By Anna Blaedel Yehuda Halevi, 12th century rabbi and poet, wrote: “A thing for fools, this,Love,But a holy thingTo love what death can touch.”  It is, indeed, a foolish thing, and a holy thing, to love enfleshed life. A risky thing. A courageous thing. Death can touch it all. This is my final “moment for common nourishment” column for enfleshed. Eight years of monthly offerings; 96 columns. Perhaps the most consistent thread of wisdom woven through and returned to is this: Everything sacred begins and ends in love. Love makes survival possible. Love makes life livable.  When enfleshed...

By Anna Blaedel I recently spent the day in the cemetery I have returned to throughout my entire life, with five elders I love dearly. All of us kin, claimed by various bonds of love. Our gathering was thick with history and shared knowing. Our sense of connection – with each other, with the land – thrumming sacred, and deep. Our gathering was also thick with the tender grief of aging, of mortality, of illness imparting the inevitability of loss. I arrived to find an old oak tree I have known for all of my almost 44 years down, fallen, dead. Its limbs were scattered among the graves, and...

By Anna Blaedel This year, every day, as a practice, I sing. I sing, and I take notice of and catalogue an encounter with joy.  These are survival strategies, for living through this onslaught of chaos and catastrophe. Singing strengthens my lungs. Deepens my breath, and reminds me to breathe. Helps my blood flow, gives my disoriented immune system a boost. It’s not nothing, a free source of endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine. It’s not nothing, to sing just for the joy of it. I am learning that it is impossible to sing, and be closed to breath, which is spirit, which is life. I am...

By Anna Blaedel On my mama’s refrigerator is a small magnetized plate that reads: “Bez práce nejsou koláče.” Translated from the original Czech into English it reads: “Without work, there are no koláče.” (Koláče, the sweet, yeast-based Czech and Slovak pastry known for its soft dough and delicious fillings; poppyseed and plum are particularly beloved in my family lineage.) My mom learned the proverb at a Czech festival we took my grandma to decades ago; she learned the practice of the proverb from her mom and grandma, ancestral wisdom passed down and circulated. Without work, there are no...

By Anna Blaedel I recently added a photo to my altar, published by the Associated Press, of a woman standing in front of an enormous military machine. She is holding a bottle of water in one hand, staring straight ahead, no more than a foot of space between her and a war machine carrying federal immigration agents to raid a farm in Camarillo, California. Rebecca Torres, as she is identified, looks fierce. Deeply rooted in courage, commitment, conviction, connection. The image makes me think of Rachel Corrie, who was killed in Rafah 22 years ago, crushed by an armored Israeli bulldozer sent...

By Anna Blaedel(photo credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA.) During this Pride month, I have been reading Tourmaline’s gorgeous new book, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson. Tourmaline shares and celebrates Marsha’s life story, in all its “messy, infinite, beautiful glory.” It is a sacred offering. Rumor has it, after Marsha threw the first brick at the 1969 Stonewall uprising, she picked up a shard of broken mirror to fix her makeup. Factual or not, this image conjures something of Marsha’s spirit, and legacy. Rooting in the inseparability of fierceness and tenderness,...