Be planetary

“Writing is not just an act, but an approach to the day. A commitment to awareness. I hope I would write and do my work anywhere. I often think of the Dutch Jewish writer and mystic, Etty Hillesum, murdered by the Nazis in 1943. Her workshop was located in the ditches of suffering. She met annihilation with an unyielding devotion to bearing witness as an act of resistance and love. Refusing numbness, she upheld the soul’s sovereignty, even in the relentless hell devised by men with small, failed imaginations. I’ve discovered that the more care I invest in my mental health, my spiritual practices, and my emotional integrity, the more I can take radical creative risks. We don’t get sick alone, and we don’t heal alone. Healing is relational—woven through bodies, systems, and stories. But too often, pain becomes privatized, packaged into progress narratives that protect the very structures doing harm. How many times must a person tell their story—whether they move through the system or refuse it? The raped person is asked to repeat. And even when not asked, the mind repeats. Trauma loops. It engraves. The nervous system circulates the wound, restimulating it— until, through the slow, aching labor of loving ourselves, and of living anyway, it becomes a powermark. There is something in repetition—not only as symptom, but as structure. A kind of refrain. The same refrain that holds our pain also carries our prayers, our celebrations, our names. Repetition is not only what binds us to trauma. It can provide the conditions for emergence, a place from which we can begin to sing. Healing has reconfigured my relationship to the sentence—the sentence as a threshold, a site of encounter. It has made my language more permeable to silence, more exacting in its care. It has made me a better writer. It has taught me how to let the wound speak without becoming a spectacle. I write differently now—because I listen differently. One of the things I have learned from disasters, personal and collective, is a quiet prayer I carry: May I and my loved ones be on the fortuitous side of the interruption. Disasters and oracles share a compositional instinct: they love juxtaposition. Rupture beside pattern. The visible pressed against the unseen. And the altar—turns out—is wherever we are. As my friend Lou Florez reminds me, the ancestor altar begins at the cellular level. We carry the archive in our blood. We sit at the table of our own becoming, and sup with the star that made us and the great-great-great-grandmother who kept the fire lit. We are always in conversation with what preceded us, and with what has yet to arrive. My mother taught me, in her way, to cultivate a poignant relationship with impermanence and uncertainty. She was right to do so. I’m learning to stay close to both—not to conquer or resolve them, but to let them shape me into something more honest.”