Every Day in May
Week 3
This month I’m doing a little thing I’ve called Every Day in May, where I’m posting and writing a little something over in instgram. I’ll collect the week’s worth and stick them here as well. Since these posts will effectively be up and free for everyone on IG, I’m opening the weekly emails to all subscribers, and will be offering paid subscribers a few extra treats.
Thanks for being here.
Mamma Mia
Mother’s Day comes twice a year when you live in a place that celebrates it on a different day in a different month than where your mom lives.
As a woman without children, this day usually does all kinds of weird things to me. This year’s weirdness is that it doesn’t feel weird or sad or heavy. It just feels like a day. There was a time in my life when I tried really hard to become a mother, but it didn’t happen the way I tried to plan. The sharpness of that grief still shocks me sometimes, but mostly I am grateful for the life I can live and the leaps I can take because I am not tethered to a life full of parental responsibilities.
In conversation about a big creative project I’m working on, two separate people referred to the process with a birthing metaphor. Both of them mothers, one through birthing and one through adoption. I understand why they chose it, it’s a clear metaphor. Hearing it said that way made me uncomfortable in a way that is my work to understand about myself, and is not their work to make any changes to their interactions with me.
Maybe it makes me uncomfortable because the wounds are still tender there? Or maybe because I want a metaphor that matches my lived experience better? Or maybe because I actually am in a metaphorical birthing process and it’s uncomfortable and I don’t understand it as well as I would like? Or maybe all of the above?
I don’t know yet. But I do know that today I am grateful for my mom and her mom and all the moms before me who paved the way the for all choices I have and the not-child raising I get to do.
Happy Mother’s Day to those who are parents, those who mother in any number of ways, those who birth things into being and tend to them until they are capable of life on their own.
Impossible Paradoxical Infinite
*This is a condensed version of a longer piece I wrote for paid subscribers to The Apocaloptimist.*
For several months now, my algorithm has been serving ecumenical with a heavy hand. This means on Sundays and Mondays, in between the memes about perimenopause, art and artists, feminism, herbalism, fart jokes, witches, and tiny cute animals eating snacks, I get handfuls of 2-3 minute sermons all on the same Bible passage. Having grown up hearing no fewer than 3 sermons per week for at least the first 20 years of my life, it’s rare that anyone has a take on a passage that I can’t see coming a mile away. The variables can sometimes be surprising, but no matter how they start they will always end up in one of two places. They will either tell you about the limits, or they will tell you about the love.
I believe a lot of us want to think we see the world with love, or at least with kindness. Religious or not, most of us agree with the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” part, though every day we’re faced with all the ways in which we don’t actually believe that, and then we tell someone else about it or share a meme saying the thing we wish we’d said first, either communicating our fundamental belief that what is possible is either some kind of dogma or some kind of impossible paradoxical infinite. Yes, it really is always that deep. Even the fart jokes.
The difference between preaching the limits verses preaching the love isn’t that there are no guidelines, it’s that the guidelines make you more free, more full, more flexible while slipping through the eye of a needle. From the same Bible passage, many will preach that Jesus declares we must keep his commandments to be one of his followers, he’s set a limit, a line in the sand that we need to pay attention to so that we can stay safely in the good column. While others preach that it is the commandment itself (to love each other as we love ourselves) that is the real declaration there. Again, these are not the same.
Yes, the proclamation is technically a limit, but that commandment is about loving in an impossibly paradoxical infinite way.
And that is the kind of really radical anarchy type of Love that is so hard to accept, let alone explain, through a lens of any brand and through a book that has taken many different shapes over several hundred years differing cultural powers. The story and the love is bigger than the book, it’s bigger than the brand, it’s bigger than all the ways we fall short of being able to fully express it.
Am I suggesting that you stop listening to religious leaders? Not at all. I’m advocating for you to listen deeply, with ears tuned towards whether they’re speaking from limits or love. When you find someone speaking from limits, notice what that does to you and how you react. When you find someone speaking form love, notice what that does to you and how you react.
Want to be a part of changing the world for the better? Start by listening. Whether we’re listening to religious folk or our ow inner sense of wrong and right, listen for the areas that are focusing on limits, and which areas are focusing on love. When we really listen, the response, the next step will be clear and it will move us deeper into having a sense of the Love that is the Impossible Paradoxical Infinite where all of it, all of you, is welcome and wonderful.
Nonsense Poetry - Everybody Wear the Dinosaur
Firm up the basement
Wind up the casement
Everybody wear the dinosaur
Hear me fall down
Angel baby clown
Everybody wear the dinosaur
Purple stinker felt
Kitten muffin welt
Everybody wear the dinosaur
Glue potatoes to the sky
You’ll never know if you never try
I know it feels like a wet balloon
But stick with me and we’ll go home soon
Fingers through the toast
Chicken loves to boast
Everybody wear the dinosaur
Gobble gobble goose
Heavy falling moose
Everybody wear the dinosaur
Purple orange green
Crates and crates of queen
Everybody wear the dinosaur
Glue potatoes to the sky
You’ll never know if you never try
I know it feels like a wet balloon
But stick with me and we’ll go home soon
Everybody wear
Everybody wear
Everybody wear the dinosaur!
Predictive Text
Do you remember those Fridge Poetry magnets? All those tiny magnets cluttering up refrigerators everywhere. This predictive text exercise reminds me of that, except this time you’re choosing from the three words at the top of your keyboard after you type in the prompt words.
This is a silly writing prompt I do sometimes to get things flowing when they feel stuck.
Prompt words…rest of your predictive word sentence. Feel free to share some of yours in the comments!
1) I would rather…not be using words that have been spoken by someone who is not familiar with me.
2) My love is like…the same thing as the other one but with a little more time to think about it.
3) When does…your heart break down to rest in the same place you feel the pain?
4) Upside down is…when your body feels like a broken heart and your heart feels like a little piece of plastic that has been left behind in the past for years.
5) May we…all have the right idea to make it happen and make the world better.
6) I love…this idea of having the ability to create something new for ourselves by doing something that will help people in need and make us feel more connected to the world.
No Public Access
In the last week, I’ve had two different conversations with two different friends from two different parts of my life about the same thing: the inability to be our full selves when we are in the various roles our lives require.
One friend stated it plainly, “I’m not the same person here that I am when I’m not here.” And the other alluded to something in this direction, but mostly I watched them expand and contract, showing more and then a bit more before pulling it all back in close to their chest, and back out again, and then back in.
This photo is of a private garden. I stuck my arms through the black iron gate to get the photo as I walked by. All manicured, all lush, and all locked up. No access to the general public. I walk by this space with some frequency, at all hours of the day, and I’ve never once seen anyone inside. Not even to mow the lawn.
I know this feeling well too, I think a lot of us do, not really having many places where we feel like we can really be ourselves. And I’m not talking about the ways that we show up differently to work than we do when we’re hanging out with our nearest and dearest, I’m talking about the ways that we all walk around our lives feeling like we’re wearing a personality two sizes too small for our real one.
I think some of us have never really had the chance to experience our biggest, fullest, selves full stop. And some of us have only ever gotten terrible feedback: too loud, too rough, too soft, too emotional, too much or not enough or somehow both. We internalize those messages and get so used to being contained and tightly controlled that we think it’s for our own good and that it would be a bad idea to let ourselves really show up.
While there is much to appreciate from outside the gate, a garden space like this cannot be fully enjoyed locked out and standing on the pavement. I have a hunch that it’s the same with us.
Right Now
Right now I’m laying on an acupressure mat with my legs proped up against the wall while I wait for my sourdough starter to feed before putting it back in the fridge. It was a long day and I will struggle to want to get up when the timer goes off, reminding me to put things away. I left my starter too long between feedings, so it was hungry and immediately began slurping up the slurry as I mixed in fresh flour and water. I like this creature, I like its insatiability and aliveness. I’m on board the sourdough train later than the lockdown wave, but it could still be isolation or loneliness that has driven me to finally commit to this symbiotic relationship. And since I need to feed it at the same day and time each week, at least I can say Friday nights are date nights again.
Overflowing with Emptiness
It’s not warm and it’s not cold
but it’s not comfortable either.
Still too much of one and
not enough of the other.
It makes sense and it doesn’t make sense
but I don’t understand it, really.
Still too much of one and
not enough of the other
and sometimes both at once.
I love it and I hate it
but I can’t seem to shake it.
Still too much of one and
not enough of the other,
and sometimes both at once
overflowing with emptiness.
Fringe Cringe Fundraising
I’m doing a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and that means I’ll need to wave this cringy little fundraising flag for the next several months. Since the beginning of time, creatives and artists of all types have been waving similar flags within their communities. If you know any cash-solvent patrons looking for creatives to support with loads of money and resource and connections, I’d be happy to bother them instead of you.
https://www.paypal.me/baerjenna
https://wise.com/pay/me/jenniferlaurenb
Every day (except Mondays) from 8 August to 30 August at 3:45pm I’ll be performing a show at a venue called The Outhouse. I’m pretty sure this is where they put new performers when they’re willing to give them a shot but still think they’ll probably stink.
The title of my show is The Spider Witches of Appalachia, and it’ll be listed as theatre but delivered mostly in a traditional oral storytelling style due to the fact that the venue is a bar that is willing to set up the barest black box style theatre situation in one corner (this is every Fringe venue unless you’re already famous and can fill an actual theatre).
The story is about five generations of women in my family, and it explores the ways we pass things to and through each other and what happens to those transmissions when connections are broken or fragmented.
My biggest costs now will be for advertising and printing because I am solely responsible for gathering all of my own audiences for 20 performances. Fringe flyers and posters are already starting to go up around the city, just a few here and there for the big names with big agencies and big budgets and big ticket prices. This is not quite the echelon I’m working in yet, so it’ll be up to me to start plastering my own face on any available square inch of city I can find. Then, in August, I’ll be out on the streets with the other thousands of artists, and/or the folks they hire to do the flyering, handing out flyers to anyone who will take them, trying to convince folks to go off the beaten path up to my little venue to hear my little story.
So here I am, posting the QR codes and links to Paypal and Venmo and Wise, and hoping you’ll help me print my flyers.
Isn’t this so insane?! Thank you for being here. I love you.