says they call her out by her name

the author’s window
Continue reading “she talks to serpents”
says they call her out by her name

During the summer of 2017 – a time of significant change in my life – including the rupture of my marriage, an upcoming “milestone” birthday, and a relocation to a quiet rural place with dark skies and an abundance of fauna and flora — I literally heard myself: I had unconsciously begun a meditative practice of singing or humming verses and melodies of sorrow, wonder, gratitude — or simply, of the mundane. They were autonomic and presumably original, lamentations.
then, serendipitously, I retroactively encountered a May 2017 piece published in Yes! magazine about the revival and history of “lament singing” in Finland.
To find that I was unconsciously, but actually, participating in a Finnish tradition that I had never experienced or even heard of — but that was somehow still within in me — in some cellular, trans-generational or ancestral place — felt like a bridge to my lineage — to all my unknown women-kin.
The lyrics and tunes occurred spontaneously over several months, and I often automatically repeated the same one over and over while working, cleaning, cooking, gardening, walking or driving. I sung or hummed them mostly while alone, but sometimes they would emerge aloud in public places — and I didn’t even realize that I was in song or know how long I had been doing it.
Continue reading “song[s] of my self: epigenetic lamentations”People who laugh, cry, sing and talk to themselves aloud in the street are not “crazy” — we are comforting, raging, celebrating, mocking and mourning ourselves, our lives, our experiences and the world.

Limineen : limin + een
noun: the time and space of the thresholds; attendance to or presence in, the in- betweens, the interregnum — of becoming and nonbecoming; of beingness and nothingness; of the material and ethereal; of sacredness and profanity; of love and hate; of calm and rage; of the authentic and the engineered; of inertia and energy.
limineen is both mood and State of this author, an Earthling, human, woman and entity, who finds her self present within and attendant to the thresholds of the corporeal, incorporeal and surreal.
from liminal / lim·i·nal
/ˈlimənəl/ adjective
my hair holds memory,
i know this because
i cut my own hair today

as i held the ends
in my hands
i said
did you touch the Merced with me and my boy?
i said,
do you remember my father?
and my other precious loss?
i said,
do you remember the first dog?
i said,
were you here when
i still loved
and was loved?
i said,
you were there when my mother was so near death’s door
i said,
and when i found and lost,
and lost and found, my Self again?
smiles
sighs
cries
laughs
rage
wail
and
song
i still have possessions from all those times
and places
but no skin,
my skin long shed, my bone resorbed
but my long hair is still me from many years ago
that is why hair is so precious,
i thought,
this is the genesis
of what i have always
mistook as phobia
but no,
i know today
that
physical memory is held particularly, and only, in my hair
more than Samsonian
or vanity
or femininity
my long hair
is
my body
my health
my energy
my sensation
my emotion
my years
my identity
my essence
thank you
for growing
for remembering
for showing
for staying
for flowing
for tangling
for blowing
for graying
for glowing
for floating
for knowing
with me
all these years
no more cuts
without ceremony
and
i promise
i will never agree to lose you

This feels like an arrow
Made from a tree
That rose from
An acorn
That I gathered and stored
In another life
Scribed with a message continually
piercing my heart
I wasn’t only wounded though,
I was woke
into a clarity
that I was already sighting in my dreams,
writing with words
mortal and eternal
You once said, proclaimed or whispered
Every single thing
that I ever believed
My own truths embarrassed in the shadow of your confidence
My inner voice silenced in your animated persuasion
Believing you so completely – for the better of my years
Becoming like and unlike you because of it,
but not be-coming me,
Un-be-coming me every day
I ain’t even mad
You don’t know this – still,
You don’t want
to hear,
or listen;
Our time is running out
Even this admission
Is sure to haunt me one day,
and guilts me today
But I can’t call you confidant or crone
If you refuse to learn,
to evolve,
From this one archetype
The wide and long view
seems to escape you
You live in the moment in the least way, the worst way
And I don’t worship here or there, any more
The faith in your godliness is gone,
It is unfamiliar
For me to pity you
You, deaf and tone deaf
You had all the answers
In the morning shallows, perhaps
But evaporation revealed even those
Were anchor-less, yet stationary
An algae
Mucking up the colorless perfection of sunlit water
But in the deep, or dark, or quiet pools, you were always so lost
And in the ocean, at night
You drown even in its calm
You have ridden civil swells and storms,
I’ll give you that
But have you ever communed with waves
Allowing them to be part of you
Swallowing and absorbing the mystery
Becoming the colorless perfection of dark water
You seem to stay parched
Your belly’s hollow from impious fasting and pious thirst
You do know that’s where your heart sits?
But let’s agree to come around again, friend
We’ll swap places and next time
I’ll be the mother,
and the son,
and the husband,
and the elder,
and the babe,
and the foreign one,
I’ll become The Other One
because,
I want the chance to know
You

I learn so many new things each day, that I feel like Samantha, the AI operating system OS¹ in Spike Jonze’s film, “Her”.
It’s as if I am birthing myself out of my own ignorance each and every day.
– kimtnt ⊕
