It’s been a minute. Or eleven days rather. Life’s been busy as the season turns. Hot here in Chicago, hotter and cooler other places, what would we fill space with if not the weather? Here’s the latest issue. Enjoy, and if not, you can use it to wipe your ass.
-G.V
P.S. The newsletter is free, although when you contribute, it makes my spirit sing. Writing this newsletter and nurturing a community of people who connect to it personally or find it therapeutic like I do is something I take seriously and put a lot of care into. Your participation financially means so much to me.
“Good grief.” I didn’t think I could handle another person dying, and then she went and died. I know I’ve been on this soapbox for some time, bewailing the loss of my Aunt Amanda, but you see, we were tight. The only way we knew how to survive was with each other, because it’s what we did. The grieving process has been long and winding, and it’s been coupled with the grief and trauma of losing my job, which I had had for nearly eight years. Both gone within a few week period, this at the start of the pandemic in February and March of 2020.
January 2020 saw me reaching burnout with work, running back-to-back workshops, one in LA for Abbott and the next morning flying back to Chicago for a full afternoon of discovery with another particular client. Meanwhile, I had an abscess that underwent emergency surgery in a strip mall Urgent Care after the LA workshop and before boarding a red eye. I also received the call about my aunt having a brain aneurism as the workshop wrapped, getting into a cab with my boss Ken, who neither consoled me nor took me to have my abscess looked at. I was on my own, and a month later my aunt passed on, and then I really was.
I was raised by wolves, if that weren’t immediately evident. My lesbian aunt and my lesbian godmother took care of me when my mother died. I was a freshman in college. My dad had decided to have a new family, leaving me to endure a grief process that would go on well into my late twenties and remains to this day. It’s a process, like I said, and it can hit at any time. My aunt has been by my Chicago apartment a few times, once frustrated and confused, maybe slightly angry once, and another time, recently, at peace.
I read an article in Scientific American awhile back that explained my aunt’s and my experience with death and loss to a tee. It’s strange that the way we viewed life and the hereafter was so identical to an ancient tribe who’s dying off on an Indian mountainside. Female shamans’ bodies are inhabited by the dead as everyone navigates grief, some falling ill with the same afflictions of the deceased. I, too, started having the same physical conditions with my hips, back, and GI that my aunt suffered with toward her end.
My aunt and I always loved butterflies, seeing them as moments of connection and peace between our loved ones and us — visits from the afterlife as the grief process evolves. The Sora, too, see butterflies as representing memories without rememberers, as those moments when the deceased finally pass through and into the underworld. Journey on, Aunt Amanda, S’Anne, Roo Roo, and mom. Thank you for raising me. I’m now a full-grown lone wolf who’s realizing that he’s never alone. Arooo!
Having studied architecture, I ponder buildings. A lot. While I’ve never actually practiced, my mind is constantly enthralled by curves, straight lines, and the grid and where it breaks. People in spaces, activating them in new ways. Folks in their houses and the blue TV screen light. You and me exploring places, discovering new things together. Here’s a sun up to sun down:
Back to the basics. Everywhere I turn are primary colors. Mostly in those secondary spaces that find their way into people’s everyday, going from home to work and back again. While you could hardly call Calder’s Flamingo in Chicago’s Federal Plaza secondary, you could maybe imagine it becoming invisible to Susan in accounting who passes the gigantic steel sculpture all the time. But then again, maybe she still finds it to be as awesome as she did the first time she beheld the bird all those years ago, back when she was just Susan in the mailroom.
Editor’s note: Since we’ve shed an única lágrima this week, we’ll return next week with The Mother.
Here’s a list of a few pretty things I encountered or experienced this past week: the joy you feel when in the company of someone new yet oddly familiar; perfect caterpillar eyebrows resembling your favorite punctuation marks; a wacky full moon; a stunning sunset from upon high; the feeling of being lost then found; and the word “holon” and a circumpunct.*
*The Lyft driver asked me what I thought the smallest thing that exists is. I said God. He said Love and Truth. He said his favorite word is “holon”, which is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. I said that sounded like a circumpunct, which is a dot with a circle around it, an ancient symbol that symbolizes consciousness. The dot in the middle connotates Source, the I-am-ness, the origin. The circle on the outside represents the expansion that you have done wth your soul through all your experiences and all your lifetimes.