Thoughts on San Fran's anti-circumcision ballot.

So, Russell Crowe--who I tend to think of as a bit of a douchesnozzle--recently went on a twitter tirade about circumcision, and after recieving "blacklash" from Jewish followers, he tweeted a ~joke~ to a Jewish friend, Eli Roth, who quickly defended him:

"I love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and the funny little hats but stop cutting yr babies  - Source.

Great. So glad you like our "apples and honey" and "funny hats," the first being a symbol for one of our holiest days (Rosh HaShanah) and the other being a sign of humility and respect. Again. Douchesnozzle.

But let's get to the meat of this, shall we (kosher meat, of course).

I'm a disabled Jew against circumcision. I've gotten a lot of flack for it, since I'm a convert and my Jew-card is constantly being revoked when I question conventional Jewish thought.  I'm against it because I'm Jewish and disabled and had no choice about the numerous surgeries I had to "fix" me when I was a kid--and I have to learn to love the scars despite/because of the rage they often invoke. So, I take bodily consent--especially when it comes to permanent alterations to someone's body very seriously. Non-disabled Jews rarely engage me on this, but I refuse to give up all other parts of myself to be consumed into a monolithic expectation of what it means to be Jewish. Another post, perhaps.

Having said all of this, I'm outspokenly against San Fran's anti-circumcision ballot and the shit Crowe and others spewed. And it's part of something much bigger than circumcision as a single issue. When Crowe thinks he "knows what God really wants," and defines Judaism only as a religion and nothing else, his missing something crucial about what's going on here. Namely: Judaism isn't just a religion. It's a complicated mix of several cultures, histories, languages, and ritual practices. This whole thing is especially problematic because as long as world Jewry have been in diaspora (and I don't equate israel as the solution to that--though we can't have a critical conversation about Zionism/Jewish nationalism without talking about global and/or systemic anti-Jewish hatred), there has always been non-Jewish authorities telling Jews how to live--sometimes at the cost of mass expulsions, eradication, pogroms, and coercive cultural changes (i.e. the Anglicization of Jewish surnames). Add this to the historical, and often present realities, that Jews are often seen as security threats. These range from things like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to the ludicrousness idea that Jews caused 9/11 to blood libels that accused Jews of using Christian babies' blood to make matzah for Pesach. The "Monster Mohel" comic has to be understood as the perpetuation of this, because we miss key aspects of it when we treat it as a solitary issue.

Finally, there's a growing number of Jews who are deciding not to circumcise their amab chidlren (amab = assigned male at birth). They're replacing the Brit Milah (Covenant of Circumcision) with Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace). It's definitely not part of more orthodox parts of the tradition, and I don't see that changing any time soon since brit milah is such a huge part of it. Either way, I think it's important for Jews to have the space so that we can have this tough conversations in the context of our own lives and traditions.

Edited to add:


I x-posted this on my tumbr, and I got an ask. I want to add the ask here with my response, because it gives other details.

The reader asks:

I read your thoughts on the San Francisco circumcision ballot, and I understand what you're saying, but don't you think that every person should have the right to choose which religion they're part of? Let's saying you're born into a Jewish family and circumcised as an infant. Then as an adult you decide you're an Atheist. You're now forever scared from that religion. It just doesn't make any sense. Your religion should end where another person's body beings. Your religion should not give you the right to harm your child.

This is my response:

I appreciate your imput, but I think you missed my point. Like I said in the post, Judaism isn’t just a religion. It’s much more complex than that. You can be a Jewish Atheist/Agnostic, although theistic Jews would obviously say otherwise. See Humanitic Judaism and historical Jewish intellectual intellectual movements like the Haskalah. I personally find the latter troubling, but’s part of [European] Jewish history and set the stage for liberal forms of religious/observant Judaism. I should also say flat out that by “Jewish history” people usually mean Ashkenazi Jewish history; there is no Reform branch in Sefardic Judaism, for example. That’s why I always say that Judaism is composed of many cultures—a good book on this is Melanie Kay/Kantrowitz's The Colors of Jews: Jewish Politics and Radical Diasporism.

Anyway, the clear delineation between religious identity and a non-religious identity comes largely from a Christian idea (I would say an American/European Protestant idea). I’ve known many self-identified Atheist Jews who still keep Shabbat, have Passover Seders, etc. That’s not to say that there are Jews who are born into Jewish families who grow up not to identify as Jewish at all, which is perfectly fine, too.

Your second point is more complicated and it’s the crux of my post. There are Jews, and Jewish organizations, who are engaging in critical conversations about this stuff. And it’s their/our work to do that. Not non-Jews, or ballot measures that create overarching laws that dictate ethics across all cultures. Because the reality is that as much as correctly reject that the US is a "Judeo-Christian” (barf) country/colonialist project, there IS a Christian supremacy intact here. And Judaism has had a really precarious (to put it mildly) relationship with Christianity and the constant enforcement of Christian mores for centuries. I recognize that it isn’t a Jewish/Christian divide here, necessarily, but I would say that people who grow up in Christian traditions don’t always understand that Jewish ethics and cultures are profoundly different—no matter how those people identify now (i.e. someone who grew up in a Protestant household and is now an Atheist who still tends to see everything as between “me and not-god,” rather than being “amongst me, my people, and (not-) god.”)

Lastly, ballots like this simply don’t work. We’ve seen it when abortion is illegal, and we see it with the “war on drugs.” While coercive anti-circ laws might be on a smaller scale, it’s dictating ethics to communities in which everything is taken out of context and ignored. If this passes (which even if it did, I have a feeling it’d be overturned on constitutional grounds), ritual circumcision will just “go undergound” into really unsafe spaces.

On "Life."

It's narrated by one of my favorite biologists/scientists, David Attenborough. He's kind of like Carl Sagan for me, with a biological focus. The cinematography is absolutely stunning, and it shows an incredible variety of species across all kingdoms. The only thing that bothers me (of course you know I was going to talk about this) is the normative, heterosexist and binarist explanations of gender, sex, and reproduction. There's been no mention (so far) of the gender, sex and sexual diversity in non-human life forms. It often recapitulates the coy female waiting for the aggressive male fighting to the death in order to mate (which the female doesn't mind, since ze wants the "strongest genes." There's a slight exception with the female damselfly, who actively searches out a mate in really dangerous (close to predators) territory. And when male and female mate, they form a heart:

[image: close up of two Azure damselflies (Coenagrion puella)==insects that look very similar to dragonflies. The male is holding on to a blade of grass and the end of its long tale is attached behind the neck of the female damselfly, whose tail is attached to the bottom of the males abdomen. Together, there bodies form something that looks like a drawn heart.]

This is why work by people like Joan Roughgarden is so important. She's a trans woman ecologist who challenges essentialist fundamentals of darwinian thought: natural selection, mate selection, ethology (study of animal behavior), etc.

Also, not all animals have sex only for reproductive purposes. Dolphins, Bonobos, some species of antelope (often female-female sexual pairings), and others have sex for what what could be considered pleasure by human standards. Also, several marine mammals engage in massive orgies.

Chinstrap penguins have been known to form long term, monogamous relationship which they raise young. One-fourth of black swan sygnets are reared by homosexual (male-male) couplings.

And some animals, like the blacktip shark, have been observed to reproduce asexually (more specifically, parthenogenesis - the absence of the male gamete)
Lyretail anthias (Anthias squamipinnis) undergo chromosomal sex changes when necessary.

In the protozoan Paramecium bursaria there are eight sexes.


Life is beautiful and complex. And for every rule or axiom, there is always an exception or important nuance.

Can I be real with y'all?

I feel really sick right now. I'm achey all over. My joints are screaming at me. I'm vomiting and dry heaving. My eyesight is blurry and I'm getting these odd flashes of light in the edges of my vision. I'm afraid that my cortisol is dangerously low again. I'm scared that I'm having another bout of renal failure. I feel alone and all I want to do is curl into someone and cry. But I'm thinking being touched will make the physical pain worse. But I'm sure it would be worth it. I'm feeling really disphoric. I don't know if I want to hormonally transition, and if I do, I don't know where it's coming from. Is that how I want my body to look, or am I internalizing binarism, and do I have to reconcile those things? And even though I'm feeling dysphoric, I abolutely refuse to frame it as body-hate. I spent damn near all my life hating my body. Hating the spasms, the scrawny crip legs, the gnarled gimp toes. The leathery scars left by non-disabled white cis male doctors who cut me open and filled me with shame. I've learned to love my body by being around beautiful crip/queer/trans*/perverts. But fuck it. Let's be real. This hot mess of a body is hard to love all the time, and sometimes I feel deeply betrayed by it. Love isn't always easy, and I can't do it myself. I need to be touched and loved and caressed and fucked when I feel like I want it. I want to feel connected to something again. I want warm, cllamy skin against mine. I'm angry that my non-disabled friends couldn't hold my anger--that they sometimes caused it and silenced me when I called them out on it. I'm ashamed that I made them feel like they weren't good enough, even when they tried their damndest to support me and love me. This is what's underneath those scars I lovehate so much. Confusion, desire, revulsion, serenity, pride, passion, love, patience, anger. I feel really broken. And I'm trying to learn that I don't need to be whole to be beautiful.

For Mama.

You, of mud and ruach
daughter of thunder and justice
mother sister lover
of life.

I first lived in your womb and was impatient
to be in your arms
to hear you and to know you
beyond the walls of blood cells and membranes.

And even when I came to you unannounced and unready
you signed contracts in contractions of blood
to love me--even as it pained you
and in my infantile foolishness
I tasted freedom between gasps of air in underdeveloped lungs
after they cut the cord that binded us.

And now that you're mud and ruach and thunder again
I'm trying to find my way out from under the weight of your absence
tracing my way back through my scars on body and soul
back to the place where we shared the same lifeblood
before you named our difference by naming me.

But all I have now are the phantoms of distant dreams of that place
of that connection too early lived to keep as memory
and my heart is heavy with regrets of trying to rid myself of that cord
from the space I now call
my belly button.

For Julie Gaither. October 23, 1963 - September 26, 2010
Your memory is a blessing.

Living the Questions and Sitting at the Crossroads

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.--Octavia Butler

I haven’t updated in awhile. I always want to write, but each time I feel ready to, another emotional upheaval unsettles me. In these moments, I’m always stunned into silence, trying desperately to maintain the patience to undertake the arduous work of collecting shattered pieces of myself and how I understand the world and put them back together in radically new, unrecognizable ways. Language leaves me; time is suspended. I have more questions than answers, and I feel as though I’m failing because I’m not finding answers quickly enough. But things that’ve happened to and around me lately have challenged me to revolutionize my understandings, goals, and desires in finding these answers.


This very moment—for a lot of reasons—marks an end of an era. About three weeks ago, my mother and my hero went into a coma and was placed on life support. She has a progressive illness, so although we’ve been expecting it for years now, one is never really prepared for it. Amazingly, but not surprisingly, she pulled out of the coma twice and she’s back home now (Mama is seriously one of the most fierce, kick-ass people I’ve ever known). But as I sat there holding her hand as she was unconscious and on a ventilator, something in me broke—shattered, really. Although I’ve confronted my own mortality because of a very serious situation with my kidneys failing completely, and even though I’ve lost very close friends in traumatic ways, none of this affected/effected me as much as the thought of “losing” my mom. Memories that I thought I lost came flooding back in a storm that only a buried past can create. The echoes of our giggles while we painted Easter eggs filled every crevice of my being ; and I felt on my skin the sticky heaviness of the humid South Georgia air as I thought of us sitting together on the back patio talking as two adults about our fears, regrets , and goals. I told her, or her body at least, that I love her, that I’m proud of her, and I asked for her forgiveness for my part in the years long silence that engulfed us, and made us grow distant. It was a crossroads collapsing the past, present, and future into a single moment, linking Jeremy with Tali, of my mother’s cis, descriptively disabled son with her (gender)queer , politically crip child. It linked a mother who struggled in silence against seemingly insurmountable odds and who passionately and painfully struggles to accept me, with the courageous, powerful woman who lives with regrets and unfulfilled desires that I think she’s afraid to utter to another living soul. I saw her more completely then than I ever had before, and as I held her hand in mine, I also held her complexities, contradictions, and powerful fragility gently and appreciatively. And in the process, I’m allowing myself to do the same thing for myself.I’m still picking up the pieces and figuring out where they all go.


My best friend of four very intense years is moving to India for at least six months, maybe a year, on Wednesday. Kate, Kali, Katherine. I remember very vividly the first time I saw her. She was working at a tea shop in a mall—a place where lifeless consumerism flourishes. She still doesn’t believe me when I say this, but she breathed life into that place as she stood there with a dignified presence that literally took my breath away. I approached her, and she simply said “Would you like to try some tea?” I knew then, and even more now, that this was the start of a profoundly deep connection that would change me forever. And it has. Kate is one of the first people—one of the only people, who have shown me what true friendship is, who’ve given love in its more transformative form, and unconditional positive regard in its most supportive. In some ways, as I said goodbye to her for the last time last night, I mourned the death of who we are individually and the relationship we have now as both of us have said to one another that when we meet up again, we’ll be totally different people. We’ll have to re-introduce ourselves then. And although we’ll stay in touch, we won’t be able to feel each other’s touch—something, I think, we both need. Significantly, though, we’re going through this together. She’s going to India; and I’m going to California—both (metaphorically) totally different worlds than that which we know now, and in the process we sacrifice our sense of place, belonging, and connection in order to go on to the next and necessary chapters in our lives. The pain we feel is real. And although we say to each other, “see you later, friend,” both of us know that there’s a certain permeable finality to all of this. We committed to each other that we’ll push each other passed our fears and delusions of safety that comes with not taking risks and making sacrifices that we need to in order to recreate ourselves, to  become something wholly else and unprecedented.  So, crossroads again: holding at once feelings of intense sorrow that the end we always knew was coming is finally here, with the ecstatic excitement that the new beginning is just around the corner.

And so I sit here at the crossroads, lost in torrential sandstorms, not knowing what’s on the other side or even how to get there. This is what it means to live the questions. The answers will come when we’re ready to receive them.

have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

To Mama: Thank you for being a mother and a friend and for showing me that strength doesn’t always have to be loud. I love you.

To Kate: Thank you for being a friend and a sister and for being an anchor through some really hard times. Faire well, my love. You have what it takes.  I love you, too.

For Fuck's Sake: On Negotiating Non-normative Embodiment, Shame, and Sex

I tend to write my blog posts in essay form--something, I've come to realize, that gives me an intellectual distance--one that keeps me shielded from becoming to vulnerable.But this one is different: it comes from a place of emotional anguish that I’m just now articulating in ways that I think-feel are concise and intentional. But I must preface this: Whatever I write shouldn’t be misconstrued as me implying that people who don’t live with these things shouldn’t have lovers, including multiple ones at the same time. What I’m writing about is the ways in which people with non-normative bodies usually become hyper-aware of how our bodies take up space and how, sometimes, there doesn’t seem to be much space for our bodies. And so it begins…

I often talk and write about loving one’s body, but I’ve realized recently that I continually fail to talk about something of utmost importance: the process of loving one’s body. By this I mean the ways in which we find and/or create language that articulates love for bodies, how we find connection with and through other bodies, and how occupying erotic spaces with another person/other people is a way of unlearning shame and insecurities. I think it’s important to recognize that neither shame nor insecurities about our bodies are existential, “inherent in the human condition,” or felt with the same immediacy and pervasiveness by all persons. Rather, they're products and processes of systemic oppressions that steal our bodies, and the language to describe them in erotic ways, from us.

We have to frame all of this in terms of ableism, fatphobia, racism, oppositional sexism, transphobia and transmisogyny, cissexism racism, sexism, classism, serophobia, and somatophobia (the impulse to conceptualize things in a disembodied way), and how they inform and create discourse of bodies and sexuality.* The tendency, though, is to depoliticize the ways in which we occupy bodily and sexual spaces by reducing these complexities to simple “preferences.” I read a lot of personal ads that say, “no fats, fems, or blacks” on sites like manhunt and okcupid. They then qualify it: “I have nothing against them, it’s just a preference.” This fails to recognize the ways in which non-normative bodies are understood only in the shadow of normality, and those of who are forced to negotiate living in that shadow end up internalizing it. Our bodies because repositories of shame; they’re desexualized and/or hypersexualized and/or fetishized, and some of us are read as asexual (not that there’s anything wrong with actually being asexual).

Personally, I’ve spent most of my life “comfortable” living in the shadows. I feel safe there. But I pay a tremendous price. I look around at my friends who have both normative bodies and multiple lovers, and I feel the sting of isolation, confusion, and sometimes resentment. I’ve been feeling that sting very intensely lately; I’m beginning to realize that I’m read as the very flirtatious, fun to be around friend. But, I echo Loree Erickson’s sentiment: "I want to be both a good friend and a good fuck.” I’m also tend to be a counselor of sorts, always inhabiting very intimate emotional spaces with people I love—and although I value it and understand it as beautiful and erotic, it always tends to end there. I sometimes feel that I’m in people’s headspace so much that they forget that I have a body—one that I’m trying my hardest to reclaim, recreate, and call home.

Perhaps it’s because I’m not as direct as I need to be, but I also realize that I simply don’t have the language to be direct. As someone who’s been the “good [disabled, asexual, desexualized] friend” for as long as I can remember, I simply don’t have the words to be blunt, honest, and open. I’m working on it, but I need people to meet me half-way. I need people to realize I can’t consistently love my body in a vacuum, that I need to be naked, fucked, and told that I’m beautiful in that extremely vulnerable place. It’s the only way any of us—especially those of who have to constantly resist oppressive representations of our bodies can develop ways to resist internalized somatophobia and shame.

I want to breathe Eli Clare’s and Audre Lorde’s words into me:

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.
This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.
The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision - a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
---Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic

But it isn't only oppression that lives in my body, our bodies. The many experiences of who we are, of our identities, also live there. I know so clearly that my queerness, my disability, reside in my body--in the ways that I move, dress, cut my hair; in who I am attracted to and who's attracted to me; in my tremors, my slurred speech, my heavy-heeled gait; in the visceral sense of muscle sliding over muscle as I lie with my lover; in the familiarity of tension following tremor, traveling from shoulder to fingertip. Identity, of course, can live in many places all at once--in the communities we make home, the food we eat, the music we play and dance to, the work we do, the people we feel wild and passionate about, the languages we speak, the clothes we wear. But so much of who I am is carried in my irrevocably different body.

Irrevocable difference could be a cause for celebration, but in this world it isn't. The price we pay for variation from the norm that's defined and upheld by white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism is incredibly high. And in my life, that price has been body centered. I came to believe that my body was utterly wrong. Sometimes I wanted to cut off my right arm so it wouldn't shake. My shame was that plain, that bleak. Of course, this is one of the profound ways in which oppression works--to mire us in body hatred. Homophobia is all about defining queer bodies as wrong, perverse, immoral. Transphobia, about defining trans bodies as unnatural, monstrous, or the product of delusion. Ableism, about defining disabled bodies as broken and tragic. Class warfare, about defining the bodies of workers as expendable. Racism, about defining the bodies of people of color as primitive, exotic, or worthless. Sexism, about defining female bodies as pliable objects. These messages sink beneath our skin.

he stolen bodies, the bodies taken for good, rise up around me. Rebecca Wight, a lesbian, shot and killed as she hiked the Appalachian Trail with her lover. James Byrd Jr., an African American, dragged to death behind a pickup driven by white men. Tyra Hunter, a transgendered person living as a woman, left to bleed to death on the streets of D.C. because the EMT crew discovered she had a penis and stopped their work. Tracy Latimer, a twelve-year-old girl with severe cerebral palsy, killed by her father, who said he did it only to end her unbearable suffering. Bodies stolen for good. Other bodies live on--numb, abandoned, full of self-hate, trauma, grief, aftershock. The pernicious stereotypes, lies, and false images can haunt a body, stealing it away as surely as bullets do.
But just as the body can be stolen, it can also be reclaimed. The bodies irrevocably taken from us, we can memorialize in quilts, granite walls, and candlelight vigils. We can remember and mourn them, use their deaths to strengthen our will. And as for the lies and false images: we need to name them, transform them, create something entirely new in their place. Something that comes close and finally true to the bone, entering our bodies as liberation, as joy, as fury, as a will to refigure the world.

The work of refiguring the world is often framed as the work of changing the material, external conditions of our oppression. But just as certainly, our bodies--or, more accurately, what we believe about our bodies--need to change so that they don't become storage sites, traps, for the very oppression we want to eradicate. For me, this work is about shattering the belief that my body is wrong. It began when I found communities committed to both pride and resistance. It was there that I could begin to embrace irrevocable difference--come to know the grace in my shaky hands, the rhythm of tremor and tension in my muscles, the joy in my transgendered butch body, sun on my back, a lover's hand on my belly.

I am still in the middle of this work. I think of my lover cradling my right hand, saying, "Your tremors feel so good"; saying, "I can't get enough of your shaky touch"; saying, "I love your CP." Shame and disbelief overwhelm me until I stop and really listen to the words. Another layer begins to shatter… At the end of the day, I went to sleep adoring irrevocable difference.

In the end, I am asking that we pay attention to our bodies--our stolen bodies and our reclaimed bodies. To the wisdom that tells us the causes of the injustice we face lie outside our bodies, and also to the profound relationships our bodies have to that injustice, to the ways our identities are inextricably linked to our bodies. We need to do this because there are disability activists so busy defining disability as an external social condition that they neglect the daily realities of our bodies: the reality of living with chronic pain; the reality of needing personal attendants to help us pee and shit (and of being at once grateful for those PAs and deeply regretting our lack of privacy); the reality of disliking the very adaptive equipment that makes our day-to-day lives possible. We need to do this because there are disability thinkers who can talk all day about the body as metaphor and symbol but never mention flesh and blood, bone and tendon--never even acknowledge their own bodies. We need to do this because without our bodies, without the lived bodily experience of identity and oppression, we won't truly be able to refigure the world, turning it to a place where, to quote the poet Mary Oliver:

. . . each life [is] a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.

--Eli Clare, Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness

* I think it's also very important to recognize that these oppressions don't effect our bodies, or how we understand them, in the same way, or even with the same immediacy. I'm still forming this thought, so bear with me.

Words and meanings--

transphobia - hostility towards, people who are transgender or who otherwise transgress traditional gender norms

cissexism - the belief that cis (non-trans) people are more "natural" or superior to trans people.

oppositional sexism - according to Julia Serano: Sexism that is rooted in the presumption that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive, “opposite” sexes, each possessing a unique and non-overlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires. It targets those who do not conform to oppositional gender norms.

serophobia - hostility towards people who are hiv positive. This can be direct violence, or something like outing.

trans misogyny - a kind of sexism that targets people on the trans feminine spectrum.

transgender - Also, trans; A general term describing people whose gender identities/expressions differ from what is expected. “What counts as transgender varies as much as gender itself, and it always depends on historical and cultural context,” (Stryker 2008: 19).

for more trans related definitions, check out Gendersaurus Rex.

Learning the Language of Butterflies

I'm not interested in you telling me who you are. I want to know you ache for, what feeds your soul. I want to know if you can promise yourself to never again make apologies for your own intensity. I want to know whether or not your afraid to sit with yourself, and not move from distraction to distraction, and what that fear can possibly teach you. I want to know if you're willing to let the tidal wave of confusion and anger and rage and disappointment to wash over you, consume you. I want to know if you'll let sorrow, yours or another s, be your cocoon.

I want to know if you can teach me to remember always that storms will pass, and that we never wade it alone. I want to know if you're willing to learn the language of the butterflies so that they can teach you how to be gentle, but resilient, and that the only way we can make it to our destination is by braving life's strongest winds together. I want to know if you truly understand that we don't burst forth from the ashes like a phoenix, but as a butterfly, who experiences transformations slowly, painfully--and who understand that those transformations are necessary for survival. Can you, like the Monarch, feed on its own chrysalis as a life source, knowing that your past will always be a part of you? I want to know if you can treat others as butterflies. Can you allow someone to simply find rest from fluttering on the tip of your forefinger? And will you not hold them back when they journey without you?


In the end, it doesn't matter what you study or what your goals are. What matters is whether or not you know that a butterfly only lives about 24 days, and that you, too, have to learn to accept your own mortality.

Find beauty. Be beauty. And then flutter off into the sunset.