Welcome to Coming Through: Building a Body Memoir

. . . and other Gestures of Faithfulness

Hello Friends, Known and Yet-to-be-Known!

Welcome to my Substack, Coming Through: Building a Body Memoir and Other Gestures of Faithfulness. Thank you for any path you took to arrive here. While getting this up and out it may not be big for others, this is way big for me!

Coming Through: Building a Body Memoir and Other Gestures of Faithfulness feels familiar, possible and mysterious, and I love this combination!

Why Coming Through?

1 - This Substack will be a space where I practice coming through for myself. I have lived through long spells of abandoning my artmaker and writer, for lots of reasons. More to come in time. But hey, we are officially one day into Spring (so I'm joining all manner of life popping forth from the earth), and it’s also what would’ve been Mom’s 89th birthday! In her last years, she’d sometimes say, “Coke, you’re at the top of my bucket list.” I think she wanted me to finally choose and claim a path that not only gave to others but to myself, so Happy Earthday-Birthday, Mom! This is kind of a gift to both of us!

2 – Writing (and dancing) is not only where my most authentic voice lives, it’s also one of my primary paths of solidarity and activism, of participating in the movement for peace with justice. I come about this queerways, through following signs in nature, image, story, body, poetics, music/sound. So this will also be a space where I come through for us, especially for what’s been forced into the margins, either socially or internally. I also come through, determined to strengthen my place on our collective web, with translucence about my process of building a body memoir book project.

3 – This will also be a landing place for how Life asks to come through—Spirit, Divine Mystery, the Ancestors, Mama Earth, the Universe. So many pathways from Holy Center, from Sacred Source, none with ego about how it’s named or not named. I’ll try to get out of my own way to allow for these whispers, nudges or downright instructions to come through.

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How did I get here?

For those of you who don’t know me as a writer-dancer-maker, you may be wondering how I got here and why I must do this (and do it now)?

It may have begun at Coliseum Street School, Los Angeles Unified School District:

As you can see, I found the words “nice” or “real nice” very convenient, even though it was also likely that a constraining-survival imprint on my personality was already forming.

But here, you can see where “nice” found her trickster twin, who learned that “yes!” was a great way to add that much-needed syllable (and still sound pleasing; I know, why not “no!” right?). Seriously though, don’t you like my illustration of air?

I did make dedication and copyright pages, so maybe the dream was there long ago.

I did write throughout my Jr High years at Audubon, when I also wanted to be like Cheryl Song (the big sis of my classmate Jason), the sole Asian American dancer on Soul Train, or like Goldie Hawn, the go-go dancer on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

In high school and college, I got caught in a net or trap or rubbery bubble. Or like a ladder that kept leading to different iterations of itself. Ah. Call it academia, accreditation and the colonization of my ways of knowing and expressing.

Yet, verrry spottily, these things did somehow happen. I like to think the divine hums and thrums in the “yet” and the “somehow.”

The intervening years weren’t bad if art was involved. But otherwise, it was like I was walking around with the center of me gone missing. My voice. The soul of my senses. I had spiritual and faith community off and on, always with a direction toward social change, but my toolkit felt misfit, lost or empty. Meantime, my ears and body got super filled with other people’s tenuous lives and stories (as a community-based therapist) until my body started to buckle, then disassemble.

In my re-emerging body memoir project, I try to plumb the mysteries and wisdoms of this body and the conditions I’ve experienced in the contexts of “normative” culture, religion, school and profession, that had at some point decided that bodies were not to be considered trustworthy voices at the table, if present at all. Yet for me, the body is an oracle. More to come on this, too.

Fast-forward’ish: Here we are.

I’ve been writing into my iPhone’s Notes app, in my pj’s first thing most mornings for years now, not realizing that much of what was coming through may have intended to go beyond me, into our culture and these very times. Substacking Coming Through: Building a Body Memoir and Other Gestures of Faithfulness feels like a gift of transport, and I hope it can be something like this for you too, should you choose to become a Subscriber.

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Speaking of subscribing, here are my thoughts and invitations:

I’ll offer all my posts for free between now and at least April 1st (I know, not a huge window, but any actions toward a sustainable vocation as writer-maker are very real and present hopes for me).

During this period, I’d like to ask you to experience my Substack posts, and if you feel that murmur or spark, to share/recommend Coming Through to people in your own circles who could find what I write—as a creative, mystically-inclined and justice-seeking queer cis middle-class able-bodied baby booming Sansei/third-gen woman of spirit and Okinawan-Japanese descent (phew, but seriously, how many other Substackers or writers out there do you know, casting their voice from this place?)—to be engaging/freeing, or at the very least, humanizing and accompanying in these deep times.

Come April 1st and beyond, I’ll enable 2-3 tiers of paid Subscriber options and see what emerges from there! For now, I give thanks for your witnessing of this experiment. I hope you will help me to build my body memoir.

Oh! And I finally DID form a haiku without “nice” or “yes!” So, if I’ve remained on that trajectory, there is still hope for me. For all of us! Let’s come through together.

Lakes of love and possibility,

Coke

PS: Oh! And for anyone who has concerns about Substack as a platform (which also does allow for Substackers who are haters/neo-Nazis), I commend you to Jeanna Kadlec’s Substack post here, which articulates much better than I ever could, why I’m still choosing this platform over others.