Flood, Shining Flood

or, more sky than there was

Hi-hello.

Aunty Kay Kay here, coming to you live from Second Winter™️.

The wind is hitting so hard this week that my kitchen window (already pretty broken) flew from its gliders and crushed my beloved wooden whale tea light holder. Mama! I miss it.

I also got some bloodwork back and your girl’s triglycerides are real bad. Good news: it’s scared me enough to start living like I want to live. Let me rephrase: to live like I don’t want to die. Yesterday I did a pretty emotional meditation/journaling exercise and it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be drinking, smoking, eating, and screening like this if I were in any way mentally well.

So, call it a health kick, or a Weightloss Journey™, or a rude awakening. But I downloaded a little app called MyFitnessPal, which I utilized successfully in the past, and I’m going to count some cals and steps until I remember what it was like to be an aware human being. Just aware, like. Just un-numb.

K? K. Zooming out some.

The Five W’s are:

Writing (What’s up with my projects? What’s up with my community and writerly friends’ projects?)

World (A quick-hit on the news and the hopelessness of it / how I plan to be of service lest utterly breakdown).

WooWoo (Witchy shit, astro, tarot, etc.)

Words (A little poem or excerpt I’ve written recently with the above-mentioned writing community)

Wonder (An inquiry: a question for you, dear reader, to consider or comment on in the post).

Writing Well it's been a longer road than I thought, but that’s life in the creative community: putting those last dawdling entries into the Northampton Lit Society Zine Master Doc and sending it off to a neutral third party to copy-edit. A cute name for the mag came up this week at our meet-up: “Grief Rhombus” for the shape we sit in and how we all seem to be losing something. It might be the one.

World Girl, I have my period and have been stunned to silence this week. Lost in my own “world.” Though I do know that the horrors in Gaza have resumed, and I am deeply saddened though not at all surprised. We weren’t meant to scroll from bunny in a blanket, to child screaming for his dead mother in Allah’s name, to Wonderskin lip stain commercial in one sitting. When this wind dies down I need to touch grass.

^Grateful for my dear friend, Michael, who’s always down for a walkabout.

WooWoo There’s a new moon in Aries hitting March 29. It’s a partial solar eclipse, shutting the portal opened by Pi Day’s full moon lunar eclipse in Virgo/Libra. What’s all this baloney? Basically it’s a good time to examine your relationship to relationship. Self vs. Other. Independence vs. healthy attachment. It seems fitting, for example, that I feel like loving myself again now, as opposed to last month. I could also be making all this shit up. Whatever saves your mind or life today, kittens.

Words “Flood” from Litso this past Thursday

The other morning I stepped out into the blue and white weather, gazed toward the swamp and Mt. Tom, and noticed it was different somehow. The trees reflected into themselves–the whole back-ninety a mirror. There was a helicopter chopping somewhere above a cloud and there was more sky than there was.

Ah, I see–the swamp had flooded wildly in the first spring melt and there it all was: shining at me.

I’m at that phase of the moon that aches. I always end up here, flooding. Shedding and turning in the widening gyre of my grief and my body. I look older, but I feel dumb. Not naive, foggy. Hungover. When is it over? This transition, the next? No mud-in-frost, no crocus, but I’m no more myself than I ever was. The grackles grackle in impossible swarms. In old dead trees, blackening the yellow lawn. And my hand automatically clinks open the lighter or slides the doom endlessly down my pocket computer. And there are so many children without mothers, or chicken, or shelter, or limbs. No one keeps their promises anymore.

But I sure would like to. I’d like to set the alarm for seven and just get up like I said I would. And for some days, I could turn it around. Hold a purple crocus between my fingers instead of those bleach-white cigarettes–but the water ever-rises and creaks as the moon grows, and some damn dam breaks–and there’s all my grief again, shining at me.

Wonder What’s one “healthy” habit you can add this week?

Love,

Kay