🎨✨Shaking loose, rigidity

I’d spent the day elbow-deep in two very different materials: emails and oil paint.

First canvas I’ve touched in years. And when I finally set the brush down, my shoulders weren’t just sore—they were witnesses. Carriers of every deadline, every anxiety, every time I let someone else’s urgency override my own pace.

Also, I’ve had spine fusion surgery. So yeah, some of that rigidity is literal.

But the rest? That’s the residue of old stories—craggy influences that had been blocking my own damn narrative.

So I did what I do when language fails: I moved.

Let the music take over. Every instrument spoke its own lineage: grief, heartbeat, defiance, returning. And I followed them. Because sometimes the body knows things you’re too busy—or too polite—to say out loud.

Now look: “Kundalini” is rooted in South Asia. Let’s be clear on that. But the core of it—awakening life force through breath, movement, vibration, and the coiled wisdom of the spine—that belongs to a much wider tradition.

African dance traditions knew this. So did our ancestors. The ancestors didn’t call it yoga. They called it survival. They called it praise.

In both worlds, the invitation is the same:
Listen to what your body can’t un-remember.
Move like you’re in conversation with someone who’s long gone but still watching.
Trust the wisdom that lives under your ribs, behind your teeth, in your hips.

The floor groaned under my bare feet, and I let it.
Einar Selvik’s guttural voice howled through the speakers—half Norse prayer, half war cry.
And I shook.

Shook like a bird just freed from someone else’s silence.
Shook like my cells remembered something I hadn’t named yet.

And in that moment, “the body keeps the score” wasn’t a self-help tagline.
It was scripture.

Because here’s the thing no one wants to put on a tote bag:
The world is loud about erasing joy. About muting nuance.
So when you honor your rhythm, you’re already a warrior.

Which brings me……..to the snails!

So, heliciculture isn’t some Instagram hobby. It’s curiosity with a slime trail. Tending to snails isn’t indulgence—it’s ancestral memory in motion. They move slowly, refuse urgency, and still manage to transform everything they touch.

They eat what we discard. They turn it into nourishment. And in return, we give them shelter. Attention. Song. It’s reciprocity— biomimicry. It’s a closed loop with good boundaries.

The paintings I started this week will become product labels for Mama Kuku’s line.
Not as decoration. As reminder. That even our most mundane daily acts; drinking tea, massaging balms, composting a banana peel—can be ceremony.

Because no one heals in isolation. Not the body. Not the soil. Not a people. Everything connected means everything composts together.

So here at MKH, we move slowly. Intentionally. We listen to the land’s whispered urgencies. To our own bodies’ stored grief.
To the call of art that says: You’re still alive enough to try again. To build something better. To be both soft and strategic at the same damn time.

Special thanks to Yoga Farm Ithaca, where I’m a student and occasional weirdo, surrounded by a sangha of deeply generous weirdos. 🙏🏾 You know who you are.