Cara Andreina

Right now, they’re holding your funeral in Padova. I’m holding your hand. Mi manchi.

Grazie, Andreina.

When I write your name, I’m immediately grounded. My sit bones deepen. My shoulders go back and my chin goes up. My lip trembles. My eyes well with tears and I’m held in them. I smile. I place my hand on my heart.

When I spoke to you on your last birthday, you were in a lot of pain. Yet you still greeted me with your characteristic effervescence.

You lived over 94 years. You hid under a bridge in Vicenza from American bombers in World War II. You practiced fascist calisthenics as a girl in the piazza.

You were a very independent young woman and insisted that you would never get married. Instead, you were the first of your girlfriends to marry when you met your man from Abruzzo. He died young. I wish that I got to meet him. I met him through your daughters and granddaughters. La nonna.

Thank you for taking me to your cherished Dolomiti with you on Sundays. When your daughter wrote to me, she said:

Ed è andata nelle sue montagne in serenità.

The first thing you asked me is why I described my ideal host as a single older Italian woman. No other ragazza americana had asked for that before. I said that my grandmothers both died before I was born and…you interrupted me with an abbraccio forte.

Then we went for a passeggiata to the supermercato. You taught me how to take the bus. You taught me how to make risotto. You said, “Brava, Mattie!” after I outlined the history of Venice at the dining room table.

We made fresh tagliatelle con pomodoro e piselli. We went to the prosciutto and Prosecco festivals. When we visited the rose garden, I was so proud to help you hold steady on my arm.

You and your family welcomed my aunt, my ragazzo sorrentino and many friends for meals over the years. When my mom came to visit, you two went to the De Chirico exhibit together. You didn’t have a language in common but came back delighted to share that you kept pointing with preference to the same paintings!

You and your family came to the agriturismo that I was working on outside of Bologna to celebrate your 80th birthday. We chuckled about the curmudgeonly owner.

Thank you for always asking about my brother.

I thought I would spend a semester abroad and that would be it. Instead, you ushered in my love affair with Italia and ultimately, a decade-long global lifestyle. You knew where the marvelous and mundane met. You knew how to stay down to earth and rise up all at once.

You used to say, “let’s have a goccio of vino so we sleep well tonight.” Dormi in pace, Andreina.

Con tanto affetto,

Mattie

Che forza. Che tenerezza.

spirit, make me congruent, make me a resource

We want to work with these times in many different ways.

It’s important to know how to feel good, play, appreciate, make love and trip the light fantastic. It’s also important to know how to widen our capacity to be disillusioned and the meet the moment we are living in with a devotional seriousness.

Keith Aaron’s Transformational Coaching - Actually transformational. I’ve worked with him for a year and a half. I thought I had the embodiment piece down. I didn’t really. I’m gratefully deep in that groove now.

Matthew Stillman’s Poetry Course - When I attended the first time, I reconnected to what’s real and alive in me. When I attended my next time, I deepened inner counsel while in the liminal between the urban and rural. In the current one, I’m accessing reinvigorating life force through aspirational devotion to Red. Let the poems get in you, and they just might enchant or reconcile a thing or two for you. I’ve known Matt for 8 years.

Clarinda’s Matriarchial Marketing - Clarinda actually comes from a culture. (American is not a culture.) Actual indigenous wayfinding. I’ve been connected to her for 5 years.

Idola Stellarum’s Talismans - astrology & psychology minus superficial / predatory bullshit equals Magic. Sirius & Venus. #iykyk

Engage with the material of great liberatory writers beyond one-off (often white-washed) trending quotes. James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal essay is a good one.

Reesma Menakem’s book The Quaking of America.

The whole abuse of power / narcissism thing isn’t just an individual pathology. People without a culture, without an attachment to land, tend to attach to imbalanced personality dynamics. People racialized as white are behind. We need embodied reps to build our capacity to confront and be a part of the change. I love the practices in this book. Repetitions to fortify our minds, thicken our skin and soften our hearts. Until we’re dead.

People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond - One of the most potent anti-racist experiences available from a 40 year old organization. Understand structural inequity. Go from stunned to serious.

SURJ Showing Up for Racial Justice - Affinity group for white folks serious about undoing racism. I’ve been connected to them since 2016. Just sign up and show up.

Have you widened your worldview yet to be aware of the racialized imperial structure that we’re steeped in? This grounding will help you quake less, understanding the left and right are closer than they appear.

And of course, singing, dancing, and other art-making.

Oh and Constellations and other consultations for soul-nourishing balance and order repetitions with yours truly.

Amò is neopolitan for love (Part 3/3)

part one

part two

Ciao bella! I remember well when you told me, “You know, I also like being called beautiful.” So I took great pleasure in calling you beautiful regularly. You would dress yourself with great pride and I would look you up and down and say, “Wow, quanto sei bello oggi, Amò!” “Wow, how beautiful you are today, Amò!” You also taught me how to dress as we prepared to “fare la passeggiata sul Corso,” to go for a walk down the main drag, to see and be seen.

Meeting your mother was a very big deal. The word for mama’s boy in Italian is mammone. Mama’s boy doesn’t quite grasp the quality of attachment. The literal translation of mammone is large breast. Your mother called you beautiful a lot.

Your mother was bed-ridden when I met her. I didn’t understand her Neapolitan but I would listen and respond with “lo so.” “I know.” She never got over having to leave her hometown, the next town over. She didn’t understand me either but I would complain too and she would say, “Uffa!” Mirroring my frustration. Upon arriving at her house, I said that we needed to clean the place out. You said, “Good idea.” And I said, “No, I mean right now.” I gained your older brother’s respect from that. He was as serious as you were not. He was a frame artisan. I’m looking at my wall right now with the exquisitely framed sketch of the inside of the Pantheon by an architecture professor from New York.

-

You had a dream to live on Corso Italia, the main drag of Sorrento and so although our relationship was already flailing, we moved there and we had a balcony that overlooked the bay of Naples. And the other balcony, the town of Sorrento. In the course of a year, we’d entertain almost a dozen of my guests from the US. I remember still the look on my brother’s face when you told him that he could, indeed, have the entire pizza, for himself. He relaxed around you like I did. He still uses the Italian canvas bag that you got for him to put his catalogs in.

We started to fight something awful. It was so bad that it was embarrassing to see our neighbors the next day. You’d tell me to ease up and I’d tell you to take your life more seriously. You’d try to read my favorite books in Italian translation. I’d help take care of your bed-ridden mother. You’d go to English language school. I’d show you the world is much bigger than being the King of Sorrento. I’d grow you up, you’d grow me down. I’d enjoy the affection of your many friends, colleagues, older brothers and sisters in law. And you, Tu Vuo' Fa' L'Americano - you’d enjoy capitalist Christmas in the US.

-

When I said how much I loved you, your land and your people, you’d reply with “You’re just an American refugee, you’re going to leave us.” I’d say, “Come back with me, we’ll live in NYC and you can work at Eataly!” But you were never going to leave your home.

I said I got a job up north as if that wouldn’t completely and irrevocably change everything. You couldn’t protest because you knew I felt tearfully suffocated in the isolation of the peninsula. “Why are you crying? It’ll be fine, we’ll visit one another,” I said. And we did. I took you skiing and ice skating for the first time. Southern and Northern Italy are very different - you enjoyed regaling your friends with tales from the North. They called me Polentona, a term southerners adopted to make fun of northerners, mocking their propensity to eat polenta. The term was a response to anti-southern prejudice and epithets.

When we said goodbye on the train platform in Naples, I lost control in my grief, just as I lost control of so many defenses in the field of your love and land.

a mother sits beside her daughter

The forces of a larger magnitude pluck the mother up

And place her right down beside her daughter

Just an inch back

Just enough to place her hand on her youngest’s back

She remembers patting her back

When she was a newborn baby

Over her shoulder

Before she pulled her hair

In the backpack carrier

Asking are you my mother?

Do you even want to be here?

It was hard to bear that her daughter wanted to be near her

Aren’t I making it worse?

Just by existing here?

In her big Need

She couldn’t understand how much she was needed

She understood today, however

Because her body told her

The bottom of her lung cavity

Filled with air

For the first time in 38 years

It was then that her father died

And just like that, went all her resources

She hadn’t realized that she was holding on to him from way down there

She hadn’t had a breathe of fresh air in years

After the lung-chucking grief

and her never-ending tears

complete

all goes from static to conducted,

the flow of life runs through like a current!

in her awe-some surprise

she widens her eyes

moves proudly in place

behind her daughter

Determined to protect her

She had stayed out front

Facing backwards

Hips forward

Shoulders and gaze backwards

She realizes now

It’s facing fully forwards

That provides the most

For everyone’s secure-yet-surely-doomed future

The daughter can now be rightly responsible

With the feeling of this privileged weight

Comes a rush of tears

A babbling brook, embodied

That will never end

But allows a continual cleanse

Right within her

Sourced endlessly from those who came before her

The patting isn’t a “stop those tears!”

It’s a “keep that tap going now, dear!”

“That’s it!

Let it all out now

I’m not going anywhere.”

The grandmothers are in chorus above, back and down

Singing out and clinking glasses, “oh my goodness, finally!”

Balance Praxis

The two core principles of family constellations practice are balance and order. In my experience, the closer we stay to the profound simplicity of that space, the better we facilitate sustainable movement.

The parents are too close. No room to breathe, stretch and expand.

The parents are too far. The children are lost.

One sibling is very anxious and can’t step out of parental entanglement to create her own life.

One sibling feels freedom in their avoidance but their children make up for it.

The parents face one another and one thousand things occur in an instant. That’s quite a lot. Enough, even!

The mother is very sad. Her daughter, pollyanna to compensate.

The father is full of rage. His son terrified of any potential misstep.

The siblings are too close, neither can live freely.

The siblings are too far, they can’t find any forward-faced belonging.

-

One friend longs for more contact with people after a childhood of loneliness and neglect.

One friend longs for more space for themselves after a childhood of constant closeness and abuse.

They learn something from one another.

One student’s blood pressure raises. While another student feels galvanized bearing witness, another courageously checks them with a request to slow down. The teacher reflects after class how her parts are showing up and making sure it’s in service to their students.

Learning from one another. Practicing together.

In family constellations, we are practicing.

Of course none of us are just one thing or the other but as we all practice together in our co-creative stew of funky concoctions, we lean lightly on one another for this alchemical temperance effect.

No matter the degree of participant or witness, things happen. Something’s remembered. Something’s felt. Something’s accepted. Something’s seen.

We practice noticing. We practice bearing life and love. We practice stepping toward and away.

We practice tapping into the elemental forces of life and love, the elemental principles of order and balance.

We pause to fully experience the wet-eyed tender miracle of life.

We recollect ourselves, again and again. We practice gaining and losing, gathering right momentum and traction.

we all have our limits

Sometimes it’s just too much.

Sometimes the hurt and harm is too much for one, two or three bodies to hold.

The ground was already broken and now, with this too, well, it’s simply untenable.

Too much for this period or lifetime.

Sometimes the soul says no, or not now, or too late. Goodbye.

Sometimes something says we’ve got to focus over here now…as we accept what’s dead over there now.

Sometimes the entanglement is too complex.

The weight of what’s uncared for in us and them, too heavy.

The vibes are too off.

Then what?

Our work is the thankless work of having our clean say.

And from that place that’s both kind and assertive,

We step away.

Thanks the laps in the bush of your unconscious ambivalence!

With help from our lionhearted part, we say a little about what hurts and what’s not been acknowledged,

Grinning about what went well without losing our bowed-head humility.

Where do we go? What do we do? What about closure?

We go as far away as we need to maintain the love we still have for them.

Closure happens in the postmortem!

Even though our world inevitably shrinks without them in it.

Even though the contraction is quite uncomfortable and painful.

And so we, although quite cliché, we return once more to ourselves and repair within.

And later, with another and others, try again, more wise, more gorgeously imperfect.

And when even the whole broken into parts is too much to collect, we begin smaller… with just the particles.

Breakup turns into anger and sadness turns into that moment when we were little and they dared say and do that to us.

We practice our microcosmic orbits of rekindling and renewal.

Small steps of review and reclamation.

Medium steps of revamp and reconnection.

We keep close the big saying “it’s about the journey, not the destination!”

love and loss go hand in hand

gatekeeping and gategiving

are you gatekeeping from us around you, gathered?

fearful that your well-woven wounds might cheapen in the hands and mouths of shallow artifice?

thrown around flippantly like a freebie?

aghast! the hungry ghosts clog the psychopomps

greed enters the field.

the wave scatters into particle

resonance collapses

greed sniffs out what’s been dug up by somebody else

“it’s my turn, damnit!”

greed, scarcity and incompetence’s consort,

forgets that nothing vibrates without, first, a ferment

fixated with safety,

greed glances left and right, looking to grab onto anything

generosity enters the field.

particles recompensate into waves

parts no longer seen in their small form

formlessness precedes everything!

greed scowls in unrighteous indignation

generosity laughs with too much love, “how adorable!”

still stuck in dyadic gatekeeping

gratitude enters gallantly

gifting a current that with levity, lessens gravity

when witnessed in plentiful approval

recognized

both become right-sized, fervent in their creativity

next arrive 4, from 7 generations back

from the formless, an arc, a gateway is formed

content turns essence

love and life flow through

a six-sided star, sextiling

people, parts, and waves trine, serving simply

the chaos agent signals

great mother stabilizes

the line collapses surrendering to what’s cyclical

do you want to try again?

“Do you want to try again?”

A question that hums without a “you versus me.”

A prayer that the dyadic impasse between us has collapsed.

There is a tune of “time and space have worked their magic.”

You’re stronger and you’re assuming that I am too. Thank you!

You might even be saying I didn’t irrevocably fuck it up?

You’re confident enough to take a risk to try and love me again?

You still consider me, my impact on you?

There’s no “are you ready to pay penance for the error of your ways?”

More of a “have the errors of our way settled?”

A “I found all of those parts in me, too.”

I’m not a total terror-inducing doom and gloom boogey man?

Try what again?

Something generative, something life-giving?

You want more of me?

Wow.

Too bad I’m too stunned to speak now.