and Craving was a little girl

shit, Grace, digestion + other stories ..

Apr 03, 2025

i have to be well-acquainted with my shit.

this is a metaphor, And, it isn’t.

for most of my life i have been haranguing and blaming my body, my guts, my digestion, for not functioning the way ~the perceived Normal folk~ do.

for most of my life i have overlaid My Own Story of not-enoughness and dysfunction and hopelessness, on top of Anything my guts could want to add, or say. there was no room for them, their voice, their Truth. just like there has been no room, for me. just like i have been talked over, steamrolled, bulldozed, by my closest relatives. is it not tragic— how we reenact the same wounds we were given, the ones we grieve and rail and writhe against— onto ourselves?

the un-covering of this has only been over the past few years; since 2022, consciously— i’ve detailed my guts/constipation/digestion/food journey in this post here; the one i almost deleted from the wash of shame that came with seeing the word ‘constipation’ in a post i published. no one wants to hear about that. disgusting, dirty word. shameful word.

turns out people Did want to hear about it.

turns out That is my territory.

last year when i was doing the day-before prep for the colonoscopy i avoided in full terror for a decade+, i found myself darkly laughing and listening to my late great teacher danny deardorff tell a coyote story that frankly involved SHIT. there was a magical plant he ingested that said it would make him shit, and he REFUSED-TO-SHIT. did everything he could to HOLD-IT-IN. refused to let the plant be ‘right.’ funnily not funnily enough, when coyote finally exploded, shitting/farting literally to the heights of a tall tree branch— the branch broke— and guess where he landed? yep, In It.

disclaimer: this is how i’m remembering the story. if you want to hear it accurately/directly from the man himself, check the youtube video at timestamp 38:40.

down In It. IN IT. in the shit of it, the smell of it, the stickiness of it, the thing we reel from and want to flush away. the metaphor isn’t lost on me; this is my territory. whether i fucking like it or not. this is what my life has been about. this is the thing i am somehow, Actually, adept at doing, metaphorically— helping folks, and myself, Process. extract nutrients. let go. (?? i’m incredulous as i’m typing). and, even more unbelievably from a person who most-often has identified as ‘Constipated’— that i am also here to help folks, my family lineages, and mySelf— Get Unstuck. that is literal and forever Wild to me. because i have been The stuck girl. i have been the afraid-to-be-stuck girl. // yet over and over my miraculous (eco)system shows me— we’re actually not stuck. you just think we are. you keep telling us we are. you keep saying we are. we just need our own way, our own time and space, to do this.

the revelation of this has come, unsurprisingly, from increasing and increasing distance from the overculture. it has meant not having a full-time job in 4 years, it has meant living back in my childhood home paying nominal rent and being on food stamps. it has meant doing less, way less, painfully at times less, than i ever did. it has been literally DESIGNATING TIME TO DIGEST. TO HELP MYSELF DIGEST. TO DO NOTHING, OR MASSAGE MYSELF, OR JUST LAY THERE. THAT THAT IS A THING TO GIVE SPACE TO AND NOT JUST A ‘BACKGROUND PROCESS.’ it has been Listening more than i’ve ever been capable of listening. it has been letting intense insights and information be Received, and Pass Through. it has meant constantly being shuffled or knocked backwards from what my head, and honestly even my heart, want to do or enact. there’s— the force, Grace, the daimon, the higher self, the Soul— leading, now. and i think to many it sounds really pretty. but it’s honestly some of the ugliest and Realest work one can do.

i have been locked in tangles with Craving through these weeks— my ‘disordered eating’ patterns coming back to the fore in full-force. i had a thought to want to revisit some of the physical places where these things happened, leave flowers, make prayers. but/and, other things have happened. it’s all metaphor; isn’t it? and Why these patternings have been so difficult to Be With. have been impossible, entirely, to ‘Fix’— because that’s inherently not the way. the stringency i try to apply to ‘Be Good’ (ie: not eat ‘the bad things,’ not binge, not polish off the pint of ice cream in one sitting in the supermarket at 1am, not mindlessly shovel into my face foods that i know ‘don’t agree with me’…) is the same harmful, controlling energy curled back on itself in guise of Goodness. and it doesn’t work. because if you haven’t noticed, ladies + gents + other-beings like me— I Am A Really Hungry Person. and telling a really hungry person not to be hungry— not to do this— not to do that— for me, inevitably backfires when the levee breaks and all that dammed-up primordial/visceral unchanneled energy spills out and floods the landscape.

i wrote recently about my incredibly energetically-dissonant experience of going to what felt like a baby mega-church in my neighborhood. thanks the gods that in my seeking and weird internet lurking i found a handmade-feeling, humble, experimental church experience that was basically the complete and glorious Opposite. and in this experience this past sunday i encountered two things relevant to what i’m currently writing:

~ ‘and Craving was a little girl’

~ the prodigal son.

the prodigal son was the last story i told at my previous church-home in 2023; my year of Return To Church. it is an incredibly moving story, for me— and this time i heard it differently.

i was the son returning who had spent all his money on food and prostitutes. and there was still a welcome for me. and there was still a welcome for me.

it’s hard (this doesn’t seem like an adequate word ..) living under the poverty line and being with Craving. i end up spending ‘money i don’t have’ to quell or trance-out my big emotions. even when i had a full-time job, this was true. one of my debit cards has a taped-on tiny note from 2020 when i was working with an old friend who was a financial consultant— it says something akin to, pause, breathe, how does this serve? ain’t that the question. did it stop me from buying something? i don’t know; not really. // anyway—

there was a little girl there, at the experimental church service. who made no effort to hide how excited she was for the eucharist. she literally exclaimed, WAFERS! alternating between whirling like a sufi in the space at the center of our gathered circle, or crouching down, Front and Center, right in front of the low table where the priest kneeled to prepare the bread and wine. her mother was kind to her, not interrupting her process but also asking her to sit back a little— and i was just incredulous in watching. This Was Me.

and how did i feel, watching this little one? watching her Enthusiasm and her Hunger, her over-zealousness, her Voraciousness? did i feel shame towards her? did i feel like i wanted to pull her back to sit in the seats and not on the floor? i am tearing up as i type this— because it was truly Grace, to encounter such a direct reflection of such Shadowed parts of me, in such Preciousness. i did not feel the way i usually feel towards myself— so punitive, so awash with shame— in trance of a binge, a far-away-from-myself-ness, a rushing upstairs to my parents’/sister’s apartment to squirrel a KIND bar or some handfuls of cashews or broken-off pieces of dark chocolate before someone (usually my dad) notices.

this is how Grace works; this is Grace Grace Grace.

///

i didn’t want to write a long post today. i’m thinking of my friend ava whose birthday it is today. <3 i’m thinking of my friend seán who is getting open heart surgery today. <3 i am thinking of ‘beauty and the beast’ and my ex/lover/friend whose inner selves have been with me and the note i just added to my gmail signature:

~~please note that i do not / cannot reply in the harmfully rapid timescales of the overculture; my sensitive nervous system needs a lot of time to process; please do not receive this as a lack of interest or care. if you don't hear back and want to connect, feel free to email again.~~ <3

in my ‘break’ from my work over the past month and a half, much Lostness emerged. debt, immediately. loss of purpose. Craving. so many beautiful realizations and revelations most importantly about inherent Beingness, selfhood, queerness, christianness. how i keep ‘trying to find my job out in the world so i can find more resources’ or ‘something for my wretched self to do’— when it’s Already Here. i am Already It. and it’s so much of the Intangible, the Relational, the nuance and the Noticing— the Unseen.

i am one of Those i know are countless all over in these days— bringing the new world into context, shape, form— or at least— Rather— resonating with that new-old world that is Re-membering us, beckoning us Back Into It. the more i can loose my ties from the overculture— my outwardness— stay Descended, as my teacher danny says— somehow there is Flow, there. there is Lightness. i feel like i wrote to myself the other day that it’s not about being positive all the time. It’s About Being With What Is.

if these scribbles from the edgelands resonate with you, Thank You; I Hear You, my brethren.

i am currently and forever working on how not to be apologetic about my existence. about being ‘In It’ as part of the flow of my life and not some bad thing i need to move through to get to the Better. wrangling with wanting connection and reaching out for it— replying to emails, sending emails— and then not being able to complete the plan or the connection, because the energy just isn’t supporting me in doing that. receiving that as fact, with Equanimity; not push-through, not Shame.

and— learning how to recognize that energy— As force, daimon, higher self, soul, Grace— and not something constantly ‘stopping me from doing what i want to do.’

the big current questions: what if i collaborated with this energy? what if i trusted what it can See that i can’t? what if it knew things about myself still unconscious to me— because it Is myself? what if these are layers and sensitivities asking to be Trusted and continually reBirthed into the world right now?

these are My questions and i am learning how not to swerve from them. i am learning to recognize that This Is The Quality of my life, this is my Here-ness, this is my research. this is not something to Get Through; something i will put on the shelf when i find my ‘outer world’ job that will bring me up and out of poverty, living in my parents’ home where i still get to hear my dad’s yelling voice splitting through the ceiling, where my mom gets to hide things my dad isn’t supposed to see.

i’m So Comforted by all of you i have met who are Doing This Differently, because you Have to do it differently. because US— in all our Shit, in all our terror, in all our collapse— are the ones bringing the Dark-Light forward.

///

here’s some photos from the past few weeks cuz i don’t have any more words.

NEXT ONLINE GATHERING: 4/13 desert mother / mother tongue

thanks for reading. <3