RIPE
on long love, crushes, and the embodiment of pleasure parallel to the privilege of experience
There is someone on this planet I have spent years loving. They have taught me the power of attention, earth’s pace, the value of messy, talking as love, food at the center of it all, the potency of my divergence, and what loving eyes actually feel like. The relationship this person and I have has enhanced my softness, communication skills, and love for myself. There are few things I want more in this life than to be the lover I dream of being, and I feel I am knees deep in this trajectory. As I continue to grow through long love and the embodiment of being alive, I recognize pathways for release, peace, integration, and letting the body be a body.
As I slowly unravel the word settled from my vocabulary, I am ripe with the potential to deepen my embodiment. I did life obtusely because trauma is a motivator. My initial inklings of embodiment showed up relationally, which is deep though ran alongside material stability as it relates to my disabilities and recovery from childhood poverty. As new relationships emerge, embodiment meets my lungs, the nooks of rest in my body, the way I do and do not hold myself at the center of gravity, how and where I gaze, experimentation, how to transmute anxiety into care not stained by childhood wounds, watering but not drowning each other, and the energetics of it all.
Crush dynamics can be so consuming however, my crush and I have been etherly (of the ether) creative about our contact. It makes me aware of my pleasure embodiment, the privilege I have to experience, and the continuum of hard healing I have engaged to be able to securely relate. This is a gift.
My most grand pleasure in life is to experience. I was Upstate since Saturday evening indulging in the relentless care of my community. It was like floating from joy point to joy point. We were drunk on each other’s love, biodynamics from the Finger Lakes, and the neighbors’ blue cheese. God told me that I came to Earth to love people who take it and give it back over and over again, and I believe them. There are white people in my community, people living through unfathomable grief, recovering addicts, mentally ill folks, the whole gamut — and what this requires is checked dissonance, loving interrogation, lots of jokes, and shared values around worthiness.
I am noticing a tightrope of possibilities regarding my burgeoning life as a respected and well-known artist and it is all culminating so that I just have to be. Movement and dance exists in my bones while music and sound hover just above the surface of my skin patiently awaiting permeation consent. Care Manual is now digital, ‘89 Toyota comes out July 22, The Deep Play Institute and BULK SPACE will have me this summer/fall, and most notably land soon come.
I know this newsletter is deeply personal, and does little to call in other artist’s voices at the moment, but my hope is that these oral to text present-time histories do what they need to do. Care Ecology will always be free, which is why many more of you ought to pay the subscription fee. I love this newsletter so much, it is currently accessible for/to me, and I want to keep it that way.
XOXO,
CARE ECOLOGIST / GOSSIP GAY / KAMRA