Summer Updates & Abortion Access Fundraiser :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
Brief political commentary and commiseration
Visual art by Mary Tremonte
A benefit for abortion access
Poems by Denise Levertov
Over the past few days the US Supreme Court has ripped off whatever remained of its shabby mask, showing the world exactly how it feels about the basic rights of more than half of the country. At a time when the stakes for continued survival on this planet couldn't be higher, this court is more than happy to launder the authoritarian fantasies of oligarchs and Christian extremists under the pretense of sober constitutional exegesis. This all points toward a dark and difficult time ahead, and my heart goes out to everyone else feeling shaken by the news.
As always, administrative violence is distributed unevenly: it flows most fiercely along the existing cracks in our social and political landscape. Folks who are Black, indigenous, undocumented, trans, queer, gender-nonconforming, poor, disabled, non-Christian, and/or non-English-speaking have already been feeling and will continue to feel the effects of this authoritarian slide most severely. Its implications for a much broader set of protected rights—and for the cover it provides to right-wing vigilantism—is frankly terrifying. With a Democratic party that couldn't fight its way out of a paper bag, we need to take up the responsibility to support and care for each other.
Sorry to open on a downer. If any of this rubs you the wrong way, don't worry: I get it off my chest here so I don't have to talk about it during our sessions.
The image above is a somewhat unflattering scan of a print by Mary Tremonte hanging in my office. The text says Knowledge, Privacy, Access, Power, Respect. The design speaks to various facets of reproductive justice, and I've always held these as core principals of my healthcare work in general.
I've been proud to show affinity with the struggle for reproductive justice, but this moment calls for more than a symbolic display, so I will be reviving the fundraising model I've used in the past. For all appointments paid between now and the end of July (including prepaid Self-Care Packages), I will be donating 15% of proceeds to Indigenous Women Rising and the Keep Our Clinics campaign.
Indigenous Women Rising is part of the National Network of Abortion Funds. They support individuals seeking abortion anywhere in the US, with a focus on indigenous folks, for whom access to basic healthcare, including abortion, is already severely limited. Keep Our Clinics is an umbrella fund supporting independent abortion clinics around the US. Many small clinics are of course being forced by new laws to close; those that remain open are seeing a surge in demand as well as compounded legal and financial challenges.
Set up your own recurring donation:
Organizations need steady commitment more than they need sporadic headline-driven donation surges. If you set up your own monthly donation, of any amount, to one of these organizations, or to another abortion fund or clinic of your choice, I will happily offer a session at 50% off the normal rate. Send me your initial (or most recent) donation receipt and I will apply the discount to your next session. Offer expires July 31.
Poems by Denise Levertov
I know I've tended to privilege dead poets in these letters. I apologize for the recurring theme, and hope you'll excuse one more for now. Next time will be for the living.
Denise Levertov has been a favorite of mine since I came across her work in my early twenties. A friend whose house I was crashing had a copy of To Stay Alive in her bathroom. She was looking for new reads, so we swapped for an edition of Dylan Thomas I happened to have with me. I never looked back.
This month's offerings come from Levertov's 1972 collection Footprints. These pieces resonate with me in this moment for how they speak to the nature of time and the possibility of progress. They are political poems, but not banner waving movement poems. Their critique is reflexive and contemplative, and they recover a spark of hope in the unknowability of our fortunes. They speak across the years as a note pressed tenderly into the palm, personal and sincere.
Intrusion
After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones
something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.
After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown
something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.
The Sun Going Down Upon Our Wrath
You who are so beautiful—
your deep and childish faces,
your tall bodes—
Shall I warn you?
Do you know
what it was to have
a certitude of grasses waving
upon the earth though all
humankind were dust?
Of dust returning
to fruitful dust?
Do you already know
what hope is fading from us
and pay no heed,
see the detested grave-worm shrivel,
the once-despised,
and not need it?
Is there an odyssey
your feet pull you towards
away from now to walk
the waters, the fallen
orchard stars?
It seems
your fears are only the old fears, antique
anxieties, how graceful;
they lay as cloaks on shoulders
of men long dead,
skirts of sorrow wrapped
over the thighs of legendary women.
Can you be warned?
If you are warned will your beauty
scale off, to leave
gaping meat livid with revulsion?
No, who can believe it.
Even I in whose heart
stones rattle, rise each day
to work and imagine.
Get wisdom, get understanding, saith
the ancient. But he believed
there is nothing new under the sun,
his future
rolled away in great coils forever
into the generations.
Among conies the grass
grew again
and among bones.
And the bones would rise.
If there is time to warn you,
if you believed there shall be
never again a green blade in the crevice,
luminous eyes in rockshadow;
if you were warned and believed
the warning,
would your beauty
break into spears of fire,
fire to turn fire, a wall
of refusal, could there be
a reversal I cannot
hoist myself high enough
to see,
plunge myself deep enough
to know?
3 a.m., September 1, 1969
for Kenneth Rexroth
Warm wind, the leaves
rustling without dryness,
hills dissolved into silver.
It could be any age,
four hundred years ago or a time
of post-revolutionary peace,
the rivers clean again, birth rate and crops
somehow in balance . . .
In heavy dew
under the moon the blond grasses
lean in swathes on the field slope. Fervently
the crickets practice their religion of ecstasy.
With care,
Wilson