Today is International Women's Day, a day that is celebrated in public with much fanfare in (for example) Cameroon and the Netherlands (this just in: it is also a national holiday in Russia), but not too much in the United States of America.

There is a lot of fighting left to be done in our country.

This has been a very strange few days. I had couchsurfers and then made my social re-debut after six weeks of isolation that began with an extra bad anxiety attack triggered by a person and turned into a host of other nightmares. Spring is well on its way and I am trying to be well on my way with it, and I miss my friends and want to see them again, and it has become pretty clear that lying around in my bed flirting with what my therapist refers to as "the narcissistic abyss" is not an effective way of combating any kinds of demons.

Here we go.

I subwayed and walked back from North Buffalo on this warm, sunny day with a letter in one arm and a bandana wrapped around a smudge stick in the other, thinking about all the power I held.  In one hand, words, which I always wonder at, but wonder at even more after this weekend's brief encounter with illiteracy. In the other, a pure force of positive energy. I kept expecting people and spaces to leap away from my smudge stick arm (although who knows how potent it is when unlit). What I do know for sure is that I have felt extra uncomfortable in my skin and house since Saturday morning, and that I feel a whole lot better now that everything smells like sweetgrass and I have stood on tippytoes in all the corners, asking the bad energy to please make nests in someone else's spiderwebs.