Map Walking
Dial Turning
Threshold Crossing
Seconds before coming to this draft, I instinctively began rubbing my third eye, both vigorously and gently. After several strokes it felt like multiple eyelids fluttered to relax. Something like a butterfly.
When I was on my way to where I was going, I had so many people around. The struggle of travel was an inhale, sucking in people to push me forward. But once I arrived, the exhale drew distance between me and sociability.
One former friend said something along the lines of, they couldn’t wait until I was lonely so I’d know what it was like. That would have been a curse had I forgot to ward my name. Another friend admitted recently that they stopped reaching out because they felt like my life was going somewhere and theirs wasn’t. Something you see in movies but never expect to experience in real life.
A childhood best friend said at some point in our relationship, they started to feel like a fan more than a friend. This speaks to my inability to stop moving forward. I gave this friend everything though. Shared my home, my relationships, my essence. All to eventually be on the outside looking in on relating I had once been foundational to.
And somehow, inward is the only place the future lives. At least that’s what I think Esu, Black god of the crossroads and mediating third force, would say. In yoga therapy they teach how underrated the exhale is. The emphasis on inhale, on taking in, attracting, absorbing, bringing closer, gathering, gets centered. Yet the inhale only sets you up for the emptying it takes to be who you are. When a baby leaves the vagina, its first exhale is a lusty cry. Right now in my body my exhale brings my belly button rising to meet my shoulders down bad by gravity. Compression that cleanses.
What does your exhale feel like? Can you sense it?
Meaning Flipping
When people say it can be hard for others to be happy for you, they’re not lying. I get it. A friend’s glow up can be triggering. On the farm we have burn piles. Old wood scraps, weeds, anything that must convert to ash. Biochar-like substance that lets burning flames of jealousy become nutrient-rich sponge for soil regeneration.
That’s why I’m obsessed with the word ‘cooked’ in our modern language. It’s being used in an inverted way that regresses meaning. To me, to be cooked is to be changed into a state you can’t come back from. Cooking compounds taste if prepared at the right temperature. Part of getting your tongue back could be, I wonder, taking the etymology of commonly used words and using the fabricated social definitions against themselves. New language out of the same old words. This is how we begin to map an era we can’t see through yet. We flip meaning.
Antennas Tuning
I realize I have what a lot of people don’t. Expressed solitude in a body born female. There’s been such pressure toward community, even when conditions aren’t suitable for it. So much so that solitude has been scrunched into a category of aloneness. I hear it every phone call. Are you alone on the farm? I hesitate before saying the trees, the bees, the birds, the soils, the forest after a hard rain, the low hum of more-than-human life all around me, make everlasting company.
The arithmetic I’ve come to for strong and stable vision is accepted solitude and embodied practice. My antennas buzzing with wordless song and my soft flesh make showing up here to type, well, easy. Thinking of the ears as what perimeters the field.
Quiet solitude partners with the body. Offers a rendering the ear can hear, the gut can metabolize, the mouth can finally name. What folks who left my life had throats too choked to speak.
Geometry Reading
I think over the past couple years I haven’t been able to make anything without considering the mechanics of it. Somewhat possessed by the law of three, I break down all of my creations into active, passive, and neutralizing forces. Threes, sixes, and nines. Orbital pockets that tell on each other. From Kemetic philosophy, the older root that Pythagoras carried back from his years studying in Egypt.
I rely on that third force because otherwise, the making collapses. There has to be a secret third thing for the active and passive to rest on.
Now that we’re through the entry, let’s see about this room of a framework. No longer able to trust perception on an ocular level, we move inside. To the throat. What the mouth emits has first churned in the gut, after being received by the ears. The throat is the geometry where these three meet. Because the interior is where the future lives, the throat provides insights the eyes can’t register.
Throats choke when the gut spits noise into the mouth instead of signal. Creative and intellectual acid reflux. When there isn’t enough resonant signal to digest, the gut has no choice but to reflect static back through the mouth.
To conjure this geometry as a perception tool, I’m using symbols as gadgets for map walking and dial tuning.
Below the wall, you’ll learn their shapes and how they work.
