#49: Lori-May Cruz Orillo

"Making art is my greatest self-healing."

Lori-May Cruz Orillo (@a_drifter__) is a writer and gardener living in New York.

At a glance…

Location: Brooklyn

Big 3: Sagittarius/Gemini/Scorpio

Health Gossip with Lori-May Cruz Orillo
Responses logged March 2025

What does health, or ‘being healthy,’ mean to you?

I can’t say I am the healthiest person. It’s hard for me to define true “health” while humanity seems so ill. I believe our mental, spiritual, and physical well-being depends on the resilience of our planet. “To have health is to have hope, and who has hope has everything.” We are observing a dreadful time, and I believe it means we’re unhealthy. I can’t be immune to what humanity suffers, so I’m devoted to observing it in my own life. It can feel hopeless.

I have a “low idling speed.” I’m alert when I need to be, though I sleep easily. When I get home, I nap, forget strange things that happen at work, reset, .. And then it’s when the city sleeps I love to be awake. There are much fewer variables in the night, and I like to read, write, dance, watch films, make work with little disruption. Sometimes I leave, haunt a music show, a dance party, meet a friend ... can’t be every night, but I welcome when it does.

Recently I wrote that my favorite state of being was one “susceptible to fear and enchantment.” Sometimes this feeling requires more or less sleep to bring upon. I fast intuitively to clear the mind some days. Especially if I am waiting for a sign or an answer to some thought, or just locked into some project.

I believe my handwriting is a direct litmus of my whole equanimity. I have written and drawn so much all my life, so I have a distinct if vulnerable “hand” in my line, seismographic, I know the state I’m in by my penmanship and what I am writing (and my amateur graphology). My hand’s steadiness, the style of it, the movement of my thoughts, is always expressive of the physical, spiritual, and mental state I am in.

It gets pretty rough when I’m down bad. It can look like asemic writing, in a sad way. I have little control of it, but I also believe it to be a way I communicate with myself, like an inner voice wavering — it should not be repressed. It is for this reason I have elected unlined paper for a long time. Dance is like this too; a discipline but also somewhat ungovernable. I feel healthiest when I am at ease, have freedom of movement, flexibility, content with my body . . . “Can I dance?”

To consider health I am imagining myself in some peril: Can I carry my own weight (physically, emotionally, spiritually)? Can I run away from danger? Through rain? Can I scale this fence, can I defend myself if I had to? Am I alert, lucid? Am I okay alone? I have felt my vitality walking the edge of a campsite in the dark. I can hear my thoughts and feel my creatureliness.