alchemy raze tell yourself a broken heart is the same as a broken nose. it feels like the end of everything, but it mends itself, and when the mending's done it works just as well as it did before. it just comes back a little tougher, a little less or more beautiful. tell yourself we're all a collection of cells, small parts of a larger structure that takes us for granted but couldn't function without us. tell yourself about nigredo. the cooking of the metal until the metal turns black. the final stage of something ending before it's returned to the dirt that made it. tell yourself the dirt you were made from was cool and soft and wet, the better to shape you with, and your eyes were smooth stones, the progeny of other stones before them, and your mouth was a stream fed by a river fed by the sky, and all of this remains in you but has been altered by the weight of living into more than the sum of its parts. tell yourself a moth flying into your face is an accident charged with meaning. tell yourself the sound you hear now is your own voice in a different body, singing to you the only way it knows how, and if you listen long enough you can hear everything you've ever been. 210727 ... unhinged he came to me at exactly the right moment it has been thunderstorms and blossomings ever_since the universe gives us what we need when we need it i could live on the power of your hugs echos of a different man with bad teeth in a different place but this time you bring your hugs to me instead of me doing the chasing you transmogrify my grief into an open heart and magic making hands with the power of your smile, exotic inflected english i will be whatever you need me to be to keep this magic in my life 210728 ... tender_square submerged inside this cup, swathed in a froth of pearls nine-times distilled, i soak. it’s been a long day washing constellations, their imaginary boundaries are needful of much tending. i piece myself back together, the cracked parts let the light bathe what was once obscured. the thoughts from these seven planets gives blindness; my heart sits in the ninth house, my brain in the eighth—life and death neighbors—and i can’t know what their burning row homes will leave behind in the char. pour me out from the mouth of one vessel and into another and i shall be rarefied, pure. 211203 ... tender_square when we become ill, or lose jobs, or relationships are on the brink and we turn toward the arena we are stuck in, and with concern to free up the block, then we are practicing alchemy. we are seeking, with the help of the psyche, to penetrate into the heart of the matter, gain insight, free spirit and find renewal—the fundamentals of alchemy. to have the help of the dream spirit, active imagination, and another human being in the process can make all the difference, otherwise the ego may just go on projecting its ideals and not enter into the round of death and rebirth necessary for change to happen. listening to the subtle movement of the Self from within is key. —monkia wikman “pregnant darkness: alchemy and the rebirth of consciousness” (p. xxii) 220131 what's it to you? who go blather from