on power

hi,

welcome to my irregularly scheduled life update. even more welcome, perhaps during my looooong hiatus from instagram and fb and twitter.
what have you been doing and thinking about lately? i have been, as always, sinking into and clamboring out of various layers of delight, joy, anxiety, depression, contentment, focus and restlessness, facilitated (the sinking and the clamboring) by writing and/or not writing, watching a lot of television, runnnnnnning, and climbing.

thinkings
i have, also as always, been thinking about vulnerability. i have found myself unexpectedly weepy after beautiful social gatherings, as i remember what it is that we lost over the past year and a half (each other).

one thing that can be hard about feeling loss, big and small, is that the feeling is mostly the feeling of being vulnerable. which is also sometimes related to the feeling of being powerful. i don't mean powerful in a good way, like "naomi osaka's stance on mental health was so powerful" (which really means "vulnerable"). i mean it in a really simple and selfish and self-protective way, like "the NRA lobby is so powerful" (which really means "insulated from accountability"). feeling weepy after beautiful social gatherings has made me feel both too vulnerable and too powerful. do i really think I am insulated from accountability? not personally, but probably (definitely) socially, a lot.

so I have also been thinking about what it means to be in a social class that protects me, and people like me, with the various buffers of enough money and education and housing and respectability and savviness and entitlement and clothes, and i have nothing new to say here, except maybe just to be honest that feeling powerful enough to feel vulnerable always feels better than being powerless and being too vulnerable. except that "always" might not be accurate. because buffers don't always help us to be with each other. the longing for which is where this all began in the first place.

another small (big) loss is that my sweetest cat maya passed away this spring. I miss her presence in my life everyday.

writings
otherwise, i've written and published some things i'd love to share. i had a conversation with a beloved writing teacher the other day where i said that it was really hard to feel connected to my writing once it was published. he said, "do you share it with people who love you?" and i said "kind of."
i invite you to spend time with these stories in whatever way feels good to you. it's a way of being with me.

In Forest Thing a black woman goes into a forest and doesn't come back out. In Do Nothing, humans try to figure out what to do about the aliens. And in The Field Tiger, bureacrats try to solve the puzzle of human existence while exploiting field laborers. They are all special to me in different ways, I guess like children, or like cats.

and more writings
i've had some short and longer pieces come out in various nature magazines, including twoooo pieces on redwoods in my favorite local magazine, Bay Nature. redwood memory (also in the print edition!) and the generosity of trees.  i also wrote a short piece about brown girls climb, to help amplify their crowdfunding campaign.

that's all for now. but, again, let me know, what are you thinking about and doing lately?

endria

ps i read way too many books in the past four months, but highlights are:

Dance on Saturday by Elwin Cotman

Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell