pleasure | Sondra Writer

Aug 26, 202312 min read

Widen the Net of the Flesh

Note: This is an essay originally sent to subscribers on my mailing list, where I send essays every 1-2 months. If you would like to...

Aug 7, 20237 min read

On bodies, souls, and indigenous ontologies

Note: this is not a full essay, but a segment taken from a longer piece sent to subscribers. If you want to receive essays in your inbox...

Jun 28, 202314 min read

Great are the Multitudes

Note: This is an essay originally sent to subscribers on my mailing list, where I send essays every 1-2 months. If you would like to...

Jan 14, 202312 min read

Nowhere But Here

There is no ideal life. There is only the life that you have chosen freely. Sometimes, a line arrives fully formed in my life, like a...

Oct 14, 20227 min read

What is a god?

Note: This post consists of a few excerpts from Ousia, a book that I am currently writing. These sections are not finished, but I felt...

Oct 3, 20223 min read

How Many Ways to Pray (whether or not you believe in God)

Let us begin with a clarification: the existence of God is beside the point. The fact that we can question God's existence as external...

Sep 5, 20222 min read

Art is useless...unless it makes you an artist

I have long believed that my work is useless. Useless unless its beauty crawls beneath your own sight, hatching new seeds of seeing....

Sep 4, 20228 min read

The Weight of Material Things

Sun clutters the floor. Still, no words. My objects have not yet bent their bodies to the shape of this new space. Opened boxes, my...

Jul 23, 202217 min read

Bodies & Lost Localities

The hand of summer has felled interior wanderings. The whoosh of cars and the buzz of lawnmowers sound thickly through a viscous heat....

Jul 17, 20223 min read

The Ghost of the Female Body

(This is an excerpt from my memoir, The Sea Once Swallowed Me). The earth wakes stark with white light, the air tastes of iron. As I...

Jun 17, 202210 min read

Time is a Hiding Place

Evening, the sun still un-setted. Light shatters through the outside trees, breaking through windows and landing on my typing hands....

Apr 22, 20221 min read

A Forgotten Belonging

There is a profound alienation at the heart of the modern self: we move through seas of strangers, we feel trapped between the cramped...

Mar 22, 202218 min read

In Praise of Shadows (On the Precipice of Light)

Note: This essay was originally written for my email subscribers. If you struggle (as I do) with reading very long essays on the...

Feb 4, 20224 min read

The Weight of Selfhood

"Spacetime is the individuation of entities." —Schopenhauer Blinking into self-consciousness, you are birthed into a terrible weight. You...

Jan 27, 20224 min read

Language, Being, and the Sea Beneath

A truth is found in fragments, scattered throughout all disciplines. Each thinker employs a distinct language, but the essence is the...

Dec 24, 20213 min read

Excerpts from Wakings: Performance Poems to Awaken the Body and Transform the Earth

These are early excerpts from a book that's been gestating for about three years now. If you'd like to receive more early excerpts...

Nov 25, 20214 min read

Bake a Loaf of Bread, Craft a New Mythology

Note: This is an excerpt from my next book, Ousia: Performance Poems for New World-ing. There are symbols in the original book that...

Nov 15, 20215 min read

Love Widens The Horizon of Possibility

Dear Readers, What’s distracting her? I’m not sure; my eyes are fixed on her child. He is maybe a year old, wearing only a diaper—with no...

Oct 25, 20216 min read

The Iconic Nature of Love

Dear Readers, From cold air and brightly-colored trees to a perfect 70 something degrees and stunning sunsets: we are back in Arizona to...

Oct 24, 20214 min read

Love De-objectifies

(This and the next three posts are from a three-part email series about the workings of love. I rarely post emails to my website, but if...

Dec 26, 20207 min read

Netflix's "Cuties" Is The Film We Deserve

"My aesthetic perspective is to hold a mirror in front of the world so that we as adults are able to see what we have created." -Maïmouna...

Apr 2, 20205 min read

Day 100

This morning when I opened the blinds, the sun was of a different quality. This is summer sun, I thought, or at least the sun of middle...

Mar 29, 20202 min read

Day 99

Once upon a time, there was a garden. And a woman and a man walked in the cool of noon and were unafraid. Things changed. We began to...

Mar 28, 20202 min read

Day 98

We are too big in our brains, too little in our bodies. This is what I tell myself, at least, when Georg takes Sophie on a hike so I can...

Mar 26, 20202 min read

Day 97

Our mythology sinks deep. It is whispered through us since birth, the axioms of our doctrine. "Blessed are the wealthy," they whisper,...

Mar 25, 20202 min read

Day 96

It is so much easier to write about the frustration than the joy. I have expressed dissatisfaction with staying home all day (my life for...

Mar 24, 20203 min read

Day 95

It seems unreasonable to claim that any of us could be responsible for the actions of a stranger. But I am beginning to believe that...

Mar 22, 20202 min read

Day 94

It appears that our neighbor has committed suicide. It appears that my love wasn't enough to save him. Or rather, it appears that I...

Mar 21, 20202 min read

Day 93

I speak from hypocrisy, as we all must speak. Georg is listless and depressed at the end of each day working from home. Last night, he...

Mar 21, 20203 min read

Day 92

Here are detailed instructions from an ancient letter, on how to turn copper into gold: Step 1: Take 9 chicken eggs Step 2: Place them in...

Mar 18, 20202 min read

Day 91

The cool silence of a morning with the blinds pulled shut. Hearing the rain on the windows behind, while Sophie breastfeeds on the couch....

Mar 18, 20202 min read

Day 90

Over the weekend we ate pandemic pizza, quarantine cookies. If it's alliteration, it feels justified. But today is Tuesday, the beginning...

Mar 16, 20201 min read

Day 89

People in desperation will always welcome tragedy with a strange intermingling of relief. I can't quite explain it, but I think it has...

Mar 12, 20202 min read

Day 88

Today a friend called me, then texted. I was away from my phone, chasing Sophie through the sun-lit grass while other moms chatted and...

Mar 11, 20202 min read

Day 87

Morality is taking personal responsibility for the wrongness of all things. This seems impossible. This requires caring, and we think we...

Mar 11, 20202 min read

Day 86

I had the strangest thought today while taking out the trash. It was in answer to a question which isn't so strange during this season....

Mar 10, 20201 min read

Day 85

What I didn't mention is that we spent all weekend looking to buy a condo. Utah is expensive, especially near Salt Lake, which is where...

Mar 9, 20202 min read

Day 84

As we age, we become reconciled to the earth. No. But that’s the idea anyway. Reconciliation. It’s why we breathe to begin with, you...

Mar 6, 20202 min read

Day 83

The light came through the glass door this evening while I drank peppermint tea. Sophie tried begging for cartoons, but I insisted on...

Mar 4, 20201 min read

Day 81

To track the living, dying light. This is essential to me. And I'm not sure what it means (I'm not sure what anything important means). I...

Mar 3, 20201 min read

Day 80

You can only love someone whom you do not need. How is this possible? We must fill the crater-sized hole inside us with something other...

Mar 2, 20202 min read

Day 79

We aren't taking Sophie (to Costa Rica). She is almost two years old, but it still feels like abandonment. When I booked the flights, I...

Feb 26, 20202 min read

Day 78

I am trying to hide from myself. That's my excuse. Good days and bad days this winter; lately, the days have been bad. I have no desire...

Feb 20, 20201 min read

Day 77

The broiled red peppers inside, the breaking light outside. Cold. And God in everything: the feeling of something sacred stalking me. The...

Feb 19, 20202 min read

Day 76

Joan Miro: I can't stop thinking about him, the abstract artist who aimed to reveal the inner stillness of things. "[Stillness] strikes...

Feb 18, 20202 min read

Day 75

Precious people have been blown open like sacks, their brains and organs unseaming. The image hit me in the stomach as I walked past my...

Feb 18, 20202 min read

Day 74

"I sing the body electric." These are the words of Walt Whitman, the poet to whom the body was not just bound by bones and sinews. “And...

Feb 4, 20202 min read

Day 73

I was washing dishes, preparing my world for the sunrise. Everything becomes symbolic in winter, you see, as we plunge into the inner...

Jan 31, 20201 min read

Day 72

Death is such a passing thing. It comes and goes like a cold, leaving germs of life in its wake. Something always remains. If not me, at...

Jan 30, 20202 min read

Day 71

I see the light through the glass porch door as I drink lemon water and eat a thin slice of bread. I am "fasting" today, and this is my...

Jul 52 min read

Ep. 17: The Case Against Self-Discipline

Listen to this episode on Spotify here, or Apple Podcasts here. Rather than summarizing the key points of the podcast episode, I decided...