Jess Kalinowski > Recent Status Updates

“Nobody is born with self esteem. It is an earned presence within yourself. It comes from you learning little by little that you can handle the greatest fears of human existence and still survive. Self esteem is about survival. That if you have to be alone, you can be. And if you have to make it in the world by yourself you can.”

“All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.” -H.P. Lovecraft

“The dream work process is like the journey in my dream: an exploration with an unknown destination. But when we arrive, we will know it.”

“Waking early cuts off the longest episode of this dream-rich part of our sleep cycle, which is implicated in the regulation of mood and consolidation of memory.”

“You will know who you are when you see who you are not… you will know what is real when you accept what is not real… you will know love when you realize what love is not.”

“Spirit reveals itself to everyone with the same intensity and consistency, but only warriors are consistently attuned to such revelations.”

“More important than seeing itself is what warriors DO with what they see.”

“Warriors have only one thing in mind - their freedom.”

“Warriors aim at succeeding therefore they compress time.”

“A warrior’s final aim is to focus through profound discipline his unwavering attention on the wheel of time in order to make it turn. Warriors who have succeeded in turning the wheel of time, can gaze into any furrow and draw from it whatever they desire. To be free from the spellbinding force of gazing into only one of those furrows means warriors can gaze in either direction as time retreats or as it advances

“A poem can be considered a sacred site, in which so much of our culture is stored, made into form to be acknowledged, given a place, even a place to hide. Many of our oldest and most traditional poems and songs contain maps of the stars, road maps, or precepts of spiritual knowledge.”

“There is no such thing as a Native American. Nor is there a Native American language. We call ourselves Muslims, Diné, or any of the other names of our tribal nations. In many cases these names often translate as ‘the people.’”

“At contact with European invaders we were estimated at over 112 million. By 1650 we were feeer than six million. Today we are one-half of one percent of the total population of the US. Imagine the African continent with one-half of one percent of indigenous Africans and you might understand the immensity of the American holocaust.”

“We are more than 573 federally recognized indigenous tribal nations in the mainland United Stayes; 231 are located in Alaska alone.”

“What is shared with all tribal nations in North America is the knowledge that the earth is a living being, and a belief in the power of language to create, to transform, and to establish change. Words are living beings.”

“those of us who read and listen to poetry want our ears and perception “bent” for unique insight and want to see how the impossible becomes momentarily possible in the arrangement of language and meaning.”

“The equating of written languages to literacy came with an oppositional world view, a belief set in place as a tool for genocide. Yet our indigenous nations prized and continue to value the word. The ability to speak in metaphor, to bring people together, to set them free in imagination, to train and to teach, was and is considered valuable, more useful than gold, oil, or anything else the newcomers craved.”

“We mark our existence with our creations. It is the poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death. We sing our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren: our human experience in time, into and through existence.”

“Love ignores near measures, the waves leave ragged wet marks on the shore, autumn lights one more fire in the maples.”

“like thoughtful fairies in a Shakespeare play”

“And we did, reading Austen, Dickinson, Eliot, Woolf, until we understood we’d come to train-not tame-the wild girls into the women who would run the world.”

“I tell you, Chickadee, I am afraid of people who cannot cry Tears left unshed turn to poison in the ducts.”

“I am the woman offering two flowers whose roots are twin Justice and Hope Let us begin.”

“to love and be loved in absentia is joy enough for me.”

“Women have always been the weavers of the world, literally and figuratively. We weave people together. we weave our stories into words. Poetry has been one of the ways we do this. Poems distill our deepest emotions into a very few words- words that we can remember, carry with us, and share with others as we talk and weave the cloth of life.”

“I’ve figured it out: Mom wants me to be less like Dad, more like she.”

“Mom names me for a creature with wings, then wonders what makes my thoughts fly.”