Year: 2021

One of my most intimate recent dates involved mutual….

sobbing. Bundled up in his outdoor kitchen beneath three story buildings, a distant brass band on the streets of Oakland, our salmon and kale going cold, just sobbing out our encroaching acceptance and deep grief that the earth as we’ve known her is dying.

Chopping garlic he told me about the tide pools in he grew up with in Laguna Beach, full of starfish and sea slugs, abundant abalone, hermit crabs, and occasional octopuses, and returning with his kids in recent years to the same spot at low tide, to only a few kinds of seaweed and snails, virtually lifeless.

Part of me still believes humans can awaken in time, I have to keep that hope skin in the game, imagine my kids’ future without water wars, believe my work matters, but too many clients and friends have shared their conviction in recent days: it’s too late, it’s over. The fires, tornados, hurricanes, pandemics, floods, and tsunamis will escalate, until the earth has scourged the virus that is humanity off her back.

And what a fucking beautiful planet. I grieve giving my children a more impoverished childhood than my own. I grew up with crawdads in creeks, cats eaten by coyotes, my third grade teacher like Gandolf, hiking us right out the classroom and up the redwood studded hill to find spring’s first wild iris. My girl can catch chickens and my boy races bikes under streetlights at dusk, but there is nowhere wild they can freely go.

I remember a moment when my daughter was one, a warm Central Valley night. She stuck her head out the window, warm freeway wind hitting her face. It felt like a scene in a movie, a mother/daughter teaching and sharing about the world, a first, first head out the window, and the phrase, “I give you….” bubbled up in me, but we were passing car dealerships and the backs of strip malls somewhere between Vacaville and Davis on I-80, fluorescent lights and……it’s not the world I want to give her.

I’m sobbing as I write this.

If you feel it too, and have any grief you would like to feel together in community, join us when the veil between worlds is thin, Saturday November 6th, 10am-1pm. All kinds of grief are welcome. The earth wants our tears, it’s good manners to cry.

Saturday, November 6th

10am-1pm PST

$50* suggested donation

Online

 

*$25 Students, activists, etc.
Those who need to come for free please come.
No one turned away for lack of funds.

Learn more and register here.

A zoom link will be emailed to you after registration.
Registration ends at 9am 11/5.

I’ve started drumming on my hot tub deck. It started the night my neighbor put black duct tape through my pro choice sign and broken-record-shouted, “Florie is a baby killer” for HOURS, deep into the night. First discovering punk music on my ukulele, I suddenly felt an urge, like lightening, sweep through me and I ran into the house, wiped the cobwebs off my snake drum, and rushed up onto the deck. 

Crazy sounds came out of me, ancient sounds, high pitched wild woman “ay yi yi yi yi yiyiyiiyiyyiiii” that could be heard from blocks. It must have been quite the scene for the suburban dog walker, this middle aged white lady, dead lawn strewn with scooters and bikes, street light illuminating her pacing in circles, call and response with my neighbor sing-song shouting, “Kill some babies Florie.” 

Something has grown and snapped open in me that I don’t want to go away. There’s a welcome fed upness. All my life I’ve seen the best in people, believed excuses, stood smiling at monologuing men while my feet hurt, given all my apples and branches and breastmilk away. But I’m done now with excuses. I’m done with men who don’t handle their shit, so that we have to, whether that’s wiping their pee off the toilet seat, calling the police to get my drunk neighbor off my lawn because he never went to therapy when his wife died, or trying to explain why it’s not ok for the leader of our country to gloat about grabbing women in the pussy.

Watch out motherfuckers.

I’m also fighting fatigue because I’m iron deficient due to these Texas Chainsaw massacre perimenopausal periods. I’m talking crazy Pele lava gushes in the middle of the night, changing saturated tampons hourly, days and days of blood. When I stood up after my appointment at the bank the other day, I was like, “Oh shit.” 

“I’ll walk you over to the teller so you can make the required deposit to set up your new account.”

Fuck. I’m pretty sure you can’t use a bank bathroom, especially during COVID, so I take these tiny steps, thighs clenched, through the roped line to the teller. If there is a Guinness record for longest kegel, I am challenging it. Finally at the counter, I search my bag and find a white cotton mask the co-op gave me when I forgot mine the other day, reach up under my short dress, and jam it in my underwear. Whoever’s behind the security cameras must have been like, “Whoa, can I get some help please? What is that lady at Teller #4 doing?!!! Does she have a gun in her underwear?!”

This could all be solved with hormone therapy, probably even just birth control, but I am afraid of losing this ferocity. I feel like the quintessential crazy perimenopause lady but I don’t feel crazy, I feel sane.

For Halloween wouldn’t it be rad to have a huge mass of women dressed up in charred dresses, carrying signs saying, “We are the witches you burned.” We could smear ourselves with menstrual blood and make just the right the people who need to, quake in their boots. It’s time for witches to make their comeback. It’s time to rematriate the land. Patriarchy needs to be over. Colonialism needs to be over. Relentless extraction needs to be over. 

We need bitchy crones. We need fierce brujas. We need women crazy enough, and privileged enough, to shout and drum on their suburban hot tub decks and get those motherfuckers off of our lawns, out of our forests, out of our rivers. 

Covid was a break in the spell. Do not go back to sleep. 

We need you bruja, stay fierce.