Image is from the Siluetas series by Ana Mendieta (NOTE: I posted this essay on Facebook this past November and have since been asked by many to make it more easily available to read. As I am currently navigating the kind of autoimmunity mentioned in the first paragraph, it feels even more important to speak about. This essay is excerpted from a book of essays I am currently finishing about healing beyond the human.)
May 7, 2022·edited May 7, 2022Liked by Sophie Strand
I've loved reading your freely-shared work since I discovered it very recently. This piece has now brought me in to paid subscription.
I cannot speak highly enough of how your words touch parts of me in ways that other words don't quite reach, giving more substance to mystical, unformed experiential notions and senses that I yearn to press more closely into.
I affirm the clear sense that in my own deepest wound lies my gift, and that 'it's not about me'. It's not about my healing and wholeness. And it simply can't be about everyone who's hurting suddenly and miraculously having free access to all the right 'healing' modalities. That my part, my service, has to be immediately available to be given and received. That there is something far, far greater to see and to inhabit and into which to invite others than any single recognised path can lay claim to.
Oh Sophie - the yearning is deeply felt in me and I hear it in you. Your writing gift has drawn me in pretty much the same way that Bayo Akomolafe's did when I discovered him in 2015 - I am immersed and soaked in so much deep wisdom and poetry from such words that live alongside my own, often wordless, yearnings and I don't know what to DO with it all.
Grasping it, understanding it cognitively, organising it and writing about it - seems to me at this moment not to be the path that will take me to greatest service. In opposition to 'follow your bliss' I more and more see the need to follow my greatest heartbreak.
This morning I felt that I had to stop. That I just didn't know what or how. I had to, yet again, surrender to the not knowing, but also I did want to know why I didn't have personal support and instead took all my solace from inner experience of divine reality, oneness with all that is, and beautifully-written insights from others whose offerings resonated with what I already know. Sitting alone in my room so much of the time.
Giving, offering, serving, caring, feeling is its own reward of course yet still I miss real-life connections where I get to be seen and supported.
I love your imagery of doorways. It has to be that. Often in my paintings I have made portals. Now, today, I have to acknowledge that, just as you are big and wide enough to hold your own doorway open, I too am for mine. I don't know if I've made complete sense but I just needed to talk to you.
May 15, 2022·edited May 20, 2022Liked by Sophie Strand
The whole thing. Especially the last paragraph.
I have been thinking for the past two years that I will be able to get my RA back into the trajectory of reducing inflammation that I was on pre-pandemic. Once I am settled safely into a new home among Black and Brown bodies in an environment less impacted by climate change than the SF Bay Area, I'll get healthy again. I've quietly knowning that this is an adolescent notion at best even as I complete the final leg of the journey here on the raped land of the Coast Salish.
This piece arrives in my world to commune with this emerging thought I've been having that there is no "getting over" "recovery" "healing". What there is is what I know to be true through my sensual experiences. The way through is to relax and expand into it. In that way perhaps it becomes possible to incorporate the "trouble" and move with it, evolve with it out into the new emerging that is not quite known yet.
To remember that the superpower of the living is that it is always becoming, never backtracking despite appearances, this is the trajectory that you have inspired me to name just now. If I refuse the stagnant narratives of social justice, perhaps I can be released from the stranglehold on the wildly (and increasingly more rapid) evolving nature of being in my center of the universe allowing "me" to slip easily into the blackhole that has caught me, in any case. Letting go to dance with the horror of patriarchical white supremecist anthropocene into this other way of being I caught a glimpse of on the horizon.
Oooo, and we should discuss onmicentrality sometime, Soph.
Thank you so much for articulating this Sophie. I practice as a herbalist and you have put words to a niggling inside of me around the current paradigm through which we practice “health making”. I question whether two people sitting in a room trying to fix something is perpetuating dis-ease, the problem dressed in different robes. Your words, and many things I’ve heard you say in podcasts have been a springboard for many of my own explorations around healthism and the weird world of wellness - you have definitely made some good soil for my own ideas to seed and ferment, revolutionising the way I think about and approach my craft. Deep thanks again 🖤
I've loved reading your freely-shared work since I discovered it very recently. This piece has now brought me in to paid subscription.
I cannot speak highly enough of how your words touch parts of me in ways that other words don't quite reach, giving more substance to mystical, unformed experiential notions and senses that I yearn to press more closely into.
I affirm the clear sense that in my own deepest wound lies my gift, and that 'it's not about me'. It's not about my healing and wholeness. And it simply can't be about everyone who's hurting suddenly and miraculously having free access to all the right 'healing' modalities. That my part, my service, has to be immediately available to be given and received. That there is something far, far greater to see and to inhabit and into which to invite others than any single recognised path can lay claim to.
Oh Sophie - the yearning is deeply felt in me and I hear it in you. Your writing gift has drawn me in pretty much the same way that Bayo Akomolafe's did when I discovered him in 2015 - I am immersed and soaked in so much deep wisdom and poetry from such words that live alongside my own, often wordless, yearnings and I don't know what to DO with it all.
Grasping it, understanding it cognitively, organising it and writing about it - seems to me at this moment not to be the path that will take me to greatest service. In opposition to 'follow your bliss' I more and more see the need to follow my greatest heartbreak.
This morning I felt that I had to stop. That I just didn't know what or how. I had to, yet again, surrender to the not knowing, but also I did want to know why I didn't have personal support and instead took all my solace from inner experience of divine reality, oneness with all that is, and beautifully-written insights from others whose offerings resonated with what I already know. Sitting alone in my room so much of the time.
Giving, offering, serving, caring, feeling is its own reward of course yet still I miss real-life connections where I get to be seen and supported.
I love your imagery of doorways. It has to be that. Often in my paintings I have made portals. Now, today, I have to acknowledge that, just as you are big and wide enough to hold your own doorway open, I too am for mine. I don't know if I've made complete sense but I just needed to talk to you.
Much love ❤️
Your reach is amazing
The whole thing. Especially the last paragraph.
I have been thinking for the past two years that I will be able to get my RA back into the trajectory of reducing inflammation that I was on pre-pandemic. Once I am settled safely into a new home among Black and Brown bodies in an environment less impacted by climate change than the SF Bay Area, I'll get healthy again. I've quietly knowning that this is an adolescent notion at best even as I complete the final leg of the journey here on the raped land of the Coast Salish.
This piece arrives in my world to commune with this emerging thought I've been having that there is no "getting over" "recovery" "healing". What there is is what I know to be true through my sensual experiences. The way through is to relax and expand into it. In that way perhaps it becomes possible to incorporate the "trouble" and move with it, evolve with it out into the new emerging that is not quite known yet.
To remember that the superpower of the living is that it is always becoming, never backtracking despite appearances, this is the trajectory that you have inspired me to name just now. If I refuse the stagnant narratives of social justice, perhaps I can be released from the stranglehold on the wildly (and increasingly more rapid) evolving nature of being in my center of the universe allowing "me" to slip easily into the blackhole that has caught me, in any case. Letting go to dance with the horror of patriarchical white supremecist anthropocene into this other way of being I caught a glimpse of on the horizon.
Oooo, and we should discuss onmicentrality sometime, Soph.
Thank you so much for articulating this Sophie. I practice as a herbalist and you have put words to a niggling inside of me around the current paradigm through which we practice “health making”. I question whether two people sitting in a room trying to fix something is perpetuating dis-ease, the problem dressed in different robes. Your words, and many things I’ve heard you say in podcasts have been a springboard for many of my own explorations around healthism and the weird world of wellness - you have definitely made some good soil for my own ideas to seed and ferment, revolutionising the way I think about and approach my craft. Deep thanks again 🖤
this is a pure relief to read... I'm so enlivened by your vision, THANK you.