2020, A Recap and Thanks

2020 was the year I:

- started in bed—after an abrupt breakup that affected my financial and immigration future—from where I wrote a January first post, determined to take back the authorship of my life.

- taught my first university class and realized how much I enjoyed the interactive, dialogic aspects of teaching, and how gratifying it was to teach what I had learned about writing and research in my PhD journey.

- was approved for a US visa I applied for after scanning countries around the world for their responses to COVID19 and commitment to diversity, and felt how much my colleagues and seniors in the field of poetry/writing valued my work and arc through letters of reference they wrote in support of my O1 application.
 
- fostered a kitten, fell in love with her there that first night when she sat on my lap with a cold and eye infection necessitating an elaborate herbal regimen, told her to get better if she also wanted to stay with me because I would not have the capacity to care for a chronic infection—the kitten honored our pact and got better and I adopted her and we are family now.

With Zahra in her carrier bag

- was taught in loving a cat to be okay with my wanting to do a lot of loving and healed a layer of attachment beliefs.   

- took responsibility for my financial well-being.

- got a professional artists' grant. 

- published poems in four journals and an anthology, published an article and an essay, gave a conference presentation and two poetry readings, gave a talk, taught a workshop, and recorded poems for two digital spaces. 

- wrote a book proposal to get my dissertation published as a book and got an invitation to submit from a scholar-editor I admire. 

- revised a poetry manuscript. 

- reread Women Who Run With the Wolves with a group of wild soul women who had accepted my invitation to form a reading group during four months of the pandemic. 

- organized a neighborhood-based poetry reading, and started a salon for writers and artists to call forth a decolonial visionary paradigm. 

- was held by friends and communities in the flesh and online. 

- felt deeply into the heart of the mother and sat in her dark womb and felt my personal practices attuning evermore to the path of the ancient earthsky women walking in her ways on the land of my ancestors.  

- started to integrate the many aspects of my being, and realized there is no need for me to figure out the exact/perfect how of being in better service to the worlds. 

- had a revelation that straddling different paradigms was out of balance, and committed to a paradigm of "we/me." ​