Our Lady of Sorrows
I’ve been working on this oratorio for a while now, on and off. It only feels right to put my hands on it when I allow myself to dip down into the depths of the thing and I haven’t quite been ready yet. Also, I cry whenever I stitch into it, which blurs my vision and takes twice as long.
People speak of grief in all kinds of watery metaphors: it comes in waves; we drown; it cascades from our tender faces. And, it’s a great, heaving, rippling outwards—directionless love maybe, or seasickness.
Soon, when I’m done replacing these stark outer stitches, I will mourn the little project too (when it’s done, will that mean something?) and won’t know what to do with myself once it's not keeping my hands busy.
#journal #misc works
August 2026
Last summer, I found a swallowtail caterpillar in my farmers market dill. I fed it, watched it grow, and cried when it wrapped itself in chrysalis because I knew that meant it would change.
Weeks passed and it never emerged. A whole winter came and went, and then all of spring. It remained enshrouded on my kitchen counter for a whole year—cold, hard, absent, neither this nor that. The chrysalis became obsessively symbolic to me, religiously analogous to my own internal state. And I couldn’t bear to do away with the sad, failed thing even though it depressed me. I believed (against reason) that someday it would emerge and that when it did, I too would finally be transformed in the way I was waiting and being rather violently dissolved for.
Today, a whole year later, the chrysalis was cracked and empty!
#journal
June 2026
I’ve spent much of my life as a dancer in one way or another—long weekends at feiseanna as an adolescent and long nights at the strip club a decade later. Now, long retired from both, subtlety and flow still inform much of the way I move through the world.
As a ~courtesan~, the dance is everything; the choreography makes or breaks the illusion and the fantasy is my armor as much as it is a stranger’s indulgence.
In other realms, I work with my hands: folk craft, music-making, bodywork, the setting of an altar, the tracing of a butch lover’s strong shoulders.
The exchange of ideas and resources in community spaces. God, of course, who playfully reveals and conceals herself from one moment to the next!
All this, to me, is the great and mysterious dance of being and becoming.
#journal
May 2026
Irish lace collar made by my great-grandmother
February 2026
Coaster—Bar Madonna—The Marlene—Houston, TX
#ephemera #sw
February 2026
Christmas card and artist's zine
O, holy unrest. I spent this year learning about love and trying to keep it. And, I’ve been stripped down to my most essential parts: “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit” (John 15:2).
Despite this paring down which seems to be the lens through which I view the world as of late (especially as the dearth of winter sets in), I collect a wide assortment of roles yet: sex worker, femme lesbian (as erotic/political complement of butch, of course), herbalist, archivist, pseudo-academic (a means to an end), maker, wanderer, inquirer, mystic. Lover, I still like to think—despite the grief and the guilt of growing apart.
Well, I’ve tasted the wine of deepest devotion. If you’ve seen me lately, I likely bear the marks of circumstance. And I hold wisdoms that I’m still digesting. May we all come to know the highest expression of love in this new year—in our communities, with our closest beloveds, and in our own intimate processes. The bright Child is born!
My most favorite combination of words comes from an address to God taken from an anonymous letter written in the late Middle Ages, presumably from a priest to a penitent in distress: “O deep treasure, how wilt thou be unearthed?” So I will rise now and seek You, pursuing beauty to its lair.
Blessed holiday and warmth for the new year, dear friends.
#journal #misc works #photography
December 2025
California State Parks entry permit—Humboldt County, CA
#ephemera
May 2025
I’ve become foggier in recent years—perhaps with the times or with whatever conditions I bear or with a growing repulsion with academia’s integral role in the scope of imperialism.
In turn, within my own changing landscape, my goings-about have shifted to much less heady processes. I still have ideas, sometimes. I read when I feel capable of thinking in words. And, moreso, I make things. I dance. I spin wool and press herbs into skin and I photograph the textures of things. I mend, on occasion. I tend to archival boxes and I was my hardwood floors on my hands and knees on the first of the month. I get tired early and I knit in my rocking chair.
An essay by Joan Parkin and Amanda Prosser called “An Academic Affair: The Politics of Butch-Femme Pleasures” (appearing in the seminal dyke anthology, The Persistent Desire) describes the apparent “erotic aridity of the classroom” in which:
Since the seventeenth century, academic discourse has predicated bodily existence on thought (I think, therefore I am): any vestige of corporeal origins is shamefully closeted within disciplinary divisions that find their material expression in the desks and tables that tuck more than half of our bodies neatly away, safe from potential erotic contact with other bodies.
The current topicality of sexuality in the academy is an institutionalization of sexuality, a further example of what Foucault has called “the deployment of sexuality,” a term covering the production of sexuality by institutions, their will to “know” (observe, classify) the pleasures and pains of the body in order to contain its subversive potential. Although sex has so artfully penetrated the academy, it is safely screened through institutionalized discourses such as law, pedagogical theory, and gender politics.
Anyway, there is grief in losing sharpness of mind. And preciousness to gain from returning to these most erotic, embodied realms that ask something so different of us.
#journal
April 2025
Landscape—35mm
#photography
April 2025
In his text "Myths to Live By," Joseph Campbell compares the home to a marsupial pouch—a second womb of sorts where human young are nourished and protected until they become self-sufficient (quite unlike most other mammals, who are born "complete" and who achieve independence in a matter of days/weeks rather than years/decades).
Cold, wet hours invoke a sense of vulnerability regardless of life stage, I think. It feels apt, then, to spend them curled up in the hidden organs of one's own realm—warm, held, evolving!
#journal
November 2024
For the first time in a while, I saw a wild rabbit on my walk home. I knew that I was about to because of the way something in the air always shifts in the moments before. And they seem to appear to me in periods of stuckness of some kind, in times when I'm looking for guidance.
Being the way that I am, then, I call it a sign. While I recognize this as an interpretive liberty I take in order to help me better navigate the present (as is the role of any narrative), this creature that has revealed itself next to me and whose presence I can prophesy these days feels undeniably pertinent—a divine intervention, surely.
I follow the rabbit into the depths of the thing...
#journal
October 2024
Key card—Hôtel Ritz—Paris
#ephemera #sw
September 2024
Lizard skin from the lace and textile museum and a gifted pouch of gold, frankincense, and myrrh—Berkeley, CA
Rest easy, special friend and most deeply mesmerizing being. Some relics from the day Fable and I first met.
#journal
August 2024
Luggage claim tag—Hotel Grand Stark—Portland, OR
#ephemera
August 2024
My father keeps honeybees and I sit with them whenever I return home. To "tell it to the bees" is an ancient tradition where the hives are told of new loves, losses, departures, returns, and other important happenings in a keeper's household.
I whisper to them about ripe desire, suffering with heart, and the relief of epiphany. The world blooms, and there is nectar.
#journal
August 2024
#journal
July 2024
Evanston, IL
#self
July 2024
From my collection of vintage prayer cards
#ephemera
July 2024
Key card sleeve—Chicago Athletic Association—Chicago, IL
#ephemera #sw
July 2024
New Buffalo, MI
June 2024
Travel notes from a client
#ephemera #sw
May 2024
The Siren—Detroit, MI
#photography #self
May 2024
Bartender napkin notes—Candy Bar—The Siren—Detroit, MI
#ephemera
March 2024
Key card sleeve—The Siren—Detroit, MI
#ephemera #sw
May 2024
Drawing from a client
#letters #sw
May 2024
Harbor Grand—New Buffalo, MI
Eternally pierced with devotion, inspired by deepest desire, ruled by innermost passions—
Our dear Bataille speaks of the "violence of rapture before the beloved" and what else is there really, but the humble surrender to that which is great and dynamic and beautiful?
I always feel this most presently on my birth day, which is each year a reminder to renew a deep courtship with wonder, to be ceaseless in curiosity, to be brave, to cling to something real and pure, to open the heart and breathe through it.
Eternally learning self-portraits. Birthday suit is only apt.
#journal #photography #self
May 2024
Birthday card from a client
#letters #sw
May 2024
Spring in Chicago is so delicious and charged with lush beginnings. My whole world is new and full of bluebells and silver maples and wild rabbits and spring ephemerals, all fairytale-like. Life right now mostly involves many beautiful strangers and anything worthwhile starts out that way, as a seed or a spark.
Moving eastward is very strange. The ecology is completely different and I feel vaguely out of sorts in a primal way. The air feels foreign. Spring doesn't quite feel like spring because it lacks the flora and fauna of my landscape. There are no quail or California poppies or wildflowers of the great west where I would normally turn to them for comfort and friendship.
I returned home for a brief visit last week and was met with kaleidoscopic waves of nostalgia with each bar of golden afternoon light, in the breath of sea mist in a yellow field, on the caress of the wind at sunset.
The petrichor of home has a singular resinous musk that is sunk deep into our ways of knowing—I do not take lightly what it means to be able to take peaceful refuge in the lands where I was born.
Blessed Beltane, and may the flames of resistance in all realms continue to swell.
#journal
May 2024
Amtrak—somewhere in the Great Plains
Things are happening hard and fast and I do my best to revel in the throes of it all. Not as a stratagem, but with a sincerity born out of surrender.
Because I'm prone to the most excessive dreaming, I imagine things. Sometimes I can't tell what is a premonition and what is just an urge or a grand romanticism—though they've always felt one and the same to me.
Welcoming yet another brand new lifetime this week, born of a whim and a question and a great lust of spirit. Again and again! Always!
#journal
March 2024
Luggage claim tag—Amtrak's Empire Builder from Portland, OR to Chicago, IL
#ephemera
March 2024
Vintage ephemera found inside my parlor organ
#ephemera
March 2024
Note from a client
#letters #sw
February 2024
San Francisco, CA—35mm
Saying farewell for now to SF in just a month or so.
Already feeling so much grief and love and gratitude for this little space that has felt like my first true home. These walls that know my most solemn secrets and the floorboards that have held me and moaned alongside my own sorrows and pleasures. The glory of the sea and the sky and the orange glow in the parlor just before the most sublime sunsets I've ever seen. The very best shadows. The wise oak trees that raised me in childhood. The corners where I sit on the floor and weep and know that if nothing else, the bones of the place will have my back. Fortress, fairy castle, finest refuge.
The great maelstrom of going and going back! Treasuring every small moment here these next weeks, however strange and restless.
#home #journal
December 2023
San Francisco, CA—35mm
#home
December 2023
Jenner, CA
August 2023
Key card sleeve—Hotel Clermont—Atlanta, GA
#ephemera #sw
August 2023
Los Angeles, CA
#self
July 2023
Matchbook—The Rumpus Room—San Francisco, CA
#ephemera #sw
June 2023
Taos, NM
February 2023
Ocean Beach—San Francisco, CA—by M on 35mm
February 2023
Fern Canyon—Humboldt County, CA
#sw
December 2022
Letter excerpt
#letters
October 2022
Receipt—San Francisco, CA
#ephemera
August 2022
Portland, OR—35mm
#self
July 2022
Self-portrait
#self
May 2022
Death Valley, CA—35mm
#photography #sw
January 2022
Death Valley, CA
#photography #sw
January 2022
Chicago, IL—35mm
#photography
November 2021
Evermore Guesthouse—Portland, OR—35mm
#self
September 2021
Evermore Guesthouse—Portland, OR—Polaroid 600
#self
September 2021
Evermore Guesthouse—Portland, OR—35mm
#self
September 2021
Petite Auberge—San Francisco, CA
#sw
August 2021
Half Moon Bay, CA—35mm
Rilke calls the divine "the great homesickness we could never shake off" and that's forever the sea and California to me.
#journal #photography
July 2021
Half Moon Bay, CA—35mm
#photography
July 2021
Mill Rose Inn—Half Moon Bay, CA—Polaroid 600
#photography
July 2021
Portland, OR—35mm
#self #sw
December 2020
Pythia
#cats
October 2020
Desire
#self #sw
September 2020
Untitled
#misc works #photography
May 2019
Untitled
#photography
May 2019
Basin Pond, ME—35mm
#photography
June 2013
Bus pass—Contra Costa County Connection
#ephemera
March 2009
POSTSCRIPT
Social media has always existed for me as an archive of musings and moments, their colors and textures, and the rich tapestry of feeling that I am best attuned to when I'm collecting and arranging and spanning the truth of different narratives. I do my best to accept that I don't need to understand everything, in a general sense—a hard lesson for someone who loves the beauty of wise words. But I've always respected the mystery of ambiguity in the right context, and I delight in a storyscape that holds things close and requires reciprocity—doubly luminous and enigmatic like all the best things are.
As the internet shifts and changes in ways that are often unsettling, I've been curious about the idea of using simple HTML websites as a kind of independent alternative/supplement to social media and have been fiddling around with a sort of personal archive with these things in mind.
I've coded this blog from scratch and it's independently hosted online. I'm sharing the beginnings of the project here in the spirit of exploration and out of belief in the potential of spaces like this to encourage creativity and imagination and play in the way we connect and share our stories with each other.
"What if there were historic landmarks made of code and sacred monuments in the aether?"
#journal
TAGS
{ in progress }
ceilings / ephemera / found / herbarium / home / journal / letters / misc works / photography / self / sounds / sw / videography