Author

treenaorchard

I'm an Associate Professor in the School of Health Studies at Western University in London, Ontario. An anthropologist who works with sex workers, people with HIV/AIDS, and Indigenous populations, my special research interests include sexuality, gender, and the politics of health. Along with academic writing and activism, I regularly write social media articles about sexuality, relationships, dating, and popular culture. I'm currently working on a memoir that explores my hilarious, humbling, and sometimes harrowing dive into the darker side of dating apps. I live with my cats Elliott and Jhona in London, Ontario. Yoga, art, reading, cooking, and finding new ways to experience the world are some of my favourite things to do.

My Life

Moondance: Musings on Sex, Love & Finding Your Path

by treenaorchard January 8, 2024

We’re a week into 2024 and my new year rhythms are still being formed, still cooling on the countertop. I’m not a fan of resolutions but do love a good mantra. Terms like “resolve”, “transform”, and “balance” are floating across a lot of social media feeds right now. These ones surface for me: Grace, Joy, Accomplish. It’s a big year ahead with the release of my memoir in April and the exciting- and slightly terrifying- prospect of media features, book tour activities, and the unknowable impact the book will have on my life.

Although I’m ready for these events, my anxiety levels have been spiking high lately and more often. Like when I zonk out at 10 pm, thanks to a CBD product or two, only to wake up at 3am convinced that my dry mouth, which I know is due to the gummies, is actually evidence of a looming UTI. Easy, girl. The rain sound app sometimes lulls me back to sleep, but sometimes a cascade of semi-tragic-but-not-very-likely scenarios circle on a loop inside my head and keep me very much awake.

I switch from stomach to side to back positions while peeking down the front of my faux silk nighttime sleep mask. What am I looking for? There’s nothing there. Well, there’s a whole room of things but none of it is new or in peril in any way. Oh, these early hours. I call them the Sylvia hours, after Sylvia Plath who, like many women writers with children and unforgiving family situations, often wrote between 3-5am. This is when words kept her alive and she glowed with the genius so many of us reach for in the dark.

Beyond the big events to come, the hormonal toss-and-turn of menopause is also impacting my anxiety. Thanks nature. I’ve begun doing morning meditations and affirmations, which make me feel grounded but also a bit embarrassed. I always think of the Saturday Night Live skits from the 1990s featuring “nice guy…but not a registered therapist” Stuart Smalley, who began each day by saying these words to himself: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog gonnit, people like me.”

I talk to myself throughout the day but hearing myself say my own name followed by things like “I love you” or “You are enough” is still odd. Instead of letting this sort of sad reality bring me down, I’m using it to motivate me to keep going. Yes, the wellness industry is bougie and problematic but self-talk isn’t about buying anything or following someone else’s script. It’s about shifting how I relate to myself and because I’m already feeling the positive difference, I shall press on each morning. I own my words, and my reality.

I do yoga regularly and pull oracle cards, lay out tarot spreads, and work with crystals intermittently to get attuned within myself. However, I had a sound bath over the holidays, and it was a game-changing new experience that’s inspired me to take a more active and consistent role in my well-being. In that small black room a wise woman read my body through sound, chakra tuning, touch, and the invisible knowledge of ancient advice of helpers, whose insights sent shivers up my realigned spine.

Feeling a bit nauseous like after a massage and light as a feather, I emerge peaceful and grateful. I’m also thirsty- this is becoming a theme- and the wise woman hands me a paper cup of water. I drink it and drift around the store while waiting for my ride. Toxins long burrowed in my cellular landscape are loosened and fresh memories of things that I want to hear and know about myself can imprint themselves instead. Have any of you begun doing- or continued doing- any helpful practices that enliven your daily routines and make you feel good?

Thus concludes the first musing of the new year. I’ll aim to create a blog a week, which will soon morph into a newsletter, that runs around 700-1000 words. Each entry will include a story, a tip, and a picture. Let me know what you think in the comments below or on any of my social media accounts!

Tip

Find a grounding practice that works for you. Try a few different things: pulling an oracle or tarot card, breathing exercises, guided meditations online, connecting with crystals, setting aside phone-free
activities in the morning or before sleep. The goal is to be present and more dialed into not just our bodies, but also our sensory understanding of the environment around us, including our intuitive
knowledge. You might consider a sound bath, too!

January 8, 2024 2 comments

My Life

The Archipelago

by treenaorchard February 19, 2023

Feet dangle from ankles and toes dust the floor, all except the pinky ones. Is that what the little toes are called? I’m loose and more than a little adrift in the murky fog of big things completed. The first draft of my first memoir and an appearance on a national television show. Days feel big and empty as I totter bra-less around my house cleaning and thinking of what to do next.

New people populate my social media and I flip through them like a rolodex. Who are they and what do they like about me? Soon I’ll be like some of them. WRITER- with a cover release and pub release date of my own, another cheque in the red mailbox. In the soft afternoon of my failed nap, I scroll through podcast options until I find a woman from the Orkney Islands.

On the map, these scattered chunks of old land look like they’ve been randomly heaved into the North Atlantic. That’s how it feels when the drink takes hold. We fling ourselves away from the mainland and retreat to islands so blue. Her clear voice pulls me in like a wet rope and I hold on. We’re both women finding new ways to envision how we want to live.

Two – word titles grace the covers of both her memoirs: The Outrun, The Instant. Compressing it all to a the and one other thing is impressive. I google her and begin a forensic search of Amy’s angular face for evidence of stumbling nights or the temporary euphoria being more than drunk can offer. I catch it in her glance, which is far away and knowing. What does she see?

The interviewer asks where she finds her edge now and before the author begins, there is a pause. I hang in the air. That pause is a hug for the girl who made do on that tiny white yin dot engulfed in the sleek dark yang. But she no longer lives life in half and has crossed over into the lush jungle of the city and the silhouette of the moon, whose body now provides an edge.

I think that pause is also an admission of something many of us don’t talk about. How this new skin can sometimes be boring, so too is the question about how we get our kicks. It privileges drinking and the celebrity of wantonness, which we know from silvery top to endless bottom. Although a drag every now and then, life without the bottle offers something no alphabet can explain.

It allows us to reach the shore each day, and to never have to leave it.

February 19, 2023 0 comment

My Life

The Woman in the Hills

by treenaorchard November 15, 2022

The sierra is skin and seeds
It grows as you see it
Pink and curved like a wet flower
Bigger than life

Through the garden and the apricot trees
Water hose coiled like a grey snake
We walk in a group of five
Ingesting everything you shed

With Maria Chabot
The architect who became friend
The crumbling pueblo two centuries old
Was reborn

It began in letters between NYC and Abiquiu
Two women writing the future
That came up that towering orange hill
Glass, wood, heaps of earth

You lived here
For the rest of time
Under the glistening cobalt sky
With the chow chows

And the 1200 collected stones
Smooth little children
Playing in waterless ponds
Between the bleached animal bones

And the central plazuela
Which you painted over and over
Often adding details that weren’t there
But it looked how you wanted it to

Remember, it snows here
When asked to draw the winter road
You sketched the half curve of the moon
Its silvery tail guiding us

Five travellers at the Ghost Ranch
A Church
We feel you
The woman in the hills

November 15, 2022 0 comment

My Life

Spiny Oyster Shell

by treenaorchard November 4, 2022

My Orange Beauties

His tawny orange eyebrows match the shade of his hair. It’s the same colour as the vintage Navajo earrings he scoops into my hands. They’re made of spiny oyster shell, an ancient coastal animal related to scallops that live up to 50 ft below the surface of the water. They first appeared when dinosaurs roamed, and the Rocky Mountains pushed themselves into the unknown. I wonder who gathered them and if the rich flesh that called the prickly shell home was devoured.

With a magician’s flair, he pulls a mirror out from under the counter. I lean into the oval shape and gaze at the luminescent earrings that glow against my peachy skin. Motionless, I am under their spell. He admires me and the jewelry silently and then slips away from the display case to give me some space. A minute or two later he circles back, and asks: “Scandinavian ancestry?”

I tell him “English, Irish, and a bit of Scottish” and answer his question about my profession. He speaks of a teacher who crushed his dreams of being an artist but knew he could sell art. He drags an index finger across the front of his neck while laughing, and I say: “At least she saw something in you.” She changed his life and I’ve had people like that too. He smiles and says the people who I work with are fortunate. “Fantastic energy.”

The orange stories hang in my ears. Do I buy them, promise to buy them, or glide through the building like an animal that’s just eaten so he doesn’t ask me? I remove them while sinking into a plush leather chair near the woman behind the desk. Placed on my left thigh they look like teeth that were also once alive. He brings a bottle of water with paper towel taped around it, a custom they do here because the “bottles come out of the machine so cold.” How extra I think while listening to him talk to another man in the back.

I float down three large wooden steps and see Apache dancers blaze across colourful canvases that are so big we have to witness them. In a muted winter landscape, the snow falls and seven teepees sleep forever. Side profiles of important men cut me in half with their sad faces, and there’s a gigantic smiling figure in front of a pick up truck. Around the corner is a woman in a crucifix pose, naked and blood dripping. I am swallowed by beauty.

Protection

Prosperity

Fertility

Many gendered energies

Calm

Courage

Intuition

He finds me kneeling at a hilarious collection of calacas arranged in a wedding carriage pulled by two ceramic bulls. Everyone is jumping out of their seats and turned towards the groom who’s holding a jug of booze. Their strange skeleton underbites scream in fevered emotion, and with her braids and veil flowing the seething bride looks on. He points to an iridescent fish woman with child and says: “this artist has three daughters who love The Little Mermaid, he did a series for them.” Love that.

Lavishly painted wood statues sprout out of the floor like an abbreviated forest and metal Kokopellis, those dancing flute players, dot the landscape. He asks how long I’m staying and what my astrological sign is. “Guess” I tell him, excitedly, thinking that he’ll get it on the first shot. But he chooses Virgo and after I shake my head, he inquires about my element. When I say “fire” he takes a step back and grins widely, “Girl, you sure contain that flame well.” He’s a cancer, the watery emotive crustacean.

Our mutual enchantment grows. He writes down restaurant recommendations and ends up telling me much more. In between steak houses and piano bars, he speaks of his grad school days in Boston and how quickly he rose to prominence at his first gallery gig. “I started behind the desk and in two months I replaced the old lady on the floor.” After doing his big apple duty in NYC, he fled for foreign skies where he felt much more at home. UAE, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and others.

I nod and smile and don’t tell him that I can’t eat steak or drink alcohol. I watch him open like a flower while reflecting on what he calls “an amazing life.” We share strands of ourselves as a weaver threads the fabric in and out of the frame. I’m transported to those Sundays when my dad took me to the art gallery because it was free and because he knew the value of art. Art is not just about art. It is about relationships. It lines the pages I write to see me through and to make my own beauty.

On that glossy concrete floor, we lean towards one another like two swans on a lake. He pushes the printed image of the earrings into my hands and tells me to come back, just to visit and not necessarily to buy them. I will. A hug enters my mind but instead I slowly walk towards the door, smiling. When I turn to look back at him seated at his desk, he says: “I like you.” I pause for a moment and say “I like you, too” before heading out onto Galisteo Road.

November 4, 2022 0 comment

My Life

What’s it like to write a book?

by treenaorchard August 15, 2022

Some writers begin their work with a prayer, and some turn off their Wi-Fi. Others enter the flow when the kids are sleeping. Like Sylvia Plath, like so many women. There are authors who start with the last sentence, which feels God-like and scary. Some, like me, share their work widely along the way and there are those who don’t let anyone read a sentence until it’s published. We’re always different animals.

I start early, take many breaks, and munch on assorted salted nuts while sipping strong coffee. A candle is lit, usually a three-wicked cheapy from the grocery store, and I try to let the thoughts bloom. They tap me on the shoulder while I’m on the toilet and make me pause while pulling open the fridge door. Remember me, they say. Make room for me.

I look out the window a lot, and must add roofs, cedar trees, and squirrels to the acknowledgements section. Into the baroque flower wallpaper on my phone’s home screen, I’ve typed : “MY BOOK HAS A DESTINY.” Things from inside my head take shape on the page like a fishbone. Ribs of ideas and tails of tales. It’s invisible magic, and I have much to learn.

Like how to better skin my stories and loosen the red meat from what covers it. Show not tell, and don’t be so concrete. Let the birds inside sing. The ones who flutter their wings when the memories return, and my mouth tastes like rust. Sometimes I feel lost. So many swooshes of black cloth with just enough light for the readers to make it out. Is it a cape or a shroud? Maybe it’s a hooded sack.

***

A maroon mini-van pulls up in front of my house, with unrecognizable but loud music blaring inside. A basic guy in glasses bops his head up and down to the beat while squinting into the morning sun. He doesn’t see me crouched down next to the white hydrangea; my floral frenemy whose ambition threatens to overtake the order I’m trying to establish in the front yard. The little weeds come out easy after the rain.

I then rise and assume the homeowner stance, peering at him incredulously as if to say: ‘You there, what are you doing in front of my house?’ The guy at the wheel looks at me for a second then faces straight ahead, like you do when you want to pretend what just happened didn’t. A few more seconds of meaningless awkward pass before a young man crosses the street and runs up to the driver.

He pulls open the back door and hops into the van. A sexy smile creeps across my face as I put the pieces together. His crisp white t-shirt looks just like the one worn by the other young guy I observed leaving my neighbour’s house last week, also quite early in the morning. But that guy had his own car. Do the people next door or beside my house see this? Do they see me?

They might think the hippie prince in the Subaru only comes over every now and then because that’s what she wants. The woman who bought that house by herself, who freely orders Amazon products and keeps upgrading her home. But they don’t know how often I travel to his beautiful place, which I sometimes clean and stock with ice cream and gifts.

I want to keep licking his fingers in the dark. I want him to feel and to see that I’m worth it. Several months ago, I carried an orange toothbrush in my purse and nervously asked if I could leave it. It’s travelled from the downstairs bathroom, where it lived alone in a long stiff drawer, to the top floor bathroom drawer where it lays next to the black hairbrush. A plastic X in the territory of love.

I’d like to see him more and I like things just as they are. Pacing is hard for women who usually charge through because of fear and a history of being reduced to sex. I’m scared to open the topic of we, and for now basking in his sunshine is glorious. It comes strong, like his golden limbs and hair that winds its way around my mouth. Sometimes I find it in my body after we part, his X.

He writes stories too. The pages begin with the singsong alarm at 6.10 am and as he puts earth into earth, they fill with life. And beauty, which he brings to each job and each time I ask him to tell me the plant name in Latin. Just looking at his pretty mouth turns me to jelly and by the time the scientific syllables leave his lips I’m done.

I tell my friend that what he does is creation. She pauses and says: “Your voice sounds calm when you talk about him.” That feels good. We look ahead as the car plods through the poorly synchronized lights and past the sunburned homeless people, towards the art gallery, towards beauty.

August 15, 2022 0 comment

My Life

Mavericks

by treenaorchard July 14, 2022

After parking the vehicle a few blocks from the venue, we take an inaugural selfie and scamper down Queen Street. The early evening sun dapples our faces as we walk under the big trees while squealing: “She’s here…Alanis is in London!” I don’t own any of her albums but wanted to see the concert after watching the Netflix documentary. It took me back to the 90s. Remember Lilith Fair? The feminist music festival named after Adam’s first wife who was banished from Eden for being disobedient, or maybe it was because she shagged the archangel Samael, a guy with a dark past. Either way, she’s associated with wickedness and freedom, the female flipside we continue to spin.

While crossing the street, we see a group of four women all wearing white Alanis t-shirts. These are our people. We speed pass them and the guy selling rip-off shirts for 20 bucks when we hear the pop-y punk sound of The Beaches rising from the park below. An all-girl group from Toronto, they are sweaty and thin in their monochrome outfits, each one a different colour from the next. “Power Rangers” Kylie says, excitedly, and I nod my head. I was in my early 20s when the Power Rangers came out and by that time parties, music, and guys had replaced cartoons. But still, the cultural reference was solid, and they were a cool second act to get the crowd going.

Bodies big and small, some heavily tattooed, and some cloaked under boho blouses are sprinkled across the park. Women hold other women’s hands and there is much multi-coloured hair. A smile streaks across my face when I see the old guard, the ones wearing tight vintage jean shorts, black t-shirts, and long stoner hair. They cruise around with authority and other stories tucked inside their cigarette packages. Slow rocker nods are exchanged amidst their white puffy trails of pot smoke, and I feel like I’m at a summer concert in Canada. For those about to Rock the Park we salute you.

We’re directed to the VIP area by a lovely man wearing a turban, thank you India. Table 89 is closer to the back than the front, but it’s all good and thankfully it’s all women too. Under the blue sky, the energy is exuberant and chill. Loads of folks are wearing green complimentary sunglasses from one of the show’s sponsors, a local internet provider. The glasses flash every few seconds and remind me of St. Patrick’s Day. As we plow through our piping hot home cut French fries, we rack our brains trying to recall the last big concert we attended.

In between chats and munches, we watch the flock of rockers around us. With shamrock green sunglasses perched on summertime hair, a can of Coors Lite or a peach cooler in one hand, women jauntily hold on to one another while walking in small vertical lines of two or three. Bopping to the music and laughing with ease, I can see them twenty-seven years ago in smaller jeans rocking out to Jagged Little Pill in their bedrooms and clubs. Like we did. All those smoky, liquid nights of music, dancing, and sometimes guys, but always one another. We were grinding out womanhood as we left one another for new cities and professions we would grow into.

The sky fades into a darker blue when Garbage comes on. My first glance at the vocalist and front woman Shirly Manson is electrifying. Her pinky red hair is parted sharply down the middle and she wears a thick white chocker around her neck. It looks uncomfortable but also righteous, and it reminds me to look at her throat, where the sound and power travel from. She’s 56 years old and dope AF, and she speaks to the crowd with generosity and well-timed profanity. There’s a song about stupid girls and one about her imagining to have a dick, “would you blow it?” she sneers while gripping the microphone. She thanks the LGBTQ+ community for always standing with Garbage and dedicates a song to them, saying “Our fight is the same.” Her mouth is a sneer. Her mouth is a siren. She talks about keeping laws off our bodies and tucking those desiccated dicks back into the same cold hands that clutch the Second Amendment. She is a stone-cold inclusive fox.

We check our phones after Garbage wraps up. About 25 minutes to go. What will she open with? Kylie debates getting a drink but then we both shake our heads, nah too much trouble because then you’ll have to pee and that could be a fresh hell of its own. My mouth is dry from the salty fries and because I purposefully didn’t drink too much before we left, knowing that the bathroom situation could be stressful. OMG, I’m old. This is confirmed when I reach for my progressive glasses in my fanny pack. But, then Kylie has them too and she’s at least ten years younger than me. I’m semi-old, I guess.

Bright cylinders of light shock the nighttime canvas. FINALLY! Everyone stands up and starts to howl and clap. There’s a flash of a computer desktop with a few icons neatly lined up along the left side of the screen. It disappears as the stage darkens and then pops back into focus. The band is assembled and plays that taunting intro music; we’re going wild. Then she strides across the stage, blonde hair streaming behind, and I try to make out what she’s wearing. Tuxedo pants with gold sequins along the outer seam, white runners, a black t-shirt with sultry cat decals on it (which Kylie and I learn that we both used to collect in the 90s from vending machines), and a shiny black top that hugs her shoulders.

She plays the harmonica and tosses her head from side to side while lilting and belting out beautiful words. I am transported and transfixed. I trace every move she makes and follow the outline of her shining, smiling face as well as her strong legs, which she juts in a low earthy growl across the stage. Alanis whirls as a dervish, her devotion is in full view. It ripples from her body, which feels much larger than its 163 centimeters, into the crowd and into our collective memories.

I was 23 in 1995 when Jagged Little Pill was released, and for some reason I never went to an Alanis show. But when You Oughta Know comes on, I know every word and so does everybody else. I hear myself sound out of tune but also very fucking in tune with the other people swaying to this leader, this courageous embattled woman from Ottawa who shook the music industry and wouldn’t be silenced. These words are in me, like the plastics that have accumulated in our suffering planet. They have been absorbed into my body and my body knows to hang onto them.

My throat begins to swell. Do I choke the tears back or let them fall? I swallow them so I can keep singing with everyone. In the faded glow of the full stag moon, I move in time with a history of women who came before and the sea of us who have to run up that fucking hill over and over again. Alanis is showing us how to take up space and to roar. We need to do this more than ever because no one else will give us space. We are being denied rightful autonomy over more and more spaces of life, including the skin and ovaries and futures of our own bodies.

When she rocks on the glittery black guitar, her right arm strumming down hard on the six strings, I’m in awe. This is a fucking powerful woman. She is doing this for us, for her kids. For everyone. We will sing.

July 14, 2022 0 comment

My Life

Whenever I think of Sylvia Plath I cry

by treenaorchard March 27, 2022

It’s not a happy cry. It comes from below the surface, where the ovens line up for us. They do that. But the oven isn’t simply about the end or quitting the violence of Ted and illness that led her there. The oven is about her fight for herself and the love for her children. She made sure the towels placed at each door opening were wet and tightly wedged to absorb the gas. It was down to that, and she made the call in her 30^th year, to leave.

I cry for that more than the light of creativity snuffed out too soon. What she gave us will last- it’s enough.

I don’t stay long in front of 23 Fitzroy Road, unremarkable among the other brick row houses except for the blue heritage plaque next to the front door. The plaque doesn’t have her name on it, however, because Yeats lived there first and it’s one of the reasons Sylvia wanted to move there. Imagine the energy in that mortar, housing two of the greatest poets of the 20^th century. It feels like a man’s house, darkish and utilitarian in design.

The lavender place just down the hill at 3 Chalcot Square pulls me in, with its first floor wooden façade and white decorative window frames. There’s a patch of green across the way and the candy coloured recency era homes press closely together like sisters. It feels right, and it’s no wonder she was so productive here. Between the ages of 27-28 she published her first volume of poetry, wrote The Bell Jar, and gave birth to her daughter Frieda.

At 27 I move from the island of Newfoundland to the prairie province of Manitoba. Heartbroken and surviving on student loans, I begin my Ph.D. while living in an old man’s basement. A few months into the program I learn that my admission hung on the slightest of strings, which terrifies and ignites me. I can’t wait to shoot through the sky. Walking through the boring suburban landscape to and from the bus stand I know I will and that this is all temporary. None of it is me.

Two provinces and a million hangovers later, I’m sitting in a darkened room getting “rough magic” tattooed on the top of my right foot. It’s the title of Paul Alexander’s biography of Sylvia Plath that I hungrily lap up and clutch to my bony chest, defeated by cigarettes and the tired breath I am living. After another toxic weekend of hillbilly love and loud noises that stretched far too late into the night, I need this ink.

Like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who says: “This rough magic I here abjure”, I am reaching my limits and the myth of the magic bottle is drying up. When is it ever fun anymore?

Sylvia cites seeing a performance of The Tempest with her family, at the age of 8, as one of her intellectual awakenings. The play is also where she draws the name for the signature poem that would cast her moon everywhere, Ariel. The airy spirit eventually released by Prospero; Ariel was also the name of a horse that Plath used to ride in Devon. Both of them, Sylvia, even me, we gallop towards the silver freedom that hangs in the ancient sky and lights up every syllable from woman’s mouth.

Sylvia is a wishbone. Woman, eternal. We long to ingest her creaky marrow through book spines, glass-enclosed archives, and fan girl writings. Her blood, her desire, it’s ours. This is another reason I cry when I think of her. Six decades later and we are still damned. Like her we know it and we ache for the balm and the bombs we need to blow open our own holes, over and over again. We can use Sylvia’s bone-books only because she wrote so much and so so well, from the inventive juvenilia to the ferocious journals to the doubled-over destiny of Tulips and Lady Lazarus at the end.

She wrote to live, and her story is ours to follow. She is everything and we are too. Women who spin through the dusty cosmos and into the future leaving trails of light not just for others to follow, but for us to see and marvel in. Our brightness. This is forever. I will always cry when I think of Sylvia, the woman who wrote this in her journal on January 4, 1958:

Rooms. Every room a world. To be god: to be every life before we die: a dream to drive men mad. But to be one person, one woman-to live, suffer, bear children & learn others lives & make them into print worlds spinning like planets in the minds of other men.

March 27, 2022 6 comments

My Life

Ten Years

by treenaorchard March 13, 2022

Ojibway poet Richard Wagamese begins his magnificent book of meditations called Embers by saying: “Mornings have become my table.” Like the table, his life has been battered and scarred but also full of sacred energies, which he channels in the hollow stones that surround my neck every time I turn his page.

The neck is where we speak from, and I touch mine in an act of union with this man who fell to a place I know too. Knees, bottom, nowhere.

For years I hid inside my head and progressed through the world in pieces, a woman asunder. All the degrees and places travelled could never free me from the traumas that hitched a ride. Intergenerational, maybe intergalactic, these pains made the moulds I used for everything as I skirted along the darkened trail. Until that morning when I decided to make for myself a new place at the table. Terrified, lost, and fed up, I felt sadness and sunshine like never before while crawling around in a new place.

Me. I had to get to know myself. I had to birth myself into the woman I knew I was. The woman I wanted to be. The girl-woman waiting to be loved by the only one who could save her.

Richard speaks about reclamation, which is both a sentiment and an act. To claim something is to like it and to want it. To reclaim something is about expressing that desire repeatedly in a way that says: you matter, today and always, and I am choosing you. When a person reclaims herself she is articulating this inside. The process unfolds in her soul like a flower, spreading from and to the places she needs it to. It is love learned. It is love earned. It is being reborn.

This is the smallest blog about the biggest thing that I’ve done, which I like. The letters on this page have taken passage with me for the journey of a lifetime, the journey of my sober decade. There is destiny in love and having the courage to reach deep inside the sad, wet cavity of trauma to pull out the shit you don’t need anymore and never asked for in the first place. Guts are good. So are words, they help us breathe into the spaces where the light is stored and where our stories live, waiting to be heard.

March 13, 2022 3 comments

My Life

Yesterday’s Hallway

by treenaorchard February 24, 2022

Every time I lean against the kitchen counter or make a slow move to grab something from the closet, I am grateful. I feel heavy and grounded and light and spacious. Even when my mind is doing a frightening array of tasks at the same time, whirring speedily, I know I have the space for it. Haven’t left the house for days? It’s ok. Can’t remember the last time I had a bath? It’s ok. New veins on my face? It’s ok.

No one will see me that often. And it so happens that sometimes, after a face mask or exceptionally good nap, the lines puff out for an afternoon of smiles and sweets. They lay a bit closer to the bone later on, but that’s ok. I’m not putting on a show or wanting to look different than I do, necessarily. I’m just talking about the way I see myself and the joys I have in keeping it inside.

I’m not hiding, I’m manifesting.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sat on my semi-clean area rug in the living room, with art and cats around me, awake in my evolution. Sometimes I’m crying, sometimes I’m reeling with happiness bent over a book that has just pushed open something new. Sometimes, I’m jotting keen notes about a paper on the back of a red envelope from a Valentine’s Day card.

The world is everywhere, and I am too. I bring them together with my hands and my synapses and my daydreaming. I love to daydream.

Almost three years after receiving the funds for a research study about sexual cultures at Western University, I submitted the first peer-reviewed paper. It’s a powerful analysis of how sexual terminologies among undergrad students capture a series of intersecting issues related to sexual and gender-based violence: LGBTQ2IA+ marginalization, cultural appropriation, bro culture, and institutional neglect. A former student assisted with the paper, and we submitted it to the journal Sex Education.

I’m working on another one about safety, which I’ll keep quiet about for now. It’s going to be a heavy hitter too. We were interviewed, me and my student-author, by a journalist who is writing a story for Maclean’s magazine about rape culture on campus. It was so therapeutic to share our experiences with her and it felt so good to be listened to. Unlike the debacle in September and the horrible aftermath following the assaults, including being ignored STILL by the co-leaders of the taskforce.

Releasing this paper into the reviewer ether was hard and hard-fought. I wonder whose inbox the editor delivered it to? I have no clue who will read it, but I know it’s strong and it will make a difference, especially to the students who know how much I care about them.

Doing this work feels so good and is a lot to carry.

After pressing send I sort of caved into myself while doing some stretches on my yoga mat. I was listening to “What is this Love” by Blue Rodeo, featuring Sarah McLaughlin. Girls—the species who love to listen to sad songs when they’re feeling sad! It never ends. As I cradled my wet hands in my face, the two cats came up to me immediately. Elliott rubbed her pudgy orange self into my vulnerability and Jhona wound his long black tail around my swollen heart.

“I’m not sad” I told them softly, but I sort of felt sad, actually. The sense of letting go can feel like a loss, even though it lightens the load and creates space for new, sometimes better energies. The sadness is also linked with the album this song is from- Five Days in July (1993). We saw Blue Rodeo many times, often a few sheets to the wind and sometimes on funny fungi. I remember being in the park by the river, so close, and watching them climb up the humble little staircase onto the stage.

They looked a bit stoned, and I wondered if they thought Saskatoon was a bumpkin place compared to their mecca of Toronto.

I heard years later that they envisioned this album as being a reply to or their own version of Neil Young’s sound. A passing of the golden bough. I remember that one guy who played all these songs for me in his 6^th floor apartment, complete with a black bear skin on one wall and curios from the arctic. He’d also play them on the phone in the days we still talked and in the days we still talked on phones that were attached to our homes, not our hips.

He is from the past, and it’s ok. Hearing these songs always pulls up a cache of heavy and meaningful memories, the kind that timestamp my life as a woman growing up, uncertain but strong, very wild but also brave. It’s my own Mariana Trench. Like that crescent shape on the ocean floor, the deepest spot in the earth- those songs, that time, those men, the mistakes, the pleasures, the many lessons- they are my depth and my geography.

What is this dream that I’ll never find?
What is this prayer that’s stealing my mind?
What is this deal that I’ve just made with fate?
And I wonder if I have left it too late

I think we all have these albums, people, and threads of who we were saved and stored and secreted away in our laptops, old drawers of things, and the inside doors at the end of the yesterday’s hallway. It’s ok.

February 24, 2022 0 comment

Tough Topics

Mirror in blue

by treenaorchard February 5, 2022

SENSITIVE CONTENT*

His eyes travel the canvas of my skin and I retreat into that internal space many women enter when men gaze, uninvited, at our bodies. It can look like a bitchy dismissal or a funny play along, but it’s really just us trying to hide in plain view. Where can we go?

When he asks: “What do the tattoos on your footsies say?” I take a deep breath and tell him: “Rough magic and live and let live.” He chuckles and then says, with a smirk: “When you’re with a boy, does he look at your feet to figure things out?”

Coldly, I reply: “no, it doesn’t quite work that way.” My immediate anger winds itself around the residual frustration of being ogled by men as though I were a piece of meat for the taking. A colourful girl to play with.

Why do the men who come to my house to do renovations or odd jobs involving power tools think that an invitation to enter my home is the equivalent of being granted access to my body? I feel like muzzled prey as they circle me with silly jokes, leading questions, and tipsy texts sent well past closing time.

I feign laughter and cross my arms. I ignore their messages and question their public posts that refer to women as bitches and cunts. I try someone else. I let the work sit unfinished.

The 65-year-old man who asked about my “footsies” was recommended by the manager of the design shop where I bought the finials. “It’s who we use” she said. Why would she send this person to put up my wall hanging?

Because it’s the norm in the industry. Because the manager has a kid and wears a wedding ring. Because I don’t. Because the sludge of sexualization that men smear all over me is the story of my life as a woman.

On the wall hanging dances Kali, who destroys evil to protect the innocent and is considered the master of time, death, and change. Her name means “the dark mother” or “the dark blue one”, and so it is fitting that she is outlined in black on the smoky indigo cloth.

She is the lover of Lord Shiva, and she leaps from the forehead of mother goddess Durga, a manifestation of anger. It is this volatile emotion that turns her skin dark. Blue. She licks up the hot energy of enemy blood from battlefields and ties men’s heads into a garland of revenge that hangs around her waist.

Long sexy tongue hangs from the fierce open mouth. Her three eyes see you.

In some texts, Kali is said to be an immature deity because she has no consort and has not yet been pricked by the transcendent lingam. Thus her body is a dangerous, auspicious inferno of original female power.

He asks if I’m an artist and I say “no, I’m a university prof.” Then he says his girlfriend went to India and she had to go to the bathroom in a hole. I say that sounds familiar and add that it is a hard place to be a woman, referring to how often I was often harassed, grabbed, and followed.

Although he’s never been to India and is not a woman, he tilts his head to one side like he’s not sure if he agrees with my statement. Then he says: “Yeah, they treat their women badly.

I look at Kali, gesturing boldly in black and blue and say many white men treat their women badly too.

I tell him about seeing a young white man push his girlfriend to the ground the night before. I was tempted to call the cops but didn’t because it was dark, and I couldn’t have identified them. In that part of the city violence is a common as night itself, and the cops probably wouldn’t have accomplished much.

Suddenly the valiant protector, he sneers in my direction and says: “and you’re a woman”, the implication being that he thinks I should have called the police. His ignorance slides off my unfazed brain and I take refuge in the goddess. How much longer until he’s done?

Doing fieldwork in the state of Karnataka with some of the kindest, strongest women I know.

***

It’s 2002. I’m in India doing doctoral fieldwork, which includes a stop in Mumbai for some research and a tour of the city’s hotspots. As the subway car pulls away from Victoria Station, I catch a glimpse of the magnificent gothic structure with its high central dome, flying buttresses, and looming gargoyles.

Then I’m kicking my legs and swaying in all directions while yelling “FUCK OFF” to the slathering jumble of male hands on my breasts and my ass. They stop. I am left in the silence of my terror. No one says a thing. I clamp my sandaled feet into the floor, clutch my bag to my chest, and look straight into nothing.

Newspaper stories about low caste women being raped and thrown from trains flip through my head as we speed through the sprawling city. Some of the men get off the train but others stand just centimeters from my body for the duration of the forty- minute ride.

I am going to see where Ghandi spun khadi, the cloth of freedom symbolized by the spinning wheel on India’s flag. As we near the city centre, a voice to my left says: “There is a ladies train, miss.” When I turn to meet their gaze, I can’t see who it is because my eyes are full of tears. I would take one of those cars home.

Fifteen stops later and I arrive at Mani Bhavan ( “Jewel House”), a museum and historical building dedicated to Gandhi. One room is behind glass and that’s where his spinning wheels or charkhas are displayed, along with a poster of the diminutive nationalist below the words “we are all one.”

A tense fog envelopes the day and I move through it seemingly unencumbered by the blazing heat and swirling throngs of people, zooming motorbikes, buses and cars tooting their horns incessantly, and the odd cow. My next stop is Elephanta Island, a one-hour ferry ride away.

I pile onto the semi-modern, mainly dilapidated boat with other white tourists and middle-class Indian residents and think about what happened to me. What do I call it? It wasn’t rape, so does that mean it doesn’t count? Do I tell people?

As we cross the blue grey waters of the Mumbai harbour, I look for signs of similar experiences in the faces of the women around me. That one, she’s pretty, maybe someone has grabbed her. What about the older woman with the small purse and the confidence, the only other lone female traveler? Surely.

Thickly wooded with palm, mango, and tamarind trees, the small island provides the perfect camouflage for my confusion. I wander deep inside gigantic caves with thirty feet monolithic carvings of elephants and stand in the cool darkness. Eyes closed and swaying slightly, I collect myself.

I am a 30-year-old woman in an ancient cave who began life in a city more than 12,000 km away. I’m thankful to be here but also scared. Processing today’s events are about placing one foot in front of other. I do this. I walk slowly along the foot path under the trees that lead to the tourist trinkets.

There are brightly coloured scarves, jewelry, small wooden statues, bottles of water, knock-off Tilley hats, and blankets that reflect the peacock sky in their mirrored patches. As I unfold the Kali fabric, I am captured by its irregularity. The blue blotches are darker in some spots and it’s not a perfect rectangle.

I see myself.

I see the goddess.

She is power in action: dripping with heavy jewelry, stomping on the men beneath her with abundant strength, shaking her long hair and multiple arms in righteous anger. Kali screams freedom and protection, and I fold her neatly inside the fabric bag slung over my shoulder.

Back in the city, I share what happened with a few senior team members. I am told that it’s part of doing fieldwork and to simply carry on. I do. With the blue-black talisman that travels from a small Indian island to my body as a tattoo, and two decades later she finally rests on the wall of my home.

For a long time it was too hard to look at her, but even buried she gave me what I needed.

My house is like my body. It is a sacred space that I wash, dress, and lean into as I climb up and down the staircase of womanhood. How deliciously terrible that the men who are paid to restore my house often end up sullying it with their carelessness and misplaced desires.

I do not seek to live in a world without men. I only wish that they respect me and my spaces. I seek sovereignty, which I have tattooed across my shoulders in old English script. It is a reminder of women’s need for self-rule borrowed from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, whose tale tell us this, at the end.

February 5, 2022 1 comment

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