Jeanima (October)

Hello friends,

Edit: We currently have enough to pay Jeanima's sponsorship fees through October and part of November. Thank you, Shana, Quinn, and Amanda!

This money will pay to keep our little sister in Haiti healthy and in school.

Please give what you can to help reach that total. When it comes to keeping her continued sponsorship possible, it's all you, and it makes an immediate and real difference. I suggest $5 or $10.

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Once we reach $25, I get the partial match from our co-donor to make the total sponsorship fee of $38/month. As donations come in, I'll update by editing this post and in the sidebar.

If you're new around these parts and curious to hear a little more, it all started with this post. Don't miss the letters she's written us.

xoxo
Holly

Ghosts and nostalgia / Avalon Beach

Western Australia, September 2012.

Looking east

Towards the Berkeley Hills.

Self-cures / this evening

Lonely and restless, as I have been lately —
My instincts surprised me and said, find a yoga class, now,
tonight. It had been more than a year since my last one, but:
a place to be with other humans
without worrying about having
to talk or shake hands, just a place to be (sweat
and breathe) with other humans, it sounded,
and was, just right. Nights like this are why
I trust myself these days, knowing I am no poison
I am my own cure, this heart that
knows what I need and will say,
go to yoga
come back to your body, do what is
familiar and dripping with sweat
come home to your body
again

Some of the pieces

Some things your brain will not permit you to think about until you are in a place where it is truly permissible, where you have free mental space. I have gained some of that recently.

Forgotten:

• In the spring semester of my freshman year, when I myself am in the beginning of a year-long depressive episode, three alumni commit suicide. At least two of them are gay.

• The trigger for the last major relapse of my eating disorder there: being set up with a friend of a friend.  A cool and respectable Wheaton dude; I didn't know why it made me feel so terrified and despairing, but I promised myself I would get sick again and make it go away.

Waiting to be discovered:

• That professor with the fresh, shiny, postmodern explanation for why gay people don't really exist that all the more liberal students swallowed so eagerly? He based his argument entirely on concepts appropriated directly from queer theory, but failed both to give credit and to mention that the gay scholars who created those concepts had found it possible to follow them to different conclusions.

Danville afternoon

August 2013.

Ghosts and nostalgia / Circus

November 2012, Western Australia.

Read in September 2013

1. Where River Meets Ocean, by devorah major