Maria - 

i wanted to wish you congratulations on this collection - i'm grateful you trusted me to play a little part in stewarding these clothes into the world - thank you ! - i hope you are pleased with the work. i'd like to process some thoughts here about resilience with and to you: i hope you'll accept this message as a gesture of care and conversation.

when i want to enter the depth of a word, i study its history. resilience and its cognates come from the latin resilire - combining the roots re (back) and salir (to jump, leap).

to jump back- to return to some previous condition not in the manner of a step or a slide but rather a leap.

i often associate the resilient with the slow, the enduring, the linear. the jump that gives us this word resilience is not characterized merely by line or slowness - it is also the dynamic arc an object follows when it leaps through space.

so resilience is also an emphatic process, fast as gravity, spirited as a literal exultation.

apply this to the resilient mountain: resilient in its formation, resilient to time, weather, water. the ancient mountain too is leaping:

at every moment the mountain leaps back toward the forces that form it and the forces that break it apart, without which there is no mountain. the alchemy of these balancing forces is what gives contour, then mountain.

the mountain leaving itself at every moment, falling forever away from identity and towards the energy that makes mountain possible and impossible - there's something ecstatic about resilience, in the original sense that ecstasy is to leave the self behind, to be outside of self.

the mountain has no self, the mountain is no mountain.

i'm thinking now about what it has meant to be resilient over the last 13 months and beyond. it has meant, frankly, grave slowness, endurance, patience. at the same time, we have also seen one of the largest popular uprisings in the history of this hell nation. there is a vigorous struggle afoot (as always) to escape, to smash the racist capitalist identity of the united states.

so resilience is a leap of the imagination as well , back to a world before colonization, before hierarchy, before greed , to reconnect with the unbreakable unity , the connection inside-within-throughout all of us that is indestructible - yes , resilience is about energetic return to what makes life possible .

i wish i had asked you earlier about your clothes and the inspiration from your parents' medical professions and attire. i would have liked to bring my full appreciation to your history before stepping (literally) into your work.  i'm so touched to have anything at all to do with that connection and love you hold , to witness and wear some part of it in the garments.

it's a curious coincidence that even before working with you, i had been organizing my recent entrance into this industry as model around the word resilience. to tell you the truth , i battle constant doubt and discomfort navigating this work as a trans person.

i have been trying to build resiliences both to the dysphoria i experience at almost every moment and to the incredible validation that comes with being a trans model.

on one hand, i feel much pain at my own appearance  - on the other , there is such pleasure working in some small part to celebrate trans beauty. i love and question both these feelings; while holding them in perspective i activate my resilience: it springs me toward the world i want for myself and others:

where the conditions that breed dysphoria and capitalist-beauty-worship transform to inflorescence , every person-gender-body-soul a flower among thousands all aflourish, freed nourished and loved - the actualization of self no longer alienated from the actualization of the cluster , collective.

this is a part of my ambition, though im still grasping for the words . when i wear Georgia, i do feel protected, i felt my ongoing work, inside and out, consecrated. the convergence of my resilience with your Resilience -- this gender-oceanic space i felt i could enter with your work - feels auspicious - i'm just so grateful we met . thank you for receiving these words , however they come to you -

every sweet wish

nym