hello spring time fineeees,
i write to you emerging from magnolia buds, post partum vulnerability hang over of writing Waling Waling Palpitations and releasing it into the world & now its 8 months later, and in making space for what’s to come, I burned every orchid petal I’ve preserved for this project. in this i also share a hybrid-excerpt from the book & wanted to share some of my craft notes of why the page is working like this. before i dive in, i am doing a special! for the first 8 people who purchase a yearly subscription, i will send you a signed copy of Waling Waling Palpitations! support me in continuing to sustain myself so i can release my next book project Sever, a (w)horror novel that brings triumph to a sex worker and her Manananggal partner. i am also gearing up to produce and share eco-erotic corn ritual art and praxis (:D)
A draft of a synopsis of Sever will be shared at the end of this post for paid subscribers <3 <3 <3
above i play with the way the user interface of google docs tries to correct me while writing in my mother tongue. the red squiggly error line is apart of my experience of excavation — something always trying to correct my truth.
i also play with the way Waling Waling is mistakened phonetically as “wailing” in pronunciation. in strandling multi-tongues i find that my animistic relationship to the orchid is one that opens up to be able to wail, to be able to rage, to be able to honor the imperfection and disrupt addictive patterns of overfunction. wailing is one way to disrupt that and is, to me, and embodied lesson from the waling waling orchid.
the repetition i use here also plays with how nothing is actually perfectly what it was in exactitude. to repeat is not to aim for photo-copy, cookie cutter standard. rather, the repetition honors the tiny shifts, the errors, the mistakes, the projections, distortions — these are all also part of the truth.
i saintify Therese, one of my mother’s many names that isn’t exactly her name, just a name she wears to survive (see where I get my multitudes from and it’s function towards survivability and discernment who and what gets which aspects of my vulnerability?) i also saintify the Diwata. for me, this is closer to my animistic core and filipinx cultural psychology — St. Diwata unmasked as the orchid itself. St. Therese unmasked in raw expression.
as most diaspora Filipinx/a/o are aware of, our animistic, dharmic adaptations are synthesized within Catholic religion and, i see this adaptation as a survivalist strategy.
i see similar magic entwined in Santeria which honor Orishas and also has Roman Catholic influence. i see the nonbinary aptitude in that our truths are not within a clean rigid binary, but that the influences and adaptations to survive by having had to internalize some of the colonization is apart of the truth. i see a lot of us now spin that suffering into pearls of wisdom — engaging in a purification that does not require surgically sever our truths into neat containers to be understood.
i am curious dear readers and friends, what else you see, what resonances appear, and what is conjured upon this excerpt. your thoughts and witness are a balm.
may your hearts be honey’d in the spring time sun,
Moonyeka
