Stewardship: a whole new possibility

this is a bit from my Writing Ourselves Whole newsletter for November:



Last month, I attended a day-long training on Trauma Stewardship, with Laura van Dernoot Lipsky (this training was hosted by the Domestic Violence Coalition, CUAV and the Asian Women's Shelter -- thank you so much!). Here's what I want to tell you: there's not anyone I know who wouldn't benefit from the ideas and the possibility that Laura (and her coauthor Connie Burke) offer in this training, and the corresponding book. Although it's written primarily with those who work with survivors of trauma in mind, what I know is that all of the communities I participate in are traumatized right now, and so nearly all of us are going to experience trauma exposure response -- which means we could be doing trauma stewardship.

As someone who has come up with every reason there is not to take care of myself (too busy, too guilty, too tired, not as bad off as others, etc -- you know these, don't you?), I've been in need of a change for at least a year (some might say longer), and couldn't figure out how to make space in my life for self-care. And often, I couldn't honestly believe that I deserved it.

In her introduction, Laura says this about the book (Trauma Stewardship: An everyday guide to caring for self while caring for others), and about the ideas of trauma Stewardship as a different way to walk with the work we're doing in this world:

"This book is a navigational tool for remembering that we have choices at every step of our lives; we are choosing our own path. We can make a difference without suffering; we can do meaningful work in a way that works for us and for those we serve. We can enjoy the world and set it straight. Taking care of ourselves while taking care of others allows us to contribute to our societies with such impact that we will leave a legacy informed by our deepest wisdom and greatest gifts instead of burdened with our struggles and despair."

Laura's concept of Trauma Stewardship has turned a lot around for me. With deep and loving kindness, and fierce compassion, she called all of us out in that room at the Women's Building: if your work in the world isn't including time to replenish, and if you are not coming to the work from a place of powerful and rooted centeredness and choice, then your work is going to be unsustainable, and you're going to end up not recognizing yourself in the mirror.

I want to write more about what's happened for me, the changes I have started making in and for my life and work since this training, but for now, I absolutely encourage you to visit her website and buy this book -- share it with your organizations and communities and friends. We are all stewards for one another right now, and we need to be as kind and gentle with ourselves as we can be during this strong and gorgeous and difficult life.

Poem for the day: I shall be released (Kevin Young)

Thanks to the Poetry Daily weekly newsletter that directed me to this extraordinary poem from Kevin Young:


I shall be released

What we love
    will leave us

or is it
    we leave

what we love,
    I forget—

Today, belly
    full enough

to walk the block
    after all week

too cold
    outside to smile—

I think of you, warm
    in your underground room

reading the book
    of bone. It's hard going—

your body a dead
    language—

I've begun
    to feel, if not

hope then what
    comes just after—

or before—
    Let's not call it

regret, but
    this weight,

or weightlessness,
    or just

plain waiting.
    The ice wanting

again water.
    The streams of two planes

a cross fading.

I was so busy
    telling you this I forgot

to mention the sky—
    how in the dusk

its steely edges
    have just begun to rust.

Kevin Young

Dear Darkness
Alfred A. Knopf

Aural Alignments

Yesterday it felt like all the mercury retrograde hit me at one time -- bracelets broke, folders spilled all over the back of the car when I was trying to get to work early, items got misplaced and were unfindable, and at my primary work gig, I found myself feeling deeply out of place and on the wrong path entirely.

Mostly I manged to stay in a decent mood, going with the rather ragged (at least to this conscious brain) flow -- there have been plenty of bad days, bad mood days, sad days recently, and I didn't want to have another one. Still, by day's end, I felt in need of a deep spiritual chiropractic adjustment. I was all achy inside, weird and out of sorts. I had a mostly non-dinner, started watching old monty python sketches on youtube, walked to the laundromat for quarters so I could do laundry, then turned on the tv to distract myself even further.

I watched tv for maybe 7 minutes then went into the bathroom to do manicure-ish things, turned on the radio which was tuned to KQED, and a voice was saying, "I have to read the old ones first because people seem to want me to ..." and a little more and then the voice was reading "Wild Geese." It was Mary Oliver, reading her own work, and I turned and rested against the sink and just listened. I let myself cry, get into the rhythm and the possibility of poetry, and was thankful.

Listening to the pieces in her own voice, listening to the words flow with the rhythm into which they'd been intended to flow, hearing what was the same and different than how I might read myself. My mascara kind of racooned around my eyes further than is usual for me at day's end, but now it looked like something proper -- the mess of possibility.

The laundry got done, I fed myself something more like dinner, and Mary Oliver's poetry reminded me who I am when all my parts are in the right places.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press

Podcast Answers - Day 7: How facilitating the workshops has changed my own writing?

About a month ago, I committed to posting longer, more well-thought-out answers to the questions that Britt Bravo posed to me during our Arts and Healing Network podcast conversation. Here’s my answer for day seven!

7. How has [facilitating] the workshops changed your own writing?



I think the most important impact that the workshops have had on my own work is an encouragement to be more, and more consistently, brave.

Each week I get to write with folks who are taking chances, finding new language for old pains, old desires, or new and surprising ones. Every week I am inspired by these writers’ braveries, their risk and subtle (and not-so-subtle!) implosion of yet another barrier to connection with others, of demands to silence, of old trainings. The way we often go ahead and read aloud the work we hate, the work that scares us to have written, the work that seems to make no sense, the work that is “too” stream of consciousness, “too” organized, “too” truthful or “too” fictional.” The way Pat Schneider organized the AWA method makes it feel ok, feel possible, for folks to “go there” in their writing, to speak the unmentionables, to create a story for that thing without words.

I am someone who believes that you ought not ask someone to do something you haven’t, or wouldn’t, do yourself--so I am driven to step into similar risk. To let myself try on words for a big fear, a big loss, a big shame, a big longing. To let myself strip out the words to a new story that needs an old telling. The folks I’ve written with since 2002 encourage me over and over purely through their example to take more risks in my writing, to follow the truths in my writing, as they do, to say what isn’t supposed to be said., like they do, to claim my multiplicity of voices, like they do. This is the most profound effect that facilitating these workshops has had on my work.

The fact that I’m always reading aloud what I’ve just written means my work, overall, is more performative, more ready to be performed, because I’m writing it with the knowledge that I will most often be reading it aloud – that means I pay a different quality of attention, even unintentionally, to how the words will sound when I bring them up off the page and into my lungs, off my tongue and into the room. Most of the pieces I performed on this year’s Body Heat: Femme porn tour were written in an AWA-method workshop, either Writing Ourselves Whole or Laguna Writers workshops, first read there, first received in these crucibles of risk and transformation and possibility – and those receptions paved the way for a more public (nation-wide!) reading!

These are the biggest effects on my own writing of facilitating the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops – in addition, of course, to writing a whole lot more regularly. What about for you? Are there ways that working/writing in one of the Writing Ourselves Whole or another AWA-method workshop has impacted your writing?

Community and remembrances

(a slightly longer version of this got posted on my livejournal -- katasutra.livejournal.com)

Thank you, Kathleen -- thanks to your love and your consistent spirit and to the ways you have affected my life, without my even knowing it.

Yesterday was Kathleen Bolton's memorial service, and one of the things I'd like to spend some time writing about community -- community in all its bigness and struggle and frustration & magnificence. There's been a community sustaining me here in the bay area since I moved here, though I've felt on the outside. There's a community of family & the dearest of friends forged over the past two decades (and then some, I suppose, with respct to the blood family, huh?) that I'm only just now, maybe, allowing to filter into the hardened-est, most vulnerable edges of my heart. The community that showed up here in SF for the Body Heat show just about tore my heart out, it was so gorgeous and celebratory -- and then the communities we got to touch into as we crossed the country: San Diego, Minneapolis, Columbia, Columbus, Easthampton, Boston, Providence, Philly, D.C., Atlanta -- even those we didn't meet directly (Milwaukee, Asheville and the folks listening to Diana Cage's radio show there in the morning's wee hours) -- the love and support was deep and present and nearly unquestioned.

And ok, sure -- sometimes, for survivor girl over here, it's hard to trust, to believe in, that kind of presence of spirit and appreciation, that unadulterated love, that faith & yes there was trust -- the kind that offers food and home to strangers, the kind that shows up to listen and offers cheers, the kind that welcomed us at each and every stop (truly).

And so it was clear to me, after I learned during the tour about Kathleen's terribly untimely death, that I needed to be present at her memorial ceremony -- I never got the chance to meet her, but she was, as it turns out, part of the community I've been sustained by here in the Bay Area: one of the queer women's communities, one of the femme-butch communities, one of the s/m-kink communities -- and she was friend to many of the folks I know and care about, and I am aware now of just how much I missed at not having the chance to ever meet her in person.

Kathleen lived absolutely within love and presence and faith, it certainly sounds to me -- and while I know that folks can be lauded after death as their many faults are conveniently ignored, the large turnout at her memorial service yesterday as well as the conversations I've had with friends and colleagues spell out for me that Kathleen was, in fact, a good good good hearted woman, someone who's example I'd like to have had the opportunity to emulate directly, but who nonetheless has inspired me to be more present in exactly the life I want to be living, and present in creating the kind of communities and societies can sustain us all.

So here's my one first big hug to all of y'all -- let's catch up soon, ok? I miss you...

Three snaps up for the Phase 1!

(who remembers what that means, even ... am I just dating myself? :)

So much love to all the folks at D.C.'s Phase 1 ("oldest lesbian bar on the east coast!") for welcoming and treating Body Heat so kindly! We had the fiercest kind of love for & from y'all, esp. given that this was our first show with our Celestina back (no pun intended there, folks...)!

Angela, Kris & all the rest of y'all -- thank you thank you thank you. The Phase opened specially on a Wednesday night, just for our show, and we hope it was more than worth it! V. got to come home into the loving arms of friends & community -- it's just what we need as we're pushing down through into the final two shows!

Much love and many thanks, too, to the folks at the Tritone in Philly! We had an intimate and dear crowd, many of whom stuck around after the show to chat us up and make offers some of us found difficult to refuse... :)

One more hard-driving day and then we're at the Eyedrum in Atlanta tonight -- K. gets to come home! So much love to all the folks at D.C.'s Phase 1 ("oldest lesbian bar on the east coast!") for welcoming and treating Body Heat so kindly! We had the fiercest kind of love for & from y'all, esp. given that this was our first show with our Celestina back (no pun intended there, folks...)!

I got to connect with a good old friend from high school, one of those folks who, without knowing it, made life bearable (and that's no exaggeration), so the fact that he came & stayed & very well may have even enjoyed is a thing I think I have yet to find words for...

Angela, Kris & all the rest of y'all -- thank you thank you thank you. The Phase opened specially on a Wednesday night, just for our show, and we hope it was more than worth it! V. got to come home into the loving arms of friends & community -- it's just what we need as we're pushing down through into the final two shows!

Much love and many thanks, too, to the folks at the Tritone in Philly! We had an intimate and dear crowd, many of whom stuck around after the show to chat us up and make offers some of us found difficult to refuse... :)

One more hard-driving day and then we're at the Eyedrum in Atlanta tonight -- K. gets to come home!

Oh -- the Pi is my new home...

... or could be.

It's 2:30am and we have to be on the road at 7, and still...

What a show -- so so many thanks to Shannon Blowtorch & Tara & Bennie at the Pi Bar. PEOPLE -- when you're in Minneapolis, get you to the Pi Bar. An amazing performance venue/bar/restaurant & music that will not let you get off the floor if the dancing is happening. Thank you Annie for the goodie bag!

Thank you Blowtorch & T. for the quarters & hospitality & tunes!

The Pi & the Twin-Cities Femme Mafia hosted V & I tonight for the third leg of the Body Heat tour -- Kathleen rested her ailing self for one more day and so we brought her CD & her words, as we did with Celestina's -- we miss you both!

We could not have been more welcomed and well-received here -- and next time I come, I'm getting that tater-tot hot dish, I tell you what.

THANK YOUs to our incredible special guests:

Mashinda, who brought Kathleen's opening poem into the room with a deep kind of ferocious energy that I SO hope you keep on rocking!!

Jess, a so-called virgin to the mic, so clear and comfortable up there on the stage, with pieces that tore my heart up in all the good ways...

Jamez, a sister-porn writer who shared his fierce poetry and strong, showering energy (and wonderful hugs!)

and yes, yes, Zakiya, whose fresh poetry nearly brought me to tears. I really want a copy of that one...

Oh. What to do with so much shared energy, community -- with this exchange of words and power and space and love?

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We're off tomorrow, back down 35 to Columbia, for our postponed show -- hooray for the Rag Tag! This was a quick visit/reminder that up north here, winter lasts a long time... :)

Body Heat melts the snow

I'm writing to you from Vail, CO, where we were SNOWED IN last night (I-70 closed & highway patrol directing folks off the road at 1am). Fresh! helped finagle us a room in a hotel& spa, so though we're not terribly rested, we're at least clean and good-smelling! :)

We had a small show in San Diego at this wicked cute sex shoppe, The Rubber Rose, and it was beautiful! Now we're pushing through our second long long day of driving, from Colorado to Missouri. We were supposed to stay at my dad's place last night, just outside of Denver, but were thwarted by the weather goddess. The pass is open now though, and so we can get back on the road. Maybe we will be able to see my dad the interstate just for a hug... :)

Incredible scenery yesterday, and the kinds of conversations you can only have in the car.

Tonight's show's in Columbia! And then a day of rest...