Words abound. When I was just learning to read, I regaled my parents with deciphered road signs every time we got in the car. “Merge” defeated me for a long time, but I managed the others quite handily. Even now, everywhere there is text, I read it. I can’t help it. It’s how I take in the world, through words, through the written word. Given that, you’d think I would like the encouraging phrases one finds everywhere these days, on stones in the neighborhood, on tea bags, yard signs. BE KIND they advise, GO TO YOUR SPECIAL PLACE, they intone, and HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. Sadly, though, these particular righteous words just annoy me and make me want to argue.
“I AM kind,” I grump, and “YOU fucking go to your special place!” and “Oh, really? You truly don’t hate anyone, ever??” As I may have mentioned at some point in these oh so many posts dating waaaaay back to the early 2000s, a favorite story in my family about me as a toddler is me saying, a lot, “DON’T TELL ME!!!”
But I do really like found poems and all the ways you can fiddle around with random bunches of words. I just don’t like to be bullied about what to do.
This morning, going through a stack of accumulated pieces of paper (what? paper fucking accumulates, ok??), I found something that will be filed away with various other food-related bits and pieces:
Information regarding Sorghum and how to de-crystallize and use it indefinitely
I like that one. Sorghum reminds me of being in Kentucky as a child, in Mammoth Cave National Park, where my parents were members of the Cave Research Foundation. The six-hour drive from St. Louis, the humidity, the cavers, the cave itself. The sense of belonging, of being part of something important: the science of the cave, the exploration, the wonder of being underground in a living, breathing, mysterious environment.
I don’t cave any more, but the underground is alive and present for me because of that time in Kentucky when I was a kid. The above reminds me not to let that knowledge become entombed, inaccessible. Community. Caring for the natural world. Respecting and allowing the cave to be exactly what it is, with all its systems, creatures, history, necessity.
Stalactites, stalagmites, gypsum, carbide lamps and belly crawls my muddy, seeking, abiding in wonder, my exploring and allowing brave femme sisters, what is your own personal Sorghum? A food, a song, a certain make of car, a novel, the whiff of that one perfume?
De-crystallize, my beauties.
Use it indefinitely.
Many a Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.
Do you have a meditation to share? I would love to welcome you here! Email me at: thetotalfemme@gmail.com
The Total Femme 