Praise, Purple, Pulchritude
On "Poetry Is Not a Luxury"
Let Dreams Speak Through You
When we view living, in the european mode, only as a problem to be solved, we then rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious.
But as we become more in touch with our own ancient, black, non-european view of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes.
—From Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
I’ve lived in the Northern Hemisphere all my life, so I can’t call myself a well-rounded individual. I’ve only been as far south as the Philippines or Morocco or the Caribbean Islands or Texas, in terms of lines of latitude.
But one thing I sure as heck observe in the Nothern Hemi places I’ve lived is that there’s this impetuous call to the sun in the transition from winter to spring—
As I sit here at an outdoor cafe in La Línea de la Concepción in Southern Spain, I notice it all around me.
My neighbhors and community clamoring for tapas and outdoor tables like a fish on land beckoning for water and return.
It’s in this way, holding a blue ink pen in my hand after placing down my glass of water, that I beckon with ink to mark paper and begin to write.
I had the following four-part dream on Thursday, March 27.
And it’s changed everything.
Part One.
Being Praised…
In Part One of my dream, I saw a band director that I had worked for 20 years ago in 2005, when I was teaching the colorguard at Fossil Ridge High School in Fort Collins, Colorado.
When I saw him, the band director was praising me…
Praising the kids that I was teaching…
Praising the showcase that I had coordinated for the kids to perform in…
And he was saying that he missed the fellow past students of the program of this colorguard.
That was, however, far from the reality…
Being praised was not what actually happened 20 years ago.
In reality, 20 years ago, in the fall semester of the 2005 marching band season, I taught this colorguard as a volunteer…
Even though the band director had alluded verbally to trying to get some cash for me to teach.
And if you’re not aware of the colorguard activity, I was highly skilled in this. I had been trained from a very young age, through my junior high and high school years. I had gone off to march in a drum corps for a couple years. I had marched independently with a group out of Denver and was also teaching the guard at my university that fall. I basically had, what my late mentor called it, “the best blood in the activity.”
At any rate, or at a rate of $0, I committed to being a technician and single-handedly managing and corralling this group of young people.
I did have a situation, if you will, of abuse in my past, in this activity, or within this exchange. I agreed on offering my gift without compensation.
The beauty of the dream is that it showed me the opposite.
It showed that if my subconscious were planting a seed of what my past could have looked like, it could have been a situation with a lot of praise.
So I felt like my subconscious was showing me what these alternatives and healing could really be, if it were to have replaced this situation 20 years ago.
Gulp. Más agua.
The thing about being a pathological writer is no matter what is happening in the world or in life, writing will always be there…
Like breathing in and breathing out. It comes naturally, it’s unavoidable and unequivocal.
It comes as assuredly as spring and sunlight.
Part Two.
Purple.
The server at the cafe sees the book I lay on the counter. It’s blue. It’s heavy.
Largo, he tells me, in his reaction to the book. Pero no aburrido.
Long, but not boring.
I tell him, “de acuerdo.”
The book, which I compared to a brick, physically weighs a decent amount. Crónicas Linenses is its title.
Retrospectiva histórica y escenas de La Línea de la Concepción.
The school I taught at here for two years gifted me this book at the end of my second year.
Approximately a year ago.
The barista tells me that if I encounter words I don’t know, sure he could tell me what they mean. But his true recommendation is that I get a dictionary.
A dictionary.
Like a real one.
Weighted and heavy it would be in my hands. I’d get a workout holding it.
I think to my father’s timeless advice.
“Get a dictionary,” was always his slogan, coming from someone whose first language was not English.
I loved rifling through the pages of physical dictionaries as a girl, as time-consuming as it was.
Ugh, unless I had to look up seven words just to get the one.
My dad held one word as a golden treasure among many to flaunt the proof of his learning, of his language acquisition.
“Pulchritude,” he’d tell me. “Pulchritudinous.”
The glory word of his late 1970s vocabulary.
Do you know what that word means?
“Look it up in the dictionary.”
Abro el libro, I open the book.
Juan Arturo Medina Suffo, the author, was born in La Línea de la Concepción in 1951, it says. The same year as my father.
Audre Lorde published “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” the same year I was born.
In Part Two of the dream, a Black woman handed me a purple envelope, as a gift. It was sealed. The outside had black design and writing in black ink, the markings of which looked similar to a henna-style tattoo.
In my conscious interpretation of the gift, this was a highly auspicious sign, for I associate the color purple with the wealth/abundance/manifestation corner of the bagua of feng shui.
[This would be the corner of Wealth and Prosperity; Abundance, Manifesting, Receiving, and the Wood element. I guide to the Buddhist tantric Black Hat Sect school of feng shui broadly, combining this with the classical approach.]
In fact, my therapist had encouraged me previously to publish a piece on the color purple. Last September, one change in my feng shui led to the manifestation of a new apartment, even when I wasn’t looking for one.
That simple but profound change was a purple couch cover on my love sofa.
I’ll picture it here.
If you’ve not experimented playfully yet with the color purple in your decor, beware. Results may astound you.
While I’d forgotten, my dreams remind.
🔮💜🌷
For women1, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
Audre Lorde
Part Three of the dream was simple enough. Me and my boyfriend kissing.
And Part Four of the dream was the shortest.
It was a drawer. A mysterious drawer.
A full drawer, similar to one you’d maybe see in the kitchen (the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drawer, or some idea of the “junk” drawer). Such little drawers of mine have always been very organized.
This drawer, however, though it wasn’t “messy,” was not.
It was full. And I want to say a different maybe pink envelope floated to the top.
So
Why am I writing to you today about
Praise…
The color purple…
Pulchritude…
…And pathological writing?
It has something to do with the personal essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” by Audre Lorde.
My contemplation herein.
And the idea that I cannot be in Substack amidst an echo chamber of great writers
and not dance and write the way I do—
Not to stand out,
but for once to stop people pleasing
and stop taking mainstream marketing advice
and instead just stand all ten toes as who I am, a human to grace the soul of the world, feeling into my soles, treading lightly.
It’s not something I do luxuriously.
It’s something I can’t afford not doing.
For it costs me my soul.
And so—
I’ll end it here for now.
Bearing my soul.
I ask the next step of the question, which is, what do you think? (And see survey below ;)
May I incorporate my pathological creative writing, nonfiction personal essays and memoirs, into this newsletter?
And if I can’t afford not to be a poet, how often would you like to receive the gift of me saying what I need to say, and being read and listened to, even if it only has to do with life, and even if it might not have any other thing to do with anything…
than what’s mine to give, in a purple envelope, sealed, for you?
Happy National Poetry Month.
April 2025.
Share a poem with someone you love.
Or, as Audre Lorde and
mentioned it, share “...poetry as revelatory distillation of experience…”
A word in your brain contains within it every neural pattern it’s ever connected.
—Gabriel Wyner
Referenced in the essay as women, but can be construed to mean any and everyone of profundity, including trans women, nonbinary and genderqueer individuals, men and all named genders connecting us.
This is beautiful.
Hi Shayna. Do you do teaching / feedback on writing? There's something I've wanted to express since I was seventeen. And since 14, have wanted to at least be able to hold words about it in mind.🧡
I know I've failed at it, again, and badly.💙 It seems to be inevitable with the subject matter.
One thing I find interesting is that in any attempt to speak about it, I IMMEDIATELY lapse into a word salad. Fully consciously. I change the subject and I'm immediately rational in expression again.
I have a feeling you've already done and done 𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭 what my left-brain is insistent on. For years - without much of a gap except when I "broke" in 2012. I'm stubborn. I want to make this work.
But in my descriptive style and capacity? The Susan who you lightly slapped and said "PLEASE NO MORE SCIENCE" 10 years ago is still in full force and effect. Lol. : )