dear Latin, dear coffin, dear Rose of Sharon, 

Millie makes a performance in which she speaks in Latin. She was taught that because Latin is a “dead” language no one knows how it is supposed to be pronounced. People are just kind of making their best guess. In her performance, M speaks a monologue in Latin but tries on different linguistic flares as she does. I like this. A language that has no right way to use it. 

Millie ends this brilliant performance (which will be performed on 8/27 at Essex Flowers)  with a phrase that essentially means 'our thoughts form through conversation' which is an idea from The Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking Them, by Heinrich Von Kliest.

This is something I have felt all my life. My thoughts emerge with clarity through conversation. The presence of a witness-listener allows my own thinking to take form. It is in searching for language that the hazy texture of pre-ideas become statements that belong to the concrete world. It’s like an alchemical reaction. I enjoy the rhythm of my inner life and musings far better when I am in conversation. 

Circle the thing that orbits you 

With your finger 

With your thoughts 

With your tongue 

Last week I spent an hour on the phone with a coffin maker/ home funeral educator, Chuck Lakin, in preparation for a workshop I will be facilitating this fall. I spent the conversation gazing at a Rose of Sharon bush outside the window while being guided through Chuck’s life: returning from the navy, making his first wooden table,  his father in a body bag, a fall night in Maine, the jar of magic markers, preparing the body of his dead wife with two of her closest friends… I discovered things about death that I didn’t know or perhaps I didn’t know how to say. Our conversation pulled out of me thoughts that had not been given space to be fully formed. Sometimes dialogue can feel like that, like going fishing. I have new things to say about death because I learned things from Chuck but also because I was given the opportunity, by his very presence on the other end of the phone, to speak and in turn, to discover things I didn’t know were there. 

The sky is behind a cloud 

The cloud is behind the tree

On Monday we held a sharing circle for women who have had abortions. I learned once again the power of conversation, of having and being a witness to someone else's story.

May we eliminate shame through sharing.  

May none of us grieve alone. 

So much can occur in being together with language 

So much can occur in being together in silence 

Humans are relational. 

I have had ceremonies where I have been held (literally, physically…) by women I love 

I have had ceremonies where only the river hears and holds me 

Whoever or whatever can be your witness 

Speak to them 

Or simply let them see you

As you are 

It’s alchemical.