Dear Reader,
I’d like to begin Part 2 by acknowledging that I left you with a bag of poop in Part 1.
What did you do with it?
I held onto it until it wasn’t needed anymore and trashed it.
Then I brought it back to life over and over again…
In Part 2, I’d like to veer away from story and share some artistic expressions. Any time I share a piece of writing or art, feel free to take it in, glance at it or leave it behind.
These are my leavings…
I would caution against making too much sense or meaning out of any singular collection of leavings.
What is seen is never whole.
I share these leavings as invitations into embodied response & dialogue. I share in protest of loneliness, nihilism & despair. I share in the spirit of wonder and new imaginings.
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On Grief:
A grateful acknowledgement of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s “Hospicing Modernity” - the following entry is inspired by one of many exercises offered in the book.
“Sharon Stein created an exercise called “CIRCULAR” that identifies eight expected intellectual, affective and performative dispositional patterns that modernity has imprinted in our unconscious and that it rewards. These patterns may prevent us from sensing, relating and imagining otherwise, but since they are perceived as normal and natural, there is virtually no incentive to notice or to interrupt them. In fact, for you to be functional and intelligible within modernity/coloniality, you have to use them.”
The eight patterns:
Continuity
Innocence
Recentering
Certainty
Unrestricted autonomy
Leadership
Authority
Recognition
“The truth is hard to swallow…
I am a being of violence.
Purposed to love.
Bound to misstep & recreate the conditions of harm that produced me.
Bound by guilt & shame, pain & suffering.
Subjugation, greed, loneliness in-born.
I am imprinted with violence & brutal imaginings.
Guilt & shame are my compass.
Pain & suffering my birthright, my pathways toward loving.”
Where does denial live in the body?
What do severances produce?
What leavings need tending?
What is the purpose of healthy guilt in a grief process?
Stay tuned for Part 3 and thank you for reading.
Besos, Elena
Upcoming:
I’m looking forward to attending The Group Group weekend intensive with Martha Crawford -
- on August 26th & 27thRobin and I are so excited for Monstrosity in the Making to begin on August 6th