Year: 2020

I’ve thought about Invisalign, as in “I’m a woman of independent means, I’m going to treat myself,” but I don’t think it’s going to bring me five thousand dollars worth of joy, and isn’t it just stemming the tide on the inevitable?

One of my witchy healers started our session recently with, “Notice if there is a part of your body with a message for you” and you know what? My tooth told me, “Get used to being ugly.” Ugly. Wow. Ugly? Six years ago II thought, “There will always be some people who think you are beautiful, and that group of people is shrinking.” I’ve gone in and out of clutching the Conventional Beauty VIP pass, and it’s weird. In 9th grade, after years being overweight, I returned from a sabbatical to the Kingdom of Tonga tan, blond and skinny: the same person, but suddenly popular. A decade later I shaved my head and wore only bulky overalls after getting raped, and the same thing happened in reverse. 

It’s a little like the skit where Eddie Murphy goes undercover as a white guy and everyone gives him free stuff. Telling a person outside of conventional beauty standards that “looks don’t matter” is a tiny bit like telling a person of color you’re colorblind. In addition to my white privilege, I wonder what role my looks had in my admission to grad school, in success in certain classes, in all the doors that have been opened and all the free stuff, to my enjoyment of dating and meeting new people: I walk up calm and comfortable in my skin, assured they will like me, that I won’t have to work to improve or impress.

And all of that has been slowly disappearing. An invisibility starts to set in. Faces don’t light up as much. I get chosen less, swiped left. I receive less attention, interest and curiosity. In short, I have a lower status. There’s also a reckoning; much of the love and respect I’ve received has had barely anything to do with me. 

Yet I feel smoking hot, and more worthy of my own love and respect than ever. I swim or do yoga every day, and give my body what it delights in and needs. I can heal deep wounds in people in a matter of hours, and increasingly, I realize when I’m being an asshole in the very moment I am being an asshole, and I can stop, laugh, and apologize. On warm days, I water the garden naked and the sun can’t keep her hands off my skin. I skinny dip with salmon and seals, and every kind of wind is constantly caressing my cheeks, whispering sacred messages straight from the gods, reminding me to pay attention and wake up. I feel powerful, loved, sexy, and alive. 

So much so that I don’t care much about my expiring VIP pass. [Well, that’s not true, wrestling with this attachment is what has me writing this.] And even… even… it’s kind of nice being invisible. I can turn my freak factor up waaay high before anyone starts to notice. Instead of presenting my pass to the guards, I can sometimes slip past the checkpoints unnoticed and get away with more and better shenanigans. When I was young and conventionally hot it was a pain in the ass! I couldn’t even dance freely in public without some dude coming up close uninvited and energetically invading me.

I don’t want to pump what precious juice I have left into laminating that pass (although I am going to enjoy the hell out of it, like a sunset, as it fades). I’ve decided instead to invest in a different power. A “protect this heart-breakingly beautiful planet over my dead body” kind of power, a “bring shame into the light, and make people uncomfortable in a good way, risking my status to bigger the boxes for everyone” kind of power. I want to love big and wide, knowing my heart is resilient.

The amount of admirers shrinks, but the amount of pleasure doesn’t, nor does the love. Are potato bugs and possums any less awe-inspiring than hummingbirds and butterflies? Aren’t fading and dying things, death, and decay also quite beautiful? 

Now, when I stare at my growing shock of grey hair, my saggy chicken neck and fucked up teeth, I practice my troll faces. I’ve always wanted to be funny, but as a pretty girl I found it hard. Approval was granted before I spoke, so it was mine to lose. Now I bulge one eye ball and snarl my lips to reveal the wild, crooked troll tooth, and my children run screaming with peals of laughter. If I straightened my teeth I’d lose this new freedom and expanded comic repertoire. Why would I want to change that?

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Over breakfast we linger and tell stories of youthful arrests, hallucinogenic epiphanies, and heartbreak. Last week we played improv for three hours on the front porch in the sun, in costumes, waving at the neighbors. I haven’t been this still, imaginative, and present since the Peace Corps. 

So it’s a good time for housemates, and…

Just after Shelter in Place took effect, we called a house meeting because one of our housemates was still dating, seeing clients in person, and running around town like a COVID slut, touching who knows what doorknobs and spittle splattered surfaces. Did we have the right to ask him to stop doing these things? And our other housemate wants to take a job at a grocery store…

So the idea I want to propose (and it’s just an idea. I am not a medical health expert and I don’t think now is the time to implement this), is that if this goes on for a long time, or if it goes and comes back, or goes and a different one comes back–for those of you who don’t have housemates or a family you enjoy, ESPECIALLY for any lone folks or single parents….maybe it would be ok to form a COVID tribe.

This would be a very serious thing. I floated this idea to my friend the other day, suggesting it would be like being fluid-bonded, a term from polyamory when lovers choose to have sex without barriers, and she said, “Ya but way more serious than that. You can live the rest of your life with Chlamydia.” So there would be a great deal of communication around this, as anyone you choose for your COVID tribe you would be trusting with your life. Anything they touched, any person they stood near, you and the rest of your tribe would be exposed to. 

We would need to be extremely responsible with this. I’m not proposing this as much for folks like us, with six together already, or nuclear families who mostly get along, or even couples. I’m suggesting someone who is alone could approach someone else who is alone, or a family, and ask if they could be a COVID tribe together. This lone person could play board games with the family, share meals, and there would be a high level of communication around what boundaries everyone needs to feel safe. 

A single parent might form a COVID tribe with another single parent, taking turns to shop, letting the kids play together. And again, there would be a level of communication akin to what polyamorous or coop housing folks are used to, even greater, as you would be trusting each other with each other’s lives.

And some folks won’t be compatible. We wouldn’t be ok with our housemate working at a grocery store if my 73 year old father lived with us. A healthcare worker wouldn’t be compatible with someone with asthma. Folks with similar levels of risk tolerance might choose each other, forming tighter or looser boundaries accordingly.

To be clear: I am not saying to run out and do this now, before the peak of this, before we understand entirely what we are up against. More that it’s a way of being to dream into, if this is to be our new normal. It’s a better alternative to suppressing crucial human needs, only to rush out the minute controls are relaxed to reinfect ourselves. 

I’d love to hear your comments below.

Be safe and gentle with yourself. Get outside (at a safe distance), move your body, turn inward, feel your feelings. For most of us now is not a time to do anything particularly well or produce. We are in a crisis. Just be. More thoughts to come.

Big love, Florie

Wild Warriors,

What wild times we are in. New York is renting ice rinks for dead bodies. My client just layed off six good employees. A wise Wild Woman is planning to camp in the woods for the next however many months so she can afford to live. And so and so’s cousin/friend/brother-in-law just died from COVID. And this has happened, is happening, will happen, everywhere. This virus will likely touch everyone, disrupt every corner of our planet, every way of life. 

So much change and so much unknown.

And

And

I am so afraid to say all the things I feel compelled to say, because I can only say them from privilege. Right now everyone I love is healthy and safe. We have organic kale and avocados and big bags of pinto beans and rice. We have a front porch full of sun where we can wave and talk with neighbors, and a car to take us to wild places with wide paths and space to be wild and alone. We will pay the mortgage this month. (That we even have a mortgage.)

But I promised whatever it is that’s coming into me–the mugwort that kept me up until 3am, the birds and frogs and golden poppies, (I don’t want to be that person who says “download,” but that’s how it feels)–that I would say it. When I was at Putah Creek yesterday with my kids, teaching them about wild radishes, Juniper naked in the creek, Japhie making a seesaw out of an old log on an exposed root, me swimming laps against the current, I felt joy in a way I haven’t in a long time. This is the school I want to give them. This is the simplicity I’ve longed to have. 

Business as usual has come to a halt. Change is almost always unwanted and painful. No one, aside form the wisest of witches, is thrilled to pull the Tower in the tarot. And yet, look….the skies above China are clear. Some argue more lives will be saved by the clean air than lost to the virus. And all the flights we’d be taking, all the things in the shut down factories we’d be buying, do we really need them? I’m an overscheduler, overachiever, constantly planning, doing, going, getting, doing. It’s a sick old western world spell that’s needed to be broken, and for now it has been. 

For me, it’s as if a wise parent forced me to do what’s really best: slow down, stop your business, pare down, BE with your loved ones, your feelings, be aware this abundance could vanish, these beloveds could die. Be awake and alive. GO OUTSIDE! Don’t go to restaurants, to bars, to work for 40-50 hours, to stores. Strengthen your closest bonds. Write, garden, read, play ukulele. Woman, Sit Still! 

And you, wild warrior who is not in the thick of it (those of you in the thick of it, please forgive me. I don’t want to be the friend who tells you while you’re in the thick of it about the wonderful growth in your pain), don’t you feel it too? It’s going to take something this big to break the spell, to let things slow down enough and possibly fall apart enough, for all of us to pause and reflect, “Why am I running around like a crazy person with all this working, doing, buying, while I long for things like presence, creativity, and joy that I can actually have?”  

When I was a kid, I loved it when a big storm hit and the electricity went out. We’d light candles, play board games and cook on the wood-burning stove. We’d call everyone we love and shout, “Are your lights out too?!” I was always so sad when all the devices turned back on and things went back to usual. 

I don’t want the folks on furlough to remain so, as their savings drain away, or for the virus to stay with us until it’s our own cousin/friend/brother-in-law who’s died, yet I do hope the machinery isn’t back up and running too soon. When I pull away from our personal losses I see the opportunity for a break in the Way Things Are. I see the Tower on fire, burning all that no longer serves us, and I hope the spell is broken long enough for a collective awakening. 

My beloved wild human, I pray you are healthy and safe, that you have food to eat, that your loved ones are health and safe, that you can get out into the local wild spaces that are GLORIOUS right now, and I pray that your spell, our spell, is broken, and stays broken. Knowing human nature and history, I imagine we’ll be asked–as we did after 9/11–to go back to business as usual, and we will. I pray we don’t.

For further reading I highly recommend Charles Eisenstein’s recent article The Coronation.

I’m currently getting deep, intimate, and magical with online sessions on Zoom. If you or someone you know needs support, email me at drfloriewild@outlook.com to set up a free 15-20 minute free initial consult.