Ten years ago, the anthology I edited “Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement”, a compilation of 35+ queer and trans voices launched into the world. CELEBRATING THAT! I don’t even know how to begin sharing about the last 16 years— 6 years of compiling and preparing for publication and 10 years, now, published in the world. I don’t know to fully articulate how much this book has done in the world, how many hands and hearts it has reached, and how it’s changed my life, in kind, so I’ll just share some tidbits of the ride, some places it’s shown up, and I’ll share a bunch of photos so you can see the brilliant contributors and allies who made QSV real. And of course— I really do recommend you pick up a copy for yourself or a dear one or your library! I have a few copies on my website and you can order from Bookshop too— or request it at your library or local bookstore!

From the back of the book:

“Often pushed to the margins, queer, transgender and gender non-conforming survivors have been organizing in anti-violence work since the birth of the movement. Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement locates them at the center of the anti-violence movement and creates a space for their voices to be heard. Moving beyond dominant narratives and the traditional “violence against women” framework, the book is multi-gendered, multi-racial and multi-layered. This thirty-seven piece collection disrupts the mainstream conversations about sexual violence and connects them to disability justice, sex worker rights, healing justice, racial justice, gender self-determination, queer & trans liberation and prison industrial complex abolition through reflections, personal narrative, and strategies for resistance and healing. Where systems, institutions, families, communities and partners have failed them, this collection lifts them up, honors a multitude of lived experiences and shares the radical work that is being done outside mainstream anti-violence and the non-profit industrial complex.”

I always say that a survivor’s righteous rage is what brought this book into the world— both my own and the valid anger and grief of so many other folks, folks who share deeply and honestly about the wounds, what a more inclusive movement could look like, what a politic of abolition could look like in the anti-violence world (which is so reliant on the court and prison systems), and the personal healing possible, too. I started dreaming of a book like this as I left a community organizing project in Brooklyn, meant to address sexual violence with solutions. I share more about my experience in the book but when it became clear that this project had no interest considering survivors in the margins, that consciously or unconsciously it was committed to perpetuating harmful research and narratives around race, class, and gender, and no interest in collaborating with the incredible, diverse anti-violence community projects already happening in Brooklyn, I knew my time and energy would be better spent elsewhere.

And so I wrote and then launched the call for submissions in 2010— having zero experience editing or compiling an anthology and zero experience with the publishing world. It took years to gather the 35+ pieces, rounds of editing, so many emails and conversations. Sometimes a piece didn’t work out for a multitude of reasons. More times than not, it did. And the contributors were endlessly patient as I found my way through the project, pitching, and publication which all told took 6 years!

When I finally started pitching the anthology to publishers— there were more than 13 rejections. It was too academic, it wasn’t academic enough. One publisher literally rejected the book twice over like two years— seems whoever was in charge of the “slush pile” had never disposed of it and it was found, and rejected, again. Hilarious and depressing. Absurd, really.

And then there was a bite but it was an academic publisher that wanted to have the list price be $40. I said no to that because access was (and is) important to me but wow how scary it was to say no to a chance to get this book into the world, not knowing if another opportunity would come. It did, finally, in 2013. Don Weise, who died earlier this year, said yes and invited QSV to be published under the small queer imprint Magnus Books. I’ll never forget getting this email in 2013:

“I was so impressed by your book that I'd like to offer to publish it. Your book is truly important, something I don't tell authors every day. I couldn't tell you how many times I was moved and captivated by the writing. Despite a unifying theme of the book, no two people were the same or even similar. You did a terrific job of representing a wide variety of voices and experiences. After reading it, the absence of this kind of dialogue in LGBT circles is all the more surprising. Which is why the book is so important.”

Don threw his whole support behind the book for a couple years, line editing, meeting me in Manhattan for meetings, patient with my newbie status and insistence on things being a certain way, and with his enthusiastic emails. While he was no longer at the press when the book was published, his belief in the importance of it, and his commitment to publishing it, made it real. (And sadly, I’ve had quite a difficult experience with the publisher ever since the book was published but that’s not what I want to focus on here. Just know there is always more than what is seen.)

I dreamed this book up for queer and trans survivors, first and foremost. This was and is for us. Hearing from so many folks over the years, about how this book was the first time they ever saw their experiences reflected, has been powerful. I know this book is one of a kind which is why it’s traveled so far. And being that it is critical of the mainstream anti-violence movement— the non profits and the big funded organizations and the hotlines and the institutions so reliant on white, straight, cisgender women’s narratives and so reliant on the prison system— I hadn’t expected there to be much support from these spaces for a book committed to a abolitionist, transformative justice focused, queer and trans anti-violence anthology. How wrong I was— this anthology has been brought into so many anti-sexual violence organizations, prisons, therapists offices, colleges, training spaces, hotlines and so much more. Not just in the US— world wide. It even won a silver IPPY Award. (But I am still trying to get a copy to my beloved Tori Amos— please reach out to me if you have a contact!!! LOL)

A collaborative project, this book is so much more than me or any one individual piece of perspective. Rich with brilliant contributors, theres a huge variety of experience within it, and a huge variety of ideas about sexual violence, some intentionally in conflict with each other, because there is no single survivor narrative. It’s complex, it invites readers to think deeply about our individual and collective understanding of sexual violence and how we can push back on imprecise and limiting narratives.

From the start, for me, one of the most important pieces was that each person got to write their piece in their own words— for me that meant while yes, there were rounds of edits, it was essential that the voice and tone and heart came through, unmediated. For some that might look like a lack of line edits (which did happen!)— for me it was exactly what I was trying to do. Writing back through traumatic events takes a herculean capacity and often can be or feel retraumatizing even as it can also feel healing. It’s a lot to move through the body so allowing the pieces to exist as they were felt essential. And I stand by that choice.

There are a million people to thank: first, the contributors and their radiant writing of struggle and survival, the publisher Magnus/ Riverdale, my oldest childhood friend, artist Sean Sullivan who graciously designed the cover, all the bookstores and libraries, the many anti-violence organizations who saw the opportunity to make their work more inclusive and have been doing the work to put that into action, the colleges and universities and conferences and healing centers who invited contributors and I to read, speak, share, and everyone who blurbed and reviewed the book. My friends and family who kept me honest and showing up to this work. A few different partners who held me as I held this project in me for so many years. This book was never about money (of which there was very little anyways— if you aren’t a published author, you would be shocked to learn how little writers make— if anything at all) or success or social capital or becoming some kind of celebrity in the “movement”— it was about dreaming and writing a vision of the future where more people’s experiences were seen, supported, and held. It was about having a resource for us. It was about doing this in collaboration with others. And of course— even with all the intention, I imagine some folks still might not be seen.

Here are some of the places that Queering Sexual Violence has been featured over the years. There’s some great resources in there for LGBTQ survivors, too.

And on a personal note, about two weeks before QSV was published, my mom texted me the below. A full circle moment, a dreaming that came true. Little writer me who called on writing to survive an abusive childhood and then more violence in my adulthood— who scribbled away in notebooks in elementary school and on, who had writing published in the middle school journal, whose senior high school project was writing and hand binding a collection of poetry and then reading from it— is proud, always knew that writing was a way to be connected to oneself, creative practice as a way to shift and heal what was hurting.

When the book came out, to be honest, I hardly celebrated beyond the book events. I was so tired and honestly, I was scared. Scared that my estranged abusive father would learn about it, read it, sue me for defamation. A couple years prior, a different man, the man who raped me who was now married to a lawyer, threatened to sue me and an organization I was collaborating with when I wrote his name publicly. To avoid being sued, I was forced to take his name down. Another silencing. So I was right to be scared even if it never did come to fruition. Leading up to the pub day, I spent a lot of time having panic attacks in the shower while simultaneously being so thrilled that after many years or persistence— QSV was soon in the world and would become a resource for those of us who rarely saw our trauma held by the mainstream anti-violence movement. This was for us and the fear, I could push through.

In the past I was most comfortable hiding behind and inside the pages but this anthology pushed me out of the shadows which to be honest, was not always comfortable. After a few years of keynotes and speaking at colleges and anti-violence conferences (including being the opening keynote at a state-run anti-violence conference in North Carolina THE DAY Tr*mp was elected for the first time (shameful) in 2016 lol what a day), I learned that wasn’t quite right for me. Or maybe it was just that I’ve not been comfortable in those roles.

But being connected to my work and healing has meant I’ve moved through some of the fear in using my voice, being seen, and showing up. And I’m happy to still be doing a kind of anti-violence work, in working with so many survivors through my healing arts practice Corpus Ritual. All of the last near two decades of work are connected by a thread or care and commitment to not just surviving but thriving.

And now— photos of some of the brilliant contributors and I over the years of 2016-2019 book events! (And so many moments I don’t have photos of!)

The annual spring sale— 22% off tinctures, teas, botanical oils and balms, flower essences, breathwork recordings, and the two books I’ve written/ edited: The Power of Breathwork book + Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement. Use code: BLOOMING.

EDIT: This workshop is now Thursday May 7th 5-6:30pm MT. Join the next virtual, sliding scale breathwork group— BREATH ELECTRIC on Thursday April 30th 5-6:30pm MT (recorded if you can’t join live). “In a world that teaches us to disconnect, bringing intention and attention to our breath is an act of liberation. To be fully in, and present to, our bodies in a world that benefits from our disconnection is a radical act.”

There’s just one virtual, sliding scale 1:1 session left in April on the 29th: scoop it up for a private breathwork session OR an herbal consultation (which includes two custom remedies)

Join the sliding scale monthly flower essence club— ENERGY FIELDS. A suprise flower essence alongside information cards shipped right to you each month. Join by April 26th to get May and beyond.

April is the 10 year! anniversary! of the publication of the anthology I edited— Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement and I’ve been thinking through the last nearly 20 years I’ve spent engaged in anti-violence work in some capacity and I’ve also been thinking about my own survivorhood over these many, many years. I’m hoping to get a piece together about QSV and the impact it’s had in the world as well as some writing about “survivorhood” over the long haul, especially when there becomes more and more traumatic things to survive, as a way of celebrating this milestone of a decade, but I also wanted to share some resources for this #SAAM month (Sexual Assault Awareness Month) so we will start here first.

It’s been an intense few months (years) for survivors with the “release” of some of the Epstein Files. Suddenly everyone has an opinion about sexual violence and there are very few concerns about survivors and our care and healing.

For those that might not know, for more than a decade in NYC, and now in so-called northern New Mexico, I have been engaged in anti-violence, trauma, and healing work in various capacities, from being a on call and volunteer rape crisis counselor in an emergency room to a community organizer to an anthology book editor to a trauma-focused somatic writing workshop facilitator to an herbalist and breathworker working largely with trauma and the long arc of healing. I also have additional trainings in harm reduction and substance misuse/ addiction. I've worked with many people around these experiences, bring my own personal experience to this work and am also always doing my own healing work so that I can be as clear as possible in my work with clients.

As a queer person who is also a survivor, when I first entered the anti-violence movement in NYC as a community organizer and on call rape crisis counselor in a Manhattan ER I was really hopeful— I thought I had finally found a way to “make use” of the violence I had experienced, to create change. Those spaces weren’t quite right for me and my radical politics but what I did learn was that collaborating with other survivors was something that would bring true healing— that we need each other, we need a variety of folks who hold different identities and different experiences at the center of this work. So this Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I’m sharing a few of my favorite resources, organizations, books, and people in the hopes that they can support folks out there. These of course are just my faves— folks who I have personally seen show up over the long haul with a lot of heart and vision.

FAVE ORGS + HUMANS:

• The Breathe Network + Molly Boeder Harris

  • I love Molly and her singular and necessary work with The Breathe Network with my whole heart. Molly is a true survivors advocate and is a survivor herself. TBN is an incredible resource with tons of practitioners to look through, trainings and education offerings, a really incredible blog, and so much more. “The Breathe Network supports sexual trauma survivors with trauma-informed, sliding-scale, health and healing resources and offers education and training for healthcare workers, healing professionals, and advocacy organizations on best practices in trauma-informed care.”

  • I love this piece from Molly on the much misunderstood trauma response of “freeze” and share it often with clients.

• Mirror Memoirs + Amita Swadhin

  • I met Amita through QSV way back at the beginning— they contributed a stunning piece that has reverberated deeply in me for a long time! To this day I have so much love for everything Amita touches and creates—Amita went on to create Mirror Memoirs— “Mirror Memoirs is a national storytelling and organizing project creating a world where Black + Indigenous gender non-conforming children (+ all children) are free from sexual violence.” Lots of ways to be in community through MM. And if you aren’t Black or Indigenous, you can join as an Accomplice.

FAVE BOOKS + PODCASTS:

• Dear one (and contributor to QSV) also edited her own anthology “Love with Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse”. In addition to being a filmmaker and a meditation teacher, she’s a visionary in many other realms. Aishah and I have collaborated in so many ways since 2010— very grateful for all the ways she moves through this world.

  • “Documentary filmmaker and survivor of child sexual abuse and adult rape, Aishah Shahidah Simmons invites diasporic Black people to join her in transformative storytelling that envisions a world that ends child sexual abuse without relying on the criminal justice system.”

• I now have some copies of “Queering Sexual Violence” on my website! As the editor, I am biased, but it really was before its time and is one of a kind!

  • “Moving beyond dominant narratives and the traditional “violence against women” framework, the book is multi-gendered, multi-racial and multi-layered. This thirty-seven piece collection disrupts the mainstream conversations about sexual violence and connects them to disability justice, sex worker rights, healing justice, racial justice, gender self-determination, queer & trans liberation and prison industrial complex abolition through reflections, personal narrative, and strategies for resistance and healing. Where systems, institutions, families, communities and partners have failed them, this collection lifts them up, honors a multitude of lived experiences and shares the radical work that is being done outside mainstream anti-violence and the non-profit industrial complex.”

• Laura Mae Northrup just released some episodes of a brand new season of INSIDE EYES. What’s INSIDE EYES? It’s a brilliant podcast focused on working with and healing the wounds of sexual violence and trauma through entheogenic work. (I was really thrilled and a little nervous to be interviewed for the first season that came out back in 2019).

Join Us!

What I will say is that every year since moving to the rural high desert, I feel the ache of climate crisis grief even more. Out here I have the privilege of being very closely attuned to the earth, to land, to place, to trees (blooming 2-3 weeks early this year), to flowers, to fires, to mountains. To snow and lack of snow. Rain and lack of rain. Every year truly is different but there is a continuous rising of intensity.

Grief, grief, grief— we really are all feeling it and I imagine, in a variety of ways. Grief, grieving, mourning, there’s no single way through it and even the idea of “through it” has been feeling a little hollow lately. If you, like me, are paying attention, have been paying attention for a long time, there is so much to grieve. It’s ongoing, part of this being alive thing.

My work and my life are forever entangled because I prefer to show up to my work as a human being who feels things, who is often navigating a big, hard thing, who is open and present to the complexity of these times. Being so public facing means that I am continuing to find ways to show up as grounded as I can while feeling it all.

A bit of a joke with myself, I’ve been making + taking this formula as a friend for the heaviness in me. There are so many valid reasons for the heavy, of course. No need to rush it away and no need to get too stuck in it either. And then yesterday morning I woke to the news of a very dear client’s death from cancer after a 6 month at home hospice. He and I stayed connected though this time and while I knew it was ahead, the heartbreak arose just the same. Of course it did.

It is no small task to stay open to it all, the beauty, the death, the joy, the wounding, the possibility. It is no small task. Thank you, Peter, for teaching me, reminding me. A survivor knows how to survive and how to let go, too. These blooms are for you.

Join March 26th || 5-6:30pm MT || BREATHWORK FOR GRIEF

Next week— March 26th 5-6:30pm MT— we have BREATHWORK FOR GRIEF— nearly every time I offer this workshop over the last many years, I find there is more to feel, for me personally and collectively. It is all too much, really, and yet here we are being asked to feel more all the time. And so 90 minutes of engaging with our breath in practice through Diaphragmatic breath and Three Part breath so that we can touch down into and move some of the heaviness in service to our aliveness in this heartbreaking and beautiful world. Three Part breath is enlivening and a great way to meet the ongoing intensity of this time. Breathwork is also a really powerful practice to do at home and translates well over Zoom. I’ve been facilitating virtual breathwork exclusively since March 2020 and continue to be grateful it “works” well through the virtual realms.

The wild thing about grief, grieving, and mourning is that they contain so many different emotions and somatic experiences, often cycling through. We might find ourselves in despair or stuckness or anger or confusingly elated (depending on the circumstance) or numbness or sadness or maybe we feel more love through loss. There’s no right or wrong way to feel during times of grief. Breathwork can hold it all, is a space to be with whatever might arise with compassion, presence, and care and through or breath and wise bodies. You’re welcome to join if you’ve practiced a million times or are brand new— I provide a lot of information to help you engage with the practice in a sustainable way.

Join us if you’d like to be in community with others while tending to the tender places.

(And if privacy and singular focus is your preference— I offer sliding scale, virtual 1:1 breathwork sessions and herbal consultations— which include two custom remedies. March is mostly full but there’s a couple left and April availability is up too!)

JOIN US

Join ENERGY FIELDS: a monthly flower essence club

The second offering is a last call for the month for my monthly flower essence club called ENERGY FIELDS.

The doors open each month from the 1st through the 25th (so do join on or before the 25th!)— from there I pack everything up and ship them out so you can start each month with the gentle energetic and emotional support from the plant friends.

“…The way you curate the essences from month to month feels like a natural crescendo and narrative you're building with the collective at large. They feel in sync, like the most wonderful balm for challenging times. Thanks for all the care and work you put into this offering, it truly is quite special.”— Heather

The power of an energetic essence is subtle and requires faith and trust— it’s gentle and supportive guidance for weary spirits, for broken hearts, for embodied revolutionary practice in remembering change is possible, and for reconnecting the the energy and fullness of aliveness. The intention is to support your emotional, energetic, and spiritual realms through creative exploration and ceremony and the expansive energetics of an essence*. Think FUN and PLAY and LISTENING DEEPLY TO PLANTS, LAND, and YOUR WISE SELF.

Each month you will receive one essence—different each month—alongside a suggested mindfulness practice as well as writing prompts to explore your relationship with the essence. You will also receive a short piece of writing about the energetic essence from me, in an envelope, to be opened at the end of the month after you’ve explored the essence on your own— alongside a earth-based pigment mini-painting print, painted by me-- with a few drops of the essence in the watercolors.

I’ve loved sharing this monthly club for nearly two years now! It’s truly a gift and a treat to get to lean into my own practice with making and working with flower essences and then getting to share them with so many folks.

Wanna join?

“There is big medicine / big consciousness held within these, and yet, walking to the mailbox at the end of my dirt road and opening the packaging has all the surprise and joy of getting mail as a kid. The light and gentle entrance to their wisdom and support has been so helpful. Working with them in this longer-term, intentional way as I've moved through various states, spaces, and places has been a fascinating, rich, and supportive experience of meeting their unique energetic fingerprint. I'm fairly new to essences, and I would say their quality is a subtle shift in perception or a filter that my attention goes through. These essences have been a guiding hand in my creative practice. When I look back at my writing, photography, or doodles after a month with them, I see patterns and synchronicities that point to the hands of an invisible collaborator at work. It's the best energy pen-pal club I've ever joined!”— Lydia

I want the mountain. 
The apple tree.
The ancient waterway bringing life through the valley.

There is the wreck, 
the wreckage, 
and what lives, after,
the gun, 
the shots, 
the fall.

Connected by 
Cottonwoods, tall and reaching.
Chamisa, yellow bursts rivaling the sun.
Chamisal Creek, cold like that mountain
I want.
I want.

I’m no howling, desperate dog
But not because I don’t want to be.

Now on hospice, when the man who 
pulled the trigger and killed, dies. 
(Now he has died.)
Now the porch, where the
seeing
was done,
torn down. 
(Now it has been torn down.)

What’s left are the echoes in the minds
who did the seeing. 
Unable to stop seeing
even when it’s quiet, 
the sky darkened, punctured 
by stars.

What kind of outcome could
quench the
wanting
the longing.
For a world that does not exist,
yet.

I’m no howling, desperate dog
But not because I don’t want to be.

Yesterday I was preparing to teach my restorative breathwork workshop, I got lulled into thinking about practices that help me slow down and through this slowing down, I can become more present. Being present isn’t easy, not in this current world we live in and not in many iterations of my and our past worlds but for me it’s been an essential part of loving this life and this world more all the time. It’s been an essential part of healing from so many experiences of abuse, violence, and trauma in this lifetime. I remember being younger, a child, a teenager, a young person— I remember all the ways I tried to escape. Out of necessity, yes. Out of a kind of innate, embodied wisdom, yes. Being present to my body and life was a challenge. And simultaneously, I did not have the privilege of not being present to the abuse— I knew it was happening while it was happening even if I didn’t always have the language. While I will always value the brilliance of dissociation, I am grateful for the ways I have ushered myself towards more presence, too.

For a very long time I have been focused on healing from abuse and trauma I experienced from childhood through adulthood— the -ing the most important part because healing is ongoing. There’s no end point, there’s now “I did it, it’s done”, there’s nowhere to get to. For me a big part of my own healing has been about being with the truth of things even when it hurts, even when it changes my relationships, even when it’s uncomfortable. (And wow is it uncomfortable.) For me, healing is also about growing my capacity to be present— to all parts of this being alive thing.

My insistence on being present is why I experience heartbreak and rage, over and over, in the face of so much horror the world over. My insistence on being present has meant I have not been able to turn away from injustice and violence, really, for my whole life. Even when I was more deep in dissociative patterns, I still was not turning away from the impact of injustice and violence. A survivors knowing means I see abuse and abuse of power through crystal clear clarity. My insistence on being present to the reality of this world is why I still take covid precautions. Having been impacted by long covid for years now, I have both an embodied understanding of why it’s necessary and I read and follow the science so it’s abundantly clear why it’s necessary to continue to do so. Being present is why I still shriek with joy seeing a familiar plant friend on a hike even if I’ve seen them a million times before. Why I gasp with delight when I drive through the mountains. Despite the hurt, the ache of seeing clear eyed in this world, feeling it all deeply, I just refuse to turn away. I refuse to lie to myself, gaslight myself, play pretend. Surviving abuse and trauma many times now, I’ve already missed too much. I don’t want to miss any more.

In another workshop I taught this past week, I read out loud this excerpt from Terry Tempest Williams:

“I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.”

I, too, want to feel it all.

After well over a decade of trying to engage with sitting meditation, after my dear friend told me about her decades-long practice with Vipassana meditation way back in 2012 or so (and I’ve now attended two outdoor silent retreats in the mountains of so-called northern New Mexico), I’m thrilled to say that I’ve now been engaged in a morning meditation practice for 8! months!! Being present to ones own mind, the bobbing and weaving, the getting stuck and getting unstuck, provides ample opportunities to return to presence, return to breath.

Which brings me to my new favorite practice for deepening presence— pruning apple trees. This time last year and I were brand new apple tree pruning babies, having moved to an ancient orchard with more than 50 trees in need of pruning. I remember being so scared I would do something wrong, something that would damage the life force of trees planted back in the 1950’s. I was timid. My complex illness body was also struggling to keep up with the physicality of it. And honestly, that part of the process was necessary. It was necessary to go slow because we had yet to live with these trees through their whole yearly cycle.

This year, we know more. I feel more confident. I feel a deeper relationship with these trees I’ve now lived with, loved, and cared for for a full year.

It is a tricky thing having a whole huge orchard to take care of while also having a full-time job— both require my time, energy, deep presence. This means that we mostly prune on the weekends and trust and believe on Sunday morning I am often groaning internally about having to get out my safety goggles and my layers and ladders and chainsaws. Sometimes it feels like my whole life is work now but then I remember how much I both love my job and I love my new role as an orchard tender. That I both chose this and was guided towards it. To love something or someone means we stay in relationship with them, take care, listen and respond. And so each weekend this year we have been listening and taking care so that we can continue to live with these brilliant trees who will soon be heavy with flowers and then fruit (as long as a late frost doesn’t take them out).

There is really nothing like pruning an apple tree— the watching, the looking, the listening required to make a cut, to take a limb. The way it will never all be done in a single season, is a long game, a life long game. The possibility and growth that carving an apple tree out of the overgrowth of other trees and shrubs allows. The way the sunlight can more easily reach the still thriving limbs.

The way my very (very) busy brain quiets after just an hour or two in these acts of service. The way my focus narrows and widens at the same time. The way things grow quieter in me, remembering my connection to this shared life with these trees. The way I get to learn how to trust life through trusting that even without my pruning, my stressing, even my meddling, they know what to do. There’s a kind of frantic static in me that softens when I’m just out with these friends.

One has to be very present when pruning trees. If not, you might take something they need. If you are, you might get to listen fully to what they require, make the next right move which will help usher them towards more aliveness.

It really is true, they know what to do without human hands in their business and yet, wow, do they seem to relish the care. A howling kind of devotion is growing in me. A knowing that I am right where I am supposed to be. After a truly traumatic 2024, where witnessed a shattering violence swiftly followed by an abusive landlord’s threats and losing our home and garden, I am grateful for the solid ground, the reaching apple trees, and the medicine, presence, and magic of a hard days work.

Left, before pruning. Right, after pruning— see that lil cutie apple tree on the left?!

2026 has already felt like it’s been a million years long already. There is violence and overwhelm in every direction. There is beautiful mutual aid and solidarity in every direction too. It can be hard to show up to this moment, to feel into these times of great instability, great unknowns. It can be hard to see what’s ahead and how we can get from here to there.

If you’re needing a space to slow down, connect with your breath and body, and move some emotions— join us on Thursday February 5th for “THE SLOW DOWN: conscious breathing for deep rest + restoration”. It’s virtual and sliding scale as always. UPDATE: this is being rescheduled for February 19th 5-6:30pm MT.

And if you’re wanting to practice more regularly, by request, I’ve brought back my 5 week, virtual, sliding scale series called “In the Dark: writing + breathing thru trying times”. We’re about 1/3 of the way full already! I invite you to join live each week but there will also be a recording sent out each week if you can’t make it or want to work with the recordings instead. This is just the second time I’m offering it and it could be the last. (I will see if there’s enough interest for third round in winter of 2027 but no promises at the moment.)

Over my holiday break I was thinking about some of the foundations of everything I offer— relationship + connection— with ourselves + our bodies, with each other, with the more than human world. Doesn’t matter if it’s sharing my writing here or a flower essence or a workshop or a virtual, private breathwork session or herb consultation— it’s what is at the root and carried through.

Maybe it’s my Libra Sun and Libra stellium but I’ve focused much of my healing work, my energy in my life on rebuilding relationship + connection after violence and trauma has severed it. I’ve worked hard for my presence with and connection to all that is and to all that is within me and I feel infinitely lucky to support others on similar paths. So many folks I work with feel far away from their bodies or other people or feel disconnected from the world around them— for so many valid reasons (trauma, abuse, oppression, disability/ chronic/ complex illness etc.) For me, the “work” (or play) is never about forcing that connection or forcing embodiment or forcing presence— it’s about being with what is hard in order to make room for deeper connection to more aliveness, trust, and agency in our lives. And healing— with the active -ing is ongoing, of course. No destination— just presence and continued practice.

Certainly by now you know I am not a “love and light” practitioner ( or a writer for that matter)— I’m a “let’s get down into the underworld, the truth of things, the heavy, in service to facing it all and being more connected to this being alive thing” kinda practitioner. I’ve seen a lot in my life, survived a whole ton of wild and difficult experiences and I refuse to put blinders on to the tough stuff. I also know there is medicine in challenging and destabilizing times.

It’s why I’m excited to be offering the second cohort of “IN THE DARK: writing + breathing with trying times” which is open for registration and will begin Wednesday February 11th 5-7pm MT.

For 5 weeks we will come together to be with the medicine of the dark through short talks on weekly themes from me as well as moving back and forth between poems and writing prompts breath and meditation practice. This series is for experienced writers and new writers alike. It is a generative writing space— we welcome the emergence of new writing and new writers. It will not involve critique. It is also open to folks new to breathwork and meditation and experienced folk alike.

If you joined last year and want to join again— please do! We will have 5 weeks instead of 4 and I’ll shift some of the content to create both new and deeper practice.

It’s virtual and sliding scale. It was such a gift to be with folks in multi-week workshop series 2 times last year; many folks shared that joining week after week was really helpful in the face of everything happening in this complex world and helped them build (or rebuild) a creative and contemplative practice.

Please do scroll down to learn more!

Join us for a 5 week, virtual, sliding scale workshop series utilizing breath, meditation, and creative writing to turn towards, face, and make meaning of and in the dark. Darkness is not just absence of light— it is part and parcel of the spectrum of this being alive thing.

Like seeds germinating in the dark soil, what is rooting before the bloom? What can be unearthed? What meaning is there to make from welcoming the dark, practicing with it? What is the story underneath the story, just below the surface?

Sometimes things happen that we can not control, that shake us to our core. Ushered into the expansive dark, we are. These experiences of ongoing difficulty can feel incredibly precarious, a state of limbo, of in between. We can’t see in the dark and so we might feel lost, scared, our every action meaningless or futile. But sometimes I forget the possibility of the dark. These times in the dark are sacred— powerful spaces for being with what hurts, what’s true and real, for dreaming, for imagination, for finding a glimmer of hope in the seemingly unceasing heartache. These are dream states, feeling states, world building states.

Each week will follow the same structure to deepen presence and practice. I will open with a short meditation followed by a short talk on the week’s theme which will lead us into prompted writing practice, extended breath meditation practice, more writing, and time to share with the group. (As desired— no pressure to do so.) We will work with diaphragmatic breath, three part breath, circular breath, psychological sigh, and more.

Here in this space we will both make meaning and let meaning fall away. Turning towards the dark interior, the liminal space between each breath. The power here, the possibility. If you are looking for a place to reconnect to your body and to creative practice, join us. If you are finding yourself in the dark and struggling, join us. I’m looking forward to being together. It’s simply too much to go alone.

This workshop series will work to subvert racist and white supremacist narratives that assert dark is “bad” and light is “good” and will instead value and honor the wisdom and possibility in all iterations of the spectrum.

“I have taken a lot of your workshops over the years and they have been foundational in the way I’ve learned to care for myself. I bring the practice of breath work with me everywhere, but I still love being in the practice space you create and getting to do it on a set schedule with a group every week is ideal.” — M

“I’ve taken both of Jennye’s breathwork and writing classes this past year, and felt transformed by them both. There’s something about the combination, the sequence—grounding first in some inspirational writing, then using breath to go deep into the body, then a question as prompt—that unlocks words I didn’t know were there. And the breath, the breath connects things—inside me and outside world—in a way that’s clear, deep, unprecedented, potent. I find I’ve grown more comfortable with those words, made friends with the things my body has to say, and found bolder and freer ways to connect to and play with them. I’ve been in an active writing process for a few years now, and produced some work I’m proud of. But these workshops help me access something that is deeply resonant, and remind me that if I listen, if I breathe into it, my body has some big things to say. I have some big things to say.” —Jenn

“In The Dark was— unsurprisingly—precisely what I needed during a particularly grief-filled moment of my personal life. In the warmth of the container that Jennye built, I was able to connect across time, space, and generation with others in their own spectrum of darkness and under Jennye’s guidance, I felt we shifted something larger than the sum of our parts.” — Saar

I am writing you after a full year living with, in, and in service to 50+ apple, few pear and one peach tree—many if not all planted between the 1950’s and 1970’s. In service to a small, now private chapel that used to be a beacon for travelers the world over. In service to a small adobe home that had been in one family for generations. Responsibility at every turn. I also now feel ready to say we will not have to leave this place—this is now our home for whatever lies ahead, for however long we want and from being with this orchard, this land, this chapel for a full year now— I can’t imagine ever wanting to leave. A true blessing for two people who hadn’t yet had a truly safe home until now. I get teary thinking about how the trees have welcomed us into their orbit, their determined lifecycle. Of how the family who loved and lived on this land for generations chose us, two queers with no orchard experience but a love for growing.

When we arrived to this ancient orchard we were fresh from the violence of witnessing a double homicide and continued aggression and violence from a notorious for decades slumlord. There are times in our lives where our lives end and another begins. This was one of those times. We were fried, we were toast, we were people who no longer knew how to rest or settle. I knew recovery was going to take awhile (and to be honest, is still very much going on over here) and also I knew this land would heal us, in time. There was no stable ground until we got to the orchard.

We landed on January 4^th 2025 and within weeks, instead of resting and recovering, we were climbing up ladders with mini chainsaws and handsaws cutting dead and diseased limbs. Wearing safety goggles and gloves. We were watching YouTube videos and going to workshops but really, we were learning on the fly. Over the course of a few months and right up until nearly the first bloom we were on these ladders and other moments, peering up at a tangle of new and old limbs trying to see trying to listen to what needed to stay and what needed to go.

We spent a couple days with sprayer backpacks full of neem and liquid fish and water which was a disgusting chore and one that truly earned the definition of “back-breaking”. Out of frustration and extreme back pain, I started weeping, drops of neem and liquid fish covering my face and body. Never again, we said. Though we are committed to organic only, we will have to find another way to disperse these liquids.

April was a chaos of blooms. It felt unbelievable—to have come from such violence and horror, to have had my connection to the land I deeply loved stripped in seconds by gunshots and two radiant humans dead on the dirt road, to be living in rising fascism. Suddenly everywhere I looked there was a birth, a promise of a burst of fruit in the not-too-distant future. A future, wow, I hadn’t felt safe enough to imagine a future until I saw these blooms.

April also brought learning the in-ground irrigation system, a series of tunnels that ushers water from mountains through acequias into the orchard, flooding so much that boots were required when walking around. Each day we flooded a different area—the large garden, the rose and datura garden surrounding the chapel, the upper orchard, one part of the lower orchard and the second part of the lower orchard. Each day requiring close attention, setting alarms and then walking the land in between client sessions to make sure the flooding hadn’t gone too far or too close to the house.

Summer was an unfortunate couple-month swarm of mosquitos. Our neighbors tried to tell us about how bad they are, “You won’t want to come out of your house!” they said. I didn’t want to believe them but soon I was buying every deterrent on the market. Mosquitos are not common in New Mexico; in fact, we didn’t even really have them where we last rented. Weeding the garden became an irritating chore even more irritating than normal! Walking the orchard became a game of swatting and shrieking. And so we retreated when we could trusting the water and the land would usher the tiny fruit forward.

And usher indeed—by June and July, I was snatching peaches from branches before they were fully consumed by birds with a sweet tooth. Eating them one after another, juice streaming down my face. A delight every single time. By August an early apple tree was heavy with fruit for the picking. And from there, each tree was bursting with fruit, a rolling roar of bounty that soon would need to be plucked and processed. Rounds of apple butter and gluten-free apple crumble and fresh pressed cider and apple cider vinegar in view.

Alongside the fruit trees— an outrageous number of rose bushes bloomed from May through October. Every few days I was cutting a bundle to put into thrift store vases in every room of the house. The baby skunks that made their home in the orchard and my panic for days that they had been orphaned— they had not.) The Milky Oats growing full with latex, medicine for a fried nervous system. The Blue Cornflower blooming daily. The biggest Red Clover I’ve ever seen in my life.

We started inviting more friends to join us, to help us pick the bounty. Each left with a crate full of apples to use at their discretion. Have you ever seen a crew of queers shrieking in delight after tasting an apple fresh from the tree? Children tasting one after another and determining their favorites? It is harder to hold a heavy head, a calloused heart when immersed in such sensorial joy.

And then came the days of buckets and buckets of apples being gathered by friends and ferried into the vintage cider press we borrowed from other friends nearby. Pounds and pounds of apples funneled and crushed, from red and golden globes to golden liquid. That first sip I might never forget. Each day gathering with friends and family was nourishment for the dark days ahead. even plucked and bucketed and carried hundreds of pounds of apples to sell for .55 cents per pound to the local cidery. We did our best to not waste the bounty and yet, there was more than we could ever possibly handle.

Now the Starlings and Sandhill Cranes eat what fell to the earth. The trees are bare, leaves shuttled from limb to soil. This season too is a kind of beauty, an important part of the growing season ahead. A time to rest, drink water, get ready to burst forth anew in April.

I felt so much pressure at the outset of the year. I didn’t want to make a mistake. A rookie, I was, because there is no end, no real mistake that can’t be righted. To be honest, it’s felt liberating to know the work will never be done. Both the work of building a relationship with this land, these trees, these gardens and the actual intense physical labor of pruning, planting, picking, and processing. As a person who is never without a list and who loves to cross off items from said list— this list will continue until I am no longer able to walk this orchard, to climb a ladder and cut. Loving and tending an orchard is a devotional practice and while it’s not what I imagined my life would look like, it chose Rose and I. I’m outrageously lucky to have been able to heed the subtle and insistent call. To say yes even though we had no idea, really, what we were saying yes to.

Many more friends and neighbors and family not pictured!

Twenty-something me who never imagined they would leave NYC, who was death driving and diving into bottomless glasses of whiskey and harmful relationships and no real clear direction might think I have softened but I am growing tougher and more resilient and softer all at once, turning away from my small and large problems and towards this kind of loving, this kind of tender care for more than human life. Even though I never had a plan to live very long, no five year plans or ten year plans, no savings accounts or retirement plans (until my 40’s), I refused to fully give in to the abused child in me who was wise too, in wanting to leave for so long, but I am glad I was insistent to find a way to stay.

I stand in the orchard at golden hour and I know why.

In times of so much horror, heartbreak, of so much violence the world over, of so much stripping away of the basics, the increasing cost of tending to our bodies, to each other, to our lives—I am profoundly grateful to have to keep such close attention in this land of the living. We are coming in during what could be the last couple decades of these trees lives and so we need to be able to listen, to take care, to prioritize what the trees need. We also will be planting new apple trees, a few more peach trees, and a few cherry trees this spring. This too is a kind of trust that the future will come, that it is in fact still worth it to plant new life. To trust that they will have time to take root, grow, flourish. I hope we and they are right.

I hope this for you, reader. I hope this for Rose and me, too. The fierce determination to grow and thrive despite the obstacles, the despair. There is more to life than just suffering—may we, each of us, keep turning towards both the suffering and loss and the insistence of living full, embodied, committed lives. Of trusting each bloom.

Recently I archived a lot of writing here— anything that mentioned the violence my girlfriend and I experienced the summer of 2024. I’m just going to say it: It was in response to getting subpoenaed to give statements in the trial for the murders we witnessed. I am tired of the words getting stuck in my throat, undigested in my belly. This is what’s happening, this is where we are in the story. This is how the year is closing. The subpoena hit the fear place in me, the worry that I am not equipped to show up to this moment. I am so tired. And heartbroken. I am also not naive— I know there is no justice to be had in the injustice system. Everyone loses. And we have no choice. And no control.

I took those posts down and decided I just wouldn’t write about “it” until we were on the other side but the timing of “the other side” keeps moving, extending. Taking those posts down sent my writing into a deeper hole of shame and for my own sanity, I need to pull them back out (soon).

It’s been so hard to access writing this year after we escaped a place that was home, after we escaped a neighbor and his guns, after we escaped a landlord and his violent neglect that almost killed us. I am tired in a kind of wordless way— there has been no break, no respite, no relief, no “vacation” since before the summer of 2024. Even the holidays last year breezed past in a frantic worry of trying to not die in a house fire due to wildly dangerous electrical wiring and lies of our landlord, of boxes that needed to be filled with our belongings. I was afraid to carry these boxes from the office to the car— worried someone would see us leaving. I was afraid every moment of everyday.

But today I joined my dear friend Seema’s virtual writing workshop and I did in fact write something and I do want and need to share it. I’ve long relied on writing to help expunge my body of the remnants of memory, of violence, to help make sense of the echos, the chaos, to witness and be witnessed. So taking a risk today and sharing new, baby writing. My girlfriend and I will need to give testimony at the trial, sometime next year. There is no avoiding the truth of what happened and the way it still radiates through the bodies of those of us who saw, who heard, who know.

It’s not very “happy holiday season” but well, welcome to me. And thank you for being here, for receiving these words, most especially when I struggle to be here myself.

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When a man bent down on one knee, rifle cocked and pointed at a Prairie Dog, I was shocked, screamed from the hill “PUT THAT GUN DOWN. GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.” with my margarita in hand. A keystone species, how dare he! A friend was in town and we were trying to relax. This was before I mostly had to stop drinking because of the way long covid has rooted in my body, making alcohol even more clearly the poison that it in fact is. It was the first time I saw someone lift a gun in front of me. And it was not the last.

A couple years later there was again a gun lifted by a man, this time pointed at a girl, a child. She drops. Then pointed at his brother, an elder. He drops too but I only see the girl because by the time he is shot, I am crawling on my hands and knees with my girlfriend to the sunroom door. The sun is setting but the light is still on the hill beyond the field.

Sound ricochets between gun and mountain and body. The shriek from a child’s throat. The 6 bullets piercing air and two bodies. The silence that came after.

There is no life left; the man jumps in his red truck and drives to the market in town to turn himself in because he does not have a landline or internet. In he did go, for two weeks, and then after we lived next to him for 6 months while he chopped and organized wood for the winter’s stove. While having to pass him on the single lane dirt road to and from the post office, my face wet with tears after each passing.

I had memorized the way the conifers lined the side of the hill just beyond the field where the cows would run before they started dying from neglect. I could sit and stare forever, I did sit and stare forever, day after day after year. I would know that field and that hill anywhere.

In New Mexico you can carry your gun on your hip for all to see. Or in your car under the passenger seat just in case. You can keep them stored in cement pipes strewn about the yard or buried deep in earth or under the mattress or somewhere close to the front door. “No permit needed for unloaded firearms or in vehicles” and even if a judge releases you after shooting two people and says no drugs no guns, you can still keep one hidden. Somewhere. Just in case.

On warm summer days Rose and I would take the meandering desert path from behind the rental house through the junipers and then the sagebrush and down into the ravine, ponderosas towering on either side, butterscotch and vanilla wafting through the air. On our way down the Prairie Dogs would pop up out of their holes, sound the alarm, a warning for every other tiny body moving both underground and above.

Warning warning warning they seemed to shriek.

Threat threat threat they seemed to worry.

I liked their shrieks, felt seen and known.

Were they trying to warn us? Demand we listen? Break us out of our pastoral fantasy of calm and peace and safety? I had never known safety at home before. I was desperate for it. I kept the fantasy in my grip, knuckles turning red with white at the center. I could not hear the warnings. I refused them. I insisted on staying, not moving, as the landlord raised the rent and demands year after year, as the house continued to collapse around us, as the the landlord got more abusive and threatening by the day. I couldn’t listen until I did. We couldn’t leave until we could.

Beyond the badlands, where my view now is, are the mountains familiar, peaks currently covered in fresh snow as we walk the dogs, sand beneath our feet. I am looking for familiarity in landscape, for the ways I’m able to exhale more deeply when I can see what I remember, what I know.

The familiar mountain peaks are now a distant memory, most days. No more can I walk outside, turn my gaze to the left, and see the Jicarita. There is heartache in this new normal, a loss I’m still trying to write and name.

After staring at the mountain I would then let my gaze settle on the field in front of me. Eaten and stomped down by neglected cattle, desert weeds had sprung up with a fierce claiming. A shock of purple thistle was visible from afar. A field of ox-eye daisy smiling back. “Mine” they seemed to say. And yet it was mine too, something I had settled into a kind of knowing with— that view, that field, that sunset.

Consider this a moving towards. A refusal to forget. A willingness to remember.

Is everything and every one in the desert—the thorns on Prickly Pear, the murderous, rushing stream in the arroyo after a storm, the lightening that hits earth, starts fires, a gunshot blowing through a body—a warning? Demanding us to keep our eyes and ears open, go slow? Pay attention? Be careful? Be warned.

The first time I saw a man with a gun, pointed, I became the Prairie Dog protector. If I could save just one life, well, then that would be one life saved. One more hole that could be burrowed aerating the packed earth, one more shadow to notice as the sun slowly sets over the sparse landscape, one way to remember when spring returns because the talking returns, determined claws reaching. But really, I can’t say I was able to save anyone. I was barely able to save myself.

The shriek, the bullets, the silence, after.

I had survived rape at the age of 19 (among other violences and assaults both before that and after that) and at the age of 26, or so, after doing fundraising for anti-violence orgs (and if we raised a certain amount— we got to SKYDIVE for free! Hell yes! I was able to do that 5 years in a row and it is still one of the best things I have ever, ever done), I felt ready to be in a support role— or so I thought. I had also started doing community organizing work in Brooklyn around sexual violence and quickly found my edges, all the points of pain that had yet to be acknowledged in me.

Throughout those years I was struck by how little healing support was available to those of us who were both survivors AND advocates and organizers in anti-violence work. I was struck by how little conversation and understanding there was that we might be triggered by facing the violence others were experiencing, violence we knew deep in our own bones. I was struck by may other concerns too— like how focused so much of mainstream anti-violence work was focused on cisgender, straight, white women being the survivors— the “good” survivors, the racist and classist underpinnings of who was “a perpetrator” and everyone else was hardly a part of the picture. (Which led me to launching the Queering Sexual Violence anthology call for submissions in 2010 which was finally published in 2016.)

But I remember at one point I was offered some free acupuncture through the rape crisis counselor training program and I finally found a missing piece— that alongside our organizing, activism, and advocacy work— there HAD to be healing spaces. The body had to be included and cared for, the spirit, the heart too. The hospital ended up closing a couple years after I started and I stepped away from the state-funded community organizing project and put all my attention into editing Queering Sexual Violence. I also realized that I had a lot more healing to do— recommitted to therapy with a queer somatic therapist, started writing more, started exploring and studying herbalism, committed to a number of ceremonial psychedelic sessions with a variety of medicines, and later— found breathwork which felt like a missing piece to my larger healing practices— one that invited me to confront what I felt most afraid of— my breath and my aliveness. It was an incredibly difficult and dynamic and ultimately profoundly healing 10 years or so and truly essential for getting me to where I am today.

Returning to my breath and body with compassion and care, making room for the rage and grief and fear I was holding, and finding ways to stay with and in my body even when I felt pain and big emotions allowed me to rebuild trust with a battered and bruised body and spirit. There were no shortcuts.

For me— somatic and embodied practices are part and parcel of activism and liberation work. So many of us are holding so many deep wounds, so many experiences of injustice, of violence, micro and macro aggressions because of our identities in the world. Many of us also tend to put our energy on other people and other spaces before we do the necessary personal healing work to allow us to show up fully to the work with integrity and care.

All of this was on my mind as I put together THE SLOW DOWN: conscious breathing for deep rest + restoration. We will gather again in the outer space Zoom room to reconnect to our breath in a way that helps us slow down and root down so that we can keep showing up to this heartbreaking and beautiful world.

It’s sliding scale and virtual and a replay will be sent to all who sign up— this way you can download and use it whenever you need to come back to yourself so you can keep showing up for others.

Join us

Join this 90 minute workshop focused on slow, conscious breathing techniques— like diaphragmatic breath, slow circular breath, and physiological sigh— to bring your body into rest and restoration aka our parasympathetic response. A bit different than my workshops focused on utilizing Three Part breath, this workshop aims to be a gentle restorative space.

In these days of overwhelm, uncertainty, and escalating violence, our bodies are holding so much and certainly are struggling to access a deeper sense of rest and restoration. And yet— in order to keep showing up to this complex and difficult moment, we need to be able to access this, to be able to both respond AND rest and recover. It’s easy to get caught in the swirl and feel really far away from ourselves so this workshop is all about coming back home to ourselves, to building a gentle relationship of deep care with our aliveness.

We will utilize an instrumental + low-lyric playlist as well as generative writing prompts to help support this restorative breath practice.

If you want to practice but can not join live— a recording (of just my face and voice) will be sent to all who register.

Oh dear, it’s been such a long time since I’ve felt like I’ve had any writing I can share here, in such a public space. Ever since Rose and I witnessed a double homicide outside the house we were renting in the summer of 2024, my writing has felt as if behind a one-way pane of glass. I’m writing as a kind of survival tool but I can’t quite share it yet. And I, myself, am not yet out from beyond this latest traumatic experience— there are some (wildly re-traumatizing) legal tendrils lingering which makes it unsafe for me to share.

And so I’ve been trying to turn (return) to a book draft I wrote between 2010 and 2017, trying to push (or coax) it to the finish line. Titled “Assaults + Rituals”, in it I endeavor to give voice and shape to the body of a queer survivor of developmental, emotional, sexual, and physical abuse and violence, challenging dominant narratives of healing. Through a hypnotic blend of words and threads, it maps the intricate landscape of trauma, delving into the nonlinear journey of healing, resilience, and the return to aliveness. The heart of the book writes towards the theme of the marked, or traumatized, body as a site of knowledge and insight, offering a meditation at the intersection of somatic healing, psychedelics and expanded states of consciousness, and what becomes possible by staying in and writing from the wound. Through deconstructing the binary of embodiment and disembodiment, it’s a narrative exploring the realms in between. Drawing from diverse academic disciplines and my own critical and creative perspectives, it rejects the medicalization of trauma, inviting readers to reimagine their understanding of healing and agency through other realms.

This book also explores relationships, being wounded– and wounding– through connection, working with the metaphor of poison medicine. How does one build relationships, both to human and more than human life, when relationship is where the trauma(s) took place? Can a relationship be both poison and medicine simultaneously? (And do know— the book is far more poetic than it is academic but there is certainly a little of both.)

I wrote it all through graduate school (and a few years before and a year after). I’ve hired editors, for a minute had an agent or two interested (until they understood it wasn’t a formulaic self-help/ how-to book and so not in their wheelhouse). No shade— I’ve written one of these too but this book is something else.

I’ve sat with the draft in front of me, staring at the screen more times than I can count. Every Friday I have a note to “work on the book” and many Fridays I do not. Recently I began the cover letter and proposal again— sent the cover letter to a dear writer friend— a flash of determination that has since disappeared again but I hope will return this winter so I can begin contacting agents with experience representing creative nonfiction hybrid work. I’ve never had an agent before and to be honest, I’ve not really wanted one though I imagine finding the “right” one could make all the difference. And so I’m trying to decide— do I push this book forward on my own, yet again— go directly to publishers as I did with my first book? Or do I try to find someone who can hold the heart of it with me?

For me, the finish line is publication and while this book has yet to be in the world, a number of excerpts have and simultaneously, I’ve edited and/ or written two other books that have made it beyond my computer and into bookstores.

But this book, this book, it is so hard to get to the finish line. If you, too, are a writer, you might know that books can take years, decades to “finish”, to publish. So today I am sharing an excerpt again— I am gently pushing myself to return to it again this winter to ready it for spring.

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I have written the rib piece before, Looking for where the rib, if he were an evening. [i] I will write of it again. How they split, hairlines, many breaks, all of them small, so minuscule I sometimes wonder did they really break? Did I really break? And I’m not sure why it matters except that it feels like all of me dispersed and then reconfigured in those moments of fracture. It was the second time a lover chose to riptide through my body, as if it were a fatty bacon rind, as if it were a boneless chicken breast. As if taking a beating, with words or hands, was what it was good for.

I mean if you want chicken piccata, if you know you really, really want it, you go to the grocery, you check the expiration date (Is there enough time left?), you find the meatiest breast with the best date, you buy and you pound away, right?

Maybe a mallet, maybe a mason jar, something sturdy and rounded, maybe a fist. It matters little.

Maybe it will get thin enough, maybe you’ll be able to see through it, maybe your hands will shake each time knuckles connect with animal.

We so rarely ask if there are other ways to quench our desire, our ravenous hunger, our bone-splitting need, our deep-rooted grief. We reach for what’s right in front of us, what’s right next to us. We drown out the pain, the searching, in another’s body.

I mean a body is a sack of meat and we haul around the rotten parts until an elder witch hands you a chef’s knife and says cut slice discard be rid of their hands on your body, all the hands on your body. But until then we find ways to do the job, we search for tenderness, for new, in hopes of righting the wrongs. We find hands that are not tender. There is a long line of not tender, almost like looking into a field of wheat, or oats, or sunflowers.

Those sunflowers, the sheer number of them, standing motionless, faces to the sky. A reunion of cheery, golden faces looking to the sky until a heavy rain barrels down their backs, bends them forward. We look for them.

I’d like to imagine I’m milky oat tops, all lush and bursting, all milk and season change. All ripe for the picking. But many days I am a cracked hull, a shell, splinter turned full fracture, full rupture.

Sometimes I know I am still here, in this room, hands outstretched, inviting. I remember your hands on my body, other hands on my body and I can’t find a time before hands all up on me, in me, pressing palms upon palms upon me.

Nobody knows what to do with a broken heart. Nobody knows how to figure out this thing called continuous living. Nobody knows and yet it’s all anyone wants us to do. All any of us are doing.

Don’t die.

Stay here.

We ask each other to live beyond the unlivable, intolerable. We ask ourselves the same.

What is living but a free fall, no ground.

I’d like to be a milky oat top. All restoration, all plump and carefree.

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I’m thinking about survivors’ bodies as weapons turned back on ourselves. They have been used against us, used to harm us, have been split right down the middle, turned inside out.

Often we don’t die. Sometimes we do. I remember hearing at some point that rape is particularly difficult to get over because it is one of the few “violent crimes” that people live through. We are forced to stare right into the face of potentially dying; our body knows this and responds accordingly; we are left with having to do the work of reminding our bodies that not everything is a deserving of a crisis response as we turn our bodies into something we can trust again.

Survivors know, full body knowing, our bodies bloom right into collapse, grow into a host of health issues, most of them chronic.

How do we find our bodies outside of the violence, when they’ve been manipulated on a cellular level? When they’ve been made toxic?

Our bodies were not made to bear the weight of someone else’s fists without remembering the shape. Our bodies don’t know how to take hold and then release; violence slips into our bones. It stays with us. Our bodies keep track, hold on to it.

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People are always surprised to learn that I had insomnia at seven years old. That I had kidney stones that needed surgical removal, at seventeen years old. That I would faint in church, on the lacrosse field, while lifeguarding. The digestion issues. The chronic exhaustion and tiredness. Tearing my hair out right at the roots, strand by stand.

There is something in me that builds to a critical mass, until it shuts my body down, blocks my ureter, takes anxiety to epic peaks, risks full collapse in a desperate search for release. There are the days I can’t stay awake. There are the nights I can’t sleep.

On alert, stay awake, don’t sleep, don’t slow down. Definitely don’t listen, tune into the communication.

Trauma put down roots in the body, refused to release until it finally does; in the meantime, I’m losing days and weeks and hours, the promise of a connected life.

A pain without end.

Survivors of sexual and other forms of bodily violence know what kind of toxicity bodies can hold. I welcome other people are holding all the hard stuff, hold space, help them remember that they can put some of it down, release a bit, even just for a moment. My body knows it to be true.

I am indebted to the people who have done this for me. To have a lover hold you while you’re naked, wrap their arms around you and cradle you like you’re theirs, tell you it’s finally time to put some of the weight down. In that moment they promise safety. And you can believe it enough to try.

This is noble work. This is radical presence. Both the offering and the receiving. This is being open to connection after the world, as you knew it, tried to cut you off from it.

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An endless stream of questions. Even when I’m in the present I am writing in the past.

What is the physicality of a wound?

What does it mean to have deep wounds that are almost beyond language?

Beyond words?

What does it mean to always try to find words anyway?

How can we move into this writing the unwritable,

this way of knowing that is in the deep well of the body?

Can we dive into the wound, the loss:

excavate and unearth it and then move back out of it?

How much can language contain?

How much can the text hold?

Does it hold lines and shapes, like skin,

do they turn into bruises, like skin,

do deepest purples give way to a subtle yellow?

What kind of life settles into our bones if we don’t take the time to grieve?

Can there be a return to a body that was lost?

Or is there no return, and only a creation of a new in the present?

When will I be saturated?

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If not grieved, loss has a way of living on in the body. But grieving often means moving into the hard parts of ourselves and making a home in it, settling into the shadows. Or as Arianne Zwartjes says in her sweeping epic poem of an essay on the body and trauma and loss: Trauma is a shear in ordinary blacktop. A fissure in the everyday fabric. Like flannel being ripped. The shredding of each fiber in a mostly straight line. The frayed edges that result. The way the cloth loses its flat plane, becomes irregularly stretched and taut, gapping and baggy… Blooming wound on this terrain of skin.[ii]

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Even if I think I’ve left my body, in fact I am always in it, always using it, creating with it. In this sense, using my body (fingers and hands) to write about my body and my sometimes feelings of disconnection can bring me back to it. It places me right in it. It allows me to push into something I often pull myself out of; it allows me to settle into the wandering question that haunts my soul and hacks and saws at my body [iii] It allows my body to be both the question and the answer.

+++

We are made and unmade by each other’s touch. Touch a type of witness.

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I can never quite figure out the appropriate tense when I write. How then is always now and now is some kind of future I can’t always find words for.

I write in sentence fragments sometimes. [T]he bliss of a disorienting text…[iv] They feel right to me, they sound right when I read them back to myself. Fractures, stops and starts. Like speaking, like thinking, like lines of a poem collapsed into themselves.

Can form be writing in repetition, writing in fragments, writing without a care for linearity, writing to simply write that which is unwritable (until it’s written, that is), writing with no concern for clarity—writing the way memory and traumatic experience live in a body, writing the way memory and traumatic memory get stuck in the throat.

Bhanu Kapil writes of the fragment as “rough”— where the edge of it is, like glass or fur or light, so that it adheres to other fragments, not through historical or phatic means: but through the force of attraction. I place the fragments in a chrysalis: to recombine.[v]

To write with a focus on the body, to navigate that terrain, to come up to the edges, cliffs, to settle into the valley of dangerous emotions and feeling.

But this writing is also bigger than me, bigger than my body.

+++

The failure, over and over, of trying to find words for feelings in the body. The limits of language.

How is one to communicate a sentence whose subject wants more than grammar allows? And what might this want sound like?[vi]

Long ago I internalized the message I needed to be able to talk about my experiences with violence in a logical, factual, linear way. And write that way too.

I struggled and struggle to do so; no room for linearity in the spectrum of violence.

Words as a language that are never quite enough but always are. Words as a suture to lace up the rupture, the wound. In an effort to heal, to bring together the before and after, dig into the new space.

+++

Where do bodies go that were cast off along the way? How many am I still dragging around, afraid to cut loose? What about the bodies that can never be dead because they were never seen as an alive human to start with?

Sometimes I imagine you, reader, already know the stories I am about to tell you and now if I tell you, really spell it out, won’t this just be repetition? Same old shit? I try to keep things short. I try to stay small, a tiny ball. I try to take up less room.

How afraid I am of repetition but really, what is life if not repetition. A spiral, they say. Moving forward, one stitch at a time, sometimes circling back, making a mistake, cutting out the knot, tying one off, starting over, new stitches going through gaping holes.

+++

I start searching for answers to the questions. The plants arrive. The line between poison and medicine blur. I begin to feel held by something bigger than me.

[i] francine j. harris, play dead

[ii] Arianne Zwartjes, Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy

[iii] Helene Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays

[iv] Kazim Ali, Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction

[v] Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieu

[vi] Rob Halpern’s writing in the introduction for Melissa Buzzeo’s book For Want and Sound

The writing is very much in the early stages but I’m starting to feel into a framework, some questions, a future book looming. A book that wrestles with the questions “What violence and beauty does land hold? What can be excavated deep from within the earth, deep within the body? How does body collapse and illness mirror land destruction? How are they shaping each other? What is the purpose of suffering and when does it veer into cruelty? How can the lush high mountain desert hold queerness, aliveness, change?” I am also writing into my whiteness, my settler-ness, my queerness, my personal history of trauma and abuse as ways to enter into what land holds, what bodies (my body) holds, how beauty and violence thread through each and all. Writing has become a kind of anchor, a practice of being with what, on many days, feels somewhat impossible to truly hold.

See, I told you, early stages— but developing.

I’m sharing all of this with you because the last 5 years of my personal life and personal writing practice has greatly shaped the newest writing and breathwork series I am offering— starting October 15th for 5 Wednesdays 5-7pm MT. It’s virtual and offered on a sliding scale— like all of my sessions and workshops.

“EARTHBODYBREATHSTORY: a 5 week creative writing + breathwork for meeting the polycrisis” invites you to dive into the body through story, writing, and restorative breath, uncovering what is still alive and pulsing in the midst of illness, collapse, and great loss. Guided by our wise bodies, resilient landscapes, and the more-than-human world of animals and plants, we will explore how grief and joy live in both human-bodies and land-bodies, tending to what is breaking down and what is birthing anew.

Together, we will practice presence through and creativity as pathways into resilience and renewal, nurturing aliveness, trust, and collective transformation in times of disconnection and upheaval. Bring your tired, grief-filled, and tender bodies to be held in this space of story, breath, and possibility.

We will read, write, and move through restorative and enlivening breath practices, with optional space for sharing. If you’re feeling called after reading that, you can learn more and register here.

These years have been so overwhelming to navigate— so much happening both outside and inside our bodies, within and beyond this stunning and fractured earth we are all breathing on. You don’t have to be navigating chronic illness to join us, of course! But if you are, you are welcome to bring your whole body with you into these sessions.

I truly and deeply believe in staying with the truth of things are much as we can— knowing that some truths are personal. Writing practice and breath practice are a really powerful pair for getting clear and finding language.

If you have any questions— feel free to respond to this email but if you’re interested in joining us— you can do so right here. We’re a little over half full!

Here’s the fuller write up. This is a generative writing and breath meditation practice space. It will not involve critique or editing of creative work.

In this 5-week workshop series, we will dive into the body— our earthbody— through story and conscious breath, uncovering what is still alive and pulsing in the midst of collective violence, illness, and great loss. These are times of disconnection—from ourselves, each other, and the earth—but they don’t have to be. Many of our bodies are experiencing illness, collapse, and crisis (mine included), mirroring the violence and breakdown of human-induced late-stage capitalism, rising fascism, militarization, genocide, war, and ecological collapse. What happens when we acknowledge this mirroring? What is still breathing in the collapse? Which body stories serve us, and which are asking for a re-write?

Guided by our wise bodies, resilient landscapes, and the more-than-human world of animals and plants, we will listen for and translate the stories of human-bodies and land-bodies while remaining open to how those stories shift and transform, birth and break, bloom and go to seed. In this way, we come into relationship with land as grief work and joy work, tending the losses and aliveness carried in soil, water, bloom, and body alike. Together, we will explore how connection to breath, body, earth, and story can expand our capacity to be with chaos and hopelessness while also opening to possibility and renewal.

We will read, write, and move through restorative and enlivening breath practices, with optional space for sharing. This series is a space for grief and celebration, pain and joy, pausing and action, words and wordlessness. Bring your tired, wounded, grief bodies to be held through creative and somatic practice. Through presence and practice, we will nurture resiliency, awaken aliveness, and deepen trust and communication as pathways into revitalization and collective transformation.

This workshop series is different from my monthly breathwork workshops— it is equal parts creative writing practice and breath meditation practice. It is open to you whether you have a creative writing practice or want to begin one. It is also open to all levels of breath and meditation practice– whether you have an active meditation practice or want to begin one.

Please note:

• $225 is the true cost of the series. There are additional sliding scale access points for $200, $175, and $150.

• I will also have 3 spots available at $100— with priority given to those holding marginalized identities and also experiencing financial instability. Please email me to see if there are spots left.

• Please be mindful of where you place yourself when booking so everyone can access as needed and I can be appropriately compensated.

• This workshop series is capped so do sign up sooner rather than later and also, I will need 15 registrations to run it.

• I recommend you join the live sessions as much as possible as it will be generative to be together in real time but a recording will be sent out after each session in case you can not make one.

• There will also be some optional “homework”— an invitation to practice and write in between sessions to deepen your experience.

  Please note: This workshop series is not a replacement for other forms of therapeutic or somatic interventions. I am not a licensed therapist but have been trained in and working with a trauma-experienced lens for over a decade.Please see here for more about a my training and background.

• Thursday September 11th is “Clearing the Channel: an eclipse season astrology + breathwork workshop” I’m offering with astrologer (and my love and co-orchard tender Rose Blakelock). Virtual, sliding scale, a recording for everyone who signs up so even if you can’t join live but want to work with eclipse season energy— you can!

• For 5 Wednesday’s starting October 15th— I’m offering “EARTHBODYBREATHSTORY: creative writing + breathwork for meeting the polycrisis”. Virtual, sliding scale, and while you are really invited to show up live each week— recordings will be sent out in case you have to miss a week.

• And if 1:1 support is more your speed— I have virtual, sliding scale breathwork or herb consultations available.

I’ve been having such a hard time finding my words. Or— maybe not finding my words but finding the desire to share them beyond my own body. After navigating extremely hard circumstances last year, I found myself desiring even more silence, even more space and stillness but here we are at the end of a summer, in a different year, in a whole new landscape— the green bounty of an ancient orchard overloaded with apples and pears and a bounty that has and will continue to require much from us. Friends we haven’t seen much ask us how our summer has been. Well? It’s been a summer (and spring and late winter) of work, that’s for sure. Both pur full-time jobs and what wants to be a full-time job— the orchard.

Now the caretakers of about 50ish fruit trees— planted in 1956 and 1957— and a larger garden (mini-farm) that I’ve ever cared for, each season is making its demands. Late winter was for pruning the trees that hadn’t been truly pruned in more than a decade (we’ve been told). Then came preparing the soil for the medicinal herb garden and filling the raised beds with native soil and delicious, nutrient dense compost. I went big and have lived to regret it. LOL. But what I mean by that is I did not fully take into account all the weeding, watering, and attention that would be required especially as I navigated intense heat waves and abundant mosquitos which, alongside some other triggers, exacerbated the ongoing echoes of long covid in my limbs this last month.

We are lucky to have in ground irrigation for flooding the orchard, the rose garden, and the main garden bed but the sheer size of it all means we walk out nearly every morning to flood a different area. Hours and hours of fresh, chilled water sinking into the dry earth. The trees and rose bushes are drinking it up— grateful for never-ending water straight from the Rio Grande by way of the ancient acequia waterway. I am grateful too— this kind of access to water is not common in so-called New Mexico. We are lucky to be in an agricultural valley rich with heritage and tradition and the kindness and generosity of neighbors.

We also had to rider mow the orchard every 3 or so weeks as this was clearly a mosquito breeding ground. (Also rare in New Mexico but in a much less cool way.) And now we are entering harvest time— boughs literally breaking under the sheer number of red and golden fruit. There’s the collecting for use and eating but there’s also picking up the fallen apples so that we don’t make it easier for the the relentless codling moths. And then this too will end leading into more pruning of dead and diseased limbs, taking down some of the height and water shoots, and planning out next year’s gardens (I’m moving back to raised beds for a year or so in order to really get the larger mini-farm soil ready for more abundant growing.)

This kind of scale and pace keeps one humble— Rose and I are well aware that we are brand new, have much to learn, and that the work required is continuous. It will not all be done this year. Or the next. Or even the next. Instead a kind of faith in the flow, in the learning, a kind of patience and allowance of never actually finishing anything is required. I am not yet very good at this faith! I am trying!

And while I know we have done a lot— truly a ton— in the 8 months we have been here— I’ve still been catching myself feeling like I’ve not done enough and that the garden didn’t “produce” as much as I had hoped. But the garden did indeed provide— a wild amount of fresh milky oats that went straight into organic alcohol and raw apple cider vinegar and organic glycerine for three varieties of nervous system goodness, enough lemon balm, tulsi, white sweet clover, rosemary, red clover, lobelia, garden sage, and blue cornflowers for herbal remedy making in the coming year (and more supplemented by trusted organic farmers). Endless wildflowers on the kitchen table. In the raised beds— tomatoes and collards and lacinato kale and multiple kinds of chilis from our neighbor-farmer- friend Danny and dill and basil and beyond. I also stuffed myself silly with Danny’s known far and wide orchard frown peaches and cherries.

It’s been a summer (or a year, really) of “chop wood and carry water”, to trust that every little bit of time we are spending putting our noses to the grindstones, returning the orchard to its glory will continue to be revealed. That 5 and 10 years from now we will say “it was worth it”. And I am learning a lot about listening, about staying with more than human life, the trees and plants and animals that rely on this land for their very lives. (You definitely want to check out my “Notes” here to see the baby skunks we unexpectedly got very obsessed with.)

There is also a lot of planning for the future— we would love to be able to get in place all the necessary systems to be able to share organically grown fruit at local farmer’s markets, to donate to school and community food programs, to share widely.

In these times of continued crisis— I am remembering about both being but a cog in the wheel and a ghost in the machine— not taking up too much space, not getting ahead of myself, and planning for the more difficult days ahead through taking care of land and growing food and medicine for all of us who will need it.

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Ok— if you made it this far— a bit more info about the upcoming workshop and additional series!

“This month brings the latest chapter in a series across the axis of Pisces and Virgo. We are suspended between these portals in a time outside of time. Eclipse seasons mark periods of acceleration and strangeness and often prompt grand entrances and exits. How can we clear the way? How can we listen closely and try to learn when and how to hold on, and what to loosen our grip around? How can we work to tend and clear the channel, and find some path towards resolution and satisfaction?

Working with breath is a practice of working with our own energy. Where does it get stuck? Where does it move freely? Where does judgment show up? Where is there more capacity for patience and acceptance of our complexity? Each inhale enlivens our whole body. Each exhale gives us a chance to release and let go, trusting another inhale will follow. Our connection to our breath allows us to bring into sharp focus what feels life giving and what feels life taking. In this practice, we have the opportunity to notice when we fall into habit and where there might be an opportunity to exercise some agency or choice.

In this 120 minute workshop we will explore the eclipse cycle through writing prompts, astrological insight and themes, and a dynamic Diaphragmatic and Three Part Breath breathwork practice to help clear the old and make room for the new, to find choice and agency, and to help focus our energy and direct it towards more aliveness.” Join us!

“In this 5 week workshop series, we will dive into the body— our earthbody— through story and conscious breath, uncovering what is still alive and pulsing in the midst of collective violence, illness, and great loss. These are times of great disconnection— from ourselves, from each other, from this earth. But they don’t have to be! Many of our bodies are experiencing illness, collapse, change, and crisis in real time (mine included)— mirroring the collapse, violence, and crisis of human-induced late/ end stage capitalism, rising fascism, hyper-militarization, genocide, war, and ecological collapse.

What happens when we acknowledge the mirroring, connect the dots between outside and inside? What is still breathing in the collapse? What parts of your body stories serve you, and which parts are asking for a re-write? What can we learn from land, plants, and animals as we continue through these change times? Can we root into the complexity of the present moment with purpose, presence, and creativity? Can we commit to bringing more presence to our days as a practice of reconnection?

Guided by our wise bodies, resilient, adaptive landscapes, and the more-than-human world of animals and plants, we will listen for, bring presence to, and translate the stories of the human-bodies and land-bodies while remaining open to how that story shifts and transforms, births and breaks, blooms and goes to seed. In this way, we come into relationship with land— and the violence and regenerative capacity in the very soil— as grief work and joy work, tending the losses and the aliveness carried in soil, water, bloom, and body alike. Alone and together, we will explore how connection to breath, body, earth, and story can expand our capacity to be with chaos, hopelessness, and impossible times while also opening to hope, possibility, and renewal.

We will read together, write together, practice restorative and enlivening breath practices, and then write a bit more together, with space for sharing if you wish— though sharing is never required. This series is a space for both grief and celebration, pain and joy, pausing and action, words and wordlessness.

Bring your tired bodies, your wounded bodies, your pain bodies, and your grief bodies to be held and listened to through intentional creative and somatic practice. Through presence and practice, we will nurture resiliency and adaptation, awaken aliveness, and deepen trust and communication as pathways into revitalization and collective transformation.” Join us! This series will be capped so do join when and if you are sure.

It has been busy here at the orchard— lots of tree and land care, lots of flooding the orchard with crisp Rio Grande water from the acequia, lots of blooms from Datura and Blue Cornflower and ancient roses and so many wildflowers, lots of herbal remedy making too for Corpus Ritual. I haven’t had much time to sit down and write about it but I’m hoping to share more soon! I’ve kinda just been in awe of it all. This is our first season here at the high desert river valley ancient orchard and I am truly stunned by the beauty (and the labor) required!

In the meantime, this is my once a month share about upcoming offerings from my healing arts practice— I’m writing with a BRAND NEW breathwork workshop on August 21st— virtual and sliding scale of course!

In the spring I started realizing that while the Three Part breath I facilitate can be deeply helpful for processing and coming into our aliveness and power, it can also be very enlivening and really can require a lot of energy. With everything that is feeling so overwhelming and hard in our current world and lives— oh I don’t know, the whole polycrisis!?— I decided to start offering a breathwork workshop that is all about rest and restoration— slowness, softness, dare I say EASE. I’m really excited to shift gears a little and move into some gentle practice this month. I wish I could double myself so I could be a participant! LOL.

So welcome—

THE SLOW DOWN: conscious breathing for deep rest + restoration on August 21st 5-6:30pm MT

If interest continues, I plan to offer virtual breathwork workshops every 3 weeks or so this fall— we will alternate between THE SLOW DOWN and our tried and true themed Three Part breath workshops (themes like aliveness, big feelings, grief, anger, power, and more) as a way for building capacity to be with it all, to return to our own aliveness, AND focus on restoration so we can keep showing up to our lives and each other in these complex days.

There is also an astrology + breathwork workshop I’ll be offering again with Rose Blakelock (astrologer + my longtime love!) coming up in September so stay tuned for that too. (And Rose always has sliding scale, virtual astrology sessions if you need some star support STAT.)

I do hope you will join us! Learn more below!

And if you’re new to this space, me, my work— you can learn all about my background and training here.

Sign up

Join this 90 minute workshop focused on slow, conscious breathing techniques— like diaphragmatic breath, slow circular breath, and physiological sigh— to bring your body into rest and restoration aka our parasympathetic response. A bit different than my workshops focused on utilizing Three Part breath, this workshop aims to be a gentle restorative space.

In these days of overwhelm, uncertainty, and escalating violence, our bodies are holding so much and certainly are struggling to access a deeper sense of rest and restoration. And yet— in order to keep showing up to this complex and difficult moment, we need to be able to access this, to be able to both respond AND rest and recover. It’s easy to get caught in the swirl and feel really far away from ourselves so this workshop is all about coming back home to ourselves, to building a gentle relationship of deep care with our aliveness.

We will utilize an instrumental + low-lyric playlist as well as generative writing prompts to help support this restorative breath practice.

If you want to practice but can not join live— a recording (of just my face and voice) will be sent to all who register.

I’d spent the last number of days sitting on the cushion and walking in the woods with murder running through my mind— specifically the double murder I unexpectedly witnessed on a dirt road outside the house in the high desert mountains I was renting with my partner last year. My brain offering endless, unanswerable questions. No longer seeing the order of events in slow motion (gratefully), when I got really quiet, I was able to tap into a kind of guilt only a survivor knows. “Did I do the wrong thing? Did I not do enough? What is our responsibility to each other? Is there a way I could have stopped it from happening?” All present on loop, the mind loves a loop.

The loop— the long arc of trauma, the way it shakes us out of time and space. Too often in this life we experience the horrific, the unimaginable. In these moments, where reality splits, we can lose ourselves or rather our selves get taken, shaken up, and the world keeps turning. If we are lucky— or brave or willing to keep the faith— in the aftermath we find ways to survive, to commit to some kind of healing, some kind of movement in our frozen shock and grief.

These traumatic encounters so common in life— they can leave us less trusting of life, less trusting of other humans, riddled with fear that to be human is to be a monster. “Am I a monster too?” That there is in fact no natural order— nothing we can count on— besides violence.

The examples of this being true are everywhere. The examples of this not being true are everywhere, too. One thing life is not, for those of us staying with the pulse, is simple.

My life has included many, many traumatic events— this was the first one that wasn’t on my body but another’s. When I was younger I was collapsing under the weight of them— drinking myself into oblivion, disconnected from my body and breath, afraid to trust anyone and anything. I hadn’t yet found tools or practices or people who could help me piece together the destruction others had enacted on my body, my spirit, the way it was now destroying my life. It took some time to find these tools and practices and people. Now, after much more than a decade of commitment to practice and healing, alongside the parts of me that fear life, fear people— there are bigger parts of me that know I can be with the horror, metabolize it, find my way through without causing more hurt to myself or others. There is a willingness in me, to sit with myself, to sit with others in the depth of the trauma. No solution or cure to be found but breath can help us stay with whatever needs tending, needs witnessing.

“How will we know when we are better? When we have arrived?” I know these are the “wrong” kinds of questions. The heal-ing is ongoing. The -ing is essential here. In truth— there is no arrival. There’s just life continuing, even in the discontinuity, and us with our broken hearts re-learning how to move towards, move with, breathe with aliveness— the kind of aliveness that can hold death with tender hands. The kind of aliveness that doesn’t push anything away, includes it all. That pulse of aliveness we can trust. It can not be taken or destroyed— it is in every single human body and plant body and rock body and animal body.

It can not be destroyed.

Another unanswerable question that was rippling through me on the meditation cushion was “Why me? I can not handle this.” which soon was countered with “Why not me? I am equipped.” Eugene told me to not get too attached to either one because neither are true (or maybe both are, I sometimes think.)

Nestled in between the violence that split time and the grief and guilt that is ongoing, a kind of gratitude was coming through too— gratitude for how after many years of practice, my breath— which used to be a terrifying thing to notice— is now a kind of home, somewhere I can bring my attention with a lot of patience and compassion. Gratitude for the ways that I am finding my way through what sometimes still feels unsurvivable. Gratitude for my willingness to be a witness. My eyes remembering the way the light moved. The way a child’s body fell onto parched earth. The way my adult neighbor’s body was left over night on the same parched earth. That I made a choice, in an instant, to not turn away even if I could not stop what was happening. Even if it would change me.

But then quickly the guilt arrives again— why should I still be breathing? When I witnessed a man take two peoples’ lives, two peoples’ breath in an instant? The sound of bullets ripping through the evening setting sun, birdsong interspersed. Patience and compassion for this part too. For the parts of me still stuck on that porch looking out over the meadow on July 25th unable to stop what was already happening. Patience and compassion for the parts of me who take on too much responsibility, who are trying to understand the role of the witness. Patience and compassion for how hard this being alive thing is and how stunning in its beauty this being alive thing is, too. Not pushing away anything but not drowning in anything either. Not absolving myself but also not punishing.

Trying to stay with the pure essence of the witness— willing to see— even the horror, even if it changes me, to not leave someone alone in their death.

I remembered that I didn’t come to this retreat to release the trauma but rather, to be with it, breathe with it, to cry when the tears arise, to get outside of the story but also maybe to even make some kind of meaning from it so that I could find a way to continue to stay open to life, to aliveness, with less fear and more trust.

I don’t have to tell you how hard these days are— every day, for years now, a new horror story erupts somewhere in the world or right in our backyard or our own lives and indeed impacts us. The constant state of stress response that so many of our bodies are in is really rough in both the short and long term. I am committed to staying with reality— by that I mean I am committed to keeping my eyes and ears open, to staying with what is happening in the world— the horror, the beauty, all of it. To find ways to both show up and take action and rest and restore. And in order to do that— I know I need to be taking care of my physical body, emotional body— all the bodies.

I consider the work I do with others to be harm reduction work— because of my background in anti-violence work, trauma work, and my own lifetime of recovering from trauma and violence— I work with many folks who have complex trauma histories, who navigate chronic or complex illness, who hold identities that are experiencing overwhelming violence and oppression on the daily. I don’t think a flower essence or a breathwork practice will cure what ails us but I do believe that we can call on outside support— from land, plants, breath— to chip away at the impact on us. To help us remember that there is more to life than suffering and pain. To help us remember our aliveness.

I have always centered financial access in my work and work hard to meet both my financial and survival needs while also creating access— all my 1:1 work and all of my workshops are offered on a sliding scale. All of it is also virtual so no matter where you are, we can work together. The herbal remedies arm of my healing arts practice is offered a little bit differently in order to financially support the massive amount of labor and deep intention around every aspect of it— from seed to sourcing to formulating to designing to bottling to shipping— of every little jar and bottle and bag of herbal goodness I get to send out into the world.

Here are some ways to find me and connect to my work in the world this month:

• Need to move some energy and reconnect to yourself? Join us for a sliding scale, virtual 90 minute breathwork group on June 26th 5-6:30pm MT. BIG FEELINGS: breathwork + writing for being with it all is for folks both seasoned in breathwork and meditation and those who are brand new, too. Utilizing the somatic practice of working with breath and body and the embodied practice of writing, we will find our way through the murky maze of this being alive thing, this being human thing. We will welcome the big feelings as the messengers they are. By welcoming them, breathing with them, feeling them with a capital-F— we might just find a little more clarity, a little more space, a little more presence— growing some strong roots to help anchor us in this beautiful and complex world. More info here.

• Need to be witnessed, listened to, and held in a private space just for you? There are sliding scale, virtual 1:1 breathwork sessions and herbal consultations (inclusive of two custom remedies) open in July and August.

• Need a little gentle emotional and energetic support? Enroll in ENERGY FIELDS— a monthly flower essence club. Offered on a sliding scale, each month you get a new flower essence kit with an invitation to practice with the essence and some writing prompts and lots of information about each essence. If you join before June 25th— July’s will be shipped to your door. The power of an energetic essence is subtle and requires faith and trust— it’s gentle and supportive guidance for weary spirits, for broken hearts, for embodied revolutionary practice in remembering change is possible, and for reconnecting the the energy and fullness of aliveness. The intention is to support your emotional, energetic, and spiritual realms through creative exploration and ceremony and the expansive energetics of an essence*. Think FUN and PLAY and LISTENING DEEPLY TO PLANTS, LAND, and YOUR WISE SELF.

  “…The way you curate the essences from month to month feels like a natural crescendo and narrative you're building with the collective at large. They feel in sync, like the most wonderful balm for challenging times. Thanks for all the care and work you put into this offering, it truly is quite special.”— Heather

  

• Need a nervous system friend? For all the Milky Oat freeqs— Milky Oats Glycerite (sweet treat— extracted with organic, plant-based glycerine and filtered water) + Milky Oats Oxymel (tart-forward with a little sweetness extracted with organic raw apple cider vinegar and local raw honey) and the alc-based tincture are all now back. Bless that deep, nourishing, gentle nervous system support.

• Want to work with herbal remedies but can’t do alc? Happy to share that alc-free single herb glycerites are back! They are delish and a sweet way to work with herbs. Folks who can’t work with alc-based tinctures love them but they are also lovely for everyone! The Rose glycerite and Tulsi glycerite are my personal favorites. Oh! And the Skullcap! And the Lemon Balm! LOL. There’s limited stock of these single herb glycerites as I also use them in the alc-free versions of Trauma Heart Heal, Go Easy, and Give Less Shits which are also available again.

And everything else you can find over here. Thanks for being here— for taking time to read and engage and all the ways you are already showing up for yourself and for others.

I’ve been hesitant to share because as it goes— we have made a lot of small errors this first year growing here and I started to become really worried that nothing would actually grow which of course is a little ridiculous— seeds know exactly what to do and the apple, pear, and peach trees have bloomed and are now growing heavy with fruit. The ancient rose bushes are absolutely bursting with blooms of every possible color. I’m starting to believe that maybe things will be ok— at least in this tiny little pocket of the world, at least in this orchard— so here goes.

We only moved here at the beginning of January— quickly unpacked and got to work both in our regular jobs and in this orchard, both at once. Rose and I spent over 2 months— from end of January into April— pruning as many of the the trees in this close to 60 tree orchard as we could and all of the 20+ ancient rose bushes too. The trees had not been fully pruned in 10-15 years according to our neighbor and the dead and diseased limbs were robust. This meant doing a bunch of reading and research, watching YouTube videos from other orchard keepers about how to properly prune. This meant chainsaws and other saws and lopers and ladders and pulling limbs into piles. This meant spending every Sunday and sometimes Saturday bundled up in layers with our arms high above us cutting limbs, gauging what could stay for now and what needed to go, for the health of the tree, only stopping when our bodies could do no more. We did as much as we possibly could knowing that this rehab is going to be a multi-year process but all in all, we got preliminary pruning done on close to 40 trees! And just when the buds were near blooming— we had to stop so that the trees could use all their energy to bloom and begin growing their fruit.

And then without a second to spare, we turned to the (now massive) garden bed. Being an herbalist and having a robust remedy line, it’s been a dream come true to grow more and more of the herbs I work with each year since I left NYC in 2020 after 16 years. (Yes I miss it— it was my whole world— and yes I am so happy to be here where I am now.) Despite being brand new to this land, I had (and have) a whole lot of plans. Our neighbor Danny— an organic chile and fruit tree farmer (and total gentle sweetheart)— had been growing organically here for years in the recent past and so the soil has been well loved. I had planned on a modest size garden bed but D. offered to come do a one time til with his tractor (bless him because we certainly don’t have the big tools and tractors) and before I knew it, I had doubled, tripled the size.

Then there was learning the in-ground irrigation system— a true luck and privilege to have out here in the high mountain valley desert. D. got a big grant years ago to have it installed and through a series of valves and gates— the entire orchard can be flooded as often as we need to which is about once a week but requires multiple days to get to the whole orchard.

We are also lucky to be right off a robust acequia, the primary way water moves and is utilized throughout New Mexico which means we can pull from there on the regular and set up pipes with gates for the water to get into the garden. I had a true mental breakdown when we were getting everything set up (I’m talking weeping on a hill in a pit of despair after a long day planting seeds)— being brand new to this kind of system, we had underestimated the necessity of furrows between the rows so that the water could get to each seed and plant. The water came out of the gates and then went… nowhere. Just pooled up and made a big mess. (Cue my panicked texts to another sweet farmer out here Annie of Annie’s Herbs). Rookie move and it meant that for days we (and mostly and our buddy and local musician Michael) HAND DUG each long-ass row and then added as much compost as we had on hand.

When we told out neighbor D. about our mistake and labor he said “You know I have a tool for that? I could have just come over…” (the kindness of neighbors and generosity and commitment to community care out here in these small agricultural valleys is unmatched.)

“I bet you do” I said and we laughed. Maybe next year.

And still— the way the water moves is stunning. The way we can open valves and flood the earth with fresh water, a gift. We have rich soil with extra compost and manure (thanks for the homegrown manure! LOL) The mosquitos are a true nightmare (and pretty rare here unless one is close to water like we are) but I am going to figure it out because I need to be outside and I am beyond lucky to be here tending this nearly perfect place.

In the “garden” (mini-farm) we’ve now planted— tulsi, skullcap, lemon balm, pulsatilla, arnica, monarda, feverfew, st. john’s wort, lobelia, blue vervain, wood betony, black cohosh, valerian, motherwort, figwort, broccoli, mugwort, red clover, oats, blue cornflower, jasmine-scented nicotiana, french radishes, lavender, spinach, calendula, so many wildflowers, and so. much. more.

In the raised beds— lots of culinary herbs from One Straw Farm, chiles from D., greens, and flowers.

And of course the seeds sprouted!! Who do I think I even am to doubt them?!

All the days I spent worrying and raging that we had ruined it all— when we had to redo the water system and furrows— was indeed a waste of my energy. Bless the seeds that know exactly what they are doing and seem to adapt and adjust far better than us humans.

In the larger orchard we’ve planted a Red Haven peach tree, two vitex bushes, and one elder bush. Next year we will plant two linden trees, two hawthorn trees, and a mimosa tree I’ve been carrying around in a pot for nearly a decade just waiting for a steady place to plant.

And let us not forget the 24 Datura plants I planted around the mini chapel in the orchard— more than half grown from seed in our sunroom. Datura is a kindred of mine and one whose medicine I have been blessed to work with for a long time now. It is also a protection spell, a wish for as much safety as one can hope for these days.

In these truly precarious times where funding and grants are being cut for farmers across the country, and being working class queers who never really had intended to become small scale farmers and orchard keepers but inead just followed the call, the subtle invitations towards a whole new kind of life — we will of course need to secure some funding for future projects like a greenhouse, beekeeping, a tractor, fencing to keep the elk out but that certainly is all at risk. Again, a majorly long-term project that I know year by year will make itself real. But I am so so grateful for the ways farmers take care of each other out here most especially when the systems fail.

So you see— we have been busy— with labor, with doubt, with our full-time jobs (Rose’s and mine) outside of this orchard tending, with building trust and home after extreme heartbreak, loss, and horror in an orchard at the end of the world. Even this short piece does not fully express the amount of labor and investment of time, money, and energy. The work ahead is endless and in a strange way, I’m grateful to be busy with moving my body and keeping the faith.

For now I’m holding both the anxiety and fear about— gestures at everything— and the excitement and hope all at once. In dire times, it is good medicine to be more closely connected to land, to be invested in growing food and medicine to hopefully have enough to share in the near future and I’m counting my blessings.

Interspersed are the horrific videos I see on social media of ICE violently thieving away real, live human beings with families, children. Of unceasing bombing in Gaza, children and adults alike, starving, dying, thanks to violent, bloodthirsty governments and ongoing occupation. My brain continues to feel scrambled, years now of scrambling. How can a brain and body hold all of this at once? Witness this? Experience this?

We are all learning on the fly. We have no other choice.

For months I’ve been in the messy middle. Not quite here and not quite there. There is a haze in front of my eyes, a slowness to my thinking that is both long covid related and trauma related. Witnessing a double homicide and going through relentless abuse and threats from our now ex-landlord changed me last year just like the other times I’ve experienced extreme trauma have changed me.

Last summer and fall and early winter was all about just getting through day to day— showing up for myself, my clients, putting out small and large fires and threats. Packing jars and bottles and dried herbs and unpacking jars and bottles and dried herbs. Packing books and clothes and unpacking books and clothes. Lifting heavy things more days than not. Navigating emails and certified mail that arrived at random, frequently, from a monstrous man who held all the power (or so he thought.) Then we moved, unpacked it all, started pruning the ancient orchard— apple trees and pear trees and rose buses, started building out the garden. Our work continued in every direction, little chance to slow down.

My therapist keeps reminding me that I’m in the in-between, in a moment of becoming again. When I would say “But I wanted to move house, rest, and then feel creative again, to find my way into the next iteration of my work, to get back to the book that had to be paused last year, to start this new book kicking around in my body” she would say “But you’ve barely had time to rest yet. And the trauma of last year into this one will take time to fully be with, integrate, move through. Yes, you are changed but all of this is food for your work and you need to allow it all to take its time moving through you.” As an herbalist and breathwork facilitator and writer who predominantly works with other folks with complex trauma histories and who has been writing about the impact of trauma and abuse publicly for 15+ years— I of course know this and yet here I am wishing it would all move faster, that I could no longer be here but there.

I’ve stopped saying “when I get to the other side” and instead say “when I get to another side”.

It’s a very human thing, to struggle against change. It is much easier to accept the change we choose rather than the change that chooses us. I want to be ready and fresh and brand new. I don’t want to be in the messy middle, still finding myself again.

In bed the other night I remembered last summer going to a queer and trans silent meditation retreat in the mountains one month after witnessing the murders; I remembered how every time I closed my eyes (for hours every day), all my brain wanted to do was run through the order of events of that terrifying evening, as if running over the same order of events again might crack the code, might help it make sense. I hadn’t told the teachers before hand what I was coming in with because I didn’t want to center myself, figured I’d be fine since being with trauma and violence is not a new thing for me. (I know, silly.) So I sat with it alone, vibrating more and more with rage and grief as each second in silence passed. It was indeed a deeply painful few days; I could not find my way to any kind of calm. I could not accept that this world is so violent, has always been so outrageously violent. I was in a rage, in the deepest grief. After a few days of silent, eyes closed weeping and focusing on my breath— in and out and in and out— I realized I was so fucking mad that trauma and violence had yet again changed me. Left me with the task of having to figure out how to go on after seeing and witnessing the unimaginable. I did not kill and I was not killed— I was a secret third thing, deeply impacted just the same.

Some things just do not make sense. Some experiences strip us down bare, drop us right into the marrow of this horrific and beautiful experience called living.

I think of everything I had wanted to do last year that got put on pause because survival became a daily thing that required much of my creative energy. I have to move more slowly now, everything takes a little longer to do. I think of what this recent wave of trauma and violence re-ignited in me— that this world is unsafe, unfair, cruel. Many days my individual life feels small, almost insignificant, in the face of so much horror.

All of this is true and yet, it’s not the whole story.

Now that it is warmer here in the valley of the high desert mountains I am outside a lot more— preparing garden beds, gasping at the bursts of blooms returning to the land of the living— the first orange rose, the lilacs, the apple blossoms, listening to the wind chime in the breeze. Many plants have been planted, the datura seeds have sprouted and are now 8 inches tall and ready to be planted around the chapel. My work with others in my healing arts practice is moving along just fine. I am slowly getting back into a meditation practice and painting practice after a break this last month. I need to do these things because they help me stay anchored in this complex world.

For a moment all is well and then a moment later I am reminded of everything that is not well. Bouncing between the two, like so many of us, I am finding a way to have a life, to be alive again. Each day my breath deepens a little more, I find language for what feels so outside of language. But I am indeed changed and the me who is here now is still finding their way.

We, each of us, are tasked with holding the fullness, the complexity of life in a single hand. We are all learning on the fly. We have no other choice.

If you’re in the messy middle too, come breathe in community— in the Zoom room— on May 29th for Breathwork for Embodied Power. By reconnecting to an inner wisdom— a power that is rooted in integrity, care, and embodiment— we begin to move beyond the old, inherited stories of disempowerment. We begin to remember that true power does not exploit or extract. It heals. It holds. It transforms. You are invited to explore the tender places where you’ve felt disempowered, to name the barriers that still live in your body, and to gently breathe into what it feels like to remember that each of us holds the ability to lead— not in domination, but in service to collective liberation. Through our wise bodies and breath, let us step into this remembering together.

My heart breaks over and over again. Simultaneously I find myself, daily, filled with rage. In 2006 I was protesting. 2008 protesting. 2014, yep, you guessed it, protesting. 2017 and beyond, yes. Protesting. 2020. Protesting. I know too much to only be in the streets, to only be angry, when a Republican is in power. One of the many differences between liberals and leftists. I wish others had found their voices, put their bodies on the line years ago, decades ago. I am trying to be grateful that those folks who remained quiet while Obama was deporting people, when Black Lives Matter actually started (2013— not 2020), the folks who romanticize “ol’ sleepy Joe” (and ignore his genocide) are now feeling the urgency.

Recently I googled “what am I supposed to do with endless frustration and anger” which I know is hilarious but also sometimes I feel so desperate to release it and surely there must be a way I don’t yet know.

Too many days I forget about walking outside and laying down on the earth because I spent 16 years in a city where earth, real, uncemented earth without a million people was hard to find.

My nose in the flowers, I am desperate for the apple blooms, the pear blooms to stay. I know they can’t. I know I am grasping, struggling with impermanence. Can nothing stay? Really?

Just last night a spring chill came into the valley, froze some and spared others. A rust brown ring on some of the petals. There is abundance and it is fleeting.

What if there is no mercy, not really.

Last summer at dusk, the light still in the sky, I witnessed a 76 year old man shoot and kill a 14 year old girl and his 69 year old brother. Every cell in me died too. How could they not? I did not know the girl but his brother was my friend. I gave him herbal remedies to help him sleep, for the pain in his leg. He and Rose spent afternoons under the hoods of our cars and trucks. I can’t forget his smile.

He who killed turned himself in and was released just two weeks later, lived alongside us for 5 months before we finally were able to move. I don’t even like prisons, don’t believe they are the answer and yet I was unprepared for what it would feel like— in my body— to live in close proximity, to see the murder site every single day. How I still see it in my mind, hear it, the gun raised, the sound of gunshots piercing the rural quiet. My safe haven. My home. For 5 months I watched him chop and move wood from pile to truck to pile. I passed him too many times on the one lane dirt road, one of us having to pull our car or truck over to let the other pass. Before the end of July, there would be a wave. But after the end of July, I would cry. Did he see me? Does he know I saw? Can I say any of this out-loud? Am I next?

You have likely already read some this here and yet you have absolutely no idea of the endless tiny details, the continuous nature of the way trauma ripples through me still. The way the violence did not end on that evening in late July— it continued, worsened. I will continue to write about this, I’ve barely scratched the surface— so be patient with me.

The impact of the witnessing far reaching. The way it shuts my body down, the way sometimes the tears can come and other times eyes are dry. I am only now able to turn towards this brutal violence again, the way it is still living in me, because for 9 months after that July night, an abusive locally notorious (now ex) landlord was lying and trying to evict us for asking for help and demanding money and demanding we sign NDAs and threatening us and demanding threatening demanding on loop, weekly, monthly, all the while his house we were renting was collapsing around us. First the water, gone. Then the electrical nearly made the house uninhabitable. Each day a new set of horrors and I really did not think we would make it out of that house alive. Over email he told us we were transferring our trauma to him. Can you believe that? He told us that it was safer now that the murders happened. The audacity to write this to us from a penthouse in Florida. The audacity. A child. A man who lived his whole life on that land, in the mountains. Gone. For 5 months, this was alive in my body and some of the fear even traveled with us to the orchard because that ex landlord just would. not. stop. his. abuse. We have been told by many that for decades he has been doing a version of this to tenants. An NDA will not protect him— the community already knows, has known. They warned us. These kinds of men are everywhere, destroying everything. (As of this month we now have legal protection from any further escalation goddexx bless.)

My back has gone out multiple times over the course of the last week. Actually my back has gone out multiple times over the last 6 months. A body bearing too much, no reprieve because the horror and the violence is not just local or personal. It is national. Global.

I am indeed haunted, still haunted, always haunted.

I am ensnared in the riots of blooms and the continued riots required to meet this moment of full-on fascism in the US. It’s not rising, no, it’s here. I read the news (Democracy Now) and then I walk outside with Rose to irrigate the orchard now that the ancient acequia is rushing again. I give thanks to water, to community tending, to trees that know how to bloom even in the harshest, driest environments. Even when death is at every turn. Violence always in the very soil.

I am also fine. No really, I am fine. I am simply a person who feels it all. A big feeler. Whose body can not forget. A person who has worked hard to stay here, with it all. I have bounty in my life. I have blooms. A job I love. A therapist. Friends and family who helped rescue us from the horror. Practices for staying with the heavy, staying with my body. A place to call home. I have a body I listen to, a body I trust. I am alive. I can put my hands in the soil whenever I want to. I can sit under an apple tree in 54 mile per hour winds and I can breathe even if I’m scattered, rattling.

+++

Friends, if you are scattered, rattled, too, I will be breathing with the resilient ones in the Zoom room twice in May. If you’ve done breathwork a million times, you’re welcome. If you’ve never tried it but are curious— you’re welcome. Sliding scale, virtual, and everyone who registers will get a recording to use for their personal practice so if you can’t make it live, feel free to sign up still.

Register here.

“In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires a learning to be truly present...” — Donna J. Haraway: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Feeling present and embodied is not an easy task for many of us. It can feel really abstract. It can feel really impossible sometimes, too. There is plenty, in these troubled times, to wish to escape and disconnect from. There are parts of our experience, and the world outside of us, that can feel overwhelming. But we lose parts of ourselves when we don’t feel the depth or the size of our feelings, when we push them down deep. We lose our connection to others when we turn away from the world. Sometimes it might feel like we will never feel ok again but these troubled times ask us to stay present, to stay open, to witness.

Breathwork is about tuning into our bodies, tuning into our internal and emotional landscape. Are there parts of us overwhelmed by grief? Anger? Is there maybe some joy living alongside the deep pain and grief? Are there parts of ourselves that are waiting to be witnessed? Waiting to come back alive? Are there parts of us, even in the trouble, that are okay? The group container will help hold you so you can do the individual work of tending to and witnessing yourself, of staying in the trouble so that we can each find out what kind of deeper wisdom lives inside of us.

Breathwork is an active and embodied breath meditation that helps bring attention to the physical, emotional and spiritual experiences living in our bodies. It connects us to the outdated stories we carry while reconnecting us to joy, clarity, creativity and aliveness. Breathwork reminds us we all, each of us, hold the power within ourselves to shift and heal parts of ourselves. It’s you and your breath; the breath is the medicine and our bodies are wise. It’s a psychedelic and transcendent experience.

Register here.

In these times of escalating violence and the widespread abuse of power, it can be incredibly challenging to stay grounded in our own sense of strength and agency. The chaos around us can distort our perception of what power truly is, leaving us feeling disconnected from our own inner capacity to lead, to heal, and to create change.

Each of us carries personal and ancestral stories about power—stories shaped by our identities, experiences, and the systems we've lived within. These narratives inform how we relate to ourselves, how we show up in community, and how we respond to injustice. Some of these stories uplift us, while others diminish us, leaving us trapped in cycles of silence, fear, or disconnection.

Now more than ever, we are being called to come into deeper relationship with power—not as dominance or control, but as an embodied, wise, and compassionate force. We must ask ourselves: Where do I feel empowered? Where do I feel disempowered? What would it mean to reclaim power in a way that does not mirror the very systems we long to transform?

By reconnecting to an inner wisdom—a power that is rooted in integrity, care, and embodiment—we begin to move beyond the old, inherited stories of disempowerment. We begin to remember that true power does not exploit or extract. It heals. It holds. It transforms.

You are invited to explore the tender places where you’ve felt disempowered, to name the barriers that still live in your body, and to gently breathe into what it feels like to remember that each of us holds the ability to lead—not in domination, but in service to collective liberation. Let us step into this remembering together.

Breathwork is an active and embodied breath meditation that helps bring attention to the physical, emotional and spiritual experiences living in our bodies. It connects us to the outdated stories we carry while reconnecting us to joy, clarity, creativity and aliveness. Breathwork reminds us we all, each of us, hold the power within ourselves to shift and heal parts of ourselves. It’s you and your breath; the breath is the medicine and our bodies are wise. It’s a psychedelic and transcendent experience.

Welcome back Datura balm! I first met Datura over a decade ago in Brooklyn through my kindred chosen fam B Love. We would walk over from their space to peek on the blooms and check on the pods and soon we were both growing them in our little city mini-gardens—mine actually on a fire escape (and in the winter— my windowsill!)

I fell in love with Datura the first time I met them. A poisonous plant— with a long, magical and medicinal history— that blooms with the most radiant, decadent blooms for one single night, I was immediately taken by the contrast of poison and medicine. So taken that poison medicine— and the poison path— became a tenant in my ongoing trauma healing, a touchstone to help me find my way through the horror show ongoing impact of abuse and trauma from childhood through adulthood. If a plant could be both poison and medicine, could I also view the trauma I experienced— and the massive healing journey I had undertaken— as both? From there I was devoted, visiting my favorite bushes all throughout Brooklyn, placing dried blooms and pods on my altars, growing from seed and starts on fire escapes and then in the high desert poison garden I planted once I moved to the mountains of the high desert in so-called northern New Mexico.

One of my favorite bushes was around the corner from my old apartment in Brooklyn. Each year the building managers would cut them down but they were never successful in squashing them fully. Datura, the self-seeding baddie that they are, would pop up— 5 new seedlings for every bush cut down. I appreciated their refusal, their insistence on thriving.

Some years after my first encounter with Datura, I was invited by photographer Frances F. Denny to be a part of her book Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America. Given the option to have the photograph anywhere I liked— of course I chose my beloved Brooklyn Datura.

After growing and building a relationship with Datura for a number of years and continuing my herbalism study, I began exploring making medicine— topical balms as well as flower essences. (Topical balms allow for safer use because of not ingesting and flower essences do not have the poisonous constituents— just the energetic imprint. The plant is indeed poisonous so I do not recommend making medicine from them unless you are a skilled and trained herbalist.)

A beautiful remedy for pain (muscle, nerve, deep tissue and injuries, joint, arthritis), headaches, depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Many, many messages over the years of people’s powerful experiences of working with Datura balm for pain.

And of course I have my own experience with this beloved friend often calling on a little tab on my temples for sleep support or my lower back when navigating muscle tension and pain.

Energetically there is much to work with too: blooming at night with the sweetest single drop of nectar the morning after, datura is a remedy for holding us between the poles of dark and light, a reminder that they are mirrors. As void medicine, it helps guide us through the emotional and energetic threshold and freewill or releasing what is no longer serving us. To allow for a death, or an ending, invites space for the new to bloom. The death needed can be parts of ourselves that need release, old narratives that bind us to the past, relationships and dynamics that don’t serve our growth that diminish or cast a shadow on love. It invites real, sustaining connection and aliveness that exists under all the wounding and old harmful patterns. It’s bold, firey, medicine of the underworld. It supports welcoming the open palm instead of believing that clutching tight is the only way.

It’s also fuck around and find out medicine. Datura demands respect and curiosity and moving slow with the medicine.

My love is deep for this remedy and each summer you will find me waiting at dusk for the perfumed blooms to erupt to my and the white lined sphinx moths delight. I’ll be planting my seedlings around the chapel at the orchard I now live at and with— can’t wait for the ancient rose bushes that surround the chapel and Datura blooms to be in relationship this summer. The rose and their thorns and the Datura and their poison protective medicine for these wild times.

Datura taught me about trust, about being in right relationship with something others have maligned and are afraid of. By respecting the magic, the medicine, and the poison, I’ve built a deep and sustaining relationship— one of my most cherished.

There is so much more to say about this plant ally but I will save that for another day. In the meantime— if you are feeling called to work with this topical remedy (and/or the flower essence), you can find them here. Start slowly with a dime-sized amount, or as small as possible to cover affected area and see how you feel over a little bit of time. There is no rush only alchemy. Additional info for use and contraindications available in the listing. Also hello check out there incredible seed pods.

Bless the poison, the thorn medicine, the protective spikes and shields that help us remember our edges, help us remember how to be in right relationship with the plant world and with each other too.

When it began, wind blowing it fast, I was in New York City, my first time back since I left after 16 years, 6 months into the pandemic, and ran to the mountains of the high desert. I didn’t want to leave, I just couldn’t maintain my life in a tiny studio anymore. I was to be away, back home, for a month.

Each day I checked the fire maps, inch by inch mile by mile, the fire got closer to the house my girlfriend and I rent. I was navigating many things at once: an outdoor wedding for dear friends, being back in a city I love and miss, returning to family after much time away, finally gathering outside to celebrate the loss of my grandmother’s life in the early days of the pandemic.

Sure, fire, why not heap on more catastrophe. More loss.

The night before I flew back to so called New Mexico, my girlfriend asked me where my passport and birth certificate were in case while picking me up two hours away from home, the fire got too close for us to return.

You can imagine what that kind of a question could do to a person, a month away, far from home, the uncertainty of fire reminding us who is really in control here.

We did not have to leave, that day, but for months after over the mountain ridge massive plumes of smoke clouds bloomed into blue sky. For months, driving the mountain roads, firefighters and their trucks and SUVS were parked every little bit. Road shut down, whole forests were shut down, our neighbors who have been here their entire lives said “It has never, ever come this close.”

I began dreaming of this devotion series—LOVE WHAT SURVIVES— during that time, in a freeze state, in collapse, in a moment where I knew I had to find ways to bring what is still surviving to the forefront of my mind. In a time where I was actually, physically, unable to run.

I, like many, had lost too much.

I, like many, could not afford to lose more.

I, like many, remembered what I wanted might not matter, the wind, it was blowing.

In these months I learned I was a person who would refuse to leave, refuse to get out of the way of the destruction. It was not the first time I learned this, instead it solidified a longstanding truth. My girlfriend would tell friends “Trust me, if we have to leave I will take Jennye” and I said, “Nope, you can find me down by the river, flat on my back, waiting for the fire to travel over me.”

In these months I learned I was a person who, in fact,

could not

would not

refused to rebuild.

Not again, not this time.

Now, this fire was started by the Forest Service, a “prescribed burn” gone awry. Many believe it was due to their greed as well as their ineptitude. It was another moment in a string of endless moments where it was clear that the government could never care for the land like the Indigenous folks who have tended, loved, this land for lifetimes. It was clear.

But unfortunately it was started in the windiest time of the year.

Part of me knew to trust the land. Part of me knew that whatever happened to me, maybe I deserved, maybe us humans deserved it.

I wept for the further off but still neighbors who lost their homes, land scorched to dirt, plants and animals gone.

I wept for the generations of life the fire passed through.

A news article showed pictures of old adobe homes lost. I wept for the old stoves, how many had cooked on them, the ancestors cooked on those old stoves. Those old stoves could not be replaced. The culture lost, could not be replaced.

I wept for the whole of myself who was too tired to save myself. To run. Too tired to make a list of the things to take when we finally hit the next tier of evacuation and we did.

I remembered I wouldn’t need much down in the river, not for awhile.

Each day I woke, my body already rattling with fear. Each day I walked out into the field and looked at the mountains. Each day the plume, still there. Many days, much larger than the day before.

We talked to our neighbors. We made plans. Mile by mile, the fire crept closer, soon, only 10 miles away.

Mid way through, my car in the driveway, my tire went flat. AAA refused to tow me, said I had been towed too many times in a year. (Untrue.) And then my battery went too. No way to run even if I wanted to. The absurdity, the rage, the fear that ran through me.

50 minutes away from the shop but finally we got to town. Bought a new battery. The attendant refused to replace it. Here we were in the parking lot. As he walked away, I guttural screamed, shriek wept.

When Rose and I finally found someone to fix it, he was an angel who shared he had been forced from his home, had been living in a hotel with his family for weeks. His pick up truck had a grill on the back of the bed. He got the battery up and running. He refused to accept payment.

And then one day the plumes of death smoke stopped. The fires, contained, for now. In the end, the absolute worst and most destructive fire so called New Mexico had ever seen. When it was all said and done, 15,000 buildings lost, many more uncounted, countless plants, trees, animals, tens of thousands displaced.

We stopped looking at the fire maps. We put away our evacuation list. Our bodies continued to shudder.

We were no longer who we were.