A Strange Day on Planet Earth

Show me your wild edges. The place that broke and never mended, the craving that cannot be sated, the thoughts kept scrupulously out of sight.

Do not tell me your diagnoses, identities, or “what you do.” Please don’t bore me now, not when I need you so much.

Show me where you bleed. Show me where you make others bleed.

Tell me the part you can’t figure out. Speak what is definitely not safe to hear — and if you put a trigger warning on that, I will never forgive you.

Warm me with the truth when it is not uplifting. Feed me with your fears, the most irrational and twisted over themselves. 

Don’t let me stand alone in my nakedness any longer.

I must have your hatred, unauthorized and untamed. I crave your unkempt places, unshowered and unknown. I need your steaming hot mess, lest I give up on it all.

Show me your poison and I’ll show you mine.

Don’t draw the curtains around the outer regions of your mind — the paranoid and grandiose, the ecstatic and deluded — where nothing fits back in its box, however much you shove.

Don’t tell me how you got it at all together after 5,000 years of hot yoga, somatic processing, and diaphragmatic breathing.

I don’t believe you.

Don’t make it make sense: It doesn’t. It will never. I don’t want it to.

I just need your greasy haired, crying on the sidewalk, I-put-it-all-on-a-credit-card self.

I can’t live without her any longer.

Image: Hanuman and Surasa circa the 17th century via Wikimedia Commons

I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

journal 6.4.23

I started a full moon ritual in my dreams yesterday.  I remember looking down at my hands, smeared with honey, and saying, “The sweetness of life sticks to me.” The rest was lost to the spiritual trauma of waking up to thudding noises overhead.

But I smuggled this pearl out of dreamland and so the hour of 3 a.m. did find me with calendula-streaked honey on hands, face, and throat, closing one circle and slipping onto a fleetingly quiet balcony to sit in moonlight.

Today woke to an altar awash in dried flowers, a cauldron scattered with seeds, and bright red blood.  Feels auspicious to be bleeding on one’s (soon-to-be) fortieth birthday.  Here I believe the lady is meant to gasp and say, “Can it be? I feel so young inside!”  I am more inclined to ask: Has it only been forty?  I feel at least a hundred years old. In all the most splendid and awful ways.

The trees are so suddenly and so blindingly green it feels almost violent.  This is the Earth as I first saw her face, yet summer’s ascent always takes me aback, makes me want to retreat into darkness and just dip a toe in the searing golden pool.  Never quite certain of what might jump out.  Perhaps the imprint of being born under a long sun and waning crescent moon.

Depending who you ask, upon arrival that sun was in the sign of gemini and moon in aries, or it was taurus and pisces, or ecstasy and beauty, or the year of the water pig and hour of the earth snake.  All of which seem reasonable to me, making astrology as it’s commonly practiced seem rather unreasonable — but I have a fondness for the last story, the serpent and the pig, cosmic opposites that feel so familiar and inevitable.

It’s such an ordinary thing, to be born.  The most shocking things always are. Birth.  Death.  Flowers.  Moonlight.  Blood.  Ink.  The impossible ordinary.

As I write the sun has set on my last day as a 39-year-old.  There are blue clouds on the horizon but I know better than to say it looks like rain in this land, where clouds are notorious tricksters.  Even the fattest, wettest-looking ones, riding in on damp and restless air, may open their mouths to breathe fire instead of water.

I am sorry for all the moments in the past year that I missed.  I am sorry for the many moments in which I cursed the one of my birth.  I will try to meet you again, Sunna, guardian star, if I remain for another sojourn around your fiery heart.

​​                                                             Doesn’t look like much, does it?

“Anger” has ceased to be a sufficient word for my feelings. A meager word, a vague word, a still-compliant word. What is the word for when you want the entire male population to be forcibly castrated?

One knife, one person with no medical training: only fair, right? I mean how would that be any different, than like, circumcision? Since circumcision must be brought up at least once — and ideally incessantly — in every discussion, let’s just get that out of the way right now.

The niceness of women is not working out so well for us. What are we going to do: draw on cardboard, walk around a few buildings, write new songs, and maybe even knit some more hats?

I heard that a “pro-life” outreach building was burned down in Colorado and I hope it’s true.

I also hope that no one was hurt.

I’m a woman, you see. We like to build things. Make things. Babies. Peace. Knitting circles. Bread.

But it is not working out for us, no. Men were not content to receive these things as gifts. They would like to conduct them, order them, turn our bodies into factory parts.

Between the generous, universal nature of women and the spoiled, violent nature of patriarchal men it seems we will always end up on the bottom. This is the kind of language men like: tops, bottoms, fucking, banging, screwing, jerking, jizzing, cuming, dumping. They luxuriate in the ugliness of their chosen and infantile reality, then tell us we couldn’t possibly understand the consequences of our decisions, of our own bodies, of the lives we still somehow deign to give them.

It’s insecurity, I know, but turns out insecurity has sharp edges. Laws. Institutions. Guns even. 6,000 years of precedent and billions of men habituated to orgasm from women’s pain.

Then they say: I didn’t know. Okay I did know but not really. I’m not so bad. I try. I didn’t mean it. It was a joke. I’m sorry.

And we believe them. Or enough of us. Since I stopped dating men over a decade ago now I am increasingly confused on the point of their purported charms.

Or maybe I’m fundamentally no different: I still feel sorry for them. I don’t like them; I cannot understand how we are of the same species; I avoid them to the greatest extent possible. But I pity them, as I do any life form that appears to be suffering.

Whatever they claim, men do not suffer in silence. After all of the talking, they find a way to take it out on us. And that is why they are never completely gone. Separatism has its limits.

That evasive age at which sexual harassment ends has not yet appeared with invisibility in her hands. I don’t want to wish away life. I don’t want to wish away fertility; it is so endlessly interesting. But every astonishing thing about us just becomes another way for them to hurt us. Another porn genre.

If we knew what was good for us we would have eradicated them long ago. As it is, this endless push-and-pull of giving the ladies some small things, then taking them away, is overshadowed by the larger question of planetary limits. How this weird little story of human existence ends is anyone’s guess, but it will likely be with much male violence and gnashing of teeth. And talking.

The end was written into the beginning in seems, somewhere in the Y chromosome. Never say nature lacks a sense of humor.

I haven’t read the news in many weeks. This after deciding that hum of anxiety that had become a steady chorus, pulsing through hours waking and chasing me into my sleep — until I was waking with an already throbbing heart — should probably be listened to.  October was there and waiting, and I walked silently into her arms of golden leaves and crisp shadows.  The apparitions are so bright and fleeting now, short hours before the nightly curtain falls and I am left standing in chilly starlight, skin still craving sunlight.

A month of worshiping yellow and tracing the descent of leaves and standing again and again, humbled and hushed, in the presence of mule deer: they startled from their grazing and I startled from my walking, two species staring across a void both mysterious and familiar.  Sometimes a tail flickers and they gallop, and sometimes a doe stands steadfast, ears stretching wide, staring at me incessantly as if to ask: “Who are you?” And I don’t know the answer.

Weeks of just hearing headlines from other people, and still I cry every day for the knowledge of those and all previous headlines. I have accumulated more bad news in the past year than I would rightly be able to digest in a lifetime, not to mention all that came before. The backlog of mourning seems to stretch from here to the nearest star, and yet for some time I continued in a grim trance of plucking more headlines to cram in every corner of my head — until it was hemorrhaging information and statistics and grief.

I don’t know how to live with the knowledge the oceans are dying.  I don’t know how to live while millions of children starve. I don’t know how to live having read the true story of my own nation’s inception: body parts stuck “on their hats to dry,” fields of rotting buffalo. I don’t know how to live with its ongoing imperialist thrusts, the constant numb awareness of drone bombs and severed limbs and a mother being comforted by her dying eight-year-old daughter. I don’t know how to live with the knowledge of old forests tortured and rivers suffocated, of fish packed in fetid aquafarms and sows unable to turn in their cages. I don’t know how to live with the knowledge of sweatshops and coltan mines and “child brides” and shredded clitorises. I don’t know how to live knowing of scalped mountains and bee hive corpses and the dozens of species daily departed.

I wasn’t taught how to live with these things. I wasn’t even taught these things. I just pulled back the curtain and instead of a bumbling old man, found a very sophisticated sociopath, whose abuses are now so normalized and pervasive they are hard to name. But we have named them with some degree of success: Patriarchy. Capitalism. Ecocide. Human supremacy. White supremacy. At the core of each, a hemorrhaging wound. We call them economies and social arrangements and even religions, but in essence I see illness — fatal illnesses of spirit that spread through trauma, rippling through generations and across continents.

I don’t know how to be well here, truly well. I only know to survive with some integrity I must return to the mountain and listen to the nonhuman voices. To remain somewhat well I must cry a lot, give thanks, and try to find an answer for the mule deer. My mind finds this insufficient but my heart does not. This heart that told me to delete Facebook and burn sage every night, the heart that always returns to the mountain.

I lay on her rocks and listen to their memories; I caress her furry mullein leaves with my fingers; I talk to her trees and overhear their whispers with the wind. I don’t know how to live with the knowledge of the human story, but I still know how to do these things. My cells know. My feet somehow remember. My throat starts to form an old song with a meandering melody, as I walk among the chamisa shrubs that are now pale crowns of seeds that cling to the trail of my scarf.

And I cry again because I know so little, and my heart is so broken, and no one taught me how to live; and yet in these moments I have everything, and more than I could have imagined.  At the center of the wound is that which is deeply shattered, and yet beside this lives something forever intact.  Not even the human species could break what is most intact, though many have tried.  At the center of the wound, Earth still waits for us; the tears pool and wait for a moment to fall; those things our cells remember call out to be remembered. None of the headlines in all the world will tell you this, though they might bring you here.

On the mountain the chamisa is glowing, this shrub Gaia wears here like an encompassing sweater in every direction. It thoughtfully blooms in riotous yellows just as the summer wildflowers begin to fade.

The little snakes are more prolific, basking in sunny patches and swooshing away at my footfall. Some days the stream is dry and some days swollen, and I cannot understand the trickery by which the water comes and goes without correspondence to the rain. The sun sets ever more quickly and dramatically. And then in starlight I wander the surrounding roads as the land writes a love letter afresh night after night, in choruses of crickets and katydids.

Down the mountain, there are bombs in subway stations and presidents with advanced signs of dementia writing very bad haikus called “tweeting” that everyone then works hard to either decipher or believe. I continue to feel I am living in two different worlds, one sane and one that does not know what sanity is. The strange thing is that these worlds exist on the same planet — or more accurately, that a terribly silly and dangerous human simulacrum somehow sprouted on this mystical being called Earth. We remain hypnotized by our own species and its endless speaking, we who sprung so late in an evolution that had been dancing herself for billions of years.

We knew the rhythm, it seems, for some hundreds of thousands of years, too. It wasn’t so long ago, perhaps 6,000 years, that the Indo-Europeans hatched a disease called patriarchy. One feature of this disease is an intense desire to spread itself. It spread through war and conquest and rape and ethnic cleansing. It spread so far and so deeply most of us now call it “human nature.”

The mystery is that the disease could ever thrive here, surrounded by so many wise ancestors — be they towering pines or the majestic citadels called mullein flowers.  No one else is insane.  Only us.

Re-hearing Jane Caputi speak about the symbolism and blood rights of patriarchy tonight, it occurred to me that the contrast is integral to the design. Of course the system bludgeons one with such unremitting inanity and crudity, as it could never work otherwise. Against the choruses of crickets and katydids, nightly and faithfully calling us back to ourselves, it needs 24-hour cable news and fluorescent lights and cement blocks and drone bombs and endless wars to keep us in sufficient stupor. As Gaia, even after so many years of bludgeoning, still wields the power to draw us home in a single breath.

It works with women the same way: they have to keep the porn scripts and talking heads and sexual harassment churning like so many coal plants, lest for a moment our cumulative self-knowing catch its breath and strike back with the force of a million vipers.

So I suppose the unbearable unbearability of everything is somehow a reflection of the intense beauty of everything, which the dominant powers must work tirelessly to suffocate out of us and our living memory. I could never understand why patriarchs are so skittish (see: how they react to even small protests) when they already own all the weapons and monies. But in the scent of their fear lives the same knowing we carry, of the right order of things.  It is always pressing to reassert itself, like a seedling seeking the crack in cement.

The dangers are all around, the sister species threatening to reawaken the wild slumbering in our cells.  So cue televisions in waiting rooms and cue traffic fumes and cue schools built like prisons and cue private property and cue the mafia euphamastically called private health insurance companies and cue isopropylamine salt of glyphosate and cue aspartame and cue twitter and cue debt and cue militarized police and cue nuclear waste and cue Paul fucking Ryan.  Cue insanity.  Cue manufactured insanity dripping around the clock, more than one person could ever track.

Meanwhile the light has a golden edge in these pre-Equinox days, and the stars have a stronger pulse on these moonless nights, and the trees speak constantly, waiting for someone to listen.

So I pray for hearing. I pray for the mule deer and the mullein flowers and the tiniest succulents and the grandmother pines. I pray every human meets a mountain who keeps them honest.

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Walking the side of a mountain after a thunderstorm, I have never seen the high desert so green.  As the sun disrobes from a block of gray clouds, wet leaves preen in the returning light.

Yet to even think the word “green” at this moment feels a lie, a stunted word to cover a universe of throbbing photosynthetic bursts, each deserving of its own word, in need of new libraries and temples of words.

I almost forget how to think for a whole hour — or that thing we call thinking, a compulsive recitation of pasts and futures and credit card balances.  I almost forget, or is it remember, swept into this universe of beings with other preoccupations so much more interesting than my own.  I feel myself a stupid infant here, stumbling along in thin skin among ancestors that calmly absorb each raindrop and plunge deeper: and for a moment I can feel the triumphant thrust of those roots.

The wind sends cascades of latent raindrops onto my head and soaking into the fabric of my shoes, those shoes made of materials I cannot name, knowing not where they came from or where they will go.  Nor do I know the names of most of the relatives I pass here, a consequence of spending most hours locked in a monoculture of human thoughts and human deeds and human offenses.

But they do not shove me out; it’s not in the nature of a plant to be stingy, this much I know. Even to these unseeing eyes they show off each impossible curl, whispering my dulled senses back to feeling, speaking the sleeping animal within me awake.

I forget several human lies and remember the original truth: in this exchange we name carbon for oxygen there is a deeper bond that can never be entirely muted. In one popular story they say God breathed into Adam, a strange cover for this superior miracle in which the plants breathed into and gave us life.  This afternoon my cells remember, the very DNA seeming to coil anew in pure gratitude, resinging its place in an ancient chorus, a small note in a song that preceded and will surely continue us.

Caught up in that ancient melody, I almost forget the thing called thinking.  Almost.

After a time I crawl back into a metal beast burning gasoline in its belly and go back down the mountain.  For a time it stays with me, the knowing of the rightness of it all, the feeling of myself as a small organism in a universal web, the web which is my home.

But then there are parking meters and intersections and strangers — the shock of strangers in their strangeness, that strangeness I only feel in presence of my own species, the strangest thing of all.  The men I pass look at me in a certain way and all the subtle senses that had just been aflame begin to shut down one by one, like a line of switches inside me being firmly pressed down.

I am back in a world of rectangles, and I have never been so aware of how unlovely it is, a temple built via the sinew and blood of a million species for the worship of money, that god made in the image of man, that god that breathes through an unholy spirit called cement.  This cement didn’t grow, didn’t even come from here, and as if in its own silent revolt is inclined to tear and bubble, always needing to be smothered over again. I can’t remember why I’m here or what I do here; I can’t remember why I must come down the mountain and rejoin this sad story of money and cement. I only know that long ago they took away my knowing of how to live outside it.

In the metal beast I listen to a podcast about psychedelic plants, but it isn’t for knowledge: it is a desperate attempt to regain the feeling of being at home in the web. But the more furiosly I grasp at the thread, the further it unravels.

I am back down the mountain now, in a rectangular room looking at pictures of the mountain I took on this thing called an I-phone, another rectangle made through some bad magic.  The pictures are rectangles and reflect nothing of myself in the web, the feeling of my DNA coiling around my own center.

My recent human ancestors are buried far from here, over different lands and across oceans.  The place I call home is rented out by the month, with money as profits for a man I will never meet.  When I look out the window I see flourescent signs from a strip mall glaring at me, as if they too resent being left on, wanting an evening’s respite from their own light. When I open the window I hear the unhappy roar of more metals beasts — the metal beasts that seem to breed in silent cement lots, annually producing what they call another “generation.”  I can’t remember why we live like this, but I also can’t remember what came before.

I am back down the mountain now, in a rectangular building with its own letters and numbers: if I typed those digits into this cobalt-laden rectangle people across the world could pull up its latitude and longitude — with pictures! — on Google Maps, just like that. Right here I am, so tirelessly chronicled and counted, but then I have no idea where I am at all.

Walking this path with the sun a few inches from the horizon.  Were there people?  Mostly there seemed to be dogs.  They strain their leashes, and the people shout.  And the dogs shout at each other.  And then they shout at the dogs in the surrounding houses, and then the dogs in the surrounding houses start shouting at each other.  Also children, squealing, straying.  And bikes.  And joggers plodding by, seemingly seeing nothing as they gasp for breath.

But if you walk long enough you will see the dogs and their people leave, and the children vanish, and the joggers dissolve, and the bikes become intermittent, until each is a whirling apparition of lights.  Even the west wind dulls to a tender whisper.  And if you keep walking still, you will meet the object of your desire: twilight.

I do not feel the earth going to sleep here in the final blush of daytime, but waking up.  There is stillness, yes, but do you feel the pulsing all around?  It is the air crying out for starlight.  We have all stopped talking to the sun: instead now only deep listening to the moon.

It is March and twilight in March in the high desert is its own universe, one that should fill mouths and dreams and imaginations for generations.  The earth is still brown and in direct light looks brittle, but look again.  Ostara is moving, and at twilight I hear her siren call until my blood is pulsing in time with the melting mountain snow.

I am her disciple, her devotee, her child, her shadow. I feel the pressure of the swelling tree buds in my arms, memorize the shape of every blade of grass in its thrust, and impress the smell of surging water into my cells.  Nothing has changed, and yet everything is new, and old, and new again.  Even under cement, the soil sings and speaks of spring.  They say Bede made up Ostara but I know better.  I have met her on this path: a snake green as new leaves, whose dance wakes the entire world.

After a fraught week I was resuscitated via drinking a salted margarita and watching the third season of “Chef’s Table.”  It takes itself rather seriously but I don’t mind, as I also take it seriously and am inclined to cry at the climaxes of its so-serious cinematography.

I wonder. Perhaps we should never have appealed to the hearts of the capitalists, but their stomachs.  For surely, if they had any normal lust for food, we could never have gotten here?

There will be no layered honey cakes without honey, and no honey without bees, and no bees if we continue to dump pesticides about like dishwater.  There could be no perfect kimchi without cabbage, which is inclined to taste better when grown — as Jeong Kwan does — next to a forest, in amity with the billions of neighbor insects.  And nothing at all without soil, our planet’s dark nectar, being stripped so quickly a third is now categorized as acutely degraded.

So they don’t care for women, or men who aren’t rich, or winged species and the sister bacteria encasing it all.  But if only, if only, they cared enough about food, perhaps we might have been spared this sixth mass extinction?

Yes, if the Scott Pruitts of the world were sufficiently gluttonous, I can’t believe they would be conspiring to kill the soil and the trees and all the rest of us.

If only for a love of honey.

Image: modified still from “Chef’s Table,” created by David Gelb for Netflix