On off-gassing
Hello, friends. I haven’t written for awhile because I am working on a shit ton of writing that comes out of the walk I finished in January. I wrote this piece for two reasons: first, it was part of a book launch that a beloved of mine just did (their name is Josina Manu, their book is called Ride Safe and it is so good - get a copy) and it is also one of a series that might go into my someday book looking at the things we have in common. I am trying to sort out, like so many of you are doing, how to weave together the things that connect us - which largely live in the place of land and spirit - while also being clear about the histories and present time violence between and within us. This is structural, it is historical, it is spiritual, it is cultural. Yikes. There’s more to say but for now, this is a rough sharing of what might someday be a part of the next book. It is shared here as an offering and a hello, not to separate from the shitty shittiness of this moment, but as another piece of what it is to be alive together. Right now. Oh, and it was fun to write and that’s a real thing. I am also trying to go back to recording things and not just put words on the page because I know that long form writing is, well, harder and harder to access in the fast fast of the now. So you also have my voice sitting on the couch and reading the thing.
When we are aroused in any way, and yes I am talking about sex but not just about sex.
When we are aroused in any way……like when you are walking down Lake Street or some other busy road wherever you live and two cars pull up fast to the corner, doors slam open and bodies jump out, yelling.…..or when there is a summer storm, the kind where the air is electric and buzzing and you whoop it up loud and screeching while also feeling scared inside… .
When you are aroused in any way…….when the baby is crying, or the elder is dying, or the ping on your phone says there is another headline that you really don’t want to read or you wonder is this the worst case scenario or is it only just the beginning… No really, is this the worst case scenario or is it only just beginning….when you are aroused in any way like when you get unexpected cash or you come across a just released song and you are standing in line at the grocery store and you find yourself crying…..
When we are aroused in any way, our body changes. Chemically.
Our body changes…amino acids whisper to hormones to call out pay attention, something is happening here. That is what arousal is, and these changes are ancestors whose lives and loves and rages are embedded in the way your hip turns or doesn’t, how you sleep and how you digest food and the rhythm and pattern your feet make when they move across the ground, one after another, step… step….
When we are aroused we change. Chemically…and what is held in the fluid tissue of our blood begins to warm up, because that is what happens when those hormones start to sizzle and reach out signaling pay attention, our bodies begin to warm up, especially if we were frozen with old histories held tight inside, sometimes from generations before, like little icy pebbles stuck in your soft tissues and when life seeps in to those cold places, we fizzle, we sizzle, and our inside starts to whisper and expand, growing and reaching into the outside, the wide and open space of it.
There are scientists who have gone into movie theaters and tested the air after a particularly intense blockbuster to find biogenic substances - biogenic just means substances produced by living organisms - these substances showed them that the bodies in that room, mere moments ago, were exhaling fear and excitement. Were aroused. Chemtrails, criss crossing between us.
Back when I was small, sitting on the bus or in church, my eyes would track the lazy particles of dust swirling in the air, flashing as they wove through ribbons of sunlight. I was obsessed by how each one of us breathed the other in and out. In and out. Sitting there on that hard wooden pew, between the standing and the kneeling, bodies moving the air, I would fixate on that speck of dust, that mote that was moving, and see how long I could track it, thrilled when I saw one disappear into a stranger’s inhale.
I also did this while sitting in the kitchen with my grandmother and great grandmother and great aunts, an ashtray on the table between them and cups of coffee with lipstick stains on the rim scattered around. I am sure they were gossiping, that beautiful word that puts “god” and “sibling” together. I was 6 years old, maybe 7, maybe 8 and sitting on the floor, watching the dust and cigarette smoke drift and weave between them, then inside of them and then inside of me. This was what safe felt like;our breath belonging, each to the other, and there I was, a god sibling among them.
If we were air rather than our individual bodies, we would be this flow in and out of oak and salmon and me and raccoon and snake and you who are reading or listening to this and whoever is outside the building you are in right now and the one you saw yesterday and on and on and on and oh I wanted to be that air so badly. Boundaryless and intimate.
When we are aroused, we change. Chemically. In the 1970s, right around the same time I was watching my family breathe each other in that kitchen on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, scientists who were focused on getting us into space created the idea of off-gassing to explain what happens when frozen materials, like what is found in space’s forever vacuum, come into the atmosphere and begin to heat up. They needed a word to explain the release of a gas that had been dissolved, trapped, frozen, or absorbed in another material. What happens to bodies exposed to the freezing cold vacuum, to rocks retrieved from the moon and brought down to the heat of the earth? Off gassing, what was frozen is no longer and in its softening, it releases part of itself to the air. Off gassing the elements that during the frozen time, have not degraded and disappeared.
So when scientists came in to movie theaters with their scanners and filters to see if they could track the arousal from the bodies who had just watched something intense, they laughingly called it off-gassing, all of our bodies there in the space, getting fizzy and then releasing what had been otherwise inside, frozen or not. We are not alone with this. Whales and dolphins and sharks track each other through water, following the same types of chemtrails we do when we walk into a room and know that someone who had been in that room before us had left, rageful.
And here is something interesting… these chemtrails, these biogenic substances that we leave behind, they seem to be a mix of things, organic substances that disappear soon after they are released and then also something else. Mixed with carbon dioxide and argon and ammonia and so many biogenic substances, it is estimated that there are 3500 different elements that release from our bodies with each exhale. There are healers I have met who can sit across from someone, scent into their exhale and understand some of what is happening inside those bodies, where illness or stress might lie. Among these 3500 different elements are some of the same elements that were sent to us by stars and space, the elements that have never degraded or disappeared, the elements that get called the building blocks of life but are what make each one of us star seed. Shared and shed in the room among and between us. Right this second. And then again now.
When we are aroused in any way, we human kin, we whale kin, we mammals and fish and reptiles and birds, plants and algae and moss, we change. Chemically. Even the word arouse comes from this old English word that refers to what a person does who has a hunting relationship with a hawk, to rouse is when the hawk has fallen asleep or started to rest and their human partner will ruffle their feathers, blow into their eyes, against their eyes and the hawk wakes up and arcs up in the air high, high, ready to hunt…. When we are aroused, like the hawk, we release something of ourselves from the inside to the outside and even when we don’t notice it, we each follow those chemtrails. We call it following gut instinct but we forget how much our noses are involved, this hollow tube, nose to belly, this oldest most primitive part of who we are, we have been scenting these chemtrails since we were single celled beings and, like the hawk, when aroused we begin to move into the air around us, sniffing listening tracking.
When we are aroused in any way, for any reason, we fill the air around and between us, and we take each other in and we scent, our noses reach for each other even when the front of our brains are paying attention to something completely different, this old part of us, this link between nose and belly, what it picks up from the air goes straight to that old limbic place in our brain that lights up or doesn’t and that is how we know we are safe….. Or safe enough…. to stay. To laugh. To be vulnerable. I think of this every time I see another commercial selling another product to cover up the oils and seepage from our skin and hair and crevices. I think of this when I think of beloveds raised in families being told the only way you can be safe is if you release nothing into the air around you, be cleaner than clean, be without smell, be as neutral as possible.
Did you know that when someone is telling a story in a room or even over a recording like this so that you can feel the words as sounds rather than only read them with your eyes, the brain waves of the listener begin to mimic the brain waves of the one who is sharing their words and this is also weaving along with the scents, the ones we tried to cover, and the ones we can not. This is always strongest when we are in the room together but it is even happening right this second. I might not be building chemtrails with you with my words but there is still something happening that connects us. It is older than television and the internet, these are the primitive ways that we learn from each other, of being what we learn rather than doing what we learn.
When we are aroused in any way, we change. Chemically. And when we are in a room together, we share that change in ways more vast and varied than when we have sound. And those masks we wear to protect each other from illnesses such as COVID, they filter out about 95% of what get called .3 micron particles, or generally those things that can hurt us and make us ill. There are still viruses, bacteria and pollen that are smaller than that .3 microns and masks keep improving, but the elements I am mostly talking about, these organic compounds that are part of who we are, they are smaller yet. Argon, which is one of the elements that makes up the air we breathe and that passes through our masks, when broken down into even smaller elements is mostly made up of those gases and stories that come from the stars, krypton and xenon and so much more. These are what we are exchanging, back and forth, even when masks are capturing much of our exhale. Star seed. Star gases. Ancient exhales.
In the chemistry of you, your aliveness when aroused, you send out patterns and shapes that tell the world about that aliveness, just as the oak does as you walk past and just as the river does, and the otter and the swarm of bees, all of us made up of organic compounds, all of us included with the gases that are the stars’ exhale. We are in a constant interplay, even when we have to cover our nose and mouths to ensure that our bodies stay well.
This is a cycle that is older than every tactic designed to control or stop a breath. Breathe. This is happening all of the time, even in the most intolerable of situations. Breathe. This is an exchange that is happening all of the time, with and without masks. Breathe. This is how we are the change, these chemtrails we leave behind that communicate as much and maybe more than our words do. We don’t tell stories, we are stories and each story has a trail behind it, just like a comet, just like every star.
When we are aroused, in any way, we leave stories behind, old frozen places warming up again, we become stories, a ribbon of change that is made up of inhale and exhale….when we are aroused in any way we exchange what we already are, chemtrails that are stardust, that are communication…. Right this second, we are changing, breathe, inhale, exhale, and in this moment what is changing is what was always already here… a little more….. Your life, my life… Now breathe…. When we are aroused in any way, we change. Chemically.
Now breathe. Inhale…..Exhale…. Inhale…. Exhale…..
*****
and hello friends, if you want to support this writing and more like it to keep coming out and you have some extra cash to spare, i have a patreon site. this is one of the ways that i keep posting stuff just because…