Respite.

Photo copyright Aji, 2021; all rights reserved.

I wish I could just do what she does: Spread my shawl like a cape, and just take flight. It would be such a respite from being bound to this drought- and pandemic-ridden earth.

But there's no respite, and no rest, either. Not even enough snow to be called a dusting, but high wind and an incredibly bitter, bone-deep cold. The kind of cold that spikes my pain levels and full-body neuropathy and just as full-body fatigue. [There's new work linked at the bottom here, and a new ordering of the wishlist. I've got to make some sales to recover some of January's god-awful outlay.]

Meanwhile, winter grinds on, climate change doing its damage all the while, and this pandemic, too. Supposedly a storm on the way, and the wind is rising, but it's not cold enough for snow. Like everything else, the drought and all the terrible still hold sway. It's ugly here, and we're not getting straight answers from our government at any level. No vaccines. No ACTUAL halt to caged Indigenous children, deportations, or border wall construction. And no end to the suffering. At the state level, no actual effort at accuracy, sending elders out into the cold in a pandemic-riddled public for vaccines that don't even exist at a site that's been told nothing about any of it? I am disgusted beyond words.

The last three weeks have been brutal on a whole bunch of fronts. I have had to justify my humanity repeatedly and be told that it's not enough, and I said I was done: No more; I don't care; I'm done. I'm so tired, in ways people who don't deal with my health issues will never understand anyway, and dealing with another episode of nearly dying about ten days ago is going to be with me for a while, physically and mentally both. [If you've never had it happen to you, count your blessings; it's something that engenders a permanent PTSD response.] And I have to get back to my own work, back to making masks for folks, and most of all, back to making sales, which are at record lows now. But I had to do it anyway again the other day, both justify my humanity and sacrifice it. It's hard knowing that you don't matter, that the world would just as soon see you die and be happy about it, knowing that I am already invisible, and if they cannot keep my that way they will actively erase me.

There is no economy now. There's nothing. People are literally dying all around us from the government's failures, and I don't know how we keep them, or us, alive unless I can cover the bills. We have lost SO much to 2020, so very, very many people, and the gifts and the talents and the knowledge and the wisdom they carried too often lost with them. People have needed so much more help than we could give them, but we did as much as we could, even when it put us in a bind, and we will need to do much more of that this year. We have shelled out close to 2 grand over the last 2 weeks, $600 just the other day to fill the propane tank, which I was not expecting to have to cover right now on top of everything else. At some point, I'm going to have to make it up somewhere, and my Patreon still has nearly $300 in subscriptions for DECEMBER (and now another $300 for January, too) STILL UNPAID, so folks, please check your cards and the expirations. So:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here (coffee is the biggest deal now, frankly);
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

And if you've been contemplating a purchase? This would be a very, very good time to do it; I've got to make it this staggering outlay somehow. There's even new work, here and here and now here, among other new pieces from last week and last night, too, so please watch for them and share the links.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.