CL Young

✨ TUNING outside - NYC 23 May 2026 | 1 - 3pm Prospect Park This group TUNING session will explore pathways for listening with body and surroundings toward connective exchange. Through gentle somatic, walking, and generative experiments, we’ll work to balance internal and external awareness, asking how deep attention and curiosity can support embodied experience, making practices, and collective & ecological care. commitment: $0 - $30 sign up by May 20 more info + registration link in bio

LA POEM if two hawks&jacaranda blooming our hearts in each other’s vest pockets know love is to be allowed alone spine untangled from between some pliés four palm trees mirror window open i turn my body toward edges of this country send soft orange&blush a cooling blue wait for time to spool forward 04 May 2026 — video 1 by @gracie__whyte

starting to write some into the friction between loving a place & feeling continually destroyed by it. a little at a time / probably will go in other directions / may amass into something clear one day but i am liking the idea of not worrying about that at the moment. link in profile.

a couple of months ago, i wrote some about writing & how i’ve been thinking about it lately. what was once a relationship of full on obsession & love has been fraught for quite a while, since about the middle of graduate school, when i really started to dig into the origins & limitations & harms of langage at around the same time that a best friend, who i fell in love with poems alongside of, chose to stop being in a body. poems/writing sort of saved me in my 20s & when they did not keep jam here, i sent my anger in their direction. today it’s been nine years since that rupture & in addition to feeling jam as an ever bright & sparkling presence a little to the left of my vision (✨jam forever!✨), i feel myself finally returning to writing as a space of possibility & primacy, empty pages an exhilaration again. “writing now” is on substack & linked in my profile — there will be more soon, if you feel like getting notes from me in your inbox. i’ve been trying to share more bits of poems here as well, to be less precious about things so that they actually get made, little snapshots of being-in-time, being-in-place. i think it’s important to keep making records of attention, to keep up that insistence, even when the void feels massive. letters lately have been a similar grace: p.o. box 275 hailey, id 83333 💛

each idaho legislative session proves more brutal than the last & yesterday, on Trans Day of Visibility, the governor here signed into law one of the most extreme anti-trans bills in the country, criminalizing the use of public bathrooms that align with gender identity, & to tack on a little extra, made it illegal for city & county buildings to fly a Pride flag of any variety. at the protest on saturday, i felt a sense of relief for a time — steeled by living in a unicorn rural community whose majority believes in & tries to protect the humanity of all its people, happy to be among a group of mostly gray-haired folk still fighting & hoping. as things wound down, though, my body felt terrible. when i finally got myself to cry, the sense was of having been oversaturated with what pulsed underneath the solidarity of the day: sadness, anger, a feeling of impossibility, of knowing somewhere that the bills would still go through, the many wars would continue on. i know the government is not where safety comes from. wiser, stronger people than me have said time & again that it’s community who takes care of community, not big echoey rooms filled with fearful, politically motivated people. but today i am heartbroken by idaho yet again, trying to square my love of this place & my enduring hope for it with its continually escalating harm. wondering how it’s possible that we can all love the land here so deeply and not each other, who are also that land. trying to find comfort in the fact that if the land could decide, i am certain they would not choose this. the land that tends ever toward equilibrium & care, genderlessness & thriving. i seem not to let myself feel anything until the governor actually signs the bills, even as experience says they will get signed, so today i will keep crying. & i will think about how beautiful trans people are & i will think about my sister who works her ass off every day to help keep trans kids in this state alive. i will think about how working to free myself from the ways idaho taught me gender has been one of the most powerful experiences of agency i’ve ever had. & i will lie on the Earth & ask for help.

BOISE POEM [northendfoothills] kid boomerang stuck in tree next to sister’s house all the shiny trash I’ve found so far is gold gold circle gold rectangle gold sequined frond of golden deskplant Karena moves caterpillar from VA parking space to invasive grasses a box of unused kleenex at center of road where two summers ago nose bled into hands she reminds me of John’s art called NEW BOISE&how we can’t go back anyway so why think of it last week eating an apple in front of co-op I ran toward her carrying unglazed flowerplace made for dream wrote my secrets into a hunk of clay desert drying them to be heated gradually for posterity Tyler sends line about pink poem dumpster&we agree earnestness in equal importance to flashing our bright&brilliant faces into the disco ball’s orbit at whatever next most glamorous funeral crying before each ridge angle height of kestrels or so I forget partly cloudy in Idaho still means SUN SUN SUN SUN &how high I have to walk to get above a city’s lonesomethoughts trail leads to a tree I’ve never touched& language painted riverrock propped in root system seems like the edge of gone friend’s perfect outer foot eggs bore themselves into sagebrush&I face east toward where I sleep better just hills except one house when after drinking as a teenager I woke up for the first time to a ghost seated in dawnlight he vibrated seemed a small yellow bird kept close by to remember spring streets pull body to center of whatever it was I learned to become so pee behind sandstone swallowcliff then into rich neighborhood past party where downstairs to a friend during heroin needle coiled into arm still his face a moving melted window at edge ribbon of north I center body align intrusion with spine send hip back into place a short reality gets confused with future flowering brush smell Owyhees south of things or why not find crossection of hill hollowed open instead put body there a while 8-11 march 2026

taking some weeks away from here to try & actually write / find ways forward p.o. box 275 hailey, id 83333

PORTLAND POEM [saying your poems into the phone while I wait for a bus early morning almost spring 2015] on the walk to same old lighght cast on woodentable we talk through who was born where & how long “the west” “held” them until they were strong enough to make art “blue skies & bright sunshine all along the way” repeats in my head & I try to forget the map of shining hours turned ash still sprinkled at the edge of things “I miss what’s hurt me like I missed ocean before the idea of ocean” I say & it’s true for a moment sparkling ember in air — camellia daphne early forsythia 17 january 2026

end—begin concluded (or began?) this past Sunday & it was a profound experience to share with those who participated. thank you to each of you. I feel it’s a courageous, rebellious, & necessary choice these days to slow down, pay attention, and open to what might be found inside that suspension. & I believe wholly that entering into such spaces with others, even virtually, can be powerful in ways outside of conscious awareness — deep work and magic happening invisibly as each individual undergoes their own processes, made even stronger by the simultaneous attention of others. as ever, I learned so much from this group, their curiosities, & our time together. we worked a lot with letting go of language when allowing feeling/sensation to process through, vocal vibration, trusting blankness as metabolization, & finding personal routes to care/practice. &, for me, it was a beautiful way to return to remote group work after a couple of years away to assess & renew how I approach that particular form. I am very excited to offer more group spaces in the coming year & as I imagine into the shapes those might take, I would love to know what people are needing right now. I put together a few questions that are linked in my profile — if you have participated in group or 1:1 TUNING in the past &/or are interested in future workshops/etc., I would so appreciate your input.

having my hair get long again + relocating to a more rural place has been a little disorienting these past months & I’ve found myself trying to understand what physical expression means to me now, what it means to feel like myself in my body & in clothes. turning 37 just after letting go of a long relationship that supported me deeply in healing many gender wounds/the thought of dating again has also had something to do with it, has caused me to notice visible age in ways I hadn’t before — changes that are mostly welcome but also strange — as well as patterns that linger around ideas of sexuality & desirability. time in seattle seems always to do some magic on me — in lots of ways but especially with regard to the process of gender. the obvious reason for this is that it’s an urban area with tons of examples of people expressing themselves but for me it’s a lot more to do with being near friends who know the weirdo 4-year-old child core of me & also let me wear their clothes (thank you forever @buckyfarmcat & @andrewnedimyer for solitude + outfits). this trip I noticed that I kept wanting to take photos of myself, which, at this moment in my life, when I usually only look in the mirror to put in my contacts & grab whatever clothes make the most sense in the weather, is not a typical inclination for me. every time I felt really good in my body & in what I was wearing, I took a picture. doing this with my eyes closed & while in motion made it feel better, to not watch myself or try to look a certain way. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, but looking back at them, I see who I feel like now, or I see the process I am right now — someone who mostly wants to roll around on the floor in a giant sweatshirt but who also wore a dress last week & didn’t feel terrible — & how miraculous it is to be able to witness that visually, to catch in an image what passes across a face that is always changing. in the first session of end—begin this past sunday I realized that one of the things I still need to let go of is the fear of being witnessed + how to support myself in that is to allow myself to be witnessed without fear. so here I am, whatever I am is.

🌌 end—begin Sundays | 4 - 5:30pm MST December 21, December 28, January 4 This three-part remote workshop will invite participants to work with their present thresholds by developing pathways for clearing, receiving, and moving contemplation into action. Each 90-minute session will offer a gentle TUNING sequence and somatic/creative/processing experiments and considerations for participants to adapt and carry forward, as well as some additional [optional] time for connection and discussion. Please register by December 14. Participants can join the group or work on their own — if you can’t attend in real time, a recording will be available following each meeting. Suggested commitment for this 3-session series is $90; participants are welcome to choose an exchange from $0 - $90 that works for them. Link w/ complete workshop info & registration in profile + a link to more about TUNING / please get in touch [[email protected]] with any questions. 🌌

I’ve been trying out substack lately — today’s is on TUNING + “bipolar disorder” & I made a short TUNING sequence for use in chaos moments. Also feat. this poem from 2021 that @poetry_project published a few years ago + a piece of styrofoam I’m really into. It’s challenging to find language for writing about these things but it feels important to try. If you’re interested in reading / would like to receive future notes, there are some links up in my profile.