
in french blue pyjamas
july 2025


July
is always
for remembering
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón
woman, comrade, artist, disability activist, icon,
born this day in 1907, the sixth of July.
Continue reading “july is for remembering Frida Kahlo”good sunday afternoon,
everyone was exceptionally smiley at me and just sweet and friendly at my local and
very crowded grocery store chain today —
so much so,
that i had to check my sandals — to see if they were matching,
and make sure i had put my pants on,
and that i had brushed through my dirty-ish,
bedhead, dry-shampooed hair before leaving the house,
and that my mascara wasn’t bleeding from my lashes and running down my face from this morning’s exceedingly sweaty gardening session (no, that’s not a euphemism),
that, maybe their shining eyes and smiles were merely expressions of some
sy/e/mpathy for me//
but nope, all good — at quick glance in a full-length mirror of the super store clothing section ///
it seems people were just being universally lovely this sunday, and to me, for no apparent reason, at all,
after all.
////
Continue reading “aha!”Last night
the US dropped bombs on Iran,
but still, two of the four barn swallow nestlings were ready to fledge, and did,
this morning
Last night
the US dropped bombs on Iran,
but still, i washed the hummingbird feeders meticulously with bottle brushes, as if they were my own once-baby-son’s bottles, and filled them with fresh, sugared well water,
this morning
Last night
the US dropped bombs on Iran,
but still, i tried to stake the seven foot,
no eight foot, tall hollyhocks, bent over by overnight wind gusts,
this morning
Last night
the US dropped bombs on Iran,
but still, Israel was committed to its holocaust of Gaza,
this morning
Last night
the US dropped bombs on Iran,
and i earnestly searched reddit for military opinions about possible conscription of our young people,
both this morning — and last night
One experience of living rurally — without any obstructions of buildings or infrastructure — and with a full southern exposure out my front door, generous windows and an unencumbered view of all four cardinal directions — it’s like i am in the center of a beautiful compass at all times — is, that i have been able to observe and better understand the obliquity of the ecliptic:
marking the farthest northeastern point of the Sun’s eager rise and the farthest northwestern point of the Sun’s leisurely set at the Summer solstice with my own eyes — the Sun making a deep, high horseshoe arc on those long Summer days,
and to watch the Sun’s progression/regression daily,
and, to witness how at the Winter solstice, the Sun just sleeps in, lazily rising in southeastern Sky, just barely making an appearance for us in the northern latitudes — offering us the shallowest, little arc of light before quickly bedding down again in the southwestern Sky;
Darkness is so precious in the Summer and the light is so precious in the Winter. The darkness is so gloriously abundant in the Winter and the light is so gloriously a abundant in Summer;
i am so grateful and privileged to have experienced this solar panorama and time lapse in real life for eight years now, after living many decades in a major North American city — Chicago, without it;
and,
below is my favorite ever foto to share on the Solstice: Attila Kálmán faithfully and wondrously captured the obliquity of the ecliptic — his camera tracking the Sun’s path from a point on the Northern Hemisphere of Earth from Summer to Winter Solstice in 2012.

and a few of my own favorite Summer Solstice experiences:

it’s snowing cottonwood,
the oranges i purchased for orioles, catbirds,
are so sweet
that i begin to gnaw on and then eat the unbitter peel,
the crows only half-entrust their baby to me,
left here alone *with me*, yet high up in elm, babbling like babies do, i am listening, watching,
it is my solemn duty to fully raise the barn door for the nesting swallows every morning in June, to lower it just enough at sunset, and to make a soft, clean pallet beneath the nest — in case one may fall,
the dog has startled the sweet red doe and her June fawn as they approach the salt lick and water trough — and they turn and trot away,
your gait and mine, is a biometric, but i knew that already,
i could spot his walk in a crowd, anywhere, it’s one of his most distinctive, memorable traits,
Sun-warmed roses tempt me to taste their soft petals, so i do,
there is a spot here where the scent of rose and damsel rocket creates a fleeting aromatic symphony,
each step now is my bare foot cushioned deep into white clover,
there are still no leaves on my potted fig trees on June 15th — some things, like fig trees, turtles and people — living along the perimeters of the Great Lakes, will never emerge alive again from the cold of dormancy, torpor, hibernation or loss,
every poppy plant here is giving art nouveau, The Glasgow School, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and i’m so here for it,
is the cancellation of a family phone plan
an end of a family, or just the end of an era?
the black cat*, the feral one, is two weeks absent as of today,
and i just know she’s dead, i feel it.
every thing,
every one, just ends.
i carry on in absentia
dialogues
monologues — rhetoric, socratic, analytic,
with — and for, people i once
knew,
had,
loved,
who i have lost or misplaced,
or
who have lost or misplaced me,
in some way,

the absurdity of the beauty of this dawn moment,
the absurdity
of the normalization of any moment or day, in life,
of the uninhibited and unselfconscious public documentation of both the ordinary and the excesses of life
simultaneous to
the People of Gaza documenting
Israeli Zionists
confining, starving, shooting, bombing, maiming, killing
and
incinerating
children,
in Palestine.
motherhood and childhood are complex, complicated and heart-expanding, heart-breaking and heart-full journeys — but mostly elusive destinations, in our rose-colored or cracked rearview mirrors /
today is an exceptional day for revisiting motherhood, childhood and mother-child relationships //
Mothers’ Day, for many mothers and children often feels unbearable from physical loss or heavy with physical absence; it may be pregnant with disappointment, misunderstandings, unrealistic or unmet expectations; reminiscent of failures, judgment and estrangement;— or worse, it may be painful with the memory or ongoing experience of neglect, abuse, betrayal or disownment ///
these golden beings that we, mothers, carry and birth from our bodies and raise up with our arms and hearts into a world that is too often, dark and heavy /
mothers were once golden beings too //
mothers can be|come dark and heavy worlds too ///
Continue reading “Mother’s Day: also a day for the children of mothers”the golden salmon sky beckons
before the orange orb emerges and the blue arrives
i call you to the glass doors for the eastern view
but you move with an intentional, sabotaging slowness,
without the respect, the urgency
that ephemeral light and beauty require of us
that’s just one difference between me and you,
i am keeping watch, i stay ready for some thing holy,
and you, you clock-watch for the mundane:
for the mail, for dr. phil, a rush only to ever get “it” all over with — the chore, the trip, the holiday, the ceremony, the meal, the dishes, even the damn dessert and bedtime prayer /
nothing ever truly experienced — or savored by you
save for your anger, your resentment,
and that ever-lasting gobstopper of hate, that you nurse in your cheek, its bitterness, sourness, leaching down into,
embalming, your still-living heart
how did i be-come me with you as a mother?
Continue reading “unalike”
Today is both the Western and Eastern Christian observation of Good Friday,
and
When I finally became my own temple, it was clear why my own religion, worship services and prescribed prayer had felt largely inauthentic, self-conscious or weird for me all my life.
Once one knows and understands that they are an embodied spirit temple, there is no longer a need for a facilitator or mediator to commune with the Mystery — with Source Consciousness.
Some of us are descendant of a conscious “Entity” — a “Beingness” — but our near-complete devolution and severance has us worshipping false gods and idols — whether old ones or new; following false prophets; and practicing hollowed rituals, meditations, ceremonies and sacraments.

This Understanding, this Knowing, this gnosis, is inherent, existent in every spirited being, and — by grace, by catalyzed re-memory, or by the cultivation of an intentional interior communion, we may enter and traverse the liminal space where we experience our origin, and recognize our true Self.
GOSPEL OF THOMAS
(28) Jesus said, “I took my place in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh. I found all of them intoxicated; I found none of them thirsty. And my soul became afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their hearts and do not have sight; for empty they came into the world, and empty too they seek to leave the world. But for the moment they are intoxicated. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent.”
(3) Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living god. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”
GOSPEL OF THOMAS (Lambdin Translation)
it’s spring,
it’s poetry month,
but i don’t feel like a poem, much
and, i don’t feel like a poet, much
unable to wax
about the army of robins
advancing in grid formation across the wakened grass, tilting their crowns in ancient choreography, listening, listening
about a cardinal beneath
the forsythia in dulled morning light
forecasting in my mind
how stunning this scene might-could be
when that gold blooms full in a cloudless sky next week
about the bald eagle i somehow didn’t perceive,
and regrettably flushed from a towering elm tree
as i stepped out from my door
and holy fuck,
i was just as flushed
beholding the nigh colossus that was her
these seeds of words and gamete poems
just atrophy, then die, inside of me
I contemplate if a future World— or future United States will allocate for and build Holocaust museums to exhibit and narrate the experience of the colonized, expropriated, interned, starved, tortured, raped, beheaded, bombed, incinerated, genocided, and mass-buried Palestinian Peoples?
If one day, an organization will break ground and dedicate “A Museum of the Palestinian Peoples” in Washington DC followed by satellite museums in every major American city — the first one, in Detroit. So that, we all, may “never forget”, again.
Remember that in these United States, we dedicated a National Holocaust Museum in the Capital of Washington DC, before we had a national museum to represent, exhibit and narrate the experience of The Transatlantic Slave Trade — the kidnapping, diaspora, torture, murder, rape, sale, enslavement and lynching of Peoples from West and Central Africa and their Black American descendants. The Transatlantic Slave Trade was one of the two pillars of all original wealth in this nation.
This then leads to the fact that we had a National Holocaust Museum in this nation, before we had a national museum in the Capital of Washington DC to represent, exhibit and narrate the experience of colonization, theft, genocide, internment, germ warfare, rape, dispossession and diaspora of Indigenous North American Peoples — the companion pillar of all of this nation’s original wealth.
Continue reading “A Holocaust™️”