Welcome to my Moonbox: a gathering of musings, learnings, and aspirations held (perhaps, sometimes only briefly) by the many expressions of me, Sarita.

From the land of my dreams:

Content warning: Gore & self-mutilation, violence, grief via dreams

I dreamt that I was in a dimly lit room and a young boy and I were playing games. He wasn't my child but we were close kin, like I was an auntie. At first he would sit on my legs while I tried to do push-ups. Then he tried to down-climb from my shoulders and I was telling him to not use my hair like a rope. Then a figure, like a turtle-man guardian with a flute appeared and there were many other children as well. He was playing a heartfelt song, one that almost made me cry. I laid down, the boy sat next to me. Everyone was calm. I had the awareness that these children harbored a deep connection to their native culture. Then the dream changed.

A rich, white man entered the room to steal a child. I screamed and fought. The man ran down a set of stairs (like the ones at my grandparent's house). Somehow I was able to jump down and I landed on his head, flooring him. He was dead. I told the gaurdian I had killed the rich man and we all knew that I had to flee. The others, his brothers, would come to take my life.

I was walking through a school campus and ma was there in the crowd, young and in short-shorts, her legs shining in the sunlight, and she turned and recognized me — suddenly we're sitting somewhere, and all I saw was a now-middle-aged face and red-auburn hair and we were about to start a conversation. I told her sorry (for what, I don't remember) and began to cry. I knew that next we would speak of my future surgeries, but in that exact moment I'm woken by Patrick coming into the bedroom to retrieve something for work, and I am barely hanging on to the dream. I try to go back, to see if she's still there, waiting in whatever dimension I was just lucidly in. But I fail to reach her.

Another night soon after, I am wandering an unknown city with brick and stone buildings and I tell someone in a store that I'm looking for my mother (and it is this moment that I become lucid). He points me to a place nearby. It's a nursing home. I enter and there are many elders and there she is, too, very old, hunched back with gray, thinning hair in slight waves. She is boney, thin herself, sitting in a chair mostly nude as the caretakers begin washing her arms with a cloth. She cannot speak to me now. She is too old. I don't think we even made eye contact. I don't even remember seeing her face.

I wander an urban shopping center hallway, balcony style, and I see people getting tattoos outside a shop. One of them happens to be a friend I had in high school and her mom is with her. They tell me things, but at some point, I go home. Inside are a bunch of friends, female friends, like Indigo and Jenn Arge. They've sprung a surprise party for me. Jenn sets the table decor (jars?) and I'm suddenly holding a bunch of loofahs, so colorful and of different sizes. There are pink things on shelves and I thank my friends for organizing the place. Grandma and Grandpa are there, too, setting the table for a feast. Grandma has cooked extravagant dishes. Neighbors join us (though I don't recognize them). But the party is all prepatory. It is not my brithday. I will soon be having surgery.

I had a dream where there was utter joy. Grandpa, Grandma, me, ma, my sister — all spinning in a circle holding hands laughing. I mostly remember Grandpa's laughter, his enormous open-mouthed smile. The sense of reunion. The dream transitioned to a plaza. We were on vacation. Dancers in beautiful traditional dress were in the middle. I remember lots of red. I remember ma sitting at a small, round cafe table outside some shop and she was smoking a cigarette. I wanted to get a photo of her without her knowing, to capture the candidness of this plaza and of my mom. I walked to the other side of the plaza circumnavigating the dancers. The shot would be of her through them. Never did I question her smoking (she never did in real life), but in the dream I knew she wouldn't want a photo of her doing it, and that prompted me all the more.

I was in the bathroom. I looked down and there were medical plastic-based organs in place of my uterus and ovaries. But they were still wrapped in their plastic packaging. They had been installed into/on me — as in, I was like a diorama. Some of the tubes extended outside of me. I ripped off and away the wrapping from myself. But there was no terror, no grief, no lamentation, just matter-of-fact removing what needed to be removed. Then, I was behind Grandpa and Grandma doing this, and Grandpa turned around to see and I was overcome with sorrow. "Oh —," something was his lament. Oh dear. Oh my child. And ma showed up in some doorway, as if she'd come to help me. Her brave face on. Her body saying, I will do anything for you.

I was in the house my other Grandmother used to live in (dad's chilhood home). I had all these push pins, safety pins, and T-pins in my abdomen and chest. But I had no boobs, just a long, flat torso with all these gold-colored pins. And I began the process of pulling them out and undoing the safty pin clasps. Some safety pins were curved, like a bulb pin, and going through the motions of the curve, I could feel the pinch of skin, but not really any pain. After some time, the pins seemed to snag more and more, and skin or fat, or whatever bodiness, was coming off in chunks. My torso turned into a mess of gore. Then it was raw flesh, cubed for some reason, and I was trying to keep all the cubes of muscle and tissue together with great panic.

Another dream was a story. It began in the kitchen of my childhood home. Looking out the windows above the sink, toward the front walkway, the scene was actually of water. As if a river or an ocean was literally beyond the walls of the house, water high, up to the windows, and these big-foot-esque entities were floating around. Heads bobbing. A family of them. Somehow, a human man was in the house with mal-intent to harm me and I remember him trying to get to me, yelling, but the big-foot people had decided to protect me. They held the man back. The story felt as if a friendship would then ensue between me and this family. At some point, I was playing with a bear cub and teaching the cub human words. The cub was learning to speak. The cub had no mother, so I was to be the caretaker. Similarily, I think this reflected the budding communication between me and the entities. That I was in need of care and they were willing to help.

I had a dream where I'd found a forgotten onion, dimpled and aging, held in my hand to place on the counter.

I dreamt Grandma was in her bed, bundled, head covered in sheet, we must be quiet, all of us, even her son, who liked to tell many jokes — let us please not wake her. She is ready to rest.

I am in a classroom and my name is called — I am chosen, picked, one of three. 

There is a blood-sucking beetle on my finger and I pull it off only to look around the cab of the van and see them all over the place. Notably in the seams of things. I thought that they must be those larvae Patrick and I saw while running the other day, the billions of them scattered all over the snow. They apparently were beginning to manifest into other things. Like black-furred bunnies. I grabbed them by the scruff to set them outside of the van. Large black ants as big as my hand and large scarabs. But also more benign things, like fresh grapes. Several cats wanted to sleep on my lap, but another cat shot out of the van door and I had to go retrieve them. This is all to describe a sense of great overwhelm.

Ma had her own bed in our spare bedroom. The one at the Wildcat condos, the one with my desk and an extra chair, some outdoor gear and our bikes — no furniture for sleeping at all. But the bed was there in the dark, early morning hours, covers ruffled and parted, leafed over from the left side, left: from the perspective of the sleeper. A soft and fleeced molding of where a body had been laying. She was not there, but she had been. Up, awake now, somewhere. I first lamented that her and Patrick never got to share early mornings together before work. But then I started thinking about how they must have had in this dream. I could hear Patrick in the kitchen closing a cupboard. She must have just left. Surely they have bonded, mom and son-in-law in pre-work ritual. I was both happy she knew him and simultaneously aware that such a thing was impossible. But the message was there, that she knows and loves him, that she shares in the spaces we call home. 

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I have always been a powerful dreamer. And there have been many instances where I have dreamt of things that have come to pass. But usually, they are amalgams of my inner mental states, or of strange metaphors for wisdoms my body is trying to learn. I see my dreams as doorways into my fears and longings, but also as a conduit for things none of us quite understand. I’ve noticed that when I am under great stress, my mother and grandfather appear as guides. There was even a time last fall when I was so overwhelmed that I was visited by my grandfather, my mother, and even my dead cat, Chato, all in one night. Ha. But yes, sometimes I have violent dreams. I’ve been stabbed in dreams, I’ve been raped in dreams, I’ve been shot at in dreams. And I know that it is because I internalize a lot of what takes place in the world (as these things have not happened to me in real life).

I hold such reverence for my dreams. I trust in their ability to teach or to show me something. And these excerpts from my journal are all from this year. So, if you have been following my life, then I’m sure these types of dreams make sense. If you’re new to Moonbox Notes, then perhaps this is a great example of how woven my life and my writing can be. How one can experience both joy and pain, maybe simultaneously, and maybe that is someone’s every day. Or how the mundane, such as the dimpled onion, can be a simple metaphor for caring, for wanting to appreciate something that once grew so freshly out of the ground, but is now on the brink of a physical transition. It is certainly a metaphor for how I choose to live my life: part mundane, part extraordinary, always full of meaning.

[Related: Moonbox Notes #17]

La Vida Mundial:

Speaking of dreams, I was chosen by Merrell to participate in their Get FKT Challenge in Steamboat Springs next week! If you read the intro section, there’s a one-line dream where my name was called within a classroom setting. One of three. And I knew that this dream was about Merrell. Sure enough, perhaps a week later, I was notified that I had been chosen. I will be one of three women racing to become Merrell’s next female Trail Athlete for 2024! I am over the moon excited for this opportunity. And it would be everything “dream come true” to become a sponsored athlete. I truly desire to be a professional athlete and creative writer/collaborator. The event will be taking place Tuesday through Thursday, Sept 26-28th, with the actual race held on the 27th. I’ll be sharing about the trip on my Instagram.

-NPR: The launch of the American Climate Corps by the Biden Administration

-PBS: Biden cancels last oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic Refuge

-My ReNew Earth Running teammate, Becca Jay, is currently holding a fundraiser for RER as she prepares for her upcoming ultra race on Sep, 24th! TODAY! Read about it and donate through the link.

HBD to all September birthdays!

Recent Top Pick Reads:

+ “How the Land Back Movement Is Unraveling Manifest Destiny,” by Kalen Goodluck, Sierra Club Magazine, Sep 11, 2023. A very thorough investigation into the Land Back movement, hashtags, inspirations, revelations, history, and activism; and what Land Back actually means to Indigenous Peoples.

+ “The Brutal Legacy of the Longleaf Pine,” by Lacy M. Johnson, Orion Magazine, Autumn, Sep 20, 2022. Part history lesson, part narrative about the Longleaf Pine’s importance in ecosystem health and how Manifest Destiny and capitalism have destroyed one of America’s greatest forests (and the Indigenous People that once took care of it).

+ “What Now Shall I Repair? A Conversation,” Camille Dungy and Kaveh Akbar, Orion Magazine, Summer 2021. A really interesting conversation between two poets about language, craft, the why of writing books, and the simplicity of writing what you mean; “the hunger for encountering illumination that is not of yourself —that’s just art.” – Akbar

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Books/Mags in progress:

+ I Explain a Few Things, selected poems, by Pablo Neruda, edited by Ilan Stavans

Recent Listens/Watchings:

+ “Walking Two Worlds,” The North Face, YouTube, Sept 12, 2023. A short documentary film highlighting the life, advocacy, and inspirations of Quannah Chasinghorse, a Hän Gwich’in land defender who has become an influential Indigenous supermodel.

+ “Stabbed by Trekking Pole in the Wind River Mountains,” Backpacker Magazine, Out Alive Podcast, Outside Online, Aug 30, 2023. CONTENT WARNING: Gruesome injury, gore. I had heard about this incident when it first happened through social media as I follow Gabe Joyes, the ultrarunner who is interviewed for this gruesome audio story.

+ “Imrul Mazid: Running as a Vessel for Healing and Impact; Recalibration Purpose; Sculpting Society,” You Are a Big Deal Podcast with Becca Jay, Apple Podcasts, Sep 4, 2023. A wonderful conversation between Becca Jay and Imrul Mazid about utilizing running for purposes greater than oneself, on spirituality, and about the transformative powers of spoken word.

Writing/Projects: (updates are highlighted)

+The hybrid essay I wrote in 2021, “Chuckwalla,” still needs some major revision before I consider submitting again. I’ve begun another research/writing phase as well.

+I currently have one general submission in the ether. I’ve submitted a previously-published essay to an essay contest (where this is allowed). The purse is $3k! The winner and runners-up will be announced in October.

+An online writing course with Orion Magazine, “Writing Resilience through Our Relationship with Wildness,” that I signed up for has been postponed until October 2023 due to the instructor having a family emergency.

+I’ve begun a new short fiction piece with a temporary title of, “How I Came To Be.”

+I have a Science Fiction novella that I’ve been slowly working on since 2017.

MISC/Brags:

• September is Patrick’s birthday month! We climbed, we hung out with friends, and just cuddled a lot. So grateful for his love and his companionship in this life.

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Thanks for tuning in to Sarita’s Moonbox.

Happy Fall!