“Those are the ones with the toughest skin.”
Words a clerk used to describe olives I bought two nights ago in a middle eastern grocery.
This morning I muse on the ways I’m tough skinned. The ways 2023 has asked me and so many of my beLoveds to be both tender hearted and resilient. Tap confidences like we turn up the thermostat, see the gorgeous grain of our surety as strong as wood-cell fibers.
I watched the documentary Girls Can’t Surf just after solstice. Those women, badAss athletes all of them, fought for every single right to just fucking ride the waves and be recognized for their enormous talents. Sun tight skin meets brilliant body-mind sport.
I think of my sister’s succulent garden. Sitting in southern Cali sunny desert smog- plants so different than those I witness when I walk out my door in warmer months.
Now winter, I’m tapping my Swedish super powers, listening to ancestors whisper ‘layer up in wool this and bees wax weather rub that’. The softer parts of my skin and heart well insulated, protected, pulsing underneath layers of ice, hidden desires running like water in a frozen river.
And yes, desire is here. A Duluth friend recently referred to her bedroom as “the sex dungeon”. I loved the visual, the consent, the subterranean feral-ness. I feel that mix most moments December through May in Northern Minnesota. My tough skinned parts are mashed up with all the wanting in me. I spend wild amounts of time solo (and practice offering no explanations to anyone= my salute to the delicious subversive in solitude) turned on by risky creativity and the other-worldly beauty outside. I’m fed by small bites of extremely satisfying social and large amounts of individual pleasure. My body, a place to explore and push in seasonal ways, is my own. Focused and fiery and fresh.