Kayla Garnet Rose, Phd

11/04/2026

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

"Hi Chela-Bella, how are you?" My Mom's Swedish accent sounded in my ear as I cradled the phone to my cheek.

"Well, Mom, the good news is, I've fallen in love. The bad news is..." I love my Mom. Both her and my Dad have been the epitome of tolerance and acceptance throughout my eclectic love life, which has ranged from my boyfriend living with us when I was a teenager to my fierce le***an separatist days in my twenties to being with a transgender partner in my thirties.

"Mom, I've fallen in love with the Miele."

Yes, it was true. My Mom had left her Miele vacuum cleaner at my house for six months. It was worth more than my current car. Candy red, hummed like a well tuned Lamborghini, and boy, could that machine clean.

I think I'm going to start a new movement: Appliance Love. We all know how attached some folks are to their cell phones and laptops, let alone the Hitachi, but it is time to start coming out from the utility closet. Some of us have longer, more meaningful relationships with our household friends than with humans.

I see parades going down Pacific Avenue, led by the Precision-Drill Dust-Buster Squad, followed by the Microwave Marching Band, and of course, the Automatic Coffee Pot float will be one of the main attractions. I'll be the Grand Marshall, my Miele beside me as we cruise in a well decorated convertible, throwing replacement filters into the cheering crowd. Everyone will chant, "2, 4, 6, 8... Take your fax machine on a date!"

Next, we'll petition governments for the right to marry. I mean, there's domestic partners and then there are DOMESTIC partners, right? "To have and to hold, from this day forward, until death or the end of the warranty do us part..."

I made the gross mistake of attempting non-monogamy with my Miele. Yes, I admit it - I let my housemate touch her hose, fo**le her attachments, and (gasp) change her bag. Now, I love and trust my housemate to the core, but my whole world shifted when I heard those words, "It just doesn't seem to be picking up like it used to..."

Yesterday I sat out on the back deck and took the Miele apart. Five years of accumulated cat fur, dust, threads, and hair had worked its way in every conceivable crack, corner, and crevice. I used screwdrivers, scissors, exacto knives, and two different kinds of tweezers to lure its secrets out.

At a certain point, my daughter came out onto the deck. She surveyed the vacuum cleaner parts spread methodically over the deck, my deep plum velvet skirt covered in grey lint, the look of glee in my eyes as I snapped open this and screwed shut that. She listened to me prattle on about how much money I had just saved by spending hours of my time doing this.

"Mom," she said in her funny drawl, "You are all the husband you will ever need."

(Excerpt from Laphrodite's Guide to Mindful Menopause or the Adventures of a Baby Crone)

Ramblings on: Mindfulness, holistic healing, hypnotherapy, guided meditations, astrology, reiki, tarot, menopause, Santa Cruz, California, being q***r

10/22/2026

We see our heroine bound and blindfolded, surrounded by eight swords plunged downwards into the earth. It is bleak and gloomy, just like her thoughts. One definition of stress is the need to make a decision; another definition could be indecision. So many thoughts, so many feelings, so much and so many people to consider; how can she remain true to herself and not waver? But it's all in her mind; she could cut the ropes easily.

Albatrosses fly in the sky, symbols of shame, embarrassment, and punishment. Ancient sailors would hang a dead albatross around an offender's neck, symbolic of public humiliation, dirty laundry revealed, secrets betrayed. A rotten time indeed.

Bird cages are embroidered on her robe. Feeling caged by her thoughts, obsessive thinking, plagued by doubts, old insecurities arise. Overthinking, overanalyzing the situation, at times feeling cold and calculating, others at a complete loss of how to participate cohesively in the universal algorithm.

A gray castle is in the background - dreams, goals, or pointless fantasizing as an escape mechanism. A time to crunch the numbers, get down to the nitty-gritty, file those taxes, and pay the dues.

Puddles of grief stretch out to the low tides of despair and doubt. Enough wallowing in self-pity; there's nothing attractive about it. Pick yourself up by the bootstraps and know the only bad decision is no decision.

"Free your mind and the rest will follow." - En Vogue

Ramblings on: Mindfulness, holistic healing, hypnotherapy, guided meditations, astrology, reiki, tarot, menopause, Santa Cruz, California, being q***r

10/20/2026

A Little bird tells me you need to understand that you are still on the right Path. Sometimes the way ahead is Dark only because you carry your light with you as you go. Keep going. You are allowed to be proud of yourself.

Fox

Artwork by Eileen F Sorg

10/17/2026

Guess what, there's a lot to feel crazed by, let alone be angry about, during menopause, as wellas these particular times. So don’t just be a cranklepuss or a curmudgeon, notice what is really infuriating - it might be some old family dynamics or just what is going on in our government right now. Anger is truly a force to embrace, rather than just trying to be nice or deny it. It can explode and harm others, or implode and harm oneself. Anger serves a purpose - it lets us know that something is not right, something needs to change.

Often, behind anger is hurt or fear. Take, for example, if someone is standing on my foot. It hurts. I express pain. They don't do anything about it. Now I express anger - I get louder, or maybe I even shove them off my foot. Then negotiations need to start - does the other person see the harm, take responsibility? Do I just act the victim and not say anything, or respond in a passive-aggressive way, i.e., make them feel guilty without letting them know what happened? Whether it is your spouse or your government who is stepping on your toes (or your rights), now is a good time to be fierce and passionate in expressing yourself and your needs. Channel that anger into something passionate, productive, and hopefully for social good.

It's okay to be crankypants. Just like puberty, just like being pregnant, the hormones they are-a-raging. Not that I was ever pregnant, boy oh boy, have I witnessed some emotional turbulence. In fact, if I ever start a Metallica band, it'd be called Hormonal Flux. I think my next bumper sticker will say, “Hormones: Gotta Love ‘Em.” Or maybe, “Have you done your Kegels today?”

Something as stupid as a Band-Aid commercial puts me in tears. My mind obsesses on worst-case scenarios, and my dreams are plagued with apocalyptic scenes. My body is pumped with not just the mmmm whale noises endorphins but a bunch of testosterone, survivalist notions, my inner cranklepuss activated. Crank crank crank, churn, churn, churn. What has been helpful is to allow each catastrophe to unfold in my imagination, to be mindful to tap into my own inner resourcefulness by writing them out to completion in my journal.

Be Humble. You have never done this before. Puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause - you’ve been through some of these hormonal roller coasters, but nothing like this. Thank the goodness you are stronger than before. Rather than cursing, what follows in the next section is a blessing ritual to transform unhelpful people/situations into helpful ones.

This is a good time to review your past, make peace with it, and let it go. Whether you have prior conflicts or regrets or resentments, it could be as simple as writing a letter, going to therapy, or practicing forgiveness. One can define forgiveness as no longer being affected by a person or incident, not that what happened was okay or ever will be okay. But you can be okay. So forgive parents, siblings, ex-lovers. None of these people and none of the past define you now. If you can’t or don’t want to forgive, you can bless them and move on, using a Helpful Beings Box.

(Excerpt from Laphrodite's Guide to Mindful Menopause or the Adventures of a Baby Crone)

Ramblings on: Mindfulness, holistic healing, hypnotherapy, guided meditations, astrology, reiki, tarot, menopause, Santa Cruz, California, being q***r

10/17/2026

10/17/2026

“Our heathen stories are the truest tales we know. Only in those secret memories where our feeling flesh meets the mystical do we learn our real names. Only in our own tales of death and resurrection do we understand the deep and mythic meanings inherent in our life story. To be heathen means to live on untamed ground, to peel back the dried, scaly, ill-fitting crust of who we were told to be, to claw our way up from the underworld and emerge with pomegranate juice gushing from our tongues and an incendiary desire to be known — to be wholly known — burning beneath our creaturely, mud-caked skin. Sometimes, these are the only stories worth telling.

Many of us orphans of modernity were not given our necessary mythologies, our maps for meeting the world, when we were younger. Many of us were instead given parables of original sin and forbidden fruit, of fallen women and resurrected men. Joseph Campbell writes that “it’s a good thing to hang on to the myth that was put in when you were a child, because it is there whether you want it there or not. What you have to do is translate this myth into its eloquence, not just into the literacy. You have to learn to hear its song.” The medicine arises not from trying to surgically remove these stories from our psyches, as if such a thing were even possible; it comes from letting these stories breathe, from breaking them out of the fire-and-brimstone-bordered prison they were sentenced to die in."

-Danielle Dulsky, The Holy Wild Grimoire: A Heathen Handbook of Magick, Spells, and Verses

Art by Leticia Banegas

10/17/2026

09/30/2026

"Herland" painted by Vivien Ebright Chung

Two female figures enjoy a sensual embrace amidst a euphoric landscape as their dogs look on and a hat blows away. "Herland" is a homage to the le***an culture at the heart of the community in Santa Cruz, California, the artist's hometown. The vividness of the colorfield overlays the confident lines of the figures, creating a spacious explosion of energy and sublime expansiveness.

This painting is a pretty loving and restful work, despite its maximalist visual quality. The dog is showing the innocence and purity of love, sensuality, and the interaction between the two human figures.

Ebright Chung connects to and expresses her q***r identity through artistic practice, something that struck us deeply at Dotted Line. The featured painting is informed by the artist’s roots in Santa Cruz. It is directly inspired by Herland, the feminist book store that once stood in the city. Herland, full name Herland: The WanderGround, was founded by Kayla Garnet Rose, who discovered feminist bookstores as a Wesleyan student. The name was a mashup of two feminist utopian novels: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 "Herland," about an all-female society discovered by three male explorers, and Sally Miller Gearhart's 1978 "The Wanderground," about a community bridging an all-female society and a patriarchal one. Their original motto was "A Feminist Utopia in Your Own Home Town."

Ramblings on: Mindfulness, holistic healing, hypnotherapy, guided meditations, astrology, reiki, tarot, menopause, Santa Cruz, California, being q***r