Super new moon refuses to be canceled

It creates for survival

“Pearl with Girl Earring” by Ancient Cringe for Instagram

On a dirt road where radio signals don’t reach and dwarf pines grow crooked, in a time when produce tastes like bleach, newborn butterflies beat orange and black wings inside a mesh cage. 

“When can we let them go?” my daughter asks.

“When it stops raining. If their wings get wet, they could die.” 

Earlier, I explained how a virus was attacking lungs, and Mommy’s were very fragile, and if she didn’t stop touching everything in sight—

“Don’t let them die,” my daughter whispers. Her chest quakes under her shirt.

Well, my shirt. She only wears my clothes now.

Outside, a novel respiratory virus rages. Children who aren’t my children play tag outside our window. My kids, excluded from the neighborhood social bubble, don’t go outside for fear of being admonished with “six feet!”

“Because of the virus,” they say. But we all know it’s because my husband lost his temper on a night with too much whiskey.

We do this instead

It’s tiring to list trauma. A reader’s eyes would glaze over.

So, a metaphor:

Around the same time, on a week in September 2020, the Moon hugged the Earth so tightly it disappeared. At least, to our eyes, it had.

They called this a “Super New Moon.”

But Super New Moon, erased and forgotten, refused to be canceled. It lassoed tides, flooded seawalls, and stripped beaches. It lay bare sea anemones, gleaming like organs and filling the air with their stench. It heaved tectonic plates and incited a 7.5 magnitude earthquake off the coast of the Aleutians.

You don’t really want to know about my depression, anxiety, and PTSD diagnoses. Or how I was going blind with fast-forming cataracts. How I gave up one of my teaching jobs to care for my young children over quarantine. How helping an undiagnosed autistic six-year-old child learn over Zoom is a special kind of hell. How it hurts to see your daughter cry and talk about death every night, worried her mother will die.

A friend who lost her husband and father of her young children wrote: “Grief is love without anywhere to go.”

Where does it go? Where do we put our screams orphan love when the void is full?

Amanda Lehr put it into satire. My son blew up the chat feed in Zoom and screen-shared pictures of himself sporting two heads. My daughter disassembled hardware and repurposed it into art.

From 2020-2022, I monomaniacally binge-wrote and published around fifty satire pieces, shouting into the void like the Whos in Whoville, making a ruckus in hopes that my words might come out a squeak and save a life—namely, my own.

And you know what? They heard. People heard me! And they wrote!—teachers who were scared to return to the classroom unvaccinated; mothers who were drowning; people terrified with the unraveling of democracy; parents and teachers disillusioned with standardized testing; and folks frustrated with the the public’s reluctance to wear a mask to protect the unvaccinated and immunocompromised.

To be fair, I received a lot of hate mail, too. One account that went by “Teacher Unions Hate My Kids” called me a “child killer”—which, in all honesty, felt like a badge of honor.

I put that grief rage orphan love into satire, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that it saved me.

Turns out that many comedians also struggle with depression and use humor and pillows to alleviate despair.

Now I know why the wind blows leaves off of trees

Why Super New Moons heave tides and create earthquakes

Why my socially isolated son builds cairns on the beach

Why my autistic daughter Sharpies on the floor

We create…

-to be seen.

-to be heard.

-to be known.

It is our act of survival. Of self-healing.

Collette Costa and the Off the Hook Honeys recreate the “Safety Dance” with pandemic-appropriate lyrics: “You can dance if you want to, you can leave your friends behind, and if your friends don’t dance six feet apart, then they’re no friend of mine”

Our healing relies on seeing ourselves reflected. But our healing does not happen in

The Void

.

Our healing relies on others. Likewise, our healing heals others.

Just as the broken tree in the Tongass Rainforest creates a home for new growth, our broken selves become fodder for new growth. Our stories, our art, decompose and transform into something new, becoming homes for new life.

Ooh! A nurse log & fey forest creature in the wild!

Art is collective healing.

Expressing ourselves in stories, art, music, poetry, comedy, theater, and dance can heal us. Witnessing these acts of creation and seeing ourselves reflected in them can also heal us. Like this poem by

Peter Johnson

did for me today:

There’s a tattoo of a tiny gun on my hand symbolic of the tiny wars I wage inside myself. Its barrel beckons like the phallus that’s visible when you stare directly at the sun. My father said, “A man who can’t fight is disgusting.” He was half-right about that. Most fathers are, even the one who erected a basketball blackboard outside my bedroom window. In the evening, when the sun shrugs its shoulders, neighborhood children are rewarded with ice cream. But I’m sent to bed, where I stare at the tiny doorknob tattooed on my other hand until I fall asleep.

What was my feeling after reading it? Relief? Maybe it was knowing myself better. Or knowing that we’re all healing together.

Creating art is not a narcissistic or selfish act. Telling our story is not mere navel-gazing and sharing our navels with the world. Truth is, we cannot be healed without the world. And the world cannot be healed without our healing.

My middle school students’ self-portraits in the style of Picasso’s Cubism. Students were tasked with incorporating colors, lines, and shapes that encompassed their feelings, and the art was hung in the hallway for other students to take in.

The power of metaphor

Metaphor is universal. It expands beyond us, beyond our physical self, the earthly plane, and linear time, into our metaphysical and spiritual beings where time and space are infinite and exponential. Through metaphor, we become infinite, too.

We long to see ourselves as alternate manifestations in alternate realities, to know that we continue beyond this finite one. So we can imagine what lies beyond. So we can hope.

My dad and I performing original songs at the Alaska Folk Festival about the Alaskan educational budget and separation of families policy on the U.S.-Mexico border

Art as a communal act of healing

When we're not seen, when we’re erased, seawalls flood, beaches are stripped, and vulnerable sea life is exposed, its innards rotting, picked by the gulls. Forgotten “super new moon moon” rearranges the earth and rises up tsunamis like judgment day.

On such a day in September 2020, my son stacked towers of rocks on the beach, forming a trail of cairns. My daughter climbed up and over the greenschist rock, opened her mouth, and sang a song without words. Her voice was carried over the waves, buoyed by the breath of the sea.

I am still here.

In her song, I saw myself.

Has art ever saved you? Tell me about it.

Love,

Summer

At the Tináa Native Art Auction and Fashion Show in Juneau, Alaska, I wore two skirts and a top by Pamela Baker. The top skirt read words like Negotiate, Treaty, Culture, and Land Claims. On stage, I dropped the skirt to reveal another skirt underneath that read Community, Culture, Tradition, Pride, and Family.