The places I don’t know yet

Maps

A map of a place I don’t know.

Or: a map is a place I don’t know (yet).

A map of a place I don’t know (a map is a place I don’t know?)

Yet

A map shows what is still unknown (yet), and yet, whoever made the map knows more than I do.

The problem with fragments and clues is that I know I made the map, and I don’t remember making it.

I did this before the concussion too, leaving myself clues and forgetting what they meant.

What do I know

I live without memory and also I have too many memories, and while those sound like conflicting pieces of data, both of these, taken separately or together, mean I am forever mapping my thoughts in fragments of words that feel so clear and clarifying in the moment…

I then find these fragments later and have to guess what the poet intended. Surely this was an important thought or I wouldn’t have written it down. Or would I have.

Maybe that’s the poetry in it all.

What do I know about maps?

Maps as a verb

I know that maps is a verb as well as a noun.

The active act of mapping.

I found another note that simply says Charting Despair, underlined three times. Big drama there. If that’s what the poet intended.

And to chart is also to map, a chart is also a map. If I can chart the despair, I can also chart the not-despair, which means maybe I can also chart a channel, find a way through.

Not here and not there

When I was in my first year of university, in Tel Aviv, I was living in a shared dorm room. My roommate was Russian, tough, bitter, glamorous, a few years older than me. She had grown up in St. Petersburg.

I think we were put together because we were both foreign; odd stragglers who didn’t fit in and didn’t make sense, who in everyone else’s mind weren’t really supposed to be there, two difficult people who seemed temporary, who had rudely managed to finagle their way into university without doing army service first.

For this, we were seen by some as sneaky and unlikeable, and by others as cool and reckless, and we did not seem to care what anyone thought about this, which only intensified these perceptions of us on their part, and our own perceptions of not belonging anywhere.

We were mismatched with the world and mismatched (though also well-matched) with each other.

A quick and easy truce

Truly no one knew what to do with us, certainly no one believed we would finish our degrees. Everyone had an opinion, a negative one, and they all went out of their way to tell us that we wouldn’t and couldn’t succeed there, though we did, possibly out of spite.

(I couldn’t tell you where my spite-diploma is though, because once I had earned it, I had to go be spiteful about other things.)

Somewhat unsurprisingly, having had to fight our way into this situation to begin with, we both showed up to this shared living arrangement prickly and uneasy, fully prepared to hate each other, on principle. Though more as a survival instinct by this point than anything else, I think.

But we were at first surprised and eventually delighted to discover that we didn’t hate each other at all, and we became fast friends.

Opposite

She spoke Hebrew with a calm, measured way of speaking, not slowly exactly but somehow studied and methodical, a light Russian accent present though not distractingly so, and then she’d speak in English at a breakneck speed in a sort of clipped British television voice that I loved, and her personality remained consistent despite these tonal shifts that I at first found disorienting and then soon became used to.

She was, at all times, consistently dry, witty, and sarcastic, refreshingly abrasive, and very, very funny. I adored her.

Because we had both grown up inside of the cold war, confused traumatized kids of the ‘80s, I had this idea at first, one possibly rooted in wishful thinking, that we must in some way have had some similar or interrelated childhood experiences, just from opposite sides of the looking glass. She corrected me on this immediately.

Fear and Loathing in Not-Here (and a map of New York City)

“We were so scared, constantly, of being Attacked By The Russians,” I explained. “There was always this imagined imminent threat that any day the bombings could start, and probably would. It was all propaganda of course but it felt so entirely real at the time. Did you feel the same way?”

“What? Never. Preposterous.” She looked at me with the most withering possible expression. “Imagine being scared of Americans. We were so fucking ready to invade you. We memorized maps of New York City, we trained for the invasion, for victory. We weren’t scared of you. We mocked you. We couldn’t wait to take over New York, it was exciting. I can draw you a map from memory. It still comes in handy when I visit friends in Brooklyn.”

Not matching, complementary

And so, as it turns out, we weren’t having similar, oddly parallel experiences, on the opposite sides of a mirror. Our delusions weren’t matching ones, though I guess you could describe them as complimentary in a way.

A co-dependency of false narratives? A canopy of shared illusion and delusion. There’s some poetry in that. There’s always some poetry in being wrong.

Fear and the opposite of fear. The opposite of fear is not courage so much as it is that exact flavor of over-confident dismissiveness, derision. Fear and loathing, there you go.

Drawn

Delusions like magnets drawing towards each other, delusions facing the opposite way and push-pulling apart with a thrill of close but not-close.

Draw swords.

Draw maps.

Draw conclusions.

Draw me closer.

Draw me like one of your French girls.

Draw water from the well.

What am I wrong about this time? Everything, probably.

What is consensus reality when there’s no consensus

You could say that while we both grew up in heightened realities (imminent big change on the horizons, personal and political), at the same time neither of us grew up anchored in any kind of consensus reality.

Maybe because there was no consensus reality, our countries and our families were lying to us and themselves at all times.

And now we were in a different country of lies, a country that runs on lies, and there we were, lying our way out of army service as a way of not serving the biggest lie, or possibly instead we were just lying our way into some other, smaller and more convenient lies. Sure. I mean, it’s complicated.

Everyone had a strong opinion to offer on this and every other topic, we were either clever and savvy, or brazen and foolish, we were either working the system (good) or working the system (terrible), and we would either regret it or we wouldn’t. The amount that we cared was, again, almost nonexistent. We had other, more pressing problems to wake up to.

The file

The Israeli government had a surprisingly impressive file on me, I don’t know all of what was in it and I like to imagine that someone just shoved a stack of printer paper in there for the purposes of intimidation, but the person holding it definitely knew some things, or claimed to know things about me, things that I didn’t even know.

To this day I am still unsure if some or any of these things they hinted at are true, and I don’t know who I would ask because there are no reliable narrators left, if there ever were any, and I will tell you about that mystery some other time.

But through luck, luck, more luck and some light lying that was really more like playing along, it all worked out in my favor somehow.

Later when I wasn’t lying, I was accused of lying. There is something a little poetic in that. A bitter poetry.

File that away for later. In the file. A file is not a map.

Nefarious versus inept: the eternal question

Re the file, it’s worth noting that a large file can also be the result of a wildly inefficient system; many things are nefarious, and the rest comes down to everything being enragingly inefficient.

So much time spent waiting for a decision or a piece of information from a person looking at my file or looking for the file or not being able to find the file, or saying something was in the file that could not possibly have been in the file (or could it have), and then having to start the entire process all over again because they needed another document to proceed, and three copies of it.

“Tell me about your grandmother Yaffa,” someone with the file demanded, on one of these visits.

I told them that I don’t have a grandmother Yaffa, and they didn’t believe me and I lost my temper over this and had to leave the office and cry over bitter coffee, but many years later, recently, I learned that I did have a grandmother Yaffa, more poetry.

More poetry

Yaffa means beautiful, and she was.

So many beautiful things to be wrong about.

You’re wrong about this too

Enemies to lovers, enemies to friends, enemies to not-enemies, enemies to the twice-monthly ritual of dinner together at a tiny table in a half-empty cafe, laughing uproariously over something no one can remember anymore, enemies to people who go their separate ways and forget and take selfies in elevators, and that gets forgotten too.

There are many possible options for where life may take you, but start here: X marks the spot.

And. Assume that everything you believed in the ‘80s was wrong.

Victorious before even beginning

On the American side we were kneeling in corridors covering our necks and heads, a duck and cover drill that I think was meant to do double duty for bombings and for tornadoes.

And in what was then still Leningrad, the kids my age were memorizing bridges and subway stations, conquering entire neighborhoods in their minds, mapping out the escape routes, mapping out the certain victories to come.

Wrong about

I was listening to the podcast You’re Wrong About, the episode about the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and both of the wonderful hosts, Michael and Sarah, bless their charming millennial hearts, were too young to have watched it in real time, but one of the myths they busted was one that I fully believed, that everyone in the United States had watched it play out in real time. Apparently this did not happen.

“Nonsense,” I said, out loud, to my phone. “We watched it on television, in fourth grade. I remember the teacher and the student teacher pushing the heavy cart with the clunky television on it, into the classroom and plugging it in so we could watch. Everyone watched it.”

Apparently though, kids in school are the ones who watched the disaster unfold in real time, while everyone else was at work, so maybe young Gen X is still traumatized by that and maybe not. I don’t remember. It’s not like there was a trauma shortage going around.

I remember the television being wheeled in, on the cart. I remember the excitement in the room. And that is the entirety of my remembering.

January 28, 1986

We watched it in real time, and so we must have seen it. 73 seconds of embarking, everything was okay, and then it was the opposite of okay. Wild trails to nowhere mapped across the sky, an awful tragedy. But I don’t remember it.

In fact, I don’t particularly remember anything else about the rest of that day, that week or that year.

How did I feel and how did anyone feel? How did the students in class react? How did the teachers react? What did the adults do? How was this situation treated? How were we treated? Was it treated as trauma and/or did no one speak of it again. I couldn’t tell you.

Another map of New York

A sometimes friend who is a former lover and really maybe more of an enemy than a friend divides their time between New Mexico and New York. And in their New Mexico home, they have a map of Brooklyn on the wall.

I love this map, it is so beautiful to me, it is in part beautiful because it is the only thing in their home that is not-beautiful, does that make sense, and because I always want to be looking at a map.

More pleasurable to imagine

This person invited me several years ago to their home in Brooklyn and I remember looking at plane tickets but then it didn’t happen, for reasons that have been lost to time, probably for the best.

In my mind, in the hallways of my imagining, I imagine that on a wall of that New York apartment is a prominently displayed map of New Mexico, or of the city in New Mexico where they reside when they are here and not there, but I have never asked.

Like many things, it is more pleasurable to imagine. I would be disappointed by a no, but maybe also disappointed by a yes. Many things are like this too.

Many things are like this?

It’s so boring when things are predictable, and so disappointing when they are not.

I wrote that on a note to discuss with my therapist, who will raise her eyebrows meaningfully, while also laughing, and then ask me what I mean, and I will say that I am talking about this map of New Mexico which may or may not be hanging on a wall in Brooklyn, New York, and how I want it to be there and I want it not to be there.

Schrödinger’s map.

And Meirav will ask me what I think it is really about, and I will say that I have an aesthetic craving for symmetry, but also that the truth is, I like it better when something different and unexpected is on the other side.

Everything is about desire. Unknowns > everything.

But also give me the comfort of symmetry, ritual, the known knowns, the known yeses, being wanted, safe, held by a place.

Held by a place

Like therapy, which happens in a room in my mind, because I haven’t actually seen Meirav in twenty five years. Held by a ritual, held by a place.

I am thinking about a rabbi I met in San Francisco once upon a time, how he said that the function of prayer is to be a safe space to have a fundamentally unsafe experience, and this is how I feel about the room where I go to therapy with Meirav.

It is deeply unsettling to be honest with ourselves; in order to map the unknowns, I wish for good company, and a good map of what is already known, or: what is already known to be comforting, trustworthy and supportive.

Mapping my way through

I liked poring over the Brooklyn map in New Mexico, even though I have not been to New York City in a very long time, pre-9/11, back in the before of it all, when I was young and married, on an entirely different trajectory of everything.

Because of my love of food and cooking, and my need to hear voices outside of my head, I listen to a number of food culture related podcasts, which inevitably either center around or continually circle back to New York City. New York chefs, New York restaurants, New York markets.

And so, I have a map that has been mapped in my head. If you say Lexington & 92nd, I say oh, near Kitchen Arts & Letters, close to the Jewish Museum. If you say in the East Village, I think of Superiority Burger and Death & Co, even though these places don’t share space with my actual memories of being there.

Tantalizing

On the framed map of Brooklyn, I orient myself first at The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg, and then my eyes move from there.

I am pretty much always thinking about the beautiful plates of food that I will never be able to taste.

How to orient a disaster in time

The pandemic is a bit like the Challenger space ship disaster, we all saw it happen in real time but then everyone papered over the memory and now they are pretending that it didn’t, or that everything is okay when it isn’t, or that some people were hurt but it’s all okay now. It is not okay now. I am not okay.

You couldn’t pay me to go into space, and the reality is that I’m also not going to eat in a restaurant or get on a plane. Illness has changed the shape of my life, for worse and for neutral, for one way and for another.

And so these too are maps of places I will not revisit. I have been broken by something that somehow seemingly did not break reality for everyone else.

But maybe that’s because long covid and memory loss are a daily reminder of the activities my body cannot participate in and my mind cannot remember, and I do not wish to play with fire. But also, I love playing with fire.

Craving

I have a craving to put up maps on my wall, maps of places I used to know or places I long to visit that I know I will not visit, or maybe even of places that are not real.

You might say I want to study maps the way my former roommate studied New York City in her cold war childhood, a study of immersion. This is about intimate knowledge, fully prepared for a victorious landing that will never come to fruition.

I want to pore over maps of the cities I know and the cities I don’t, to throw myself into the process of mapping them in my mind, viewing and reviewing until the synapses start firing, and the connections form themselves.

Mapping familiarity

Sometimes when I get physically lost somewhere, I like to pay close attention to everything around me, imagining that I’m filling in important details for later, mapping a map, drawing the connections.

Do you see? I am making a map for a future self or a parallel world self, so that they can extricate themselves in time (just in time, in the nick of time, within time, oriented in time, not yet out of time) so that they can find their way. Maybe they will feel a flash of déjà vu.

It’s all tantalizingly familiar and unfamiliar, isn’t it.

Study

I want to study maps, not for an invasion though, just to connect the pieces.

Fragments and junctions and connection points.

These are what I want to draw from.

Tending to the animals

Everyone I know is really going through it right now. Personal crises abound. Each of my friends is going through some terrible cycle of One Fucking Thing After Another, and god it is so relatable.

We check in on each other gingerly, light candles for each other, wish hopeful wishes, make sure everyone is eating and sleeping, or trying to. Feeding the animals, one friend calls it. The animals, of course, being ourselves. Gotta tend to the animals.

It’s poetic and tender, and also a simple symbolic step.

Postcards from the river route

I checked in on one friend and she said something like, “Kinda flattened to be honest, but sending love from here in Splatsville, USA”.

This is better than Schrödinger’s map. What I really want is a map of the places we end up when we are not okay. Postcards from Splatsville.

The next time I checked in, she was on The Good Ship About To Pop, and I was hopeful for a moment that the Good Ship had left Splatsville. Where is the good ship off to? Let us embark on a grand adventure.

I think, said my friend, that Splatsville is on the coast of the River No.

Map of the states

That would be a thrilling and/or useful art project, I think. A map of internal states.

I want to make one. I want to see someone else’s. Someday you can show me yours.

Can you feel this vision? I want to make my way down a corridor of art.

Maybe I am in or approaching an apartment in Not-Brooklyn where I suddenly encounter a map like this, a map of Not-New-Mexico, a map of right here right now.

Draw me something true, a map what is known in this heart space, for example.

And not just the pits of despair, show me the passages and channels, the hopeful places, the art of heart-hearth.

Maps

This feels almost like a Yoko Ono instructional art exercise too, instructional poems is I think what she called them, and event scores is the art term, I believe, but these are all good names for a map.

In her book Grapefruit, she has a piece called Tunafish Sandwich Piece:

Imagine one thousand suns in the
 sky at the same time.
 Let them shine for one hour.
 Then, let them gradually melt 
into the sky.
 Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.

That’s a map too, isn’t it.

Map Peace (Piece)

And so I give you Map Peace (Piece), which is my attempt at a Yoko Ono instructional poem:

Create two distinct maps of your psyche then burn one,
frame the other, eat a celebratory celebration sandwich
as you trace the map path from one internal state to another.

I have been thinking a lot about maps, can you tell.

Unknowns

I like that a map can contain a heart-truth and also a place called Splatsville, and also a place for sandwiches, for example.

Maps should be surprising that way. Show me something unknown and help me see the known things differently.

A map can be an instruction towards rest and revitalizing (eat a sandwich), and a map can show me something I did not notice before.

Decisions

My friend and I were talking about the past. She said, I have been thinking a lot about: what if I had made different decisions in the past, would I like my life better now? And of course that way madness lies!

Me: haha WHO CAN SAY, and obviously I know nothing about anything but/and also I am so glad you are alive and here and not with your ex, and that you do art every day and that you religiously celebrate movie & popcorn day, I love how you light tea lights and make scarves, and I want to recognize that a lot of what is hard in your life is related to unfair circumstances and our shitty culture and capitalism, and the way that creative souls are punished for not being able to be cogs, and anyway you are a hero for not giving up.

And anyway you are a hero for not giving up

Braver than the marines. Let’s keep going.

That’s also a map.

Poem maps

Sometimes it helps to read a poem, because a poem is a map and not-a map at the same time, and I was in the anxiety and I read a poem called Instructions on Not Giving Up.

You can read it too if you like, right here, though for me all I needed in the moment was the title.

It was right timing because I had just looked at the weather app, and the temperature was going down to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (-7.7 degrees Celsius), in April!

So I was ready to extremely give up and just cry, possibly forever.

But then the title of the poem mapped something else for me. Instructions on not giving up.

A poem unto itself. A Yoko Ono instructional instruction unto itself.

You try things and then you make a sandwich

Here’s what you do, babe. Try this.

A thousand suns and a sandwich, one step and then the next step, not giving up. That’s the most important step, it has to be repeated a bunch of times, but you can do it.

You’ve got this, just follow the instructions, and then map more instructions.

Instructions on writing instructions on not giving up

For example:

write Instructions On Not Giving Up
read them
make a sandwich
eat it while reading the instructions again
this is also one of the instructions
a recursive sandwich of not giving up

There’s your map

There you go, it’s a map that is a poem that is a heart-hearth.

A heart-hearth where you can sit and eat your sandwich and not give up.

Write your own instructions.

Then write them again, or write new ones, as needed. You are the poet and the poem, the map-maker and the map, a thousand suns, not giving up.

Ninety percent, at least

I told another friend about these poem-maps and this friend introduced me to Mary Karr’s poem, “The Voice of God”:

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God from the bowels of the subway.
but we want magic, to win
the lottery we never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace
the suffering.) The voice of God does not pander,
offers no five-year plan, no long-term
solution, nary an edict. It is small & fond & local.
Don’t look for your initials in the geese
honking overhead or to see thru the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious crap—
put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
— Mary Karr

There you go

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with me can be cured with a hot bath and a sandwich; god and the poet are both correct.

These are good instructions for not giving up. These are also good instructions for where not to look for the map.

Your mileage may vary, but of course you are the poet and the mapmaker, the writer of your own instructions. You might need something other than a sandwich. I bet if you write out your own instructions for not giving up, at the very least you will find a clue.

This might be what I do for April, or for this quarter, write myself a brief instruction packet every day.

The map of not giving up, the map of small symbolic steps, the map of make a sandwich.

London and then Cyprus and then a disappearance

Are you wondering what happened with me and my roommate? We disappeared off the map.

She went to London and then Cyprus and then we both disappeared for a while.

We both disappeared for a while, disappearing into abusive relationships and eating disorders, sometimes alternating and sometimes concurrent but I wanted to name them together because they belong together…

Naming them together because, do you see, I am mapping a taxonomy of the abyss, mapping the off-the-map, the here there be monsters.

I want better for all of us

I am naming the forms both accidental and calculated that some of us enter into and how we lose ourselves, mapping the places where we become smaller and keep going until we are shadows of ourselves, shadows of our shadows, mapped only in elevator selfies, caught in fleeting moments, the moment of being lost.

And I want to remember this so that I can map the opposite, map a passage to something better.

I want better for us.

The act of remembering

I try to remember that we are good at finding loopholes and escape routes, secret passages and not at all secret passages.

No shame and no regret required, not over lost time or lost anything.

A map: YOU ARE HERE. (EAT A SANDWICH.)

Another instructional instruction that is actually a suggestion

That’s feels like a Yoko Ono instructional art exercise too.

I will write it like an instructional poem:

see yourself like a sun
in the elevator mirror, illuminate this moment:
make yourself a sandwich and consume some life force,
gather up strength and keep gathering it,
who knows you might need to conquer New York
or make it down a flight of stairs,
change as you need to, and also remain intact

Map your way to something better, babe.

Small symbolic steps and April wishes

This is what I meant to write about today but then I had to write about maps instead, so maybe next time.

Or maybe maps as a verb and as a noun is my April wish and my small symbolic step.

Small symbolic steps piece

Small symbolic steps is all I want to focus on.

Map some small symbolic steps,
and eat that fucking sandwich already

Sometimes when

Sometimes when I write, I learn what I’m so terrified of and/or furious about.

(This is also why I avoid writing, when I am not writing, to not learn exactly this.)

And what I am learning is that I am extremely mad that I just keep having to be heroic all day every day seemingly forever.

But here is a clue from another poem, a let the calendar hold us, a calendar-as-ship rally clue:

‘All we have to do now is board the ship and allow it to take us all the way. We have nothing else to do but let it take us. We have not to do the navigating ourselves, we have not to labor with the oars, we have not to see where we are going or what distance we are covering: all that is being done for us.’ (Ruth Burrows)

Thank you to Kathleen and the Captain for that reminder.

Not a prompt, but a map or a mapping out

I dislike the word prompt, as in writing prompt, I do not like that word, I do not wish to be prompted.

It makes me think of a child being coaxed into saying their lines in a school play. Do not prompt me, do not send me onto the stage, do not want things from me, do not ask me to repeat, or project, or look out at lights. Please leave me alone, it’s all too much.

I want to be cozy and safe in the darkness, I want to exist in the wings, I will speak if and when I choose to, and if I want to whisper to the wall, then so be it.

I wish to look at patterns in the circles in the water and see where my thoughts go, it’s not the same.

Liberating instructions (that don’t need to be followed)

A map is not a prompt, and also it is. Same goes for poetry.

I guess you could say that Yoko Ono’s instructional poems are prompts in some form but they feel very liberating to me, because implied is the idea that you can do them or not, that the reading might be the doing, that reading is enough in the same way that the title can be enough.

Instructions on not giving up.

It matters much less what they are than that I can remember they exist, and rewrite them as needed.

Then again, I free-associated this entire essay from a fragment of a sentence about maps, so you can say that the word map itself was a prompt, a clue, a first step into a spiraling labyrinth made of smooth small stepping stones.

A map of a place I don’t know / a map is a place I don’t know. The map is where I begin.

A sandwich, the dream of a hot bath, instructions (reminders) to write instructions (maps), and the liberating knowledge that they will write themselves.

Even, especially, in the burning

A friend sent me to the poem Why Write Love Poetry In A Burning World, by Katie Ferris.

It made me cry. So fair warning, a map of maybe: tears. I will read it again and keep being reminded of why to write anything in a burning world, but especially-especially love poetry.

This is a sandwich that is also a love poem. This is a map that is also a love poem.

I love you. Let’s keep going.

I love you. Let’s keep going.

I love looking at a map

Like the song says…

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

(But also the Muppets take Manhattan, so let’s not take anything too seriously here.)

And as the map says, YOU ARE HERE.

We are here

You are here. I am here.

Here for small, symbolic steps, and playful remappings and reimaginings, here for poetry and intention, for the many internal states and for remembering they can shift and change, here for the unexpected and the surprising, and also for the comfort at the hearth.

Speaking of small, symbolic steps, Yoko Ono says: “Think of all the things that happened in there, and the many miles you walked inside the rooms. Be kind to yourself this evening.”

Let’s map it all as we find it. Let’s keep going.

Let’s keep going. ❤️

ANNOUNCEMENT! The Brautigan Wing returns!

In October of 2013 (nearly ten years ago somehow), I put out a 77 page ebook called The Brautigan Wing.

My description of it at the time: It is about a museum of small and big realizations.

But as a commenter on a recent post pointed out, it was also a collection of intriguing scribbled notes to myself.

In this book, I imagined building a museum exhibit about my mind, based on these found post-it notes, with commentary about what the poet may or may not have intended. Now it is a glimpse into the museum of my mind from ten or more years ago. Maybe there are some good clues for you, or maybe you will be inspired to turn your pile of notes into your own museum exhibit.

Anyway, if you feel moved to give any sum of Appreciation Money to Barrington’s Discretionary Fund, I’ll email you a link to the ebook as a bonus thank you! I don’t check email every day, but it will happen!

Come play with me, I love company

You are welcome to play with any of the concepts here in any way you like. Come play in the comments!

We are experimenting with experimenting, all experiments are useful experiments! You can brainstorm your own wishes or themes you’re drawn to play with. What patterns are asking to be rewritten and what would help? As always, we remember that People Vary.

And of course you’re invited to share anything sparked for you while reading, or add any wishes into the pot, into the healing zone, as a friend said, the power of the collective is no small thing, and companionship helps.

Here’s to locating the supportive rituals, playful experiments & loving compassion we need.

A request

If you received clues or perspective or just want to send appreciation for the writing and work/play we do here, I appreciate it tremendously. Working on some stuff to offer this coming year, but between traumatic brain injury recovery & Long Covid, slow going.

I am accepting support (with joy & gratitude) in the form of Appreciation Money to Barrington’s Discretionary Fund. Asking is not where my strength resides but Brave & Stalwart is the theme these days, and pattern-rewriting is the work, it all helps with fixing the many broken things.

Or you can buy a copy of the my Monster Manual & Coloring Book if you don’t have it!

And if those aren’t options, I get it, you can light a candle for support (or light one in your mind!), share one of my posts with someone who loves words, tell people about these techniques, approaches and themes, send them here, it all helps, it’s all welcome, and I appreciate it so much. ❤