All Heart, All Sleeve: Claire Player is 25
March 12: clarification, decay, recompostion. Stepping into my own ongoingness, so delicately entwined with a new millenium, another world being born. The breakdown, and Life again. Happy to be here!
“[B]ring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
I turn twenty-five years old with the century, with this new millenium. Mary gifts me a laptop, a sturdy Dell that reminds me of the ones I used in high school, a tool to do my work. My mom sends me The Milepost in the mail and an Alaska highway travel guide; I am building my truck into a home I can carry with me, my black covered wagon, Life in motion. Multiply rooted. The beautiful close of a quarter of a century alive, here, Earth; the feeling that Life is just beginning. I am free with my wishing lately.
On Moonday I finished Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir two and a half years after a beloved gifted it to me, so delicately annotated. Heartbreak kept it shelved for a year; in Boulder, the book came back to me as a companion; so did they. (My life is awash in so much grace. Love I can barely believe. Quilted.) Emezi writes a constellation of letters to their beloveds, squarely facing the tender and divine places, the ache of godliness. Questions of the work, the glory and the wonder and how to bear the weight of it.
Reading the last few pages out loud to myself, over and over: “In that constant death, you find a fuller kind of living ... this is what this period of my life has felt like – a new planet forming – and I cannot tell if I am the one traversing the planet or the planet itself … what is clear is that it is constantly unfamiliar.” The sense of decay, the dying skin, the constant molt and shedding. Everything is changing. What is the work that must be faced? To choose to unfold. “I choose the new life.”
Both individual and collective, this sense of changing: this is the Pisces/Aries place. Pisces is the last sign of the astrological wheel; Aries is the first. This is the movement between the experience of Spirit and the experience of Self; oneness and individuality. The world is in this stellar threshold : the astrology of this year is marked by the transition place between Pisces and Aries. Venus is currently traveling between the two, as is Mercury, and soon Neptune will cross into Aries after bathing in Pisces for over a decade (2012-present; March 30: future crossing).
Old selves, old systems fall apart; beneath is tender, new skin. Another becoming. An invitation to shed the settler self, the logics of the market we’ve swallowed, the profit/prophet complexes that harden our hearts to one another. We are all now/here, together, the eternal life/decay that is this process of composting. The breakdown required to begin again; the rot and change of shape that enable fertile soil to be created. Room to grow worlds that nourish, worlds of care. (Recomposition?)
Do you believe in compassion for enemies?
Who is to blame when it falls to decay?1
Claire Player is a Pisces sun, Aries rising, Gemini mooning– my life feels like being born into strange, delightful, surprising and somehow familiar shapes, over and over and over. (AND WE’RE JUST GETTING STARTED, BABY!) This is Being in Motion, after all – God is Change, Life is Happening. Eternal decay, and life, again; eating and being eaten. Born in 2000, the experience of time is fleshy, visceral. I am the age of the year, always. Child of the millenium.
Consider: in 2012, on my 12th birthday, I had an instagram. 13 years later… my Instagramming is a teenager, now. The lonely platform where I came of age. The place I gobblescroll my friends’ lives, unspeakable tragedy, the irony epidemic, the latest harrowing news. The world of passive connection, pretending community can exist self-first. I can’t keep taking breaks. I need to leave, to end, to complete.
Gift to self (This Is Twenty-Five!): shed the selfie, bow out of profile performance. Delete forever. Tip the balance back: I don’t want to spend another halflife in any room of the metaverse. (Neptune, planet of dreams and illusions, sojourns through Pisces, 2012-2025: the length of my instagramlife. Social media: a dreammachine built to keep us addicted and hooked and senselessly consuming; dissolved, disempowered, disillusioned. The shift into Aries, firesign, quick to spark: remember who you are outside the algorhythms, the screens’ dulling lull. The next 14 years to come.)
Becoming; unbecoming – ways I’ve been walking for different shapes of ever. Claire is about to turn 6; the childeyed self I returned to, or remembered, when I gave myself a new name. When I was 5, my family left Anchorage; I’m finally planning a return journey to Alaska this summer, 20 years later. Bouldergift – barefoot, wideyed, wilderness wandering roots: baby Clarissa, Sissy Kate, four-year-old licking and hugging glaciers. I return to myself. All heart, all sleeve. Boyish, womanly, daughter, sun.
And also: Claire is the name my ancestors gave me. My great-great-great-great grandmother, Clarissa Jane Wilcox Seely, who was among the first pioneers to arrive in the Salt Lake valley, who is the source of the name my mother gave me (and the gifts of her story, her legacy): her nickname was Clair-see. And my great-grandpa Claremont Oborn went by Clare.
Clarification.
Maternal and paternal entwine in Claire Player. Two deep and sturdy rooted family trees bear me. Appleseed: not a grafted branch, but a wild springing. Something completely new. Born of a people rich in faith, determination, and love, Mormon-American; I am here to live so differently. (During my birthday party I pulled two tarot cards simultaneously. the Queen and King of Cups! Quing!) Love in action, a web we practice holding together, this soft place to land. This nestled heart. The doors of my heart fling open.2 My gift is my witness, my presence. To be a vessel of grace and change.
Clarissa gives me legacy, Claire gives me lightness. Sillyserious. Joybeing. This year I want to lean into my Playerness. This chatterspirit. Witness, noticer; the words that fly, spill, tumble, spring from my heart, my hips. I want to dance more, sing more, bring music-making into my life again. I am kind to myself and honest with others. I am learning, practicing, tending my gifts, my responsibilities. To ask as freely as I offer, to receive as freely as I give.
“I think my own unfurling will be like that, old roots running deep, a steadiness that cannot be shifted, but right now, I have become my own thing.”
Akwaeke Emezi - Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir
Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory released an album last month that has been on repeat in the cabin ever since. (Lyrics from “Something Ain’t Right”).
Sky Fusco wrote a series of alchemical offerings for the summer solstice, the first being “The doors to my heart open inward.” I tried this on for size, but it felt like the opening sketch in I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson: dead-set on not being embarassed, Tim pullllllllls on the push door until the hinges creak and break and he can force it to swing inward. So: I am a heart flinging open, exhaling love out & out & out Because I just can’t help it. Oh well! :)
Quing!!!!!!