August Updates :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
A Bittersweet Announcement
Abortion Access Benefit: Report Back
MPV / Monkeypox
Poems by Melanie Noel
Happy endless heatwave to you all. I hope everyone is finding some time for self care and for nourishing relationships in this very chaotic summer. I'm writing you all to follow up on my abortion access benefit from last month, as well as to make a difficult announcement about the future of my practice. Thank you for reading.
The image above is a watercolor by Heide Hinrichs, which graces the cover of Melanie Noel's The Monarchs.
A Bittersweet Announcement
After a lot of thought and discussion, my partner and I have decided to move away from LA this autumn, to follow a hard-to-resist job offer up in Oakland. Precise timeline is still under consideration, but likely early October. The past few years building my practice here, getting to know you all, and supporting you through your own significant transitions has been deeply rewarding. It's not easy to walk away. The Bay Area has always been a second home for me. I was born there and have visited regularly over the years, but never lived there as an adult. Despite the challenge of starting from scratch in a new place, this feels like a unique opportunity.
I will be very grateful for any connections or referrals you may have. I do not yet know where or in what kind of setting I will be practicing, but my hope is to have something similar to what I have here in LA. I may not have an office immediately, but will at minimum be available for home visits. Please share my website and contact info with your loved ones up that way. Encourage them to join my mailing list. I will be transitioning away from my Los Angeles mailing list once I make the move, so if you would like to stay informed, please let me know and I will gladly add you to the new Bay Area list. I will be following up with more detail as the date nears. I will also send out a list of trusted practitioners here in LA that you should consider checking out once I'm gone.
One small way you can support me in my transition is by sending a brief testimonial for use on my website. For an idea of things folks have written in the past, see my Gratitude page. I'm particularly interested in hearing from you if you have seen me over the course of several treatments, and can speak to not just initial impressions (I have a lot of those) but long term shifts you have experienced as a result of our work together. I'm also sharing a special testimonial from this month's featured writer at the bottom of this email.
If you have been waiting for the right moment to book a series of sessions with me, perhaps this is the sign that you should schedule now.
Please, if you have prepaid sessions or gift certificates, schedule them now. I don't want to leave anyone hanging. If you aren't sure what you have, let me know and I will look into it.
Abortion Access Benefit: Report Back
In my last newsletter, I announced a benefit for 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.
To be honest, July was a bit slower than average, with everything going on in the world combined with a normal summer slump and some personal circumstances that kept me away from the office. So I decided to match the amount raised, and am sending $550 to each of these organizations. Thank you to everyone who helped to make this a success, and to everyone providing support in any form to friends and strangers under threat from the reactionary lurch of American politics.
MPV / Monkeypox
Because we just haven't had enough public health emergencies, 2022 decided to throw MPV at us. As usual, the alarm is being directed downward, at the people suffering the consequences, rather than upward, at the governments, NGOs, and medical industry whose recklessness, racism, homo- and transphobia, and profit-at-all-costs motive have led to the outbreak of a disease that has been known for years, for which both treatment and vaccine are already available. Please know that bodywork and other physical contact is still safe with commonsense precautions. If you have any symptoms of flu or rash, do not book an appointment. Your cancellation fee will be waived, if applicable. If you develop symptoms in the days after coming for an appointment, please let me know as soon as possible. If you develop symptoms, and don't have the support you need, please feel free to reach out to me.
For more context, I recommend this short article by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and the CDC info available here. Information about vaccination in LA County is available here.
Poems by Melanie Noel
Melanie Noel is a poet from the Pacific Northwest, and a dear friend since my early days in Seattle. I had the pleasure of collaborating with her a few times over the years, and attended one of her synesthesia-and-poetry workshops. The selections below come from her 2013 collection The Monarchs, on Stockport Flats press, a lovely book if you can find a copy.
Melanie's synesthetic derangement of the senses presents an alternative to the prototypical masculinist derangement espoused by Arthur Rimbaud and since taken up by generations of literary vanguardists and misfits. Whereas Rimbaud's derangement presumes an antagonism between the creative and everyday selves to be overcome through heroic acts of self-destruction and self-alienation, Melanie's writing comes across breezily unburdened by such baggage, preferring to slip out the cat door rather than blow the house down.
Once outside, Melanie's writing encounters a world where things are precisely as they seem—but their seeming is not circumscribed by any traditional taxonomy. Here, the page is a matrix of possible transformation, animated by curiosity, careful observation, and a proprioceptive awareness that does not end with the body—indeed, the body does not end with the body. Reading Melanie's citations and appreciations in the appendix to The Monarchs, one finds evidence of an expansive intellect and refined aesthetic palette, whose allusions, inspirations, and borrowings from a variety of texts proceeds gracefully, treading lightly in whatever unexpected direction it so pleases, neither asking permission nor laying claim. Her meander takes the form not of the explorer-invader-colonizer, but rather of the namesake butterfly, pollinating as she goes.
Melanie was also gracious enough to write a testimonial for my manual therapy practice once upon a time. I was always a little too sheepish to actually use what she wrote on my website, so this letter marks the blurb's public debut, with permission, just for fun. Read to the end for the big reveal.
The Lion Ant
I had seen your pelt in the transparent woods: unclean
but gleaming. Plainspoken the birds and the yellow earth.
*
Black thousand:
Industrial sun:
Ball bearing of the hunt:
Heart, hidden.
*
I had seen your pelt in the woods and nothing else.
But then my eye did hear
the colony
ecliptic
bowed forepaws marching
as if in dark honey.
The Earth Blooms In With Affectionate Emptiness
The scars of the sun are turning to honey. Lustrous recovery. Bee of the cairn.
Loose little fists of ranunculous and bees.
*
Rose belongs to lotus.
Lotus belongs to drone and queen.
*
Two suns rose and the birds flew down. Loose little fists in the sea.
New planet of Pripyat and a taste of tin.
*
The bee
is a low yellow cloud coming out of a dream of dark scarves.
*
There, the cameo of the tiger horse.
*
Pear. Rosemary and pear.
*
Loose little fists of apples and the moon.
*
Daybreak is an emergency of twelve thousand larks.
Sky without heaven. Blushing honey.
Theater of the heartbeat. Loose little fists.
*
*
Be born.
Be born from the cloud with its door. The cloud from the sea where the birds
are suddenly swimming.
Mute Swan
It was a white bird with a bear's body : white hibernator. Seeker
of consolations The wing cave
Draft-voice a consolation.
*
There were no dry rivers. Only rivers more blue, rivers more brown.
Electricity ran under the roots and around them.
On the melting surface a thousand sweet onions.
The ice a permanent light.
The bear's wide collar of wings
the black beak a loose secondhand of the sky.
*
The melting impermanent light and the animals, yellow coats with black buttons.
*
Magnolia blossom, do not rust shut over the swan boat. Styrofoam cups
shuffle under the seats the gossip of moons.
There was a moment in my first massage with wilson that i felt myself to be a fossil: like the pressure of the earth was helping me to find my essential form. it was both sheltering and transcendent. if wilson's massages were poems, i think they'd be in russian but have a french accent from montreal. they'd be written by the lovechild of marlene dietrich's godchild and the tree under which tuvan singers learn to sing.
With care,
Wilson