moonwork missive: waxing gibbous 🌔
today i'm having a heavy slow day. sundays are my day off from active parenting & it's extended into today longer than usual, so i slept without an alarm & without a toddler climbing on me & starting the day earlier than i usually want to. i stayed in bed a long time & ate low-effort & watched the great canadian baking show & a million reels from a favourite lez on the internet.
when i started having a day off per week last fall, i thought i'd use the time to organize chaos areas of my home & resurrect my social life more fully, but it turns out that cleaning is not actually what i want to do when i have time to myself. i have resurrected my social life some (hi to my standing monthly leatherdyke friend date) & also gotten more involved in montréal writers for palestine, but mostly on my days off i do not much.
i have been taking time for autistic crash as well as grief.
early last week (has it really only been about a week??? how??) i heard that my dear chosen family bobby & their wife cris had been in a serious car accident returning from cris's dad's funeral in alberta. i learned that cris was dead. i learned that bobby was in the hospital in critical condition. i also was doing a lot of solo parenting & did not have almost any space to actually feel any feelings about it. i texted the friends i needed to check in with & focused on going outside with my kid because growing things & fresh air are some of the absolute best coparents. i read a million facebook posts & slightly fewer instagram posts remembering cris. eventually i got updated that bobby had come out of surgery & was stabilized & the conversation had shifted to rehabilitation (thank you gay gods).
i'm still in shock about cris being gone; what the actual fuck? it doesn't feel real. the first time i met her has been playing on loop in my memory. i'm devastated it had been so long since i'd last visited cris & bobby. i'm so grateful to those who have found more words & actions than i could to remember & lift up cris's legacy, especially melody mckiver, who's taken first steps towards gathering cris's archive.
today i read about a performance of "mass for nîpîy" happening at carnegie hall, where in place of the solo pizzicato chords cris would usually play alone at the start of last movement, the whole cello section would play––as kathleen allan said, cris "literally amplified and multiplied through her music". & then i cried for awhile.
this is often what grief requires: the slowness, the space, the lack of rush & demand, for emotion to come up to the surface & be felt.
when i was growing up, i almost never cried. feeling honest feelings was not really part of my immediate family culture. i relearned to cry in my late 20s & early 30s, partly through extensive & consistent somatic bodywork for early trauma that i was doing with my longtime practitioner & partly through falling in love with a high femme self-professed crybaby. for me crying rarely comes right away & it rarely comes at a time that makes sense & it rarely lasts long, but what i am practicing is allowing this water to flow when the tide does rise up in me.
i love you forever cris. i love you forever bobby.
i ask you, the wider web spun around me & my kin, to send some love in the form of material support towards bobby & their family, as this road is long towards recovery for bobby & the beloveds taking care of bobby right now. it will be long physically, but also emotionally & spiritually. & for those of you who are people of spirit, people of faith, people of prayer, i ask this support for my loved ones, too.
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the final cohort of BE YR OWN in its current form starts 4 june & registration is open!
as part of BE YR OWN or not, you're invited to come practice live together on fridays, 12:30 pm ET for 30-45 minutes––practice loves company; practice loves repetition! video off or on as suits you, participation by silent presence or voice or chat as suits you <3