8 F Y R E ' B I R D 8

tonight, i am choking up a fire, tonight the water in me burns and somehow this happens, inside me, making no sense, making only the sense, the sense ripped away from my lungs, my body decaying, how can i hate you and love you both at the same time, paradoxes dwell in me, i suppose this is like when traveling the rocky road home (to oneself) i tell myself to comfort as i push my foot farther down my own throat, yearning for some kind of intensity, some kind of relief from the pain of missing you, of missing me, of not knowing if i can trust myself on the night rides home, always knowing that i can trust something like my capacity to feel such extremities, such extreme seas, always getting closer to the one who i call Mars in me   tonight, i am remembering warmth and my ability to move with it, to move with the raging rivers in me, and not be drowned, somehow keep my head above water, my ear cocked to the horizon, knowing whispers that remind : hiding my queerness is survi...

i often notice that november can be a challenging month for me. the season of fall brings a lot of letting go, of slowing down. a surrender to darkness as teacher. akin to the luteal phase of menstruation, my energy starts the turn inward. I move a lot slower. My healing is heavy with letting go of anything that I do not need for the bare, silent wisdom journey of winter.   i get panic attacks more often in the fall. my nervous system tracks the descent into colder, darker days, and my soma slows down. My body gets more heavy, I want to sit near fires and not do as much. i’m interested in how i have been taught to believe that my body is not mine. as a body that has been invaded, i am curious about how my body becomes a war zone. how me against myself has been implanted and fed in me by social forms and systems of oppression. i am so interested in how the ancestors teach me about beauty amidst struggle, outer or inner. kindness and gentleness towards myself, truly, holding spa...

Summer now feels like a faraway dream.   My body is becoming used to the cold, constricting feeling of Fall. The sharp turn of temperature that makes me contract. For very long I have been taught that to contract is a sign of weakness, is “bad”. I do not see this as true anymore. Contraction is a natural cousin to expansion. They need one another.   Whenever I experience a full-fledged expansion, where my wings are full spread and I am offering myself to the world with a lot of generosity, I know that there will come a time when I will curl back inside myself again, and retreat. Being mentored by the cycles of nature have taught me this, as well as being mentored by my own inner cycles, of blood, of energy, of emotions.   This summer was very intense on my body. My nesting partner and I moved out of our home, and we also traveled a lot. Neither of us particularly enjoyed this. There was also family griefs we were moving with and a whole year of feeli...