MENOS MENTE / MÁS CORAZÓN (less mind / more heart)

"SHIPMATE" by @bb_pluto

As we near the portal opened up by the Winter Solstice + the Great Conjunction on December 21, we are coming into the darkest days of a dark, dark year.

In the realms of the seen and the unseen, the light is thin and the air is cold. We will soon find ourselves immersed in that inky, middle-of-the-night place where the edges of what we thought we knew to be solid in the light of day shift and melt into forms we don’t immediately recognize.

Luckily, learning to see in the dark is something we’ve been practicing all year.

Back in January, when I was touting the power of #2020Vision, I couldn’t have imagined what radical + devastating shifts this year would bring.

2020 came for us so hard it launched my lover and I from sweaty, salty sea level in Mexico to 10,000 feet high in the Rocky Mountains, cold and covered in snow. I didn’t see that one coming.

But, there are lessons here in these shadows.

What did the darkness teach you over these past 12 months?

For me, the lesson is this: Less mind. More heart.

These words have become an affirmation for making it through our year of shadows. They are a reminder to delve into deep waters with trust rather than gasping for air at the surface. They are a call to put into action the other kinds of knowing + seeing that have been birthed from all this pandemic pain.

Less mind. More heart.

In the bizarre time-space of pandemic living + quarantine, I’ve had a lot of time to explore and practice new kinds of seeing in the dark, which have led me into other kinds of writing. I started this novel project. I launched this blog, and I’ve begun to feel into my heart space as a source of divine creative inspiration.

What does it feel like to write from my heart instead of from my mind?

How do I access and communicate the deep, old knowing that sits at the very center of my chest -- vibrating and ready to sing?

How do we collectively infuse our creative processes with that tingling, prickling light?

These are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself as I seek the light and explore and express my drive to create. Asking them is part of learning how to embody creative expression as a spiritual process, rather than as an outcomes-based exercise I do for external approval.

As a life-long people pleaser and perfectionist, I’ve been well-trained in creating final products that are primed for external approval. My hyper-fast mind has been a trusty companion in puzzling out what those around me want and need and then altering the rhythms of my life and body to meet those demands.

Writing is no different. It turns out that a PhD is a great way to put these big old brains we have to work satisfying that familiar beast of burden -- an A+ and the rush of approval that comes with it.

Although I’m hesitant to say that all of what I’ve done in my life has been to feel the familiar zing of external approval, I know myself well enough to say that my internal drive to please has certainly shaped the feeling that underlies many of the directions I’ve chosen in life. And I know that acting--and writing-- from a space of people-pleasing often feels restrictive and frantic. In other words, it makes me sweat.

Two years after finishing my dissertation (PEAK BIG BRAIN ENERGY), I’m living happily in my decision not to pursue a traditional academic life that (for me) demands constant, often paranoid productivity focused on writing. As I learn to relax into other forms of creation, I’m beginning to understand that the kind of writing I want to do has to come from a place really different than from where I was “trained” to write.

In order for my creative flow to not only be sustainable, but also transformative, it can’t come pouring forth from my cortisol- and adrenaline fueled nervous system. I don’t want it to come from a place that makes my hands numb and my stomach churn. It’s got to be heart -- focused, channeled, directed, and intentional.

YIKES. What does a heart even feel like?

Over the past year of darkness, I’ve begun to find answers to that question in an unexpected place: The Akashic Records.

If you’ve been following my writing up to this point, you might know that I have a bit of what the philosopher Jacques Derrida calls archive fever: that burning, intoxicating desire to immerse myself in the deep space where collective and individual memories, knowledges, and experiences are stored. Back in my post from October, “Alchemizing Trauma for the Ancestors,” I talked about the radical potential of our bodies as archives.

The Records are kind of like a next-level archive -- they record the energetic imprint of our souls not only in the body we currently inhabit, but across all of the bodies and lives our soul has ever moved through from the beginning of time, and earlier.

According to Linda Howe, one of the key teachers and practitioners of the Akashic Records in the United States:

“the Record is a vibrational archive of every soul and its journey throughout time as human. This dimension is not visible, even to your strong inner eye!”

The Records aren’t a physical place -- they exist in a realm we must access through a kind of intense, channeled focus or meditation. To get to the Records, we can ask for guidance from our Masters, Teachers, and Loved Ones -- those spirit helpers who exist in realms beyond typical human perception but who show up for us regularly, whether we know it or not. With their help, we can open up our Records and read them like a book. Juicy, right!?

My Records were first “opened up” by my therapist back in 2016 on the floor of an office building in Easthampton, Massachusetts. My therapist' first remark was -- “Wow. It feels like a disco party in here!” I loved that -- imagining that the imprint of my soul was visible to my therapist as throbbing bands of colors and light.

Since 2016, my therapist and I periodically work in the Records together to find answers to questions about my healing journey that exceed “rational” ways of processing emotions and experiences. Together we’ve explored the spirit of alcohol within the soul journey of my dad, we’ve connected into the heart-space of my paternal grandmother who died when my dad was 7, and we’ve encountered a guiding figure I like to call “rhino-dino,” who reminds me about the need for humor and levity in my daily life.

This year, just before the pandemic started, my therapist began to teach me how to open and read my own Records. Things started moving fast after that.

I figured out that if I opened my Records and began to write on my novel--the story of Larkin, Betsey, and the Mummy-- I could access a source of creativity and knowledge that’s really different from what I’m used to drawing on. I know without question that the material I generate in these sessions comes from heart-space -- that internal wilderness I can’t think my way into or out.

The only other time I’ve felt that kind of “flow” happen was in the community creative writing groups I’ve been a part of through the Voices from Inside program, which works with folks impacted by incarceration and recovery. As both participant and facilitator in those groups, the short 5-to-7 minute writing spurts based on prompts often felt like turning on a faucet and watching images and sentences pour out that I’d never seen before. Now, I realize that the sacredness of the circle we created each time we gathered had a lot to do with setting the right conditions for writing from the heart.

So what does heart-writing look like?

As I wrap up this post on LESS MIND / MORE HEART, I want to share some notes I took during a session in the Records where I was explicitly asking for guidance in beginning the Larkin + Betsey story. I share it in the spirit of making heart-writing more accessible both for myself and others reading along.

My therapist asked me to present my questions in this session to my own INNER VOICE, so in the text below IV stands for INNER VOICE, or the answers I’m getting back from the questions I pose to the Records.

***

Me: “Inner Voice, am I ok?”

IV: Prickling feelings of excitement across my chest and heart -- different from the stirrings of anxiety there, but helpful reminders that there is plenty to be excited about --- I am more than OK, I am pure potential!

Me: “Inner Voice, am I on the right path?”

IV: Impressions of waves undulating -- a reminder of the ups and downs, that OK has a lot of different ways of looking

Me: “Inner Voice, what do you think of this new project?”

IV: Image of ship crashing / struggling on open waters -- a deep feeling of sadness. There is sadness there. It’s salty and old.

Me: “Inner Voice, what do I need to know about that?”

IV: A feeling or impression of a rope coiling, intertwining, ship’s rope thick and white and frayed w/ knots at the end -- it’s being offered up to me, reminding me of the many lines that are tangled here, giving me something to hold on to -- something to pull on out of the darkness of the pit of my stomach -- some of the entry points for this material will be in my gut and not in my heart -- my heart is maybe what I know or what is immediately available to me, the gut is the unknown place I’m going to -- the rope comes up from down below and out of my throat, ready to be pulled on -- an anchor -- an invitation.

Me: “Inner Voice, are there guides available to me on this journey?”

IV: Immediately, impression of Donald Duck in a sailor suit -- reminding me to be playful, that this doesn’t have to be personally destabilizing -- akin to the rhino dino from our earlier forays into the records -- bringing “levity -- there is a way of being light about this heavy work that I must remember first and foremost

Me: “Inner Voice, are there other guides that can help me?”

IV: A surfacing face of some kind of sea god w/ a barnacle crown -- this person knows what this journey is like, they can guide me and maybe even protect me? They are skilled and experienced -- Offering to take me down, down, down into that small black portal deep below the surface -- a different kind of ocean, a different kind of crossing. A craggy, somewhat familiar face. Is the hair white or dark? Is the person familiar or an archtype? Is this Seaward or Seward? I say yes, I will follow -- where are we going? Down and down, towards that black hole and then into it and then thru it up and up up up to the surface, breaking through on a bright deck of a wooden ship -- this is the place to begin? Is this where it happens?

Me: “Inner Voice, what are my tears about?”

IV: image of a bottle filled w/ sloshing salt water -- I get the sense that these tears are an infinitely old resource -- pouring out the bottomless well of salty water that my ancestors swum in -- these tears -- these HEART tears are a kind of visceral or physical connection to this well that I am drawing from, drinking from, being nourished by -- there is salt water in me, it is always there, and when I know truth it pours out -- manifesting and concretizing the well that is always there inside the behind space. Also, a bottle -- our tears are held in a bottle and maybe we go to the bottle when the tears are not enough -- we try to drink more of that / from that truth but it’s not the right kind of salty water. It’s not enough and it makes us sick instead.

***

I want to keep asking these questions, learning to write from the heart space and not purely from the mind space. It will be key to surviving this work as a whole person. As I write and remember here, I can feel that my toes are not blue. My breathing is a bit deeper. These are all good signs.

XO,

L

UNSETTLING STORIES

Art by @bb_pluto

Look, it’s me! I’m 6. I’m in first grade, and I just learned what a “Pilgrim” is. I’m crouched behind the bathroom door, concealing myself from Catholic religious persecutors. A purple and silver fold-up PlaySkool mirror is my Book of Common Prayer, and I study it surreptitiously. I bring its shiny reflection right up close to my face so I can read the small, secret print. I pray that those who forbid my religious beliefs won’t find me here, hiding in the future. I pray for my freedom and for the tall ships that will take me away towards the distant, unknown shores of New England.

Look, it’s me! I’m 7. I spent the past three weeks of second grade learning about Paul Revere and his infamous revolutionary ride through the towns that some of my family still live in. I’m outside in the forest among those towering guardians of my universe--the pines. I am wearing my self-fashioned three-cornered hat and I am shouting, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” I am listening and listening hard. And I am getting scared. The closer I listen, the closer I can hear the cavalry horses’ hooves coming for me through the woods. And now my blood is pumping and I am scared. I run towards the house, run towards safety--away from the Red Coats I am convinced have come to take me away.

Look, it’s me. I’m 8. I’m flipping through my favorite book again--Letting Swift River Go, by Jane Yolen, a local author. I’m pestering my Dziadzu to tell me his story again, the one about the time he rode with his father in the farm truck those 20 some odd miles East to watch the men dismantle those four little towns, house by barn by church by graveyard stone.

I imagine the force of the flood that will hit when each of those little houses has been taken apart and the cows have all been corralled and then water comes, filling the edges of the great Quabbin Reservoir like a glass very full. A glass brimming with tension, filling up that dirty hole in the earth with clean drinking water for the city folks in Boston. You can scuba dive down into the Church’s steeple, you know. Those wild blueberries growing alongside the water’s edge will keep your mouth sweet all winter, you know.

History has always been alive for me--something to play with, something to immerse myself in, something to get lost in. Growing up in Hadley, Massachusetts, I was surrounded by foundational (or, colonizer) stories and myths about our region. Not the old stories indigenous to the land, like the story of Ktsi Amiskw, the great beaver whose ancient body forms Wequamps, or, Sugarloaf Mountain in Sunderland. But settler stories--stories that made people who looked like me triumphant and brave and entitled to the many riches of the place I came from--the Connecticut River Valley.

The History of Hadley, written by Sylvester Judd and published in Northampton in 1863, was my bible. That dusty tome guided my earnest search for connection to who and what came before me. With my mom’s encouragement, I poured through the 15-pound behemoth at an early age, relishing its dusty smell and the many old stories it told.

The History of Hadley told me about the so-called River Gods who slashed and burned their way into the forests and hills of “our” land amidst emerging war with those who were already here. It told me about how that land teemed with riches like hardwood and fish and freshwater--resources that made the settlers’ lives livable and even prosperous. And it told me about the successful deeding of the land and the gridding off of private property that followed.

In The History of Hadley, I read about the founders of my town, who in 1659 (that would be 20 years shy of the Salem witch trials for context), settled a parcel of that precious earth along the banks of the Connecticut River--then known by one of its many other names, the Kwinitekw, the longest river. I read about how those settlers (whose legacies are preserved in street names throughout the region) were “gifted” the land thanks to John Pynchon’s “purchase” of the parcel from the Norwottuck (or Nolwotogg) community a few years earlier. Then, I read about how those settlers promptly constructed a nine-foot tall stockade around the entire settlement (so much for the commons) and proceeded fearlessly into the future.

On field trips, I went to Forbes Library in Northampton to see Frederick A. Chapman’s 1850 oil painting of the so-called Angel of Hadley, who “saved” those same settlers from an “ambush” by local indigenous people during King Philip’s War in September of 1675. The painting’s full title told its own story-- one I didn’t fully comprehend until much later: “The Angel of Hadley, or the Perils of our Forefathers.”

The historical stories and scenes I played in as a kid (THE BRITISH ARE COMING!!) offered me one version of one story that is held in the land where I grew up. The one version of the one story made its way to me because it most clearly aligned with how “Our Forefathers” needed to be seen by their children in the distant future: as the rightful inheritors of the land’s riches. Once that history was written, other stories that lived deep in time, bound by reciprocal relationships to the mountains and rivers and forests of the Valley, were eradicated and promptly forgotten. They were buried as if they’d never existed. Erased.

The truth is, the settlers’ stories worked. At least they worked towards the specific ends the settlers imagined. By creating and preserving a version of “local history” that became true because “we” (the white inheritors) believed it (because our triumphs were sealed in official town records and archived in the town’s historical society), the hierarchical power dynamics that still define this region today were sedimented into a governing reality.

Put another way, settler stories became the supreme rule of the land and of the local history where I’m from. White people and white problems were (and still are) on top in Western Massachusetts. Material resources like land and economic wealth and access to markets typically still flow in the one direction those settlers wished them to -- directly into a line of generational inheritance that dispossesses those who exist outside of its own story of settled, up river whiteness.

In researching this post, I wanted to find some more specific details about how these early settler stories relate to contemporary distributions of power and resources in the region where I’m from. To my delight, I came across a related project undertaken by my very own sister, Kristen Whitmore, who is completing her doctorate in regional planning at UMass.

In “HOW WE SETTLED: A regional analysis of social inequity in the Pioneer Valley” Kristen explores everything from the history of zoning laws in Western Massachusetts to current census data on income, race, and education to link up historical stories about white settlers’ control of land and resources in the region to the very real conditions of racial disparity in health, wealth, and housing across “the Valley” today. I suggest checking out the section on differential zoning laws that govern structure height in Springfield and in Amherst to see some of the time-tested mechanisms that ensure some communities stay white, just as our founders intended. Tofu Curtain anyone? Through the lens of HOW WE SETTLED, we get a clearer sense of the ways in which historical stories of white settler supremacy have become hardened into both the physical landscapes and social/economic structures of the region.

Today, I know that historical stories aren’t neutral. I know that what we call “history” comes to us directly through time-honored exercises of power. And I know that there are some very intentional reasons I played in the shadow of Paul Revere’s ride and not in the shadow of a Great Beaver, even though it rested right before my eyes my entire life, concealed as a benign lump of earth known as Mount Sugarloaf.

The settler stories I received were first and foremost about securing settler ownership over the land, and a Great Beaver like Ktsi Amiskw cannot be owned or tamed or sold for its fur. It cannot be removed or dismissed or enticed to work for pennies. The Great Beaver’s story shows us what a long-term, cyclical relationship to the land can look like. It reminds us about what happens when we live out of balance. And for that reason, the story poses a vital threat to the march of progress that white settlers brought with them, hammered into their boats and into the joists of the mills they constructed up and down the Long River’s banks. For the threat it posed to the emergent promises of settler capitalism, the Great Beaver was storied into a lifeless mound of rock and dirt.

In New England, erasure has been a choice tool in the settler colonizer’s tool box. The false narrative of indigenous erasure binds local white settler histories to the very real dynamics of land-based power they made possible. In Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, indigenous scholar Jean M. O’Brien suggests that white settlers/colonizers in New England were “obsessed” with their “self-fashioned providential history” and they defined their region “as the cradle of the nation and seat of cultural power.”

To me, that means that the local history stories I received as a white kid growing up in Hadley were the result of intentional labor, not simple documentation. Following O’Brien, the effects of that labor were to “appropriate the category ‘indigenous’ away from Indians and for themselves.”

Hence, the “Pioneer Valley” was born. First, it was naturalized as empty and then as white, and the indigenous communities who still live here were storied out of existence just like that. That sentiment is alive and well today, despite ongoing efforts by local indigenous people to reclaim both place and story for more realistic and just distributions of power, including the power of self-determination. The “battle” over whether to keep racist mascots at Turners Falls High School is just another iteration of the deep-seated local belief in white entitlement to indigenous history, land, and story in the Valley.

Today, we (the white inheritors of settler stories and settler values) must be accomplices to supporting fully self-determined indigenous life through concrete means, like land back reparations. We must listen to, honor, and directly support the voices and stories that were erased with the theft of the land. Not because we are entitled to the stories, but because they are sacred and true. Because they are part of the future we are all moving towards together, whether we acknowledge it or not. The stories are here, evading the intentional trap of white colonial history by drinking nutrients up from roots that push down far deeper than a plow could ever reach. The stories are here, alive and beating with life that looks sounds and looks different than the lay of the land we falsely think of as our own. Unsettling.

Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’ book and web project Our Beloved Kin: Remapping a New History of King Philip’s War offers the kind of story-full intervention that directly amplifies these calls to center, honor, and support other stories. Brooks, a professor of English and American studies at Amherst College, literally remaps the geography and story of the Connecticut River Valley through an explicitly indigenous lens in order to establish the movements and returns of indigenous communities across the region from the early 1600s up to the very present moment and beyond. In centering ongoing relationships of kinship and reciprocity to the land, Brooks is clear and concise about the stakes of this work. She calls it an awikhigan, the Abenaki word for a tool of navigation and creation:

This awikhigan is not "a new history" in the sense of creating some thing, entirely new and different, or offering a definitive replacement for a History that is old or outdated. Rather, in the Abenaki sense, the book and website are part of a cycling or spiraling of ôjmowôgan (history), which refers to a process of telling a collective story, an ongoing activity in which we are engaged. Every manifestation of history-telling, though, like every new moon, may shed light on "new" insights, experiences, and knowledge, depending upon the position from which we view or engage it.

Here, it’s the spiraling, multi-modal expanse of deep time and not the linear, completed march of settled history that’s front and center in the ongoing creative labor of telling “our” story-- a collective story that is incomplete and always already unfolding. What a relief.

As Brooks models this way of doing history in Our Beloved Kin, I can begin to see entirely other worlds blossoming within, around, above, and below the settled space I come from. And that vision is both unsettling and entirely invigorating. It foretells a different way of being together-- a different way of inhabiting space and story that might feel quite unsettling to some of us, until we learn to trust it, too.

It’s true that unlike much of the rest of the world, most white people in New England have been taught to trust what we know. We’ve been taught to trust and rely on a secure sense of entitlement to our history, which justifies our secure sense of entitlement to the land. Unsettling stories may leave us with a sense of loss that can turn desperate and violent if not listened to in deep conversation with what has remained true across time--the earth, its waterways, its companion species, and its continuous cycles of change. We are not losing anything if what we’re moving towards is more robust than what we’re leaving behind. White people don't need to be coddled into a new history -- we need to seek it out with the same force with which we settled.

Today, we know that settling wasn’t gentle -- it was urgent, intentional, and brutal. Unsettling stories can be less brutal, but the urgency and intentionality is no different. To unsettle is to be made uncomfortable, at least for a period of time. To write and listen to unsettling stories, we must first acknowledge the emptiness (or at least the deep incompleteness) of the stories and the maps we as white people did receive in order to move through and past the trap of white colonial history in which we've been stuck. The truth is, we set the trap ourselves and it's time to see what happens when we get ourselves free.

Follow me next week for some of the ways I’m seeking to unsettle the story I’ve been tasked to tell. Until then, more will be revealed!

XO,

L

ALCHEMIZING TRAUMA FOR THE ANCESTORS

art by @bb_pluto <3

Around the age of 12, I began an unfortunate new morning ritual. Before school, I would wake up, get dressed, and promptly attach a super-sized menstrual pad to the back half of my underwear before finishing my bowl of cereal and running off to endure 7th grade.

I donned the pad every day of middle school and high school, hoping and praying that nobody noticed the strange ruffling sound my backside made as I stood up or sat down. When I got home, I instantly ripped the heinous thing off. Only then could I feel an inkling of peace or comfort in my body, which certainly eluded me the entire 8 hours of school.

The butt-pad routine was intended to ward off the dreaded, sweat-induced ass streaks I’d left on the brightly colored melamine chairs of my middle school classrooms one too many times .

It was only one of a handful of creative strategies I’d begun to develop to keep my hyper-activated (read: highly sweaty) body at bay. I was also hyper-vigilant about avoiding any activity that might require me to hold hands with another person, lest they get a load of the cold, slimy dish rags that passed for my hands. And, to prevent wide, damp sweat circles from blooming under each of my arms, I finished off nightly showers with an application of prescription Drysol -- a literal layer of aluminum chloride that left my skin burning and raw.

It was worth it to me, that chemical re-arrangement of the molecules in my underarm muscles that produced the sweat in the first place. I felt that if I could literally get under my skin to stop the sweat where it was produced, maybe I would have a chance at a happy (i.e., dry) life.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. As I type this post today, my hands are still slippery and wet on the keyboard, and I’ll probably change my shirt after I finish writing. The sweat persists, even as my flesh sack grows and changes.

I’ve felt that my damp, anxious body was rebelling against me for most of my life. Growing up, the shame of being seen as different by my extremely small peer group in my extremely small town led me to fear the skin I lived in. My body was uncontrollable, and that was terrifying.

I tried my best to hide its betrayals behind whatever medicine or padding I could find. By the time I hit my 20s, that looked and felt like full blown dissociation. Maybe if I’d known back then about the possibility of being non-binary, some of these feelings might have made a bit more sense to me. But at 35, I‘m still just beginning to figure that one out.

As a life-long “worry wart,” I do think I knew all along that my sweaty, problematic body probably had something to do with the deep, near-constant anxiety that walked with me wherever I went. But for most of my young life, I also felt powerless to intervene. I was a kid, after all, with a limited range of power or agency to alter the circumstances of my life at the root. My family did what they could -- they brought me to the pediatrician, they validated my feelings, they helped me create routines for comfort. But ultimately I sweated on, slippery and cold in this unruly body.

When I was 22, I found work at the RECOVER Project, a peer-to-peer recovery center based in Franklin County, Massachusetts. The RP changed a lot for me. There I found an intentional, “from the ground up” community of people trying to make sense of past hurts and harms in order to live more fully in the present. I found a group of people willing to be honest about the role of shame and fear in their lives and in their bodies. In their company, I began to suss out deeper connections between my humming, vibrating, leaky interior landscape and the exterior circumstances that grew me up.

Unexpected death of a close family member. Childhood illness. Family struggles with mental health, chronic pain, moving, being broke, alcoholism, opioids. Individually, each of these dynamics didn’t necessarily define “me” or the vibe of my home life. In my house we laughed a lot and I was surrounded with love. However, as a sensitive, intuitive kid constantly trying to make sense of what was going on around me, some of those more challenging experiences surely did affect the rhythms and realities of my internal landscape.

The wise women I worked with in Franklin County were on the leading edge of understanding the wily ways that harmful experiences “stick” to the insides of our bodies. They helped me intuitively know that what we’ve been taught to call trauma impacts our most basic ways of relating to the outside world. They showed me that breath, blood pressure, and yes, even sweat, are all messengers from our insides. These processes communicate valuable information about how our body relates to the systems, structures, and circumstances in which we find ourselves surviving.

Above all, my recovery community helped me to figure out that whatever we call “trauma” isn’t a definable experience easily linked back to a single event. Sometimes it is that. But it is also the messy accumulation of stress, tension, violence, loss, and uncertainty in the body through time. It is psychic and physical. It is inherited. It is the way that the hurtful systems and structures we live within (including white supremacy, capitalism, the gender binary, colonization) attach and bond to our bodies. And our organs and nervous systems bear the brunt of it all.

So what is my sweaty ass trying to tell me after all these years?

I took these lessons with me to graduate school hoping that maybe I might answer some version of that question in the process. During my master’s program, critical theory became my favorite, most cherished tool for exploring the vast terrain of trauma and the body. I devoured theory on affect and embodiment. I read classic works by Freud on hysteria and Derrida on archive fever. I reflected it all thru the life-giving lens of queer theory and queer-of-color critique. Writers like José Esteban Muñoz and Jasbir Puar and Sara Ahmed offered up radical takes on failure, pain, belonging, and community-building for healing and liberation. They showed me other ways of living and existing in a body overflowing with shame.

During that time, I began to think seriously about our bodies as archives. If an archive is a physical space that holds and protects precious bits of knowledge and information, then might our bodies--the physical holders and keepers of our most tender and sharp memories-- be such a place?

Trauma clinician Bessel Van der Kolk would say yes, I think. His work suggests that over the long-term, it’s our bodies that “keep the score” by tracking and recording the effects of our lived experiences and storing that information inside our muscles, nerves, and bones.

I wrote my master’s thesis on the topic of body-archives, and it brought me up close to a set of childhood experiences I had long abandoned. My body’s own “score”--long sealed up in the archival space right around my spleen--opened up to me and what was lost was found, a least a little bit.

Fast forward 10 years, and my understanding of body-archives and the “stickiness” of trauma continues to evolve. Through the framework of somatics, I’ve learned that our nervous systems--especially our limbic systems and our autonomic nervous systems--are the real “keepers” of the score. By opening and closing the neural pathways that activate and deactivate muscles, nerves, and hormones, our nervous systems contain the instructions that our bodies have built over time for how our bodies “should” react and respond to our external environments.

More often than not, the instructions we receive from our nervous systems lead us down neural pathways that no longer serve us...Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Squish. Squish. Squish.

Luckily, I’ve learned some pretty rad practices for forging new neural pathways that can take me somewhere different. Meditation, somatic grounding, Zoloft, EMDR, Al-Anon, acupuncture, stretching, Akashic Records, astrology, and tarot have all been crucial for cultivating deeper and more intentional connections to creativity and spirit. Creativity and spirit are what deliver me out of the darkness where I can drown if I’m not care-full.

By knowing and utilizing those portals, I've gotten a lot closer to understanding my queer nervous system and how it works. Today, I have rituals of release and a deeper knowledge of grief and growth and the systemic harms that pull us down slowly and less obviously. And still… my body leaks and leaks and leaks.

So now, a new order has presented itself -- heal myself and I heal all of you. But how?

Drip. Drip. Drip.

As I ride the tides of my own body’s seemingly bottomless ocean, I’m beginning to think that the archive I host inside of me is quite a lot more filled up than I previously realized.

Can you drain an ocean? Do I want to?

As I circle around and around the tipsy tall pile of ancestral baggage delivered by my ancestor--the merchant seaman and mummy captor Larkin Thorndike Lee-- straight into me, I inherit his legacy through the tangled up archive of my DNA.

As I open that archive’s heavy door, I’m tasked with the question of how this salty, wet seaman and his deathly anxiety relates to my own cup, which overfloweth with salty wetness, too.

What is there of that seaman in my WAP (Wet Ass Pants)?

Is his eternal wetness my eternal wetness?

Or is my ass just full of old seamen?

The records tell me that in 1825, Larkin Thorndike Lee’s earthly fate was sealed into the wet, wet, ocean when his body was tossed overboard upon his death “of Anxiety, off the coast of Africa.”

The more I live aligned with the principle that time isn’t linear or real in the ways we’ve been taught (more on this in a future post!), the more I can feel the tightness of that old sea rope that binds my body to his body, tethering us to eternal swells and squalls with fine and complicated knots.

Understanding this alternative arrangement of past, present, and future--understanding the ways I’ve been knotted up to Larkin as he literally drowns-- is the route to releasing the wetness that’s been coded into my Permanent Record-- my DNA. Heal myself and I heal all of you. Anchor your ship, and now I’m dry too.

In a recent episode of the Bespoken Bones podcast, artist, activist, and healer brontë velez talks to us about the necessary work of alchemizing trauma for our ancestors. For velez, this means finding ways to acknowledge and feel the weight of our ancestors in the present moment--to feel their needs, their hurts, and their losses--so that such lingering pain can be transmuted into the materials of liberation. I love this.

Like me, brontë velez seems to have come to this earthly plane ready to dig themselves out. Through the conduit of a ritual where they were laid in the forest, covered in dirt, and photographed emerging through layers of vegetational debris, velez had a vision of a sexual assault their grandmother experienced, which led her to being literally buried alive.

In that moment of connection across time and space, velez uses their own body to consensually close a circuit once left open by a non-consensual act of violence. It’s an act of transmutation. By feeling the weight of dirt on their own body, velez listens, witnesses, and learns what is needed to relieve the insistent pressure of the past exerted on their present body and spirit. It is a gift of relief they give to their grandmother from the future, which is also the past.

This story -- the one about Larkin and Betsey and the mummy -- has to do with the specific kind of pressure velez names. It has to do with an ancestral inheritance that sits in your body and presses on you. Or, in my case, just leaks right out.

I’m drawn to the power-term velez uses to describe this process: ALCHEMIZE. It evokes the possibility of a deep and maybe even permanent state of change in the condition and presence of our ancestors in our body. It speaks of the core transformational power of magic and ritual. To alchemize is to convert -- to make new with.

There’s so much more to explore about the alchemy of salt and the labor of conversion.

At 10, I was diagnosed with Conversion Disorder, which is another part of another story that is also this story. I can’t help wondering if “disordered conversion” has something to do with the unresolved pressure of Larkin and his stolen mummy leaking into the present moment, reminding us of the wrongness of linear time. Stay still and maybe he will pass.

But maybe Larkin is still in me--in salt, in blood, in bone. Maybe he is underwater, pumping those instructions for WET WET WET through my blood vessels and sweat glands and pores and spleen and heart and hands, even when such instructions no longer serve me.

What happens when you alchemize salt water?

Larkin and Betsey want me to ask that question, and others -- What remains of their bodies and their actions in the anxious, watery grave of my DNA? What of their harms need transmutation in this body, here and now?

To alchemize trauma means altering core components from within that ineffable “home-place” ties us to the pool of source we rested in until we were called forth into the bodies we now call home. It's deep work that takes place across portals we thought were closed.

brontë velez’s ritual and its accompanying call to alchemize trauma for the ancestors is one way to honor and dignify those who have lived and lost and have since passed through that most major portal we face as human beings: death.

By setting our dead ancestors’ hurting and harmful experiences in light of our own energies and intentions, we can redirect the gifts and the hurts they’ve left us with toward revolutionary ends -- towards the possibility of peace and freedom-- both personal and structural.

In releasing what is stored in the darkness of flooded-out archives long sealed, we make room for the growth of new systems and new containers for holding us in all of our complexities. We make room for the dryness of land. Alchemize. Transition. Transform.

Thanks for sticking with me through these first few posts which have to do with the big-picture project I’m setting off the ground.

Join me again next week for a return to some of the nitty-gritty details of my research and writing on Larkin and Betsey Lee. Less woo, more history. Well, still woo -- but history too.

I’ll explore intuitive research processes and the logistics of world-building and the labor of historical-fictioning.

I’ll share some tools I’ve been developing to organize information and thematics in my writing, and I’ll talk about my recent roll through the North Shore looking, looking, looking for Larkin everywhere -- at the house his mother lived (it’s still there!), at his grave (I found it!) and in the harbor to which his ships came home (the perfect place to daydream about history while eating a Bill & Bob’s roast beef sandwich).

As always -- more will be revealed! <3 <3 <3