This is a story about a bowl.

A bowl with a tiny hole leaking salt.

The image of it haunts my notebook.

So much so that when I arrived at an aizome indigo workshop with Chinatsu Nagamune of codo experiment, I barely got the words out,

“I’m obsessed with this image of this bowl leaking salt—” didn’t even draw it first, just started clumsily cutting the katagami directly into the mulberry paper painted with fermented persimmon (someone please have twins and name them mulberry and persimmon).

I listened hard when Chinatsu said,

Each step: the cutting, the rice resist paste (which is the consistency of peanut butter), the dyeing, the oxidization, the dyeing again, the oxidization again, the rinsing, and then finally the drying, —each one was a revelation!

The night before the class, digging through my fabric stash, I found a 33 foot roll of narrow kimono silk tucked into a bamboo box. A gift from my parents from years ago, I had forgotten about its existence.

So, I threw it in my bag, imagining that it would be too precious to use — but then the bowl took shape, and inspiration dragged me along at a breakneck pace—we dyed the silk that very weekend.

Now the bowl needed to exist in 3D.

And who else but dear Akilah, who fiercely declared her all-in to the making of this vessel, never imagining what she was getting into.

The bowl had warped once, and I loved it.

It warped a second time and I loved it more.

Akilah is known for her perfect vessels, and this —

We talked about adding color but this bowl wanted to be the color of bone, of eggshell. It wanted to be an early vessel, something essential and undeniably handmade.

And Akilah, through all of it, kept bringing me back to my vision, when I would say oh maybe it’s fine in this other form, she would say,

and would firmly guide me back to what was taking shape through her.

A bowl with salt coming out of it.

There is so much more to tell you about how these rituals unfolded and how that bowl fell off of its ropes and I caught it before it crashed into the giant boulder that Jonah had lugged into the space, but we’ll dive into all of that next time.

I aizome dyed 36 pieces to commemorate these four rituals. Each piece uncovered a new layer of grief for me as I made them in Chinatsu’s peaceful studio with her vats of living blue indigo. They were surprising, humorous, tender, painful, strange, and each one became precious to me.

There are a few sweet remaining aizome from the series of 36 that I made for our four rituals. Maybe one is for you, even if you were too far away to come.

an aizome for you

You can view the remaining hangings at this link, and should you wish to purchase one, you can venmo me $108 (I’ll take care of shipping). Note in your venmo which number you want + your address.

🧿 I am also actively seeking new places to share these rituals, and so happy to be in conversation with you.

So much more to say,

Wishing you sandwiches pink with beets,

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When Emily Orling (who shares a name with my sister) invited me to do something with her for her A.P.E. show, How to Bear the Unbearable Body, we thought of one million possible collaborations and then settled, as I always do, on THIS TERRIFIES ME & SO I MUST DO IT.

In this case, reading the book I wrote for 13 years*, aloud, to an audience.

A book about the worst thing.

A book I could not stop writing.

A book that was, perhaps, never a book at all.

At first I imagined an endurance piece, where I would read all of it: all the drafts and weird bits and boring bits and primary sources, and maybe it would take three long days and sleepless nights and I would just keep reading, and Emily would paint and we would talk about art and people would happen into the gallery and wonder what the f*ck was going on.

I would be protected by ways they only held strange snippets of the story.

But that was never what Don’t Cry Emily wanted to be.

It wanted to be a story told to you, a story I read in disjointed snippets to Emily and César Alvarez on their screened-in porch. What shocked / satisfied / honored / awed me most was to look up and see that César and Emily were ugly-crying in concert with me as I read.

To be that vulnerable and to be that held, felt to me like the answer to Emily’s question of “how we bear the unbearable” - together and together and together.

Through our conversations and awkward disassociated rehearsals and one-on-one sharings and conversations with other amazing theater makers**, Don’t Cry Emily began to become itself: a piece richer and deeper and more exquisitely held—both by Emily’s live art work & César’s improvised score, as well as by the 90 people who crammed into the gallery to be in this work with us.

And after it finished, when a friend asked,

I said I felt like I could do it a thousand times and still be interested in it. Because in this melding of writing + performance, this third space opened up for me —

César said, after we finished.

And it was that extra part, that was a total surprise to me, of people saying,

and,

or, just being unable to speak through tears as they touched in with their own grief, that gave me a sense of purpose that was somehow more than art making had offered me in the past.

So when Mollye Maxner offered this grant of space at 33 Hawley as part of our sweet A.P.E. cohort***, I said yes, while being, again, completely terrified.

I am starting to think that terror is just a type of awe.

This rendition is just for 18 people. (The life number in Judaism)

I’ll do it 4 times. (The death number in Japan)

Would love to see you there.****

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If you are elsewhere and want to support the future of this work, and ooo—what if I bring Don’t Cry Emily to you! (?) ! Write me and tell me where to show up, and donate here.

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🧿Next time I have to tell you about my obsession with aizome : indigo dyeing with katazome : rice resist and about the lovelies at codo experiment.

^{*The work previously known as, The Last Speaker of a Secret Language that was so graciously held by super writer-editor Sumanth Prabhaker and dipped into by so many friends, Brady Dunklee, Karen Sama, Steph Skaff.}

^{**Olivia Clement, Mary Beth Brooker, Sarah Marcus, Tracy Einstein and Allie Wittner in homes and studios and on the phone.}

^{***Trenda Loftin, Kathy Couch, Jo Kent Katz, and a sweet solo for Ezekiel Baskin}

^{****Look out for Akilah Scharff-Teo’s new sculpture, and evidence of conversations with Boyuan Gao and Chelsea Granger.}

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I was born in the season of flowering trees, which other Taureans will be quick to assure you is the best time to be born.

Coming home from a life-changing training at The Embodiment Institute, where we learned to be like trees, I was greeted by our sweet tree collective—all 14 flowering trees were in bloom! In hues from ivory to riotous fuschia.

Trees flowering inside, trees flowering out.

They felt a symbol of aliveness, of our collective joy, and yes, always, of death. A few days later the rains came, and the blossoms are mostly gone.

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As a child, I always say I knew Japan through my father’s stories, but I also knew it through the Japanese House at the Boston Children’s Museum, which is why I’m so thrilled to get to share WCBF there on May 25th. Come!

We will continue to drum and dance and grieve and celebrate WHEN CHERRY BLOSSOMS FALL and while at the Eric Carle Museum. I was so moved by this little human in the audience:

I continue to ask what are the things we can only do together. Connect with me to be part of the work that’s flowing, and tell me about your answer.

NORTHAMPTON

🌸Saturday, May 16th 12:45 pm Reading at RISE Festival, thank you to the WOWness that is Jarrett J. Krosoczka, with a 3:00 pm Book Signing

BOSTON

🌸Monday, May 25th, at 11:00 am and 1:00 pm for readings and signings at the Boston Children’s Museum for AAPI day on the KidStage. RSVP!!

-
🌸with these amazing teachers: Prentis Hemphill, Kasha Ho, Osq Trujillo and Alta Starr

🌸🌸I love to tell kids that there are 72 seasons in Japan!

I keep thinking about this brilliant kid asking Ross Gay something like if gratitude is an acceptance of how things are, then where does yearning fit in? It feels to me like Japan + CherryBlossoms holds this answer, smashing together gratitude and yearning into mono-no-aware. What do you all think?

I found light too in sharing Cherry Blossoms with this delight of babies at Lexi’s amazing High-Five books in Northampton, Massachusetts. And more to come!

BOSTON

🌸Saturday 14th March 4:30-6:00 at the Substation with Rozzie Bound (big people, little people, we will interactive craft! loving this bar + storytime vibe!)

NORTHAMPTON

🌸Wednesday 8th April, 5:30-9:00 pm There’s a wait list for THE JOY OF GRIEF at SubRosa, work full of signs and grief and hilarity with Chelsea Granger and Joyous Rebellion and Studio Feeler.

AMHERST

🌸Saturday 11th April at 2:00 pm at the Eric Carle Museum (this will be such a blast, crafts for sure, and fingers crossed there will be taiko and kid-dancers!)

—

🌸(The first time I went to the Substation was to participate in a community Rube Goldberg machine, and hoping they still serve the Orange Line beer.)

🌸🌸And I have to tell you about the hi mark

For each work I surface, a universe of work remains unshared. (200 sextillion stars in the known universe : only 4 constellations I recognize🌸)

This constellation is about grief, a galaxy most vast. (And it comes out TOMORROW!)

preorder!

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Right now, as we try to CONTAIN IT ALL, I keep thinking, I know this feeling. I know what it is to try to house the beauty and terror of ALL OF IT in my body. I have learned this at grief’s feet.

I ache like little Yuna does, at the steady beauty of our snow out here, two months of it and snowing still. I am heartened by friends standing up, speaking out, friends who continue to make and gather, because together, we are transmuting terror, we are weathering apocalypse.

Yas Imamura (this heartfelt, talented GEM of an illustrator) has made a book that has, through her brush, become itself. It is not just beautiful or unique or perfect, it is ITSELF. Which is all I could dream of as a book-mama🌸🌸.

And in a recent (Tracy says I was only 4/10 awkward) hello with Grace Lin, her sweetheart Alex asked what it’s like to have my words translated into Yas’ stunning artwork, and I said,

Which, ok, is a lot more religious than I usually veer, but. It feels true. Thank you, Yas, for the blessing of this story. (Yup, still 4/10 awkward).

You know how I love a good celebration. When it gets warm enough we’ll all hanami together (cherry-blossom-watching picnic), but until the weather warms:

NORTHAMPTON

🌸Saturday 21st February, 10-10:30 am at High-Five Books (will be so sweet)

🌸Wednesday 25th February, 5:30-9:00 pm I am so honored to be part of The Joy of Grief at SubRosa with Chelsea Granger and Joyous Rebellion and Studio Feeler. This work is full of signs and joy and the universe of grief. And full of my favorite people.

BOSTON

🌸Friday 13th March 5:00-7:00 at the Substation with Rozzie-Bound (big people, little people, we will interactive craft! loving this bar + storytime vibe!)

AMHERST

🌸Saturday 11th April at 2:00 pm at the Eric Carle Museum (this will be such a blast, crafts for sure, and fingers crossed there will be taiko and kid-dancers!)

🌸And I am so happy for your invitations to come read, hit me up!

might take the shape of a conversation with a real live human at your local bookstore! You might say, “hi, though humans are more awkward than amazon, i really want you to continue to exist. so may i please have a copy of WHEN CHERRY BLOSSOMS FALL?”

And if you are far away, I’d love to sign a copy for you and these nice folks at Odyssey Books will mail it to you! Like magic!

And remind me to tell you more about Don't Cry Emily a constellation in creative mourning ritual that had its first lab with my geniuses Emily Orling and César Alvarez of Spirits Go Blah at the full of light APE Gallery.

Write me, I miss you🌸🌸🌸.

🌸The Big Dipper, the little dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion

🌸🌸I love you, Alvina Ling, life-changing editor.

🌸🌸🌸My child said the other day “what is the word for when you miss someone, but they are right there with you?” That’s how I feel about you, my friend.

I’m interested in the kinds of vigilance we practice when faced with an uncertain future.

Vigilance is the part of grief I’m noticing right now. After Em died my vigilance was around PICK UP YOUR PHONE. I would spiral if I couldn’t get a hold of loved ones, certain they were dead.

Vigilance acts as a protector of our grief.

And I want to be curious with you about “the specific kind of disaster you expect,” as the wonderful Somatics practitioner Tracy Einstein calls it. Together, Tracy and I want to offer

a gathering that uses somatics and writing to locate vigilance in our bodies and connect our apocalyptic imagination to our life stories.

reply to this message or comment with a YES if you are curious

We may offer this on zoom and in person in Western Mass, so gauging interest.

Where does your vigilance live? Is it around personal safety, food security, violence, race wars, housing, earthquakes, fires, communication, social relationships, people we love dying—

And what life stories does that unwind for you?

I always want to make sure everyone is ok. And at the heart of my vigilance around all the apocalyptic futures I can imagine, is a very real fear of not belonging.

Yeah. That hooks right into the heart of things for me.

And as Grover said to me recently, do what helps you soothe your vigilance.

and let us know if you’d like to join us.

First, the boulder smacking into the surface of the water and sinking in slow motion, landing with a muffled thud on the floor of the ocean. When the sand settles, the boulder is still there.

This is one way I recognize grief.

I felt it land the morning after the election. Heavy, immoveable. But its weight felt to me to be a palpable grounding. Grounded in the here and now. Grounded in what is. The fluttery anxious activity of the pre-election year, the anticipatory grief of all the what ifs (that I still feel), were more painful to me than being knocked down by what is.

I’d take the what is over the what if.

It’s familiar to me: the thud of understanding we get when someone is gone. When they are really really really not coming back.

Death is a gravity problem. Something that is immoveable and out of our control. Not something we can solve around.

But what we do in the face of death, the way we choose to grieve, and love, and connect, the way we build community and solidarity in grief — there’s so much movement in that grieving, so much air.

The morning after, I felt a familiar craving for connection and creativity. We felt it in the grief of the early pandemic, when we made ReachYou. I felt it in the years of making and writing after my sister died.

And I am so curious what we’ll do with this gravity problem, all the ways we will choose to access a super-charged creativity, choose to access joy and resistance and connection, choose what we do in response.

That’s how I’d rewrite the what if, I’m curious about the what we do in response to what is.

welcome, grief (in your ears), recordings of these posts, now exists! Thanks for your patience as the first set stormed your inbox, from now on I’ll aim to have the audio versions come out with the text ones. On Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This is one way I recognize grief.

I felt it land the morning after the election. Heavy, immoveable. But its weight felt to me to be a palpable grounding. Grounded in the here and now. Grounded in what is. The fluttery anxious activity of the pre-election year, the anticipatory grief of all the what ifs (that I still feel), were more painful to me than being knocked down by what is.

I’d take the what is over the what if.

It’s familiar to me: the thud of understanding we get when someone is gone. When they are really really really not coming back.

Death is a gravity problem. Something that is immoveable and out of our control. Not something we can solve around.

But what we do in the face of death, the way we choose to grieve, and love, and connect, the way we build community and solidarity in grief — there’s so much movement in that grieving, so much air.

The morning after, I felt a familiar craving for connection and creativity. We felt it in the grief of the early pandemic, when we made ReachYou. I felt it in the years of making and writing after my sister died.

And I am so curious what we’ll do with this gravity problem, all the ways we will choose to access a super-charged creativity, choose to access joy and resistance and connection, choose what we do in response.

That’s how I’d rewrite the what if, I’m curious about the what we do in response to what is.

welcome, grief (in your ears), recordings of these posts, now exists! Thanks for your patience as the first set stormed your inbox, from now on I’ll aim to have the audio versions come out with the text ones. On Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

I recorded the first 8 posts for those of you who love to listen.

And today, facing all the grief of what is and what we wish would be, just this short story from our boulder.

I’ll be thinking of you, as we sort which things we can carry, and which are not ours to lift.

*thank you to the amazing kaira jewel lingo for reminding me of this story.

Mark time in hummingbird visitations

In soil of new countries

Hair shorn very close and then allowed to grow

Dog hair that is still found clinging to socks even years after the dog is gone

By how long a smell lingers

Rocks, because sometimes marking time is to mark that it has not passed at all. 

Pens ticking off days. Better if carved into a stone prison wall, carved to make a hole that allows in light to see. 

Mark time by dancing. Well, I do not. But some might. Some might dance Balkan mathematic masterpieces in 17/4 time with footwork that challenges the MIT professors who adore it. 

Mark time by getting better at something

Mark time by getting worse

Mark time by how fast ice melts. 

How many times the snow plow comes. 

Seasons are fine. 

School years are fine.

Decades are fine. 

Mark time by how many nights your heart beats you to sleep

How many moons you’ve driven alongside at night, singing with your sister who cannot sing any more

Mark time by filled journals (48). Around 4 per year. 

Keep tally of how many ink refills you’ve spent, then by bottles of ink when you switch to fountain pens, then by printer cartridges when it’s time to print. 

Because marking time is just an exercise to prove to yourself that time has indeed passed. A tally to counterbalance the looking back. Because looking back feels more like again, like hauling the past into the present, like it’s all happening in this one instant.

And still you mark time.

1. Winter registration for Rewilding is still open!

2. And if you're local, join me for a FREE grief series at the Sunderland Library.

I like my grief to be oceanic.

I like it vast and wild and too large to hold.

I once met a woman in New Zealand who told us about parts of Te Waipounamu where humans weren’t allowed to set foot.

“I never need to go there,” she said, “I just need to know it exists.”

The oceanic in me is preserved even as I write and make. I like knowing I will never write it all, that there are depths unfathomable, places I won’t take you.

That a missive to you, a dipperful of ocean, still smells like the sea.

.

a few favorites to share with you:

1. In conversation with Janine Kwoh today, I was reminded me how comforted I am by the oceanic. Her book is a lovely handbook to grieving.

2. Winter registration for Rewilding is still open!

3. And if you're local, join me for a FREE grief series at the Sunderland Library.

Touch kettle, warm

Scoop loose tea

Fill ochre teapot

Drips of tea en route

Absorb with slipper. 

Pour

Steam tastes the air

Sip

And I’m in. 

Remind your body it is time to write. Remember it is a sensory creature who can be cued by the weight of the writing coat, the blast of hot electric air, the scratch of matches, the waft of candle, the bitter twist of tea, the monitor turned portrait to mimic a manuscript, and since my meditation bowl is usually out of reach, a pen clang on my metal desk lamp will do to clear the air. 

I write. 

No phone, no Internet, no one-last-thing, dirty dishes in the sink, objects that will not be picked up.  On a perfect day there is no can I or should I or am I good enough? I have poured enough mana into my workroom now, so I don’t wander into it wondering, wait, what did I come in here for? My whole body knows what we came in here for.

And I sit down at this secret garden that seems always to grow vines overnight, and I start hacking away. 

Part inspiration and part maintenance. 

I bind the writing with time too. 

I capture the days. 

I date stamp and keep a factory log of my writing days, clocking in and clocking out, banning devices, setting timers, scheduling blocks; all of the time management skills that future humans will laugh at.

But abandoning into this practice saved my life. 

Became my life. 

Life and work were knitted in such tight stitches, that in the beginning writing days were grieving days. And those days needed to be contained. 

The enclosure of intense emotion was a habit I started decades ago as an actor, when I played a woman desperate to die. Before each performance I would open a used chocolate tin with a tight lid and let her out, at the end I would close her back in.

I always find some way to close the work now, another clang on the lamp, or tucking a printed draft into its folio and tying a nice tight knot. I slip off the writing coat, I gather my dishes, I give my body the signal that the work is contained and safe and it’s okay to stop. 

These are my bread crumbs out. 

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I don’t know why avoiding grief never occurred to me, just that I wanted to run straight at it, tackle it, consume it, be bloated with it. I followed impulses no matter how strange they seemed.

In the mirror of Liz’s royal blue bathroom, I pulled my long mermaid curls into two braids that stretched past my shoulders, and took the scissors in hand. Liz and Jonah stood behind me, my mouth wide in a nervous grin as I caught their eyes in the reflection. I got as close to my scalp as I could. I sheared away the weight of all that hair. The hanks came off in my hand and we howled with laughter as tears streamed down my face. My hair was shorn and uneven and Jonah took the clippers and buzzed me down till the hairs stood up like little trees,

Noooo! Em would howl if she were here, like Amy in Little Women,

Your one beauty! 

The continued return to the page is what helped me slow down time, make sense of the rituals and articulate why exactly I felt I had to shave my head till it was downy as a baby chick. 

To not see her when I looked in the mirror. 

To mark the moment when everything changed. 

To know by the growth of my hair that time had passed. 

And yet. 

The sense it made was in my body, in my cells, the sense it made was a conversation with death that I was having not on an intellectual plane, but on a physical one. I was embodying loss. 

At the non-denominational shiva we held, a Luo friend told us, we shave our head in Kenya too—after the death of an immediate family member. I felt a shiver of affirmation—that this impulse I followed was older than I could trace with my own mind, that in one impulsive gesture, I had rooted myself in grief, connected myself with the grief of countless others.

Years later when Em’s best friend got married, and my hair had grown past my shoulders, I shaved a quadrant of hair above my ear down to a baby chick again. I shave it periodically all these years later, like a tattoo I make again and again, a reminder that steadies me.

In that moment, I wanted to mourn her loss—the loss of her continuation: there would be no wedding for her, no child, no family. I wanted to mark myself as someone who was still in mourning. But it was more than just the loss of her. In the buzz close to my skull I knew there was no way to separate the loss of her from the eventual loss of everyone I love, from the eventual loss of my own self as I feel my body age.  

This loss belongs to us all whether we invite it or not, this loss is our birthright.

what rituals have you created / will you create? …now is a time that is never too late.

Gathering online for Vanessa Chakour’s ReWilding Through Writing and Mapping the Wilds of Grief.

Come write with me.