roll this filling up in them. Place them rolled in a baking dish that has been treated with a little homemade tomato sauce. I cover the filled crepes with more sauce. Slayer of more romano, some fresh mozzarella and bake until bubbling and done.