You have permission to be unabashedly free, yourself, outside the mandates of what is considered acceptable, friendable, fuckable, American enough, enough of anything familiar or familial or similar to it. I give you permission to claim the fact that your ancestors hail from what is considered a shithole country but was the epicenter of civilization […]
Being in the in-between reminds me of standing at the entrance of a house where you’ve sorta been invited over but you don’t really feel welcome. After all, you’ve never met anyone there and you just can’t stand small talk. To make matters worse, it’s raining really, really hard outside and you have nowhere to […]
Spring is my favorite season now that I live in upstate New York. In California, life drifted from one ice-blue sky to the next. Fog on the Golden Gate bridge was a wraith that always managed to sneak into my Indian summers, and palpable shards of sunlight fastened a deceptive caveat to the long nights […]
I was compelled by the idea of the bodhisattva vow—this ancient, sacred contract to achieve enlightenment for the sake of liberating all sentient beings—being tied to something as base and primal as a one-night stand. Of course, for the woman I was talking to, one-night stands were never what they seemed. Furtive trysts with men […]
The hand is a throne, and it lives in the heart. It’s where fire, earth, wind, and water coalesce and become something tangible. It’s where you are drawn when you want to be a body and simultaneously more than a body, when you want to come home to yourself and remember. The memory goes like […]
What are you saying to me? I am listening. I am open. I am ready. Star veil. I wear a shroud of night and I come to you like a breeze through an open window. Open your window. But be cautious. You will know when the untoward things are near. You will know when the […]
We will not know peace until we have driven out every trace of colonization. Until we have returned to some original semblance of who we were before we became so solidified in our identities. It is possible to be colonized by one’s own identity, you know. Whether we are struggling against externally imposed narratives or […]
What many of us experience as the body—as separate but parallel tributaries of corresponding sense experiences—is limited to the Cartesian tendency to extricate intertwined processes from one another and to reduce them to their mechanical components. Thus, the experience of the body becomes not a sensory totality but a description of causes and effects. In […]
To the mother, the body, and the holy soul. We are one. From the throbbing clitoris to the pulse of heart and the stiffening of nipple and the wetness of tongue and eye, from the knobby knees to the valley of hair in the secret garden to the hidden caves of the belly button, I […]
When the heart is fully broken, we are able to elicit the truth with our illuminated bodies rather than through senses that have no relationship to one another. This is the truth that runs through all major teachings. When we separate truth from illusion, we discover that no being is to be excluded from the […]
