..... every day wake up and tend to hope

an ode to July and whatever comes after

July owes me nothing. That’s what I’ve been saying to friends because I don’t yet have the words for how transformational and tenderizing it has been. Toggled between the poles of “clamoring” and “unfurling.”

This past month was a surfacing.

I took a three week grief writing workshop with

Fariha Róisín

at Salted Books here in Lisbon. I cannot recommend this workshop enough, which is also offered online. It was a portal that offered new vocabulary, sensation, and a community of hearts just as committed to being with grief in all its permutations, as artists, as humans, as moral creatures.

I went to a translation studies conference in Leeds in early July, after the first week of the grief writing workshop. After the conference and before returning to Lisbon, I cried my way into an accidental spell over a sticky pub table, allowing myself to feel how deeply I'd been carved out by the events of the past years.

The hot scar tissue of my heart, angry and bereft.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was clearing the way for some new challenges, followed by healing light and the gentle omnipresence of god.

I received an invitation to spend a few days in residency in the Alentejo region, at a former monastery in Mértola, where, in the 1700s, a statue of Saint Anthony was seen crying. What follows are a few very lightly edited excerpts directly from my journal during my time there. I hope they transmit a little bit of the essence of what I experienced and what I am continuing to metabolize and create.

⋆˙⟡♡

July 26 2025

The open of my face slows. Why is it that on “vacation” in off time, when we’re meant to be slow and messy, I wake up early and feel compelled to organize, clean, tidy, tend to the space in this vibe of delicate domesticity that is so foreign to me in my own home— where I live like a feral ghost amidst my piles. This morning, I folded my clothes, hung them with intention, as if every placement of toiletry, bra, etc. was its own art installation or altar.

The slowness rips me open. This whisper of— what is it, exactly, that you’ve been running from? I think of the Gabrielle Bates poem, “Dear Birmingham”: “I was once so terrified of my own contentment. I bit my shoulder and drew blood there.” What a privilege, to be quietly content, to whisper. To emote without distortion, to feel safe, to engage with the land. What grief, to realize that, after all, I am a steady person or, I can be. That I don’t tend towards chaos and volatility, that I can wash a dish with pleasure, cultivate a richness within, eat a mango in the sun with friends, walk along the riverfront, go south. Our host said the muse is strong here for the writers, but she takes a little while to arrive. She is slow, patient, waiting. I welcome any visitations, revelations. I am in gratitude, dreaming. The fear that I had to cut through to embrace this unfolding with presence.

I can appreciate the newness and know it inevitably transforms to not newness. I know the mind likes to make shadow puppets.

I know I am whole.

I know I am the muse and the inspired.

I receive her. I become her.

July 27 2025

Dancing with the outer limits of my clamoring, I wake at 7:30 with a kinesthetic jolt. How far from memory before it ceases to have a charge. How far from memory before it holds you, like a thick duvet in the morning. James Baldwin said, the role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. if I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Shine light in the dark corners, fall asleep staring at the ceiling. Is there something lying on the other side of memory? What if my memory deceives me? The betrayal of memory. The – where’s my memory? The power of remembering the shaded path of memory. I am grateful for the dissolution of the structures that would bind me – a tended to piece of land to hold my restlessness. Horses snorting, whinnying, stamping, kittens following but not too close. The temporary cool of this Alentejo morning before the sun hangs in the sky with splintering heat. I long for the table in front of the fig tree, big in my mind. When I am calm I skew towards subtlety and domesticity. When I am calm, when I am calm. Maybe I am forgetful, maybe I am indulgent in vices, maybe I owe some people a text, but I gather myself in the hours of the morning. I soothe the muse in me and tell her she won’t be abandoned after her moments of brilliance. Nurturance is deep and abiding. It loves ephemera – being cared for. Is your artmaking a form of reverence?

Your strength and grace, the books in you.

focus… focus… focus…

focus… focus… focus…

focus… focus… focus…

focus… focus… focus…

And sometimes your heart just lifts. The blending and purging caught by your own latent optimization. The rawness and progress of your ever after of your labor and dreams, of your attention—

The misdirected, the bereft.

Who are you when…

The fig tree that wafts that speaks in silent aspers. The seam of the tree – its lungs living subterranean, the cracked bowels of a stump, fig tree wafting. The dance between desire and discipline. The way that memory gilds itself– shielded from more language. Always ruinous and sense-based I can’t help but reflect madly on the most material conditions of my labor. One day, you wake up, and you are happy. One day, you wake up, and the things that ailed you are clamoring, close to the surface. I clear away the dust so I can be more like I was. This natural overwhelm - the ongoingness of projects. The craft of encouragement. I woke up so early with a restlessness and walked around the property. I saw a water labyrinth, smelled lavender, sat on a mysterious stoop — a structure that was what it was. Two horses, a distant line of geese. I plunge inside of myself, feeling distantly human. My navel gazing. I feel the razor edge between being a lover and an artist, how quickly things can turn morose or volatile or maybe that’s just the way my brain is and what I’m unlearning. This softness, it’s new.

It smells like summer here. How will I continue to rain beauty down upon my own life when time resumes?

The coiled pain body of

My own want

Kneels me desirous, safe and left

You could find a web or a vast expanse of sound.

Your capacity for slumber

Your capacity for rest.

The facade of your hopelessness.

Sometimes I feel I have written all there is to write. I find myself returning to the well-worn treads of similar themes— saint anthony, alms, crying, fatima, atmospheric phenomena that are rare, discipline and desire, hanging around, lying around (chilling around, as my friend, the poet Ana Cláudia called it).

The stone of my mind grows heavy. My body weighed to the floor. Here we are, here we are.

[my thoughts ricochet off the thick convent walls]

What does it mean, really, to be productive?

To me, it means keeping my promises to myself.

Always keep

A light on, a

promise to yourself

July 28 2025

Trying to work on my thesis feeling subtly haunted in a good way by Clarice. Maybe haunted is too specific of a word. Her work is around, in the periphery, in the collective field.

I am reminded, as I’m working, of her story about a grasshopper…. in Portuguese, the word for green grasshopper also means hope. The day after arriving, I found a green grasshopper on the mosquito screen that sentried the doorway between the open kitchen and the little porch that overlooked the mountains.

Uma esperança.

Yesterday, I sat on a warm muddy rock on the river and shared about how hard it was to finance my education, how hard it still is. How I feel I have nothing to show for eight years of stripping and haven’t been able to meaningfully parlay all that access to cash into a nest egg of some sort, into a source of eternal return. At the end of every month I scrape myself bare and piece together things. Choose a bill to pay on time, the rest will have to wait.

Am I just a sieve? Why does money fall through my hands? And where does it go?

I wonder how anyone is paying for anything these days.

So I am waiting, patiently, hoping for a miracle… or at least to be paid on time. My ledger, my deluge.

Anyway, back to Clarice.

I receive an email from

Emmalea Russo

, one of my favorite astrologers who weaves so much myth, symbol, alchemy, and pathos into her astro weather reports. I always pause to read them when they arrive. This one is titled “Chandeliers, Dreamtime, and Saturn RX.” It is eerily resonant. The horoscopes are pulled from the novel, The Chandelier, which Clarice wrote when she was 23. It is translated by Magdalena Edwards and it structures itself like a chandelier. The strangeness of form. My horoscope is: “She’d been flowing all her life. But what had dominated her edges and attracted them toward a center, what had illuminated her against the world and given her intimate power was the secret.”

We go to visit Nora, the well that provides water for the property. Every time we open the tap we are drinking from Nora. Below Nora, there is a water labyrinth, not designed for navigating by foot, but maybe for staring and contemplating. Herbs dot the property. I rub sage and lavender between my thumb and forefinger.

We drink a bottle of wine called Página and stare at the rising toenail moon. My companion takes the kind of photo of me that’s almost upsetting. Because I haven’t seen that look in my eye for so long. The tinge of exasperation, the exhale of presence… my eyes almost saying “come on”— the look that is disarmed, unposed, descontraída, my gaze intense but diffuse. It’s rare I recognize myself like that in a photo.

In the morning, I wake naturally with a slight pound in my head at 6:30 in the morning. I go for a walk. I create an archive of sounds. They are as follows:

• The soft scream of the crickets

• Coo of birds

• The light scratching of the tips of palm fronds in the wind against the monastery wall

• The buzz of some distant machinery

• Things that are not sounds but feel like sounds— knowing that there is languid movement of the Guadiana River below— a bass note of silent current upon which all other sounds are scaffolded

• The soft padding of my feet against stone

• The crow of a rooster

• The big boweled echo inside the hollow of the church

• The scrape of a chair

Thank you for reading!! ⋆˙⟡♡