Everything is free now
No gods, no masters. Just vibes and trying.
It’s been on my mind, this question of what is my work worth, for whom and how to make a living that puts living first.
So I’m trying many things. Starting a business with two other women who want, like me, so much more than we’ve been told we ought to. Taking the time and making the space to write in four (4!), maybe five different ways. Learning to learn to make and bake and build more things I might need and want to share. It’s good, this opening up. I can feel my world expanding.
And I’m learning as I go. For instance, this week I learned I really don’t care for putting my words behind a paywall. So I’m not going to do it anymore! Everything is free now, all my words for everyone, every poem I read, I read to anyone who wants to listen. We follow the rules of the Honorable Harvest:
Take what you need.
Use what you take.
I want this, like I want all of us, to be free.
Anyway here’s Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker covering Gillian Welch, which really got me in the spot today (which was yesterday).
And also other things
READ: UNDERSTORY QUARTERLY
My friend Tanuja made a gorgeous, life-affirming, heart-velveting zine, which includes two poems i wrote last year.
Of understory, she writes:
Rooted in the values and practices of Healing Justice, Disability Justice, Transformative Justice, PIC Abolition, Environmental Justice and Traditional East Asian Medicine, understory quarterly is a space for generative silence, imagining, dreaming, and voicing the world in which we want to live.
It really is so marvelous. I urge you to spend time with it. The Beebee Cooper Browne piece knocked my head clean off.
COME: LUMINARIES READING
Another friend called Sofia who, funny enough, knows Tanuja from above—but I know them both separately, through poetry and also moving through the world like people who want to know and love more people—took on the gorgeous, generous task of creating a free monthly poetry workshop last autumn, which in turn has created this brilliant and beautiful community of kind, exquisite poets from all over the damn world who I feel so fucking blessed to know. And now we have our own reading.
Saturday, March 27. 3pm EST. RSVP for the link.
LISTEN: CYMANDE, SELF-TITLED (1972)
Heavy in rotation this past week, which was helpful I think, in ways I might not come to understand for 30 years. I’m trying to work on my patience.
VISIT: GARFIELD PARK CONSERVATORY
My goodness, how I love this place. The air is made of life. It’s good and it helps to have some time to breathe it. They’re open once again and taking reservations. We went at 10:30 on a Thursday morning and strolled, unhurried and grateful, the place nearly to ourselves. Reader it was heavenly. Go, if you can, as soon as you’re able.
That’s it. Now you know everything. Be kind to you today.
The gift is the same as the joy is the same as the curse and frustration - to wake every day creating something new and having the bravery and courage and willingness to share it. And then, to rise and do it again the next day. Keep the words and thoughts and stories and feelings coming.