distress // this stress

…thoughts and questions, on dark beginnings and this week.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

How frightened are you?

How numb are you?

How angry are you?

— Economic blackout – Pussies fight back – Boycott Inauguration —

[Barack, Michelle…I will miss you.]

How can we reenvision patriotism during the reign of this volitale leader?

What can I do?

We the People of the United States of America

are in distress.

My small, human, woman, brown, queer body is responding to this stress.

Check out Shepard Fairey’s (The Amplifier Foundation) new artwork and collaboration to support the people in this movement.

It’s time to organize, it’s time to get clear in the issues you are passionate about.

It’s time for agency.

we’re in this together, right?

 

 

 

Breaking Agreements

This is what beginning 2017/ending 2016 looks like, for me…

Who would I be if I left the suffering that I felt made me this strong?

Who would I be if I didn’t look to be seen?

Who would I be if I was already loved and didn’t have to look for it?

Who would I be if I didn’t have to win? If I didn’t have to be more?

Who would I be if I didn’t need someone to remind me who I am?

Who would I be if I didn’t feel abandoned? Or like abandonment could happen at any moment?

Who would I be if I wasn’t afraid of being alone?

Who would I be if I didn’t attach to my dream worlds?

Who would I be if I wasn’t addicted to love?

Who would I be if I wasn’t trying to impress ‘ the people who matter’?

Who would I be if I didn’t want to be older or younger or healthier than I am now?

Who would I be if I forgave my guilt?

Who would I be if I forgave my grudges?

Who would I be if I could ask for what I want? If I could stay with what is satisfying without looking for the next thing? If I could move into more pleasure?

 

 

Becoming Bruja : My Protest

Five ways to be Latina

1. Talk with your hands

2. Have a fiery personality

3. Allow yourself to be openly emotional

4. Wear red, whenever possible

5. Purse your lips and lean into one hip

Remember…

‘Growing up’ has a direct relationship with Nurture, in Nature vs. Nurture.

My Nurture was designed by Displacement – Identity Confusion…and verbal abuse.

Through Nurture I am a direct descendant of alcoholism, rape and physical violence.

Victim is not a word I choose, Survivor is the first word used in healing, I don’t choose to identify with either.

The act of hiding – in plain sight – of trying to become invisible – the acts of Fear are common from this Nurture.

My Protest is to not Hide, My Protest is letting my Nature be seen.

My Protest is allowing You to witness my process of healing.

My Protest is allowing both my Nurture and Nature be safe, Here.

My Protest is in allowing both my Nature and Nurture to be powerful.

Five way to Understand Bloodline

1. Make a small prick on your finger and take a taste of the blood

2. Go to a sandy area, bury most of your body under the sand.

3. Listen to the flow of blood and heart beat in your body

4. Place your fingertips on your low belly and dig toward the cellular makeup of your DNA

5. Drink red wine

Bruja // Fugitive Majesty

• The Magician – the Alchemist : an ever-moving, ever-changing, mysterious creative force
• The Lover – the Unwanted Child : She is one in the same, seen as sensual a lover who once felt and remembers what it feel like to be not loved
• The Queen – the Tyrant : Her Power is in choice, direction, attention. She sometimes becomes disconnected with her humanity.
• The Warrior – the Healer  : She is one for others and in service, both to heal herself and hold all of earthly balance close to her.

 

Bruja // Fugitive Majesty is a new work by Will, commissioned by the Right Here Showcase. It will premiere in San Francisco (April 22nd) and in Minneapolis May 5th-7th. This work has received national funding, local funding and now is seeking community-based funding through and Indiegogo campaign. Donations can be made here.

 

 

 

Photo credit : Hillary Olson

Graphic design : Jared Williams

Again.

Again, we belong here, we belong together.
Our non-traditional family, radical and strong, held and nourished in these walls by these floors…
We’ll step out with remembering and believing in the depth of something like love but also more, something both dark and light. All the low wild growls and all the angelic presence in flight.

Skin glowing with sensation in spaces where windows stand thick with a fine mist of water.
Our sweat is passed in bodies grazing.
We are dancers,
We are exquisite playmates,
We are family.
Community in the truest embodiment of that flashy word.
I feel myself, a lover with animal eyes and an appetite for reaching for hips, made of honey and magic.

Spiraling skeletons and the volume of our organs guide us through low ambition impulses, until we complete. Our bodies in a soft pile. A pile filled with conversations of both the serious things, belly shaking laughter, and gentle exhales of content. This could be all I ever need.

Promises of love made without effort, you are mine and I am yours, we have always belonged together…and somehow we find our way back to each other again and again.

How to be S.A.C.R.E.D.

Each and every day our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies ask for attention. Some days one has more to ask for, it’s louder, the needs shift and change. The intersection and ability to track attention is what I believe to be a holistic approach to personal wellness.

SACRED is a map to track attention throughout the day.

Self – Begin the day, truly begin, in the first moments of waking, to ask how you are today, notice if there is anything left from yesterday, or a to do list already forming…allow that to quiet while you welcome yourself into a new day. Then you can get up.

Atmosphere – This is your immediate surroundings, the environment, ecosystem around you. What it looks, smells and feels like…what and who it includes. By placing your attention here you empower yourself to create an atmosphere in which you feel the most safe to be fully yourself.

Creativity – There are endless possibilities for creative expression everyday. From cooking and cleaning at home, to choosing what you wear, how you bathe, how you love your community, family, partner…raising a child, practicing an art for or hobby…creativity can be found in our vocation, career and the way you play.

Rest – I hypothesize our socio-economic culture is confused about rest. How to do it physically, When to do, and How to give ourselves permission to do it…My recipie starts with permission to notice how the physical body gets ready to do work, I notice the amount of muscle tone that gets ready and part of my brain that quickens for clarity…

then I will use the reminder of gravity to settle the weight of my organs and feel my feet on the floor, then I allow myself to keep my focus and let my weight fall through my feet into the ground a little bit more so that I can really feel the full support of the earth. Then I work from that place and I start rest from that place.

Embodiment – Our physical bodies have already been invited into all of these areas of awareness. This is when I notice how I’m using my body in it’s everyday activities, I look for places of more ease and efficency, I try “not to look for the pain”. I know so many people who live with chronic pain, when they notice they aren’t feeling pain I’ve witnessed them go look for it and of course if you are looking I bet you will find it. Move how it feels good, even as you sit in a chair at your computer, always when you are doing your version of exercise, especially if you are resting or playing!

Devotion –  This is our commitment to our body of work, personal practice and relationships. When we approach family responsibilities, one’s day job, and/or the discipline of personal practice with loving devotion the tasks become infinitely more enjoyable and easeful.

S.A.C.R.E.D. starts with Self and ripples out to how we compose and architect our lives moment by moment. Creating a lifestyle that is holistic is about attention and intention, self love, forgiveness and gratitude.

~in love & belonging

*S.A.C.R.E.D is a tool I developed as a main stage Holistic educator for Weight Watcher’s MeFest. A day long selfcare initiative in Minneapolis, October 2015.

Blustering wind teases my gravitational pull,

I wish I could follow it’s current to flight.

The leaves are costuming.

I taste like elderberry, cinnamon, maybe pumpkin if kissed deeply.

I smell of frankincense, rose and vetiver.

My hands are busy with garlic, onions, sweet potato and polenta.

The dead days are coming.

The days of cold fingers and cold cheeks during my my greenway daydreams.

Daydreams of this grounded gypsy, creative nesting and untamed essential wildness.

I continue to let things fall way and try to not tether myself to their memories or call them back toward

me and I’ve promised not to follow. A promise made in love and trust that all things essential will return.

I yield to the inner poetic and romantic voices, the ones that experience the world with daily wonder.

I fall toward questions of pleasure, and questions of discomfort.

Some new doors closed, unlocked, windows slightly opened and nothing completely put away.

I’m cooking, like a scientist, with a hypothesis of the outcome, my sensational body tasting the process,

working toward something somewhat unknown, like a scientist, like an artist.

A camera can’t catch the details my eyes see, my words can’t nuance enough to share what I feel.

You’ll have to come look into my eyes and touch me to truly know. This place.

The dead days are here.

Wild she’ll be, Wild she is. A grotesque mess of beauty, decay and breath.

Bravery, Creativity, Fire & Wildness : Fall

The Midwest is alive with warmth and magic of harvest time. The air cool whispering fall and sun hot reminiscing summer.

Beginnings abundant and the witches come out in critical mass to stand in the wind and presence of new moon transitions, there is no mistaking wildness.

Some prayers have been answered, while others are still gestating.

I am drawn into thinking about the beauty of wildness and it’s destruction. I can’t feel the heat or burn of dry ash in my air. The way I imagine California feels as the wild burn of the forest fire sweeps through.

Is there any meaning in burning down structures we’ve built and love, homes and havens? I know fire is a rich death even as my heart aches for those in mourning.

Do you remember the wildness of land untamed, unconquered, uncivilized, uncolonized…I don’t. I’ve only heard of it, learned of it.

Is there bravery in untethering ourselves from the conventions of comfort? My life composed in the utmost of city living comforts, anything I want and need at my consumer fingertips if I have enough money to own it.

This idea of owning, purchasing, buying…where’s the wildness in that? Where is the trust, prayer, stretch?

Is it bravery it takes to conquer wildness or live with wildness?

I practice something from mild to extreme bravery everyday…as a full-time cyclist. The feeling of freedom is not dampened by the inhale of exhaust or sudden shift, turn, stop as a car, a driver decides to make a quick cut leaving me moments to make choices on how to survive.

It’s damn brave. Is it bravery it takes to burn something to the ground, to wash it away, to make space for something new?

Some of this life and death, fire and water, bravery…it is creation and destruction, it is a force.

I think of creativity or perhaps the potential for creativity as kin to these forces.

“Creativity is a shape changer. One moment it takes this from, the next that. It is like a dazzling spirit who appears to us all, yet is hard to describe for no one agrees on what they saw in that brilliant flash. Are the wielding of pigments and canvas, or paint chips and wallpaper, evidence of its existence? How about pen and paper, flower boarders on the garden path, building a university? Yes, yes. Ironing a collar well, cooking up a revolution? Yes. Touching with love the leaves of a plant, pulling down “the big deal,” tying off the loom, finding one’s voice, loving someone well? Yes. Catching the hot body of a newborn, raising a child to adulthood, helping raise a nation from its knees? Yes. Tending to a marriage like the orchard it is, digging for psychic gold, finding a shapely word, sewing a blue curtain? All are of the creative life…Rio Abajo Rio, the river beneath the river, which flows and flows into our lives. -Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Let a testament to wild creativity in all spaces, vocations, lineages of making.

I hope to feel my most animal like desires fully in my creative life. I hope to feel my creatively life full in my daily walk, with flow, fire and gentleness.

confessions : A grounded gypsy

Growing up, perhaps feels more like pressing into the ground and reaching for fullness.

There is a space, deep in my guts,

I am unsure of how or when it will be filled, for now it reads as hunger.

Just days ago I could have fasted from human food and lived on life force.

I have not learned to fill this space with all of the attempts or offerings.

I have not yet individualized ideas of prime and primal.

I look for the horizon to steady myself in a reality that I hope tastes like synthesis.

Revel in the spilled blood and the groaning guts of desire waiting to be made real.

My memory stills at an image of fingertips reaching for hips and my eyes linger at lips.

I am so easy seduced by beautiful humans and my heart wants to race and love without end. Although those are two connected but different sensations.

I’ve studied the young lion from my watery world, to what end do I learn from this creature? Young Lion is charismatic, bold, a creator. I’ve liked to lean toward a bombastic rhythm.

I am one of Earth and Water, Fire when enticed or provoked and I learning when the recipe calls for delta soil, hot springs, lava or a fresh running river.

The wind fills my ears with the robust song of cicada as I lay alone, waiting for some spirit to point and promise it’s the right direction.

I will stretch out to fill this moment and continue to practice low ambition building.

– practicing this moment –

 

Have you ever danced with your love in hot summer rain?

So deeply inspired that you completely ignore the cracks of thunder and lightning, 

and even for a moment forget the mosquitoes’ successful attempts at drawing sweet blood. 

What is it, that seduces you deeply into the sensations of pleasure?

Of yes, thank you, more please.

…and have we tabooed it? Pleasure. Call it fun, call it happiness, stay appropriate to the proportions of expectation.

What if I am louder, bigger, more wild than those proportions? What then? Will it trigger too-much-ness?

Will it make someone uncomfortable? 

I am not even speaking of anything lude, 0r shock for the fun sting of it, I am not talking about heckling a response. 

This is about living in the moment, saying yes to both work and play and whatever feels delicious.

Thoughts take us forward and backward, sensation takes us in. 

Perhaps attention to this moment is foreign, uncomfortable, perhaps it needs practice. I don’t mean to suggest each and every sensation present will be pleasurable. 

However, I have learned the longer I live here and make this place home, the more easily I see and feel, experience the space and freedom of instant and improvisational potential for manifesting everything, anything.

I am talking about full body sensation, a feast of it. Sensations of eyes adjusting to dark and light, weight adjusting to gravity, joints moving in tensegrity to impulse, heart speeding up with excitement and nervous system totally calm and invigorated. 

Head toward sensation.

Here I am, promising again, to head toward sensation.

Photo by Blake Nellis

Video informally captured at People’s Movement Center

Alive & Well : Short, Daily Promise

Alive and Well, it’s alive And well, rather dying out now. Is there anything to wish dead and sickened? I suppose.

It is the overuse and complacent tone of alive and well, which concerns me.

Do you mean to say surviving and gravely ill? Or is your aliveness marked with luster and your wellness reflected in ease?

Or could it be…I am one, for sure, who gently tests – gently, strictly, lovingly tests the spectrum of sensation in Aliveness.

I am one, for certain, who listens – deeply, sensitively, unwavering-ly listens to my Wellness needs.

I will perhaps forget at times to follow the calls of responsibility and then my something, spirit, body, mind, soul, self…

my Something will call me back.

Let me stand near a rooftop, glowing with sun on skin, warmth on face, bones standing, muscles fibers somewhere between rest and ready.

Let me be here, home, alive & well. Please. Help me to remember to be here, please.

I made a quick and ready response of promise two hours ago. Saying this…

The body and its creative impulses are the key to creating the lives we most deeply wish to live. For that I promise to luxuriate in the specificity of bone, agency of muscle, fullness of organ tissue and promise of cellular respiration.

So be it, the remembering and remembering and forgetting, and help and remembering.

Heath and wellness, are inclusive of the whole individual human experience, day-to-day, moment to moment. We, as a society/culture have any tools and modalities for healthcare and ongoing wellness. I support those that are holistic, knowing that each individual heals in their own way. The beginning of healing is being ready to receive it. That self work needs a witness, sometimes a guide, facilitator, practitioner to work with and through the blind spots, the most challenging places. I advocate for asking for help. No matter how small you’ve made the voice of your need. Our young selves need the reminder. For more information on my healing practice, modalities and offerings visit my website.

~in love & belonging,