We tend to romanticize our childhoods. The "things were better then" mode of believing.
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Things Were Not Better Then, Get Out and Vote
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
The Depressions of Elections
Monday, May 27, 2024
The Universe's Light is Always Moving
There are many times the universe sheds light on important matters in unexpected ways.Our bodies are meant to move, my friend Meg Dellenbaugh, a bodywork and movement therapist, always told me. They are machines geared toward movement, with joints and ligaments the pistons and gears and the heart and lung the engine.
They are not meant to sit in front of desks and screens day and night.
Yet this is the culture we built. And then all of us wonder why we are literally "sick and tired."
At the "cancer cathedral" this week for my partner's penultimate treatment, talking to the doc about fatigue.
She repeated something she has said several times: in order to have energy, you need to fill up the tank. And the way you fill up the tank is to move. It is to condition your body. While this also expends energy, it fills up the tank in a way that is absolutely required.
And so it's a Catch-22, my friends: when in pain - move. When tired - move. This is when it is both most difficult and most necessary.
I think, in the way we have built our culture, that most of us need to be re-conditioned! This is just one of the many reasons why our fishermen do not want to give up their way of life. They move all day, living in their bodies on the water. Is it also destructive of these same bodies? It can be. We wear out. But what the hell are we saving ourselves for?
I am so lucky for the dogs, for long walks every day, for a childhood of sports that taught me to love gyms and bikes and movement.
I hope you are, too. Go out and wear your body out today. Use your body up. That's what it's here for.
#bodymechanics
#movementismedicine
#reconditioning
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Cross Creek
Rawlings wrote, "There is no human habitation—there never has been and probably never will be—in the scrub itself...a vast wall, keeping out the timid and the alien."
Her writing, much like that of downeast Maine's Ruth Moore, has been castigated (mostly by white men a.k.a. "the dominant culture") as "regional," to which Rawlings retorted that people's lives everywhere and of all kinds have larger meanings than "quaintness."
Here's to rural living, rural writing, women writing, and the preservation of the wild places on our planet.
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Ethical Storytelling, Ethical Living: Give Us More
On Friday, January 12 -- just before the entire nation was again plunged into cruel and damaging winter weather, freezing in the Midwest and flooding here, in the Northeast -- I was honored to participate in a panel discussion on Ethical Storytelling.
Curious about what role ethical storytelling might play in a country in which the leading Republican candidate for President has been proven to consistently lie? Read on.
The discussion was a grand finale to the University of Southern Maine's 10-day winter residency for the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program, serving over 50 MFA candidates. The panel was moderated by author David Anthony Durham, many of whose nine novels generously provide us with Black-centered histories of the Civil War, the colonization of the west, etc.; and in addition to me included Chinese-American queer poet Chen Chen and choreopoet scholar and artist Monica Prince.
Chen Chen |
David Anthony Durham |
- Listening
- Honest response
- Consent
- Accountability