Sometimes amid damaging patterns, the loss of people we love, our creeping self-doubt and bone-tiredness with grey—we need reminding our life has been here, beautiful and shining, the whole time. Read more
The Sound Of The Bell As It Leaves The Bell
July Westhale
On The Beauty Of Setting Boundaries: ‘No’ Is A Love Word
Perhaps I love the female octopus because she is like the very best people I love: shape-shifting according to circumstance, principled in her priorities, and completely no-bullshit. When she needs to, she exercises extraordinary boundaries. Read more
The Heavenly Torture Of Grief, Of Winter, The Bulb Before The Tulip
It’s the time of year when the weather acts like a Philip Glass score. The body can’t get enough of the mikva of hot water, and we turn inwards. “What day is it?” one of my students asked in class last week, twirling his pencil. “The 87th of January,” another quipped back, without looking up. Read more
A Portrait Of The Self As Self
It’s challenging, isn’t it? The way we come face-to-face with the things we’d like to leave in the last calendar year, the things we expect ourselves to be able to cleanly cut away from just because we scrawled that we would in 2019? Read more
How To Throw Our Bodies Into The Fire If We Need To
Is allyship privileged? Read more
On Covert Subjectivity: The Truth Contains Multitudes
What needs to happen to make opinions facts? Read more
Sensing Danger Before It’s Visibly Apparent (And Other Useful Lessons In A World Rife With Destruction)
Humans are repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged. Read more
The Nonconsensual Time Travel Of Trauma
This is San Rafael, 2015, but suddenly it is Indio, Riverside County, 1994. The judge has the same face as any judge. The drone of names being called for attendance transcends decades, buzzing in a low vibration that makes me feel nauseous. Read more
Being Femme Is A Radical Act Of Resistance
Sweet queer family — let’s watch ourselves! We are obviously and absolutely not exempt from gender bullshit, included, but not limited to, misogyny and femmephobia, despite being a part of a political identity that has, itself, been historically and systematically oppressed. Read more
The Troubling Trendiness Of Poverty Appropriation
It’s become trendy for those with money to appropriate the poverty lifestyle — and it troubles me for one simple reason. Choice. Read more