After publishing 'Flower of Life' I received some commentary on my choice for the word vagina rather than the technically correct term vulva, I wrote a short essay and poem in response.

Ingredients of Language

To truly know an ingredient, you must first taste it raw — unadorned, unmediated. Only in that purity can you begin to understand what seasoning will honor it, what will draw out its hidden layers and allow it to fully speak.

When we stop at the surface of a word, we taste only the seasoning. The name, the category, the agreed-upon meaning. The ingredient itself — the living, breathing essence beneath remains untouched, unsavored. We mistake the label for the thing.

But when word and vibration find each other, when the name carries the weight and texture of what it holds, something shifts. They become symphonic. They penetrate rather than merely describe. And what once could only be spoken can now be inhabited. We no longer just say it. We become it.

Essence of Language

Somewhere along the way, we handed our lives over to language. We let it hold our reality for us, sort it, file it away. Now the mind names things before we have even had the chance to feel them — before wonder has time to rise, before the body can respond. The rain is just rain. The wind is just wind. We think we know these things because we can name them. But knowing a name and knowing a thing are very different forms of intimacy.

There was a time — in childhood, perhaps, or in certain rare moments of stillness — when a single gust of wind was enough to stop us. When a drop of rain on the skin was a small miracle. Language, in its eagerness to make sense of the world, has quietly swallowed that enchantment.

A word is only the title of a song. It gestures toward a melody you have yet to hear, offers a shape without the sound. Until you experience it, until it moves through you — you can only intuit its depth. Poetry is what happens when language refuses to stay within its own borders, when words stretch past their edges and open into something felt rather than understood. They become doorways to an inner truth that ordinary speech can barely touch.

And yet, if a word cannot exist without a voice to carry it, without a hand to write it into being, what, exactly, is it? Does it belong to us, or do we belong to it?

Layers of Language

Language is a living thing. It breathes, it shifts, it asks to be tended and questioned and sometimes remade. For practical purposes, naming is necessary but we should never forget that names are agreements, not absolutes. They can be renegotiated. They should be, when they no longer serve us.

The names we have given our bodies were not chosen with care or reverence. They were inherited, clinical, often reductive — words that place the most sacred and mysterious parts of us into categories that cannot hold their full meaning. If we wish to speak of our bodies, our origins, our nature, we need language that rises to meet the beauty and mystery of what we actually are.

For Flowers of Life, we chose the word vagina — not because it is the most precise term, but because it is the most universally understood. It was a bridge: a way to meet people where they are, to create a shared entry point before moving into something wider and deeper. The project itself reaches far beyond any single word. It uses the language of art to reveal what language alone cannot carry — the many layers, the quiet power, the living reality of her.

Vulva. Yoni. Flower of Life. Each word opens a different door and holds a different frequency. 

the curves of your words can tell stories beyond you
they can also convey nothing at all

yet here I am 
writing you
you live through me
and I live through you

my eyes use you to make sense of what I see
you have grown inseparable from the idea

language, what do you mean?
are you the truth of all things?
or just the title of a song?

as the mast of my memory
the translator of my heart
the narrative of my dreams
you have painted a world of words for me
you have given my tongue sounds of knowledge  
but without you,
would I bow with gestures of universal knowing?

language, don’t just teach me how to speak
teach me how to understand the voice of the wind and the trees