May Days/Mercedonius 2022
Ambush your fear
And eat the fucking cupcake. 31 posts to celebrate my birthday starting May 1.
My birthday is in late May, and each year I celebrate for the entire month by giving myself presents every day—a new pen or notebook, a really amazing pencil case (which I may have already ordered), a dress to wear on the day.
And some days I just give myself permission to linger in bed at either end of the day to read, write, or just…linger.
Whatever I gift myself, I consciously unwrap the moment and experience the extra snooze cycle or crisp cotton sheets or few more pages as an artifact of the age drawing to a close and a tool for building my year to come.
The themes of May thread themselves through my next 12 months or so.
I have a notebook filled with last calendar year’s Advent reflections (see my Advent blog here) and notes written over December’s 13 Holy Nights between Christmas Eve and Epiphany. This ritual, which I stumbled upon the day before the first Holy Night and practiced clunkily but intuitively through the season, guides one through reflections that speak to each month of the coming year. (If you are interested in learning more about this practice, I highly recommend checking out Lara J Day’s website and getting her beautiful deck and guidebook. I did and will be using it this December.)
In my December 2021 reflections on May 2022, I wrote, “ambush fear with your ferocious dream/follow your own light.” At first I thought I’d written it (it’s at the bottom of the page and is essentially the sum of what I wrote earlier on the page—you’ll just have to trust me on that), but now I realize it is actually from Chris-Anne’s Sacred Creators deck. While I am a bit disappointed that it is not my original language, it is actually my language—it was given to me. I didn’t create it, but I captured it.
Ambush fear with your ferocious dream.
So, in this year’s May Days series, I plan to write about the gifts I give myself (and perhaps receive from others) during my birthday month that help me ambush my fear and wield my ferocious dream through May and into my next journey around the sun.
And the most helpful gift I can receive is for you to join me.
Birthday chronicles/12th of Mercedonius
I am luxuriating in the perfect month at the perfect time during the perfect season to look around at all the people, places, penchants, and peccadilloes that help me be me.
Bad grammar
I don’t think there is such a thing as over-reading—the word is everything and always; punctuation perforates the word with energy and rest, with intimacy and familiarity.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Yesterday, I asked a question I couldn’t answer: How do you know you are making the right space?
Today answered it.
And now we wait
But it’s hard to understand what it feels like to stand still, be patient, and wait for the next thing to start. The next thing—I wanted to write the next act or the next scene (thing is so vague), but I don’t know if I am waiting for a costume change or a set change or if I am supposed to move to another theatre.
First of Mercedonius (or Mercedonius V)
Mercedonius is a period of time—about a moon cycle—that you can insert into your year when you need to catch up with your season.
Stop hitting yourself
Part of me wants to keep going back to that classroom so that I can savor the feeling of not going back to that classroom.
I'm out on parole (and I'm a flight risk)
The other day, a student with a high C grade asked me what he could do to get a B. I thought to myself, how about just ask for one?
I hid the rest of the pie so I could finish it all my damn self
The belief that a woman is selfish for feeding herself leads to the bias that a mother’s greatest value is in her self-sacrifice (the upcoming abortion rights decision from the Supreme Court further emphasizes that).
X marks the spot/the elephant in the room
My need to feel organized rejects the idea of mental piles but embraces a giant card catalog with hundreds of unlabeled drawers. They’re unlabeled because I like to rearrange the contents, and because I am sure I will remember where I put everything.
How do you know when it's over?
Do you just know? Does it tell you in a whisper or an email or a brick through your window?
Making the extraordinary, ordinary
A book that pairs obfuscation with ostentation and calls it self-evident. A book akin to a box of Crayola Crayons dressed for the Met Gala.
Let there be light
I have let a lot of inspiration and intention pass me by. From time to time, I recognize ideas that once lighted around me, like dust motes or fireflies, taken up and shared by someone else.
Mayday, mayday, (may day)
It’s not that my ship is sinking, but, to paraphrase Stevie Smith, I’m waving and perhaps a little bit drowning.