Move your ass, girlie.

you can run but you can't hide.

There seems to be something about this time of (forced) presence that makes each day feel incredibly full and yet when reflected on - a fuzzy blur of vignettes. Looking back on the time since I last wrote you feels like trying to recall a dream, I remember it only in flashes - the feelings are palpable but I can’t track a plot.

See, I took a quick trip back to Brooklyn to speed clean my studio to sublet and sign paintings, finished but for some reason left unsigned (?!).

Then I was standing at the water’s edge looking at the NYC skyline and wondering if this was a see you later or if our karma was complete.

Then it was Mom’s last day at rehab and we’re outside waiting like school children waiting for my sister to pick us up.

Then I’m feeling isolated, and that my autonomy had been stripped away, raging at life for domesticating me against my will.

Then I’m laughing with my Mom, thinking how lucky I am and that I’m actually pretty good at this.

Then I’m feeling woozy cleaning feeding tube incisions twice a day.

Then we’re picking out our nightly movie to watch and - Shakespeare in Love still holds up.

And through all this I remember “Move your ass, girlie.”

There was a woman at my Mom’s rehab facility that I became friendly with. She’s mostly in a wheelchair but moves herself around. Her frame is small and frail, but her wattage is bright, with frizzy hair and a voice like Cher. She has a great name too, which I unfortunately can’t share here, ask me at a party - which I can’t wait to see you at one day. We became fast friends. She’s the kind of person that makes you feel special and singled out with her attention and then one day you walk out to the communal space and see her holding court with many of the nurses and realize she’s everyone’s favorite. I walked up and said “What are you, the Mayor of this place?” she and the nurses laughed but no one denied it. So let’s call her that.

I don’t remember how The Mayor and I first started chatting but it was an immediate dish about the place, her experience. How we all got there. She was a Beverly Hills divorce attorney. Is a Beverly Hills divorce attorney? Interesting how quickly parts of us become past tense - I can’t help but sense there’s something about removing parts of identity from our elders simply because of circumstance that feels like it contributes to their invisibility and infantilization, but let me stay on track. She’s exactly my Mom’s age, and similarly, was completely independent and living her life freely. One day she passed out, and she’s been unable to care for herself since. Her daughter brought her up to Seattle and here she will stay. We talked about the fact that there is physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy but no …therapy therapy.

No people to tend to the fact that this is an extremely shocking event.

To go from living your life a sovereign being, to a nursing facility. There are anti-depressant drugs of course, which certainly have their place, but there’s also no opportunity to speak the depression out of the body. Express it. And as The Mayor puts it “it fucking sucks.” I saw my Mom cry more in her 3 weeks in rehab than I have in my entire life combined. That’s not exaggeration. I’d arrive and the nurses would tell me “Your Mom is sad.” and I would tell them - yes, of COURSE she’s sad. This is sad. I can’t explain how dizzying it is to see the sharp contrast of how my Mom is treated now vs how she would have been treated in March before all this began. How many times I’ve had to explain that even though she couldn’t (at that point) respond, still hears you and understands. How many times I’ve had to ask fully grown adults to lower their voices as they project 3 inches from my Mom’s face as if she’s 10ft away. And don’t get me started on the baby voices. Yes. You read that correctly.

She’s still here, I remind them. And so is The Mayor. They are not a was. They are not past tense.

When I walked past The Mayor in the hallway she usually asked how my Mom and I are hanging in. She want’s me to get her a bigger room. She tells me my Mom is beautiful and that I’m doing a good job. It feels really great to hear that. I tell her we’re taking things day by day and sometimes it really is a lot. She tells me she knows, she took care of her Mom too. The Mayor often share’s little tidbits about her own Mother - that she was “sort of a witch”, and that she always knew things, and that she should have listened to her more. She told me that when she’s gone through challenging times her Mom would tell her “Move your ass, girlie”. Real cute I thought. I didn’t realize at the time that she was actually giving me a powerful new mantra. One I’ve said to myself a thousand times since.

See, although much of my life and work is dedicated to exploring the bridge between Spirit and Matter - I’ve definitely always erred on the side of Spirit. If I’m being honest, up until now, I’ve mostly flown by the seat of my pants. Treating the majority of my tasks like whack-a-mole. I’ve worked quite hard to give myself time freedom, and a sweet little bohemian life. And what I’ve built so far is partly a DELIGHT, and partly wreaking total havoc on my nervous system. This last year I had been actively trying to cultivate structure. So I could, hopefully, have a bit more delight and a bit less havoc. I knew how I was working and living wasn’t sustainable. New York is the kind of place where, in order to survive well, you must have a lot of energy or a lot of money and frankly, both were beginning to dwindle. And yet I was still trying to find some way to move through to the next level of the game while avoiding my personally most dreaded beast.

Responsibility.

True responsibility. I’ve been a very high-functioning shirker. Buoyed only by the fact that, ultimately, I am incredibly resilient. I’ve been in the same room with this greatly feared creature for a long time. Dancing around it. Walking up to it and then running away. Except now I don’t get the option to run away. I’ve used up all my cheat codes. But this room has been shrinking around me, and if I want out - I have to go through it.

My first few days in Seattle I was riddled with every deep insecurity I had been able to mostly avoid up until this point. Sitting in my Mom’s apartment. Looking for passwords, financial, and medical information. Truly questioning if I was capable. It all felt like too too much. Too foreign. Bit by bit I showed up, I gave myself the permission and gift of presence over perfection which got me through the emotional obliteration that is watching someone go through all of the things I’ve seen my Mom go through, while my own life became more unrecognizable by the day. Just keep showing up to the moment, finally understanding in experience what sooooo many spiritual texts and teachers repeat ad nauseam:

There (really) is only now.

With no future acutely known or knowable I leaned into my personal practices, meditation, prayer, energy work, the support and guidance of other strong practitioners, friends, love in the form of car pools, and door dash, voice notes and venmos. The image that keeps coming to mind is Alice just after falling through the looking glass. Whizzing and whirling through space, as the characters of your past, present, and future pop in and out for brief pit stops on your way down, down, down. When I was young, the kids at school would sometimes call me Allison Wonderland. Now I can give it to them - it’s pretty clever, but at the time I absolutely loathed it. Perhaps my distaste for it was the accurate foreshadowing of the day it would come true.

My Mom has been home and out of rehab since the middle of June. And I’ve been with her since. Where now, after the emotional obliteration of it all, I also have to DO stuff. All. The. Time. Responsible for meds, correspondence, wound care, appointments, and laundry. I feel like I’m always cooking. And making decisions, and genuinely caring. And trying SOMEHOW to plan for many versions of tomorrow and my own needs as well.

Move your ass, girlie.

When I feel especially overwhelmed or alone I remind myself a million times that I’m not the only person who’s gone through this or that will go through this. So why does this all feel so utterly shocking? I have been hesitant to say it too loud in case I offend the “real” Moms out there, raising little ones to adulthood and facing everything that comes with transforming from Maiden to Mother in the classic sense, nurturing the life that you bring in. But I see now there are those of us who initiate from Maiden to Mother through the back door. Mother-ing the life that brought US in. It’s both poetic and disarming to be this responsible for someone else’s well being. It feels really amazing to give back in kind, complete the circle, and totally destabilizing to become a Mothering person overnight. No 40 week prep time. Just another sacred life suddenly at your door.

Move your ass, girlie.

I’m in a post-partum of sorts. Feeling all at the same time, the powerful web of the collective I’m very grateful to have sewn around me, and the devastating absence of a tribe. That is in part my own doing. I’ve always felt most comfortable one on one or on a stage. Smaller groups have historically felt inhibiting and messy to me. A nightmare for someone whose main values include spaciousness and simplicity. The Triple Jewel in Buddhism is the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. I was always hopeful that two out of three aint bad.

Don’t get me wrong, in many ways I do have a sangha - a string of pearls all across the globe that by the grace of modern technology are a mere phone call away. AND there really is something to be said for the irreplaceable need for in real life, regular, human to human contact. Someone to come over and sit across the kitchen table from you. Lay on the couch. A buzzy house filled with people. Intergenerational engagement. I know I’m not alone in this. Most people I know want this too. Ache for it in fact. And to create it takes real commitment and devotion and bravery and we are all SO exhausted. Socialized to the hamster wheel of self, survival, and a general mistrust of the “other”. And above all it takes TIME - something, that most of us are very much conditioned to believe… we don’t have.

I think the scary part about maintaining community is letting people love you poorly without pushing them away. Note: This does not mean letting people harm you. But accepting that they will fall short of your desires and expectations, and you will theirs. And sometimes scarier - you have to let people love you well, without pushing them away, and give up some of your prized independence in exchange for the very real vulnerability of interdependence.

So, what do you do in the whirling dance of sometimes leading and sometimes following? Where support is out there - and no one’s coming to save you?

Move your ass, girlie.

Your Fellow Wanderer,

Allison

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PS My site is back up, with a little refresh too. You can check it out here. I’ll be opening up my books again soon. More on that later.