I spent years creating music out of pain. Real pain. Intense frustration. Deep sadness. And then … my life changed and the reason for all that was (ahem) divorced from my world and suddenly, I had room to be pissed off about other things. Climate change. Social justice. Sexual equality. Bodily autonomy. Much more productive […]
Creating art can be an act of resistance, which is maybe one of the major reasons to do it. Art can show us new ways of thinking, new ways of understanding an idea. Maybe we’re afraid of something and we read a story in which the object of our fear, a spider or a snake
Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and follow the stars. Or in this case, the Sun, which is a star, too. Michael and I are headed to Arkansas in a few days, where totality will be crossing right through the parents’ backyard. How could we not go? I kind of don’t love traveling,
So turns out, the Neanderthals didn’t die out naturally. Nope. Sapiens happened. I recently read a fascinating book by a French archaeologist Ludovic Slimak, based on his 30+ years of studying Neanderthal remains and sites in the field. Apparently, geneticists recently discovered that some of our DNA is actually Neanderthal, leading to the speculation that
There’s a beautiful tradition about the Goddess Brighid (Celtic Minerva) that I try to observe as often as I can. On the night before Imbolc, which is generally observed on February 1 so the night of January 31, she walks the land, spreading her blessing over the fields and through the homes, touching all the
Everywhere I look blank pages The world becomes invisible with it’s coating of brilliant gleaming . . . Nothingness . . . It’s been over a week since I have seen, really seen, brown or gray or tired green and the cold is a constant ache you’d think we’d be used to by now But
I’ve had occasion lately to write things based on parameters that weren’t my own. A short story and a song, both with specific purposes that were not part of what I ordinarily think of as my central emotional … thing. Stuff. Doo-dad. Mojo. Whatever. I didn’t write from some emotional or intellectual realization or epiphany,
A rooster crows somewhere in Mesa in the tangle of Phoenix This anomaly wakes me up makes me chuckle Mesa seems to be mostly gray-haired Iowans sick of the cold who come here to Never Be Cold Again But it’s November and I miss the cold and I miss our modest-sized bed where we brush
The Refrigerator Wife trope has haunted us for centuries. There are plenty of fairy tales where a woman has to die in order for something to happen, and so many books from the 18th and 19th centuries where a woman is just starting to have some agency over her life and has to either commit suicide or die of the consumption (it’s always the fucking consumption, innit?) because we can’t have women making their own decisions about their lives.
You’re getting weak, Old Sun. Not so long ago your slightest touch would set my skin aflame But now … You’re getting weak, Old Sun. And Winter, he’s coming for you, and I don’t know if you have the stones to see him off anymore. I think maybe you threw your weight around a little
