One night in South Carolina...

I am writing about healing, but not the kind that stays in language. Healing that shows up in movement. In rhythm. In the way your breathing changes when something in you finally settles, even if you cannot explain why. I am writing about reconnecting, but not as an idea. As a physical act. As something you do with your body, not just your thoughts.

There is memory in the body that does not belong to a single lifetime. Patterns of fear. Patterns of endurance. Ways of bracing, ways of reaching. You can trace them back if you want, through names and stories, but you can also feel them directly. In your chest. In your gut. In the way your body responds before you have time to think.

Movement gives those patterns somewhere to go.

Sometimes that looks like pacing. Sometimes it is swaying without music. Sometimes it is hitting your chest hard enough to feel it echo. Sometimes it is stillness that is not empty but full of tension that is finally allowed to exist without being pushed down.

I am not interested in making this sound clean.

There are moments that feel grounding. There are moments that feel disorienting. There are moments where something lifts out of you and you are left trying to understand what just happened. I am not claiming a fixed explanation for that. I am saying it happens, and it matters.

This is a place to write from inside those moments.

To track what the body does when it is given space to move. To notice what changes when rhythm enters. To stay with the experience long enough to learn something from it, without rushing to explain it away.

If you are here, you probably recognize some part of this already.

Not as an idea. As something you have felt.

That is enough to start.

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Arslan

There's a thing that lives in the chest of men like me. Not a wound exactly. Wounds have edges. This has none. It's hollow. It's the specific emptiness that gets passed from one set of hands to the next before anyone knows what they're holding. My father had it. His father before him. Men who didn't have words for what moved through them, so it moved through them and kept going. Into rooms. Into the people they were supposed to protect. Into me. I received it young. I didn't know I was receiving it. That's how it works. You don't get asked. You're simply the next open place and it settles into you the way cold settles into a house when no one's tended the heat. Quietly. Completely. Until you can't remember a time before it was there. I tried to fill it with everything I could find. Some of it numbed it for a while. Some of it made me feel, briefly, like a man who didn't have a hollow center. None of it held. It never holds. The holl...

Collection of writing, poems.

Higher than the oldest tree, whose breath began with the universe. His smell intoxicates my loins, his touch excites my soul. His love ignites it all. Your absence reminds me of the warmth. The pain crashes away and I am the sun. When nighttime comes, I am the darkest side of the moon, raging for the Sun again. II. The Night Rumi Broke Me Open Since Mom-mom died, something has been turning in me. Not away from her. Toward something underneath the grief. It actually started before she died. I was doing somatic work, trying to move the trauma my body had been carrying. What I did not understand then is that the body does not only hold what happened to you. It holds what came before you. The line runs through the tissue. As I cleared space, something older became audible underneath. She was the crack that let some light in. Tonight I was reading Rumi. I learned that his greatest work came out of grief. The reed flute in his most famous passage cries because it was cut from the reed bed. T...

Going outside...

Arslan gave up so much to save me. His childhood, his identity. The world demands a sacrifice. In order to win this life, you must lose that which you love. I sat with her as her life was leaving her body. Her arms kept jumping. I read it's from the morphine. I also read it's from the nervous system shutting down. I held her hand. I sat and asked myself if this could be real. The protectors came up, helped me walk out of the nursing home. When I walked out, it felt like the longest hallway I had ever seen. Like if I kept walking it would take me to the other side of the earth. The person who kept me steady is gone. What is hardest now is going outside. Grief lives out there. When I stay inside, she can't get to me as easy. She means no harm. She is the price. The price of love. After the hallway, the hollow came. The place in my chest that continued to reach for her, for something to tell me it would be okay. But, if we are being honest, what does "okay" lo...

The Art of the Healers

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