I'M SIGNE. YOU CAN CALL ME SIG. WELCOME.
You've arrived at the peep show of my longings, my musings, my ripenings and crumplings. What I'm after is exposing myself - coming out of the closet of who I think I should be dressed as I am, or better yet, naked and unshaven. I've been away from social media for some time. It came to feel like a competition, one I always seemed to lose, my performance never as compelling as the next post down. We all present ourselves differently than how we truly are. That is only human and I won't get around that here. But my aim, in earnest, is to share right from the center of my own small life, rather than from the ways I've made myself worth loving*. I'm not saying it won't be spell binding, just that my intention is authenticity and revelation, not performance.
There's nothing wrong with faking it til you make it, in principle. It is probably usually a good thing. To throw yourself out beyond what you know, and risk a sense of what is possible for you. But I have no problem falling in love with my possibility, my potential. It is who I am already that has given me trouble. What I must do now is to fiercely claim where I stand. I won't posture about my work in the world and pretend I feel accomplished. But I will celebrate my life, what I do feel and what I know, and honor that as a gift given to me, that I offer you now. Really it's more like standing before you cupping an empty begging bowl, which my soul needs, weathered enough by life to risk being un/met. I would like to take that chance. I would like to give you that chance.*
WHAT TURNS ME ON
Tragically, I've labored a lot in my life to qualify myself for love, which I learned was earned, always pushing an agenda of self-improvement fed by the values of my upper-middle class Jewish American upbringing: the marriage of meritocracy and tikkun olam. I honor and thank my hard-working self, resolutely dedicated to making the world whole again and shielding me from the pain of my wounds. And leading my life from that place got me into a pining struggle for redemption that landed me squarely, and blessedly, on my ass, and with a not small sum of debt. More here on that. From what place do you lead your life? It is not a small question. I'd like mine to spring from the bowl of my hips, from the glint in my eye, from the trail raised by hair perking to meet the salted sky, from the pulsing wet carnal sensations that scream "I'm alive!" So I'm playing with tracking my pleasures, sniffing them out, courting them, for the ecstatic sake of it. Here's some of what has me lick my lips.
nature-based human development guiding
I've only recently recovered from the tyranny of shoulds, those I've held over myself, and those the world seems to overlord. I am no longer interested in moralistic questions about the right way to live. The more meaningful question is: what is uniquely yours to do? The world touches you, opens you, draws you forth, in particular ways. Earth dreamed you into being for something specific. You were invited. No one can live your life but you and no one can live it for you. Instead of worrying about being on the right side of history, worry about being on the right side of the one life you can call your own. Wild as it is in these times, I trust human nature, yours, to bring into the world what is most needed. It just takes some devotion to feel it. Guiding people on this adventure is why Earth birthed me.
spell casting
For me, it is just as much how you say it, as it is what you say. The cadence of words as they ripple over the rocks of teeth, how wet the tongue seems to be. I'm whispering now. I'm repeating myself, making you roll my words around in your own mouth. I don't know about you, but my world can get pretty rigid, and without my noticing. I require seduction into mythic imagination, so I can move, so a pussy in the Earth can open and swallow me whole, in the place I used to call ground. Words are bones, spells are flesh. We are meaning making creatures who need our worlds wet. If you distill it right, get the nectar balanced, a spell has irresistible power. It is dangerous. I guess I'm warning you. I'm gathering my quiver of sparrows, I'm aiming at the words on this page, to pierce your heart.
the gift
To act in the spirit of the gift is to remind ourselves through our living that we are supplicants in a greater mystery. That in the end, we are at the mercy of the gods, the sea, the sun. It is terrifying to admit but even more terrifying to deny. Western culture’s gymnastics of disavowal have trained our lives to be instruments of control. We work tirelessly to claim even a small piece of pie, to stick a landing on a balance beam that slithers away like a water snake. It is all too easy to become disenchanted when survival anxiety licks constantly at our heels, as our hands grasp and manipulate, wringing. All that work and for what? Instead let’s act as if life is a gift and is incredibly abundant, because it is, and wants us to live and become. Instead of wringing, giving. Then, when we are met it is not because we pressed from life what we earned, but because the larger web cared for us, undeserved. Gift is a portal into relationships of reciprocity and trust, and necessary humbling.
ecocentric sensuous eroticism
Veery thrushes are small birds who migrate from South America to the northeast United States to mate. The size of their clutches and the moment they turn their rust wings south again depend on the strength of the coming hurricane season, which is still weeks out ahead of them. Their power of prediction surpasses modern human meteorology and with no instrument outside their round white bellies, pulsing with the salty blood of the sea that crashes against their throats in a fluttering timbre of lyrical trills. I believe humans are also migratory creatures, viscerally equipped to find our way home, even through the immensity of storms we face. Migration is a feat of sensuous coherence, a love-making with the land, not manipulation or measurement. And its purpose is of utmost importance: the making of more life.
dreams
For a long while I told a story called “I don’t remember my dreams”. This story makes a relationship very challenging. Like the "I don't have a racist bone in my body" story makes it very challenging to be in relationship with your bones. Truth is, while I certainly wasn’t flooded with nighttime narratives, I’d sometimes wake up wet, but soon abdicate memory to amnesiacal knowing, even if I recorded the dream, as if my blanket was a used towel that I left hanging on my bed to dry. The thing about food is you have to eat it to be nourished. The thought of water never quenched anyone’s thirst. Once I started drawing the dreams I received into my lungs, that world began to breathe. Inhale. Waking life. Exhale. The wild lands of the dreaming. This all happened very recently, but dreams cackle at, shit on, and make martinis with time, and who you think you are and what you suppose you know or don’t know. We are each astounding mysteries, perhaps especially to ourselves.
