The Week: Choosing the Flowering Wand

Tuesday, 7/23/24

I walk around with The Animate Everything stored in the drawers and pockets of my mind. Throughout my days, I am marinating in thoughts about the existence, bare-bones, and creation of everything. The fibers in the rug. The abdomen of the bee. The rust on a train car. The multitude-ness sends me to space and I rise and I rise above it all, seeing it and yet I am not seeing anything. As I write this while sitting on my patio, a trash train goes by. I can smell it. And immediately I think of the narratives of that trash.

Today, I walked up a steep trail and came to a pile of rocks in the woods. They lay in the leaf-matter like a sacrament, most covered in a bristle of moss. I approached the pile and discovered two larger-than-hands rocks, full of fossils. How many people must have walked past this pile of deep-time? I wondered how many fingers might have caressed the ribbed trace of shell.

Dry, brown grass needs very little rain to turn a vigorous green again. The landscape is laughing a bit more, thanks to yesterday’s rain.

Wednesday, 7/24/24

I dreamt that I pulled a large, hand-sized plug of white pus from the skin of my chest. It had four legs and a tail. I tried to hold it and care for it, but it would not let me so I put it down in a corner of a room. When I checked on it later, it was a kitten.

The inside of my head feels like a soft blanket, creating static. Or a neon sign, plugged in and hot. Words look too small. Light, violent.

Thursday, 7/25/24

I felt well enough to attend a poetry reading in the evening. My meager attempt to meet other writers in the area. Books were eventually on display, indicating that some of the readers were published writers. I read three of my own poems which I guess went well considering that I don’t read my poems aloud to others very often.

To keep things kind, I will say that I was disappointed in most of the other writers’ works. To keep things in perspective, they were self-published which is fantastic but doesn’t always guarantee the reader’s meaning of quality (and yet the same goes for published authors who aren’t self-published!). To keep things in perspective again, I will say that the camaraderie was welcoming and it was a wonderful venue for vulnerability and sharing. A slight tweak to my mindset was needed in order to appreciate it fully.

Migraine symptoms flared up again while at the reading. A wonderful duo band called Firewheel performed some acoustics. Increasingly sensitive to sound and the movement of things, I closed my eyes and felt the vibration of the music with my hands on the table. Because self-soothing wasn’t helping with the silent migraine, I left about 20 minutes early, but by that point everyone had read their work. No comingling for me.

Before I had left for the poetry reading, I was saying hello to my garden, squinting into all the greenery. Because it had moved, I noticed a mantid eating an aphid, a leg or antennae sticking out of their mouth. As I tried to witness the necessary violence, the trains went by, irritating me with their horn-and-clatter. I am usually very tolerant. I hope this whatever it is goes away soon.

Friday, 7/26/24

Politics are ramping up the inevitable hatemongering, hot-takes, slant, defensiveness, complaining, ignorance, and egoism. Pettiness is on all sides, from judging a man for having a beard to judging a woman simply because she’s a woman. I don’t even try to find my people let alone know who my people are. I’d rather spend that energy barefoot in the garden or creating something. I guess that's also a kind of egoism, though, huh?

However, all of this going on resonates with what I am currently reading in Sophie Strand’s book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.

In the book is a quote by Rebecca Solnit:

“You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you’re facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you. And then, other times, you should be like people unlike yourself. Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.”

To which Sophie Strand writes:

“It is undebatable that men need to get better at thinking like people and beings who are not men. This will not be hard work. I think, in fact, that it might be pleasurable…As our capacity for empathy blooms, nourished by otherness, we will be able to see different narrative possibilities in our own lives…We are bad at asking for stories. We live in a world teeming with narratives that we actively pave over and ignore every day…It is our own malnourished ecological imagination.”

“Sides” stew in the broth of familiar narratives, disallowing empathy and even just as importantly, curiosity. Everyone is a culminated narrative of every instant and impression of their lives. It’s time to encourage narratives to wander, include, and be asked for.

I am going to dinner this evening with a lovely couple who I have reason to believe are on the other end of the political spectrum from me. The dinner table is for everyone.

Saturday, 7/27/24

I was very scared last night. After going out to eat with friends, I fell ill with silent migraine (I guess?) symptoms again. I came home, thinking that relaxing in the shade of the patio might calm my symptoms. I eventually figured I should water the garden. I got up and walked around the house. Two feet away from the hose spigot, I felt I would pass out. I turned around and walked back to Brian, trying to hold myself together. I went to bed and it wasn’t even 9. I went to bed and didn’t sleep much at all throughout the night. I thought I was going to need to go to the hospital. Dehydrated, disoriented, Charlie horses, and sensitive to everything, I couldn’t tell if my body was about to pass out or if it was trying to sleep.

The little I did sleep, I dreamt that a man my age entered my parents’ lives, living with them (likely because earlier in the day I talked about wishing I had a brother). I grew to like this new brother-figure and accepted him right away. Other older adults lived with my parents in this dream, too. I accepted all of them and didn’t question it. At one point, intimidating clouds the shape of elephants appeared in the sky. They marched, like elephants, across the sky. I was horrified because they seemed to carry doom. At one point, later in the dream-night, the sky looked curved and deranged. I went to look for my parents to warn them of some unknown doom. Around a corner appeared my father, taller, naked, his skin blue-gray and gaping with holes like a walking corpse. Behind him, my mother, also taller, gray-blue, and gaping with holes. They told me my new brother was dead. I went to find him and passed a woman with an arm growing out of her face. I entered my new brother’s bedroom and he sat on a couch, smirking at me. He was the doom.

Then I awakened from the dream, unable to get the image of my gigantic corpse-parents out of my head.

That was the only sleep I got.

Sunday, 7/28/24

No migraine symptoms today, but I may have a sinus infection or something of the likes now. I spent time in the sun, which felt like medicine. There have been numerous times where standing in the sun felt ethereal and dare I say holy. But when I stood in the sun today, I felt it working on something. The sun was doing some kind of work that my body took and allowed.

Despite both of us not feeling well for different reasons, Brian and I enjoyed each other’s company. We briefly attended the African American Heritage Festival. He has been unwell with an ear infection for over a month. On top of that, his body does not respond well to antibiotics all the time. Deep down we both wanted to be home, so that is where we spent the day. I basked in our yard, finished a book, and felt relief at being sick with something familiar rather than questionable and scary. Bring on the throat pain, swollen glands, cough, drowsiness, cloudiness, and head pressure.

Monday, 7/29/24

I felt compelled to write about healing today after having finished reading Sophie Strand’s book. Not quite a fan of the healing industry nor the popularity of defining one’s selfhood with diagnoses when our mind/body/spirit is so much more fluid than those labels, I “keep scrolling” past the infographics and reels about mental health and self-improvement; not because they’re not helpful, because obviously people resonate with them, but because it isn’t the mirror I want to use. Sometimes I don’t even want to use a subjective mirror; I prefer looking outwards at the nest material and the trash train. The “work on myself” sensation has its heart in the right place but it encourages so many mirrors and of course capitalism. It should be encouraging feeding the soil, naps, curiosity about and compassion for things that anger you, sitting out in the shade with a good book, learning ceramics. I would rather spend my life making one ho-hum vase with my hands than spend my life agonizing about myself and convincing myself that I’m good enough to attempt to make a vase as my hands pull out my hair.