Wonderful people,
Hello from the bloomiest, bosomiest part of the year - it’s enough to make your eyes zoom out of your head like a lovedrunk cartoon dog around here. The whole city is exploding into flower. The lake opposite our home, which is sanctuary and home to many generations of Canadian geese and mallards and herons and egrets and all manner of other water beasts, is completely overrun right now with tiny fuzzy goslings. The hills are yellow with flowering mustard, the elder trees are full of graceful umbrels like tiny ladies in frilly hats, the creeks and rivers still run full with the spring rains. We are tasting the very first stone fruit of the year. My body is so happy.
I’m in love with these summer months. It’s our birthday season, mine and my daughter’s, and we are rosy cheeked and filled with joy as we approach our time in the sun.
I hope the land where you are is leaping into life, and all your senses along with it.
I’m writing to you with a bunch of good news and announcements: some miracles of this season, and some upcoming summer things I’m greatly looking forward to in Los Angeles and in the UK.
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This past couple of months have been nourishing in ways I had forgotten were even possible.
All parents do parenting differently, and the way that my partner and I do it is about doing most things together. I love it very much, most of the time - it’s truly a preference and a choice rather than an obligation. AND - when it goes off the rails, it’s from lack of space and solitude and silence, all of which I need a hell of a lot of to feel or act like a decent person.
One of the great learning curves of my adulthood has been around tending to things before they go awry - preventing fires rather than putting them out as a general decision that has improved the quality and tone of life in every way - and it was in that spirit, and in an enormous gesture of fun, that I accepted an invitation from my BFF to fuck off to New Orleans and be utterly drenched in music and the wild soul of that festival city for the first weekend of Jazz Fest. No kids allowed.
It was AMAZING. 10/10, no notes. We saw music we loved and aimed for (Lizzo, for example, who is a goddamn national treasure) and music we stumbled across as a glorious surprise, ate gorgeously, giggled a lot, slept in, sang a lot, and let the wind blow us this way and that, which is a rare luxury for both of us at this point in our lives.
It is a marvel, going away and coming back. The clarity conferred by the travelled shift in perspective is beyond price, always, and this trip was no exception - I sat alone and wrote for hours on the plane home, and felt the ripeness of things long anticipated that are just now beginning to happen. I can feel them stirring in my blood.
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Some great things happening in June, starting this Saturday!!!
My absolute all time favorite Pride event in Los Angeles is Dyke Day, and we are stoked to be offering Pap Smears for Queers for the second year running - last year was incredibly fun and we can’t wait to 2.0 that shit.
My beloved team at the Center for the Advancement of Body Literacy is joining forces again with Faith Freeman and her team at MindBody Birth and Pati Garcia of Gracias A La Vida Midwifery (and possibly some other star midwives TBD!) offering sex and body literacy education and materials, free pap smears (anybody who wants to can insert their own speculum and take their own swab for a pap - did you know that no one needs to touch your body during a pap smear?! cuz they don’t, tell a friend), healing bodywork (Pati will be offering sobadas and limpias), dope merch and a library and our delightful company. We would love to see your shining faces there.
Why are we doing this?
Because queer community is where it’s at.
Because we love you and we want everybody to get the care they deserve in the exact way that best suits them.
And because last year, we gave free pap smears to a whole bunch of people who normally find gynecological care awful and traumatizing and who therefore avoid it. All of them had a completely hands-off, empowered experience of self-care and self-love - and many of them discovered things about their bodies that have helped them to stay healthy since.
In short: it’s worth it because you’re worth it.
If you’re coming to Dyke Day, come find us!!!
AND:
If you *aren’t* coming to Dyke Day, we’re holding another wonderful reproductive health event 2 weeks later in DTLA at MindBody Birth. My indomitable longtime collaborator Mychal Shifrah will be at this one with us, too - in her words, if your ex is going to be at Dyke Day, come to the birthing center :))
We’re a fully trans & queer staff offering free sex ed and contraception counseling, free pap smears for anyone who wants one, doula support, flash tattoos (!!), and the first in-person Take Back the Speculum since 2020, baby. If you want to come hang out, I’d love nothing more than to see you at either or both of these events.
*IF YOU ARE FEELING FLUSH AND WANT TO SUPPORT QUEER COMMUNITY HEALTHCARE BY SPONSORING FREE PAP SMEARS, WE CAN ACCEPT TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS!!
All the labor is donated by us, but we still have to pay for labs. All donations will go towards labs and supplies at both of these events.
You can sling your dollars at us here.
On behalf of all the folks who will benefit, THANK YOU. We’re so grateful.
The Ecstatic Body is coming up NEXT WEEK!! The humans who have gathered for this round are just amazing, and I’m crazy excited to be diving back into this vital, gorgeous exploratory work together.
The Ecstatic Body is a 4 day hands-on introduction to the profound energetic, somatic, and structural connections between the jaw and the pelvis, and the deep capacity for systemic transformation held within them. Taught from a perspective that holds sensual presence, somatic awareness and a skillful therapeutic touch as essential to healing in any context, this workshop offers a clear, comprehensive, experiential understanding of the anatomy, the functionality, and the ecstatic potential of these beautifully sensitive axes of the human body.
This workshop is intended both to engage in deeply personal exploration and to equip participants to offer this work as relevant in their professional context, and as such is offered to touch therapists of all varieties, somatic therapists, birthworkers, sexological bodyworkers and other somatic educators, and anyone with experienced hands and a personal interest in exploring the ecstatic possibilities of the human system.
Because of the limitations of time in a 4 day workshop and my desire to do justice to the anatomy portion of this curriculum, this workshop will be limited to participants with internal sexual and reproductive anatomy.
This, like everything I do, is a 1000000% queer and trans-inclusive joint.
There are just a couple of spots still open in this round of EB. If you, dear person reading this, are interested in joining us, please let me know by registering or writing to me with any questions through the form on this page.
I alluded somewhat mysteriously back in March to the collaboration that was forming with my spectacular collaborator in the UK Emily Carson, and am delighted to announce that we have just gone live :)
We have just launched The School For Ethical Touch, a project spanning our respective homes in the US and the UK that will be a space for inquiry, education, advocacy and dialogue exploring models of healthcare - most especially hands-on care - that explicitly center the embodied agency of the person on the receiving end as their guiding principle.
Together, we are moving toward a world in which healthcare of all kinds explicitly centers the embodied agency and consent of those receiving it, and we are HERE FOR IT.
We will offer our first in-person trainings in London and Oxford in July - please join us if you’re in the UK!! We would be overjoyed to see your face.
In London:
The Listening Touch: a 3 hour experiential community workshop exploring embodied consent, for all interested humans
The first ever in-person Take Back the Speculum in the UK!
And in Oxford:
The Listening Touch for Birthworkers: a 6 hour workshop focused on the practice of hands on skills and embodied consent for those of us who tend to birthing bodies.
If you’d like to stay apprised of our doings, you can find us on Instagram or sign up for our seasonal newsletter.
Both Em and I would be so very happy to be in touch with you.
That’s all for now, sweet hearts.
Please do write back to me if you’d like - I’d love to know how you are and what’s happening in your lives.
XOXOXOXO
PCWS