Grief House - Portals

In this episode Sascha and I talk about how panicked my body is about my mother's body dying. We talk about how to survive in a culture that doesn't have a plan for how to help our bodies integrate this kind of loss. We explore things that might help and what it will be like if nothing really helps. We talk about other bodies that have left us and also how they've stayed.

In this episode Sascha and I talk about how the longest, soundest stays are sometimes born from many departures. We discuss the nature of death and rebirth in every phase of evolution and how building relationships that move with that cycle might offer a deep attachment we both want.

This month Sascha and I are talking about staying. 

We discuss how staying with the hurt bits and the fears is not passive; it's muscular. It burns calories. 

We notice how it feels, to us, like an endeavor for which a person requires a support crew - to wave and shout encouragement and offer snacks and flashlights when the sun goes down. 

It also doesn't feel intuitive - it feels like something we are learning, slowly, by trial and error. In hope that shared knowledge might help us fall less often and less painfully as we build our staying skills we share strategies for staying. 

It feels helpful to us. We hope it also feels helpful to you.

In this episode Sascha and I talk with each other about how it felt to talk with our sisters about how it feels to trust our parents. 

We discuss rocks and rivers, how it might change a sentient river to watch swimmers play in or flee it, and our hope of some day becoming sentient rivers at peace with the elements that made us. 

We talk about different kinds of commitment and sign our names to a kind that embraces change, and deep, tolerant love. 

We wonder about how our families might have looked if we weren't forced to relate to each other in roles rigidly defined by a society we had little hand in building and decide to work for something different and more complexly woven starting now.

In our second sister episode, Sascha talks with her sister, Isadora, about trusting their mother, Teresa.

Sascha and Izzy discuss the complexity of trusting someone who lived in a reality they couldn't quite fathom, how that effected their ability to trust their own perception of reality and how it shaped their ability to trust themselves and each other.

Sascha and Izzy offer a glimpse into their resilient, tenacious love that makes me feel hopeful about our human hearts.

In this bilingual episode about family, I talk with my sister about if and how it could be possible to trust our father, Gerardo.

We talk about how it feels to be people who have been set aside, the particular pain of being let-go-able. 

We explore how gratitude and sadness live together in our bodies, and wonder if there's a way to trust our father as a gift bearer and to trust the gifts  - our mothers, our family, each other - he's brought us. 

I marvel at my sister - her strength, compassion and sensitivity, and my great good luck for getting to be hers.

In this episode about feelings Sascha and I call our wants over. We watch them move and tell each other what we see. 

Then we hand our want creatures to our friend (and Portals editor) Sid and he makes music they can dance to. 

I wasn't at all sure how this experiment would turn out but in the end what came is exactly what I wanted.

In this episode about feelings Sascha and I discuss what it's like to want. We consider categories of want, wonder about the difference between wanting things for ourselves and wanting things for our beloveds and explore what lessons the tea cup carnival ride has to teach us about want.

We consider want in the parent-child relationship where it quite often feels bright and like survival and work our way towards a more expansive relationship with wanting - one that allows pinwheels to spin to their full potential, sparing fingertips their sharp slap.

We hope you'll come explore with us. 

In this episode Sascha and I talk about how it feels to hold people in our hearts, thoughts and consciousness. 

We consider what it's like to be born, again and again, into vessels that then wander off holding you however they see fit. What it's like to carry someone who doesn't know you have them. What it's like to carry someone who may or may not be alive.

We think about how we're born in you, each time you listen to this podcast and feel glad for the chance to be expansive and held

In this episode Sascha and I discuss the many iterations of our birth. 

We consider what it means to be born into a communal reality that's made from individual realities that overlap like bubbles in foam, how it's possible to be born into someone's world years and years before they're born into yours, and what happens when you begin to suspect birth is an act of creative invention and play in it as such. 

We pull up chairs for our gray haired snakes and reminisce with them about the many times they have been born. We'd love you to come join us!