failing/falling, it’s light outside
tattoo opportunities, bodywork openings, support for gaza, clown camp recap
if you’d like to listen to this newsletter:
it’s an eerie feeling for summer to just be “beginning” while the days are now getting shorter. we are, in fact, officially descending into darkness, one minute a day, saying hello to the light just as we are incrementally saying goodbye. i’ve been trying to practice saying little goodbyes, out loud and internally, more frequently, even (or perhaps especially) to things and folks i’m just beginning to deepen with. not as a means to evade depth, but to remember that i have an infinite amount of endings and tiny deaths to come in this life, a reminder that is nearly boring me with how much i need to circle back to it in this perpetual whatever-the-noun-is-for-tumultuous.
i’m letting myself stay up into the first light more and more, a mediocre feat up north where the light ascends around 3:30am. i find it a spooky liminal space with the bookends of a day bleeding into each other and we can actually touch the other side of this death/life spectrum (continuum) where none of it ever really ends after all. planning anything feels fraught and risky in the surf of real time catastrophe, and at the same time we need to be prepared (for what, anything). my heart can’t keep up with the devastation of fascism, though i keep trying to. my life in my new home hugs and holds my heaviness daily, transmuting it into a goopy love puddle, formless and infectious. what a gift, an experience of home in all it’s meanings that i haven’t felt since i lived in brooklyn, almost 3 years ago now. holding it dearly and lightly, in the spirit of the precious temporality of my own flesh.
and this temporary blue rose neck tattoo i put on last night is making me consider a neck tattoo. the juxtaposition of feeling both hot and heartbroken puzzles and excites me. my water kefir crystals are keeping me in line and impressing my flatmates. the frog emoji continues to reflect my internal world: shy and sweet, calm and a little melancholy, ready to either attempt to flirt or stick my hands in the soil for an hour or so without speaking.
tattoo openings
i’m booking tattoos for july at fantasy collective :) i haven’t tattooed in a month or so and really look forward to getting back into slow time transformation mode next week with some new and continuing pieces. bookings have been slow and sparse, with no one wanting to miss a swimming opportunity or everyone being broke. it’s a strange feeling to be in a field so dependent on expendable income in a city that’s exponentially getting more expensive (on top of recently beginning my practice on a platform well after it’s uses have dissolved into an algorithmic hellscape). but alas, the queer bodies must continue to change form and mark time, so here we are continuing to adorn bodies.
on the 5th, i’ll be tattooing at spark collective’s soli event. this feels extra sweet, as i was a part of this collective last year as a bodyworker and essentially self taught myself tattoo at the space before moving to fantasy. they have also been donating the space to the weekly free bodywork clinic i’ve been co-organizing for almost two years now (!). i have a lot of love for these folks and this community space and really want them to be able to thrive in a moment where these sorts of third spaces are rapidly disappearing. please come and support and maybe get tattooed? they will be sliding scale, all donations going directly to spark. i’ll be there allllll day tattooing until my hands can’t do it anymore.
new studio! bodywork/teaching
in may i joined a small movement studio collective in kreuzberg where i now hold my bodywork practice and try to revive some semblance of a movement practice after a long period of dormancy. having a place to move again is really filling me and intimidating me. my dancing body feels far away, yet also my nearest and oldest comrade. i’m spending a lot of time alone in the studio, doing anything at all, and then forgetting about it, as a means to get back into it without much profundity. i’m taking visitors, for those looking for a dance buddy… come on in ;)
and for those needing some hands on care: my bodywork practice is open for massage and craniosacral sessions on a low sliding scale (not turning anyone away for lack of funds). this practice has been with me for almost a decade now, and i continue to be humbled how much touch can shift our inner landscapes. we are witnessing more chaos than our nervous systems can compute. i’d be honored to be a small support to your digestion of our hurting world. (just respond to this email if you’re interested <3)
and and big thanks to those who partook in my falling classes. what a treat to get to teach regularly, i loved discovering that i love teaching. we opened many doors: sensing into when touch is invited, finding the sweet spot where we need each other to remain “stable”, recognizing that we are touching before our skins make contact, cultivating more supportive ways to fall into the ground and one another, practicing exiting dances more frequently, with care. i’ll be ready to continue maybe after summer, either at 90mil or my new studio, hopefully with an evening slot instead. so stay tuned for that :)
support for mahmoud’s family in gaza
i’ve gone over to mahmoud’s flat a few times in the last weeks to deliver the very small amount of money we are able to wrangle to send to his family in gaza as they continue to survive the unspeakable that needs to continue to be spoken. each time he makes me the most decadent palestinian meal, ready to go when i arrive. he doesn’t really speak english and we both speak just a bit of german. we start by doing what we can in deutschlish and then move to the very slow cadence of the translator in his phone, toggling patiently between english and arabic. he assures me that the martyrs are fulfilling destiny, so long as they were devoted to allah leading up to their death, a concept perplexing to the western mind. he tells me to keep eating and then curiously asks me why i’m not yet married with kids.
the amount of money his family needs to survive is constant and will be for a long time. family members of his are injured from israeli attacks and needing urgent medical care. can you spare 5-20 bucks a month to send regularly to his family? we can see that protesting has barely been making a dent. to me, sending funds is currently one of the most direct lines of support for those in gaza.
i went to clown camp
a few weeks ago, i spent a few weeks on a farm in norway with 20 clowns from around the world, learning clown. everyday we essentially practiced the same thing, over and over again: one at a time we would go on stage, do anything (often in the context of a chosen theme, like drama, classroom, romance, etc), and then sense into and respond to the audience (the rest of the class). if the audience liked it (generally meaning laughter), then you had to build onto what worked. if the audience wasn’t into it (silence) then you had to admit failure (what we called “the flop”) and out of that sensitivity of failure, do something else to save yourself. what you get in this structure is clowns failing over and over again, as our ideas are the least funny and honest part about ourselves. the ideas we start with are merely a portal to the flop, the pile of shit we find ourselves in after acknowledging that we are operating from all of the defense mechanisms that get in the way of our actual essence, our bare bones humanness, often tragic, stupid, amusing, relatable. when we know we’re there, when we admit it optimistically in front of those in the room with us, then we can put our armor down and access the naive idiot inside of us all, only able to act on impulses that seem to come from our subconscious body, ancient and naked. three consecutive flops in, after moving through the psychedelic trip it is to repeatedly fail in front of a group of people you barely know, you might finally touch something genuine, randomly hilarious. you have no idea how or why you got there but you and the audience are listening to each other and that’s all that matters.
we all learned a lot about what happens when we are met with failure—crying, laughing, freezing, yelling, leaving, trying to play it cool, trying to be funny again. at the start of the camp, i was constantly dissociating and ended up moving through a lot of aggression by the end, only being instructed to insult individual audience members when i was on stage. it gave me a glimpse of how i confront failure and challenges in the everyday, as well as some of the layers of protection that distract me from making friends with rock bottom.
i’m figuring out what the hell to do my with clowning practice— i haven’t performed anything in a few years and this feels like the beginning of a beginning. for now, i’m getting into the studio and putting all my worst ideas into the room for a start. but i for sure know that these practices of making failure a playground are imperative for the times we are tumbling into.
thanks for reading as always. get outside, be slow, snuggle your people, get on the streets, go swimming, take care of each other. and let me know if you think i should get this neck tat
all my love,
holly
