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  • a girl as an insect and a minotaur and what it means

    someone asked me recently what hospital vespers means and why i started a blog.

    i don’t have a great one word elevator pitch answer to this, because it’s not something i can easily explain.

    what i can say is that i’m on a healing journey and a seeking journey. i’m seeking to understand myself, the world, and my place within that world and this is a physical, mental, emotional, sexual and ultimately spiritual pursuit. it is something that will be a lifelong unravelling, unspiralling road of transformation and truth seeking. i do not know what the journey will be or where it will take me or what i even hope to find.

    i’m filled with so many complicated emotions and i realize that for many years i swallowed every emotion i had, good and bad, until i was filled to bursting with feelings that felt forbidden and awful. it took someone trying to murder me, a spiritual revelation, and ultimately my diagnosis of fairly severe PTSD and being forced into years of therapy for me to even begin to grasp and understand just how broken and fucked up i was inside, and really, still am.

    i guess none of us get out of this life unscathed, and some of us wear heavier mantles and are decorated with more battle scars than others. something something sweet delight, something something endless night, etc.

    i attended a sweatlodge ceremony this summer with other indigenous and mixed indigenous women and i crawled my way out of that hole in the ground, eyes burning, tears streaming down my face and threw myself face down into a creek and it was like this primal rebirth and instantaneous baptism. i have not been the same person since then.

    it’s hard to explain, of course, as most spiritual reveries probably are. how can one explain the unexplainable? how can i say to you how i felt my spirit transmogrify and shift inside the confines of my chest? before i crawled into that hole, back into the womb of our great mother, i treated my life like a funeral procession because it was. i knew hate and avarice and pride, o, how i knew pride. i knew vanity and shame and anxiety and fear and grief.

    i still know these things, of course, so it is this human condition of ours – both a blessing and curse simultaneously for us to know both beauty and horror wrapped together eternally.

    but. big BUT here – i feel so much less consumed by these things.

    i was able to finally quit something that should have died years before, something i hung onto out of stubborn vanity and god, this desire to feel needed and wanted, to feel like i could be somebody, to feel like someone, you know?

    this is a primitive desire in humans, and natural of course to desire love in its infinite baffling chemical horrorshow and yet for me, love is an intoxicating force that has remained for most of my lived experience – something that was only ever conditional, something performative, a transaction.

    as a child, i got the love of my mother by performing to a certain set of standards. if i completed these invisible tasks, i would get an intoxicating sip of love and affection, but if like a poor actor i happened to miss a mark or fumble a line, love was denied, acceptance denied, grace denied.

    my mother is not guilty in this. she too was on a ration of love from her own mother. how could she give to me something she did not have to give. she could not pour from her own empty cup to fill mine. and while i never got addicted to any of the drugs i did or the booze i drank, i became someone desperate for love and acceptance.

    when one is desperate for love, connection, humanity, you become a side character in your own story, always overshadowed by someone else, always putting yourself second to be the best friend, the hardest working employee, the most doting spouse, the girlfriend who doesn’t nag or complain or spend too much time in the bathroom or ask for expensive gifts or refuse sex or get sick. i became a doormat in my own life, a people pleaser through and through, always worried that a boundary i would set, or a word from my lips would cost me the always tenuous thing i wanted most – love, connection, acceptance.

    i still want love, of course. that’s a seeking i don’t think will ever end.

    but i’ve began to ask of myself – where can i find love? where can i reparent the broken child and the angry girl that live inside of me? do i go through more IFS work and talk to these parts and listen to what they have to say and hear them despite the static?

    after i dragged myself soaking wet and filthy out of that creek, i was changed and i began the process of transformation that i still find myself in. and yet, somehow i can’t say all that when someone asks why i started this blog?

    so i say something like, “just for fun” instead.

    how can i tell them that i’m walking a path to myself in the same filthy cotton dress from sweatlodge, my blundstones on my feet, blood on my hands and in my mouth, and i’m carrying a braid of sweetgrass and as many books as i can carry in my pink fjällräven kånken backpack alongside my cameras and gel pens.

    shirley manson once sang, “the trick is to keep breathing” and that’s all i’ve got.

    i’ve been thinking about bugs today, and maybe it’s because i found this book about bugs and plants in ponds and i scanned this old illustration of bugs from that 1967 book with a broken spine. i’m okay to be like that book you know – fully broken and full of knowledge, wanted only by a few.

    whenever we talk about change or growth or transformation, an apt metaphor is the caterpillar, becoming small, digesting the self to become something else.

    we can get alchemical if you’re one of those types of mystics – the alchemical tenets of “solve et coagula” or “bind and break”, to truly create we must first destroy.

    or what about the snake shedding it’s skin when it becomes tight and ill fitting, growing larger and wilder into something more appropriate for the climate.

    metaphors of girls as insects and growth as another natural force we all cannot outrun unless we simply lay down and die.

    mike posner once sang, “i’m not dead yet, in case you were wondering” and i’m not dead yet, in case you were wondering.

    truly, i feel more myself than i ever have in my life. i feel more like who i was always supposed to be, this self i was fruitlessly chasing by trying to be someone.

    i feel like i got so lost in trying to be someone that i actually wasn’t someone.

    not to get all cosmic or anything.

    maybe i needed it all to fall apart, and maybe i needed all those hard lessons. in the norse pantheon odin trades his eye for knowledge, and could this be a sacrifice for that?

    jesus died on the cross to redeem sin. aslan died in sacrifice, too, but he was kind of lion jesus if you think about it.

    what about the athenian youths sent to the minotaur? was i just sending all my previous selves there too so i could appease the hungry maw of want?

    was this all just my own redemption arc?

    so, no, i can’t explain this blog to you in a way that would be fitting or acceptable to be rendered into a few words. but fuck it, who cares, let’s transform into bugs together and fill our lungs with sweetgrass and prayer.

    i love you.

  • tänker på dig

    i think about him

    so, i tell him i’m thinking about him

    “tänker på dig”, i say

    “i know” he says, “jag vet”

    i had loved him from afar of course

    how could i not?

    this sweet complicated man who loved me in return, from afar and from the north

    two northern hearts beating together as one on snapchat

    “jag älskar dig,” i say

    “i know,” he says

  • truck stops and fantasy magazines

    i don’t realize it, but my body is already feeling it, and i dream about being chased by wild dogs again. november is here with all it’s bitter cold, poppies on jackets for sale in the super market, and with the knowledge that soon, all too soon, it will be the two year anniversary of my father’s death. he was 71 and he died of influenza type A.

    i remember shopping for a cat bed and going to a bakery for a croissant i would never eat, that would instead go stale and hard on my counter, because i got the phone call from a doctor who told me to come to the hospital because he needed to see me. i fumbled with my iphone app for parking at the hospital and i was sat down in a room and told my father was going to die. my mother asked in a small voice, “how long?” and i remember becoming so irrationally angry at her, thinking “how the fuck is he supposed to know?” but i didn’t say that.

    the doctor met with us before telling my father the news and my father, in his way, said, “so, doc, i’m checkin’ out?” and like with many things in his life, he had a grim downturn to his mouth and he nodded slowly. it was in that moment that i saw the frailty of my father and his mortality, too.

    my father did not live to see christmas 2023 and he left us in the early morning hours of december 18, 2023, lying in a hospital bed that became a death bed, in a room where everything became really big and really small at the same time. i stayed the night, sleeping head to toe in a single hospital cot, so i could watch my father die. i saw him take his last breath and i kissed his dead hand and said i loved him, and god, i really did. for all his failings and complexity, i loved my father still.

    when i dream about the wild dogs and my bare ankles just out of their grasping jaws, i think about the legends of the black dog from England – a harbinger of death and of change. when i dream the dog dream, it means i’m thinking about death.

    this summer, i was at a yard sale and i found a few copies of old fantasy magazines in a box, discarded and unwanted. i paid a couple dollars and took them home much to the confusion of my mother who couldn’t understand why i would want some old magazines.

    when i was young, maybe 10 or so, my father would take me to this truck stop on the edge of town. like many canadian men of his generation, he liked to play the lottery. he was convinced this one truck stop had the most winning tickets and while i don’t know anything about that kind of stuff because i don’t gamble, my father must have been somewhat right, because it seemed like everytime we went there, he won something.

    the truck stop was huge and had this shitty restaurant inside it and my dad would let me pick out a magazine of my choosing from the huge magazine selection and he’d send me off with enough money for an order of fries and gravy (poutine eh?) and a pop.

    being an autistic kid with braces AND glasses AND hand-me down thrift store k-mart discount rack clothes, a bad haircut, and a little pot belly from the fries and pop, i had no friends, so like many kids who read at a college level when they couldn’t yet be left alone unsupervised, i drifted away in books and movies and other media i could mythologize and obsess over and catalog.

    i loved fantasy – knights and unicorns, dragons that breathed fire, and girls in chainmail bikinis (bi-girls just know, right?). i was obsessed with this magazine called “realms of fantasy” and it had fantasy stories and ads for magic: the gathering right alongside weird mail order shops where nerds in the 1990s could order swords and skull bongs.

    i remember being overcome with grief at that yard sale, feeling it hit like a sledgehammer to the chest, and i paid for the magazines with teary eyes and hands that felt like paws, huge and unwieldy as i counted out exact change to a nice lady with curly hair and a fat ass.

    i think of my father and his lottery tickets and flannel jacket and beat up old van from the 1980s and me with my shitty mullet and “mystical” sea shell and crystal necklace i’d got from this lady on our block who said she was a witch and owned huskies and fed the crows and had wild hair and nice eyes and liked to chainsmoke with my mother on the front porch – we were such a pair sitting in that truck stop restaurant. we sat in a silence that happens sometimes between a father and a daughter, broken only when my father would greet someone he knew from something or another, “how the hell are ya?” he would chortle to someone. once, a trucker came over and my father hugged him hard, and i learned later on, that they had grown up on the same indian reservation, caught the same frogs in the same creek together, and later, had grown hard together.

    no one told me that i would be middle aged, looking back on those evenings as precious memories of my father. in five years, i will be the age he was in those truck stop evenings.

    god, what i would give, for just one more night in a truck stop with my father.

    what i would give for a fantasy magazine clutched in a greasy hand on the ride back to my childhood home, back to my bedroom covered in unicorn posters and my old bed with a shitty cotton moon and stars printed bedspread my mother bought for me at zellers.

    i drove past the old house the other week. a new family lives there now and i wonder if they love it as much as i did.

    when i stopped to check, my handprints are still visible in the poured cement of the old driveway, with my clumsy handwriting “JuLy 1992”.

    just a snapshot from another life, another time – fantasy magazines, truck stops, and the impermanence of life.

    i’d give anything to go back.

  • thinking about sex at the thrift store

    i’m back at work again from my three week vacation, which means i’m back on my bullshit and lunchtime walks to visit birds in the park or blog in the coffee shop, or take a stroll to the really cheap thrift store that’s right by my work.

    i like that thrift store because it’s ran by this group of older ladies who take it all very seriously and look very serious in that powdery no-bullshit way that some older ladies tend to have about them – all elizabeth taylor ‘white diamonds’ and gold rings from husbands with bad hearts and long white hair caught up in barettes and grim lines where smiles used to be type of thing. they’re beautiful and i like watching them. they know my name and my comings and goings. i’m the old photograph girl, the vhs tape girl, the antique jewelry girl, the incense girl, and the religious girl.

    i’ll come in sometimes to visit them and see how they are, searching for conversation just as much as i am for sterling silver and old bones or little leather cases for my smudge supplies. sometimes they’ll have a little something put aside for me behind the counter like they’re my personal shoppers. once it was a little case of those spindly wire frame glasses everyone wore in the early 1900s, sometimes it’s tarnished crosses or scapular medals, sometime’s it’s crystals or carved sticks or an old photo of someone who died before i was born.

    i feel kind of special when there’s a little something for me. it’s always nice to feel seen even for a moment.

    i like those kinds of thrift stores the best. you know the ones where everything is really cheap and the finds are immaculate but you kinda gotta work for it. for every 1950s vintage silk garter belt in your size you have to sift through a pile of farted out wal-mart brand sweatpants and shirts someone’s dad wore in 1993 because it came free from a work event and he needed something to wear while mowing the lawn in order to get out of the hunter green dusty rose nightmare his bitch of a wife had turned the house into.

    for every antique art deco ring shaped like a heart, you’ve got to sift through boxes of tamagotchis and beyblades, and microwave cookbooks from the 1970s. maybe that’s why i like the hunt so much – makes you feel like you earned it, you know? like a wizard on a quest in some dungeons and dragons ass fucking ass shit ya know?

    i also like this thrift shop because the book section is great. books are usually $0.25 or $1. I buy cheap books and cut them up or scan them. sometimes i just like to get lost in the book section and while away a few of the precious minutes of my lunchbreak reading about frogs or ducks or how to properly clean and dismantle an old VCR.

    one time i found a first edition copy of frank herbert’s dune for $1 and this weird occult volume about angels and yahweh that sells for like $300 online to fake ass instagram witch influencers. i read about half of it but it kinda lost me a little and i ended up watching old episodes of buffy the vampire slayer instead and i haven’t gotten back around to reading about the “enochian truth” yet, but i will.

    anyways. i’m distracted at the thrift today and my jacket is too warm and i can feel the tag in my sweater and there’s these two ladies blocking my access to the book section. they’re both struggling to breathe in an asthmatic way through puffy faces with too red candy apple lips while they explain tiktoks and memes they’ve seen on the internet to each other in high piercing tenor voices. i’m instantly annoyed and feel the unhealed parts of myself bubble to the surface and i want to say something mean but of course i don’t. i want to say that i’m a bit lonely and tired and that i miss my lover quite badly and i’ve been thinking about sex the whole time i’ve been browsing candles and dishes and doilies and stinky old out of style clothing – waterfall cardigans, anyone? no? not even for $1? come on, take a chance.

    i’m thinking about sex and love and romance and what it’s like to be almost 40 and newly fallen in love somehow and how everything’s crazy because i locked my heart up in 2016 when she died and put the whole thing on ice and my underwear is too loose because i keep losing weight and i can feel my toe ring on my left foot for some reason and won’t you please just get the fuck out of my way so i can read poetry and daydream about collages and martyrs from the 13th century in peace without having to listen to two braying asses trying to remember the punchlines from tiktoks that made sense several months ago?

    i stand there looking crazy and they eventually take the hint and i can browse the books in peace.

    i find an old book with a cloth cover that smells like my grandfather’s workshop at the house i spent my childhood in and it makes me nostalgic. it’s about animals and plants from alberta and there’s cool inky illustrations of bugs and leaves and ferns and it’s $0.50 and i decide to buy it and scan pages for my blog, for my own amusement.

    i’m about to leave and i find this book, lonely on a shelf next to that fake ass “a million little pieces” book and a couple discarded jordan peterson volumes:

    it’s a collected volume of mystic poets from india and their verses, written in 1941 and later republished in 1963. i’ve been feeling a lil mystical lately and doing a lot of learning about various religions and i like reading about holy people and insane people and poets with addictions and religious experiences. i page through the book while i’m thinking about my lover’s hands and his accent and his crooked eye and deep laugh. i’m thinking about fucking and that uncontrollable urge i get sometimes to just sink my teeth into his arm or shoulder and i wonder how hard i could bite down before i’d actually do some damage.

    i know i’m going to buy this book to read while sipping lime bubly sparkling water on my lunchbreaks because i have to be the most esoteric bitch that reeks of sage anywhere i go apparently.

    paging through it in the thrift shop that smells like cannabis and window cleaner i find this:

    and, damn, ok, i wasn’t exactly expecting to be read to filth by an indian poet called harischandra who was born in 1850 and lived in british india, and yet, hey here we are. (he died in 1885 at the age of 34 btw)

    god, i love the whole “love as cannibalism” stuff just as much as i love comparing love and the act of love to religious experience, because, like, how true?

    when people ask about religion and spiritual experiences, or rather, when that stuff comes up at parties or events, usually after a few drinks, i tell people that some of the most religious experiences i have had have been simple and this seems to flummox some people.

    the first time i saw someone die, is one. call it my siddhartha moment i suppose.

    the first time i attended stonehenge.

    lighting a candle in the notre dame cathedral.

    and, love, of course. everytime i have been in it. god, how can love not be a spiritual reverie directly from the heavens? those little moments with someone like the first time you kiss or the first time you share a washcloth or a toothbrush or see each other naked, and no, i’m not meaning like fucking naked, in a sexy way, but just in a human way. the way you take your pajamas off in the morning and bend over with your whole ass out to go rooting around in your sock drawer for that matching sock you could swore you had the other day, you know the one that says “god is a woman”?

    i know lots of people who have had many other bigger moments than mine, and i wonder if they think about them like i do. i guess i don’t care, but i always have wondered if i was the only one sweating through my leather jacket high on wal-mart brand gravol having a moment in direct proximity to something bigger that day at stonehenge? was it just me choking down tears as i realized how small and insignificant and meaningless i, and therefore everything else truly is in the grand scheme of the vastness of time and the universe?

    o great coyote, who am i?

    do other people think these thoughts or is it just me being fucked up?

    sometimes it seems like other people are more along the lines of donkeys in the thrift store describing tiktoks they saw, but if i think like that it’s an ego trap, because i’m not like, levitating above the rest of us somehow because i think about god and the devil and the dust of time and burn a lil sweetgrass.

    so i pay the nice ladies for my books and i think about sex and halloween candy and i see two crows at the park yelling at each other over something.

    as always, i say, “hi baby!” to them. my lunchbreak is almost over and i should be getting back.

  • our lady of fatima on vhs

    there’s a religious thrift store in my town that i like to go to, but never seem to get there too often – it’s on the far side of the city, and it’s usually open when i’m working and on the days that i’m not, i usually forget.

    but, since i’ve been on vacation for the past three weeks, i was able to go the other day.

    i found an amazing antique picture frame for $5. i’ve been collecting picture frames for my upcoming solo gallery show and this one is perfect – i already know the photo i’m going to put in it.

    i found a little table for my room. i’ve been sitting on the floor watching endless vhs tapes and burning candles and incense and reading tarot cards and studying various picture books and reference books.

    but, i think most importantly, i found a stack of religious vhs tapes containing religious cartoons from the 1980s – some very memorable ones including the stories of st. patrick, ben-hur, and also our lady of fatima. i remember watching this type of thing as a kid. the cool part of this thrift store, is that any religious related items are free. there’s a big shelf at the front of the store that contains religious items.

    i initially wanted to digitize the cartoons for my youtube channel but unfortunately, the fatima tape is copyrighted by some weird user and unable to be put onto youtube because of same. i edited some clips from it and composed a soundscape for my instagram and created a .gif or two for my blog and tumblr instead.

    i’ve digitized old bible cartoons on my youtube before and they’re very nostalgic for people. i like running a youtube channel like that where it’s just random weird ass videos that people run across.

    i’ll try to digitize the rest of the religious cartoons and see what happens there.

    anyways bye, fuck off