WordPress says that I haven’t journaled for four days, but it feels much longer. It feels like so many things have happened. Some projects I have been working on for months have finally moved to a new stage. I was given new options for finishing my Reconciliation certificate – another process getting unstuck. I have found that a few timid wild strawberry plants on my back yard have grown into a patch. But most importantly, and quite unexpectedly, I went to my first therapy session. It didn’t feel cathartic, but afterwards I felt lighter and calmer, as if the emotional and somatic storm has calmed down and constant inner dialogue has paused. I know better to believe that this condition will last, but I do have my next appointment, so I am not afraid. It is a long journey and I am curious who I will find at the end of it, or along the way.

I have to pause and hug myself for all the work I am putting in this year into healing. I have to pause and admire how everything in inter-related. Would I have sought therapy if it wasn’t for that fateful conversation with Nicole and Stephanie back in April? I may not be good at self-love, care and liberation, but all it took are a few little gestures in that direction: signing up for a community of practice (deciding that yes, it is for me and it is worth time and money), gradually opening up to discuss things like sex, pleasure, religious trauma, anger, my relationship with my body, slowly building habits of self-care and self-love, dancing. There is so much happening and I know that the feeling of drowning is going to come back, but maybe I start feeling the current.

I was thinking over my experience on the bus back home and realized that what felt so serendipitous about it was that Maya’s invitation fell square to the time and place when I was free and in the city – I didn’t have to move things around or agonize about the response and making things work – I just had to accept. Which made me think about the way things usually happen:

usually, whenever I receive an ask or an invitation, I FEEL OBLIGED to accept it, even if it doesn’t work with my schedule or doesn’t feel right for me. Every time, I feel like I am rearranging my life to meet the expectation of whoever wants anything from me. And as I do it, I feel stretched between desire to please, resentment, guilt for feeling resentful and mental overwhelm from having to arrange the logistics of my life around the priorities of people who have no idea that I feel this way. The powerful thing that happened during the therapy session today was when Maya asked me to say no, loudly, with a gesture, like I really mean it. The she asked me how it felt. It took me a while of scanning, searching, listening to realize that it felt spacious, as if I reclaimed a little more space. We spoke about boundaries and how saying no helps us to claim our agency. This! The more I think about it, the more I understand how often I refuse to claim my agency: to say no, or to say yes, to ask for what I want, to ask for help. Instead, I choose to do everything myself, to take on me more than I can carry, to never ask for what I need or want and I systematically end up feeling defensive, guilty, unappreciated and overwhelmed.

So, here is my first healing homework (that I give to myself): to reclaim my agency, or, if I can’t do it, gesture towards it. Start in the easiest way: by saying no when it feels right and liberating and when it is possible to do it with love. Eventually, it will lead me to saying yes (although even now I cannot imagine myself telling someone loud and clear what I want).

The alternance of rain and sun continued all weekend. I have to admit that this is my favourite weather. I love change, the poignancy of transitions, the transience. This is the first time I remember not being tired in the past weeks.

The news this weekend is awful. Another massacre in the Gaza refugee camp, the win of French fascists in the European elections, the dissolution of the parliament, and the never-ending war back home. I have long given up on waiting for better times, but I am still to learn how to consciously live in the times we have. I have stopped feeling angry with people who don’t feel the same pain as me at the same time, but I need to learn what I can offer them instead.

wasn’t such a bad day after all. We got rains after a heat wave and a rollercoaster of dark skies and light and rainbows (we only saw a small one, but Griffin sent me a picture of a giant ark that seemed to embrace all of the city). I heard and then saw a northern mockingbird and then got soaked, looking at my youngest child running on the empty bmx trail with other little, fearless and careless kids. It is hard to reconcile this reality with what I hear and read and fret about.

There is no picture for the day, although the peonies are everywhere and the sunset was a beautiful peach colour. I’ve been good at keeping my morning yoga routine for the past three days and this morning I took it outside, under the green canopy. It’s funny how priorities change. The two things that preoccupy me most these days are finding a therapist and a yoga practice.

I think I am getting better at acknowledging my feelings and somatic responses and engaging with them without being swallowed by them. What I feel now with regard to my work is foremost lack of joy and lack of feeling. I think two things are happening: I get increasingly frustrated with constant and casual appropriation of my knowledge and ideas – this robs me of intellectual satisfaction of having produced and shared knowledge. The other side of it is constant squeezing, urgency and scarcity that robs my work of joy and meaning. I do not know what to do with it.

MA said today that I have to be ready for people to be resistant and unsettled by my work. Although I did not know how to respond at the moment, I call bs. Nothing in my work is particularly radical or unsettling, nothing is novel, but the people who gave themselves right to judge it have no intellectual capacity or interest to engage or learn beyond surface level. And I no longer want to subject myself to their judgment.

Something else I thought today: I am no longer willing to engage in non-reciprocal relationships. I am no longer willing to share my knowledge and to do emotional labour for no recognition.

It’s time to set boundaries.

I took a day off, a very hot day, and went for lunch with Griffin. Griffin gave me a piece of glass from a hundred-year old glass factory explosion as a birthday gift and promised to help me to look for a therapist without me asking. Because with Griffin I never have to ask. They told me about queer talent shows they are working on and we spoke about my religious trauma and their time in Paris. As we were walking back through little Burgundy, we saw this tea-rose coloured peony – the colour I never saw before on this flower. I do not interpret everything as a sign, but I am deeply grateful for the ability to see the connections and patterns.

In four years since I have planted peonies, this is the first time two of them opened on the day of my birthday. Everything feels a little rushed this year, a little too soon, but also right on some sentimental schedule that makes the events of the middle of my life and a continent away fall in rhythm of the early summers of my childhood. I always loved having a birthday in the beginning of the summer: the long days, the whisks of poplar pollen floating in the air, the peonies and the first strawberries, the feeling of endlessness, of all the things that lay ahead: picnics, seaside vacations, summer reading, evenings on the terrace. I am glad I have not lost it. I am glad that four people who wrote to me for my birthday are the ones who knew me forever, who knew the younger versions of me. I am glad that something incredibly deep, child-like, wondrous remains between us.

People ask me what I did for my birthday. I say that I went to watch the bull-frogs and played on the swings with my kids. The ones who understand this are kin.

The day and especially the evening tasted like the beginning of summer. It had the spaciousness, the abundance of light, the balance between the green and the blue, the hustle of summer activities and the lazy understanding that we have all the time in the world. The nights are still too fresh to stay outside, but I wonder if the fireflies already light the garden.

I am listening to the amazing podcast conversation with Vanessa Andreotti, which makes me rethink the meaning of connectedness in the sense that we can’t just choose to feel connected to the beautiful, the natural, the green and pristine. If we want to really understand the mess we’re in, we need to acknowledge our connection to the ugly, industrial and extractive.

So, as I was walking tonight in the high grasses under the electricity lines, listening to their buzzing, I stopped to reckon with the fact that just as I am dependent on the oxygen breathed out by the beloved trees, I am dependent on these ugly metal giants for my everyday needs, including writing this blog. I may dissociate myself and pretend that they are someone else’s problem, but the truth is we are connected.

The day was extremely ordinary, but the evening was wonderful.

First, we went to McDonalds. I love McDonalds in our town, it reminds me of McDonalds at home, where even fast food restaurants are beautiful and surrounded by extraordinary architecture. The McDonalds in our town is very prime and tidy and it seats at the main intersection, opposite the town square with a fountain, flower beds and the market.

Then I went for a long walk in the forest and it was pure bliss. I saw white-tailed deer, a baby rabbit and a fas racoon and heard the birds I’d never heard before: Red-eyed Vireo, Indigo Bunting, American Redstart and Great Crested Flycatcher. Although I love the forest in every season, I have to admit that it’s generosity and fullness in the early summer almost makes me cry.

I went to a book store to buy a gift for a child’s birthday and walked out with some Legos and a book on Somacultural liberation. I could pretend it was a coincidence, except that of course I chose a book store with a small toy section to do my shopping and an English-language bookstore at that and once I had my toy, I didn’t walk out of the door, or stopped by a fiction section, no, I went straight to the Community and Culture and to Indigenous voices shelf.

So, me walking out of that store with a new book was pure determinism, a product of lifelong cultural conditioning. Back when I was a smart, shy, chubby, fat-shamed child living in a tiny claustrophobic community of soviet military families in Eastern Germany, my favourite place was a small bookstore adjacent to the only grocery store in our compound. The store would receive the new releases every two weeks – I knew the schedule by heart – still, I would come there almost every day, browsing fiction (children’s novels) and non-fiction (books about animals). The shop attendants knew me. Sometimes, they would put a copy of a particularly popular book aside to give me time to ask my parents for extra funds for a new purchase. I still remember a particularly devastating week in the second (or third?) grade, when I first got a 2 (D) on some subject, followed by a 3 (C) in math. That same week the bookstore received not one, but two new children’s novels that I really wanted, but I after the abysmal school performance, I just couldn’t ask my parents for new books. I felt that I didn’t deserve them.

I returned to the book store every day, looking at the two books, dreaming about them. Finally, after a week or more of this torture, I mastered the courage and asked my mother if I could buy the books. To my surprise, she said yes. She didn’t believe that poor academic performance, that was so untypical for me, could be cure by restricting my access to reading. So, I flew to the bookstore with money in my hand, feeling very much rehabilitated. To my dismay, one of the coveted books was already sold out. I came to late! I don’t remember if I cried. I might have, because the shop attendants noticed my distress and asked me about it. When I told them, one woman said to another: I believe we still have two copies in storage. Give one to the girl, she’s hanging around here all the time. I still remember that moment of my life with pure gratitude: to my mother, to the shop attendant, to life that has a way of erasing our woes that seem so devastating at the time.

So, almost forty years later, I still go to the bookshops to be around books. My choice of reading has gotten bigger and more sophisticated and the time I can give to reading has shrunk, but I feel the pull of a bookstore just as much as when I was eight. So, the compulsive book purchase was predetermined, but the actual title of the book was pure accident. I had never heard about the book or its author. It was an only copy, casually tucked between more popular titles. When I saw the words somatic, cultural and liberation, I knew I had to know. This morning, when I pulled the book out of my backpack I realized that my birthday is coming up on Sunday and I decided: let it be my gift to myself. Not the actual book, or rather not only the book, but learning how to liberate myself through my body.

One of the ways I am trying to keep my sanity now is by walking. Preferably during the time when the daylight is slowly fading into dusk and the traffic noise recedes, giving place to the chorus of insects and birds.
I am trying to take a single picture during every walk, to remind myself that time is passing and that despite everything I am alive on the living earth.

The picture I took yesterday somehow became a solace, so I thought I’d share it. Maybe, you will feel it too: the soft, earthy smell of rotting wood and of the fungus decomposing it, the softness of soil after two days of heavy rains, and the warmth of the air. And this beautiful, intricate web woven over the dark cavity of the dying tree.

The tree is dying, but it is not dead. Instead, it is slowly transforming, becoming a different thing, a multitude of different things: a home, a shelter, a food, a soil. The tree is teaching me that grieving and loving and living are all pretty much the same thing. It teaches me that “we came from dust and we shall return to dust” is not a threat, but a promise. It teaches me that we make so much more sense and more senses in connection with other beings.

I am witnessing a tiny moment of its decay and it is witnessing a moment of my awakening. I am marvelling at the fact that we are made of the same stuff, but to a vastly different result. It seems that it has all the answers, whereas I have none. It seems so much more solid, balanced, reliable, useful even in its death, while my default operation mode these days is helplessness.

Yet, I have to trust myself that I also somehow play a role in the universe. I am a home to billions of tiny organisms, I am a part of cultural survival and maybe even, if I try very very hard, I can be someone’s momentary comfort.