ISSUE 03 / FEB 2021

Here I am: startled by this month's end just as I was by its beginning and its middle. This month we have been blessed with snow, carried in on the back of an arctic wind. Early daffodils droop their heads in the sudden flash of white – small and large snow-creatures erupt briefly from the ground, shaped by many eager hands – geese float in the shallows at dawn, a layer of snow still resting on their backs.

Now, as February closes, bundles of delicately purple crocuses open up into the warming air. The world feels clear and full of contradictions.

How do we make room for the often contradictory nature of our experiences as we heal, process, and shift in relationship to circumstance and past events?

What does "truth" imply in this changing landscape? How does our relationship to time change as we try to gather and consolidate all these different versions of ourselves and our lived experiences?

As I reflect, I begin to suspect that the source of a considerable source of defeatedness and agonizing has arisen in the face of what I perceive to be a demand for certainty: the call to know exactly who we are, where we are going, what we believe, what our experiences mean – for-ever, or-else. In my hastily assembled attempts to provide these certainties, often within oversimplified binaries of thinking, I have often fled from contradiction and complexity – or I have attempted to include everything within the same frame as a necessarily cohesive thing (rather than allowing each essential aspect its own room within which to play and grow and change).

I giggle to myself thinking of some sort of oak-tree-song-sparrow-seastar-salmon hybrid, for instance, rooted in the earth with a fierce desire and need for the water, for flight, frustrated by its many opposing commitments...all of these bodies are separate, of course, when we find them in the world – and for good reason! If only I was also capable of existing as a flock of birds instead of just the one. And, quietly, the body does: as a wild amalgam of bacteria, saltwater, blood, fungi, and so on.

What I intend to offer, here, is that our paradoxes are welcome and necessary – that we change as the light moving across the earth does, that truths can last moments or many lifetimes. A deepened examination of what we perceive to be our weaknesses often reveal the root of our greatest strengths.

In The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson offers Roland Barthes' “the Neutral” as a welcome disruptor of binary systems of meaning, as it provides a third alternative to “entering conflicts, producing meaning, taking sides, and choosing between binary oppositions: 'a right to be silent – a possibility of being silent...the right not to listen...to not read the book, to think nothing of it, to be unable to say what I think of it: the right not to desire.' It allows for a practice of gentle aversion: the right to reject the offered choices, to demur, to turn away, to turn one's attention to rarer and better things.”

I have found this to be a useful inroad to discussions about gender and the fluidity of identity and our relationship to our lived experiences. I am reminded of my friend Jonah's writing on non-binary people as the alchemical point between two apparent binary opposites. “Without the gift of transformation, that which is static cannot reach its height of glory”, they write. 

The acknowledgement that we are all capable of and constituted by many things which are often at odds with one another, and that our ongoing change is inevitable, can feel like an enormous heaved sigh of relief just as much as it can be a source of pain and confusion. (Go figure!)

Having a body during a time where it is widely discouraged to seek out touch has been what in many ways feels like a head-on collision – fear rising as much as is curiosity, an eagerness to practice what I do not have access to, an hours-long examination of my own body, pressing myself into the world, the earth, the water. I passed by someone on my morning walk a couple of months ago who stood embracing a tree for a long time. The bittersweet medicine of solitude (turned-loneliness) has played a significant role in my own expansion and contraction over the past year.

The body is the address where everything arrives and settles in: to our tissues, our postures, the stories we tell one another about who we are and what kind of love we are deserving of.

“It [the erotic] is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” (Audre Lorde)

To investigate:

1. My Grandmother's Hands, a book by Resmaa Menakem

2. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, an essay by Audre Lorde

3. Migrant workers are the present and future of low-carbon care work, an article by Maya Menezes

FOR THOSE IN "Vancouver":

1. If you are someone with access to a vehicle and are interested in doing food deliveries for PACE Society, I would encourage you to reach out to them and offer your time. (They will be sending some folks out on foot, too -- join me!)

2. Families of great blue herons are once again nesting in Stanley Park this year. Take a peek at the city's many livestreams here, or come say hi to them yourself! Their nests are easily visible in a cluster of trees just beyond the tennis courts.

Freshly blooming snowdrops peeking through last autumn's loam, turning death into new colours – the large and unwieldy herons attempting to find purchase in the thin, bare branches of familiar trees, their amusing precarity such a wonderful echo of what it feels like to fall in love – and all of us, in the middle of it, spinning.

I have spent most of this month scrambling, digging. The advent of March brings with it the smells of things growing. May that thawing feeling reach you, too, wherever you are now. 

Warmly,