Synaesthesia

For my upcoming Kickstarter, I have been collaborating with several musicians. Meredith Yayanos (who completed an exciting Kickstarter of her own, "The Parlour Trick")  is one of these, which is in many ways a dream come true; she has been a small hero of mine for years now.

I don't call Mer "Small Hero" because she is short (though she is every inch as short as it becomes a tree elf beauty, dressed magnificently like a silk road-era fabric shop bazaar, to be), but because she is a hero of mine who happens to be on a human scale. Many of my other heroes, William Blake, Malcolm X, Tilda Swinton, David Lynch, Sissy Hankshaw, Alice Walker, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Sonmi-451 (from the book, not the movie), to name a new, are either fictional, dead, or so famous that I can't imagine how we would ever get to know one another. My Small Heroes are friends, or friends or friends, who make beautiful art, or change the world, and who are knowable to me.

It's a wonderful thing to have Small Heroes (not everybody does), and it's even more wonderful when we can make art together. Mer is a co-founder of the beautiful Coilhouse project, lives in New Zealand with her beautiful partner and plays exquisite music on the theremin (an extremely metaphorical instrument). She is also friends with some of the most wonderfully creative people in the world, has worked with some big-time heroes, and has performed her music on stage to breathless audiences.

When I went to the postapocalyptic wastelands of San Bernadino in 2011 to help run the interactive metal sculpture Syzygryd at Beyond Wonderland, Mer did me the favor of finding me beautiful as I was sitting in a pappazan chair on the set, gnawing my fingernails in an uproar of bashful awkwardness and slowly acquiring a sparkling patina of rain drizzle and fly ash. I showed her my tarot cards a few months later, and two years later (that is to say, last week), she sent me a piece of her music that she made just especially for me.

Mer's idea was that I'd give her a tarot reading with my own cards, and then she'd write some music about it. The reading I gave her touched on Vladimir Nabakov's odd, inspiring, real-and-unreal, lovable-and-unlovable character Ada Veen, and a few weeks later, Mer wrote some music and titled it "Radiant Void," from the passage:

"You are breaking her heart," said Ada.

“Ada girl, adored girl," cried Van, "I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.”

I have always been a synaesthetic. When I hear sounds, I have visions beginning with simple colors, which usually expand into detailed apparitions of fantastic spaces and dream-like scenes, like the one I have described below. I have listened to Mer's "Radiant Void" many times now, as I have always listened to my favorite music, reliving its vision again and again, and sometimes seeing new details I had not noticed before, until the song becomes its own little world. Now, at last (alas) for the synaesthesia part; here's what I saw when I heard her music, 28% radiance, 72% void, and 10% kind-of-maybe weeping with surprise and happiness into my keyboard:

There is a sense of vast space, derived from the sounds of an impossibly huge waterfall echoing across the black, moonless, unseen landscape of a huge canyon or 4-dimensional space-time enclosure. This dark universe (and the sense one gets is that there is nothing to see yet, that the singularity has not yet popped, not yet projected light and energy and identity into the willing nothingness), begins to tremble with a faintly cacophonous jumble of distant oceans and volcanic eruptions, thermonuclear explosions and silent supernovae and stone-metal mountains shaken out of the new earth.

The sound, of course, of the beginning of the world.

Visible things (rather than the many things one has already begun to perceive in the dark, as a sleepwalker perceives her path between the bedpost and yesterday's boots and the gaping doorframe) begin to show themselves. They are all thin, filagreed and golden (in fact, they are dragons, but we will talk more about dragons later, when we talk about the suit of Sticks in my tarot deck). In the beginning there are only the outlines of ghosts and of the reflected glints of light upon the face of the deep. But afterwards, out of the darkness, comes the dull metallic sheen of a large ship (both space-ship and sea-ship), and then, suddenly, I can see inside. I see glass-enclosed, golden-lit interiors with great views into the engulfing sea-sky, which has suddenly become alive with tiny stars and planets, which are really phosphorescent algae and the luminescent skeletons of diatoms and tiny fish, which are all upon closer examination only the tiny points of light emitted from distant galaxies. I can see further, into empty corridors covered by leaded class archways, leading into impossibly vast gardens and orchards, the fruit heavy and ripe, songbirds and insects blending their songs with the whirring internal machinations of the ship. There are signs among the trees. They are impossible to read, but I know that they are pieces of words and phrases, and I find  messages of loss and hope and generosity, tremulously hand-painted on rough wooden chunks of driftwood and sea glass and salvage.

I pass by palace-like libraries, and museums of biological specimens displayed in amber-colored glass. I pass vaults of monstrous machinery, with clicking cicadas seemingly standing guard over the slow movements of the gears and pneumatic systems, and over the tiny sun suspended in a chamber at the center, throwing off light and radiation. a descending staircase of interlocking glass surfaces leads me to the base of the ship, where there is a stone-and-glass room shaped like a boomerang. The sharp external surfaces of the stone trail their edges in a knifelike silhouette across the light of passing galaxies. Inside, the room is smooth, and black sand, running along the mortared seams of the stone and glass, shivers in regular pulses, keeping the heartbeat of the ship's mechanical systems.

At this point, as I watch the shuddering black sand, the world around me begins to shake violently, as the sounds of glass (and dragon calls, just wait) and insect hum and birdsong fall off into silence, and nothing is left but the hushing sound of the vast space-ocean of the outer darkness, while one by one the fish-stars sputter and die. In the darkness, which smells of cold stone and damp earth, in the dimming gold of the failing lights shining through dark water, is the faint outline of, for the first time, another person, dancing like a flickering shadow in the blackness. The shadow turns to face me, and where its face belongs is the thin golden crescent of a new moon or a solar eclipse, and then the world winks out like an extinguished flame.

The "Radiant Void" EP by Meredith Yayanos will be available exclusively throughmy upcoming Kickstarter campaign for the Cheimonette Tarot.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Dizziness of Freedom: Fortitude and The Devil

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss . . . Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” -Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

The Cheimonette Tarot has several unique connections between the cards, and I wanted to expand on one of them, the Fortitude (Strength) card, and The Devil, embodying opposite and contradictory concepts of freedom and captivity.

Free will is a funny concept, wherein we are told (at least, by the Judeo-Christian bible) to think of that which we take for granted as a special dispensation from god, conferred on human beings alone. Otherwise, those who believe in a deterministic universe may argue that, in the inexorable course of time, the world is constrained to have only one sequence of events, only one outcome, only one choice. Within this miasma of divine boredom (god sits on his couch, having ruined the movie for himself, watching the story play out without any hope of astonishment), free will gets lost in the shuffle, crushed under the bulk of an all-powerful fate.

In Fortitude, a blindfolded woman is frozen in the moment just before she leaps off the back of a speeding, headless, horse. Is she in danger? The scene would suggest not. Sprouting from her back are four insect wings, poised to go into action at any moment. In fact, the woman seems to be about to fly, rather than to fall. There are in fact three blindfolded characters in the Cheimonette Tarot (and none of them are the blindfolded Fool of the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck): the Priest, the Ace of Swords, and Fortitude. Each of these cards represents a different act of courage, and the latter two symbolize a genuine leap of faith. True strength is not about confidence, but is an act of imagination. After all, the strong must accept that they are in danger. When we travel as far as the legs of human experience: wisdom, reason, and animal instinct (the headless horse), can possibly carry us, we may take an imaginative leap, and thereafter decide for ourselves the course of our lives.

If fate denies free will, this leap is nothing more than another foreordained act of human limitation, but if fate accepts free will as a cohabitant and a sister, then machinations of a deterministic universe affect our freedom not one whit. What have the affairs of the gods to do with our mortal choices? Our mortality make us artists, generating beauty, wonder, and nonsense within the monotony of omniscience.

In the Devil, we find the head of the galloping horse in Fortitude. Although Fortitude's horse, despite having no head, has a seeing eye where its head would be, the animal's mind and mouth and face are missing. In the Devil, the horse's head expresses pain and fear, seemingly unable to move its limbless body even without the superfluity of the chains, held by unwinged, birdlike creatures. There are no people in the Devil, although the angel, itself headless as it merges in terror back into itself, spreads its wings as a sign of its power to escape. The Devil horse portrays human suffering. The nameless birdthings (the identity of which is as mysterious to the author as it is to you, reader) have no expression, either of satisfaction or dismay or confusion. The expressions of their faces remain illegible. A scene to make the angels hide: the disenfranchisement of the soul from its birthright of freedom and fortitude.

Anxiety is a natural reaction to danger. The abyss, as everyone knows, can be frightening and disorienting in its hugeness. There is nothing really left to do, then, besides tie on a blindfold and jump, and fly, or else stay in your shackled little world forever.

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

Atlas/ Alas/ At Last

They say that to dream of the moon is a sure sign of impending good fortune, but I dreamt last night of the full moon in Beit Ummar, in the occupied territories of the West Bank, where good fortune is notoriously hard to come by. Last year at this time I was working in Israel, putting together the beginnings of a research report that would delve into the Arab and Jewish history of a beautiful small town in the northern Galilee named Safed. During the Golden Age of Qabbalah in the 16th century, this little town was the center of the world: from which vast quantities of art, music, mystical literature, and poetry poured out, and from which much modern Jewish tradition derives. As I found (but which is not widely known any longer), the Arab Sufis had a great deal of discourse with the Jewish Qabbalists at that time in Safed, and these two spiritual communities shared many techniques and ideas for religious meditation and practice. (You can read an article I wrote on that research here)

In the course of time, I traveled all over Israel, and by July I found myself in the West Bank, staying with a wonderful Palestinian family and learning about them and about the political situation in the occupied territories. I was staying in a little guest room they had, with a pretty view overlooking the few farming lands left to the community there.

I woke up in the night, just as the Muslim Call to Prayer was sending its first sonorous echoes across the landscape, sounding like a lonely love-song. Outside on the bare soil between the olive and fig trees, skinny dogs dragged their chains. One uttered a low howl, but the other kept silence, her head down, her black feet raising the dust as she slowly paced the circumference of her captivity. The full moon hung so low over the trees I felt I could touch it. The Call to Prayer seemed to be pulling it down out of the sky. I was sure that unless the Call stopped, the moon would crash into the earth, breaking open and spilling bright water into every pore of the parched soil. The Call did cease, and the night insects (as if they had quieted themselves to listen to its beauty, though they were as ignorant of Arabic as I was) resumed their clockwork sounds, ticking out the time until morning.

I did not sleep again that night; I lay and listened to the sound of the dragging chains, the heavy sounds of the thirsty dogs, the memory of the Call, the night insects, and I watched the way the moonshadows slowly dripped over the landscape, turning black and blue and then fading like a bruise to pale purple as dawn approached.

Last night I dreamed of that night last July. The dogs were black wolves, and the moon still did not break open and water the earth. I woke up as hot as I had been that night in the tremendous heat of summer in the high desert, and with the taste of fresh figs in my mouth.

Atlas was the god with the worst job (or, rather, it would be the worst job if there weren't so very many others). Atlas, while his Titan brothers were imprisoned in Tartarus, was singled out by Zeus and condemned to carry the the celestial spheres on his shoulders, in order to keep the primordial father and mother (the sky and the earth) forever apart. Atlas was a tragic giant with a monstrous burden (which could only have gathered in bulk as, over the centuries, human beings discovered just how deep the sky really went).

I love Atlas for his burden, because the world is indeed a heavy, heavy place. But I think that the god that holds up the universe isn't a strong man at all, but a baby, a madman and a madwoman, a beggar, an animal, a wandering idiot.  A Fool.

The Fool doesn't take on burdens, doesn't try to help or to fix problems or even to heal wounds. The Fool is simply the Fool, ignorant, self-centered, and unable to rise even one inch above personal survival. The Fool stands on the top of a mountain because to a Fool, every direction is down. Any little movement will decide the whole course of existence; the Fool will keep falling, and the direction of life from there on out will be initiated and perpetuated on its own, like a glacier slowly and irresistibly carving a canyon out of a high, rocky steppe.

An innocent adventurer, the Fool is built to learn rather than to help. And in this way, naturally obviating the well-intentioned trap of paternalism, does not rob others of their own powers of salvation. The Fool has nothing to give, and everything yet to understand. The two tails reveal an animal nature: a person driven by physiological needs and the animal instincts enshrined in every human being's genetic makeup. The Fool may someday reach the black sea (or perhaps it is a dark stretch of desert) beyond the mountains, but at present the Fool is frozen in infancy, neither male nor female, whose two tails recall the number zero, an empty shell, a womb, a hollow world inside which to dance out the stuff of human existence.

I went to Israel and to the territories knowing next to nothing, and without any thought of working for peace or helping an oppressed people. I felt I did not know enough to know where or how to help. I traveled and I spoke to anybody who would share their thoughts with me, which turned out to be quite a diverse lot of people; a foreigner of unstated political beliefs can be a blank slate upon which people of all faiths, political positions, and personal values will write in great profusion, if I could only keep quiet and polite, and listen. And I found I could; my curiosity was stronger than my outrage. And it turned out that being there to understand rather than to help ended up helping more than I would have imagined.

Franz Kafka knew all about fools, and he wrote a beautiful little story called "Children on a Country Road". It ends this way:

"There you'll find queer folk! Just think, they never sleep!"

"And why not?"

"Because they never get tired."

"And why not?"

"Because they're fools."

"Don't fools get tired?"

"How could fools get tired!"

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Numinous

"I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck." -Aleister Crowley

At some murky time in my own distant past, I saw a few Tarot cards. There were women with horns, and smiling faces with blank Greek statue eyes and insect wings. I could not imagine what the cards were meant to illustrate, but I wanted them so much that they continued to appear in my dreams over the years. I therefore had no trouble recognizing them, when my first boyfriend was teaching me how to read Tarot cards and I happened upon the Thoth tarot deck.

Beautifully painted by Lady Frieda Harris, apparently following exacting instructions from Mr. Crowley (who wrote a characteristically grandiose book about the tarot called "The Book of Thoth"), the Thoth tarot is enchanting. It is brimming with the images derived from an overwhelmingly rich experience of spiritual symbology, with a strongly Egyptian bent. Mr. Crowley himself was an odd man. Photos show him looking like a grim version of Christopher Lloyd. In the priestly raiment of the Order of the Golden Dawn (a prestigious occult society to which the poet Yeats belonged), he looked flamboyantly like a bouncer at the Luxor in Las Vegas. A feckless libertine, Mr. Crowley enjoyed a great deal of sex with both men and women, and was an enthusiastic user of recreational drugs. After dropping out of Cambridge, he wrote prolifically about his spiritual escapades while travelling widely across the globe. Having survived a fall off a cliff in China, a volcano eruption in Mexico, and bankruptcy over a lawsuit in England, Mr. Crowley, alone in the wake of a tragic family life, died of complications from heroin use.

The Thoth cards, despite their freaky beauty and the care with which they were imagined and executed, didn't quite satisfy me. Mr. Crowley seemed excessively devoted to an intricate synthesis of the world's spiritual and occult traditions (he unwisely named his first daughter Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith). Some of the cards were crowded tight with Mr. Crowley's elaborate language of occult traditions, and I amused myself trying to imagine poor Lady Harris rolling her eyes as he demanded she add more planetary glyphs and symbolic animals to an already full card. Often I felt annoyed by the deck's demanding pushiness; the cards were intended to mean something very particular indeed, and it felt as though my own creative imagination and ideas were uninvited guests.

Mostly, Mr. Crowley never seemed to experience a moment of self-doubt or bewildered wonder. I got the sense, from his Book of Thoth, that he understood every word that he was saying. Frankly, I found that strange. For someone fascinated with as much esoteric magicky spiritualism as Mr. Crowley, he seemed terribly concerned with sounding as though he knew what he was talking about. If there are any general rules of mysticism, they are that there are aspects of the world that are incomprehensible to the human mind, that these aspects give profound meaning to human existence, and that human beings are able to experience the incomprehensible. Ultimately, Mr. Crowley did not seem to have that experience (despite having heard a disembodied voice which he believed to be an Egyptian god). He had reasons for everything.

As much as I love the Thoth deck, and will always love it, I wanted the freedom to interpret the images according to my world and my internal mythology, rather than according to the impassable mountain ranges of the many traditions of human history. Tarot cards, to me, have always been a modular way of telling stories about the mysteries of the world. I like that the cards themselves should remain mysterious and interpretable in a variety of ways. I was dissatisfied with the man behind the Thoth tarot, and I believe that this is what inspired me to make my own deck of Tarot cards.

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

Flight

When I was a kid, my bedroom window faced what I still believe to be the most beautiful alleyway in San Francisco. The alley sloped upwards from our house, which stood at the lower end, with the surrounding neighbors’ driveways and back yards connecting all along the alley’s spine. Our neighbors’ gardens overflowed with camellia bushes and rose trees, edged by fences piled high with climbing morning glories and honeysuckle and clematis. My room was on the second floor, and I could see right into everyone’s back yard. Our neighborhood was mostly full of elderly couples even at that time, and I would watch an old man though a picture window, at the upper end of the alley, slowly mount his stationary bicycle at 6 A.M. every day and stare gloomily into space for an hour while he pedaled. There was a dyed, painted, and very sour-looking lady with silver hair who often worked in her rose garden, and whose livid purple gardening gloves I could see even through the heaviest fog. A little, speedily balding cantor from the neighborhood synagogue used to trot out on sunny afternoons in flowered Bermuda shorts with a plastic lawn chair, and listen to opera music while sunning himself and dreamily turning the pages of a ragged newspaper. Around the time of my thirteenth birthday, the couple next door to us, a truly ancient man who looked entirely constructed of dried papyrus, and a bedridden lady who I had never seen, put the house up for sale. I found out that the lady had died of cancer, and her husband did not want to keep the house. Within a few months another couple had moved in. The man was an uninteresting-looking businessman with a bland face and grey hair, in appearance not unlike the father in “Calvin and Hobbes”. He would shuffle out into the garden on occassion to watch his young wife and two small children play together. Once I was delighted to see him hand his little girl a bottle of beer and let her sip it a few times, but he never again displayed any vestige of personal distinction. I thought his wife quite beautiful, and often wished to peek over our fence and talk to her. She had curly brown hair that fluffed all around her head oddly and made her look like a slovenly angel when the sun shone through it. She wore jeans and men’s shirts, was wonderfully tall, and her lean arms and neck were covered in freckles the color of pupils in sepia photographs. My favorite thing about her was that she would sometimes pause over her children, who were docile and blond like Golden Labrador puppies and only rarely whimpered for attention, and she would gaze for a long time up into the sky. There wasn’t anything up there to see, except clouds. I made sure to lean out the window and follow her line of sight several times, and there was never an aircraft or a bird or a stray balloon to watch. I thought that she looked up into the sky to use it as a blank canvas to receive the rich artistry of a profound imagination.

During my earlier childhood (say, ages five to eleven) I was bold in the use of our alley. I visited the neighbors and peered over their fences until they complained to my mother, and made friends with all the cats and dogs who frequented the neighborhood. I built a structurally unsound go-cart out of wood and wagon parts with my father and sped down the alley, crashing deliberately into garage doors when I frightened myself by going too fast. In the evenings, I liked to blow up an old balloon and use a Ping-Pong paddle to keep it from falling to the ground, bumping it gently into the air every time to catch the golden light from the sunset. My parents sometimes allowed me to earn five dollars by washing their car, a job I executed poorly but thoroughly. On weekends I put on a leotard, a homemade set of cat ears, and a tail I later learned was meant to be part of a rat costume, and climbed over our fence and up the alley to wander around the neighborhood by myself, meowing when mothers with strollers and men walking dogs looked at me strangely. The majority of this boldness vanished during the year that I was twelve, after which I preferred to read and draw and write, and watch the daily activity of the alley in the safety of my room.

So by the time the young wife moved in next door, it was too late for me to just lean over the fence and say hello to her. I had grown shy, and my peculiarities as a little kid began to catch up with me in high school. It was the 90s, and I felt bewildered with my classmates’ obsessions with dating and fashion and modern music. I bungled my way through 18^th century philosophy books while the other kids watched MTV. While the computer nerds learned how to code in the dank computer lab, and the potheads were stealing bites of a piece of space cake in the bathroom, and a blond boy with eyeliner was kicked out of his mother’s house, I wandered around the little garden behind the music room, gnawed on unripe pomegranates, and pretended I believed in tree spirits and fairies. Although I never excelled in much besides art and English literature, my teachers seemed to find me refreshing after having to suffer through the petty sea of hormones and impulsive thinking that largely constitute up the lives of teenagers. I don’t think that I was really less superficial than the other kids; I simply had no group of friends. Quentin Crisp once said that no one is boring who will tell the truth about himself. I agree, and the fact is that people of any age behave more honestly when they are alone.

By the time I was fifteen I was desperate to make contact with an outside world of which I knew even less than most fifteen-year-olds. The Internet had just begun to rise from the primordial ooze, and I ventured into AOL chat rooms, armed with not-quite-clever-enough lies and a murky soup of desires that I was unable to articulate even to myself. After sneaking out of bed late one night and watching a gangster movie in which a house was set ablaze from a flaming brick hurled into a parlor window, I got the idea to start sending my young neighbor anonymous notes. I began to write terrible poetry. It wasn’t blank verse about love or being a misunderstood genius, and it wasn’t a poor imitation of an admired writer, all of which I understand is the usual literary output of teenagers. Therefore I did have the merit of being original. What made my poetry awful was an overly wordy, melodramatic style, combined with truly radioactive levels of self-importance (these are not terrible qualities by themselves, but combined they make for some seriously clumsy and pedantic writing).

I don’t think that my notes ever frightened her. My romantic attentions were entirely taken up by a tomboyish blond girl at my school who had a lumbering boyfriend who looked just like her (a truly impressive obsession that I was far too cowardly to reveal to anybody at the time), and even then I had a fairly good sense of how to, at the very least, appear to respect personal space. I never wrote about myself, or about her or her family, or made any oblique references to love or sex. I simply wrote imaginative poetry about dreams, metaphors, philosophy, or the bits and pieces of abstract physics, which I picked up on the sly while I was supposed to be studying Newtonian mechanics. I would write to her on a piece of lined paper, fold it up carefully into an airplane, and send it sailing into her yard, always under cover of night. I never knew if she read them. The planes usually sank out of sight beyond the fence, and I never saw her pick one up. She continued to dreamily alternate between watching the sky and watching her children play in the garden, for three more years. I then went to college, and when I came home after my first semester, she and her family had moved away.

Although my poetry was forgettable (except for a single line that I recall, about children praying to the ceiling through closed eyes), I had never written such private things to anybody in the world before. I was a fairly secretive child and had been an outrageous liar when younger (I once stubbornly insisted to my entire cabin at summer camp that I had grown up on a farm where there were nine cows named after the Greek Muses, several ostriches and a monkey named Lester). At fifteen, I discovered that what I really wanted was to be understood. I believed that my young neighbor and I thought similar thoughts and saw similar visions. I imagined that she would find my white, lined airplanes, and be secretly delighted that the sky she stared up at so often had finally yielded strange gifts meant only for her. I believed that she would see herself in my poems, and that they would be little passages communicating intellectual kinship and solidarity, that when she would lie awake next to her boring husband, or fix breakfast for her vapid, blond, puppy-children, she would feel that there was someone else in the world who thought as she did.

Oh, the solipsism of youth. But you see, I never knew for sure. I never spoke to her. I have thankfully developed many gratifyingly material relationships with the outside world, which has in return grown from a mere macrocosm of myself into a universe of previously unimagined proper nouns. Nevertheless, my experience of being a creepy teen that watched my young neighbor and sent her paper airplane poetry was my first lesson in how to be an artist. Many begin their lives learning how to blend gracefully into shared social habituation and normalize themselves to the lives of those around them. Like me, many do not begin this way. We usually find, later, some other way to make contact, from the inside out. As though I had travelled deep into the Arctic Circle and discovered there among the icebergs a perfect replica of my own room, I suddenly realized what an artist was, and that I was one. It would be about ten more years before I began to shake myself free of my reluctance to leave the safety of my loneliness, and now, nineteen years later, I can say with complete, self-aware honesty that I have indeed discovered my own dear room in the howling, icy wilderness, in the shape of my community and my partners and my ever-increasing sphere of friendships.

I would like to thank my young neighbor, wherever she is now, for being the recipient of my writing. C/O neighbor woman, golden brown hair, freckles.

Thank you.