MARCH 11

It’s incredible what little it takes to make yourself smaller for a man.

It’s the ultimate nightmare. To watch as the wimple ooze forward in your periphery. But the verb can’t possibly be to watch, which implies enough space in the field for the clarity that you are watcher and the watched is on its way to being named. This watched was not on its way. It was perished, flabby, room-temperature. This watched came with me smoothly, walking side by side, and somewhere down the road it turned me inside out. I couldn’t see or feel anything. I can hover behind my then eyes now, astral projecting into a past which continues to be real as hot shame.

All things. All things become themselves as they perform for an audience of the known options. My voice receded in my throat, receded as the holes for listening opened sweetly for him. My walls were down and the auditorium could not exist, an auditorium being only a firm shape with air in it that can resonate, and space for the rag dolls of love and God to watch on proudly or disappointed. Remove yourself from the auditory field. A rambling voice is sticky—it’s looking to stick. An auditorium cannot be soft; you put the plush panels and plush chairs and plush people in there in a very choosy manner after the shell is curved and reinforced. The best ones have no right angles. There is nothing right about it. The walls are hard and curved so that the sound may continue to tumble and slip. Again and again and again I look for metaphors for femininity that involve hard surfaces. Our influence is directly proportional to our reflectivity. No: our influence is our reflectivity. Think about this as reflective surfaces, in whatever configuration you please, not in the abstract sense of reflecting on one’s life. Eventually these phrases will return to where they came from: physical phenomena.

MARCH 6

Can I feel it without looking?

Been struggling to wrap my head around retrogrades, and also looking for a clearer supertransposition language for transit to natal position relationship

Current working frame: transit is what the world wants us to focus on, natal is what we naturally focus on. Where do they meet?

I’m realizing how often my thinking boils down to calculus terminology. How often my thinking boils down to what was in my orbit my freshman year of college. It certainly makes sense: that state of hyper-arousal, hyper-alertness in the new environment, overstimulated, desperate for patterns and memorizable language. If only I would remember them when it counted. I was desperate then. But did an awfully good job, awfully, terribly well, until all cylinders combusted from their strengths. Good girl.

A good one I learned from astrologer Molly McCord: for retrogrades, add re- to the planets normal verbs to understand what is being asked of us. Venus is retrograde now for March: revalue, relove, readmire, rebeautify, redecorate. You already have what you love, or you will, she’ll make sure of it, as you reposition yourself in her honor.

MARCH 5

today will ramble. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Damn I thought I had the tail of something

That brings me to another tail:

There’s an excellent podcast called Between the Covers. The host interviews creative writers, mostly poets if I remember? I despise when podcasts are full up with apologies about how nerdy or deep they’re going on the subject I sought out. Such an accessibility obsession in podcasts. I get why they do it. Okay, I caught a new tail:

At some point, seems to be about nowish [now-ish, no-wish. There’s a there there], I have to own the fact that I’m a bit of an elitist. I’m a bit of a snob. How fun to admit that. BUT it’s also fun that it’s a lie. That just might be the most Gemini moon thing I’ve ever said. I suppose I’m not an elitist if I genuinely like complications/rabbit holes/dissecting paradigms and am not using it as a social cudgel. And there are shadows everywhere. They are not inherently evil.

I’m working through the shadow of being perceived as a bitch, am I ever not, had the pleasure of naming that yesterday morning and then going to Ivan’s concert with so many of my friends, and feeling friendlier and sweeter and warmer than ever. It’s how shadow work ricochets you open: you name it, you catch its tail in the woods and make it look at you, you see that it is really quite fluffy, really quite gorgeous, has many tails that many other women are holding, and is just one thing, one emotionally-charged totem—not some sovereign being of heroic intent—taking up space in a field of infinite space. And by this time you have tapped into the engulf, the fenceless space, where you are immediately more, unencumbered by the static thingness and its trying to be a real boy, its sophomoric bids.

February 27

Today my roommate locked me out of the house—unintentionally, it’s safe to assume—while I was writing in the garden. We said good morning when they came outside to check on the vegetables, they went back inside, and I stayed out there for a few hours. I’ve been locked out before. Except this time when I knocked to be let in, no one was home.

I was furious.

What an excellent opportunity.

The bitchy inner voice kept hissing; the narratives kept whipping themselves up into hot frenzy.

The following progression worked thoroughly and efficiently. The best one I’ve tried:

0. Calmed enough to send a simple text. Communicated that I was reasonably frustrated while not performing frustration or propelling it in their direction, and asked that they be conscientious in the future. I tried my best to sound like me, and not pedantic.

1. Wordless yelling

2. Wordless singing with the same force, with the intention to expel the material from my body

3. Selfhood-affirmations spoken aloud until the electricity felt like it has become soil again: I am loved. I am supported. I am worthy. I am safe.

4. Otherness-affirmations spoken aloud until the same transmutation was felt along our energetic bridge: ______ is loved. ______ is supported. ______ is worthy. ______ is safe.

I transcended something today, but I’m also a monkey. I climbed in through the bathroom window.

February 26

Please make me strong, so that the low vibrations and malintent of others cannot get inside of me. Please make me strong, so that that the low vibrations and malintent in my own pain body cannot pass the threshold without me knowing, where I will recall the mental superimposition for today: *deep breath* Reiki *deep breath* Love *deep breath* Light.

Sorry. I refuse to let the corniness of this disable me anymore. All perceived corniness is the pain body recognizing its overcomplicated, dismembered view, recognizing that it itself is not true, and that god created and continues to create darkness in order to recognize himself amidst the swirl. In Love, corniness and darkness are necessary and sweet. We’ve all experienced this.

I might trigger people by He-ifying god. Lord knows I’ve spent a lot of time trying to talk myself out of this.

It’s time to be done trying when only fear of judgement is keeping me from sharing. I know what is true for me, and I’ve been over it too many times to warrant alignment with some greater virtue and not just a victim of my own fear, fear that someone will call a masculine god nothing but inherited cultural programming, and tracing that to the inevitable false premise that I am [crazy/unintelligent/unaware of my environment/being used/otherwise eligible for social-animal exile].

It is one of the greatest epistemological fields, this triangle formed by:

1. knowing that we will never get to the bottom of our inherited cultural programming

2. knowing we must investigate anyway

3. knowing we must develop trust, not in ourselves as certainties or as harbingers of certainty, but as people who try our best to balance 1 and 2, regardless of literally anything else. Certainly regardless of where anyone else is at in this process.

For me god is “He,” and has inspired an honest relationship with my own masculinity. I’m a yang-type in every spiritual modality I’ve encountered that categorizes: an Aries in astrology, a Manifestor in Human Design, a Rooster in the Chinese zodiac. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

It’s interesting; while referring to god linguistically as “He” feels right to me, He does not feel yang. I’m not done with this.

FEBRUARY 23

god MADE YOU DYNAMIC.

dumb and brilliant.

YOU ARE NOT THE NEUTRALIZED LOCUS TO WHICH THEY’RE EQUIDISTANT.

So sTOP SHAKING HANDS WITH THIS INCIDENTAL CHIMERA EXPECTING IT TO REMEMBER YOUR NAME THIS TIME around.

Instead, experiment with the extremes in your environments and build the bridge indirectly, avoiding direct eye contact with it. The second you start thinking you can outperform g by going straight for the jugular is the moment you shorten your leash.

Play dumb to the swirling monkeys. “I’m not good enough for that? I don’t know anything about that sorry. I’m a dumb old rock.” It feels so good. It feels sensational.

I spend a lot of time visualizing a more voluminous inner space. To watch the chakra wheels turn from any angle. In opera singing you may get the advice to maintain a sensation of inhale while exhaling. “Suspension of the breath.” “A state of delightful surprise as if you just said gasped and said WOW! with blooming heart eyes, this sensation from the inside out, expanding your body like a balloon, a cavern for vocal resonance. Laying the backyard just now I felt the wisdom of the opposite for the first time. A yin physicality and persona that is not a cavernous womb, but a flatness, an opaque oil slick. This is the other kind of dominance in the yin. A snake run over by a car. She’s terrifying even then. You cannot crawl inside her like she is your mother because there is no place in her to go. The monkey mind cannot control her because they cannot get inside her. The opening has been sewn up. She makes room for no one, not even herself. Impossibility at its finest. And yet there it is. Visible.

FEBRUARY 21

I began with physical barriers: a rubber doorframe liner, a rubber doorframe sweep, a packing blanket tacked up over the door, a velvet West Elm quilt doubled over and duct-taped to itself—which I now, of course, regret. The duct tape pulled the fuzz off.—and tacked up over the packing blanket.

No, I began by asking for quiet. Then I wore noise-cancelling headphones. Then I went for the doorframe.

This made the sound louder. I gave it so much space in my skull and my chest that it echoed, which triggered The Feedback Loop. That one so dear to us it’s smeared across our faces, unseeable without a mirror:

rightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrongrightwrong

I tried to meet the sound on its own terms, out of respect, respect for precedence, to neutralize it by imposing a barrier of equal and opposite force. This is not a wise way to teach children about object relations. Sure, maybe if I was building an airplane. But in normal life, objects are totems. We watch our flesh hand perform what it has learned watching the mind hand, that collection of ancestral, invasive, and upstart fingers, coming into and out of focus like an AI video mirage. Staring each other down and stockpiling more weapons until the barracks become so crowded someone trips the landmine accidentally, the one they buried in their own camp in case of intruders, the collective memory dense and unforgeable with anger and plans.

Hey boss, remind me how I recognize an intruder again?

This is what we know. This horizontal engagement. It’s so easy. It’s right there. It’s easy because it feeds itself and its always hungry.

The only choice is not to live here.

I thought that meant I had to move to a new place. It didn’t. It could. When they cannot see you, do not try again and again to be seen. Float upwards. Float upwards like a ghost. Or perhaps you are an alien just visiting, as in many ways you certainly are, delivering cooly while also somehow laughing,

Look at Nelle’s brain trying so hard building barracks. It’s sad, but it’s what it does, and how unusual that that brain alone sustains the conditions for my floating. There is nobody here to judge, nobody here to coddle.

I am up here.

FEBRUARY 17

In Montessori school we called it a “Work Diary.” That’s why I’m calling it that. Today was a step forward. I feel the sinews congealing back to their happy place, a happy place that may have only existed before I was born. What a pleasure to be able to follow the breadcrumbs back to that now. What an honor.

January 30

Dare I call this a blog? Yikes. I was half-inclined to leave the Squarespace LOREM IPSUM filler type here as a kind of performance. I’ll never be done with this website, so I’m very tired of putting energy into hiding that under smooth temporary shells. The shell is not the interesting part.