In defense of...
Welcome to my deeper dive into everything Unfixed! In this series titled “In Defense of…” I delve into a quality, experience or object often rejected, misunderstood or discounted in our culture. Ten years ago I never thought I’d be making a case for living in an unfixed body and exalting its virtues. So it got me thinking, What else have we been conditioned to reject? What unassuming beauty or opportunity awaits us when biases are examined and we embrace a life holistic? I invite you to join my horizontal playground where duality commingles without hierarchy or preference, recovering the parts of ourselves, our lives and the earth longing to be part of the conversation.
All the p’s (prose, poetry and photography) are by yours truly. 🤍
In defense of uneventful
This fictional piece was loosely inspired by a song my biological father, Charles Brauer, wrote called Bertha. It’s a bittersweet little tune about spending a birthday alone. I encourage you to give it a listen—it’s the kind of melody that lingers with you long after.
In defense of not knowing
Forget all you know about yourself; forget all you have ever thought about yourself; we are going to start as if we knew nothing.
In defense of sentimentality
We live north of the California wildfires. North of unimaginable devastation. North of winter blue, where the sky is nothing but a constant, wet oblation. I look up and try to move clouds south.
In defense of inefficiency
Last winter our neighbor discovered a secret society of cats—twenty ferals haunting the Garbaj Mahal, a collapsing, abandoned house just up the road. Golden eyes peeked from hoarded mounds of filth, an occasional question-mark-tail echoing our disbelief,
In defense of death
This past week, death visited. My mind, desperate to escape the ache, tried to pull me toward the light—toward renewal, beauty, and the comforting truths about death we often lean on. But staying with grief is harder for me. It’s a practice I’ve begun to learn through my own body and chronic illness, yet death is a deeper lesson altogether.1 With time I am learning: intimacy with the insult doesn’t necessarily promise lift or renewal, but a more lasting grace with irreconcilable truths and the raw feeling they demand.
In defense of the dark
I want her to trust me, to let my body hold her sadness, to let me pull her down and inwards, steady, but not falling.
Once, I was her friend. We’d slow dance our bodies—her’s fetal and finite—and I’d whisper her name before her name. But when her eyes met the world, colors bled into her vision and she forgot me, then feared me, as if we had never danced at all.
In defense of monotony
A few weeks ago, while clearing closet clutter to make space for a new printer, I unearthed a half-finished project—a craft I had poured myself into for two years before abandoning it for other pursuits. Needle felting had never called to me, hadn’t even crossed my mind, until life stripped me bare. I didn’t search for it; it found me, in the aftermath …
In defense of fog
Today, I am in a fog squared. Oregon’s damp blanket has finally thrown itself over summer while my brain also slumbers with low clouds. Outside my window, tree limbs blur within a grey gauze. The sky pulls wool over my eyes, fooling the me who is someone with something to say and somewhere to go. While sailors navigate safely to shore with fresnel light…
In defense of bitter
Recently, while hiking Oregon’s overgrown logging trails, I descended into a dusty blue horizon of Oregon Grapes. Ripe and juicy I bit down on one—a smokey initiation, then tart explosion, and final oh-so-acrid resuscitation as its seeds tannined my tongue. Each morsel a koan to suspend thought and discover the world anew.
In defense of going nowhere
We stood in the grass, an infinite moment or two—my bare feet on morning dew, Kitty Nova wearing her best fur—and watched the world, more ears than eyes, more nosing than knowing. I tune myself to her tail-conducted symphony, discordant human notes relaxing agenda, and together we go nowhere and arrive now-here.
In defense of unanswered prayers
With each passing month, I feel less and less Joseph Campbell’s hero and more a failed mortal drowning in the River Styx, trapped soulless between life and afterlife. But cathartic shifts with mom are a healing balm so magical thinking interjects with dire conviction: Mom’s apology was the missing piece. Now the journey is complete and the dizziness will surely go away. But time has other plans.
In defense of crow's feet
Last week, enthusiastic spring winds blew a significant Big Leaf Maple limb to the ground, her leafy branches undone near our back door. I investigated the scene, wondering what cosmic joke busted her laugh lines into flight. The earth beams crow’s feet everywhere I look, and not just as branches, or rippling echoes on water and sand. Flower carpels dra…
In defense of beige
A team of astronomers recently reported, after surveying and then averaging light from over 200,000 galaxies, that the universe is beige. Upon their discovery, they reached out asking for suggestions for names, and some of the responses included: Cosmic Latte, Cappuccino Cosmico, Big Bang Buff, Cosmic Cream, Univeige, Cosmic Khaki, and my favorite, Primordial Clam Chowder.
If the universe is beige, I argue that hugs are beige too. Let me explain.
In defense of weeds
I write about weeds today while a rosy affliction polka-dots my hands. Springtime swishes away the tail of Oregon’s winter with frenzy, assaulting my flesh with rash change, my skin more verb than noun. If I had microscopic vision, I would see the boundary of me eating the stardust of other—fescue and rye grass, maple and ash pollen, moss and mildew and wolf lichen spores—reminding self of its endless undoing.