Do you want to feel better?
Then stop playing the victim
Start acting like a survivor.

Even if your gut
And heart
Are telling you it's hopeless.

Your brain is an ***** and a muscle.
It keeps you alive.
And it works if you work it.

Your heart and your gut can heal
If you eat right and get outside.

Begin taking care of yourself.
Set limits for others,
And be kind when
It's mutually beneficial.
Then sometimes when it's not.
And when you feel great,
Do that a lot.

Soon you will teach someone else
To be a survivor
And then you become
A thriver.

Peace and joy
Together
Comes only
To those who have earned it
For themselves.

Women
are not mysterious.

We are not shrouded
in cloaks made from the night sky.

We are not anomalies
or irregularities in the data.

Our nature has been hidden
from men, by men.

We have not been studied;
Not extensively, thoroughly, over centuries.

Not the way men have been, either.
There was no equal footing in
analyses.

Women were test subjects, when men were patients.
When we were "relevant" at all.

This pattern literally kills us quicker.
In medicine, and love.
In the office and the bedroom.
In the workshop and the nursery.

In the kitchen.

In the kitchen.

Some food for your soul:

Everyone is magical.
You don't need a pointy hat and a ******.

Everyone is intellectual.
You don't need spectacles, white skin, or a *****.

Everyone is environmental.
Just go outside.

You just need to be you.

Subscribing to the binary
and rejecting it completely:
One ties your hands,
the other your feet.

Be all the parts of you. Then you can feel
Whole.

Do not pick sides.
It is not a time to divide.

We need a smooth transition
From constant competition.

When destruction is at our door
We look eagerly to each other.

Yet we all want the biggest piece of pie.
It changes the look in our eyes.

No one is in the foul box.
We don't need another power play.

But the ice is melting,
and no one is that good of a
swimmer.

We all do it.
Videos.
Either it's massive *** organs and bad acting
to hilarious music.
Or it's baby armadillos being tickled.

For me today, it was the glossy pages
Of National Geographic
depicting beautiful, fragile ocean life.
Everything was as it should be in the tiny reserves.

Or was it? Doublethink asked.
Were there really no plastic bags floating by?

The miracle of life
Is so addictive.
But the synthetic version,
In two dimensions on your screen
Or the shiny pages of my magazine

Is no replacement
For the intimacy, reality, or
beauty
that overcomes
without filters.

He's a hunter,
But comes when I call.
He was born in the wild.
He's wild still.
But he's always there
When my pain
Makes me wish for privacy.
His attachment
overrules, intrudes
just like his teeth  in my sleeve,
when he cannot
resist
the urge
to PLAY!

Sustainability
An odd moniker
That has come to represent
That we cannot hate and mine and drill
and pillage and ****
the Earth and each other
Indefinitely.

So what can we do indefinitely?
Sustain (not so odd after all).
Sustain our love and kindness and patience.
Reform our economies and sanitation.

Build lives that foster life;
Plant, and nurture.
Harvest, and dry some seeds for next year.

Marching makes a point.
We need to tell others how we feel.
So they can help us
Do what we need to do.

Impeach hate. Kick it out of office.
We have everything to lose.

The truth will out!
Said Anna to the Grasshopper.

Whose bladed legs had cut her own
When it jumped into her pocket.

Grandmother moon got cancer
And almost died. Just like Anna.

But cancer didn't do it on purpose.

Now Anna doesn't wear pockets.
Or walk in the long grass.

Two things she loved to do.

Instead she paints canvases
Full of green and red.

Sometimes Anna feels worse than dead.
And then she reminds herself

Of all the grasshoppers
Still in the long grass

Who might hear her story
And empathize with the foreigner.

Soon she found herself in a forest
Evergreens planted neatly, but full grown.

And Bear lived there
And made her feel at home.

From there she heard a rabbit say
That Grasshopper would be locked away.

And Anna was afraid.
Almost like the moment

She felt the blood seeping through her shorts.
Before she knew the cause.

Suddenly long grass was everywhere.
And her screaming scared the Bear.

So Anna climbed a tree.
And from there she could see

A little brown bird
who told her
she could
fly.