naming what has risen

the great (re)awakening

It’s deep summer here on the East Coast, and somehow I feel like I’ve just finished thawing out.

It was a long winter. Metaphorically, literally, spiritually. A winter of the mind and of the body. A winter that lasted three seasons. I didn’t realize how deep it went until I began to emerge from it. Has that ever happened to you? I felt aware, I felt tuned in, but I mistook the stimulation of a full schedule with embodied reality. Recently, I heard Raquel Willis (while in conversation with Elliott Page) say “being on is not the same thing as being alive.” I was very much on, but not feeling my aliveness. I know why I go numb: It’s an adaptive coping mechanism to living in a world of overlapping, accelerating cruelties — but I often don’t realize I’m living there until I’m coming out of it.

This summer has been a long lesson in the ways I can still elude myself. While I’m working on my book, I’m confronting this truth: That as much as I invest in the project of living inside my body, I don’t always know when I drift back out or even what to do once I’m back inside. Self-work is cumulative, in my experience. It feels like a continuous act of remembering.

In May, I visited a friend in Miami who is going through a devastating separation. Impulsively, I ordered a teeny bikini for the trip. I’m not particularly body confident, nor am I someone who feels comfortable being nude or semi-nude in public, even though I am coming to embrace it more. But something distinctively shifted when I put it on — it changed the awareness of my body. Completely. It rewired how I looked at myself, how I moved in space. Something about the tug of the fabric, the way those side bands firmly gripped my body provided just enough sensory input to remind that I do, in fact, have a body, activating the possibilities for more activation. It didn’t allow me to ignore myself. It inserted me back into my body. There were other things going on that helped, too. Getting more clarity around how I want to be, where I want to be in the world, and how to build the relationships I’d like to have in my life as I open myself back up to deep love and intimacy.

I wore it all summer long (to the dismay of my doctor friends), under sheer dresses, oversized jean shorts, to the beach and to the club. The thong initiated a chain reaction. It felt gradual, the way the sunflowers I grew from seed opened their eyes to the world a few yellow lashes at a time, as if gently waking up from a nap. I re-visit Audre Lorde’s urgent essay on living fully in our awareness often. And while I don’t feel that I was refusing to be conscious of my feelings, I deeply understand her concerns about the high cost of not being in touch with the self. The way that detachment, however safe it may be, allows the self to be co-opted, compartmentalized, reduced, flattened.

Emanuele Coccia also writes about the pluralities of existence in his book “Metamorphoses” and the different shapes and forms we move through — and that move through us — in our lifetime. We are always arriving and departing, he observes, and understanding that circular flow as integral to the experience of being a human is key to compassion for the ebbs and flows of life. “Birth is not an absolute beginning,” he writes. “There was already something before us, we were already something before being born, there was something of me there before I existed.” Wellness capitalism works through shame; shaming our past selves so we’ll be desperate enough to acquire new ones at any cost necessary. But we don’t need to discard those previous iterations, or even fall prey to the idea that they’re only worthy if we upgrade or improve upon them. Lately, I’m finding it so much more interesting to sit with what came before to make space for what wants to come after.

Here’s to the great (re)awakening. 

🌞🌞🌞

The juicy juice: 

the perfect watermelon-rose-lime cooler

meditating with Tina Turner

calendula, lavender, sandalwood summer mist

KiaCooks x Edna Lewis

documentaries on David Hammons, Jamel Shabazz; Zora Neale Hurston

awakening, a playlist i made in honor of all the arrivals of the season

may all your delulu come trululu

🌞🌞🌞

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The title of this newsletter comes from a Camille Dungy poem. This month, a portion of paid subscriptions will go towards supporting Maui relief efforts in the wake of the devastating wildfires.