The umbrella is made of grey linen. Are umbrellas not supposed to be bright and colorful? As it is cranked open and wide, the sound is the abrasion of rust, perhaps like the slow erosion of trust. There are always ways to hide in the shadow, find reprieve from the blinding light. But then the sun moves ever so subtly, unhurriedly, and her rays find their way to you. The truth always finds its way out. The truth will come out of the shower curtains, seep through the drain, distaste the fruit in your pristine fruit basket with a bitterness you can’t put your finger on.
 
My chest houses stones. Strangers live in my body. I’m unsure who invited them. Who let them in, I wonder. I take deep breaths and yet they make me more aware of the places in which breath does not move. The mountains are curved by water. Uncried tears too must move into form. One day I’ll teach a class about the art of breathing. It is an art, really. You could spend your whole life learning how to breathe. Most of us walk around not breathing much at all.
 
Imagine a line that connects life and death. At one end of the unending line, full liveliness, you are happy, breathing deeply, your whole body is pulsing with the chi of the universe; your organs are in a constant state of crimson ecstasy, in love with their work, in love with this precious life. And as the singularity, this tiny point in space time moves along the spectrum from life to death, you start constricting your breath, tightening your chest, the stones start forming, the water doesn’t flow, your organs start sagging, there are black dots forming, ulcers, ulcers, stress, you’re stressed out.
 
Imagine if we breathed. 
​Imagine if we all deepened our breath.
 
The planet is slowly dying. We don’t see the landfills, the ulcers, the black bleakness we are pouring into the soil. We feel ugly so we put on toxins that make us feel pretty and then we wash them off each day, down down the drain, and the earth cries. Phthalates, Parabens, rat poison in our pours. Coal tar, petrolatum. Sounds like petroleum. Be Beautiful, the product reads. Hmm. Be beautiful.
 
The girl walks in a fluffy pink sweater and tight ripped jeans and looks in the mirror a few too many times. There is little glitter on her face, subtle, yet unnerving, unnatural. If you close your eyes and open your hands, listen with your body, there is sadness, there is anxiety, there is this frantic, frenetic desperation to be beautiful, to be seen. Too bad she doesn’t see. She needs to go bathe in the forest, watch the birds, scream, yell, breathe, cry, place her tears on her third eye, on her tongue. Breathe.
 
The hawk calls. Do you listen?
 
That sweater the young girl wears was made by children and malnourished mothers in a factory without windows in a country where the human waste is disposed in the streams where drinking water is fetched. The trees have a hard time surviving, so imagine the people. Imagine the families. The carbon footprint of the shipping company that brings these oversized sweaters to girls desperate to uphold the beauty standards of the misogynistic patriarchy is as big as the foot of Goliath. These men are too proud to cry. Too insecure to see beauty. They wear sunglasses because the sun rays of the divine are too much for them to bear. What do we bear by hiding from our bareness. How did we come this far, this far from the closeness.

​We are all brothers and sisters. There is hatred only because there is love. And we hate how much we are loved because there is this responsibility. There is this sacredness chirping in the trees, bellowing in the wind, screaming out in magenta and pastel visions as the night turns to day, day to night.
 
What has happened to us? We work all day to avoid any time of freedom because there is this fear of freedom, this fear of silence. We create these walls, these borders, these expectations because we are scared of what will emerge in our art if we allow for the space between notes. Can you imagine music without the space between notes? Without the silence? There is no music without silence. There is no art without silence. There is no melody but this one melody. And when we always move upstream and forget to move with the waters, forget to sleep under the stars, forget to kiss the earth, kiss the trees, talk to the unseen, the whimsical dreams fade into the façade of fear.
 
It is time to start learning from children instead of teaching them our learned fear. It is time to start nourishing ourselves and our children, with food from the earth and lessons from the only teacher there is, this life, this life, this life. Where does the wind blow? Where does the wind blow? Do you hear the faint remembrance of your soul before she, he, they, we were kissed into ignorance? Do you think this is a game? Of course it is a game, a play, a cosmic unfolding of this ether as she moves toward that single space of crimson ecstasy. Who are you, what part do you choose, what are all the sources of everything in you and around you and of you. Is there even a you? Or is there just this beautiful pulsing mystery that moves on through.

We care not if our blouse 
was stitched by a person 
who has no roofed house;
we care not if those 
who picked the cotton 
are malnourished
or eat food that's rotten. 
We're told 
we are are not enough, 
and that we'll be happier 
with more stuff. 
and yet we walk around with this
anxiety because our clothes 
are stitched with scars 
screaming out to us, 
that we have gone too far; 
and some like to say 
that it's too hard 
to change a system like this
but I will degrade to nothing 
if I don't do something 
even if that something is simply 
not buying a thing 
that sings scars
into bleeding hands 
and colonized lands 
corrupted by our
capitalistic consumerism.