Mugwort

When the fresh air and open sky scares you, tears you up, a little, tears you open- there are no words, but who needs them? I will never tell you how I feel. There is aloe growing in the backyard. There are vultures circling above, so there you go- you won't be wasted if you lay down and bleed out into the earth's open eyes. Let her decide, let her see you this vulnerable, let anyone. There is infinite space and even more living beings flying around in every breath, crawling through the dirt, landing on your skin. The bees buzz childhood through the broccoli gone to seed. There are oranges and avocados falling fresh from the trees. There is a girl named Willow on a bike who says do you smell the sweet grass? There is a boy who brings you lupine and sunflowers on your first night. There is sex, it is slow, and then sleep like death, that is, peace, and every time you resurrect, you hear wind rustling the leaves outside and the rat in the wall makes a place for her babies and the boy rubs your back to let you know he is with you. You walk out into the dark to piss in the dirt and above the shed there are two raccoons two feet above your head watching you through black masks and the moment of seeing, the darshan, is so intense, the connection, it's like suddenly you aren't split open, you are hummingbird sage, you are safe. To the pure all things are pure and it is so good to be good, this seeing, their eyes, their no eyes- it's like falling in love and out again at once and everything intense and beautiful and cruel that could have happened didn't, or did in a heartbeat too quick to be counted, and the fearless, living stares aren't human. They don't concede. They don't insult. They don't stop until you all part ways- they crawl to the compost pile for food, you walk out under the moon for a drink of light and it's just you and your lifetime. You are just rootless or maybe growing in water, lotus body, grabbing for mud and sky at once and yes, beautiful girl, God loves you, the Calendula told you so, the medicinal good mornings, the naked bodies, the dirt road, the air, the claws that tear, tear, and eat up flesh and blood and bone with only the best, most natural intentions. It's only a day. It's good- this tea

traditionally

used

for dreaming.

Mano Farm!

On Monday I am going here! Yay!

Leaving this snow barren wasteland to hang out with beautiful jadecricket under the sun, in the dirt, and a bike ride away from the ocean. Hell yeah.

Don't Be Afraid, She Said.

My darling Barbara, the best friend I had while living in Hungary as an exchange student when I was eighteen, the beautiful girl who took me in when no one else would and loved me through a lot of fears, cultural and language barriers, and new experiences- is sick. She has bone cancer. She told me today. I have not seen her in ten years, but she has always been in my heart as one of my greatest loves of many lifetimes. I will be flying to see her in the next few months. For now, I ask for your prayers as I have many times before. Pray for Barbara.

Life keeps throwing things at me. I don't see it as bad luck or karma or a curse anymore. It's just life. Life can only be controlled with love. I am not afraid anymore. Life, give me all you've got. I am not afraid.

wordless wednesday: snow lies

Radical Love

This is an experiment in Grace. To carry the love of God, our neighbors and ourselves into every moment, in the way of Jesus. We believe that we’re called to love with a radical, scandalous dedication that sometimes looks a little weird. In every single moment, we are called to honesty, compassion, and awareness. Of course, that doesn’t mean we accomplish it. What it means is that, with a combination of meditation, prayer, and kindness, we try to support one another in the attempt."

I am thinking a lot lately about this emerging movement of thinking and defining and trying very hard to practice whatever it is that we, in feminist and activist and artist and just people movements, call "Radical Love." I was first introduced to this concept by bfp and her genius and bravery and unique way of interweaving the personal and political poetically has always riveted me toward an almost imprinting like experience of taking her definitions to be thee definitions, although I don't think she tries to offer any concrete definitions, but, more a series of questions and images and confessions that grow like the Talmud over time and are rich with lived experiences of pain and growth and survival and love that happened despite all of that and because of all that, informed by all of that. Isn't that radical love in a nutshell- the love that takes place and is genuine and real despite the shitstorm of oppressive systems all around us? Even the exhausting and sometimes completely frustrating attempt to create a safe space for each other and a better world for everyone when you are still young and without resources and fresh out of deadly childhoods and homes - isn't that better than what most people call love? Isn't a lifetime of that way better than whatever it is most people call "love." I know it is. I know what it is. Inside, formless, without definition or words yet, it sits and stirs to life and demands to be lived by me and, although I feel it and know it when I see it or experience it, I can't share what I mean with anyone until I dismantle the very definition of "love" because- what is love? (Baby, don't hurt me, don't hurt me...) No, for real, What is love?

Cricket and I were talking about this unsettling realization we both had independently but on the same day that maybe all this romantic "love" we have suffered over was not love at all. Was something else completely and we just called it love because that's the name of the color we learned to call it when we were kids only to later find out there is no color called *&%&% in the land of Loveless, no such color at all. Maybe we were wrong the whole time. I think this is definitely true for my recent experience with S- so much of it wasn't love at all, even the original impulse toward each other probably wasn't even the zygote of what could later become love. But I know for me, so much of the reason I stayed and loved him (yes, I loved him) was radical, albeit naive. What I mean I will explain later.

I was surprised to find that a google search for "Radical Love," will first and foremost bring you to Christian websites wholly dedicated to this principle. The intro definition above was quoted from one such page and, I gottta admit, I like it. Of course, the "in the way of Jesus," part was probably strategically inserted there to remind the reader that, well, wait a minute, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves here- we mean loving within the context of Christian dogma and biblical laws, not any hippie free love shit. This means we are talking about a "love" that cannot break at all away, definitely not radically away, from a canon of hate, homophobia, heteronormative compulsory monogamy, sexual repression and stigmatization, religious intolerance, xenophobia which breeds genocide and war, yeah all the terrible mind-killing shit we do not mean at all when we say radical love. But I do like the "radical, scandalous dedication that looks a little weird." Because for me, right now, my personal focus on radical love means trying, within my personal life, to create an underground system of mental health care which stresses safety and space and "love," meaning trust and honesty and acceptance and doing whatever is necessary to keep very sick friends and family members out of the devestating and often fatal psychiatric system. It also means for me, as it means for Anishinaabekwe, fighting like hell to love myself despite the deep-sea angler looking thoughts of self-hatred that attack my mind every minute because I live within a dominant culture that needs me to hate myself and trained me to hate myself as a woman and as a poor person. For bfp and Anishinaabekwe, learning to practice self-love and teaching it to others in communities of color underseige (yes, these communities are under-seige) is not only radical as hell in the way it challenges within an individual person a system of popular representations of people of color that systematically create endemic shattered self-esteems in whole communities, but also it's radical because love is always taught, especially to women, to be a thing that moves outward, in service of others, namely men. Many of us need to move this energy inward to heal and hopefully then we can begin to be the medicine.

Much of the writing I find on radical love by white feminists stresses romantic love and the unit of two as the primary space where deconstruction and re-defining needs to take place. Of course this is an important, essential place to start defining and practicing radical love by trying with all your life to connect and love and trust despite everything around us leading us away from one another, our bodies, animals, the planet- and it is within this context that all of the fucked traits of so many systems of oppression are recreated and lived out painfully and fatally on a micro scale- so it's an important context to start creating new definitions. But, in WOC and queer writing I always find a stress on the urgency to create radical love and spaces of love and trust and support within whole communities and this urgency is a matter of life and death, life and Zombi, life and whatever you call it when you can't function as a Whole Self because your families and communities are constantly traumatized by racist representations, police brutality, total uprooting and disintegration (immigration raids, home destructions as land grabbing tactics, etc), systemic poverty, oh, it goes on and on. As this conversation takes place and grows, I really hope it does not become monopolized by the voices of white feminists who always seem to think everyone's major problem is a middle-class marriage rendered unhappy by gender inequity and not an actual community-based fight for basic human rights.

Reading up on Radical Love, it seems that the monogamy question is the primary factor in the definition that is gaining ground and will soon be, unfortunately, the definition of Academia, if it ever makes it there. But for me, always when I think of radical love, I think of trying to create an atmosphere of honesty and "radical, scandalous dedication that looks a little weird" for my community of friends, family, and hometown because life is so frightening and we are nothing with out each other. We are nothing without real flesh to flesh, life history to life history, difference to difference connection. How can I love my friend who has been branded schizophrenic and needs to hide out from his parents who are trying to 302 him into another torturous institution? How can I love my sister who suffers from catatonic depression and has had doctor after doctor prescribe her dangerously powerful psychoactive drugs only to abruptly deny her a refill when she could no longer pay, leaving her in a state of panic and withdrawal? Driving around late at night buying street drugs is a radical, loving act then. Refusing to let labels and diagnoses scare me away from mad bright and beautiful friends who occasionally get scary, that is radical. Right? A friend of mine jumped in the middle of a group of cops beating the shit out of a very mentally ill homeless man and got himself beat up and arrested- that was radical love, wasn't it? It isn't always about a couple- it can be about complete strangers, families, whole communities. We need to remember this.

That being said I come back to S because today I realized so much of it was not love at all and that's the part that makes you suffer after the fact, not remembering and longing for real love, but dealing with the fact that so much of it was something else entirely. But I did love him and this love was somewhere at the core, radical. It was riddled with pain and codependence and oppressive dynamics, but my reason for standing by him was, honestly, mostly motivated by this scandalous and weird dedication to a model I have of not letting popular hysterical fears and labels of people and myself as drug-addicts or poor or queer or whatever keep me from offering my love and friendship and honesty and trust and safety. I wanted to challenge this idea that someone is not worthy of love because they are addicted to drugs, that they are less than human. I wanted to get past my own class anger which blinds me to the individual person with their own nightmares and traumas, irregardless of how much money they have. I wanted to create a safe space for him to experience love and trust that, I thought, might help him heal. I was wrong- it didn't work, or did it? I guess that depends on what he remembers later on and what parts he takes with him as his history. I guess it also depends on me getting over the hurt and being ok with what happened. What I mean is, I am not sorry I tried.

As bfp says, love is all I have and of that, it's all yours because I have nothing else and neither do you. It hurts when people take, but you cannot lose what you give.

I guess. I hope. I don't know.

<4126169365> I love you so fucking much. I have to believe we can be ok. Please tell me you can be ok.

twins.

Tonight I sent my lover home in a panic. I mean I was panicking because it happened again. It happens all the time. This thing I can't explain to anyone except for my twin sister- this thing where I really don't know where I begin and another person ends and when I look at them I think they are me talking, moving through the apartment, laughing. I really look at them and experience them as me. I don't know how else to explain it. It's scary and feels something like the beginning of a bad trip.

It's because I am an identical twin. Since conception I have been with someone else. As soon as my eyes developed I was looking into someone else's eyes and identifying with them, feeling them, knowing them as myself. So, my boundaries easily dissolve when I am with someone for a long period of time. They dissolve into an almost psychotic feeling of being the other person. You see, my twin Nina and I are not only twins, we are extremely sensitive people and extremely close. And how do you define a person? DNA + experience + what? A soul? If that is the equation of a person, Nina and I definitely blur the lines of that already slippery definition because our DNA is identical, well like 99.9 % identical- our experiences are very similar, almost identical during our formative years when we were just inseperable, always connected and touching in every family photograph- because, then we just knew, I mean, we just were something like a planaria worm that had existed once as one body and then was cut in half and regenerated into two bodies, but the bodies are identical in composition and experience and always touching- so, yeah, we are two different people, but are we? Really?

If Nina died, I would immediately commit suicide. I am not being dramatic. I think of Nina dying every day and cry and almost puke about it. It is my greatest fear. Torture me, kill me by firing squad, let me hang on the tree branch being eaten by termites with a monster below me and a tiger above, just please, don't ever take Nina away from me, God, Jesus, Mary, please, don't. It is her worst fear as well. Eating the other day in Whole Foods I made her laugh and we laughed like only we can and we both stopped and knew what the other was thinking and we put our hands together and promised each other that if one of us should die, the other had to live on and be happy, had to. We promised each other. But we both know if one died it's over. When... I mean... one of us will before the other... ok.... I cannot even go there.

So Piaget, was it Piaget, well, someone said that children exist in a very self absorbed phase until about, I don't know, five or six. Until then if you ask them to make themselves invisible, they will cover their eyes because they just don't understand that others really exist. This is the theory. Their world is naturally and innocently self-absorbed. Mine was not. I always knew someone else existed. Through knowing she existed and feeling complete empathy (that word isn't even adequate) with her, I learned early to experience it with all people and animals and even, yes, inanimate objects. Being a twin is so amazing I could write volumes on the experiences we have shared, the psyhic connections, the secret languages, the never being lonely growing up, always having a playmate, always having someone have my back- the way this threatened everyone around us, made people jealous and freaked out so much I wasn't surprised when I learned years later that in many cultures twins are either deified or considered to be curses. They just confuse the human mind and nowhere is this more confusing than when the twin grows up and tries to be in a relationship with another.

I could write a lot about how being a twin is a curse. Worrying about another person as if they are yourself, as if you are walking around in another body out in the world and you have no control what that body does to itself, if it gets hurt by someone else- you are hurt. If it gets in trouble, you are in trouble. This creates a lot of instability in identity and also a strength and feeling of connectedness totally unequaled in all of human experience.

But- the way my boundaries dissolve so easily in love is a big problem. It doesn't always happen, but when it does, it really creates problems. It can create, at first, the most intense intimacy the other person has ever felt, but soon, no one can live up to my standard of closeness- the standard I have lived with naturally and easily since CONCEPTION. I am always trying to replace my twin because I just cannot be without that kind of closeness. Don't get me wrong, I love solitude. I spent a lot of time by myself- that is something twinnie-hood (as we call it) also creates, a hyper need for individual identity, but in relationships I must know every thing my lover is thinking, feeling, and it can't wait- I must know it instantly or I feel very uncomfortable, on foreign ground with an unknown language, and I just can't read their minds as easily as I can hers, so I ask a lot of questions and probe and watch, constantly watching and this makes my lovers uncomfortable and exposed.

Then the break-up. It's like in the movie Avatar when they connect those living tendrils with the tendrils in the animal they are flying- I connect like that and once I do, breaking up is catastrophic for me. It feels like death for everyone, but for me it's like... I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

This was all written really quickly and out of nothing. I need to read books about twin psychology. I need to figure out a way to understand it and control it.

I am at once extremely individual and extremely empathic. It's hard and I am constantly at war inside about whether to let go and connect or to hold on to my boundaries for dear life.

People say "Every man is born and dies alone," as if it is an essential truth of nature, but it isn't- for twins it just isn't. Well, for no one really cause you are always surrounded and embedded and enmeshed with life everlasting all around you-inside your mother's body, full of microorganisms, surrounded by life, even in death, but yeah, for twins, that shit really isn't true.

That's probably why I hate the word codependency so much. People have applied it to my relationships in the past and I am like, NO! I AM JUST A TWIN! This is the language we speak in the land we come from. This is just the way it always was. I don't know where you end and I begin. It's the mystical union everyone strives for, but when it happens, it's scary.

Once Nina and I were tape-recording us just being twins, being silly, laughing and talking and I said, Nina, if you ever got cancer or something, I would have the doctors inject me with some kind of disease at a rate where I would deteriorate and die at exactly the same time you did so our souls would just reunite at the moment of death above our bodies by whatever powerful force which brought us together in the first place. I was very sincere and ready to cry. Silence on the tape. Nina is thinking. She then says, "Wait a minute- why when you talk about this am I always the one dying? Maybe YOU gonna die, mafucka." Maybe you had to be there or be us, but it was pretty funny.

Ring Around The Rosey Nosey

Boum by Nina

My twin sister made this very strange, yet hilarious video awhile back and I've been meaning to share it. Two friends are featured, Canadian Johnny who Nina last saw in Thailand. They fought over a feminist issue and he left for Burma. In this video Nina is lecturing Johnny in a Bangkok hotel room about his bad Thai. Then, there is the illustrious Mikey the Pants, freestyling some hilarious shit on the phone. Then there is Nina, doing god knows what, but it's bizarre and I love it! Maybe you have to know the people involved to make any sense of it, but hopefully you'll laugh a little. Enjoy!