to unfurl and out reach/ out: part 2

This is part 2.

I am very aware of the difficulty that I have in communicating, and I am trying. This was made clearer by a post I read recently about communicating. I felt sad when I read it. It is why sharing on social media is very difficult for me. This is partly why I am trying here. Also. And still they are different. And connected.

The next section of this post is mostly the first thing I wrote, that is, part 1 rather than 2, but it only needs to get out.. of my brain.. wherever it lands..

unfurling out, within..

I want to write about beginnings, to write about beautiful things, to share the joy of a past life that happened as I ran from demons, the residual of monsters, that which resides within me, became part of me, ^[1]

when I tried to find a way to handle things I had experienced before I ever knew how to describe them or how they made me feel, as I tried to create who I might be if they hadn't happened,

and I couldn't have known I was still running, until maybe I could no longer run, when it was difficult to walk, when I could no longer explain how I felt or connect how I felt to words,

when I stopped being able to explain what had happened to me but could draw pictures of it, or to explain what was wrong with me but could draw the body and cover it with a map of broken parts,

when I had to figure out the world, to understand why things that hurt me happened so that I could try to make them not happen because when they happened my nervous system was so broken I could have hurt myself,

and I did hurt myself, and I had people who could fix me, and I learned how to fix myself, and I've injured myself over and over throughout my life, so much that I sometimes described it as feeling like I've had more lives than a cat,

and then also sharing that I now understand better why some people hurt themselves more,

and then this also doesn’t stay inside me, within me, even if it circles in a pond, in a conversation with itself, only a self that understands the words,

that for my entire life the country in which I was born, I am a USian, and this is also the first term for a person from here that ever made sense to me,

only curses leave my lips when I think about the audacity and offensiveness of using a name that is shared with people across an entire hemisphere of the earth to refer only to one country because that’s what has been done before,

and it is a country that has bombed children, charred babies, referred to families as “collateral damage,” trafficked in people for centuries, and continues to use forceful means against people to control them and extensive propaganda to create perceptions that are only ever illusory, ^[2] and it has never stopped,

and it was founded on the genocide, dispossession, and enslavement of Black and Indigenous people, and it has never stopped, as a country, this is its fuel,

and it disables, financially impoverishes, incarcerates, and in all manners continues its long history of dispossession, enslavement, and genocide, always broadening the net of who is included even as they are excluded, deported, locked up, and so many things to so many people,

and mostly not to people who look like me,

and it's hard to live any day without recognizing the privilege that it is to have sustained so many injuries and still be able to be alive and try to heal, to have a place to sleep, to have conditions that make sleep possible, even when it takes hours to find, I know I am not alone,

and privilege is always clear to me in so many ways, and one of those is being with a partner who never left me when I was broken, who always saw me inside of myself when I couldn’t see, and made it possible for me to access healing,

and I feel like I’ve had multiple beginnings, which is also privilege, to have these, even if they required losing something or many things,

and then it is still difficult to communicate and the world is full of ableism, and so I still cannot do enough, and I try, and I still want to protect people as I wasn’t protected,

and there is still so much I want to write, and I cannot yet write about joyful things until I write about other things that are part of cruelty, brutality, indifference, antiBlackness, and more,

and even then, I feel I still want to share more joy in the presence of horror, in the presence of terror, in the presence of fear and grief, to help create a large enough community who cares and understands that we are together, that we need to protect each other, to hold each other in community, to refuse to sacrifice others,

and so I share books that might bridge a both widening and narrowing empathy gap,

and I also want to share that I still need to find a name, that Cead, a temporary name I tried out for a few months here, never felt quite right, 

and that reading was part of what I did to recover language, but also to understand and much more,

and there are things I can write easily and things that are much more difficult, 

and for now I’m going to use C., which still sounds like “sea” though really I wish I could find the word I once created that sounded like “ocean” but for now, it will be C.,

and C is still the first letter in the word change. ^[3]

Hello again..

previously..

For a partial background or context, here is part of what I wrote previously about the name Cead, or why I needed it, and this website:

• welcome
• starting to write, writing again..
• hello again

reaching.. will it make sense..

The plant above, a deer fern (Struthiopteris spicant), was in my backyard, like the western meadowrue (Thalictrum occidentale) of the previous post, when we had a backyard, in an area that was grass when we moved in. I took this photo almost 10 years ago, and the fern never became more than a young plant, like a (forever) puppy I once loved and lost when she was still young. I always felt this fern was consumed back to the earth through succession, giving nutrients to its neighbors, its comrades in struggle against a warming planet, as the neighboring shrubs grew larger, that its time was still in the future. I appreciated the few years we had together.

It was one of my favorites in the woods, which I couldn't go to very well at that time, where it might cascade over rocks at the side of a trail, its fronds reaching out, each year new ones, growing outward across the earth, not very far, and not into the sky, though other parts of the plant grew toward the sky, including the shoot in the photo.

Reaching out, reaching down, reaching up. I'm reminded of one of the opening chapters in Healing Justice Lineages by Cara Page and Erica Woodland. ^[4]

The chapter, written by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, is titled "Learning to Listen," and begins,

Instructions from Harriet (Araminta) Tubman also known as Moses also known as the bravest shapeshifting conductor of the Underground Railroad.

Here are a few notes (quotes) from those instructions that have stayed with me, influenced me, and in some cases, were felt so deeply, that I cannot shake loose the connections to my body, the words that gave fuel to a fire while reshaping the space it is within, it is without. ^[5]

Fire. This.

Sometimes a healer needs to call on the fire in their own body.

Sky. This one connected so close to my experience, in a way I will eventually write about.

Learn to listen to sky. Listen through the top of your head. The place where your skull breaks. Listen to the sky through any wound. Learn from the place you break open. Love from the place you break open.

Water.

Listen so soft and so long that it reshapes everything. Listen to how what makes the path can cover it over.

Earth.

A healing movement needs soil to sink roots and send branches.

books

At the end of each post, I will share books I referenced and recommend unless the post itself already contains recommendations with book covers or the book is not part of recommendations, but was related to a quote or passage I shared. Some books, I will touch on again, but in case that doesn't happen, I will try to include each.

Thank you for reading.