Lara Vesta's Blog

And just like that, it is done.The thing that seemed interminable, won.After nine years of illness, two years of complete disability, I am returned. It is a wonder, from the Old English word wundor. A miracle, a marvelous thing.Here's the thing about rites of passage: we never know what will open or close a door. Yet, when we are through there is no denying the change. This is the power of death transitions, the mark on our lives is indelible: before, after, the delineation clear.So what do we do in the within? In the midst of transformative change, while the old self dissolves, while the new is still a ghost shape in ether?What I discovered in my long transformation is the subject of Dark Goddess: The Sacred Art of Death Transitions. This book is in process, like so many things right now, but I am sharing the journey on Patreon, continuing the healing of this time. Here's a few other things coming in that space:Dark Goddess Circle Release: This is the creativity work group where I will be sharing the Dark Goddess book pages, my creative process, and offering support and/or structure to your own. On the Dark Moon of January 5th I will release the first pages, including an interactive call for submissions and a creative process video in our private classroom. This is available to all patrons at the $5 and up level.CIRCLE Healing the Witch Wound: In the week of the Solstice I will send out readings and interactive suggestions for creating a practice around the witch wound in advance of our first meeting/gathering/ritual, which will be Friday, January 4th, from 12-1pm PST. For those who cannot make the in-person meeting (I know we are all in a variety show of time zones and obligations), the meeting will be recorded and posted in a private classroom space. Dates and times will shift and change, so don't despair if this one doesn't work for you. I will be soliciting feedback on scheduling after the first meeting, so you will have an option to request a date or time that might work better for you. I will honor scheduling requests to the best of my ability, and am exploring many options in this regard. We will also have a forum for posting work and exchanging ideas, links to both of these opportunities will be in the Solstice reading packet posted in this space. I am so excited to begin the process of this vital, fundamental work with you. This opportunity is available to all patrons at the $25 and up level.1:1 Consulting Sessions Open: I returned to my first consulting session in over a year this week, and was profoundly moved again by the potency of experience in co-creation. I also created a rune web for an Ancestral Weaver of Magic patron on their birthday, which would have been impossible just a two moons ago. Sessions are ritualized and rooted in intention, give a touchstone-locus-focus to any work you are visioning, gestating, birthing into being. If you are seeking support for any life transformation, desiring clarity and accountability, or just looking to increase the magic in your cycle path, 1:1 ceremonial sessions open the way for deep, luminous unfolding. This opportunity is available to all patrons at the top tier. Space is limited.Today is the darkest day in the Northern Hemisphere, Solstice, a sacred time of extremity, a time of intention and giving thanks, a time of release and blessing. I am so grateful to share the wonder of this season in a state of grace. May the magic you make be the love you are.By this and every effort may the balance be regained. ALU

Once upon a time there was a witch with magical words. Her words charmed and spelled, healed and hallowed. When she spoke, apertures opened and fetters unbound. Then, in the fullness of life she met a death and was exiled to nine long years of incommunicable dis-ease. You see, even with all of her magic she was limited by language. In modern culture it often feels impossible to communicate the experience of disabling chronic illness.I am the witch of words, but here words have failed me. When you have been telling people you are sick for years, they tend to stop having a context for what illness means. And, as we know, language is rhythm and sound, woven into meaning with context.For most of my life I was a well person, and like most well people, I saw sickness as temporary, something you get over. Well people use words like, "feeling better" when communicating with sick people. But with a chronic illness, better is amorphous and sometimes unachievable. Two days ago I was possibly better. But then I had a gallbladder attack that left me in bed all afternoon, and today the rains have returned so my whole body aches. What is better? No progressive, measurable methodology, no linear trajectory. In this way, for some of us, better does not exist.Long ago I wrote:Better is a bitter lispCalls you down to digLeaves mud around your shoeI have Myalgic Encephalomeylitis, more commonly known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but most of us now use ME as the label. CFS has a long history of being dismissed, denied and categorized as a psycho-somatic illness. Recent research has contradicted this presupposition about ME/CFS, yet even with quality science emerging that identifies ME/CFS biomarkers there are few resources for diagnosis, treatment and education. The CDC estimates as many as a million people in the US likely have ME/CFS, yet a pitiful amount are accurately diagnosed and a tiny fraction of those have access to care from a specialist. I know this intimately, having received my ME/CFS diagnosis in December of 2016. At that point I had been sick off and on for seven years. Then in 2016 I had a severe crash that led to me losing my job, dropping out of my PhD program and spending most days homebound and in bed. There are no ME/CFS specialists in Portland. My doctor is part of the largest medical system in the state of Oregon, but had no one in the system (or even the state) she could refer me to for treatment. I requested a referral to the Stanford Chronic Fatigue Clinic in Palo Alto, California. The waiting list was a year. In that time I had no education about my illness other than books and online research, no course of treatment and no support. In 2017 I did receive treatment for mycotoxicosis, brought on by exposure to toxic Stacybotrys mold. I have a gene that makes these toxins invisible to my body's defences, and it was this exposure to mold, combined with chronic stress, and a compromised immune system, that led to my severe crash in 2016. Most MD's don't believe in mold though, so this portion of my illness has always carried an additional burden of being illegitimate.Whatever others believe, I'm sick. I have been sick for years. Living in moldy houses, waiting to be seen by a specialist, trying to work, parent, be social, "normal", but the truth is I haven't had consistent health since 2009 and for the last two years I have been ill to varying degrees every single day. I run low grade fevers whenever I overextend, get terrible headaches that are unresponsive to medication, am frequently nauseated in spite of my limited diet, and worst of all I am often so weak and shaky that I cannot walk or drive. At Stanford this August I finally received diagnostic proof of my illness, the "reason" why I have been sick for so long. My body has incredibly high levels of inflammation, three times what is normal, and I tested positive for six different viruses including Epstein-Barr and CMV. Researchers at Stanford believe that in ME/CFS immune dysfunction allows for viruses to remain active at chronic levels increasing inflammation and leading to more immune dysfunction. With inflammation reduction, antiviral therapy and strictly limited activity, some patients can improve in one to two years time.This is good news. But it is a prognosis full of slowness, setbacks, spiral dancing through limitation...in short, it means nothing though to the people who have heard me say I'm sick for years. Because I'm still sick.What I've learned in this time of isolation, as friends and work and life all fell away: We don't have a place in our culture for people who are chronically sick, disabled or dying. In the absence of inclusion or education, we avoid. We are afraid of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, and our social norm is a kind of artificial cheer--ARE YOU BETTER??? Which leaves us feeling helpless--both the person who is trying to be supportive, and the person who is sick.What I wish to learn in this process of undoing, unspooling the known, the normative, the usual and customary from my life (by force, yes, by force of illness) is how to hold my not knowing in a place of compassion and actually listen to what people need. To make space for the ill, the disabled, the dying. In myself, in others, in this weaving.I've thought of this many times as a sick person, but also as a long ago mother of newborns and a caregiver of sick people, which are also places that exist outside the norm: What if we could just be? Without trying to optimize or improve? What if we saw illness as a kind of holistic health, a portal, an initiation into sacred mysteries? A rite of passage.What if the sick, disabled and dying are the edge walkers, hedge riders, cellular secret keepers of this magic life? The ancestors are closer to me now than ever before, the undoing of contemporary culture a way into ancient rituals, precious magics. When well I avoided the dark, skirting the pits and thresholds on my way to new and (again, ever elusive) better. But a healed culture is inclusive of everyone, and an empowered culture bends close to listen to the power of the liminal. We the sick wear the death's head, the Goddess Hela speaks through our pain. It is necessary, a letting go of self-ness impossible otherwise. I move toward her now, at last, unafraid.This all-hallows eve I light the candles for my ancestors, for the beloved dead whose legacy flows through my blood and bones. I lay out offerings for my Dísir, the ancient grandmothers of my lineage whose name means Goddess, whose divinity assures me that this embodied process of undoing is, in fact, a gift. And I dedicate myself to the Goddess of Death, to her work of supporting the sick, the suffering, the impoverished, the dying through passage ritual and compassion. We need new language to speak the experience of chronic illness, new words that hold in their presence a power, an elixir that transforms all who are initiated by embodied processes. In the ancient Norse poem, the Völuspá, which Maria Kvilhaug translates as The Divination of the Witch, the Goddess Gullvieg survives three burnings by the aesir gods. She takes a new name, Heiðr, and travels the land practicing seiðr, divining and transforming wyrd. The poem says she is much loved by "illrar" women. Illrar in Old Icelandic means wicked, evil, difficult or, simply, ill. In a simultaneous world, we transcend duality, and what is wicked becomes also what is good, what is ill becomes also what is well. All may rejoice in initiatory survival, all may welcome seiðr, women's magic. In the absence of language, we open to sacredness: dis-abled, abled by the Dísir, initiated into wholeness through solitude, otherness, suffering and sacrifice.I began this essay with a sick heart, yet I end with a whole one. In the garden, the year dies in cycle and chickadees eat seeds buried in the composting lemon balm. Perhaps one of the reasons we have no patience for illness is we have no knowledge of true health. Health comes from the Old English, hælþ, meaning wholeness. The roots of hælþ are intimately twined with Hela, mirrored in the Old Norse heill, healthy, and helge, holy, sacred.*When we return to the sacred whole, all experience is essential. The rot in the garden, the death of our beloved, the pain in our body. This I honor. This I claim.For now I dream of Hel, heill, helge, wholeness as darkness falls and the season turns again.By this and every effort may the balance be regained.With blessings to your wholeness.Alu*from the ever beloved Online Etymological Dictionary

I am currently integrating the transitions of this past year. What I thought would be a two week hiatus has my ancestral spirits laughing at and with me. My body aches. So I am rooting in, taking time away from screens and deepening, joyfully, into this turning summer, into earth and presence, into the slow remembering my body has always loved.The best way to find me: wait. I will return when wholed. In all transition there must be a time of integration, for the parts to come back together in their new form. It is the completion of the ritual cycles, and as essential as any other part.

INGWAZ:: Where are you in the cycle? Cycle of death, cycle of birth, cycle of change, cycle of earth? :: Yesterday in The Runic Feminine Collective we traveled with Ingwaz to the fertile field and asked this question. I don't normally vision when leading a journey, but immediately saw scorched earth, the aftermath of fire cleansing so common in the Willamette Valley where I live. I was at dirt level, eye level, microcosmic, and emerging from the soil, renewal: the tiniest shoots of vibrant green. :: In death transitions faith is hard. I've been thinking about these a lot lately, as I sit with mine. What is the difference between a life transition and a death transition? In life transitions, everything carries a modicum of sameness even as you change. Death transitions are wildfire, volcanic, meteor, flood. The entire landscape of your life changes. Nothing is recognizable. In the liminal of a life transition you feel still the wyrd webs of support shaping your outcome. In death transition the liminal is dark, chthonic, you are liquid, acid, dust. What happens next is inconsequential. It cannot be visioned, your dissolution is that absolute. :: If that sounds bleak, it can be. But death transitions are cyclic, too. Even physical death is not an end in the mythic. I can't speak to all death transitions, or even to most. I know intimately that chronic illness is one, and that is why so many people fall away. In death transitions, we become what everyone fears most. What nourishes me are the small daily practices, the call to presence, the songs of the runes, the love and prayers of family and friends who remain, even if they are baffled by what they see, even if they don't know how to help. :: There is no true help for death transitions, only through, only the dance of cycle which is many cycles at once. It is possible to be in life and death transitions simultaneously. Wholeness is nonlinear.

Dear Travelers-- May the blessings and magic of this full moon find you. Right after I sent the last Myth and Moon letter I crashed into another disabling illness cycle. This one has lasted for nearly eight weeks, with little pause. In the depths of this transition many things became luminous: the summer class had to be rescheduled--tentatively, hopefully— for fall, and is now called the Art of Self-Initiation. And I have recently embarked on a slow, healing project long in my heart: Dark Goddess, The Sacred Art of Death Transitions is now becoming a book. In the past I've taught to create, it is a method that works well for me: make a class, then make a book from the class materials. It is a process I recommend to anyone struggling to get a creative project off the ground. But teaching is far too labor-intensive and demanding of my struggling, sensory-sensitive body. So this book takes a chthonic approach, seeding in the depths of my own initiation. In April I applied for, and was awarded, fiscal sponsorship as an artist by Fractured Atlas, a 501c3 that accepts tax-deductible donations on my behalf. With this status I can also apply for other funding, but only after I have raised $1000 in non-earned revenue...meaning, gifts, donations without attachment to products or services. Grant funding will help stabilize my projects, offers resources currently inaccessible. So in this Beltane-Solstice letter I'm asking: If you have benefited from my books, classes, writings, offerings, if you love this work and would like to see it root and grow, if you believe that differences and disability should not be barriers to creation, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support the Dark Goddess project, sacred art and the Wild Soul School. Donations may be one-time, or they may be made as a monthly contribution. There is little I can currently do about my health, or my living situation (which is contributing to my ill health). We are waiting for my husband to get a job, and for some assistance to find a healthy home. I will be seeing a specialist for the first time ever this coming August, by then I will have been living with ME/CFS for almost two years. But what I CAN do is make, craft, channel this death transition into some fertile compost of creation. The act of making is healing for me, one of the only things I can do without post-exertional malaise (when my body craps out for days after I exert myself mentally or physically). I will do make no matter what. That is the mark of our gift work in the world. We do it even when it feels impossible, even if we don't get acclaim or payment. We do it when it is hard. We do it because we have to. I invite you to make with me. In the hopes that at the end of this cycle there will be an offering that is of exchange: beauty, growth, radiance. Sending you and your creations so much love. I am grateful, always, for your support.The Dark Goddess Project a year long myth cycle exploring death transitions Tentative topics: Death in the Body Death in Relationship Death Work Tending the Bones The book is interactive and illustrated, incorporating aspects from the Wild Soul School classes including Ancestral Connection, the Power Class, the (forthcoming) Art of Self-Initiation and the (still free) 13 Day Ritual Practice, plus others yet unseen. Thanks to the generous donations of this community, we now need to only raise $800 to qualify Dark Goddess and the Wild Soul School for other funding opportunities. Please consider making a donation today.With love and trust--Lara

Tea for the Pause::liminality and divination only work if I’m clear. And I wasn’t, not for a long span of weeks. See, the way forward is still shrouded. We are here, we are waiting. I’ve waited many times for beautiful things—a kiss, babies, creation, fulfillment, direction...you? In the waiting I can try to push but (baby as metaphor) if the timing isn’t right, nothing works. Similarly in waiting if I try to force an answer from a still weaving wyrd, the resulting tangle deepens frustration, and can even cause delays. :: In these past days I’ve returned to practice. Writing, making, ritual, stretching, infusions, family rhythms. Those anchors. And I feel clear, at last. Not about the way forward—we don’t get to know the how, the what, the all important when. But the way here. With all its imperfections, here is where I am, where we are. This moment, writing to you with fresh roses on the altar and Mugwort scented hands. I release to here and trust the way, the wyrd.

First you must take her hand, not your own hand. You must extend your palm outside the familiar. By our very naming this is known. Spirit from breath, from necessary life, shared even beyond an unconscious exclusion, weaving from wefan, that most ancient art, to combine into a whole.It is not enough to hold each other’s hands and call her name in a circle. These are the acts of frightened children, whose self-preservation will not allow the dark goddess in. There are two ways to be a container, a word invoked in safety, but one is to exclude. By the nature of magic a circle must close and open, both. Can you not have faith in the dark ones, the ancestors, the fringe to protect even while she comes in?Your rituals, your letters, your words for well women, women of substance and freedom and power, women who are easily identified, economically secure, physically able to bring their bodies to an event in-person, these gestures to the common crowd are not an invitation for Sick Woman. Sick Woman waits for you to ask for her words, her rituals, her letters, for you to extend offerings to her, acknowledging the value of women who wait on the edge of death, women who battle chronic pain, women who are unemployed, women who are caregivers, women who are mentally ill, women abused or neglected, women dying in transitions, transformations, these women live in the soul of Sick Woman. These women bring the wisdom of the other with her many voices, with her chorus of women contemporary society deems unwanted and unseen.In extending an invitation to Sick Woman it is not about the known, the easily controlled. You invite the unknown, the unseen, you heal you heal you heal. US.“The trauma of not being seen. Again – who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible?” –From Sick Woman Theory by Johanna HedvaSecond you must know to whom you speak. For the name of Sick Woman comes from ancient times, the pockmarked sage, the haegtessa, the hedge rider, the feared. In modern definition I call her name from the essay Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva who says that Sick Woman is:“…all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible.”When you invoke the name of Sick Woman you invoke a multitude of names, ancestral names in the mass graves of colonialism, the bloodline traumas running deep in Sick Woman whose strength persists beyond legal, cultural, social, political, financial, emotional, spiritual systems that deny her presence, place, voice. When you invite Sick Woman you do so in a spirit of story change—no longer will we let our desire for self-preservation, protection, neuage comfort and joy plexiglass experiences for the majority…yes, the majority. The majority are contained in Sick Woman. The majority of our ancestors, the majority of the population, the majority are eldered, poor, disabled, unhoused, dysfunctional, dying, dead. If we are to reclaim, truly, the ancestral ways of partnership, skill and song we can only sing together. With Sick Woman boundaries are removed.With Sick Woman we feel the completeness of love.With Sick Woman we stand a chance.With Sick Woman we open our arms to a future of, yes, interwovenness and patterned with complexity.When you invoke the name Sick Woman you bring forward through the mists the Giantess, the ever-changing primordial beings from beyond time, the earliest weavers, the Nornir, the sacred grandmothers, the Disír, and lay out the knives for the Three in an ancient ritual of social-spiritual solidarity.Would you know more?Three: Sick Woman loves you. She is your mother, your sister, your daughter. She longs to drink from the well of your creativity. Her intent is not to betray your trust. It is the work, always the work, to weave inclusion. Sick Woman cannot be asked to provide the labor as she is already engaged in the deeply magic task of BEING SEEN. Sick Woman wishes to participate. To have you hear her name song, to glean the skills and teaching and love of the community, to experience even through time and netherspace some semblance of empowerment that transcends her limits. After all, photos and videos and writings are used for advertisement, for participation in the great capitalist game of charge and expose, why not for sharing with Sick Woman and her tribe?“Forget safety, live where you fear to live, destroy your reputation, be notorious.” Said Rumi…Sick Woman is doing this already, every day. Thousands, millions, alone in rooms, in the silence of dis-ability, or age or dis-ease or dis-pairing sit within the folds of her robes, draw breath and sigh out a great spirit song: weave with us, weave with us, weave with us all along.Four: Sick Woman is at your door. She will come in whether you invite her or no. In the fairy stories it is always best to provide respite for a traveler, by the ancient laws of hospitality we lay out food and drink, prepare a warm place by the fire for the other. However she stinks, however inconvenient her breathy words and her too present truth telling, however she takes away from a personal wish for ease and a quiet night, she is divinity…as are we all. You could try to ignore her, pawn her onto someone else, claim there is no room at the fire this eve, Old Woman, Sick Woman. But this is the challenge of coalition building, it always comes to a point where we have to let the other in, have to stretch our edges and our boundaries, have to say, yes. In order to change culture we must change the story. The story of a gathering that just allows those who can attend to participate is one version of the tale. But the story of a gathering that grows its aura and influence beyond the known, invites Sick Woman to the fire, listens and allows its community to be enriched by the Other, this is a potential for action, flex, and force of growth.Sick Women have skills too, and Sick Women would like to learn. Sick Women miss out on shared experiences, are often financially and physically limited. Creating a space of Sick Women requires thought and engagement, not simply making room in rituals that already exist. Those actions are not for Sick Woman, they are for the unsick only. How can you value the work and worth of women who are invisible? If you choose to invite Sick Woman and her contemporaries, to widen the container (which is the very definition of inclusion), you will need to engage outside of the norm. How will you engage Sick Woman and her communities? How will the other be allowed to participate?When the invisible is seen, the true circle is created. With Sick Woman only is authenticity possible. In this circle we reclaim the gifts of our ancestral communities, the gifts of otherness and edge that were once celebrated, the gifts of sharing and exchange, the gifts of sight and voice, the gifts that remove shame, the gifts that enrich, the gifts that honor, the gifts that weave, truly, new culture from the fabric of the whole.A ritual of blessing, a spell of transformation, a prayer from the heart and womb.In this and every effort may the balance be regained.AluHere is a simple, positive example of inclusion and widening the container:This author held a live writing workshop, but also linked to an online workshop presentation that anyone could attend for free, and also articles with writing exercises:https://sonyahuber.com/2017/06/22/writing-about-disability-and-illness-in-pittsburgh-and-online/Here is a link to the essay I mention in the above spell. Johanna Hedva crafts a valuable and academic perspective on what it means to be chronically ill in this culture, but expands the definition of illness to include all marginalized peoples:http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theoryThis essay on Coalition Building by activist Bernice Reagon Johnson is valuable for its exploration of inclusivity in creating cultural change through investigating the women’s movement and the civil rights movement:https://womenwhatistobedone.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/1983-home-girls-coalition-politics-bernice-johnson-reagon.pdfNote: inclusion is the act of making a part of and the root of container is to stretch.

Familiar:: The first argument I remember having was whether animals had a soul. It was late afternoon on a Sunday and we had made one of our erratic, emotion strewn visits to the church seven miles from our rural home. My parents were conflicted about religion. My father was raised Episcopalian. His Catholic parents left the fold after they denied my great-grandmother burial in the Catholic cemetery. A lifelong practicing Catholic, she was from Czechoslovakia and didn't have access to her baptism records. She could not prove she was Catholic in death. My father was an altar boy, but no more faith ridden than the next person. My mother's church attendance was spotty. Her father called himself an atheist--though I know from reading his papers he was a heathen at heart. Her mother felt religious education somewhat obligatory. They didn't go often. And neither did we. I liked some things about church, music and story. But so much of what was offered grew contrary to my conscience and the reality of life in the woods. Like the idea that animals lacked souls. If that were so, how would Rosie Posie, my cat companion since I was four, know exactly when I needed extra love? Why would my horse Trigger (not named by me, but fitting for her personality) whinny expectantly when I showed up, pawing the ground and dancing? Why would she let me spend hours on her back without any tack, just resting and talking to the beings of the land? There was no doubt in my mind that whatever soul was, it was present in animals and plants, creeks and stones, sky, wind, stars, rain, sun...everything. :: Next month is the cat Crowma Trouble Nutball's birthday. In the past year this little kitten has moved twice and ruled each home. She fetches paper toys, attacks me viciously, gives kisses and warms laps. She is in mine now, offering a mild look of reprimand for me not fully focussing on her affections. Women who expressed kin with animals experienced a special viscousness in the witch hunts. FamilIar is our reclaiming of this relationship, of the tenderness in an animate universe where connections like these are vital, central, and thread beyond speciesism into all.

I am not a woman who runs with wolves. I am a wolf. This discovery came to light again in the past few weeks, as I've been repeatedly initiated back into illness--through viruses, pathogens and another mold exposure. This is an excerpt from an essay I'm working on exploring chronic illness and social alienation of mythic form. I'll be sharing this essay with my patrons, along with sacred art processes and giveaways over the next few weeks. Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/laraveledavestaNine Ways of the Wolf: The Mythic Initiation of IllnessOnce upon a time there was a mostly functional woman. She worked as a university professor, was enrolled in a PhD program, parented three children in a blended family, partnered, gardened, circled with friends. One day she woke up to find she had become a wolf. Her skin covered in fur, her eyes glinted in the night, her teeth grew long and feral. There was no way for her to reconcile this shape and form with so-called ordinary life. Her mouth could no longer speak human words, her nights were filled with hunting, her husband (gentle, kind) cleaned the blood on the sheets, her children could only find comfort with her while she slept. The university could not employ a wolf. The graduate school could not educate a wolf. The world had no space for a human in wolf form. So she denned up in a kind of despair, solitary, angry, ravenous and afraid.This is the story of my time as a wolf. It is a story with a long ago beginning, it is a story without tidy end. Last December, after months of decline and years of cyclic illness, I collapsed in a mysterious pile of symptoms that rendered me unrecognizable to most, even and especially to myself: headaches, skin rashes, heart palpitations, chest pain, gallbladder pain, joint aches especially in my hips, low grade fevers alternating with low body temperature, tremors, neurological problems including memory loss, difficulty finding words or completing thoughts, spatial reasoning problems, low blood pressure, weight loss, weakness, digestive issues and new food allergies, extreme chemical sensitivity, sleep disturbances, bone deep fatigue that left me bedridden most days, depression, anxiety. I was diagnosed with adjustment disorder, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, as my symptoms all correlated with mental health conditions and I had been under a lot of stress. Then, on the 29th of December I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Myalgic Encephalomeylitis. This, at least gave a name to my shape, but it was not the name of what I was…at least not fully. Genus but not species. For I was no ordinary wolf. I was a Direwolf, huge, menacing, extinct.By the time I was diagnosed it was too late to save the human I had been.I was supposed to teach again in January, but was too weak to get out of bed. And so I left my job. My leave of absence from school expired. I padded the halls of my home when I could rise, alone and feral.

The Art of Imperfection:: All you create is essential. Sing it with me. There is no time to second-guess this. Just make and make again and make more. Listen to the well that is already within you. It trickles from the primordial, all those aeons and epochs bringing us here and amid the echoes of commerce and the mirrored lies that more training, more degrees, more and more will somehow give us value, our souls long simply to see each other. This is art: show me your soul. It looks like nettle infused home cooked meals and calendula gardens grown wild, its frame is colored with beeswax crayons and salt dough on an afternoon with babies, it smells like sea bath salts and the shavings of hand carved spoons, it tastes of curatorial chocolate or lemon balm elixir, it sounds like the pipes your grandmother gave you and the guitar you taught yourself, its touch is woven tapestries and a dye bath of rust on silk. You offer and offer and offer and question, as do I, but the more I live into the shortness of things and a life woven small, the more I wish to release the question. You inspire with your making, your lives are art. And beyond the valley of televised fame or press kits or dollars there is a meadow with a blanket spread and an invitation. Show me what you made today.