Stitch work

I often tinkered as a kid with mixing things together, creating food and beverage potions that would not only be the best new thing you could taste, but help you feel better, relaxed, happy. A bit of a “kitchen witch” I was, even back then. I would make my poor mom try it all, bombarding her with “fun” menus from which she could pick her preferred kitchen-sink potion (if given the option). She was a champ and no matter how busy or stressed she got as a graduate-degree earning, working, single mother, she’d always make time to “order” and taste, still does. 

Part of what inspires the emphasis on integration is my lifelong journey of working at understanding all the parts in myself - the family styles, cultures and influences, the social structures, patterns, habits and cycles, the intergenerational and interpersonal traumas and successes, the waves of resistance and resilience.

For me, integration is about the actions of holding space for, of hopefully, bringing together, and of transmutation.

It’s about understanding how my French Canadian side sits with my Mexican-American side (I have many other “sides,” but these feel the most prominent); how the unspoken matriarchies on both sides function amidst patriarchal systems; how relatives by marriage contribute and shape vis-a-vis those by bloodline; how liberation and oppression cycle, colonized reckoning with colonizer; how queer identities live within and around the enculturated binaries; how capability, maturity, and health correlate or don’t with ability, age, and form; how organized religion meets community, spirit, and energy; how politics, education, work, money, and consumption nourish or destroy; how coffee stands alongside tea (both having their own complicated stories).

I want for this understanding at the intersections, so that I can write new stories and experiences into existence on behalf of myself, my families, and our ancestors. My dream is for us all to be free-r of the parts of us that live(d) as othered, disconnected, overlooked, exploited, undervalued, suppressed, repressed, pinging among, clinging to, or furthering the power structures of the past to survive (and so doing within family, organization, and society at-scale).

Not everything has to be combined together, often things are excellent in their simplest form. But sometimes with integration, we get a whole or a more expanded experience, perspective, and appreciation of the beauty and strength within the parts, or of what the parts can help us understand about ourselves. I believe there’s a place and space for all of it.