Winter Updates :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
New Year greetings
Another Palestine Benefit
Farewell to Five Pins Project
Poems by Dmitry Maksimov
Sending you all warm New Year's greetings from beautiful, chilly Oakland, CA. I've been enjoying a bit of a seasonal slump these past few weeks (I've even allowed myself the luxury of calling it a vacation), and have been glad to spend a bit more time with music, books, cameras, loved ones, the great outdoors, and—let's be honest—social media. But life moves on! I anticipate a pretty busy season ahead.
Next month, I travel to Los Angeles once again to assist a Visceral Manipulation level II training with Dee Ahern, PT, a longtime instructor with the Barral Institute. VM2 focuses on some of the deeper and more subtle abdominal organs: kidneys, pancreas, spleen, peritoneum... some of my favorites! For my therapist friends: there are still openings available in this class, and I'd love to see you there!
I will follow VM2 up almost immediately with another training here in San Francisco, Manual Approach to the Brain I, with Kenneth Lossing, DO. This is a new ensemble of techniques developed by Jean Pierre Barral in recent years, and I have been looking forward to taking the class. Cranial work has taken up an important place in my practice, and I am excited to expand my skills there. Spaces are also still available in this class.
Somewhere in the midst of all that, I will probably make time to turn 40 years old. But we'll see... I might be too busy this year.
Another Palestine Benefit
Thank you again to all who showed up a few months ago to raise funds for Palestine solidarity. Like many of you, I have felt overwhelmed and discouraged by the ongoing situation and our seeming inability to affect a meaningful change of course. So I will again use my little platform here to try and foment some solidarity. I am contributing 10% of proceeds from any appointments booked or gift certificates purchased between now and February 13 toward Palestine Legal.
The previous benefit focused on the UK-based nonprofit Medical Aid for Palestinians. Given that MAP has been a common beneficiary of fundraisers in recent months, and given that most international aid intended for Gaza is currently being held up at the border by the Israeli military, I feel that it's important to support protesters putting themselves at risk for the sake of shifting US, and ultimately Israeli, policy. Palestine Legal is a US-based nonprofit that provides legal advice, Know Your Rights trainings, advocacy and litigation support to college students, grassroots activists and affected communities who stand for justice in Palestine.
Schedule your next session here.
The above photo is from a December 30 Queers for a Free Palestine march in San Francisco. I was happy to see someone holding this sign, which was designed by a friend, the print-maker Sanya Hyland, in Mexico City.
Farewell to Five Pins Project
Last month I made the difficult decision to move out of Five Pins Project, my friends in the Mission District who have graciously hosted my practice for the past year and change. For the moment, I am focusing on the Oakland office, as well as on-site work, but I have an ear out for a new part-time location in SF. Feel free to let me know if you hear of any opportunities! I do appreciate having a location in the city, and don't want to give up on the relationships I've established so far.
Poems by Dmitry Maksimov
In the early days of the current Israeli war on Gaza, I reached for a somewhat unlikely book to help me think and feel through it all. Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad is a 2016 collection edited by Polina Barskova for Ugly Duckling Presse, which gathers the work of five Soviet poets written clandestinely in Leningrad between 1941-44, and kept secret for years following the Nazi siege of the city. It is a remarkable book, a testament to the ravages of war, the gnawing effects of desperation and brutality on the intellect, and the kinds of double-consciousness that life under the eye of Soviet censors induced in the population. These poets had all been influenced by the OBERIU group of writers around Leningrad in the late 1920s and early 30s, and though their experiments diverge in some ways from their earlier contemporaries, the resonance is strong.
OBERIU was a collaborative and openly subversive vanguard in Russian letters whose strategies included humor, formal experimentation, and a systematic disentanglement of linguistic meaning. Commonly labelled Russian Absurdism in the West, OBERIU had as its most visible members Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky—both of whom were ultimately arrested as subversives and died in captivity. Modernist experimentation in retrospect can seem academic and frivolous, but the siege poems in Written in the Dark bear witness to the very real existential dilemmas which often provoked crises of meaning and form in moments of aesthetic upheaval. Faced with brutal and irreconcilable circumstance, meaning degrades and intention turns in on itself; structures fail, or provide mocking respite; familiar symbols take on a nightmarish hue as the writer grasps along bombed out streets and tattered pages. Delirium is not merely a poetic device, but an acute physical state.
This month's offering is a suite of poems by Dmitry Maksimov, entitled WAR, translated by Jason Wagner, Rebekah Smith, and Matvei Yankelevich.
WAR
December 1941. Leningrad.
At night under a quilted jacket in triage
on Vasilevsky Island. My soul,
to defend itself, pretended
to be wooden. There was no light.
1
She raises little spiders.
They hang overhead,
Their little heads hang above the world.
And strange is the outline of the sky
In the nets of a spider's head.
She sewed up with white crosses
The bottomless eyes of
My buildings cast into darkness.
From every side of every field,
the necks of newcomers extended.
She scarfed out porridge,
And our souls were emptied,
While our daughters and our grandmas,
Curled up into cotton wads.
In cropped fur coats she dressed
Us all. And from this snowy massacre
We fly, like eggshells, in the wind,
And all the pretty girls are crying.
Know this! She has yet to pull the brake,
She has stories yet to tell.
2
Not enough porridge to go around.
As I lay barely breathing
With Natasha under our furs,
We saw her soul tearing away.
Then the place was thick with thieves,
They sat down near aunty on the bed,
Then the executioners appeared,
They took away our Easter bread.
And so from that infinity of darkness
Our true friend came when harkened.
So she shut the windows of her eyes.
It's too bad she didn't sneak a look
At how they carried her toward hope
On the broad shield of a hero.
She didn't look, had no desire,
Didn't hear the eagles winging,
Spreading far her praises, even
To uncharted limits of the earth,
As the sisters of the seven seas
Bawled their eyes out by the couch,
Which is where I'm standing now,
Reminiscing in the dusky room
Of my sweet aunty dearest.
Kovenskii Alley.
The apartment, dark.
3
Just enough strength
To open it halfway.
Storms of reality
I've crossed.
Such ailments
And such ravages
Will give faith in heaven,
In the hearts of friends.
Such vigils
And such insults,
Bring fate's verdict
To thunder close.
With such losses
What distant shores
Would our souls
Not illume?
Dragging your feet
Without alarm,
By the time you get home
You're someone else.
An attic. Anti-air raid duty.
With care,
Wilson