8 F Y R E ' B I R D 8

gentle bird, bring that wander-lust in.   mend and restore   what has been broken.   so many years, of broken,   many shed tears & cries of confusion war in bodies,   across centuries.  gentle, gentle, gentle bird   calm the fangs of blood  aimed at yourself rest and reflect on these stories   in your body,   and remember   to circle above   and see from there too.  all is convening   to come together   and give you a chance to put down that heavy   weight   and   move   on  

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...

we are beginning to feel autumn bite at our fingertips. it nips at the tips of our ears and tickles the inside of our necks, not yet covered by scarves.   i love autumn. i love this witch bitch, sad boygirl fall. i love when things get colder, leading us to gather warmth around fires, with loved ones, and in our hearts.   my ancestors know something about how to keep and stay warm throughout the winter months. i am thinking of my slavic peoples, who braved beautiful and terrible winters for generations.   there is one in me who is thinking about stocking, taking stock, and preparing for the colder months to come.   i am in a new home. with a new view. i am next to green again, writing with green. is this home perfect? no, but what is. i am learning to let go of my deeply embedded perfectionism that white supremacy and colonialism has taught me. i do not need to be perfect. neither does anything around me .   letting go of this is libe...

echo memory :: june 19, 2018 :  i am sitting here, in the mountains and i can smell the alfalfa near me. it is not growing. it is tied up, in a bundle. this bundle is for my use. it is for the practice of archery. i have yet to transport it to the forest for this purpose. the smell of it is nice. it lingers. it reminds me of fall, which reminds me of my childhood, which reminds me of my birthday. as i was transporting it, it shed many pieces of itself and they ended up collecting along the edge where the wall meets my deck. i liked this. i hope it liked it. i kept them there. for the lingering scent, but also for the sight, of something beautiful. of a chaotic, kind of beauty that i feel happens the most in the fall, when things are letting go and finding themselves strewn about everywhere, in a surrender to death, to change, to transition, to life.   the rain is trickling, the rhythms of it can be heard against the trees and the rooftop. playing with each other. the...

when i came out to my cis-het boyfriend as genderfluid, he asked me what that meant. when i explained it to him, he said: “that’s weird”.   we were driving in the car. he was driving. he quickly looked over at me afterwards, as my face, space, and whole being was impacted by the weight of his statement. horror, pain, and grief erupting through my eyes. tears beginning to rush.   needless to say, i broke up with him. it took me awhile, but that moment taught me who i wanted close to me as i transitioned (and who i didn’t want close to me). it taught me self-care, boundaries, and respect. it tacught me to see how ingrained self-erasure had become for me as a non-binary person, and how low my sense of self-worth was as a result of it. it taught me how deep the pain of many years and lifetimes and generations of erasure feels. i was crying for days after that incident. i didn’t know what was happening to me. enormous grief portals opened in my body. i didn’t have lan...