Category: on Love

flame in the shape of a heart against a dark background

on Love/Poems

avoidant {a poem}

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Nix Kelley / 0 Comment

please enjoy a poem for which I have no handy excerpt but this.

Nix Kelley

Genderqueer non-binary trans. They/them/theirs. Death doula, clergy-in-training, writing about queer identity, death, hope, praxis, & song lyrics.

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Divination
Journal Entries
on being Exvangelical
on Books I've Read
on Chosen Family
on Chronic Illness
on Co-Parenting
on Deathwork & Griefwork
on Decolonizing
on Dramas I've Watched
on Generational Trauma
on Grief
on Happiness
on Harm & Reciprocity
on Hope
on Love
on Mental Health
on Neurodivergence
on Perimenopause
on Praxis
on Queerness
on Rage
Poems
the Cycle of the Seasons
the Pandemic
the Work
WTAF

CURRENTLY READING:

I am on StoryGraph tracking my reading and the reading challenges I've joined. You can go to my StoryGraph profile if you want to see what kind of reading I've saddled myself with this year, although I'm listing current reads here & finished reads on my Chronology of Finishment so that you don't have to create an account if you don't want to.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty

Never Whistle at Night: an Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, various

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers 1), Becky Chambers

Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3), Brandon Sanderson

The Body is Not an Apology, Sonya Renee Taylor

The Barren Grounds (The Misewa Saga 1), David A. Robertson

Tongues of Fire, Seán Hewitt

Like a Boy But Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary, Andrea Bennett

The Map of Salt and Stars, Zeyn Joukhadar

The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. LeGuin

To Shape a Dragon's Breath (Nampeshiweisit 1), Moniquill Blackgoose

Nimona, ND Stevenson

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi (Novel) Vol. 1, Mo Xiang Tong Ziu

This Place: 150 Years Retold, various

Call Us What We Carry: Poems, Amanda Gorman

all about love, bell hooks

The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth 1), N.K. Jemisin

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Reverie, Ryan La Sala

Ghost Forest, Pik-Shuen Fung

... when Skywoman arrived here, she did not come alone. She was pregnant. Knowing her grandchildren would inherit the world she left behind, she did not work for flourishing in her time only. It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous. For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children's future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

-- excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

remember who you are

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

-- excerpt from The Dispossessed: an Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin