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Vicks and Kicks: Doing the Winter Solstice Rag

Today I drank one gallon of water, four large pots of ginger and lemon tea, and a liter of orange seltzer. I ate two kale salads, a vat of ginger-chicken-garlic soup, and tons of Vitamin C. I slathered a jar of Vicks Vaporub on my chest, nostrils, and feet, which I encased in cozy fleece though I normally don’t wear socks even in the dead of winter. Also I took two salt-lavender-eucalyptus baths. Which is to say: I am so sick of being sick that I am admitting I am sick. I stayed home all day, treating my symptoms–napped, lit candles, meditated, shuffled my butt to James Brown (yep). Generally heeded what my higher self was telling me.

Body as alarm clock, ain’t it always the way.

Let’s call this malingering cold the Winter Solstice Detox, because it’s coaxing me into shedding 2018 toxins along with December 21’s tremendous energy release. Don’t get me wrong. The origins of the illness are hardly high-falutin’: late nights, too many cocktails, general dissociation. But they’ve been fueled by resignation, romantic rejection, false bravado, and I’m letting all that go–everything blocking my voice and heart from a bigger home in the world.

So how can you ready yourself to shine as the days lengthen again? What can you release? Friday is the darkest day of the year, and during that long, long night, bid farewell to everything keeping you in the dark. Then light a candle for everything you wish to make brighter.

Painting: Mickalene Thomas.

Fall Back, Fall Back

By Lee Krasner

Daylights Saving Time today. Most view it as an extra hour of sleep. I view it as an extra hour of night.

In my head it’s a rhythm, a mantra, a sick, squalid croon. It’s why the Legend and I have fallen into old habits–him coming around only when it suits him, never ushering me into his world. Me swallowing whatever crumbs he offers, blowing up badly when they become indigestible.

Fall back, fall back.

The light is more beautiful, also more precious. There’s so little of it, you see.

Yesterday I met with my eldest goddaughter on the Upper East Side. Both of us live in Brooklyn but make formal friendship dates while getting acquainted as adults. She is in her early 30s and I am in my late 40s, high time we learned to appreciate each other as peers. We met when I was a recent college graduate and she an elementary schooler, so our relationship has undergone serious growing pains over the years. Me relying too heavily on her preternaturally adult wisdom, doing her the same disservice done to me decades before. Continue Reading →

Morning Without Venus

Detail from “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dalí.

Sad and lonely, that’s how I wake during this Venus Retrograde in Scorpio. The regret of what should have been said, could have been done. How love was failed, how missed opportunities loom–that dropped ball, unacknowledged joke, declaration unmade. How doors were shut and labors were lost and hopes were shattered. Again. Again. The so so so many ways we missed each other because of scars already sustained, burdens already borne. The clock ticking-ticking-ticking–no time, no space for the messy, complicated ways of wounded people who still want love. To give it, to receive it. To improve, to learn. It’s not just you. It’s not just me. It’s just sad.

And lonely.

I open social media despite best intentions and a Yuseff Lateef quote gleams:

Loveless moments are to be avoided.

I nod twice, fast. Then fight back yet more tears. Because: how? Love thrives in kairos, not chaosI flash on the first time we had coffee. In his 1940s rasp, chewing gum no less, he’d said: “We’re all broken!” And that foxhole solidarity, so cheerfully delivered, made me sure we could fulfill the promise of our shared smiles.

When will I learn? We cannot protect our hearts by protecting our hearts. The only way forward is to open, wide.*

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* There’s a joke in that.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy