Saturday's Substack — Becoming Intimate with Winter
Saturday’s Substack — Becoming Intimate with Winter
“I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.”
— Frida Kahlo
It is 29º in rural upstate New York this morning. Winter has arrived. Snow and ice cling to the ground. My boots greet the cold; the days of tennis shoes have surrendered to the season. The earth is lying fallow, and so am I — planting seeds invisibly beneath the surface while tending a slower, quieter life.
Pulling back from public life has been necessary medicine. A refusal. A choosing-my-own-rhythm. Mental health has its own liturgical calendar, and the season I am in right now is one of deep healing — of staying still long enough for my nervous system to trust that stillness is not a threat.
This holiday season carries a double-edged light: sorrow, because I am in exile, and delight, because invitations from beloveds keep arriving. For now, though, nesting is the work: slow mornings, yoga, strength training, and the occasional pilgrimage to the porch to let winter’s wind brush against my skin — a small act of intimacy with aliveness.
As agoraphobia matures into something I can name and befriend, and as I recover from severe depression and catastrophic anxiety, I’m remembering Frida Kahlo — and her fierce insistence on narrating her own becoming. Like Frida, like Gloria Anzaldúa, I am the subject of my own story. My body, my belonging, my flight from danger — these are the materials I have been given to work with.
Next week, I will be working at the public library. I requested some James Baldwin, that master of exile and home-making. Literature is a map for fugitives who refuse disappearance.
Place matters to me. And this land — these hills, these barns, this county named after Friendship — is still foreign ground. I am a citizen of an Other City, one we are building as we dream and imagine another possible world. The Friendship Free Library is becoming a sanctuary for me — a base camp for my next book on belonging and freedom in Friendship, NY of all places. Maybe this safe place will soften the edges of agoraphobia, helping me feel more held in a town shaped by white Christian Supremacy’s long shadow.
I’m reading. I’m watching films. I’m journaling. I’m mapping where grief unlocks imagination.
I’ll be digging into myth and other wisdom narratives — to chart a discourse on belonging and freedom that can speak honestly to life in rural America.
I don’t know exactly where this project is headed. Long essays? A book? A series of dispatches from a queer, trans, autistic refugee becoming rooted in a foreign land?
For now, I’m letting the art emerge as it wants.
May this winter teach me — and maybe teach us all — the sacred work of becoming at the speed of healing.
Paz, —RCE+