When Writing Helps. (A process piece).

I haven’t been writing. How many times have I started a Substack like this. I am so sick of this line.

But maybe you haven’t been either or maybe you haven’t been creating whatever it is you love to create. Maybe it’s just too much. And you understand the ebb and flow of this (or any) grueling art that we love so much and know we need so much, especially now, but now feels hard. I am so sick of saying this as well.

Today is August 1st, as I type this, and full on Leo energy has me remembering that it’s time to begin again. But it has to be cool. I can’t write the fire right now. I need to let the water move through this page. Fluid prose, soft bends, sandy beds, riverside words. 

My brain hurts. My heart hurts. Those are two complete sentences that can sum up all that I want to say, but in between those words are meadows, oceans, crevices of emotion, thunderstorms, walls of humidity, underwater whirlpools of grief, menopause, sacrifice, pure Jupiter luck. There is always more, the downbeat, the in-between beat, all those letters that make up the sentences — each one contains universes yet to be discovered. I know this. This is why we write. Create. Be together. 

We want to unearth the rhythm of what is unseen. 

The truth is, writing helps me remember what is important to me. It reminds me there are universes between how I feel and what I sense and what is happening. Under the vowels. Between my hands. `

Writing is the god within that helps me language for my own regulation. My desire to sit down, beyond my own regulation, is that somehow, these words, my words, saturate you with softness as well. Even if they mean nothing to you, I hope you can feel them on your skin. 

Not the kind of writing that yells, or sells, or fights. Not the kind of writing that needs to be right (as LL Cool J says “I don’t wanna be right, I just want you”). Not the kind of writing that tries to change your mind, but maybe changes the shift of your breath. 

I want my writing to be a pleasure bath, to be a hope, to be a spell that lands at your feet. This is always why I sit down to write like I am speaking to you — because I am. I am not here to research (though that is fun), but words that come from investigations of the unseen. Pulling threads from the roots that connect us. Silver from stars. The love of God. The tolerance of the Mother. The sweet humus smell of death in soil after the July rain. 

The kind of writing that just comes when things are indeed falling apart.

When things are indeed cruel, unusual, and historically repeating itself. When things feel like “what a shame” everywhere you turn. It could be so good. It really could be. 

The kind of writing that inspires the soft tender yearning parts of our human-ness that still know that life is so good, it can be, and it is.  The fierce words of our guts that remind us we are indeed living, walking, stories, poetry, change. 

As I watch things fall entirely apart 

I am also watching things fall perfectly into place. 

I know this is true. 

It’s a wild storm of pieces breaking in mid air

And cracking us in millions of pieces

And watching our story fracture. 

Take unrecognizable form. 

As I type I don’t know what they are but let’s just give this a go and say as this happens

Things are also

Always

Falling in place. 

What a crazy notion I can’t believe I am even typing it. 

But. 

A mimosa tree showed up in my life, in the backyard of my new, very old house. Who knew I needed mimosa medicine in my life. And there she was sprouting stings of pink. Too high for me to reach, and gather, but perfect enough for me to just stand on the ground, look up. Pink.  

My family arrived from all over the country for 4 days to celebrate my daughter and my mother (graduation and both their birthdays). My mother, whose 94 year olds now, traveled 3 hours, stayed in a hotel, traveled three hours back. Since my father died, she died mostly, too, and it’s been a strange and normal grief path to be the daughter of a living but dead mother. During the party, she looked around at all the children and grandchildren and said “I did all this, didn’t I” and she smiled, and I felt the joy in her heart. There was a moment of her knowing that everything was falling apart for her; her body, her mind, everything she knew— she lost a limb when her husband died, but in that moment, things were right, something was right. In that tiny spark of time/space/ to notice, an entire lineage system fell back into place. 

An old friend of mine showed up so generously for me. This is a complete sentence that moves me with such gratitude that I cry. 

My husband pours his sweat into the old cracks of the new old home we bought but can’t live in yet — an old nunnery on the river— preparing us for move-in (I hope soon because the one I currently live in is also falling apart, like everything else).  I sit on the balcony, roll a smoke, watching the Hudson River move in both directions, up and down stream— not in confusion of it’s direction, but with such soft persistence that all ways are the path for the water. Both directions are going somewhere.  Meeting in the middle, currents are doable, they are ease. The wrinkles and folds of the river rolling wash my brain clear of expectation of how I assume things should be, of timelines, of plans, of what I want.

The river is the elder I asked for. That I wish to become. Across the street from the house I can see a shrine to Our Lady, she’s called Our Lady of The Hudson River. Before we found this house, my root worker, in the middle of a moment that felt hopeless for me, told me “there is a shrine for you to tend to” — and sometimes things fall right into place. The next day we found this house, in need of deconstruction, but with the Mother across the street, a shrine right there to tend to. Things fall together, too. Do you notice the things that are doing that? 

I am watching communities form. Friendships deepen. We hold each other up. When things get too hard, we show up. 

There are more butterflies and fireflies in my yard than the last 3 years. A butterfly lands on my body almost every time I take a walk. The black kind. With the white dots on the bottom of both back wings. There is blue vervain growing everywhere. I pick chicory and put them in old sauce jars. I bought the cheap nag champa and burn it every morning forgetting that I really like the smell. 

Last night a toad came up right next to me. I understood exactly what it meant but if I told you, you’d think I was crazy.

My daughter fell in love.

My other daughter wrote a poem and read it out loud to a lot of people. 

My other daughter found freedom. 

This morning I found two of them in bed together, cuddling in sleep. 

There is lake, crystal water, one I can submerge my entire body in, cool water, soft bottom, walking distance from my house. My body has been on fire. The water is putting it out. 

I have discovered the sexiness of bright colored bike shorts. 

I am falling apart on the mat to practice my breath falling back together. 

I am learning how to cut all vegetables with a paring knife, in my hand, no cutting board, and watching and feeling each piece of cucumber or onion falling together in a bow. This is how my parents did it. How my aunts did it. How my grandparents did it. 

The crows like the peanuts I live out for them.

This morning, right now, I can feel a breeze. 

Every day, I seem to still be here with his opportunity to write. I can wake up this early, on the first moment of every day, and just remember what is falling together. What a practice to take on. It’s not easy. I feel like I am bypassing the destruction. But I am not. It is the reason I am writing each word. 

In the end, there is nothing that isn’t connected. 

I wish I did it more, this writing, because this small list has shifted my entire energy while showing up. I know it’s not about anything. But maybe it gives you some permission to just fly?

What is your falling together? 

What is falling into place while everything else falls apart? 

These two things, the spirit of both falling together and falling apart—  are intricate webs. Also, there are beautiful spiders this year. And not one has bitten me. Well that’s a lot. Only a few have bitten me.  

I can write this while I push up against the falling apart with each word here, I can remember what also exists, within it. Or around it. They both breathe life into how we change. 

We show up as best as we can in the liminal, middle spaces, to be present to everything that is. We cannot always fix but we can pay attention. Attention is connection. And my things falling together are intricately woven to you, as is my falling apart. I take joy in what is saving you, holding you. And I grieve with you for what has been ripped apart. 

I love you. 

PS. I am working on a more researched - and also investigation of the unseen- piece about “old women” priestesses in Mediterranean culture, specially Magna Grecia. We tend to only think of priestesses as goddesses. But post-menopausal women in this ancient culture had a very specific role (many of them) because of their “oldness”. As I enter my menopause and old days of my life, I am deeply interested in the way my lineage cultures held space for old women, or how the old women held space for the entire culture. It may take me another couple weeks to finish it — but stick around if you are interested.