Webby glass, spilled off the ladle

Cobalt plate

A very elegant warehouse!

From labor with my first child, I suffered a disconnect. The labor went wrong — actually, the epidural went the wrong way, towards my heart, which would have produced a rather unintended result had not the nurse anesthesiologist (to whom I have great gratitude) picked up on my complaints that things felt as they should not. It was a horrible experience, simultaneous with the most incredible experience: the arrival of my daughter, whom I had heard in my mind since I was a teen. There she was. And there I almost was not.

The disconnect was not from Ciara, so much the realization of my dreams, but from my surety in the constancy and eternity of the world. Other concurrent events also catalyzed this disconnect; I lost my footing. Time in the scientific sphere, where nothing is true that cannot be seen (note: this is not how science must be, but too often how science is argued); time with those close to me whose concepts of eternity, or lack thereof, tore at mine; too much time trying to be comprehensible to “professional society” and adequately perfectionistic… all these things unfooted me in the moment of dying, and I came out empty of surety, scared.

I came out less able to hear the world beyond the intimacy of my close reality.

Forwarding time… It has been a hard several last years, physically, emotionally. I have lost people that mattered deeply to me. We found my grandmother (literally) only to have her dissolve from life days later. I have loved intensely only to lose ones I loved. I was shattered by my father’s near death this fall.

And I have been brought along death’s boundary by people I have loved. This is perhaps the strangest part. You can argue — why not? — that it is my psyche talking to itself, consoling itself. But I have been walked to the edge of death by those I could not in any rational sense know were dying.

It is sometimes difficult to parse apart the living from the dead. And perhaps that is the point I am supposed to be comprehending?

The internet is a marvelous tool. I can be inspired and brought to joy or worry by friends from Malaysia, Australia, Toronto — people I have never seen except in jpgs, people whose words I only know on the screen or page. These friends are real, lively.

But so are the friends whom we call dead. I can hear their mp3s, I can see their photos, I can read their words. I can even still encounter new facets of them in shared friends. How is this different than anyone who is not in the same room with me at this moment — how do I know who is still alive?

And more than that, I feel my friends and family. I sleep and dream them — and they know they are dead and I know they are dead, and yet they still *are*. They do not act like reflections of my expectations, and I do not always understand what they are doing; they are still their own people, living their own lives. In my mind. I feel the heat of their hands on my skin; I feel the tangibility of their presence. If they are still as tangible as any flesh, if they are still warm in my mind, what is death?

Some will argue these are my memories’ impressions; I remember sensation and recreate it. They exist only in my own mind. And in each of our minds who remember them.

And this could be true. But if it is, it is just as true that when I touch you tomorrow, you are there and not there; you are there because I feel you, and not there if I don’t? Except in your mind, where you are there because you can feel yourself.

I am still less sure, more scared, more grieved than I was as a child. But the more I know people who die and who are still so warm and alive, the more I think either I am a madwoman, we are all madfolk… or maybe we simply aren’t hearing the rest of the world, beyond the immediate intimacies of the reality we can see.

I still hear them, the weight of their breath, feel their palms on my skin, smell them in the air. They take up space. So I kiss them — you — all back. And I am glad all of you — dead or living, but warm somehow — are here in the intimacy of my senses.

But neither Milk nor Fidelity carries the punch I feel - and maybe that’s intentional, but perhaps risky too? Or maybe we just need a continuum of voices, from measured and simple to the heart-and-soul-tearing “this is how it really feels.”

We are, I think, trying to make the conversation accessible and non-threatening to straight people — too much pain and honesty unsettles folks, and can make them run. But somehow we also need to communicate the depth of what’s at stake here. Fidelity and Milk are good steps. But I think that there are other steps too, that will require soul-bearing outside of the community as well as in.

And, I think that ultimately, the community has to become everybody. Yes, I really do believe we need to queer the world, in the sense of opening freedoms and possibilities to all folks, not just those who feel far enough along a continuum that they have no choice. When the conversation becomes a question not just of whether two girls or two guys should be able to marry, but one of compassion for and the integrity of love - for all that the heart loves - then we humans can effect the sea change that will be the measure of true equality and peace.

I do passionately want to get some writing done… in amidst unburying our home from chaos, decorating, readying for the winter rains (which have finally arrived; it has already rained, snowed, slushed and hailed today), mailing holiday packages, preparing insurance forms, working on must-do contracts, and traveling to Seattle in ten days.

Then again, perhaps I am as mad as that schedule yesterday!

It is beauty and flow, it is starvation and fear, it is desire and release. It is too precious to simply throw away, and too dangerous to dance unwary. Trying every day to find a ballet that is full and hale and powerful and kind, to ease out every killing notion, leaving only the joy and the leap and the spin and the skin and the warmth, at the end.

A full bodied, full spirited, full-footed dance. It may well mean abandoning toe shoes, dressing boys in tutus, and changing our concept of line. I do think there is enough in ballet that it can evolve. That we can weed out the pain, and the prejudice — and ballet will not be lessened, but reborn.

The winter holidays can be a beautiful time, full of mirth and coziness, cooking and being together. They can also be tense-making and grief-awakening.

Especially in a time of recession, the holidays raise questions of how we will make it through winter and into the new year. For some in our community, winter is a long thought — they aren’t sure where or what their next meal will be. For many of us, there are questions of how to juggle bills, and whether our jobs are secure.

It can be very hard to be playful when you’re not sure how those presents will get under a tree. It can be hard to be mirthful when you are alone, and there isn’t any together to be.

Solstice (which comes a few days before the Christian holiday) is the darkest, longest night of the year. And Solstice is simultaneously the promise that earth will keep spinning, that the bounty and beauty of spring will return, nourished by winter rain and snow. It’s both a recognition of needed dark, and of relief in the light.

I hope that we all find enough mirth and joy and hope and faith and delight and strength to make it through our darkness, into the returning day. That in the unlit periods, we do not forget to dream.

‘Isn’t the forest beautiful?” said Stella. “Look at these big old trees.”
“Are they older than Grandma?” asked Sam.
“Almost,” said Stella. “They must be a hundred years old.”
“Is that why their skin is so wrinkled?” asked Sam.
“That’s not skin,” said Stella. “That’s bark.”
“Grandma’s bark is much softer,” said Sam. “Especially on her cheeks.”
- from Stella - Fairy of the Forest by Marie-Louise Gay

My Grandma’s bark is much softer too. I’ve never touched anything quite like it before. It’s not simply that I adore my grandmother; this summer, neither of my children could resist petting her hands, as if she were a kitty or a horse.

At the age of eighty-eight, Grandma’s skin seems to have reached a similar luminous quality to that of a baby’s. Her mind has lost none of its agility (it’s still faster than mine), but her skin seems to have lost all stress, and become something slightly magical.

It seems to be a very happy zen-like skin. I hope that anything in my body has learned to be that happy and zen by eighty-eight!

Intermediate Latin Dance Class, Erin Fernandez studio

It has been suggested to me that a fascination with feet is a “photographer’s thing.” I’d offer instead that once you really focus on feet (via camera or eye), you’re hooked. It’s like reading a walking library… book here, look there…

Jennica’s lovely feet