If you ever wondered what it's like to be asexual in a culture alternately obsessed with and ashamed of sex, this dream might give you some idea. The self-consciousness of performance, the noisy aura of social commentary and expectation like a constant hum overlaying the visceral physicality of other people's bodies and your own. And the way performative sexual intimacy can gradually give way to something more comfortable, more tender, given enough time and gentle consideration.
Where do we seek healing and renewal when the comforts we usually turn to are the very things that are harming us — when gathering together for the holidays and singing songs and sharing food might actually make us sick? It is not only the elements of fire and air that can cleanse and heal. When these are out of balance, we can turn to the heavier, cooler, "darker" elements of water and earth to seek out healing.
I’ve always wondered what it means to love “like a rock.” Does it mean that the love itself is rock-like: round? heavy? flecked with mica? Or that you love someone the way you love a rock? Or perhaps it means to love the way a rock would love…
"Red as blood, white as snow, black as a raven's wing…." These three colors appear again and again in folklore the world over, but why? What is it about this triad that exerts such power on our collective imaginations?
Responses to a recent tweet by Pete Buttigieg rightly called out the presidential candidate for his use of the phrase "American Heartland" as "code for white." The incident raises interesting linguistic questions about how we unpack complex cultural metaphors.
What kind of bird are you? (And how do you know?) My penultimate column, "Cowbird/Changeling," is out now in the latest issue of SageWoman Magazine.
There's so much I want to tell you — but how?
Mark Wallace's new book, When God Was A Bird, represents a well-intentioned first step along the path towards Christian animism. Unfortunately, it is the same first step that Christians have been taking for hundreds of years. Can they do better? ...maybe.
In light of the more serious challenges to free speech Twitter faces, and their inaction in rising to them effectively, bumping up the character limit from 140 to 280 seems largely irrelevant. What will we say in 280 characters that we haven't been able to say in 140?
Masks are everywhere these days... and not just because Halloween is just around the corner. Sometimes we don't even realize the masks that we've been wearing -- the patterns and themes and synchronicities that have been lurking behind the mask of random chance in our lives -- until someone else points them out to us. That's sort of what happened to me when, by sheer coincidence (or was it?), a curiously thematic bunch of my poems all were accepted for publication during the month of October.
Alison Leigh Lilly 