A content warning of sorts
Hey friend, if you are here to read my words today, I should probably warn you that in this moment (and by “moment”, I mean the past six weeks at least), I am a fire-breathing dragon and my wingspan is enormous…
And I have absolutely no idea what words might spill from me today, what form my fury might take, what I might bring up or knock over…
If [trauma-related], I will do what I can to tread lightly because of Safety First, I know we are all hurting now, but again, I have no idea what I will say, and am liable to say anything to anyone, and it is possible that I am also too angry to edit…
Certainly I have not even been able to sit to write until today, and now I am here (but as a dragon!)
Welcoming a dragon
Dragon-me is welcome because that is the me who is here, the embodiment of Fierce Fury and this Startling Incandescent Rage that is striking in all meanings of that word.
Welcoming, and a dragon
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature (and also it’s a dragon!)
Not a weakness, but a source of new strength, not a flaw, hell no, it’s a superpower…
What does it mean to call in/on the superpowers of Seeing The Superpowers? What do I see when I decide to experience every uncomfortable disruptive emotion as a superpower? What is the superpower of hell yes today I am a dragon, and I have been a dragon for weeks now, and it is hard for me to write words because I am a dragon?
Wield What You Fucking Have
Wield What You Fucking Have
Haha, the raging fire in me sparks in recognition of the raging fire in you, welcome to the yoga of breathing fire and destruction, beloved dragon friends!
LET’S FUCK SHIT UP WITH ALL THIS ANGER, let us use this as as Fuel and as Catalyst and Forms Can Change, It Is Time, let’s do this.
What if all I have is my NO and my fury
Good.
After all, so often it is exactly that moment of arriving at the FUCK NO ABSOLUTELY NOT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES THIS IS NOT OKAY which fuels the quest for a better yes, and what are we doing here if not devoting ourselves to the pursuit of more-and-better yes?
New
This anger is so familiar and yet it is new, how is it new?
Well, the emotion is not new, just the VASTNESS and also Just How Little I Care About Filtering It For Other People’s Perceived Need To Be Comfortable Around Me, this is new…
Here and not
I am rage-crying from fury and helplessness, from distress and pain, from something beyond fury, a murderous spear-throwing vengeful storm of being.
I am here, in the car, the yoga studio, the cafe, I am here in these places but I am also everywhere I have ever been…
(That is to say, the first time a stranger put their hand on my ass in a bookstore, or brushed up against me for way too long in a shop, or pinned me into the shelves at the grocery store, or touched my body on the street, and all the times after the first times, and all the times it wasn’t a stranger but someone I trusted, that too.)
Kavanaugh
Like many women, I am not sleeping much.
I dream about Kavanaugh and then I wake up at 3am and spend a few hours recovering.
He is not in my dream. The dream is about the fact that he exists.
In the dream, Dream-Me finds every one who has ever touched me without consent, and puts a spear through him. She does this because it’s her job, but I won’t say that she doesn’t enjoy it.
It takes many hours, and the dream continues over weeks, because there are so many memories, always more, and also new ones because of all the moments I have forgotten, or intentionally misunderstood or made myself forget, I allowed them to be rewritten in my mind to not lose my mind, and anyway, you couldn’t possibly spear everyone who needs spearing in just one night, there are too many of them.
And then I am awake, and I think about things I don’t want to be thinking about, and about spears.
And also about how none of this is unique to my life, none of this is some weird anomaly, this is the experience of so many of us, of nearly every woman I know…
Real talk though
DREAM-ME IS NOT WRONG: WHY NOT WITH SPEARS, TOSS THEM INTO PITS OF SNAKES, I WANT TO FIND THEM ALL AND MAKE THEM REMEMBER, BECAUSE I AM SO TIRED OF THESE LONG SLEEP-DEPRIVED NIGHTS, THESE SUDDEN THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING REMEMBERINGS, I AM TIRED OF REMEMBERING ALL THESE MEN, I AM ANGRY AT HOW THEY HAVE STOLEN MY TIME AND MY SLEEP, AND I AM DONE, BEYOND DONE
More real talk
Part of me is working hard on opening a new retreat center where we can breathe/cry/move/write/process/play and commune with our wise powerful Incoming Selves in safety and sanctuary.
But part of me wants to just open a sanctuary for vigilante training, let’s work on everything from buffer phrases and force fields to full-on spear-throwing.
This wish is a tiny bit of a proxy, but also it is very real: I am ready to be about a thousand times more terrifying and intimidating, fearsome and formidable, than I ever even knew I wanted to be.
Yes? COME JOIN ME. Let’s train.
I want to be a panther and dragon, a medusa and artemis of the hunt and venus rising from the sea, and I want to be good with a spear.
Snakes
I am writing, but I am a mass of snakes, of [writing snakes and writhing snakes], Medusa and all the foremothers of this fury, the furious furies:
SEE US, with our wings and talons and glowing anger-embers!
Snakes, also
“Well, you knew he was a snake when you took the job…”
This is what my friends said when I told them that my boss at the yoga studio assaulted me. (And people wonder why nothing gets reported? If that’s what my friends said, I don’t even want to imagine what the cops would say…)
First of all, no, I did not know that, why did no one tell me?
And second, what does that even mean? We are just supposed to get used to being assaulted because snakes are everywhere, that’s just how it is?
But what if we throw them into a pit of snakes, the ones who take and take and take without permission, who think their taking is a compliment…
What if we inhabit the world with writhing snakes in our hair, what if we write-and-writhe our pain and fury into art, while they experience what it means to fear the way we fear, welcome to being afraid, snakes!
That’s where I am right now
I am [being] in this being-state, which is to say being both the eruption and the thing that is erupting…
All that to say:
(1) big feelings abound, and they are real and they make sense and they matter
(2) and also let us be here with strong force fields, steady breath, intention, so that we aren’t all unconsciously casually amplifying each other’s pain, since there is so much of it and we are all hurting, now more than ever
(3) acknowledgment & legitimacy: this is where I am right now, a breath for [this is where I am right now]
Let’s begin with fragments, because that is what I have, that might even be what I am…
Fragments
FRAGMENTS, this needs to be written in fragments because that is all I have to give right now, that is [my experience of BEING right now], fragmented.
I am whole with the whole/hole, but it needs to be expressed in the fragments, because we are in pieces.
A fragment
Driving down through New Mexico, Bernalillo to Las Cruces, a winding two lane mountain highway, and a road sign:
STRONG WINDS SOMETIMES EXIST
Yeah they do.
Exist / Sometimes
Obsessed with this deliciously odd and unlikely sign wording, what else does this work for?
Strong [emotions] sometimes exist!
Except what if they always exist, and sometimes they are just existing their way across the road we happen to be existing on…
D.H. Lawrence was an asshole (1/?)
It was the 11th of September and I took a wrong turn and then followed a bunch of signs to the ranch where D.H. Lawrence used to live in Taos, I suddenly had that feeling of THIS IS WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE NOW…
That frisson feeling, tiny hairs on edge, something is different here, the molecules reconfiguring, the air is different.
A sensation of being called up the mountain to witness
But it was closed and so I turned around and went somewhere else.
D.H. Lawrence was an asshole (2)
A few days later the timing was right and I made it to the ranch, where I learned that the 11th was his birthday, and also the day he left the ranch for the last time, that was what wanted my witnessing.
I also learned that he never bothered to learn to type, he was fine having the women in his life, all talented writers and artists in their own right with their own SHIT TO DO, put aside their own art in order to type up his.
Fuck. That. Guy.
D.H. Lawrence was an asshole (3)
I stretched out lengthwise on the bench where Georgia O’Keefe used to write and gaze up at her favorite tree, it really is a good tree.
I thought about the thing someone said about Lawrence (“he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did”), which is an amazing and almost baffling description.
I want to steal the glowing silver essence embodied in that phrase and give it to all the women I know.
Look at me, I am the dream-stealer and I am made of wings and fire, watch me take your dreams and your powers.
Oh, and learn to type, asshole.
Laughter
I heard Georgia laughing.
I was born too early, she said
Fly and rage for me, she said
The tree
I hugged the tree that Georgia O’Keefe loved so fiercely, and the tree said comforting things:
FILL THE SPACES AROUND YOU
AND UNDER YOU
WITH LOVE
That is what is said to me and that is what I will share with you, even in my fury state.
(We can have both! Love and fury! We can be the Furies and exist in Love, be a force of Love, and a force to be reckoned with, I believe this, or at least right now I do.)
More tree wisdom, fragmented
I asked the tree about a project of mine that scares me and it said:
GROUND FIRST
GET YOUR BASE
THE WORDS WILL COME
SAY THE WORD PRAYER
(the word ‘prayer’? the word-prayer?)
OUT LOUD OR IN YOUR HEART
IT IS ENOUGH
The Light Sanctuary
Everything going spectacularly wrong led me to the light sanctuary, if you are ever in New Mexico, get thee to the light sanctuary.
It is round and all the windows and skylights are prisms so you just bathe in rainbows…
The light sanctuary is a place where Nothing Is Wrong, and I wish to recreate this in my own space, both in a home when I have one, and within the vessel of my body-and-being.
But also, like so many forms of sanctuary, it can quickly become full of people who do not understand how to act in a place of [Sanctuary], and so then you are just helpless and glaring at loud teenagers, leaving because it is time to leave the light…
I wish for better boundaries, a better glare, the right words to say “hey, not okay”, in this and in all situations, amen.
The Sanctuary Sanctuary
Places for Safety First that exist inside of us:
Heart
Breath
Presence (I am here now, I want to be here now)
A quieting that comes from allowing
Solar plexus
I vomited the day before Kavanaugh was confirmed, a fit of kavanausea, because I knew what would happen.
No and more no
A table of boomers at the cafe, talking loudly about how the only thing that matters is his “impeccable” record, and really, “who didn’t do things in their youth that they regret” and “why is this even a big deal”.
I had to immmediately exit because otherwise I would have exploded, because I do not have a handy pit of snakes for them.
Where to
I walked to to the yoga studio and the teacher asked how I am, and I told her, because I answer that question honestly now.
I AM SO ANGRY
I AM IN SO MUCH PAIN
IT NO LONGER SURPRISES ME THAT THE WORLD IS FULL OF RAPISTS
IT SURPRISES ME A LOT THAT PEOPLE ARE SO QUICK TO REVEAL HOW LITTLE THEY CARE
Good
Good, she said, thank you for bringing your pain and honesty and realness to yoga, let’s do a class for this.
So we had a rage class, and it helped.
Canyonscape
I have a Grand Canyon inside me, carved from grief and rage and fury, I saw it during a meditation.
But you know what? The Grand Canyon is beautiful and breathtaking.
Yes, I have experienced pain that is enormous and disruptive, events that have changed the landscape of my life. This upheaval has formed something new, and this new is impressive.
A breath for recognizing this.
Contentment
September on the calendar was the month of Contentment, and yes, I spent most of it in a state of bewildering rage, and this is okay, and I have room inside me to hold the bewilderment, the rage, and wishes for contentment, I can breathe for both.
Are there any moments of Contentment I want to remember? Any noticings or learnings related to this theme?
Being in the light sanctuary. And beneath Georgia’s tree.
Driving into gorgeous New Mexico sunrises and sunsets.
Walking labyrinths. Bathing naked under a startling sky.
Nourishing meals. New friends.
Exiting when it was time to exit.
Breathing my way through.
Seeds of
May these contentment-wishes and contentment-seeds do their work beneath the surface, may our rage and fury also be powerful seeds for new and better, may it all be revealed in right timing how useful it was to experience the Opposite of Contentment in the month of contentment…
And if you want to do some spear-throwing with me, that is welcome too.
I am thinking of ways I can be of service in these times, and have some ideas about that.
For now (a quiet invitation)
For now, come take breaths with me, share any sparks, leave a comment so we can have some togetherness in whatever form, join in my vigilante mission or glow some love here for all these seeds, fragments, noticings, wonderings and new vision.
Name any superpowers you like, we can all use some more…
Here’s to Safety First, to More & Better, to Fierce & Formidable, to New Superpowers Revealed, whatever is needed. Thank you for being here with me while I process my way through, as we do, with presence and breath and as much grace as we can muster in a moment.
Endless compassion for all the hard things in this life, and a breath of awe and appreciation: I am glad you are here in whatever form, here we are with our landscapes of experience, wishing our contentment-wishes, exploring and noticing and taking exquisite care of ourselves to the best of our ability, the work of this life, and it is a big deal.
Also a big deal: recognizing just how much I trust you that I can write these words and let them go. Thank you for that.
And I do not have any bandwidth to write a Not All Men etc disclaimer here, I am going to trust that your good heart trusts my good heart, may it all be received as it is said, with clarity and truth and my arsenal of spears
Follow
YES
yes yes yes to all of this
I am here. I am always here.
Thank you for your fierce wild heart.
I feel like I need to print this out and carry it with me wherever I go until it is a dog-eared, tattered manifesto of righteous and rightful rage. What most resonated with me:
“What if we inhabit the world with writhing snakes in our hair, what if we write-and-writhe our pain and fury into art, while they experience what it means to fear the way we fear, welcome to being afraid, snakes!”
As I begin to exit my time leading my company, the final show I’m working on is autobiographical, following a young woman through her experience growing up and dealing with the boxes other people try to put her in. The cast is entirely female. The production team is >80% female or gender non-conforming. This is a first for us, in seven years of producing over 50 productions of some sort, and it is how I am staying sane.
The director had an idea that gave me chills. The show does, unfortunately, deal with a true case of assault. Our writer-actor lead has been brave enough to give us a scene of the aftermath, when she went to the police. And she got all the usual questions: “What were you wearing? Did you flirt with them at all? Had you been drinking? Because you washed yourself, you’ve destroyed the evidence and we will likely not find them.” An encapsulation of all the answers to the question, “why didn’t she report it sooner?” Because this is what you do to us.
Those questions will be the only time in the 90-minute show that we hear a male voice.
The show ends with a triumphant celebration: I am more than my past. I am more than what you tell me. I take joy and pleasure in my body, with or without a partner. I define myself.
This is the art I cling to right now. Let’s let the snakes out.
Laura, this sounds like an amazing show. May you have a fabulous run.
Fucking holy fire, this is imho some of your finest writing. Stunning and gorgeous and FORMIDABLE.
Thank you for this articulation of truth. I am learning to channel my dragon fire outward, to cleanse what needs cleansing, rather than let it fester and char me from the inside out. And yes, I think the holiest fire is the same as Love. We are angry at injustice, after all, and a truly devoted love always seeks justice.
<3 <3 <3
“Oh, and learn to type, asshole.” — This made me laugh out loud, which I sorely needed. Yes a thousand times, to all of it.
“I wish for better boundaries, a better glare, the right words to say “hey, not okay”, in this and in all situations, amen.”
So much this.
When you first named medusa, I thought there’s something in the world of biology that’s called a medusa, and I looked for it. It’s a life stage for jellyfish. Mysterious, beautiful, and dangerous, this medusa embodies what I need in order to navigate the world today.
I’m here and listening and raging along with you.
YES.
I love your fierce dragon and superpowers! I love its vast wings that can darken the sky. I love my own superpowers: love grounded in courage, contentment growing from freedom!
FURY!
Thank you for this.
I love the wisdom from Georgia’s Tree:
GROUND FIRST
GET YOUR BASE
THE WORDS WILL COME
SAY THE WORD PRAYER
(the word ‘prayer’? the word-prayer?)
OUT LOUD OR IN YOUR HEART
IT IS ENOUGH
Yes yes YES!
So much yes. Where to start?
Well, here:
“What if all I have is my NO and my fury?
“Good.
“After all, so often it is exactly that moment of arriving at the FUCK NO ABSOLUTELY NOT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES THIS IS NOT OKAY which fuels the quest for a better yes, and what are we doing here if not devoting ourselves to the pursuit of more-and-better yes?”
Yes and yes and yes. I hit my point of NO and FUCK NO and NEVER A-FUCKING-GAIN around this time last year. Packed my bags and a pocket handkerchief and went on the quest for a better yes.
Still looking. Getting closer. (See below.)
And then this —
“I thought about the thing someone said about Lawrence (‘he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did’), which is an amazing and almost baffling description.”
Amazing and baffling — to think that one (of any gender and gender identity, any human being) could take for granted the presence of someone who would decipher one’s crabbed handwriting and type it all out, flawlessly, at sixty-plus words per minute; ensure that one’s surroundings were hygienic and optimized for one’s creative comfort; who would cook one’s dinner and haul one’s ashes — without asking for reciprocation for time for them to climb Maslow’s hierarchy and self-actualize?!?
I have that in my husband; he provides nearly endless support if I can bring myself to ASK him for what I want, to TELL him what I need.
There’s the rub– I feel incredibly guilty and shamed that I should need the support in the first place. I’m running a small business (and actually bringing in profit each month(!)) and I feel BAD that I should have to ask for a hand with the things that are not in my wheelhouse.
What would it be like to feel that because I was doing Important Work that people pay me for, I should be ENTITLED to ask him to datamine my marketplace while I do something that I bill a bucket of bucks for per hour? To handle some of the monkey work of doing the filing while I do the research that he doesn’t have the chops for?
To ask nicely because I value the relationship, but not to feel that I ought to couch this as a favor to me?
If he were my paid assistant, this would be different — this is what I would be paying my assistant for. But to feel that sense of entitlement (as I am sure Lawrence felt, as so many men throughout history have felt entitled to the services of their wives) — to me that is like asking what it would feel like to breathe water, to experience air as a bird does.
I spent the 2 weeks before Kavanagh was confirmed a nervous wreck: jittery, insomnia or nightmares, PTSD flareups. The week after, I had something like stomach flu. Thanks asshole!
+
Some years back, a poem I wrote that mostly didn’t work gifted me the line:
My soul is karst
and it has become a comforting idea and image, then a model, for possibilities of flow [air, water, spaciousness] in my life.
Your inner Grand Canyon seems akin.
October has been Medusa month for me – reading everything I can about her, looking at ancient art, feeling that energy of rage, earth, wild, change, snakes, winged serpents. I read a rambly-but-pretty-cool dissertation, “The Silent Scream of Medusa: Restoring, or Re-storying, Her Voice” by Cathy Ann Diorio (miraculously not behind a paywall at https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/858607301.html?FMT=ABS).
In case these mythical tidbits cause sparks for anyone:
Medusa had wings. People depicting Medusa’s head sometimes kept the wings, but the wings look like weird nubs coming out of her head 😛
In some versions of the myth of Aphrodite’s birth, she and the Furies were created at the same time.
Some of the oldest versions of Aphrodite are called Aphrodite Areia (areia = “warlike”); she holds a spear and/or wears armor like her precursors Inanna and Ishtar. The Spartans and some other non-Athenian Greeks worshipped her like this.
I’m reminded of those three Venus-star goddesses as raging, mourning goddesses. Some badass lines from “Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer”:
“You make the heavens tremble and the earth quake. Great Priestess, who can soothe your troubled heart?
Your deafening command, whistling like the South Wind, splits apart great mountains.
…Holy Inanna, the riverbanks overflow with the flood-waves of your heart.”
Wield What You Have is an awesome power, similar to one of my old favorites, Start Where You Are.
Whether it’s a “new retreat center” or “sanctuary for vigilante training”, I want to go to there.
Thank you for writing this and all other things. I remember how incredibly scary and intimidating Medusa seemed to me in the old 80s Clash of the Titans movie, and that is certainly what we need stirred up right now. Snake-hair, turning evil men to stone, I’m in!
<3 your name!
Thanks! I’ve seen other Claires commenting here, so just wanted to figure out something to differentiate 🙂 and also it is one of my favorite qualities <3
Lots of sparks around love and fury as I have been mentoring since 2011 and the idea of being FIERCE yet COMPASSIONATE feels so right but sounds so contradictory…
Feeling the outrage at your No and more no: I live in England, UK where so much of this was third-hand-news, removed from our reality… and yet, I attended a meeting for dayjob in September about how the local university needed to “raise awareness to the female students about the risks of drinking and how it can lead to sexual assault” and I was so taken aback I fell silent when my head and heart just screamed “THE ONLY THING THAT LEADS TO RAPE ARE RAPISTS you AssHoles.”
Yes, I was the only female at the meeting. I am both angry at myself for my silence and also totally understanding my complete inability to stand up to this response in such odds.
Next time, I will have the skills to stand up. I have my spear now.
As for ‘join in my vigilante mission’ I teach curious, creatives and fiercely wild souls to connect with their inner fire, so can I join and teach and learn all at once? <3
Today is October 31st and I am here and I am holding space. I spent the last 5 days in the middle of a cold so overthrowing that I felt almost no impact from the cascade of atrocities in this country. And now I am coming out of it in the middle of Halloween and my costume is a member of the Royal Goblin Balloon Corps (goblin mask, vambraces, pilot goggles) and I want to remember what it feels like to be powerful because I keep just feeling small and overwhelmed and tired.
November is tomorrow and it is my birth month and I hope it will give me strength.
I am full of pink and red and white paper hearts for your sharing here.
Thank Full for your Dragon rage, and snake spears, and all the loam and fetid feels before the words.
dancing with and near you, not not not touching.
Dragon!!!
I went to an exhibition ‘inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf’, and a lot of it was art made by people in her circle, other members of the Bloomsbury Group, and other people who happened to be around in the 1920s and creating things. It changed the way that I think of Virginia Woolf, put her in a context of a creative society where all sorts of people were making all sorts of things.
That is the sort of milieu I want to move in – not the one where one person’s creativity is sucked up and drained dry by someone else’s, but the one where nobody has to
where people can both take care of their own thing and support other people’s things. The one where it isn’t a zero sum game.
Snakes and dragons and D. H. Lawrence makes me think of his poem about a lizard, which is very true and very relevant, and which I quote to myself quite often. (‘If men were as much men as lizards are lizards/they’d be worth looking at.’) And slow worms, which are lizards, not snakes, though I still don’t quite understand the difference between a snake and a lizard without legs. And ‘worm’ here is really ‘wyrm’, being ‘dragon’.
Dragon-me glows fierce love-appreciation at Dragon-you; bright and expansive <3
Thank you for the light sanctuary bath of rainbows
Thank you for the tree wisdom and Georgia's laughter
Thank you for rage/fire/spear/no-and-more-no honest yoga
Bowing with scaly wings stretched out, xo
Sparks, as always, thank you and may your dragon be mighty.
—–
It is good to be a dragon.
Dragon slithers through the convoluted dark, knowing where everything important has been lovingly cached, knowing that all treasures are retrievable as required, and that their safety has been ensured through quantum magic.
Dragon emerges silently at sunrise, spreads wings wide and lifts effortlessly into the glowing air.
Dragon builds throat fire, banks toward the warfront, hears the far calls of other dragons, roars back with the joy of pending battle.
—–
Over here, I am dreaming of dragon essence to which I can aspire:
Dragons are physically powerful. Even small dragons are capable of destroying, or diverting, their enemies and the wild forces of nature. Dragons are persistent, always coming back to their intent.
Dragons are emotionally intelligent. They know they have hoarding tendencies, and they become impeccable collectors and also divestors. They know they have tempers, and they exercise control to best accomplish their desires. They know they can receive unwanted attention, and they have learned to hide, or to intimidate, as the situation warrants. They are cognizant of false stories, and why people, and dragons, tell them.
Dragons are wise. They know when to speak, and when to be silent. They know what to take, and what to abandon; what is treasure, and what is dross. They know how to trust, how to decide to trust, and how to recognize untrustworthiness.
Dragons meditate, recognize the workings of Shiva/Chaos, and are content.
—–
The heart of a Dragon embodies Fire, Joy and expansive Summer.
But also, Metal: Discernment and Judgement; Autumn and Transformation.
Dragon cuts away the unnecessary, the damaging, the spurious.
Dragon, when needed, is the Avenger, not for hate but for Justice.