Hello all! I’m excited to share the full recording of the interview I did live on air on Vallejo, CA’s OZCAT Radio in mid-September. The brilliant and incredibly supportive Vallejo Co-Poet Laureate Kathleen Herrmann interviewed me about my new book, Itinerant Songs, and my small press, Recenter Press. We talked both personal and political: my many moves, ancestry and identity, and the impacts of imperialism on our communities and ecosystems. Support community radio and local authors and give it a listen! Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Today I’m celebrating 8 full years of sobriety from all intoxicants. Making the decision to completely give up alcohol and substances has been one of many foundational choices I’ve made on the lifetime road of recovery. There was a multi-years-long period before this sobriety date where I had already been reducing my alcohol / substance intake, with long strings of abstinence, but my first 10-day Vipassana meditation course in 2017 really solidified for me that alcohol use and walking a spiritual path could not go hand in hand for me. I could take it or leave it, sure, but I saw that most of the time, I was either harming myself or harming others when I was drinking or under the influence. Substance use exacerbated my already difficult problems, and while those problems haven’t disappeared, they have become more manageable. Abstaining from substances is a vow and commitment to myself — and really to all those I come in contact with — and its foundation has been necessary for the progress I’ve made in other areas of my life. It’s one of the five Buddhist precepts of conduct that come from the accumulative experience of monks and lay people that create the foundation for a service-oriented life. Refraining from intoxicants, killing, sexual misconduct (which I interpret as romantic / sexual relations outside of a committed relationship), stealing, and false / harmful speech are all ideals which I hope to strive towards, not for any kind of self-righteousness but for the benefit of my own and others’ well-being. When experience has proven that those indulgences have caused me and others’ suffering, then it is in my best interest to strive towards a better way. Sobriety, for me, is a structural pillar. If I don’t have that as a part of my foundation, everything I build on top of it will be weaker. I become more susceptible to inevitable storms. When my foundation is strong, only then am I ready to build my life upon it.
Recommending:
Gina Myers’ brand new poetry collection, Works & Days, from one of my favorite small presses, the Philadelphia-based Radiator Press. When I got my preordered copy in the mail I read it all in one sitting. This is absolutely what I needed to read, especially as I am dealing with some high-stress work-related things in my life currently. I love Gina’s pop culture references to critiques of toxic workplace cultures under capitalism, from Dolly Parton to The Twilight Zone to Aliens. Her workplace testimonies. Her sharpness, wit, and subtle humor. Her assertions that we all deserve better than this. This is a book that needs our attention and demands it.
To answer the final line in Works & Days, “What is it that keeps you alive” — Recovery. Taking walks. Talking to my friends. Sharing meals. My family. Swimming. Reading books from people I admire. Sharing other people’s work. Going to church. Good sermons. Praying. Meditation which I forget to do. Affection. Creating. Looking at art. Being offline. Being of service. People watching. Dancing. Nature. Drinking water. Getting really good sleep (rare). Learning something new. Seeing something new. Exploring. Meaningful work. Getting my head out of the mega spiral and back into the world.
Amy Berkowitz’ Tender Points is brilliant and precise, a scalpel of investigation and testimony of chronic pain, traumatic experience, and the bridge between them.
Amy writes: “When it comes to the mystery of my pain, I can’t resist the impulse to solve it. I have all these pieces, and I can’t stop my hands from wanting to jam them together until some sense emerges.”
I read this during my own not-quite-solved experience with pain, first chronic pelvic pain and now dispersing itself in many directions, knowing my own history of trauma and that it all must have to be connected somehow. The pain having to show up somewhere. All of the doctor’s appointments and ruling things out. The pushing and the advocacy. The back and forth. The nights with little sleep or rabbit holes of research. The fears and the desperation for answers. Just learning to “live with it” and accept the pains as a new constant, a new normal, a new voice that is always in the middle of every conversation trying to interrupt my own. The body a vessel and an ever-signaling mystery. I have my attention on you — I am looking right at you — what is it you want me to see? What is it you want me to do? I am seeing. I am doing. The answer in part: that my body is a fist that is having trouble undoing itself. It is always waiting for an enemy around the corner so it has become its own enemy. The fight-or-flight response has been active for way too long. The beating it does to the whole system. The multi-generational experience of it. “It feels like just another body part. An always-clenching in my shoulders, neck, back, legs, hands.”
Tender Points should be read by anyone living with pain or loving someone in pain. By anyone who has experienced trauma or loves someone that has. It will shine a bright light on the truths that are so often downplayed and dismissed. The solidarity of reading a work that makes the “invisible” visible, that says I believe you.
“the angels have no wings
they come to you wearing
their own clothes
they have learned to love you
and will keep coming
unless you insist on wings”
/
“you are not
your brothers keeper
you are
your brother”
— Lucille Clifton, from Mercy
