wonder what

a collection of cosmic tissue

[meganevaloud]

the oil spreads slowly at first and magnifies all the texture and detail in the iron

the heat that warms my face as I bend to observe is slow and promising

(what else what else)

cracking the shell and watching the gentle fall

oh I'm hungry but each step is so beautiful in its own right

the curling sizzling sound of the egg hitting the surface and settling into the heat.

observing the sacrifice of what is to transform into what will be (me, a happy fed person in about ten minutes)

(tell us more, tell us everything)

the toaster pops, a little premature, but its okay as I love the enthusiasm.

I dip the knife into the butter, it sinks and accepts, then holds on when I bring it back up, but then it relents and allows me to continue

I spread it over my toast. I am thorough and attentive. it melts obligingly into every vestibule

now, where were we eggs? how about a little sprinkle of salt.

a swish and flick, I turn them over and they sizzle in response. their gifts are endless and I am humbled with gratitude.

(it's almost time!)

I lay them gently over my toast and marvel at the sight of them. so beautiful and ready at last.

so which are you now? hungrier or hornier hehehe

[marta-bee]

The Abortion Absolutist

Warren Hern has been performing late abortions for half a century. After Roe, he is as busy with patients as ever.

This was an interesting read. Surprisingly nonpreachy given the subject; and well worth the time.

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

This is oaywalled but it made me weep with relief to see an honest recounting for once, so I’ve saved some good bits:

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

[meganevaloud]

(Last year)

I’m a half ghost vessel Known by a wake of unfinished business  I roll in with the fog Thirty years to think about the right last words Please excuse my lifelong struggle — It shouldn’t be much longer now (But it is)  I don’t do monochromatic feelings (I don’t know how) But what I wouldn’t give  To just once Respond with one sentence And let that be enough  It feels like my mind is being pulled by a poorly trained sled-dog team. (They don’t give a shit.)

thirsty by sandas04 on deviantart

[meganevaloud]

i want to go to the ocean right now and get wet even though it’s dark and cold and i’m a little wet. i want to do something impulsive like that. i want my life to be a series of going to the ocean and the oddest hours and painting with colours as vivid as i can keep them and telling stories of people both real and imagined and tattooing the truth on all of our skin and carving slowly things that will live beyond my time and someday welcoming a child into my life and showing that child what solid ground feels like for maybe the first time. i have had great loves in my life, maybe i have no right to complain. maybe the new shape that all this love takes is waiting for dogs and eventually children. i don’t want to do that to raj but i think it’s alright if i keep building love and habits for the day that will eventually come. 

i still haven’t done my yoga for the day. i’ll have to do that now even though i’m a little lubricated. alright off i go because i promised.

wild strawberry. by shadddow on deviantart.com

[meganevaloud]

i’m an idiot. what am i doing? what do i imagine is going to happen? it’s okay and safe to let it go. they always say, when you know you know. and i want and i burn and yearn and plead in my heart but none of those things are the same as knowing. “serious question — why don’t you write for the artidote?” because i’m terrified, are you kidding? life feels mostly like a no win situation for the terrified (perpetually). makes me want to vomit. but only in these moments when i dig my heels in. perhaps it’s just a matter of practice to listen to the rational mind and believe it first before the emotional. maybe i’ve just got them switched. if he were my man, maybe he would have said so by now. he’s had every opportunity. i’ve been all but asking him if he’d be willing to be mine and to make me his. when i feel like this, i wish my life was straightforward. i wish i’d met a great love when i was young and realized earlier that what i really want is a simple life. everyone told me i could be great when i was growing up, so many people said i could be a great writer and change the course of things. it set the bar really high and i wish i’d been allowed the option of just like, milking cows everyday while the sun rises. haying. learning how to plant carrots most efficiently. dirty finger nails were a treat and a privilege. times i felt most alive: the time i was naked in the garden and completely covered in mud. the time i was laying in the ocean, feeling supported and watching the sky somehow be orange and pink and blue individually all at the same time, hearing the boat coming about knowing this moment was about to be over, both mourning and celebrating it at the same time in the same way that the sky can carry blue and pink and orange all at the same time and somehow manage to keep their integrity, i carried the grief and the joy distinctly and together. 

morbid mud by mad-dame on deviantart.com

[danger]

[meganevaloud]

It feels like I was raised to be fragments of a human by people who were fragments themselves and my quest in life is to take shape and become fully formed, and help them become fully formed themselves because I think they’re actually both wonderful people at their cores, once you wade through all the deeply sticky coping mechanisms. I don’t want to let them go to waste. I know I’ve helped my mother and I’ve helped a lot of other people. But it’s been a long time since I tried to help my dad. Not for no reason either. When you’re in pain, it’s not a hard decision to help someone else in pain. It’s harder to decide to help the person causing your pain. Even though you might know in your heart, that person causes you pain because they themselves live there and don’t want to be alone. But I think pain is so much in our own experience (and not in our world-shared reality) that it could be possible to open up a choice within it. If it’s my nervous system and my soul and my heart, surely I have a little bit of say in what enters and stays. I don’t expect to control everything about it but maybe I’m a little more powerful and influential in this sphere than I’ve realized. Maybe I can learn to hear the differences, learn to distinguish individual intentions. This undertaking feels almost too big to be possible but I don’t want to let that stop me anymore. I am big. I am resilient. Shit gets done when I’m around, I am a man of action as they say. And as pain-ridden as my story is, it’s a gentler version of my dad’s story. If I deserve grace and acceptance for my story, he deserves it in spades and my failing is in withholding that. So. I know that this is going to be a practice at which I will sometimes fail. This is where I’m going to need some help because a) my dad does not entirely live in reality but b) he is worthy of love and acceptance and of forgiveness but not of being enabled or empowered to continue coping as he pleases (ie. lashing out, manipulating, bulldozing, willful ignorance). This is what I’m going to bring to my therapy session in two days. 

alone with my thoughts by kianarene on deviantart

[meganevaloud]

this morning i realized something that contains a lot of grace. i’ve been on my own case for years now that i’m not braver or more action-oriented. but if someone came to me and told me their story: they grew up in a house where mother was afraid and father was a bully, brother was a real person and they were an experiment went kinda wrong but they couldn’t get rid of, and all their self-esteem was built on silt and sand. where everyone was more concerned with putting on this depiction of a family for the world instead of digging in and pouring a foundation and no one talked about anything of substance but the truth of all that was in the air. then, in attempt to avoid the scent of failure in the air (uncertain whether it was actively following or what) they moved far away and tried to do what was expected of them — have a job, live independently, that whole floating bar. and they met someone who would take anything they could for themselves. it took a long time to catch on to the reality of the situation, probably because reality wasn’t a priority in their upbringing. so learning as much about themselves and the world became the focus before anything resembling another attempt to live in the world could be made because they’re afraid of what else they don’t know and they don’t have much evidence to support a positive prognosis. so half-awake this morning when i was imagining someone telling me this story, going from being kept ignorant of reality to being shoved into it and capsizing shortly after, eventually found by someone so greedy and hungry and saw everyone else as either food or not food. i would understand. i would have room for all that. i certainly would not prosecute them for not having accomplished more in their life. actually i think i would commend them for the work they’ve done in the year since, in spite of the fears they have. and i’m left with no reason to withhold that grace from myself, after all. 

bikes in place by darkdex52 on deviantart

[meganevaloud]

I open my palm and bloom a flower that is free I can change it. the world can change it. but it is mine and I like the way we are with iridescent lattice petals and a strong stalk lightly thorned this is all free to change as is true for everything but I am not precluded from enjoying the scent and splendour for the time I have together with myself

this one is also mine :) meganevaloud on deviantart.com

[meganevaloud]

a response to a poison tree by William Blake

you’ve grown up but you’re dangerous do you have a part to play, do you still deserve to live?

tall, sticky-tongued and silver enigmatic, magnetic smile but with the intention of consuming the person in front of me

as if they are not me, as if they are not my equal, as if they’re just food for the tree that takes and gives only pain

do I chop it down and burn it and salt the earth and pray for rain?

I am the poison tree and what starts as love, as growth as a gift, quickly becomes twisted and distorted and no fun no more

because love looks to me like a lot of pain in my heart it’s still good and there I know the truth of it but how do I keep it sweet?

[meganevaloud]

this piece of writing rose out of this moment in a conversation with someone special to me. it's far from the first and probably far from the last time I find myself face to face with this topic in between me and a person I hold dear, and it's hard every time. conversations like these often follow a similar pattern that I haven't yet found a way to break. part of that pattern is my own struggle to articulate what I mean in the moment and illustrate the discrepancy I'm trying to describe. in that moment I asked if we could put a pin in it for tonight and he was headed to bed anyway, but I stayed up and wrote this. if you feel compelled to respond, my inbox is open. here it follows:

“But I just don’t think he’s such a bad guy, I think he’s not perfect but he’s a human and he’s trying”

He spent seven years pestering the same woman to love him when she didn’t want him

Look, explaining the difference between our perspectives and experiences feels a lot like this:

You live on land and I live in the sea

And you wanna yell at me from the shore that the land is the place to live, that land is home and land is great

But I was built with gills and fins and my oxygen is packaged differently 

And I poke my head up above the surface, My ancestors have been to your land, your place called home, and they don’t come back.

They are pulled from their beds to be served on rice, they never come back.

Very few of you don these elaborate contraptions so you try your best to join me down here in the cold and the quiet 

But you can’t withstand the pressure and you don’t know how to make your own light 

So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a little tired of hearing your fists beating on the sand and the rock 

Like a presumptuous salesman, or Mormon, or local council member

Disturbing my peace with your priorities and your objectives and your single-dimension point of view

What is it that you believe I can give you exactly, what do you want with my absolution

I want just one of you to come down here and stfu for a minute or two so your eyes can have a chance to adjust 

You won’t be able to breathe as above, but so below at least you’ll feel the weight.

I am not responsible for what you have done with your land and I will not condone your overdrawn accounts.

I will share in this with you only if it is a dialogue, if you listen before you speak, if your goal is a bridge and not another highway. 

But I’ll need to see what you’re all for before we sit down to any sort of table

Because I know what you’re used to: staff at your shoulder and cubes of flesh peeled carefully away from sprung bones on a plate for your pleasure and consumption.

Now you want me to serve you the change in the way of the old traditions, no.

I had no help from you when I was lost and spinning in the rip tides here.

You have yet to clean up your oily messes 

My task is to find a way to save myself and my line from sure destruction

Don’t ask me to embrace your flustered and crumbling delusions, I am busy. 

I believe this impulse of yours, at the very first and most pure bloom, is to find ourselves joined again as we once were for a time, and I want that for us too

But to have that is to let go of your faith in your own understanding 

And to surrender to the dark unknown places where you can trust you surely wouldn’t survive

To come to respect them and figure them into your calculation of wholeness 

Currently, your world is the whole world to you

One tidal pool is the whole world to a barnacle

You must come to love your smallness, your nakedness and your inherent rattletrap mortality

We none of us on our own are able to understand everything, that not everything needs us to understand it and that your two eyes do not show you all there is to see. 

Take on this responsibility of knowing that you are only you. Please stop dropping gifts with hidden fish hooks and yanking me to a place I don’t belong by the skin of my cheek. In return, I will not hate you for what you have become and I will try to help you heal where I can. But please bear in mind, I have my own healing to do as your line has been in the business of hunting, consuming and exterminating mine for a long time. As my kind reclaim their power, yours is afraid they will go hungry as they forgot how to be satisfied long ago. 

Take only what you need. Please give your silence and attentive listening. Please accept what is offered. Please be brave through the great unlearn. Please allow the tide in and out and let the moon illuminate the dark in her own time. Please stop struggling against, you won’t be able to win with your wits or your will. This isn’t a war, after all, and I don’t want to fight you 

(I never have, I actually love you so much sometimes I can’t contain it) 

So I need you to learn how to sit still and be silent, I’ll help you, you won’t be alone and you won’t go hungry. And I need to build my legs, for this long road, I need muscle, tendons and a much stronger spine. And slowly, we’ll come back to the love we once had.

Enantiodromia. Evolution. 

sunshine by nuhanotion on deviantart

[meganevaloud]

when we consume content obsessively, the nature of the content itself can indicate what we feel we lack. we watch on tv what we know we could have been. for example, i consume story structure and character development and plot lines. plot lines were the thing that would never unlock themselves to me, the thing that stumped my writing development

my dad obsessively watches athletics. i don’t know what the nature of his deficient is as he views it but there it is. my mum watches shows about travel. 

people who moved their life along when they were ready to do not need to consume anything to absolve themselves of their residual feelings in various ways. 

how can i empower this knowledge toward my growth then, since i still wish and yearn to write, i can learn about plot structure and i can play with plot structure and i can  move the pieces of this bed to my shop (and it will be my shop) and finally pin up paper on the walls like i’ve wanted to for years and play with timelines and give myself freedom of exploration

weeds by tdpemble on deviantart.com

[meganevaloud]

if i was a boy, how would you have fucked me up differently? probably all that boys don’t cry business. at least girls are allowed to cry in your time capsule they call a mind. maybe i got lucky being born a girl. i hate to imagine what you would have done with me if i’d been born a boy. tiny toddler in front of you. the moment you saw that little pecker the day he was born, you were overjoyed, you were getting what you deserved: a wife that doesn’t present much of a challenge and a son in your image. two years later he’s upset because he can’t read your mind and the tears roll down his face and his cries reverberate through the walls of the run down townhouse at a volume that rivals those precious speakers of yours. if you had to assign a price, would they be more or less? he reaches up to you, person that he looks to for love and guidance, he wants to be held, he wants to be reassured, his young mind has doubts about the world already. and to this you have the audacity to cross your arms, impose your height and scowl down at him to say “stop it. boys don’t cry!” does it still sit right with you when you say it out loud?

this one is mine :) come on chamomile on this kid's deviantart

[meganevaloud]

k. the current swirling: 

a person can contain so many different things going on at once. i’m trying to answer the question of what we owe to each other. i’m relentless about trying to be right and so as a result, i keep tripping over the truth i read in the subtle art of not giving a fuck that says “you will never ever be right. life is a matter of slowly becoming less wrong.” and during a conversation last night i was pontificating about trying to be responsible with your ignorance and struggling to word what i was actually getting at. but what i heard back was along the lines of this: stuff happens, things come up, even if you know all the things you should know. life is always moving and developing and constantly contradicting itself and yet somehow it all works. i really wish i’d written it down while he was saying it because the way he said it was cosmically audible as fuck. but it’s true. there’s nothing anyone can do or know or read in a book to stop life from happening however it wants to. “you can build a fence horse high and hog tight and they’ll still get out.” and things will get in. true on a farm, true in life. you’ll probably reap what you sow but nothing is promised. maybe some people are born or raised with an awareness and acceptance of this fact. for me it is a practice of relearning and reminding. to accept that no amount of books i buy and read or don’t read, no number of oil changes to which i’m on time, no selection or quantity of things i can think, feel, process and release is going to stop life from the march. i see some people captaining their own ship but that does not make a lick of difference to the sea. actually that thing i read last week, “the ocean isn’t trying to kill you, but it is aggressively indifferent to whether or not you live.” or something to this effect. no amount of precision in your sentence structure, diction, syntax or grammar will save you from the experience.

i feel like this is a pothole i dump a tire into once in a while, i wonder if there’s a way to fill and pave it so it stops being such a rude awakening. i can see how, when i look back on this particular thread, why it’s perverted so much of the pattern over the years. a lot of what is going on in the world at different scales and levels is this grand hindsight as i’m sure is a rite of passage for every generation. we’re collectively realizing the waves of damage.

on my way by stonystonephotos on deviantart.com

[meganevaloud]

your people, your places, your treasures count all your things that you have know that they’re all made of sand  life will take any shape you like

the deal, as you know, is the day that will come  you have to watch it melt through your fingers  and return into the endlessly shifting  the desert and sea

you cannot go in after it  you will not die because of it though you would trade your breathing for burning,  you must stay above the quicksand's line 

stand up and take your own weight  you will rebuild many more times  each will be painful and doomed but you will have what you make for the time in between 

desert wind by zyteche on deviantart

[meganevaloud]

he has eyes like the ocean but not the pretty tropical brochure kind (blown out and enhanced beyond all reality) like the enraged sea, wondrous and dark and throwing herself  against the walls and hulls of our contraptions the sea that has been betrayed and is rapidly losing patience,  impenetrable and ready to give us wrath the sea that will one day forgive us,  but first will show us the meaning of fear maybe these eyes aren’t a mast  from which i’ll set my sails or a north star, making the whole world home but they have been the most interesting tide, a gift from the sturgeon moon how do i begin to say thank you

vortex by alexvanderlinde on deviantart

[meganevaloud]

earthrinse. rain. reticulation.  mud. moreover. just might. knot. impossible. constant consternation. calling. colloquialisms. can’t quite.

incoherent. constellations. shipshape. diatomaceous. deference. cold. onlsaught. ramshackle talk.  a wheezy one stoplight town i’m told.

revert the invertebrate to the seed of the strong. ran afoul of a fog.  we can always be wrong.

find me a folly that’s good and long. ambrosial redolence  sing us a little ditty of a song allusive of our coalescing nonsense

what are you talking about? i already forgot. where will you go now? i’m off to nix the naught.

nightbuns by TomTC on deviantart.com