If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.

If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.

If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.

If we break down the year into microseasons specific to our place and experience, what is February? I heard a friend say “it’s seed catalog time.” I loved that. Mid-winter isn’t for planting the seeds; it’s time for looking at them in shiny catalogs and having big dreams. So often, even if we do set aside the time for daydreaming (which who does?), we quickly poo-poo our own dreams with rationalizations about money, time, our lack of expertise, etc.

In this episode, I talk about how I'm itching to go deeper as an antidote to 2024, the idea of heart-mind, and the practices I'm hoping to go deep with this year.

If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.

I’m not the first one (by a long shot) to notice how the self-care industry has taken a good idea - caring for ourselves - and commodified it. I’m mostly certain that there isn’t some council of old white men sitting around manipulating things so that capitalism keeps churning, but it does feel like, as soon as we more collectively start calling out the abuses of the system, that all of the sudden this new industry of self-care starts booming. Suffering from burnout? It certainly isn’t the lack of social safety net, lack of childcare funding, lack of healthcare, continually rising living expenses, your employer’s lack of family leave or paid time off policies; it must be because you personally aren’t taking enough bubble baths or doing enough yoga. 

If I did think there was a council of old white men orchestrating things, they would have played this one perfectly: Get people obsessed with their own self-care practices, so that they don’t have time to think about systemic racism, sexism, workaholism, astronomical CEO pay, the destruction of the planet led largely by a handful of corporations. Instead of directing our burnout, anger, and frustration with the systems, we blame ourselves for not sticking to a workout routine or not meditating enough. 

I tried a little experiment last week. I don’t work my day job on Thursdays, so I tried to do all of the things the wellness bros, lifehackers, and self-care pushers tell you to do: get plenty of the right kind of sleep, light first thing, move, lift heavy stuff, get lots of steps, meditate, eat enough protein, pursue your purpose, have a gratitude practice, etc. Here’s how my day went, roughly:

Huberman doesn’t have a partner or kids, so I’m assuming he can pop right out of bed and do these things he’s telling the rest of us to do everyday. But it took me nearly four hours of “self-care” to even cross off a few of the things the wellness bros are telling us to do everyday! There is zero possibility that I could do even half of these things on a normal work day, and I’m someone with a flexible job and in an equitable partnership.

According to plenty of research, chronic stress is the leading cause of death in the US. Workplace stress alone accounts for 120,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. We aren’t chronically stressed because we aren’t doing enough self-care; we are chronically stressed because the systems we’re living under don’t work for most of us. And instead of waking up to that fact, we’re stuck guiltily navel gazing about our quality of sleep or how we’re not getting enough sunlight in the morning. I count myself in this group for the record. The most marginalized among us aren’t navel gazing; they are suffering chronically from the stressors of these systems that keep them constantly hustling, constantly playing catch-up, constantly worrying.   

It reminds me of the narrative around climate change. Somehow, the fossil fuel industry has us individuals trying to tackle climate change when in reality only 100 fossil fuel corporations are responsible for over 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions since we started keeping track of human-caused climate change. Similarly, instead of coming together collectively to address the systemic injustices causing our communal wide epidemics of chronic stress, burnout, anxiety, and depression, we find ourselves spending our days trying to lifehack our way out of these systems problems. This cycle keeps corporations off the hook, billionaires billionaire-ing, and government in the pockets of the corporations. 

That is what is so promising about recent strikes. According to the Cornell ILR School of Labor Action, more than 200 strikes have occurred across the U.S. so far in 2023. Collective action works and is more popular than it’s been in a few generations. The writers’ strike ended last week with big victories for the writers. Also last week, President Biden went to Michigan to join the UAW picket line. During the UK’s “winter of discontent” of 1978, British journalist Andy McSmith wrote that it was “irrational not to strike, ” and I think the same is true today when you look at the pace of CEO pay to worker pay since the 1970s. 

Not all of us are in jobs where collective action at the workplace makes sense, and it isn’t that I think caring for ourselves is a bad idea by any stretch. But I wish we would see clearly how the way self-care is sold to us as one more thing we have to add to our never-ending to-do lists in order to feel better only exacerbates the problem and keeps us mired in our own exhaustion, guilt, and self-absorption.

Psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin, author of Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included), calls this the “Goopification of self-care” in this excellent conversation with Tressie McMillan. Dr. Lakshmin suggests that we redefine self-care from the “Goopy” version we’ve been sold into something more holistic, values-based, and useful to our healing. To do so, she lays out the following framework:

My thesis is that instead of thinking of self-care as taking 15 minutes out of your day to meditate or go for a walk that we need to be thinking about self-care as something that is threaded through every single decision you make in your life — the small decisions and the big decisions. So it’s not a task to check off of your list. It’s actually something to embody…

And when you deconstruct these choices, the framework that I’m suggesting is that there’s these four pillars we can talk about — boundaries, compassion, values, power — when you deconstruct that, and you decide to make choices in your life based on your own values — not society’s values, not culture’s values — that that’s actually deeply subversive.

In their conversation, McMillan and Dr. Lakshmin go on to discuss the pillars in more detail, but I think the important consideration is that we learn to make choices based on our own values. Part of the work of growing up is figuring out what your values are, as opposed to the values imposed on you by culture, religion, your family of origin. This is hard work, and, when done well, requires frequent revisiting based on our season of life. Dr. Lakshmin rightly points out that this work is also deeply subversive to the systems of power because you can’t control people who truly know their own values, making this seemingly individual work more collective than it seems at first glance.

I just started reading Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma--And Our World by Thomas Hübl, and in it, he references Fares Boustanji, who uses birds of prey to teach leadership skills, who says “to get in contact with the other, you have to get in contact with yourself.” If Boustanji’s proposition is true that what we do to connect with ourselves helps us better to connect to others - both the human and more-than-human world - then the truer kind of self-care that Dr. Lakshmin is talking about goes hand-in-hand with the collective action our times are hungry for.

She concludes the conversation acknowledging that our ideas of self-care and community care should be more of “a dance, where you’re constantly moving back and forth…as we’re always going back and forth between the individual and the social. And the two are always in this dance, where both are true. I think both are true — that the government is responsible for enacting top-down solutions. And individuals do have agency to make choices in their lives that can protect them and buffer them and also spur potential change.”

Like so many things, the response isn’t either/or, but both/and. We need a new kind of self-care (that probably looks more like the idea’s founders), and we need that individual healing that comes from true self-care to feed our collective healing.

Thanks for subscribing to sara by the season. If you liked this post, I’d be so grateful if you shared it. Sharing helps keep me writing!

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, as well as other things related to this newsletter’s topic that maybe didn’t fit into the actual newsletter, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

* Beauty culture has become synonymous with “Goopy” self-care. Jessica Defino is my go-to source on all things beauty culture, and I really loved her interview with Fariha Róisín (author of Who Is Wellness For? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind, which I highly recommend) that overlaps with the self-care conversation. In the interview when she’s talking about the navel-gazing variety of self-care, she says, “I think these are dark times because so many of us are choosing disassociation over true connection with oneself and others,” and I think she is spot-on about another part of the dynamic around the explosion of the “Goopy” self-care industry.

* I first heard about Dr. Lakshmin via AHP, and this interview is an excellent continuation of this conversation. I especially loved this bit that plays off her idea of the dance above:

When you make choices differently, as one individual, you impact the systems that surround you — whether that’s your family system, your school, or your work-place. The debate about whether change has to first happen externally or internally is the wrong conversation. Both always happen together. To transform our outside world, a critical mass of us must transform our internal worlds. I don’t know of any leader — and by leader, I mean at the family level, workplace level, or social level — who came to that position without going through a powerful internal shift first. Internal versus external is a false dichotomy in my mind.

* Some of my favorite real self-care practices are: yin yoga, journaling, taking a cool off walk when I’m mad, prioritizing rest, and letting myself off the hook. What are yours?

Here’s to rethinking self-care this season,

Sara

I was listening to Dr. Vandana Shiva on the For the Wild podcast a few weeks ago, and she said, “So part of what we have to transcend is the commodification of every aspect of our lives.” I stopped listening in the middle of the gym and wrote down the following in my notes app: We have to fight the commodification of every effing aspect of our lives.

I laughed when I went back to check the episode transcript at the difference between her actual words and my interpretation of them. You can tell that I’m a little worked up about said commodification, huh? 

I’ve wrestled plenty here with social media over the years, and I don’t really want to rehash those old arguments. But Shiva’s words stopped me in my tracks because they are so true. The culture tells us that everything can be monetized - and because it can be monetized, it should be. If you’re good at putting on makeup, why not video yourself and use your expertise to get a commission off of the makeup products? Going through sorority rush? Why not share your fashion sense and maybe get a kickback from your favorite boutique? Have a big garden or like to cook? Why not make fancy videos and sell classes to people who want to learn how to garden or cook or sew or fill-in-the-blank? Read a lot of books? You should be on BookTok sharing your reviews in exchange for free copies. The commodification of FREAKING everything has even taken away our hobbies! The things we used to do for fun to escape the monotony and perfectionism of our jobs is now an opportunity for a side hustle, and we’re really missing out if we’re not taking advantage of that side income potential (especially in today’s economy, says the devil on my shoulder).  

I have written a book about leaning into nature’s wisdom and rhythms, but every time I shop it to publishers and agents, I get feedback that my platform isn’t big enough (often among other more pointed critiques). The way I grow my platform is by making my writing a commodity. You feed the social media algorithms by making more Reels for Instagram, pithy quotes for Twitter or Threads or Notes, setting your content to whatever song is trending on TikTok this week for maximum views. I don’t even know what I’m talking about because I get so exhausted anytime I even attempt to read any of this type of advice that I give up before I get too far into it. The most absurd part about all of this advice is that you’re not supposed to just make your art (in my case, writing) a commodity; you’re always encouraged to share more of yourself in these spaces, to be more “relatable.” So what they are really recommending is that you make your life the commodity. 

We typically see the word “commodities” when someone is talking about the economy. According to Wikipedia, in economic terms, “a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.” Economists like commodities because they are standardized, making them easy to compare no matter who is producing them. Of commodity-type products, Karl Marx famously said, "From the taste of wheat, it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist." Commodities are things like wheat, corn, gold, and oil. It doesn’t matter if Shell or BP extracts and refines your oil, both end products will run your car (and hasten the climate catastrophe) regardless.

It should go without saying that art is about as far from a commodity as one can get. Art’s value is subjective. A poem can have tremendous value to me and not make any sense to you. A song can bring you to tears and annoy me. A painting could garner millions at auction and leave me indifferent. Art’s subjectivity is part of what makes it so beautiful and necessary. In a sea of commodities, we hunger for the authentic and particular. 

In other words, we don’t want to turn the creative aspects of our lives into commodities, and we certainly don’t want to commodify our actual lives. I think the consequences of doing so are playing out in front of us in real time: multiple mental health crises, loneliness epidemic, mass shootings every day, a planet on fire driven primarily by our consumption. 

Sometimes when I’m in a boring meeting, I do this thing where I write out my “ideal day.” I don’t know why I started doing this, but I probably have hundreds of pieces of paper (mostly recycled at this point) with my ideal day broken into blocks of time. I think I keep doing this thinking that someday I’ll arrive at not so much an ideal day as an optimized one.

When I heard Shiva say (to my ears) that we have to fight the commodification of every effing aspect of our lives, I thought of my scraps of paper with my days laid out so perfectly on them. I’m habitually trying to commodify my life, so that my life looks like it “should.” I have to maximize every fifteen-minute block of my existence because, if not, I’m somehow wasting it. 

But you know what’s not on my “ideal day” scraps of paper? Time for snuggling with our oldest when he asks me to, (and nearly every time lately, I say yes and wonder if this will be the last time he’ll ask). Time to ease into the day because I’ve actually gotten up when the alarm went off seven times in my entire life, so not sure who this version of Sara is that is magically going to pop up at 6:30am for her meditation practice suddenly after nearly 40 years of pressing snooze. On my optimized day, there is no margin for someone to come home cranky and tired after work and/or school, to help Maeve study for her test because she likes it better when I quiz her, for watching the sunset, for snuggling on the couch for just one more episode, for sex, for a few more pages in my book before bed.

There is this ideal out there that Shiva is getting at, in which we’re trying to maximize every aspect of our lives. If we have a hobby, we think it needs to be turned into a side hustle. If we have a meditation or prayer practice, we think it needs to be longer or better in some way. If we go to the gym regularly, we think we should go more frequently or be more efficient. If we’re parents, there are a million things we think we should be doing that we’re not - or things we are doing that we think we shouldn’t. We’re judging ourselves constantly about how we could be better, faster, more successful, more productive, and we’re missing out on all of the life right here, right now. 

In response to the commodification of every aspect of our lives, Shiva goes on to say:

Let us shift our minds to regenerating the currencies that make our life work, and the currencies that come from nature as the original source. These are the currencies of food currencies, of water currencies, of bread, currencies of love, relationship, currencies of being cared for, and the capacity to care. Now, once you do that, then instead of looking towards the market, or the financial sources, you start to turn to nature and to each other to say, what is it that we can do with this amazing body…And as bodily beings, we have needs of food, water, air, but as bodily beings, we have creativity of the most amazing kind, I think we'll have to reclaim our capacity to work physically. And for that we have to turn to Indigenous people, because they are the people who created abundance and wealth before the fossil fuel age before the age of capitalism.

I would ask it differently: What are the elements of living that not just make your life work, but help you to feel present to it? What are the pieces of your life that feel the most expansive, that generate the most joy, that make you feel most like yourself?

In this beautiful conversation, Rainn Wilson and Kelly Corrigan toy with the idea of creating a different kind of game of Life (the board game). In the original game, basically, the person with the most toys and accolades at the end, wins. Wilson wonders what might happen instead if we redesigned the game of Life, so that the person who wins is the person who has gained the most spiritual qualities - he asks if the criteria for winning might be, “has life made you more wise, more kind, more compassionate, or has life stripped those [qualities] out of your heart?” 

When we’re worried about maximizing or optimizing our work, our health, our influence, our lives, there isn’t much room for those things that not only Wilson’s alternative game of Life rewards, but that all of our great wisdom traditions talk about as the highest path. Because we’re commodifying every freaking aspect of our lives, we’re leaving ourselves little room for the actual deep and meaningful stuff that makes life worth living.

Thanks for subscribing to sara by the season. If you liked this post, I’d be so grateful if you shared it. Sharing helps keep me writing!

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, as well as other things related to this newsletter’s topic that maybe didn’t fit into the actual newsletter, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

* I don’t know of a better way to get out of the optimization mindset than getting outside. A few years ago, I did a September nature challenge, where I challenged myself to get outside more, and I wrote up a post with tricks and tips that helped me to get out more.

* Another aspect of the commodification of everything that I didn’t really get into above is how it creates SO MANY choices for us as consumers too and how exhausting all of the choices become. Anne Helen discusses some of the pitfalls that are especially relatable to us millennials and Gen Xers and James Richardson talks about it a bit more broadly here, which includes two tables comparing our choices in 1920 to 1970 that I can’t stop thinking about.

* With the fall equinox approaching, it might be time for some grounding to settle and prepare so that we can more fully embrace the more inward seasons of fall and winter to come.

* The commodification of everything has become as American as apple pie, which means it’s the water we’re swimming in, which means you have to find ways to see the water for what it is. You need to find practices that work for you to experience what it’s like to be a human being instead of a human doing, as Richard Rohr says. My favorites are yin yoga, free journaling, cloud gazing, walking the dog, and sitting, which is what I call my meditation practice instead of calling it a meditation practice because then it tells my brain that there is nothing to do or achieve, but just to sit. What are yours?

Cheers to finding some ways to not maximize or optimize or commodify in the week ahead!

Sara

I keep finding myself sucked into reporting on the “loneliness epidemic.” This epidemic started before Covid; a 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22 percent of all adults — almost 60 million Americans — said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated. But the Covid pandemic seems to have exacerbated the problem, so much so that Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, put out a warning in May 2023 equating our lack of connection with smoking 15 cigarettes a day, among other dire health outcomes. 

The Surgeon General’s report on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation is 82 pages long (!) with a solid twenty of those pages devoted to a national strategy informing us what we and other stakeholders can do to foster connection - plus a very fancy website with interactive videos and printables. In other words, this is a big deal to our national health and well-being according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It isn’t just the US though - rates of perceived loneliness seem to be rising around the world.  

Over the last few years, probably because I’m interested in this whole conversation so it’s likely that I bring it up often, I find myself talking to friends around my age about friendship. Most of my friends say that they wish they had more friends and stronger connections. We wish we had more time for our relationships, and we feel like there are people “out there” somewhere enjoying more and better connections than we do. 

I have a few theories about the causes of this loneliness epidemic that I haven’t heard much about that I’d like to delve into here.

Maybe it’s an expectations problem.

Years ago, Grant’s therapist assigned him some Brené Brown CDs to listen to. This was before Brené’s TED Talk when no one we knew had ever heard of her, and we loved her Texas twang and how she cussed just the right amount. While I don’t remember a ton of practical take-aways from the hours of talks we listened to together, I know that it sunk into our psyches in ways we’ll probably never know. There is one bit of wisdom that she shared that I have since referenced too many times to count: 

Our stories are not meant for everyone. Hearing them is a privilege, and we should always ask ourselves this before we share: ‘Who has earned the right to hear my story?’ If we have one or two people in our lives who can sit with us and hold space for our shame stories, and love us for our strengths and struggles, we are incredibly lucky. If we have a friend, or small group of friends, or family who embraces our imperfections, vulnerabilities, and power, and fills us with a sense of belonging, we are incredibly lucky.

Brené, who remember, gets paid to study shame and connection, says that we’re lucky if we have one or two people in our lives who we trust with our deepest stuff. When I share this tidbit with our friends in these conversations we’ve been having, they all express so much relief. If Brené Brown says we’re lucky if we have one or two of those types of connections - and most of us would say that there are at least one or two people in our lives that embrace our whole selves - it felt like we were ok. We didn’t have to worry so much about our relationships. Instead, maybe we could put that worrying time and energy into deepening our existing relationships.

Maybe it’s a social media problem (but not in the way you’re thinking).

Much of this reporting I’ve been reading and listening to has tied the loneliness epidemic to social media, in the sense that people are spending too much time on social media and don’t have time for real, in person connection, which is making them lonely. Or that social media engenders FOMO, which leads to loneliness. You weren’t lonely until you saw ten of your friends hanging out together without you. I think both of these characteristics of social media certainly contribute to the problem.

But I wonder if it’s not so much social media itself, as it is that social media puts people’s highlight reels in front of our faces all day long, so that it appears that everyone is having more and deeper connections than it feels like I’m having. The source of our dis-ease is shoulding ourselves into thinking that we need to have more and better friends instead of having gratitude for the connections we already have. It is the comparison baked into social media that then creates a sense of lack in ourselves instead of us noticing a lack on our own and maybe deciding to join a book club or a hiking group to find more connection.

Obviously personality and age comes into play here. I had more friends when I was in school and just out of college because I had less responsibilities, but also because the way my life was structured during those years fostered more ease in connecting. I spent so much of the day with my friends when I was in school and college. In college and after college, I lived with or very near my closest friends, eliminating so many of the barriers to hanging out that I face these days: work schedule, kids’ schedules, childcare depending on the kids’ ages, distance, exhaustion. In fact, I don’t ever “hang out” with friends anymore - time with friends has to be scheduled, oftentimes weeks in advance. We might hang out once we get to our destination, but it isn’t really anything like the random, fun and sometimes boring, hanging out that I used to do in a friend’s dorm room. 

We tend to compare ourselves to past versions of ourselves, so if we have a couple of close friends now, but had a handful of close friends 20 years ago, we judge ourselves for it instead of acknowledging that our lives are completely different than they were 20 years ago. Or we judge ourselves instead of getting honest with ourselves about whether or not our connections are actually lacking or if we’re holding ourselves to some ideal we see on the internet or that we experienced during a previous season of our lives.

Maybe it’s a social media problem (but not in that way either).

To keep piling on social media (everybody is doing it), I also wonder if there is a component of the “right” kind of social activities that make for good social media posts. To go back to hanging out in my dorm room, even if I had social media back then, not much of our hanging out would have made compelling social media content. These days, my favorite activity is hanging out with Grant on our porch - sometimes with the kids, sometimes with friends who we invited over. It’s fun, relaxing, basically free, and easy - but I’m not posting it on social media because it really is only fun and exciting to me.

In this great conversation with Ezra Klein and Sheila Liming, author of the new book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, Liming defines hanging out as, “daring to do not much and daring to do it in the company of other people.” That is completely contrary to what social media rewards. When it comes to your social life, social media rewards the epic couples’ vacations or the “it” concert with 40 of your closest friends or a flawlessly orchestrated dinner party. Unless you already have a huge social media following, no one gets tons of likes for the video of you and a few friends “not doing much” in whatever today’s equivalent is of my boring college dorm room.

Liming goes on to say:

Another way to think of this is spending time with others without trying to put too many expectations upon what that time has to do, or what it has to result in, or what it has to produce. Yet, I would say that hanging out itself is not necessarily a skill. You don’t necessarily excel at hanging out. You either do it, or you don’t do it. But I think there are certain skills that are built into the work of hanging out itself. So I’m thinking of it in the book as a kind of social musculature that we have to expose ourselves to these sort of repeated scenarios with relative frequency, just like exercise, in order to keep those muscles active and in order to prevent them from effectively atrophying.

Because most of our lives are quite busy, we have to plan out our social activities far in advance, and if we don’t get to see our friends as much as we’d like, then it feels like when we do see each other, it needs to be something exciting and something that typically requires meticulous planning and/or money. Because we don’t “dare to do not much in the company of other people,” we lose the “social musculature” for hanging out that Liming warns us about.

Maybe it’s a our solitude muscles have atrophied problem.

Speaking of musculature, I’m wondering too if some of this is because we have lost the muscle for boredom and solitude. We carry around these super computers in our pockets everywhere and never have to be bored. But we never really have to be alone either - we can text our entire social circle at any given time or eavesdrop on their lives via social media or just consume entertainment that makes us feel less alone for a time. Solitude, like boredom, is a muscle that will atrophy without use, and all of our great wisdom traditions point to solitude as an essential spiritual practice:

* The Buddha said: “Apply yourself to solitude. One who does so will see things as they are.”

* In Jewish scripture, Moses and Elijah experienced spiritual awakenings of sort only after 40 days alone in the desert.

* The Tao Te Ching says, “Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.”

* In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna advises, "Those who aspire to the state of yoga should seek the Self in inner solitude through meditation. With body and mind controlled they should constantly practice one-pointedness, free from expectations and attachment to material possessions.”

* Most Christian traditions consider solitude a spiritual discipline, modeled after Jesus’ own solitude practices related throughout the Gospels.

* Despite their diversity, we see practices of solitude in nature as vital to most indigenous cultures around the world. 

Perhaps we confuse loneliness with solitude. Solitude feels uncomfortable for many of us, especially when we don’t practice it and experience its benefits. As we’ve increasingly disconnected from our spiritual and religious traditions (often for good reason, let’s be clear), I am wondering if some of our collective loneliness comes from an inability to sit still with ourselves. We think what we’re feeling is loneliness when really it’s just that we feel uncomfortable being alone with ourselves because we don’t have to as much anymore, so the difference between loneliness and solitude gets murkier.

Maybe it’s a we’re only “counting” human social connection problem.

Another thing worth thinking about is how our disconnection from the natural world plays into the loneliness epidemic. I have a solid five minute snuggle session with my dog before I get out of bed every morning that I guarantee you does something good for my mental health and serotonin levels. My best cooling off place is the garden or a walk in the woods - I can go in completely pissed about something and calm down considerably in less than ten minutes.

We all have experiences like this where we might not be connecting with another human, but we’re definitely connecting with the more-than-human-world. But the data is clear that we’re collectively spending far less time in the natural world than ever before in human history. Is it a coincidence that we are also reporting feeling far lonelier?

It’s complicated.

I think it is  great that we’re collectively talking about loneliness, but, as we tend to do, we act like there is a practical five step solution that we can follow to resolve the problem. Instead, we should be talking about the complexities of the problem, acknowledging how we all might be impacted differently, and, most of all, offering ourselves self-compassion and curiosity instead of judgment and critique.

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, as well as other things related to this newsletter’s topic that maybe didn’t fit into the actual newsletter, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

* So many great podcasts and articles on this topic if you’re interested in digging in:

* There is a whole structural element to this conversation in the sense that we’ve setup our society so we could all be by ourselves most of the time and then we wonder why we’re lonely, which had me thinking about this piece on Sabbath.

* Live Closer to Your Friends and The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake via The Atlantic. Also this follow up from AHP on why we don’t just live closer to our friends if it makes us happier was excellent (always read AHP’s comments).

* Derek Thompson hosted some great conversations on his podcast Plain English that helped me to come to some of my conclusions above, specifically this one on lessons from that 80+ year Harvard study and this one on why our teens are so unhappy. Similarly, Ezra Klein has been digging into the teen mental health crisis, which makes me curious about what overlap there is with the loneliness epidemic.

* Vivek Murphy (current US Surgeon General) was great on the Ezra Klein podcast and on On Being.

* Every year, we curate a pretty killer (if I do say so myself) playlist for hanging out. Here’s 2023’s if you want to listen and hang out wherever you are.

Here’s to finding some time to just hang out!

Sara

Thanks for subscribing to sara by the season. If you liked this post, I’d be so grateful if you shared it. Sharing helps keep me writing!

I’ve been thinking a lot about this On Being episode with Amanda Ripley, a journalist-turned conflict researcher who has been studying and writing about what she calls “high conflict,” which she defines as, “the invisible hand of our time. It's what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side.” Welp, that sounds familiar.

The whole episode is really worth listening to, but there was this little story about her son that I’ve been thinking about lately. She noticed that, when her son was afraid, it came out as anger. He got mad. And once she noticed it in her son, she realized that was what happened when she got scared too. She got angry. The thing I hate about cable news generally and Fox News in particular is how they’re obsessed with keeping viewers scared (except when it costs them viewers like rational reporting about Covid or gun reform or January 6th).

I wrote about being sick of the rage cycle, but I didn’t think to connect it to what might be underlying all of the latent rage we’re seeing everywhere, especially as we see young people making very innocent mistakes and getting shot for them. When we’re scared, for many of us, anger is what shows up because we’ve been indoctrinated that it’s weak to show that we’re afraid. In most spaces, anger is not only allowed, but often glorified. 

I like to make this analogy about difficult emotions when I’m teaching yin: the difficult emotion is like a beach ball that you’re trying to push under the water. It might disappear for a second or two, but then it pops up elsewhere in unexpected ways. When we stuff or numb our difficult emotions, they’re like trying to push the beach ball under the water - it doesn’t go away, it just comes up sideways, usually at very inopportune times. Instead, it’s better to sit with the difficult emotion, get curious about it, see it as a teacher instead of an enemy. Pema says, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know,” so you might as well deal with it on your terms instead of risking it coming up sideways with all sorts of blowback.

If fear is underneath the anger that we’re stuck in cycles of, then we can’t deal with the anger until we’ve dealt with the fears. There is plenty to be afraid about: we are living in an unbelievably destabilizing time, the pace of change continues to accelerate with little thought to consequences, we seem to be more divided than ever or at least watching the news certainly makes you feel that way, and the climate crisis alone forces me into the fetal position with the covers over my head more times than I’d like to admit. 

Ripley says, “In high conflict, any intuitive thing you do to get out of the conflict will almost certainly make things worse. So now I try and I don’t always succeed, to take my first intuition and just ask myself, ‘could I do the opposite? What would that look like?’ Because that’s how you step out of that dance. But it’s very unintuitive.” Our instinctual thing to do when there’s conflict is to get angry, to fight back. I tend to retaliate in my own head (often for hours after the conflict) even if I don’t physically or verbally fight back. Ripley is saying what many of us have experienced firsthand - our initial response when we’re in contentious situations is maybe not the most trustworthy response. That initial flash of anger is valid and good information, but it likely isn’t terribly conducive to resolving the situation at hand. 

In another On Being episode, activist Adrienne Maree Brown talked about, when she was organizing for the 2004 presidential campaign, she had this realization that they were putting all their efforts into the presidential campaign:

And I was like, oh, we are trying to just change the top layer of this very layered cake, this very layered process, this system of governance. We think that if we just win the presidency, that then we’ll be able to change the world.

And it clicked for me that it’s like, actually, it’s a fractal system. And it’s layer on top of layer on top of layer. And if none of us are practicing democracy anywhere, it’s not going to just suddenly work at the top layer. 

And then I realized — so something about smallness, I was able to gain respect for, because I was like, every single large system or structure or network or political protocol, all of it is made up of small things: of humans either having or not having necessary conversations, and humans being willing to stand up for what is right and stand up against what is wrong. It’s all these small activities that we need to get great at if we want to actually have anything that would be a real democracy.

She goes on to say that we can’t expect democracy to work on a macro scale if we aren’t practicing it in our homes and with our neighbors. In this specific context, she is talking about democracy, but the same is true for the values we want to see more of in the world. We can’t expect them out there if we aren’t practicing them within ourselves and our immediate, closest relationships. Something about the American way of life biases us to what I’ve called “the epic life mentality,” so we are partial to the bigger, grander gestures instead of the smaller, more mundane practices that, Brown argues, are required to effect actual and long lasting change. 

I’ve been getting curious about my own instances of anger since listening to Ripley explain the anger-fear connection, and I’ve been getting curious about how anger shows up in our home. It helps me to have more compassion for myself and my family because I’m trying to focus less on the actual anger and more on what might be underneath it. Think if I multiplied that out beyond the walls of my house to get curious about what fears might be underneath the person angrily honking at me at the red light or my coworker who snapped at me in frustration. Think if all of you reading these words chose curiosity instead of anger or retribution - even just occasionally! You can quickly imagine how that would ripple out in our communities.

I don’t think the solution to how divided we are is to just start being more curious about our friends’ and neighbors’ anger. I think there are at least 73 things that we could try - some of them individual and some of them collective. We like to act like there is one solution to our problems, and then fight over the solutions. In fact, our problems are complex and require complex, varied, and many solutions. But I do think A way of building the kind of world we want for ourselves, the generations to come, and the more-than-human world is to choose curiosity whenever we get the chance.  

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, as well as other things related to this newsletter’s topic that maybe didn’t fit into the actual newsletter, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

* One of my favorite things written about curiosity, especially pursuing it instead of passion. And follow up with this listen.

* Amanda Ripley, when she talks about maybe not trusting that first response when you’re in conflict, is really talking about finding the pause - what Viktor Frankl famously was talking about in Man’s Search for Meaning, his masterpiece about surviving Auschwitz: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” The pause or the space between stimulus and response is also what many of our great wisdom teachers try to teach us. The pause is increasingly difficult to find our over-stimulated, anger-rewarded, trigger-happy culture. In order to - even occasionally! - have access to the pause, we have to be more regulated human beings. For me, good sleep, nature, and movement are the most essential practices to being regulated. Yin, sitting, good food, and books would be next on my list. Your list is probably different. But before we can access curiosity about our anger - and its underlying fears - we have to practice what regulates us. Katherine Morgan Schafler has some great tips, ideas, and a mantra to steal.

* Chris writing beautifully (as always) about the impermanence of spring’s blossoms - and everything, really. “So much comes to us and then leaves again, all in the single season, while other elements linger … then also disappear as summer scorches, fades, and autumn finishes the job. We love it all so hard and it is difficult to not be a little bereft when it leaves, which is okay too so long as we don’t cling so hard to the sorrow that we forget the joy it all brought in the first place.” Read the whole thing.

* Via Elise Loehnen’s newsletter comes this anecdote about Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, from Celeste' Headlee’s Speaking of Race:

The psychologist Carl Rogers suggests reading the following paragraph to yourself before you engage in a fraught discussion with another person:

I’m interested in you as a person, and I think that what you feel is important. I respect your thoughts, and even if I don’t agree with them, I know that they are valid for you. I feel sure that you have a contribution to make. I’m not trying to change you or evaluate you. I just want to understand you. I think you’re worth listening to, and I want you to know that I’m the kind of a person you can talk to.

Rogers’ paragraph before conflict seems like the perfect way to find the pause and to halt the angry retort when we’re in high conflict situations. I’m pretty sure Amanda Ripley would love it!

Here’s to choosing curiosity in the days ahead!

Sara

Thanks for subscribing to sara by the season. If you liked this post, I’d be so grateful if you shared it. Sharing helps keep me writing!

Thank you for reading sara by the season and sharing with your friends!

The kids and I were thinking about waking up for the Geminid meteor shower back in December, but as I was researching the best time to view them, the article said that you really need to plan to be outside in the dark for up to two hours before viewing nighttime sky events because your eyes need that long to adjust to the darkness so that you can actually pick out the falling stars once they start. Needless to say, I could not convince the kids to go outside with me starting around 2am for a 3-4 am meteor shower in the middle of December.

I can’t stop thinking about this idea that you can’t see the meteor shower unless you’ve sat in the dark for long enough for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. Winter is the season that we’re invited to sit with darkness, to see her as our teacher instead of something to be feared. But us Americans live as if it’s perpetual summer with our climate control, electric lights, and nearly everything available to us with a few clicks of our keyboard and some money in the bank. We (myself included, of course) barely give ourselves over to the darkness of the middle of the night without doing something to distract ourselves from it, let alone sit with the darkness long enough for our eyes to adjust and be able to see what lessons there might be for us there. 

I recently read Clark Strand’s Waking Up to the Dark, and, in it, he references a study done by Thomas Wehr, former chief of the Clinical Psychobiology Branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health, in which Wehr attempts to determine the sleep habits of prehistoric humans. For the study, Wehr tried to recreate the conditions that prehistoric humans would have faced at the location of his lab in midwinter. Without alarms or artificial lighting, the participants slept around eleven hours per night for the first few weeks of the study, sleeping seventeen hours more than they would have under normal conditions during the first few weeks of the study, probably making up for their sleep debt from their normal lives. Then after three weeks, the participants’ sleep patterns stabilized to about eight and a quarter hours per night - but, interestingly, it wasn’t eight hours all at once. According to this NYT summary of the study:

Each night the volunteers lay in a state of quiet rest for two hours before passing abruptly into sleep. They slept in an evening bout that lasted four hours. Then they awoke out of REM sleep into another two hours of quiet rest, followed by another four-hour bout of sleep and another two hours of quiet rest before rising at 8 A.M. This pattern of divided sleep, separated by rest, is called a bimodal distribution of sleep, and it is typical of the sleep of many mammals living in the wild, which is to say that it is atypical of humans living in modern Western society…Bimodal sleep, punctuated by quiet rest, was a pattern to which modern Americans reverted almost as soon as they were given the chance.

Strand argues that we’ve lost more than sleep by artificially keeping darkness at bay. By squishing our sleep into seven-eight hour blocks where we’re too exhausted not to sleep through the night or medicating or numbing away those quiet rest periods when they arrive, we’ve lost our ability to sit with the lessons the darkness teaches. For most of human history, those quiet times in the middle of the night were a time for dreaming, sex, meaning-making, and just being - without efforting or striving. Strand writes, “[modern people] no longer have any reliable access to the non-physical realm and that has everything to do with electrical lighting and our modern habit of staying up so late that our bodies have no choice but to sleep straight through the night.” Even the scientist Thomas Wehr, reflecting on the results of the study, sounding very mystical, summarizes, “it is tempting to speculate that in prehistoric times, this [sleeping in two blocks] arrangement provided a channel of communication between dreams and waking life that has gradually been closed off as humans have compressed and consolidated their sleep. If so, then this alteration might provide a physiological explanation for the observation that modern humans seemed to have lost touch with the wellspring of myths and fantasies.”  

Even the black-and-white scientist recognizes our separation from the spiritual realm and wonders what kinds of effects it is having on us. If our eyes need to adjust to the darkness to even be able to see a meteor shower, how much more do we communally need to readjust to the darkness to be able to learn all that she has to teach us? Our culture refuses to sit with the dark. Even on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, all of the emphasis is on the growing light instead of learning to get comfortable with the darkness. As soon as mid-January comes around, much of our conversations start to center around how much we can’t stand winter and our excitement for spring. Strand argues, convincingly, that we are missing out on half of our existence by filling our consciousness with so much light and so little willingness to be in the dark, arguing that “we have demonized the dark along with half of what is good within us.” 

We tend to push away the so-called darker emotions: sadness, grief, fear, loneliness. But all of our great wisdom traditions, as well as Psychology 101, teach us that it is in learning to sit with the spectrum of emotions we experience without reacting to them is where freedom arises. Our culture equips us with all sorts of ways to fight off, numb, or ignore the darkness, but our fullest, freest lives only come from learning to embrace the full spectrum of our experience - both the light and the dark.

I’m not planning on giving up my electricity anytime soon, but I’ve been experimenting with a few things lately to help me grow more comfortable with my darker side. I used to ask one of the kids to take Wendell out for the last time before bed, but lately, I’ve been taking him out without a flashlight and walking deep into our backyard where the city lights are dimmer and the darkness is deeper. Most nights, I see something beautiful I would have otherwise missed. I’m learning how the planets move through the night sky. I’m noticing the difference in the night-to-night shape of the moon instead of only going out on full moon evenings. Some nights I get a little spooked, which is good for me too.

Probably because of my season of life, I wake up in the middle of the night most nights. Since reading Waking Up to the Dark, I’ve been thinking of it as a thin space instead of an annoyance. I pray or meditate or write down my dreams instead of my previous habit of getting increasingly annoyed that I’m awake in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping. The funniest part is that, by enjoying the quiet and stillness available during those middle-of-the-night wakeups, I tend to fall asleep before my prayer and mindfulness practice is even over.

Meteorological winter is over, yes, but our opportunity to embrace the darkness remains. It isn’t just our eyes that must adjust to the darkness in order to see; our minds, spirits, and whole bodies must experience actual darkness in order for us to adjust enough to see - figuratively and literally - the “half of what is good within us” that we’ve been missing by refusing to sit with the darkness, let alone settle into it for awhile.

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

* Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in this series of talks titled Seeing in the Dark, uses the word medial to describe the ability to see both the world of the ego and the world of the soul. If you’re looking to dig more deeply into the invitation of the darkness, Estés is the place to start. P.S. My Hoopla app had all of these talks on there in case your library has Hoopla too.

* If you, like me, wanted more details on the history of our sleeping patterns after reading about Wehr’s study above, check out these:

* Way more details on biphasic sleep over the centuries from the BBC.

* The anthropology of sleep and how varied it is from what little we’ve learned.

* The rise of insomnia as we stopped sleeping in shifts.

* Clark Strand in Waking Up to the Dark and in this article argues that the invention of the incandescent lightbulb was “the spiritual tipping point that would eventually guarantee the excesses of the twentieth century, from world wars to climate change to the widespread pollution of rivers, lakes, and streams.” It seemed far-fetched when I first read it, but it’s one of those things that won’t stop circling in my brain either.

Here’s to finding some ways to adjust to the dark in the weeks ahead,

Sara

I love Katie Hawkins-Gaar’s My Sweet Dumb Brain newsletter. She writes about grief and marriage and motherhood in a very accessible, down-to-earth way. In a newsletter from a few weeks ago, she wrote about friendship after having a baby, but what stuck out to me was this post-Covid study she referenced. According to the study, we experienced significant personality changes “equivalent to about one decade of normative personality change [emphasis mine].”

Holy moly! We experienced the equivalent of a DECADE worth of personality change in the last few years. That is bonkers to me, if not all that surprising based on my own personal experience.

Science says that we get more introverted as we get older. Psychologists call it “intrinsic maturation,” and Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, describes this process as people growing more “emotionally stable, agreeable, and conscientious…as if personalities are a kind of fine wine that mellows with age,” and she references studies that show that this phenomenon happens across cultures.

I know for me that the energy output that parenting requires has made me far more introverted and more in need of quiet time to refill my reserves than I was before kids. So some of this growing introversion and “mellowing out” is natural, it seems. But I’ve still been left feeling weird since Covid, if I’m being honest. We used to host practically weekly dinner parties and big seasonal celebrations, and now I can barely muster the energy to commit to a dinner out with friends where I have little to do except for show up. I find myself nostalgic for quarantine when we had no reason to leave the house. If I was also sad or uninterested or experiencing other symptoms of depression, this feeling might be concerning, but that study made me realize that perhaps we’ve just experienced a decade’s worth of mellowing in a much shorter length of time, making it feel less gradual and, therefore, more abrupt (in addition to just being exhausted from the constant barrage of crap coming at us from all angles).

Hopefully, as we grow older, we settle into our personalities, and science demonstrates that this is typically the case. We become more of ourselves. We tend to get happier by all metrics as we grow older.

In Katie’s newsletter, she talks about how her life has become smaller since the pandemic and having a baby, but it made me think that this tendency that we have to beat ourselves up about our supposedly small and quiet lives is just another symptom of the epic life mentality we’re infected with.

Neurology tells us that our brains are wired for novelty. We get a rush of dopamine when we experience something new and exciting. This benefited us evolutionarily because this trait enabled us to seek out and adapt to new environments. But neurology also tells us that people with too much of this novelty-seeking behavior often veer into addiction; their constant need for the novel becomes an obsession that obliterates all real enjoyment. Social media obviously supercharges this neurological tendency because it produces a dopamine hit all on its own, but it also keeps us constantly unsatisfied with our novelty in comparison to others’.

So we obviously need some novelty but not too much. We have to find our goldilocks novelty spot. Or perhaps instead of constantly seeking new and novel experiences, we need to cultivate ways to see the new and novel in our everyday lives. After all, we supposedly have somewhere in the neighborhood of 6000 thoughts a day; certainly, we can seek out some novelty in those 6000 thoughts even if our days might look similar from the outside. Perhaps this is what all of our wisdom traditions are trying to teach us when they talk about contentment and the beauty of the present moment.

It makes me think of the Buddha’s saying: “When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.” Or Thoreau who said that you must “find your eternity in each moment.” Or Jesus who said, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. ” Or the more indigenous way of thinking that would have us see the miracle - and novelty! - that is in every flower bloom or compost heap.

What Katie’s writing helped me see about the changes that I’ve seen in myself is that perhaps these changes I’ve been experiencing aren’t anything to worry about. Covid was an accelerant of plenty of things, our personalities, seemingly, being one of them. Instead of adding this to our list of things to worry about, perhaps we could see our mellowing as a gift. We could practice finding the novel in the everyday moments of our lives, finding more contentment, ease, and gratitude along the way.

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

* The NYT talking about how - and why - to experience more awe in the everyday.

* The ceremony of everyday life. Think about how different things would be if we thought of certain parts of our days as ceremonies. Casper ter Kuile, in the excellent The Power of Ritual, says that ritual requires three things: repetition, attention, and intention. Ritual and ceremony seem to share many characteristics, and I wonder what kind of goodness could come from bringing more attention and intention to the things we’re already doing each day.

* The only kind of new year’s resolution I can get behind - and that just so happens to couple perfectly with this week’s newsletter!

* Your annual reminder that January is a terrible time to be doing all of the things (unless you really want to!). January 1st as the new year is a very recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.

Cheers to embracing everyday novelty in the year ahead,

Sara

Thank you for reading sara by the season and sharing with your friends!

Many wisdom traditions around the world set aside time, and usually around September and October, to celebrate the dead in some form or another: there are the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico and many Latin American countries, Hinduism’s Pitru Paksha, Buddhists and Taoists celebrate their ancestors for the entire month of the Hungry Ghost Festival, and the many variations of All Soul’s Day in places where Christianity subsumed the culture’s previous traditions into their own.

In the Celtic tradition, Samhain begins the evening of October 31 and ends the evening of November 1. It is the beginning of the Celtic year and marks the turn toward the darker half of the year. It is said to be a thin space, a time when the ancestors, spirits - and fairies! - are closer than throughout the rest of the year. Most of our American Halloween traditions are adapted from Samhain practices.

At our church, we celebrate All Souls’ Day by bringing in pictures of our loved ones who have died. A few volunteers hang up the pictures all over the place, so that when we walk in on Sunday, the entire room is filled with smiling pictures of our loved ones. Last year, I brought in a picture of my cousin who died when I was 17. He is perpetually 23 in my memory, but he would have celebrated his 50th birthday this year had he lived. I hadn’t talked about him outside of family in years, and our All Souls’ Day celebration was a reminder about the importance of talking about our dead loved ones as a way of honoring and remembering them.

My friend lost her dad this year, and she was telling me about a recent therapy appointment, in which she was sharing with her therapist some frustration that everyone’s lives just seem to go on while it feels to her like everything stalled the day her dad died. The therapist sarcastically responded, “well, yes, it’s been three months since your dad died. That’s about all our culture can handle when it comes to dealing with death. Our culture says you should be moving on by now.” Even though the therapist was right, it made me quite angry and not just for my friend but for how stunted we all must be if we have little to no long-term support to help us carry life’s heavy losses. Barry Spector, in Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, writing about the necessity of grief says, “When survivors aren’t allowed sufficient time to grieve, however, the wounds close too soon, remain infected, and never heal.”

Even if you haven’t faced a loved one’s death this year, there are likely other sorts of death that might be in danger of festering and in need grieving: an expectation, a relationship, a story you told yourself that is no longer working for you, your own or your loved ones’ aging, the climate emergency, the state of the world. Living in tune with nature’s rhythms invites us to reflect on what we’re being invited to grieve during this season when nature demonstrates for us the beauty in letting go and the life-giving power of death.

We have watered down the one day of the year that we Americans are even willing to think about death to be consumerized practically to meaninglessness. We desperately need to recover some of our ancestor’s lost rituals and practices that not only help us grieve what needs grieving but also help us relinquish our incessant need to stave off death with our intense workouts and supplements and ten-step skincare routines.

In Francis Weller’s should-be-instant-classic, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, he writes about what’s to come if we don’t:

We are depleting, with an ever-growing tenacity, the complex, multi-layered song of the world and replacing it with a single-pitched monotone, depositing empty calories, sterile seeds, and meaningless objects in every developing country while silencing forever the voices of hundreds of cultures. Every few weeks a language is lost, and, along with it, a nuanced imagination of a people who were rooted to a place for perhaps thousands of years. Soon we will be left with only the barest semblance of the exuberant matrix we once had, as the monoculture of modernity plows into the lives of every culture, replacing their traditions with imitations of our own pale expression of life.

I’ve been walking through some mourning of my own this year and have decided that this fall, the grieving season, that I’m really going to lean into feeling and ritualizing the grief that I need to process as the days grow darker. Martin Shaw, in this prescient essay, writes that “we have to operate from both wonder and grief, at absolutely the same time. One does not cancel the other out, it is the very tension of the love-tangle that makes us, possibly, a true human being.” If Shaw and Weller are right, and I think they are, an integral part of growing and evolving is welcoming in the grief that comes with being a human - and there’s no better time to accept the invitation than autumn when nature offers us extra support with the grief that arises when we’re open to it.

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

* Since most of us are so disconnected from communal grief practices, we have to work to recover those we’ve lost or create some of our own. Some ideas of practices that I’ve been collecting for grief season: a grief altar, grief journaling, grief collaging, nature mandalas. If you have a favorite grief season ritual or practice, I’d love to hear about it.

* This conversation on “the fall and the underworld” with Martin Shaw would make a wonderful autumn listen.

* I can’t get enough of Sophie Strand, and this essay is the perfect read as we celebrate Samhain and Halloween next week. This line, especially, hit me as I’ve been thinking about our fear of death so much lately: “We are the product not of a garden but of an impact. An extinction event. We are the children of the crater. The bodies produced by collision and eruption.”

Here’s to welcoming the grief this season,

Sara

I’ve been reading (well, listening) to Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, and I can’t stop talking about it (be glad you don’t live with me). One thing I’ve always had a curiosity about is the preconceived notions that we collectively assume are true, and Yunkaporta has me thinking about more of these than ever.

In one of my favorite chapters, “Romancing the Stone Age,” Yunkaporta says, “Most of us today are living in a state of compliance with imposed roles and tasks rather than a heightened state of engagement. We are slaves to a work ethic that is unnatural and unnecessary.” Even though I’ve done some noodling about the roots of the Protestant work ethic, I hadn’t considered that having a work ethic could be unnatural and unnecessary until I read Sand Talk. I just assumed a work ethic = good. Laziness = bad.

But Yunkaporta got me thinking about my assumptions, so I did some googling. I came across this fascinating article by James Suzman, an anthropologist who has been studying the Ju/’hoansi people of southern Africa, one of the world’s oldest hunter-gatherer societies. According to Suzman’s research, “The Ju/'hoansi were revealed to be well fed, content, and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure.” Marshall Sahlins, another anthropologist and author of Stone Age Economics, estimated that hunter-gatherers worked, on average, three to five hours per day (and contrary to our whitewashed, colonized ideas, were actually affluent by any standards).

We don’t even have to go all the way back to our prehistoric ancestors to see that our modern ideals around work are relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Author Juliet B. Schor reminds us:

One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries…Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.

All of this looking back matters not because we can be absolutely sure of how our ancestors lived and worked, but because most of us Westerners are living with the assumption that I made above: that working hard has always been a good and necessary part of being a human. But for most of human history, not only was how we defined work and laziness different than how we do today, but humans had vastly different priorities if what we know of how they spent their time is true.

Because we’ve embraced this Western, capitalistic pedestalization (a word I made up to mean the noun form of “putting something on a pedastal”) of work, we structure so much of our lives around our careers. It’s the first question we ask when we meet someone, and for most of us, it is how we define meaning and purpose for ourselves. But for most of human history, we’ve defined meaning in vastly different - and often more sustainable, less personally, communally, and planetarily harmful - ways.

When the bosses complain about “quiet quitting,” (which is really just doing what your job description requires instead of going above and beyond what your employer has agreed to pay you to complete your work tasks), the powerful are selling us a premise about work that 1) isn’t even accurate and 2) we don’t have to buy into. By seeing our communal assumptions about the value of work as a fluid manifestation of cultural forces at work instead of black-and-white facts of “how it’s always been,” it helps empower us to determine what role we want work to play in our lives instead of just carte blanche taking the presuppositions that we’ve been handed.

Handing it off to Yunkaporta to finish off these Labor Day-induced thoughts on work’s role in our lives:

We still endure longer work hours than our roles require today, for reasons of social control rather than productivity. It’s difficult to find the mental space to question systems of power when we’re working eight hours, then trying to lift heavy weights that don’t need lifting or pedaling bikes that go nowhere for an hour so we don’t die of a heart attack from being stuck for a third of our lives in a physically restrictive workspace. We sleep for another third of our lives (although not if we have small children), then the rest is divided between life-maintenance tasks, commuting, and using the few remaining minutes to connect with loved ones, if we still have any. Somewhere in there we also need to find time to study and retrain, unless we want to finish up homeless when our industries inevitably collapse or change direction. The job is the unquestioned goal for all free citizens of the world—the ultimate public good. It is the clearly stated exit goal of all education and the only sanctioned reason for acquiring knowledge…

I am often told that I should be grateful for the progress that Western civilization has brought to these shores. I am not. This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on preinvasion living, which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people do now for leisure activities on their yearly vacations: fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping, and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships, ritual and ceremony, cultural expression, intellectual pursuits, and the expert crafting of exceptional objects. I know this is true because I have lived like this, even in this era when the land is only a pale shadow of the abundance that once was. We have been lied to about the “harsh survival” lifestyles of the past. There was nothing harsh about it. If it was so harsh—such a brutish, menial struggle for existence—then we would not have evolved to become the delicate, intelligent creatures that we are.

If we haven’t always worked this hard or this long, that opens our imaginations to how differently we could choose to structure our lives. What other assumptions about “the way things have always been” are we making that keep us small, exhausted, and defeated?

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

* Laura McKowen on what is enough, which is a question the natural world is far better at answering than we are.

* I came across this quote from Wayne Muller on a podcast. It reminded me of my epic life theory and a reminder of how we can be most like the earth: “The word humility, like the human, comes from humus, or earth. We are most human when we do no great things. We are not so important; we are simple dust and spirit—at best, loving midwives, participants in a process much larger than we. If we are quiet and listen and feel how things move, perhaps we will be wise enough to put our hands on what waits to be born, and bless it with kindness and care.”

* Some good questions to ask ourselves as we ground during this unsettled season before settling into the fall and winter ahead.

* Here in Indiana, we can feel fall coming. I love anything that reminds me that death is an invitation, a doorway to transformation, especially as we prepare for the darker seasons ahead. In this lovely post, Ariella/beekeepinginskirts writes, “Death does not separate us. It is a door for evolving relationship.”

Cheers to rethinking some assumptions this week!

Sara

Pardon my unintentionally long summer break - our family’s middle world has been especially bananas these last few months. I haven’t felt much like writing, but I’m trying to show back up here anyway.

I picked up this book at the library a few months ago based solely on the title: I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt by Madeleine Dore. I was expecting to flip through it, thinking it would be just another self-helpy book, but I ended up reading the whole thing and taking plenty of notes. In her chapter on the pitfalls of expectations, Dore writes, “we make the mistake of labeling ourselves as nouns, when we are really verbs—we are not a runner, but rather a person who runs; we’re not a writer, but a person who writes. Our sense of self doesn’t have to be bundled up with whether we did the thing today—because we are not the things we do.”

This goes against a ton of anecdotal wisdom: “we are what we repeatedly do;” just about every quote on any motivational poster you’ve ever seen, and famous habit-writer James Clear even says that connecting your identity to your habits is a key to habit-keeping-success.

But Dore’s warning rings truer for me. We aren’t static nouns, so much as dynamic verbs - one hopes anyway. I love the freedom Dore’s labeling offers instead of the strict confines of noun-based characterizations. If we offered ourselves the flexibility to pursue our curiosities instead of sticking to some set of standards (usually set upon us by someone else), we would likely learn much more about ourselves and the world around us. We would know what works best for us instead of assuming what worked for our parents, our friends, or the latest self-help writers will work for us. We would be more open to trying new things, to questioning our assumptions, and to evolving into new versions of ourselves.

Living in tune with the seasons teaches us this lesson too. There are seasons for running and writing and seasons for resting and creating; seasons for healing and seasons for launching. One isn’t better than the other. The fallow seasons are no less beautiful, necessary, and life-giving than the abundant seasons. What we do - repeatedly or not - does not make us any more or less worthy of love, belonging, and compassion. We know this. We probably teach this to our children. And yet, we judge and critique ourselves endlessly by this tidy list of things we did and didn’t do today that lives in our heads (or at least it lives in mine).

The version of capitalism we’re living under finds it profitable to flatten us into certain static identities, into nouns. Nouns can be categorized, marketed to, defined, and managed. Verbs are messier, less clear, more wild.

Dore’s advice reminded me of Braiding Sweetgrass, in which Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of learning her native Potawatomi and discovering that it (like most indigenous languages) is a language of verbs. Where English is about 30 percent verbs, Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Elsewhere, Kimmerer writes about what Potawatomi offers us :

The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world. Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object. Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. Because we are. There is no it for nature. Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t. I greet the silent boulder people with the same respect as I do the talkative chickadees.

It’s no wonder that our language was forbidden. The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things…

English has come to be the dominant language of commerce, in which contracts to convert a forest to a copper mine are written. It’s just the right language for the purpose, because the forest and the copper ore are equivalent “its.” English encodes human exceptionalism, which privileges the needs and wants of humans above all others and understands us as detached from the commonwealth of life.

Perhaps thinking of ourselves and others as verbs instead of nouns isn’t just generally good for breaking up with the cult of productivity, as Dore asserts; perhaps, as Kimmerer contends, it is a larger counter-cultural act that opens our eyes to our inter-connectedness with the human and more-than-human-world, with our own imaginations, and with our innate desire to grow and evolve. It’s an invitation to being open instead of closed off, to curiosity instead of complacency, to compassion instead of judgement, to sovereignty instead of submission.

Just raves this week

👍 The August garden. It’s exploding, but I’m still quasi-on top of things. The August garden is the best garden.

👍 I know it’s so childish, but the memes and jokes about the Mar-a-Lago raid are giving me so much life this week. Send them all my way please. This was by far the most worth your time. Grant, in his text when he sent it to me, “this is the best thing I’ve watched in 2022.”

👍 Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. Here is my Instagram review of the book. I listened to this on Scribd, which is also a 2022 rave. (I originally subscribed for some hard-to-find reading for Seminary on the Wild, but I found it worthwhile enough to keep it up. I did find a deal, so maybe worth waiting for those.)

Stuff worth sharing this week:

* I found this via Ask Polly, and the song immediately got added to our 2022 playlist.

* As usual, Virginia Sole-Smith making me think - this time about where diet culture shows up for me (plus another systems problems entry).

* John Green FTW:

Cheers to evolving in the week ahead,

Sara

A few years ago, the four of us picked a few films to see at the Heartland Film Festival, as is our annual tradition. One of the films we picked that year was The Serengeti Rules (highly recommend it - here’s how to watch), a documentary film about a small group of scientists in the 1960s who discovered almost simultaneously in their various corners of the world where they studied what has now become a modern ecological principle: keystone species.

Keystone species are defined as having “a disproportionately large effect on [their] natural environment relative to [their] abundance.” The film discussed many different kinds of keystone species that this group of scientists had studied all over the world, but the one that is most familiar to most of us are the grey wolves and their reintroduction in Yellowstone.

In 1995, due at least in part to the work of this group of scientists from the documentary, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone after a nearly 70 year absence. During the wolves’ absence “the entire Yellowstone ecosystem had fallen out of balance. Coyotes ran rampant, and the elk population exploded, overgrazing willows and aspens. Without those trees, songbirds began to decline, beavers could no longer build their dams and riverbanks started to erode. Without beaver dams and the shade from trees and other plants, water temperatures were too high for cold-water fish.” In other words, the extermination of the wolves had a catastrophic effect on the entire ecosystem.

Even the scientists have been surprised at how quickly the ecosystem rebounded after the wolves’ return:

The elk and deer populations started responding immediately. Within about 10 years, willows rebounded. In 20, the aspen began flourishing. Riverbanks stabilized. Songbirds returned as did beavers, eagles, foxes and badgers. “And those are just the things we have the time and funding to study,” said Smith [of the Yellowstone Wolf Project]. “There are probably myriad other effects just waiting to be discovered.”

The wolves were basically eradicated in their natural habitat because they were seen as a danger to humans and livestock (even though the data says otherwise). But in fact, the so-called dangerous wolves were key to promoting ecological diversity in their natural habitats and in maintaining population control of other species that had the potential to throw the ecosystem out of balance.

The indigenous tribes of the Great Plains revered the wolf. The Pawnee who lived in what is now Nebraska and Kansas were even known as “the wolf people” by other tribes. Had we listened to their wisdom about the wolves (as well as at least a thousand other things, let’s be clear), we could have avoided the ecological crisis in Yellowstone.

I hope you like today’s science lesson. The end.

I kid! The reason I’m bringing this up at all is because I keep thinking about keystone species in light of the Alito leak.

Reversing Roe v Wade will have tremendous downstream effects and not just for women, of course. Pro-choice advocates have identified so many of the likely effects, many of which we’re already seeing in states with little abortion access. I’m worried about the activists who will turn their attention from the climate crisis or voting rights or income inequality or public education or fill-in-the-blank to address this, admittedly very pressing, issue instead. I’m wondering about what diversity our ecosystem is losing by having a two party system in which one party votes on largely one issue to the exclusion of all others.

But, like the Yellowstone scientist quoted above about the “myriad other effects just waiting to be discovered,” what I’m wondering about even more are the unforeseen consequences that we haven’t predicted or considered or the ones that are at least not mainstream news.

I find myself thinking about this about all sorts of issues we’re currently facing: the climate crisis first and foremost, rising income inequality, voting rights, gun control, equal rights across the board, the broken aspects of our cultural fabric revealed or exacerbated by the pandemic, the fact that the litmus test for running for office in one of our parties in our two-party system is to deny the reality that their guy lost the last election.

Social media and the media cycle feed us what to be outraged about from one week to the next - and there is plenty to be outraged about, let me be clear. But we can’t continue to be jerked around by the outrage cycle. It’s exhausting, it isn’t sustainable, and it doesn’t actually do much, other than leave us worn down and powerless.

Instead, we need to participate in and support local, grassroots efforts that are addressing systems problems and that acknowledge the shared responsibility for the multiple crises we face. We’ve been trying the top-down approach for the past several decades at least, and it hasn’t been working for a long while now. We have to dig in and start small, local, spread out. We have to care for ourselves and our communities as we lean into this hard work, and that demands honesty about the complexity of the problems we face. It also requires us to get clear about the problems that most light us up.

We treat our politics like an athletic event where there are clear and defined winners and losers, and while that is sometimes the case, if you’ve lived for even a little bit, you know that few things in life produce clear winners and losers. That more often, the consequences of our actions and policies impact us all in foreseen and unforeseen ways because as the Duwamish Chief Si’ahl said, “humankind has not woven the web of life, we are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

I don’t know what the answers are from here, but I think part of the solution is to begin recognizing how interconnected we all are and how our collective decisions and policies have long-ranging ripple effects that must be addressed. We must begin listening to local people who have been in the trenches of the particular problem we’re called to and to seek out the people like the native people of the Great Plains who instinctively knew that the wolves played an integral role in the health of all life.

Bob Paine was one of the scientists profiled in The Serengeti Rules and, in fact, is credited with developing the keystone species concept. Of that time in the 1960s that the documentary focuses on, Paine said:

What made this group [of scientists] so special is that each of us has a pretty private part of the world, some large, some small, which we understand and love. To know something intimately one recognizes change, and much of the secret of ecology today is to not only acknowledge change, but to begin to factor out causes. Why is the world we know so well changing?

I think part of the work ahead is to understand and love a particular part of the world, whether that’s a particular corner of the natural world, a particular issue that lights you up, a particular relationship or community you feel drawn to, or some combination of those, so that we can see what is changing and better understand what is needed to help instead of ignoring our interconnectedness to our own peril - as individuals, as humans, and to the more-than-human-world we’re connected with and dependent on.

Rants and Raves

👍 I planted lots of the garden this week, and I am ready for the season ahead of early mornings spent working out in my happy place.

👍 I sat on the couch and read nearly this whole book for Mother’s Day. Highly recommend - both the sitting on the couch all day and the book.

👎 Thanks to working lots in the garden this week, I found three ticks on me. I label ticks like this when I find a tick on one of us, and I made up another batch of this spray (it seems like we usually go through about two batches a season) to leave by the back door to spritz ourselves (and Wendell) with each time we head outside.

Stuff Worth Sharing This Week

* “Climate action was ‘for the children’ in the 1990s. ‘We’re not doing this for the children,’ Kate Larsen, an energy analyst at the Rhodium Group, told me after the event. ‘We’re doing this for us!’” A depressing, but necessary read, especially as you think about midterms ahead.

* I’m increasingly mesmerized by the world beneath our feet, especially since I’ve been digging in it the past few weeks. Read this to catch some of my obsession.

* On pro-life voters, I wrote a little rant a few years ago at the end of this post.

Cheers to wondering about unforeseen consequences in the days ahead,

Sara

“Without attachments, no life.” This is how Andreas Weber begins his book Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, which I am slowly working my way through like a dense spring salad that is full of life and nutrition, but hard to chew nonetheless. I underlined that line three times and put three exclamation points above it because it reaffirmed something I’ve long had a problem with in the yoga and Buddhist circles that I seem to frequent: the idea that the solution to our suffering is to detangle ourselves from all of our attachments.

The first of the Three Poisons in Buddhism is upadana, typically translated as attachment or clinging; Buddhist teaching says that upadana keeps us suffering. In my yoga teacher training, we had to pick one of the yamas, which are the ethical rules according to yoga philosophy, to work with over the course of our training. I read somewhere that the yamas are the “don’t do these” guidelines to a life well lived. I picked (or more accurately, it picked me) aparigraha, which is typically translated as “non-attachment” or “non-grasping.” I spent nearly a year focusing on this concept, and, honestly, I was nearly as angsty about it when yoga teacher training was over as I was when it started, which probably has something to teach me in and of itself.

Aparigraha was (is) so difficult for me because it is precisely my attachments in my life that bring me so much joy: my relationships with my people, my place, the things I care passionately about. In yoga and Buddhist philosophy, the word I’ve seen most often associated with attachment is what these teachings recommend we do with our attachments: surrender them. I don’t want to surrender them because my attachments hold so much (all?) of the good stuff in my life.

For example, I don’t like all twelve year-olds, but I love the particular twelve year-old Jasper version that I get to live with every day. While I appreciate all gardens, I’m attached to and love my specific garden best. I love trees, but I’m attached to a handful of them that are special to me that I pass each and every day. The best part is that, in my attachment to the particulars, I have a larger capacity for love and empathy for all twelve year-olds or gardens or trees or fill-in-the-blank.

I’ve read enough Buddhist and yogic philosophy to know that, when they’re talking about non-attachment, they are probably talking about attachment gone awry - too much of it becomes clingy, possessive, and greedy. I’m probably being willfully difficult just because I don’t like this teaching, but it still comes off sounding to me like “you can’t get hurt if you don’t get too close to anyone or anything,” which, you know, is true. But also: what kind of life is that?

Wendell Berry centers his beautiful Jefferson Lecture (go listen to the whole thing) around the idea that “it all turns on affection,” and by that, he means that good living arises out of affection for ourselves, our communities, and our places. He calls us to be people “motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that [we] want to preserve it and remain in it.” Affection and care don’t work in generalities, though. Affection requires specifics, it requires knowledge and wisdom, and it requires time and commitment.

Affection, I think, requires healthy attachment. When we commit to learning about ourselves, our people, and our particular places, affection flows from that posture of curiosity, openness, and, yes, attachment.

Back to Weber who goes on to say:

From cell division to child rearing, we can understand all processes in the biosphere as processes of relationship—and we can learn from them. In these processes, two different positions must be brought into balance such that something altogether new emerges, something that both contains and completely redefines everything that preceded it. This connection of two (or more) different positions in a common cause—one that remains full of contradictions—is perhaps the most general definition of an ecosystem. It is also the precise description of loving attachment.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we miss by only platforming one perspective - by acting like there is only one way to understand a concept, especially an ancient spiritual one. By consistently associating attachment with a need for surrender, what might we be missing? What if, instead, we leaned into curiosity about our loving attachments? What if we noticed how our particular attachments help us to better sympathize or even empathize with others? How might we live differently if we opened our eyes to how the foundation of the whole thing is relationship and attachment, as Weber claims?

Rants and raves

👍 Long spring walks with Wendell.

👍 This framing of connection and control was somehow both mind-blowing and so obvious.

👍 Sleeping in on the front-end. Grant and I have had some heavy stuff to deal with these last few months outside of our little family, and, accordingly, we’re just kind of operating at what feels like a low level of exhaustion all the time. So for the past few weeks, we’ve been encouraging each other to sleep in on the front-end because we can’t do it in the morning. The heavy stuff is still heavy, but we’re a bit better equipped for it when we’re as well-rested as possible.

👎 Biden’s reversal on drilling. What a missed opportunity to use the Russian invasion to demonstrate to people how getting off fossil fuels is the best defense spending there is!

Stuff worth sharing

* How do we get this in the inbox of everybody that leads people? I also found a new category of adulting scripts thanks to this piece: phrases to eliminate from your vocabulary. Entry #1 = “kids these days...”

* John Haidt with a piece I’ll be thinking about for months.

* I came across this, and it was just what I needed this spring week:

Cheers to thinking about your attachments in the week ahead!

Sara

For my birthday last year, the kids gave me a giant yoga mat. I was using it the other day and realized again how much I love it because it is so roomy that I almost have to work to fall off of it. When I roll out my huge yoga mat, I feel like I have all the room in the world. I don’t have to restrict or restrain myself.

A few weeks ago, I had my first in-person work event since before the pandemic, and I had to wear business attire. I put on a suit and threw a toddler-style fit at how uncomfortable it was. I wore something else, and then once the event was over, I spent a few hours going through my closet and donating everything that was too small or made me feel cramped. My uncomfortable clothes tantrum reminded me of Laura’s must-read post years ago about the tyranny of tight pants.

I read this a few years ago:

And I’ve thought about it ever since. What would it be like to have a routine baggy enough to live in? That sounds amazing.

But it isn’t just clothes and routines and yoga mats. I’ve grown sick of anything that feels like I have to bite my tongue or restrict myself. I know that part of being an adult means that you have to restrain yourself at times, but I can’t help but think that our world would be better if more of us (especially of the non-a*****e variety) took up more space and let our full selves hang all the way out.

From a young age, I’ve been rewarded for hard work, competence, and general “good girl-ness.” These days, I think all of those things are vastly overrated in our culture, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t benefits to those things; just that I don’t think they’re the peak of human achievement that I’ve been led to believe.

However.

The tentacles of those values run deep and untangling them will probably take the rest of my life (and then some). A thing I’ve been doing as a way of dismantling some of these achievement-obsessed identities is to ask myself: could I make this thing a little roomier? Could I give myself some more space? Could I try doing this thing a little softer? Could I do this thing with a little more ease? Could I let good enough be good enough?

If we are, as I believe, made good from the very beginning, we have to let go of the idea that our worth comes from what we do instead of who we inherently are. Asking myself if I could make the roomier, gentler choice helps remind me of my own inherent worth – and the magical, mysterious thing is that kindness toward myself spills over to how I treat others too. 

We think that we have to push ourselves harder to accomplish our goals or beat ourselves up to motivate ourselves, but the science of self-compassion is really helpful here. Actual research shows that more self-compassion does the following: increases motivation, boosts happiness, improves body image, enhances self-worth, fosters resilience, and decreases stress and anxiety.

The queen of self-compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff, writes

This nurturing quality [of self-compassion] allows us to be less concerned with what is happening in our experience—whether it’s painful, difficult, challenging, or disappointing—and to be more focused on how we’re relating to it. We learn to be with ourselves in a new way. Rather than being lost in and engulfed by our pain, we’re compassionate to ourselves because we’re in pain. The care and concern that we extend to ourselves allows us to feel safe and accepted. When we open our hearts to what is, it generates a level of warmth that helps heal our wounds.

When I teach about the need for self-compassion, I always feel like I’m getting some side eyes. We’re so stuck in the muck of self-criticism and hyper individualism that we think it’s a weakness to cut ourselves a bit of slack, to lighten up, to ease up.

I like to tell students two stories about a young boy that comes home with a D on his math test:

In the first story, the boy’s dad berates him when the boy shows him the test, yelling at him that he is a failure, asking how he could have been so stupid, saying how he’ll never amount to anything.

In the second story, the boy’s dad sits down with him to talk about the test. He asks if he studied for the test. He asks how he can help support him to do better the next time. He reminds him that he loves him and that everyone makes mistakes.

Now everyone that I’ve ever told this story to has been appalled at the first dad and cheered on the second dad, but think about the way you speak to yourself. My bet is that you’re much more like the first dad when you talk to yourself than you are the second. What if you tried being roomier, softer, more tender - more like the second dad - with yourself? I figure I’ve tried the harsh critic way for around 30 years or so, so it’s worth a shot trying the other way for at least a decade?

Rants and raves

👍 I gave up Instagram (and Facebook, but that isn’t that big of a deal for me) for Lent. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this at some point, but wowzers was that a great decision.

👎 My senator this week.

👎A million deaths from Covid milestone that the US passed this week. More than the Civil War in half the time. I can’t help but agree with Peter:

Stuff worth sharing this week

* I’ve referenced this article in a half a dozen conversations in the last week. Don’t let the title dissuade you from reading. It explains so much about where we are if you ask me.

* NPR correspondent, Tim Mak’s reporting from Ukraine and his morning update threads.

* Discovered this practice this week, and it arrived just on time. 10/10 highly recommend.

Cheers to making roomier, easier, softer choices in the week ahead,

Sara

I’ve written about systems problems here before, but watching Dopesick had me thinking about it in a little more ruthless way. Dopesick is a Hulu documentary based on the book by the same name by Beth Macy about how the under regulation and mislabeling of OxyContin due to falsifying studies and outright bribery by the drug’s manufacturer led to the opioid crisis.

The film and book tell the story about how Purdue Pharma, the company that manufactured and marketed OxyContin, defended themselves, as it became more and more apparent how addictive the drug was, by focusing on the narrative that the problem wasn’t with the drug itself, but that the problems were coming from individuals abusing the drug. There are several scenes in the film where Richard Sackler, the architect of the company’s most egregious lies and manipulations during the rise of Oxy, instructs his attorneys to “hammer the abusers,” keeping the focus on individuals instead of the addictive properties of his drug.

Here’s the thing with Sackler’s argument: it isn’t completely false. It’s just very incomplete and refuses to acknowledge any of his company’s responsibility in the wave of addiction caused by OxyContin. My very rough graph below isn’t based on anything but my own research on OxyContin and addiction, and this is my rough split of responsibility according to my own judgement (i.e. this is obviously not scientific):

Purdue misrepresented data, but then the FDA didn’t look at the data as closely as they should have. To me, Purdue and the FDA bare the brunt of the responsibility. Doctors and pharmacies were acting out of trust in the FDA’s process, but they also were on the frontlines to see the warning signs from the beginning. Individuals do bare some responsibility in the situation, but as there is a very strong tie between trauma and addiction, many of the people who eventually got addicted to opioids probably also had some deeper traumas that they were using an extremely addictive substance (that their doctors prescribed to them and told them was safe) to deal with.

Once I noticed this pattern in Dopesick, I started seeing it everywhere. People, especially people in power, want to blame individuals because that is easier and doesn’t require anything from them versus tackling the systems that led to or exacerbated the problem in the first place. A quick Google search of the news demonstrates this phenomenon all over the place:

* The pandemic has exposed all sorts of systems failures (our healthcare system, how we think about work, public health communication, social media, to name a few), but instead of sitting back and looking at the big picture, the news - and our conversations - are filled with stories blaming individuals instead of doing the much harder work of rethinking the foundations of these systems that led to the failures we’re now seeing all over the place.

* Every time a politician proposes more programs to help average Americans, you hear people (almost always Republicans) complain about so-called “welfare queens” (which is another instance of political opportunism instead of actual facts) versus looking at the systems that keep people in poverty and the relatively simple policy choices that we could make that are proven to help.

* The NRA spends millions in lobbying lawmakers every year to keep Congress from passing saner gun laws (even though the vast majority of Americans - 80 - 90 percent! - favor common sense gun laws like background checks, an assault weapons ban, and preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns). Then there’s another school shooting, and the NRA and its cronies blame the individual with the gun (“guns don’t kill people, people kill people”) instead of looking at how easy the system makes it for individuals to obtain guns in the first place.

* The fossil fuel industry funds marketing campaigns to encourage individual responses to climate action because that keeps the heat off of them to reduce emissions, something that would do far more to alleviate the oncoming climate disaster than individuals recycling or eating less commercially-farmed animal products. But if they keep individuals feeling guilty about their consumption, it keeps the pressure off of the industry as it spends millions to block meaningful climate action.

* Republicans use abortion to get voters in line because women who want or need abortions are easy targets (and because they want power over women’s bodies). But they don’t actually care about reducing the number of abortions because the data is very clear on what policies reduce abortions - and Republicans by in large don’t support systemic policies that decrease actual abortions. They would rather keep attacking individual women versus setting policy that would create conditions in which less women need abortions.

* People are crippled by college debt, but instead of using that as a signal that the higher education system is broken, we all just keep participating in this same cycle and blaming the individuals themselves for going into so much debt.

* Companies and politicians celebrate International Women’s Day instead of actually paying women what they deserve or passing legislation that would help balance out centuries of oppression and inequity. (Same goes for Black History Month, Indigenous People’s Month, and so on of course.)

A way people in power stay in power (whether that’s the executives at Purdue Pharma or politicians or billionaires) is by gaslighting us into thinking our problems are just about us not working hard enough or being too sensitive or not being smart enough instead of taking the time to see that so many of our problems look like my pie graph above. Yes, we bare some responsibility (and in some cases, most of the responsibility), but there are often - if not always - other factors at play.

It goes back to the idea I wrote about here about being a jerk or a doormat. We keep thinking that our options available to us are dualistic when, really, there are a plethora of solutions needed and available to us. But getting stuck thinking that the problems we face are just because we’re too much this or not enough that keep us from acting in ways to confront the systems working against us, our communities, and our places. And by allowing ourselves to stay mired in arguing about individual problems instead of systemic ones, the forces in power stay in power and keep playing the same game.

Rants and raves

👍 It’s snowing as I write this. The fact that I’m not mad about that is a sign that I need more wintering.

👍 An entire Substack dedicated to, as my friend Nan who sent it to me said, “the mind fuckery of the beauty industry?” YES PLEASE.

👎 The truth of this Tweet won’t get out of my head:

Stuff worth sharing

* My long-delayed what I’m learning and loving lately post over on the neglected blog. I love this practice and had missed it. I don’t like to should people, but I really think you’d be glad if you take up this practice for yourself.

* Another Atlantic headline that sounds like the conversations Grant and I keep having: The grown-ups are losing it.

* I wonder if we’ll look back and see this Ukrainian initiative as part of the glue that helped hold the country together during this impossible time. (It also has me imagining the ways in which we could incentivize culture-making instead of spinning our wheels fear-mongering about our refusal to face our history).

Cheers to asking yourself, is this a me-problem or a system-problem?, in the week ahead!

Sara

A few years ago, I read Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations. It was beautiful. I remember having a book hangover for weeks after finishing it, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what it was about right now unless I cheated and googled the synopsis to tickle my memory. But I do remember this one part clearly:

Working at my desk one day, I hear a great mob of blue jays sounding the alarm: a predator is in their midst. Minutes pass, and their rage shows no signs of dissipating, so I step outside….But I see nothing in the sky, nothing, in the trees, nothing on the utility pole at the corner of the yard, nothing on the power lines.

Eventually, she discovers a long rat snake in the back of the yard that the blue jays are warning the whole yard about. I do remember that I was sitting on the couch by the fire when I read that part, and I was so captivated by it that I read the whole section out loud to Grant. We were both intrigued, but didn’t think much of it.

A few months later, it had moved from reading-by-the-fire season to working-in-the-garden season. Grant was moving wheel barrows of wood chips, and I was pulling weeds or at least trying to look like I was pulling weeds to avoid doing any more loads of wood chips. All of the sudden, Grant took off toward the chicken coop and, by the time I followed him, he was throwing a big stick up into the tree line adjacent to where the coop was at the time. A huge red-tailed hawk took off out of the tree and quickly flew up and away. I looked at Grant, confused about how he knew there was a hawk in the yard. He said, “I could hear the blue jays going nuts and remembered the part of that book you read me months ago and wondered if something was scaring the blue jays.”

Since that time, we’ve come to always trust the blue jays’ warning signal. They get very loud and about the time I start to get annoyed about all the racket, I realize what I’m hearing and go check on the chickens. More times than not, there is a hawk up in the trees somewhere. The hawks eat our chickens, so I always thank the blue jays for their help before going on my way.

I am a very amateur birder, but I do know that most backyard birders don’t like blue jays. They supposedly tend to steal food from the more “preferred” and rarer songbirds; bird stores even sell jay-proof feeders. I had heard the stereotype that blue jays were mean, but that was about the extent of my blue jay knowledge before Late Migrations.

But since the lesson from Renkl, I’ve come to love the blue jay. You can’t deny that she’s gorgeous, but what really gets me is that she takes such good care of her community - her entire community, not just the ones that look like her. She surely has a bit of self-interest in her warning call, but it seems to me that she is telling everyone in the vicinity that danger is present. She doesn’t seem to expect anything in return. She doesn’t bolt when she sees danger; she sticks around and sounds the alarm. The call itself can be a bit obnoxious, especially when there are ten or more birds doing it simultaneously, which is usually the case at our place. My birding book calls the call “a loud jeer.” I’m assuming that they have realized that they have to be annoying to make sure everyone hears their warning.

I’ve been wondering if we could take a cue from the blue jay and get a little louder and more annoying about sounding the alarm on the things that are hurting our communities - and, of course, not just the communities that look like us.

The blue jays’ warning works because the blue jay isn’t trying to save the whole forest of songbirds and other easy prey; it works because they are just trying to warn the more-than-human beings (and heck, maybe the humans too - I don’t pretend to know the minds of the blue jay) in a small area where the blue jay lives that danger is present and to be on guard. It works because they get quite loud and annoying, so that it is very difficult to ignore them unless you’re really distracted. It works because they are looking out for everybody and not just themselves.

I’ve been totally sucked into the news about the war in Ukraine over the last two weeks, and, while there are many, many things to write about that atrocity and what we (especially Americans) should be learning about our reaction toward it, I keep coming back to the blue jay and what she might have to tell me.

I think she might be telling us something like: find a small place to care for - not just for yourself or your kids or your friends, but for all beings that call that place home. Place doesn’t have to be a physical space necessarily; it could be a certain injustice that lights you up. By working to make it better for all, you’ll make it better for yourself and those you love in the process. The blue jay might encourage us to be as loud and obnoxious as the danger warrants. She’ll tell us to just ignore those who will try to hush or diminish us.

I think there is certainly a place for big, collective action, but I think we let ourselves off the hook too much by waiting for some epic fix to our many problems. It’s so daunting to think about the scope of the issues we’re facing, but perhaps we could take a cue from the blue jay to see what’s worth worrying about in our own (figurative or literal) backyards, get annoying about it, and warn the others.

Last week, Wendell and I were throwing sticks in the backyard. We’ve been having a few of those gorgeous days here lately where you can smell spring coming, so we were soaking it up. I heard the blue jays going nuts up toward the house, and, sure enough, as I came closer to the coop, a hawk flew out of the tree above me. The moment felt like grace: I thanked Renkl for her writing and the new insight into the blue jays, I thanked the blue jays for their warning, I wished the hawk well and asked if he might consider eating some of the 763 mice that we have in our barn instead of eating our chickens.

Rants and raves

👍 I bought this print for myself for Valentine’s Day, and I love it. Her shop is full of good stuff.

👍 Christena Cleveland’s God Is a Black Woman lived up to my high expectations. I accidentally read it just after finishing God Is Red, which now that I’ve finished both was definitely no accident.

👍 I’m hosting a spring equinox rage party. You locals should come. You non-Hoosiers should host your own!

👎 [Trigger warning on both of these links]. The pictures and videos coming out of Mariupol are horrifying, but eerily similar to what Putin did in Syria - we shouldn’t be surprised that this is how he wages war.

Stuff Worth Sharing This Week

* I couldn’t love this Courtney Martin newsletter more - and the comments! So good. Martin, perhaps channeling the blue jay a bit, writes, “In caring for a little piece of earth, one rejects the idea that scale is all that matters, or that all worthwhile labor is paid labor. One creates unruly beauty for its own sake. In creating small, weird projects, one reclaims one’s energy away from destruction, plays like a wise child, sheds illusions of perfection. One finds an outlet for the unspoken and unbranded.”

* On fools.

* Speaking of fools, I would like to put this billboards everywhere:

Cheers to channeling your inner blue jay,

Sara

The developer that I wrote about here came back with a very slightly modified proposal that he presented to the city Planning Commission last night. It’s no accident that he waited until late February in Indiana in the middle of a holiday week, I’m sure. We neighbors were much better prepared this time: we split up our complaints ahead of time, we strategized about which issues should be brought up in which order, we had an attorney. The Planning Commission members barely listened to our issues, cut us off repeatedly but didn’t enforce any time limit on the developer, glossed over our questions, and voted 6-0 to move forward with the development as is, which will be a disaster for our surrounding ecosystem and watershed, to say nothing of the infrastructure impacts on roads and schools. It was honestly one of the grossest things I’ve witnessed in real life.

Also yesterday, the Indiana Senate Education Committee passed this awful anti-CRT-type bill similar to what you’ve been hearing about all over the country. In Texas, Governor Abbott signed a letter (conveniently side-stepping the legislature, which seems…illegal) that calls on citizens to report parents of trans kids. Later today, I have to go to my local library to support the librarians because anonymous people are demanding that they ban books.

Then I woke up this morning to the news that Putin was bombing Kyiv and invading all of Ukraine, threatening nuclear war to any who stand in his way.

Obviously, my frustrations pale in comparison to the world seemingly on the brink of World War III. But, as I often say: two (or seven) can be true at same time. It seems like everyone around me is facing similar heaviness and exhaustion, especially as we approach the two year anniversary of the pandemic.

I don’t know what to tell myself, let alone anyone else. But I do know that it’s important to feel our feelings and name what is. I’ve also been learning that there are some things that work for me better than others, and that I have to figure out what works best for me - not anyone else.

I woke up today at 3am writing angry emails in my head and couldn’t go back to sleep. When I get angry, I feel like I’m almost filled up to the brim with energy. I can’t sit still. I have trouble concentrating. After Grant and the kids left for school, what I really wanted to do was take Wendell for a long walk or maybe go back to bed. But instead, I got out the kettle bells, put on some very loud music, and lifted heavy things for awhile.

I’ve been learning (and relearning - it takes me awhile) that I don’t always act in my own best interest. So even though a walk or a nap sounded good to me, what was best for me today was to lift something heavy for awhile and yell along to some ragey music because I needed to get in my body, feel the anger, and then let it move at least a bit. The nap or a walk wouldn’t have been bad choices; they just wouldn’t have been as good of choices. It’s taken me 40+ years to figure out that the best thing for me when I’m pissed is to lift heavy weights and have a good sweat. When I’m sad, journaling, cooking, and snuggling are my go-tos. When I’m stressed, I always feel better after a nap or yoga nidra. When I’m overwhelmed, I like to get lost in a book or a good show. When I’m confused, a walk outside preferably with Grant or a friend to verbally process. When I’m anxious, some breathwork, comfort food, or just getting outside helps.

But I don’t want you to read any of those things as prescriptive because they are a list of what works for me in this season. I’m not saying that any of it should work for you. I’m trying to say that you do need to figure out what works best for you in various situations. It will take experimentation, and it requires that you build some trust in yourself to tune into what works best for you instead of what works best for anyone else. It will change depending on what season of life you’re in.

Social media, especially, is full of morning routines that no human could consistently accomplish, glamorous-looking workout routines shared by people who get paid to workout, perfectly plated meals by people who get paid to develop recipes, and a long list of other shoulds flawlessly curated, usually in hopes of you buying something. I’m not saying that you should get off social media (you do you!) or even that the people selectively curating their lives should stop what they’re doing (I do it), but we should definitely be honest with ourselves every time we get on these platforms about what is actually going on.

Living seasonally has taught me that I’m not always the best judge of what is good for me - at least in the near term. I don’t like other people telling me what to do. I love life and food and celebrating. Generally, sobriety (in the original sense of the word) is not my strong suit. I’m an Enneagram 7, after all. But I have lived long enough to know that I also can’t just go around pursuing pleasure all the time. Living in tune with the seasons isn’t always terribly convenient and I don’t always want to do it, but the benefits so far outweigh the costs that I’ve seen, after 15+ years of trying to live this way, that it is so much better for me - physically, spiritually, emotionally. The benefits of living seasonally continually remind me to look for what’s good for future Sara and to trust my deepest knowing (I am nature, after all).

We all have different and particular strengths and struggles, and so - of course! - we all require different solutions. It is probably helpful to read and hear about someone else’s solutions, but we need to do a better job of tuning into our own needs instead of assuming that there is a one-size-fits-all solution for pretty much anything. And we also need to stop listening to teachers of any stripe who tell us that there are one-sized-fits-all solutions and that they have them.

Instead listen to teachers who are constantly reminding you to tune inward, to see what aligns with your values, to trust yourself. More than ever, we need to care for ourselves in the ways that work best for us. When we trust and care for ourselves, we have a better foundation to do the work we’re here to do, which for me, right now, in this season, looks like calling state legislators, writing letters to the editors, and showing up to boring ass meetings.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* I’m following Christopher Miller, Christo Grozev, and Julia Ioffe on Twitter for Ukraine news in case you want to follow good reporting.

* I loved this interview (and such good questions!) with Heather Havrilesky. So many great one-liners, like this one:

Nothing feels more disgusting than self-loathing, and nothing makes you hotter than self-acceptance—if only inside your own mind. But what other place matters more?

* I love this meditation when I need a boost of self-trust.

* Grant’s text message to me this morning seemed worth sharing based on the texts and DMs I’ve been receiving this week:

Cheers to tuning into what works for you in the week ahead!

Sara

The kids and I are listening to the Emily of New Moon series, and we keep talking about this one scene at the end of the first book. Mr. Carpenter is Emily’s curmudgeonly school teacher. Emily wants to be a writer, and she finally lets Mr. Carpenter see some of her poems and short stories, and he harshly critiques most of her work line by line. She is heartbroken, thinking that she isn’t any good because she actually respects Mr. Carpenter so she can’t brush him off. Here’s the end of the scene from the book:

Her eyes brimmed with tears—her lips quivered. She could not help it. Pride was hopelessly submerged in the bitterness of her disappointment. She felt exactly like a candle that somebody had blown out."What are you crying for? demanded Mr. Carpenter.Emily blinked away tears and tried to laugh."I—I'm sorry—you think it's no good—" she said.Mr. Carpenter gave the desk a mighty thump."No good! Didn't I tell you there were ten good lines? Jade, for ten righteous men Sodom had been spared.""Do you mean—that—after all—" The candle was being relighted again."Of course, I mean. If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you'll write ten times ten—if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though—and don't imagine you're a genius, either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there's something trying to speak through you—but you'll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it.

We keep talking about this scene because the kids realized that Mr. Carpenter is Emily’s biggest fan but also her fiercest critic because he knows what she is capable of. We’ve been talking about what a gift Mr. Carpenter gave Emily of really acknowledging her calling honestly and authentically, and, because we’re farther along in the second book now, we can see how that scene described above becomes a lamppost for Emily for the rest of her life.

Probably because I’ve already been thinking about this phenomenon, I’ve been noticing the Mr. Carpenters of the world all around lately. Grant and I are watching Friday Night Lights, and Coach Taylor pulls Smash, his star wide receiver, aside to tell him that he believes in his ability to play football at the highest levels. You can see how Smash lights up at Coach Taylor’s faith in him because Coach T doesn’t hand out many compliments. In this recent podcast episode, Martin Shaw talks about how Robert Bly (RIP) took him under his wing and changed the trajectory of his whole life by seeing something in Shaw that he hadn’t yet seen in himself. At the end of that same episode, Shaw offers his guest David Keenan a “Mr. Carpenter moment” that brought me to tears. In my writing group, one of the women believes so strongly and specifically in the calling of another woman’s poetry and art that it is a beautiful thing to witness and play a small part in.

As a mother, I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon a lot when it comes to our kids. Our job as parents, I think, is to be relentlessly on their side when it comes to what they want to do in the world (within reason, obviously). Parents are really too close to be Mr. Carpenters. We care too much, and we can’t be ruthlessly honest without risking breaking their spirits because we’re their parents. We need coaches, teachers, and other adults in their lives to speak into their calling in a way that is authentic, clearsighted, and genuine.

I get squirmy about calling because it’s become all packaged up as something else to be sold or available only to certain people, but I still think the idea of calling is true for each of us in some capacity. We need Mr. Carpenters to see it in us and give us confidence to pursue it.

One of my favorite things about the holidays is the opportunity for good questions and the storytelling that ensues. I like to go into each gathering with a big question for everyone and challenge myself beforehand to come up with a question that will really get people talking and sharing. This year, I think I’m going to ask about my loved ones about their Mr. Carpenters, but first: I’d love to hear about your Mr. Carpenters in the comments!

And while you’re reflecting on it, I bet it would make your Mr. Carpenter’s whole year if you reached out to them and told them what their encouragement meant to you. You have more power than you know to make someone’s whole day.

Rants and raves

👍 As a fellow lifelong procrastinator, I appreciated this list. I also love all of the end-of-the-year reflection posts, so please send me your favorites!

👍 I am taking the rest of the year off from my day job. I desperately need a break and also realize what a privilege it is to have ability and stability to take time off. I read this from Hanif Abdurraqib: “Rest as an actual requirement for my ability to embrace the world at the volume that my emotional makeup often requires.” I can’t stop thinking about that line. As an HSP, I probably need a little extra margin, a little more buffer than the average person in order to show up in the world in the way that I want to, and I want to show up as someone who embraces the world, to steal Abdurraqib’s words.

👎 I've been under-the-weather for the last week or so, and I’m reminded how frustrating it is that my body seems to say “screw you” at the beginning of any extended period of time off. I know it’s actually telling me that I’m doing too much, pushing too hard, not resting enough and, because I don’t listen, she forces me to. I’m annoyed that I have to keep learning this lesson by force instead of doing a better job of practicing what I preach about rest and renewal.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* Virginia’s jean science part one is totally my catnip: the history of pants, actually testing over 50 pairs of jeans, and then sharing her insights along the way. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the the (now) obvious realization that the problem isn’t with our bodies; the problem is with the whole beauty industrial complex behind fashion. I’m so pumped for the rest of the series.

* If you don’t already get Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files, fix that by signing up. This response was so beautiful that I printed it out and hung it by my desk.

* I have new life goals after reading this amazing obituary.

Cheers to acknowledging your own Mr. Carpenters in the weeks ahead!

Sara

P.S. Share your Mr. Carpenter stories in the comments - it would make my Christmas to read through them!

First, two stories:

The neighbor. This is a much longer story, but I’m trying to stick to the basics for the sake of brevity (never a strength of mine!). Over the course of several weeks, our neighbor’s friend’s dog who visits often had snapped or snarled at me, Wendell, and Maeve at various times. It seemed pretty harmless, but the snarling was scary. Then a few weeks ago, the dog ran up behind me and Wendell. I screamed. Probably a bit more loudly than the situation warranted, but I scare easily. Grant went into protector-mode and yelled at the dog to go home and in the direction of our neighbor and his friend to keep the dog away. We continued our walk into the “back 40,” as we call it. Shortly after the confrontation, our neighbor came zooming up on his golf cart. Grant and I assumed he would apologize and try to set things right. Instead, he shouted at us for several minutes and things got quite intense. Eventually, he calmed down, we explained the backstory, and things ended up as resolved as these kinds of situations can get.

The trail rockstar. I was running on the trail earlier this week. I don’t enjoy running so much as I enjoy having run, so I am not one of those happy runners you pass on the trail. I was slugging along the other day and came up behind a guy who at first I thought was on a very animated phone conversation, but then as I got closer, I realized that he was listening to music and playing along with air guitars, air drums, and also part of the audience with copious fist bumps and cheering. As I got closer, I could hear him singing very loudly; I didn’t recognize the song, but I could clearly make out all of the lyrics even with my own head phones in. And because he was quite loud and because I’m a slow runner, I could still hear him for several more minutes down the trail. I laughed to myself, happy to see (and hear) a person enjoying themselves so much seemingly without a care in the world. I turned around where I usually do, so I met him again on my way back. Or rather, I started hearing him still singing very loudly minutes before I saw him, still air guitaring and jamming with enthusiasm.

And.

This was where the connection between these two stories hit me. While I think our neighbor was pretty far out of line to jump straight to verbally attacking us, I also found myself strangely jealous - or at least quite curious - at our neighbor’s ability to own his position with no apologies or second guessing. It seemed to me like he was pissed at how Grant had handled the dog situation, and instead of even a minute of self-awareness, rode back to unleash his anger all over us. He didn’t seem to wonder if there was more to the story, or how his anger would affect our neighborly relationship, or any number of other hang-ups that regularly keep me from confronting people or situations that piss me off.

At first, I found myself appreciating trail rock star guy’s unabashed and unashamed enthusiasm for his playlist. In a similar way that I recognized from the neighbor situation, I even found myself a bit jealous of how he obviously didn’t care how he looked or if he was interrupting the tranquility of anyone else’s walk (the trail is always busy the time of morning that I was running, so there were lots of people that he had to have passed). But trail rock star guy’s antics reminded me of our neighbor, albeit in a far less confrontational way obviously.

What is it about these men that allows them to take up so much space with no apology or self-awareness? I guess part of the answer is toxic masculinity, but I’m not sure that is all of it. What is it about these two interactions that weirdly made me both angry and a little envious?

I don’t want to go around being an insensitive jerk, but I’m wondering if more of us should worry less about hurting people’s feelings as we advocate for the people, places, and causes that we care about. It seems to me that the a******s of the world aren’t walking around worried if they are being the a*****e. It’s the rest of us tiptoeing around what we really think and feel so that we don’t hurt anyone’s feelings who spend our precious energy worried about what we said or how we said it.

The danger, when I set it up like this, is to think that the only two options that are available are for me to be the a*****e or to be the doormat. But I don’t think that is the case: I think there is an entire continuum of options available to us. And I think that means that perhaps I have some things that I could learn from the men in the stories above.

I could give less caveats when I am standing up for something I care about. I could let myself be angry or passionate without apology. I don’t have to go full-tilt to the jerk side of things, but maybe the world needs more of us willing to lean into a little bit more unapologetic feistiness for the things, people, and places we care about?

Look, I even made us a very sophisticated drawing of some of our other possibilities:

Rants and raves

👍 The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Someone recommended this, but I can’t remember who. I put it on hold at the library, not knowing anything about it and obviously forgetting who had recommended it or why. Grant picked it up for me, and, honestly, had I been at the library, I probably would have reshelved it because I didn’t think I liked graphic novels (which it isn’t - it is a graphic memoir). BUT. I decided to give it a few pages. I got totally sucked in and finished it in an hour or so. I loved it, and I plan on reading all of her books now.

👍 Dopesick was really well done and heart-wrenching. I think everyone should watch it, especially since it appears the opioid crisis is just getting worse. I can’t believe Richard Sackler isn’t rotting in jail, and I say that as someone who has a ton of problems with incarceration in this country.

👍 Grant and I watched Happiest Season last year, so this year, we asked if the kids wanted to watch it with us. They both loved it, and Maeve declared it her new favorite Christmas movie. Dan Levy gives the best speech on coming out of all time (IMHO).

👎 The conservative Supreme Court justices, but especially the comments from Coney Barrett and Kavanaugh. When anti-abortion advocates have all of the foster parent needs filled in the communities they live in, I’ll be willing to listen to them. Until then, the hypocrisy, especially in light of so many of these same advocates’ actions during the ongoing pandemic, is almost too much for me.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* The Supreme Court news this week had me revisiting this piece tracing how the Religious Right played Christians into single-issue voters. (Alternately, if this interests/maddens you and you want to dig in more, you have to read Jesus and John Wayne).

* I’ve written many times about the importance of naming things. In that spirit, the conservative columnist for the WaPo is absolutely right.

* I’m leading a winter solstice retreat of sorts and would love to practice and celebrate with you!

Cheers to leaning into your unapologetic feistiness in the week ahead!

Sara

I’ve been listening to podcasts from the first few weeks of the pandemic - conversations that were recorded back in April 2020. A recurring theme of those conversations is this: the pandemic is an opportunity for a global initiation. But every teacher that I’ve been listening to spoke of the danger - back in the early days of the pandemic before the politicization of masks and vaccines - of not using the opportunity for initiation, of us missing the invitation.

It is generally accepted across many different cultures that initiations have three parts:

* The separation

* The ordeal/threshold

* The return

Covid obviously forced us out of our “normal” lives - the separation that is step one of an initiation. Then, depending on where you lived and/or how seriously you took the threat, there was (maybe still is) this liminal period of so much uncertainty - the threshold space that is the middle part of any initiation. You can see how some of us rushed to define and control the thing when really, the liminal space calls for a sitting-withness instead of a grasping ever more tightly. It calls for a sense of curiosity instead of any self-righteousness. This middle period calls for us to embrace possibility and imagination.

Most of the teachers in these podcasts that I’ve been listening to say that the hardest part for us 21st century Westerners is the return part of the initiation. We don’t lack for separation and ordeals, but we rarely make the return. We stay in this pattern of repeating steps one and two over and over again.

Martin Shaw uses an analogy of three soldiers returning from war:

Three guys go off to war. Everybody, I think by and large, would say that war, in the way that most people understand it, is an initiation. The three men come back. One of them commits suicide. One of them becomes an alcoholic. And one of them decides to do some work with their soul. But they all had the initiation.

War is always an initiatory opportunity, but not all soldiers finish the cycle of initiation. A pandemic is an initiatory opportunity, but many will not take the opportunity offered. Not everyone will stay in the threshold place to honestly confront themselves, and even fewer of us will integrate what we learned from the separation and liminal spaces to be able to properly return to share our hard-fought wisdom with the community.

Our pastor preached at another church last week, so she asked me to preach in her absence. I was excited until I saw the text for the week: Mark 13. It’s all fire and brimstone stuff. I was not thrilled about figuring out how to talk about those passages that have been misused so egregiously over the years to stoke people’s fears and goad them into submission. But then I started delving into the etymology of apocalypse, whose original meaning is “collapse, unveiling, renewal.” I pulled on that string, trying to connect this idea of apocalypse with the times we find ourselves in (you can listen to it here).

Covid has certainly been an unveiling, revealing the underbelly of so many of our systems and ways of living. Like an initiation, an apocalypse is an ending and a beginning. The death of something, so that something new can be birthed. These apocalyptic times are an invitation to, as I said at church on Sunday, “feel all of it, to ask what it has to teach us, to  be present and awake, and, then, to imagine what could be - what could be birthed - for ourselves, our communities, and our world as we move forward into it.”

Part of my grief (and rage) over these months has been that it feels like we’re missing the invitation altogether. We are stuck in that first phase of separation. You see this if you just read the news or look at most of our elected leaders. Most CEOs are talking about “getting back to normal” instead of grasping this opportunity to completely reimagine how we do things.

But one thing I’ve been learning from this threshold space is that the top-down way of growth and change doesn’t seem to be working. We’ve tried it for at least a few centuries at this point. The new way forward, I think, will have to be from the ground up instead.

This is the best invitation of all: that my own individual return from this initiation and the reimagining work that little old Sara is doing is part of a larger quilt that, while many are probably missing the opportunity, there are many of us who are waking up to the invitation, crafting our squares in a beautiful tapestry, among our particular people and in our particular places.

Rants and raves

👍 Thanksgiving is coming! Here are some past round-ups. I’m not cooking much this year, but I will definitely still lose myself to looking at my favorite food blogger’s menus.

👍 The kids and I finished Emily of New Moon on audiobook last week, and I loved it reading it with them so much. It led to so many great conversations together. A related rave: the library’s free Hoopla app, which is where we listen to all of our audiobooks.

👍 Speaking of initiation and Martin Shaw, I wish I could buy every one of you subscribers a copy of this for Christmas.

👎 This:

Stuff worth sharing this week

* I don’t really have any way of properly summing this up other than to say it brought together so many different strands of things I’ve been wrestling with lately, and I’m envious of how well Antonia does that (and grateful).

* Saving Courtney Martin’s Notes on Rejection to send to friends when they need it. You should too.

* “…to be a woman in America involves paying a steep fine for simply trying to live.” Read the whole thing to see how it’s the water we’re swimming in.

Tis the season for

working by the Jøtul and the Christmas tree

Cheers to wondering where you are in this initiation in the weeks ahead!

Sara

patriarkhēs, from the Greek, πατριάρχης. Formed from the compound of patria ("lineage, descent, family, fatherland"), patēr (“father”), and arkhē ("domination, authority, sovereignty").

From patriarkhēs, we get “patriarchy,” which, etymology tells us, means to sit under the rule or authority of fathers. The root of our matriarchy is similar, except with matria- obviously meaning mother instead.

I was listening to this podcast a few weeks ago when Stephen Jenkinson, the guest, pointed out that he has never heard the word “matriarchy” used derisively, but that he hears “patriarchy” used that way all the time. It was a bit of an aside comment, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I use “the patriarchy” as a catch-all word for all sorts of systemic (and individual) ills in the world, so I’m as guilty as anyone of this practice.

As I’ve reflected on why this comment struck me so forcefully, I’ve been wondering about the following:

* Patriarchy isn’t inherently bad or evil; just as matriarchy isn’t. Sitting under the authority of (good) fathering and (good) mothering is an important part of an individual’s and a culture’s growing up and maturing.

* So fathering is good and needed, just as mothering is. Perhaps we need to differentiate between the ways in which patriarchy has abused and neglected its responsibilities and the ways in which patriarchy is good and beneficial. In a similar way to how we have tried to differentiate toxic masculinity from non-toxic, we could name the (many) toxic forms of patriarchy and its effects on our cultures today instead of lumping all of the toxic forms together in one category and, therefore, neglecting or ignoring the ways in which sitting under the authority of fathers can be beneficial.

* Fathering and mothering aren’t determined by genetics, but are functions or roles available to all of us, no matter our gender identities. By demonizing the word “patriarchy,” have we somehow demonized fathering? And what are the downstream effects of this throwing the baby (fathering) out with the bathwater (toxic patriarchy)?

Yogis like to say “what we resist, persists.” In yin, I often use the beach ball analogy to teach this concept: the stuff we push down, numb, or in some other “offload our hurt,” is like pushing a beach ball under the water in a pool or lake. You push it down in front of you, but it pops back up somewhere else, likely at a time or place where you don’t want it to. Better to deal with it when it’s right in front of you, instead of stuffing it down or numbing it away - only for it to rear its head in ugly and unexpected ways later.

By fomenting so much resistance to The Patriarchy, have we instead just forced it underwater so that it comes up sideways, more toxic and dangerous than had we dealt with it when it was right in front of us?

This seems to explain the rise of white nationalism in so many places, the entire Trump phenomenon, as well as so much of the blowback around critical race theory, LGTBQ acceptance, and much else that you’ll see them talking about anytime you turn on cable news or see what’s trending on Twitter.

This reminded me of something I read recently from Bayo Akomolafe, a teacher who has been blowing my mind lately. He writes:

Very often systems of oppression endorse their own critique, making room for dissent, so long as this is contained within the architecture of its preferred reality. Said another way, we will often reinforce the very dynamics we are trying to defeat with our opposition.

He is saying that the system thrives on having something to resist against, so our acts of resistance backfire, by actually strengthening the system by giving it a force to react in opposition to. He seems to be saying what the yogis say: that our resistance to the toxic aspects of patriarchy keep it persisting.

I don’t know what to do with that or do about it.

But it seems important to name it nonetheless.

Raves and a rant

👍 I’ve been listening to a LOT of the Mythic Masculine podcast in the name of following my curiosity, and I have yet to find one that wasn’t worth listening to.

👍 If you haven’t already, now is the time to find fun Advent calendars. I bought this one for Jasper because he loves Haribo candy and this one for Maeve because she is weirdly obsessed with fidgets. I got a boozy one for Grant, and I’m still on the lookout for one for myself. Here is a fun list to look through.

👍 I fell off the journaling wagon for awhile, but I decided to just set a timer for 15 minutes, start off with the phrase “I wonder…”, and let my thoughts flow. Most of the time, nothing particularly insightful comes up, but it is a way of inviting my curiosity first thing in the morning that has me excited about journaling again.

👍 Mare of Easttown was so beautifully written and acted. I don’t even like crime stories generally, but this was just great art.

👍 I told my dad about three months ago in response to a text about Jasper getting vaccinated that the parents of kids under 12 “are not alright.” I’m not naïve enough to think that a simple shot will make everything better, but I can tell you that a little bit of the weight I’ve been mindlessly carrying lifted off my shoulders when I made Maeve’s Covid vaccine appointment this week.

👎 I’ve been sending out loads of book proposals for my book on living seasonally the last few weeks. The response thus far has been that my platform isn’t big enough to sell a book like mine. Rejection is never fun, but getting rejected for that reason (one you can’t much control, especially if you find the social media platforms you’re supposed to be using to build said platform problematic, to put it nicely) is a particular kind of shitty feeling.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* Virginia Sole-Smith wrote about one of my sacred cows/teachers this week, and it blew my mind in the best sort of way. I’m so curious about these issues or stories that we romanticize about how things “used to be” are in fact either very privileged or just plain wrong.

* It’s Native American Heritage Month. Celebrate by picking up one of these poetry collections. I’ve added a few to my Christmas wish list, so I’ll keep you posted.

* I’ll always read Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Cheers to wondering about what we’re resisting in the week ahead,

Sara

I keep a perler bead cow taped up on the wall above my bathroom sink. It’s an icon to remind me of the kind of loving I want to do in the world. A few years ago, Maeve was making this elaborate cow out of perler beads - those teeny tiny plastic bead things that you arrange in patterns and then iron together to create something new. We were on vacation at a house we had rented, and, unbeknownst to her, she was working on it on a wobbly table. After working on it for hours, she went to iron it together, and the whole thing crashed to the floor. She completely lost it. My first instinct was to rationalize her grief* - all the beads are right here, you can redo it, we’re on vacation, get over it, a perler bead cow isn’t worth losing your mind over, etc.

But I said none of those things. I held her, told her I was so sorry, and whispered to her to let it all out. She screamed and cried - getting progressively louder for a few minutes, until she stopped, resumed position at a more stable table, and started over. She gifted me the finished cow, and it’s been hanging on my bathroom wall ever since.

Of course, there were a hundred (thousand?) times prior to and there have been since the cow incident with my children, my husband, and loved ones when I haven’t handled their grief well. When I’ve skipped straight to sunny skies ahead or given them solutions when they just wanted to be held or any number of other rationalizations because I’m really good at those, but I keep the cow because it reminds me of who I want to be.

I also keep it where I can see it several times a day to remind me to offer this same gentleness toward myself. I was a kid who was often called overly sensitive. Heck, I’ve had employers say it to me as an adult! I remember when I was around Jasper’s age now that I finally mastered that ability to swallow my tears back down so that I could still talk. I could never (still haven’t) figured out how to keep my eyes from watering, but I learned quickly that using my contacts as an excuse covered that up, even though in hindsight, I’m sure I wasn’t fooling anyone. Having your own children is this beautiful invitation to reparent yourself too, to be gentler to your own kids in the ways you were wounded, and, in so doing, somehow healing yourself in the process.

All of this has been on my mind lately because fall is associated with grief. Sadness is more prevalent this season if we’re tuned into it. It too is an invitation - to get curious about what we need to grieve or what new layers of old griefs are resurfacing, to lean into our grief about who and what we’ve lost, to feel all of it.

I love how Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about grief in Braiding Sweetgrass:

If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again…Until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health.

Grief as a doorway to love. If we don’t grieve what needs grieving, we can’t be as fully open to love as possible. If we don’t grieve what needs grieving, we’re somehow spiritually cut off from wholeness.

I have a long list of things that I love about my yin practice, but the space it provides for me to do this hard work is at the top of that list. Americans don’t do grief well. We don’t do “big” grief well - the things we think about as worthy of grieving like a really close family death - but we’re really terrible at the so-called “smaller” griefs that we all experience after having lived for even just a bit on this planet. And we have no clue how to do communal grief (just take a look at the pandemic for exhibit A).

This season - especially, especially in the Fall of 2021 - is inviting us to sit with our so-called big and little griefs, as well as that communal grieving that continues to well up because we refuse to face it in a meaningful way. It is the doorway to more love and wholeness on the other side.

*I feel a little squirmy about using the same word we use to describe the devastation my friend’s children are facing at the death of their mom as I used to describe my child’s hurt over her wrecked craft project. I’m doing it anyway because I think it demonstrates the deficiency of our language around these kinds of things and because I think grief, like trauma, is a continuum whose intensity varies tremendously based on whether or not it is given space and validation in relationship.

Rants and raves

👍 I make this every other week (do yourself a favor and go ahead and triple it like we do), and I just wanted to share it in case you’ve been missing out. #soupseason

👍 Grant and I both really loved this - mostly great acting (Vignette annoyed me at a few points), several storylines, romance, underlying political and sociological themes, and fairies. I would like to get sucked into another story with more than one season please. Reply to this with your suggestions!

👍 More stuff I’m loving lately over on the blog!

👎 I am so mad at Senator Manchin, but then I’m annoyed with myself because obviously the entire Republican party isn’t even willing to discuss any of the actual “Americans first” proposals included in Biden’s infrastructure package. No paid family leave this week was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. [excuse me while I go scream into the void and figure out how to help fund challengers to my equally maddening senators and congresswoman].

Stuff worth sharing

I’m only picking two things this week because I think dismantling of body and beauty norms is so necessary for our flourishing - and dear God, I desperately want things to be better for my kids in this department - and these two writers have been really instrumental for me in that work over the past year or so especially:

* First, read this from Virginia about recovering the joy of clothes - for ourselves but also warning for our kids (especially daughters). Aha moment of the month was this line: “flattering is just code for slimming.”

* Then follow up that with this adjacent piece from Anne Helen talking about when fashion become more about sameness for her as a child and further fleshing out how problematic the idea of flattering is:

“Flattering” is the vernacular of body discipline. It is a way of convincing ourselves that an item of clothing is or is not for us, simply because of how someone else thinks a body should look in clothes. If that sounds weird to you, it’s because you’ve been swimming in this understanding of how your body should look in clothes your entire damn life: that legs should be long, breasts contained, skin smoothed, waists pronounced, measurements proportional. That if something does the opposite to our body, it should be rejected.

Seasonal view of the week

When it’s not raining, my walks on the trail have been breathtaking this last week or so!

Cheers to a good cry or scream into the void or however else feels good to let it all out in the week ahead,

Sara

I listened to John O’Donohue’s Walking in Wonder this week. It’s beautiful, as anyone who has read any O’Donohue would expect. As you can deduce by the title, O’Donohue spends most of the book talking and thinking about wonder. This bit especially stuck with me:

Imagination according to William Blake is about the awakening to and recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that there is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than their facts.

I also just finished John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed. Last night, I underlined this and wrote “O’Donohue!” in the margin:

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires. Still, I’m fond of our capacity for wonder…Here’s the plain truth, at least as it has been shown to me: We are never far from wonders.

As I’ve been trying to lean into the falling back of autumn, I’ve been trying to stay curious about what is in front of me. I’ve been attempting to “pay attention to what I pay attention to,” as Amy Krouse Rosenthal suggests.

I’m curious if part of my continued angst is that I’ve been living in the facts space instead of the possibilities space. I’ve been dealing with what is instead of imagining what could be. I haven’t been prioritizing the work “that awe requires” because, let’s be honest, angst is easier work than awe and more rewarded (in the short-term at least), especially with the supercomputers we carry around like appendages whose creators work tirelessly to find new ways to vacuum up all of our attention.

There is so much to be angry about, of course, if you’re paying attention. But as Green, says, there’s also wonder lurking around every corner. Later in Walking with Wonder, O’Donohue recommends that we “take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.” There is something about the stuff that is quietly doing its thing that sucks me in these days. Perhaps it’s because we’re surrounded by and participating in so much attention-seeking all day long, but I’m thirsty to pay attention to the things that could care less if anyone is there to notice them - like the birds I noticed when I took Wendell out this morning that seemed to swoop around in swirly loops for the pure joy of it.

This is obviously not an original thought - there is even new scientific research about the benefits of awe and wonder. But, as I struggle with the general dis-ease pervading pretty much all sectors of our lives at the moment, I’m ready to try something different. If I am to take my own evangelizing about how there’s a season to everything to heart, perhaps this next season is a season to tune into wonder as if I could find its frequency on the radio, to walk with it, to notice how it’s operating quietly, without fanfare all around me.

In the introduction of The Anthropocene Reviewed, Green says that, despite all of the tragedy, trauma, and general crummy ways in which we treat one another and creation, he wants “to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”

Me too.

Raves only this week

👍 I read this for a Seminary of the Wild assignment last week. I loved it, but it also made me grieve all the alternate possibilities that were available to us prior to Christianity getting in bed with empire back 1500 years ago or so.

👍 This was such a fun read. I wish I would have saved it for a beach vacation, so do yourself a favor and bring it along for your next one.

👍 Staycations but where you do nothing. Last week was our fall break, and because we have another trip planned in November, we decided to stay home. I took the week off work, but Grant couldn’t. I had planned fun things for the kids and I to do, but instead we mostly stayed home, read books, slept in, and watched too much TV. It was glorious.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* This from Chris LaTray was so good. And if you’re looking for a way to tune into wonder, read through the comments about how people answered Chris’ question about where they’re “finding sweetness” these days.

* I really loved this #3 from Deep Fix, and I keep thinking about it. Which led me to this, which you should read if you’re in need of feeling some things.

* Anne Helen doing what she does best: naming what’s ailing us. Read the whole thing about what she calls the fall regression, but I especially loved this comment:

I just described myself to a friend this way: "You might want to take everything I say with not a grain but a whole sea of salt because it is Fall, which is, for me, the slow descent into a bleak winter. It's my hard season." I feel like my skin is see-through, and everything gets under it because I am that sensitive. And yes, I am wearing a sweater, and it's nice to wear a sweater and mostly athleisure, but I know that the line is so thin between this luxurious laziness and feeling like I just give up on everything. Because even the daylight is giving up. Also, I'm not sure if anyone else feels this way, but it seems even harder because I KNOW this season is coming. It happens every year, and yet, I am ALWAYS surprised by how it affects me. The surprise is a real one-two punch.

I actually love the descent into fall, AND I still totally get what this commenter says so beautifully.

Seasonal view of the week

Pretty much how I spent all of fall break…

Cheers to tuning into wonder in the week ahead!

Sara

A few weeks ago, a friend posted about their mom’s birthday. They said kind and thoughtful things, most of which centered around a theme: she puts everyone above herself. I was at a funeral pre-pandemic, and several of the speakers said something similar about the woman who had died: she always put everyone else’s needs first. I googled “she put everyone before herself,” and there were 40,000+ results, most of which were obituaries about women.

I don’t like to should people, but I’m making an exception for this series. We should really stop saying stuff like this. It plays right into the patriarchal playbook. It erases women’s (it’s always women that we say this about) actual needs, desires, hopes, dreams. It diminishes women who have a career they care about outside of serving others. It harms men (or infantilizes them) because care-giving is seen as a uniquely feminine characteristic that “real men” don’t do. It creates this ideal woman that serves everyone else with joy and finds no meaning in life outside of her roles in relationship to others. Spoiler alert: most women can’t live up to this standard.

But also, who wants to?!

I’m still working my way through Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted. It is taking awhile because I got sidetracked by going down the rabbit hole of how many stories we’ve lost, especially feminine ones, or stories that we’ve embraced to our own detriment. In the introduction, Blackie writes:

The world which men have made isn’t working. Something needs to change. To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves – and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are. The stories we’ve been living by for the past few centuries – the stories of male superiority, of progress and growth and domination – don’t serve women and they certainly don’t serve the planet. Stories matter, you see.

If Women Rose Rooted has opened my eyes to the stories we’re swimming in that keep us hamstrung from our full humanity. It also has inspired me to dig into where the cultural stories we tell ourselves come from. This “she put everyone else before herself” story has deep roots. I’ve been trying different ways of researching where it came from, but it is almost like trying to locate the beginnings of the patriarchy.

The agricultural revolution certainly had something to do with the simultaneous beginnings of patriarchy and feminizing care giving, but because I was raised in a Christian home, because America was colonized by Christians and because Christianity is still - by far - America’s largest religious affiliation, I’m particularly curious about what stories Christianity is telling that have gotten us where we are. It is helpful for us Americans to dig into the ways in which Christianity is the water we’re swimming in, whether we practice Christianity or not.

That led me all the way back to John Calvin, the reformation theologian who is largely credited with the idea of the Protestant work ethic and whose ideas influenced many of the Founders, who wrote “There is a great advantage in almost forgetting ourselves and in surely neglecting all selfish aspects; for then only can we try faithfully to devote our attention to God and his commandments” in his book on self-denial.

More recently, in many Christian circles, the “Proverbs 31 woman” gets paraded about as a laundry list of what a virtuous Christian woman should look like (the people that use this to hit women over the heads with never seem to acknowledge that Proverbs is first and foremost a Jewish scripture, not a Christian one). After I had Jasper when I was kind of flailing about for some sense of myself as a new mother, I tried out the women’s group at the church we were attending. I only made it once because the small group leader kept talking about the Proverbs 31 woman. I wanted to ask what she was even talking about, but everyone else was nodding along so I felt silly. I didn’t go back, but a few years later, I read Rachel Held Evans’ thoughts on the Proverbs 31 woman and felt quite vindicated.

Anecdotally, I grew up Catholic, and “selfish” was about the worst name you could call someone - maybe second only to “lazy.” But I don’t think this demonizing of selfishness is baked into Christianity. I think we’ve missed the point - or, more accurately, we have been deliberately misled by the story keepers to keep us powerless and controllable. More plainly, it has worked well for the people in power to keep us elevating women who live up to this ideal because it keeps women small and largely powerless (and perhaps even competing with each other).

Something we reiterate often in our house is the second part of Jesus’ greatest commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. But when we spout this off, it is always accompanied by our own addition to the verse, which is something along the lines of the following: “if you’re doing a crummy job of loving yourself, you’ll love your neighbor in the same way. How well you love yourself determines how well you’re able to love your neighbor - oh and, your neighbors aren’t just humans.” Or as Rabbi Isaac ben Moses Arama says much more succinctly, “all love is measured against the yardstick of self love.”

Jesus himself said that this self love was the second greatest commandment behind love of God (which I would argue is just an expansion of self love), which demonstrates to me that it isn’t the story itself that is rotten, it is how the story has been used, manipulated, and diluted against us that has produced the bad fruit. If we choose to do so, we can go back to the roots of the story and see what fruit comes of this kind of “re-storying,” as Robin Wall Kimmerer calls us to.

The “she put everyone else before herself” is a story that we keep telling about the ideal woman in our culture - and it isn’t a good one. We should talk about women - and men - who are particularly suited to care giving in ways that elevates their acts of care without diminishing themselves. We have to stop saying that someone “puts others above themselves” as if it is a good thing. We have to stop aspiring to it ourselves.

Even though this is a systems problem, it is also one in which we have agency too. We can simply stop saying this about the women in our lives and questioning it when others say it.

Rants and raves

👍 I loved The Anthropocene Reviewed, and I would like to read 100 more books like this. I’ve decided insightful, sometimes funny essay collections like this are perfect bedtime reading. Suggestions?

👍 These kinds of lists aren’t usually all that helpful, but I actually gleaned some good stuff from this article about how to better remember what you’ve read, something I increasingly have trouble with as I get older. Send me all of your tips, please.

👍 This ad for Charles Graham in NC.

👎 The Amazon is losing 200,000 acres a day, and I don’t understand why this isn’t front page news every damn day. The amount of loss is more than we can comprehend.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* I’ve had at least two weekly conversations a week for the last six months that mirror almost exactly the quote that leads this must-read piece.

* I keep wanting to quit Twitter, but then I find stuff like this thread, which explains so much in so little time that keeps me coming back.

* Speaking of stories, this conversation was brilliant:

Seasonal pic of the week

A view of me putting myself first and doing something I enjoy because that has to be a big part of what we’re here to do

Quotable

I’ve seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write… and you know it’s a funny thing about housecleaning… it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art* is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

*I think Estés would say that we’re all creators, whatever your art might look like.

Cheers to removing “putting others above themselves” from your vocabulary!

Sara

I was listening to Dr. Anne Lembke on The Huberman Lab podcast a few weeks ago, and she said something that keeps ringing around in my head. I can’t find the exact quote now, but she was talking about impulsivity control and said that she could imagine that at some point, evolutionarily, a lack of impulse control could be helpful for people. If you’re being chased by a tiger, you don’t want to overthink it; you just want to run. However, in our modern culture, a lack of impulse control is a detriment to success at work and life (or say they tell us).

For whatever reason, this made me think of our son. From the time Jasper was little, he has had a defiant streak. Even as a five-year-old, he could argue his way out of situations. We have grown to coining it “being Jaspered” at our house when he debates with you and makes such good points that you realize you’ve lost the argument. When he was younger, it was completely maddening as a parent because he never just listened to a simple request; his first instinct was to argue with you. Grant and I had thousands of conversations about our frustration with this phenomenon, but we also tried to repeatedly remind ourselves that what was frustrating as a parent of a five-year-old, we would be thrilled about as a parent of a sixteen-year-old because Jasper wouldn’t be doing anything “because all his friends were doing it.” His stubborn, lawyerly streak would probably make him a more secure and self-aware adult because he doesn’t do things unless he has thought them through and seen the benefits for himself.

Dr. Lembke’s thoughts on impulsivity and this parenting conversation Grant and I have had so many times reminded me of this week’s discussion on Pantsuit Politics of kids in sports and the various ways that reflects on our values as a society. In their discussion, Sarah and Beth talked about how our public schooling system rewards competence - but how, as Beth said, “the line between competence and compliance is razor thin.” They went on to discuss how they both excelled at competence (and compliance) until they reached their 30s, when they began to unpack some of the repercussions of all of that good girl-ness. This is my story too, as well as so many of my friends that are around the same age, as well as women I observe and admire in the world.

So between these different situations, I began to wonder what other things we’re collectively teaching our children (whether that is individual parents, religion, or culture) that they will have to end up undoing or unlearning in order to become whole, integrated, healed people at some point. It also makes me wonder at the depths of my own unlearning that I have yet to do.

What are things that we reward in children and young adults that wind up creating new and different problems as they grow? What types of people do our communities that we belong to put on a pedestal that breed behaviors or characteristics that we generally don’t value - or at least say that we don’t value - in adults? What are the behaviors we critique that end up creating anxiety, neuroses, and addictions later in life?

I’m not asking these questions to heap any more pressure or blame on parents or teachers or any of the rest of us that influence children and young adults in any capacity - we’ve got plenty of that already. I’m asking these questions because they are important and necessary - and because they point to system-wide problems more than individual ones, although, of course, it’s the individuals that suffer.

Some further examples that I’ve come up with now that I’ve been paying attention and asking myself some of those questions above:

* Our culture glorifies work and a very narrow definition of success, which is leaving so many of us sick, depressed, or worse.

* I was a sensitive child. Instead of having the freedom to express that sensitivity out in the world, I felt like I had to squash it down or swallow it, which has led to me being an adult who spends a lot of time and money on reconnecting with my feelings.

* Because of our fetishization of a certain kind of focus and achievement (likely coupled with the addictive nature or smart phones or the failings of our education system), 30-35 percent of our students are on amphetamines of some sort, which seems…bad and like it will have many long-term consequences.

* The professionalization of sports and hobbies is burning out our kids - and us adults too. What happened to just doing something because it’s fun? Our kids don’t know how to do it because we adults don’t either.

* Grant and I say that, mostly, we want to raise our children to be kind, empathetic humans who speak up for marginalized people and places and are gentle toward themselves. Jasper is on a travel soccer and basketball team, so he spends a ton of time each week with teams and coaches that largely consume themselves with competing, winning, and becoming better athletes. Those two sentences don’t seem to be in alignment with each other. We’re sitting with this seeming contradiction every week these days.

* Seeking to maximize everything we do in terms of achievement and productivity is how we judge machines - not how we should judge human beings. Our collective spiritual wisdom teaches that our lives are meant to be lived and enjoyed, not hacked.

* For years, we went to a church that put certain kinds of people on an actual pedestal, and it allowed certain kinds of people to lead. We left more than six years ago, but both of our children still talk about the lessons they learned from that time - most of which are not aligned with our family’s values. It is a frequent reminder for me to be careful about the types of communities we invest our time and energy into.

* It seems to me that the entire thesis of the excellent (and infuriating) Jesus and John Wayne is about the disastrous consequences of evangelicals glorifying only certain types of masculinity - and how we’re all living with the repercussions.

As usual, I don’t have any answers to these questions - let alone good ones. But naming the problem(s) is a good first step. Having these conversations in our homes and communities is a good first step. Not blaming ourselves, but getting curious about spaces and places where we’re just going along with the current instead of asking what we (and our people) really want is a good first step.

Rants and raves

👍 The autumn equinox and the cooler fall temps this week that make it feel like fall has officially arrived.

👍 I found this album this week and can’t stop listening to it. The lyrics are poetry.

👍 Speaking of poetry, this arrived this week, and I love it so much. It’s like a permission slip and guidebook to paying closer attention.

👎 We’re out of Afghanistan, but our proposed defense budget keeps going up from an already astronomically bloated number. I can’t even.

👎 The Biden administration’s handling of the Haitian refugees at the border. I have zero clue what the appropriate responses are (because you know it’s not just one or two things, but at least twenty), but what they’re doing isn’t it.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* Obviously, if you’re wanting to have these conversations, check out this Pantsuit Politics episode + this Atlantic article and this killer piece from Anne Helen Peterson that spurred the conversation.

* Our kids’ school doesn’t provide school lunch, and I would LOVE to have that fifteen-ish minutes of angst back into my morning by having them eat at school. But if your kids’ school does provide lunch, I think this piece is required reading (also thank you, Michele Obama).

* This will be maddening reading, but I think it’s important nonetheless (or here is one of the reporters of the story with a Twitter thread summary). Here’s another journalist’s succinct summary of the reporting for Twitter: “Giant accounting firms send their officials into the government, where they water down tax rules in ways that help their firms' clients. Then they return to those firms, which double their pay.”

* I’m so excited for this book.

Seasonal view of the week

A downpour ruined my planned equinox wander, but I was able to at least start my mandala before getting soaked.

(If you want my little worksheet of autumn equinox ritual ideas that I created for the workshops that I led this week, forward this email to a friend and copy me and I’ll send you both a copy!)

Cheers to getting curious in the week ahead,

Sara

I’ve been having to remind myself as I began to listen to these more urgent nudges that living seasonally applies to roles and talents too, meaning that just because a role works for a season (or twelve) doesn’t mean you can’t put it down. Your surrendering of it might be forever or for just a season.

I’m also discovering that there are some things that I became good at as a child or younger person out of some need to be loved or to be seen that are causing problems for me these days. It’s far easier to let go of things that are obviously detrimental to you, but it’s harder to let go of things that you feel that - or you’ve been told repeatedly that - you’re good at. It’s hard to let go of roles that you’ve played, sometimes for decades, that enable you to fit in with your family or a certain group.

Grant was an economics major, and he still reads intense economics books for fun (weirdo). I try to have a baseline understanding of economics so I don’t feel like a total idiot when he tries to explain what he is reading to me. One of the concepts that has been hugely helpful to me is the fallacy of sunk costs, typically discussed in terms of investments. According to this helpful explanation from The Decision Lab, the sunk cost fallacy “describes our tendency to follow through on an endeavor if we have already invested time, effort or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits.”

I have been realizing that I’ve been using this fallacy on myself: if I’ve put in this many hours at something to be good at it, I have to keep doing it. If I spent this much money to pursue something, I have to keep at it. If I’m talented at something, it must mean that I have to keep doing that thing.

But they call sunk costs a fallacy for a reason: they aren’t rational. Now I’m all for being irrational when the time is right, but in this case, I don’t want to be hamstrung by the past. I want to assess my present needs, desires, and hopes to determine how I want to spend my time and energy, instead of defaulting to what has earned me praise, money, or attention in the past.

This grounding season we’re in now is inviting me to consider what I’m doing because it’s good for me, my people, and our place — and what I’m doing out of expectation or obligation. There’s a place for expectation and obligation, of course, but I don’t want to live my whole life there.

Rants and raves

👍 I’m almost finished with an advanced copy of my friend Victoria’s new book, Church of the Wild, and I think everyone who grew up even adjacent to the church should read it. I’ve been sick of the capital “C” church throughout the pandemic, but Victoria’s book has given me some inspiration that a new (old) way is possible.

👍 The new season of Modern Love. We are only three episodes in, but I love this concept so much.

👍 Quitting things. See above for more explanation, but 'I’ve quit or said no to a handful of things in the last month that I was struggling with - and it feels really good on the other side of those decisions (just in case you need a little push to quit something too).

👎 One of my continual pet peeves is the use of Roundup and chemical fertilizers on lawns because of how it affects all of our air, water, and soil quality (not to mention that perfectly manicured lawns in general are a stupid idea sold to Americans by chemical companies). This story of a man who died after being turned away from 43 ICUs that are at capacity because of Covid made me ragey because it’s the same thought process as the people that dump chemicals on their lawns and the root cause of our uniquely American sickness: death by individualism.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* I loooved this conversation between Brené and Amy Cuddy on pandemic flux syndrome. It helped me feel a little more sane and level-set expectations going into the fall. Also, I just want to be friends with Amy.

* I always make time for Courtney Martin’s newsletter, but this one was especially good. I’ve been sitting with the L’Engle question Martin quotes since I read it and still stewing on what my own answers might be. The question is" “When are you the most you?” and this seems like the perfect question to sit with as we approach the Fall Equinox next week.

* My August what I’m loving and learning post in case you missed it.

Cheers to setting something down in the week ahead!

Sara

Know someone who might like this sort of thing? Sharing is caring, as they say, and a wonderful way to support writers you appreciate in the meantime.

This year, because I’m back to this unsettled, even flighty feeling once more, I’m really needing and seeking more of a sense of grounding. It’s like I have this need to feel heavy and anchored to the earth, instead of the in-my-head anxious, ramped up feeling I’ve been living with for months now. This late summer season is a bridge between the more expansive, abundant seasons of spring and summer and the more inward seasons of fall and winter. This year, I’m thinking of how I want to enter the more inward season of fall ahead with firmer footing, with a better sense of who I am and what I want.

Incidentally (or not) during these last few weeks, I’ve been reading If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie. It is full of stories of women who go through something, usually something traumatic of some sort, and who use that brokenness to break open instead of shut down or grow hard and brittle. It is full of stories of actual women and ancient mythological women finding their footing in their world. Blackie writes:

We won’t find our way by running hell-for-leather towards the light; we will find it rather by embracing the dark. By exploring the fecund, loamy ground of our being — our own being, and that of the rich, wide world around us…Whatever form [this explorative work takes], whether it comes easily to us or not, we have to be still, and trust; we have to resist the urge to view what is happening to us as a problem to be solved. We have to let ourselves hurt, release the old needs, let go of the old urges to become what we are not, what we were not meant to be. This is how we pave the way for rebirth.

As I’ve said (many times) before, I think this #covidseason is a massive opportunity for rebirth, a time to contemplate who we are and why we’re here, a time to reconsider how we spend our days. Even if I’m disappointed (to put it mildly) that more of our society isn’t using this as the opportunity that it is, I don’t have to let that keep me from doing this hard, worthwhile, imaginative work.

Last year, at this time, we were looking ahead to so many unknowns for the fall and winter months: what would happen with the election, with school, with a respiratory pandemic as much of the country got colder. In hindsight, I realize that last fall was just about survival and not much else. I want to lean hard into these more inward seasons coming that I almost feel like I missed last year out of sheer physical and mental exhaustion. This fall and winter seem like the perfect time for the “embracing the dark” and “exploring the fecund, loamy ground” of my own being, as Blackie directs us.

But I’m realizing that I’m not going to get to that place without some nurturing and preparation in this season that already supports that kind of work. To that end, here are a few questions I’m wrestling with in case you want to join me in preparing for the dark seasons ahead - or even if you’re finding, like me, that you could handle feeling a little more centered and grounded these days:

* In nature, this season is the last big push of growth and ripening before harvest. In what ways have you ripened this year? In what ways have you grown into more of your authentic self?

* In TCM, this late summer season is associated with the stomach and spleen organs and meridians, so we think about digestion during this season. This applies not just to our physical digestion, but our emotional, spiritual, and mental digestion too. What do you need to digest from the past season? Past year? What is serving you and what can you let go of?

* The earth element is associated with mothering, nurturing energy. What do you need right now to feel nurtured, supported, cared for? Imagine what a good mother might do for you during this season.

If you need some grounding practices, check out this newsletter for some of my favorites.

Rants and raves

👍 Wendell went away for training for TWO weeks, but now he’s back and has the best manners in the family.

👍 Mountain Rose Herbs (my favorite place to stock up on herbs and plant medicine) is having a huge tea sale. I always stock up on Holy Basil Chai, 21st Century Tea, and whatever else looks good when they have their once-a-year tea sale.

👎 More kids are in the hospital with Covid than at any point in the pandemic.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* I really appreciated this conversation on Afghanistan on Pantsuit Politics (there is also some really great additional reading linked to in that post if you want further education). Sarah and Beth disagreed pretty starkly, and I found myself agreeing with both of their points of view. I think it’s important that we bear witness in these kinds of situations, but I also don’t think it’s all that helpful to have one more desktop pundit offering her opinions on the interwebs. One of the only things I thought Trump got right was to support pulling us out of nation building around the globe (I did oppose him negotiating with the Taliban and leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations for what it’s worth), and I expected more out of the Biden administration’s execution of our leaving.

* I loved the first third of this Raptitude post, especially this bit:

We’re full-time subjects in many mad science experiments: industrialized food, noise pollution, overabundant passive entertainment, decreasing face-to-face interaction, increasing employer demands, blue-light-emitting screens, over-identification with news and world events, lack of physical activity, separation from nature, separation from community, and many more well-known and well-discussed pitfalls of modern life.

But then he went down the rabbit hole of solving it with a individual choice (blame?). While I think that’s helpful, I was hoping he would pursue the systems that put us in this position instead of assigning us another 30 day experiment. It’s still worth reading regardless.

Seasonal pic of the week

The view of the garden in late August - last burst of abundance out there too:

Cheers to finding some grounding in the week ahead!

Sara

Weeds taking over the greens bed? Eff it. Planting the summer squash? Eff it. Pruning the tomatoes? Eff it.

I decided to fully lean into this practice. I had already planted the bed of tomatoes, peppers, beans, and cucumbers, but I decided not to plant anything else. I cover cropped some beds and others I just let go. Instead of regular weeding every few days, I went whole weeks without actually doing anything in the garden other than maybe picking some kale that came back from last year or spying on whichever perennials were in bloom in the pollinator patch.

These days, the tomatoes are going bonkers, as are the so-called weeds and lots of other stuff that just came up despite me not doing much of anything. The garden is messy and full of life - even moreso than usual this year. It’s interesting to see what comes up when I’m not managing it, and there is so much to learn about the soil and various microclimates even in such a small area by paying attention to what happens when I let it go a little wild.

I love our garden. It is my happy place. I’ve written before, nearly every summer, how being out in it is my therapy and sanity saver. All of that is still true - and I needed a season to just let it be. To let myself be too.

I don’t feel quite as abundant as the garden looks after what I’ve named “eff it season,” but, as nature teaches, I know that there is more going on underneath than what it appears on the surface. I trust that fallow seasons are necessary, good, and bring forth even more life in the seasons ahead.

Eff it season has taught me that my power and control matters less than I think it does, that life is persistent and abundant without any input from me. It is reminding me that, in so many cases, we’re already doing it, and that it is good and necessary to let some things go during certain seasons, even things that you love doing and are passionate about. It’s teaching me that there are seasons to give a damn and seasons to just let things be.

Rants and raves

👍 I bought some dried hibiscus flowers on my last Mountain Rose Herbs order on a whim. It makes the prettiest simple syrup for cocktails and mocktails, but I’ve been drinking my weight in iced hibiscus tea lately - just put some dried flowers in a jar, fill it up with water, set it in the sun for a few hours, and then strain and serve over ice. Repeat often.

👍 Grant wanted to watch Malice at the Palace, so I just jumped in not really remembering much about it, despite it involving my hometown team. Wowzers. It was like a whole microcosm of so many of the discussions we’re societally having right now about teaching history from various perspectives, about white privilege, about consequence, but it was so well done that you didn’t realize it was about all of those things until it was over. Highly recommend.

👎 Some of this coverage (including in our own town) about parents fighting mask mandates. I won’t link to any of them because I don’t want to give them anymore oxygen, but I really feel like we might be living in the twilight zone.

Stuff worth sharing

* As usual, Pantsuit Politics helped me process the news this week. Their main segment on Afghanistan posed some really great questions and insights that have me thinking about the complexity of foreign policy and the importance of defining our mission from the beginning. It also gave me permission to just be sad about the state of things.

* This is the best non-sciency thing I’ve read on vaccines. My favorite line was “the mRNA vaccine is not an invasion, it’s an education,” but all of the tree visuals is what will stick with me.

* These times we’re living through are so heavy. It’s natural to want to look away and it’s a privilege to do so (and I would also argue here that we didn’t evolve to be able to handle the amount of information and news bombarding us each day, but that is an entire book). I liked the questions Nadia poses here as a way of wading through all of this overwhelm and heartbreak.

* “In fact, if you’re feeling settled, you’re probably in need of a good gut and fact check. The world is burning. Countries are crumbling. People are dying of a pandemic that we sort of pretended was over.” Courtney’s newsletter is always so great, but I really felt like she was in my brain with this one.

Seasonal pic of the week

A few days’ of the garden’s abundance - it doesn’t seem to know that it is “eff it season!”

Cheers to saying “eff it” to something that is weighing you down in the week ahead!

Sara

P.S. If you don’t like the adult language, might I gently suggest you find some space to use some of your own? It’s good for you, especially during this anger season so many of us find ourselves in.

Hi friends! I accidentally took the month of July off from this space, but I’m back for now and, if not refreshed, at least full of words and feelings. As always, if you know someone who might like this sort of thing, forward it along, and thanks for reading!

Last year around this time, the developer across the street began cutting down a big patch of old forest that had divided the corn fields for at least many decades. Many of the trees were older than Indiana’s statehood. They had initially promised those of us who showed up at the city council meeting that they would keep that strip of forest, but a new developer came in and reneged on the original plan. There was this one silver maple that had to have been one of the oldest in central Indiana if its circumference was any indication.

I made a few phone calls and was told there was nothing we could do. Maeve made a sign for the silver maple, begging them to at least leave it. It was gone by the time we got home from school and work, already woodchipped and delivered off to who knows where. We ate dinner as a family that evening with barely a peep (which is really saying something if you’ve ever met Maeve).

I spent the next several days working outside (#becausecovid) on our porch, and you might accuse me of sentimentality or anthropomorphizing, but I know what I heard and felt: I’ve never heard so much bird noise at our house as I did those first several days after they cut down the forest. A hawk circled his presumably former home all day the first day. It felt like the birds were mourning. Their calls sounded sickly and confused. After several days, their sounds faded away. The birds and critters found new homes elsewhere. I’m sure some of them were killed in the destruction, along with their forest homes.

I wrote about this kind of solastagia last fall, and I fear I’m experiencing preemptive solastagia these days (like Brene’s anticipatory anxiety, but for the eminent destruction of a place you love) because we received notice that a developer plans to slam 330+ homes into the farm and woodlands surrounding the entire west and south boundaries of our property. We knew something like this could happen, but we had been assured by city counselors and mayoral staff that it was always the “worst case scenario” in terms of development options.

Despite this development being planned in conjunction with the city for at least a year, if not longer, we homeowners only found out about it with two weeks notice when we learned that it would be proposed to the upcoming Planning Committee hearing via a generic looking letter in the mail. So Grant and I rearranged our schedules to both make it to the meeting. We encouraged neighbors to go. We met with the developer. We contacted the city staff with our questions. All in the week’s time between returning from a restful vacation and the evening of the meeting.

I’ve only been to a few Planning Committee meetings, but this one seemed fuller than most. They saved our proposed development for last. A city planner described the developer’s plan, then the developer was given time to review their proposal for everyone (even though we all already had copies of it). The floor was then opened for questions and concerns. At least twenty-five people got up and shared their many and varied concerns with the density of the development. Some were soft spoken, others were vehement, most of were a little nervous.

When it was my turn, I spoke about how this property had a less dense development proposed on it five years ago, which was not approved because of traffic concerns. Why would they allow a more dense development into the area now, especially when we have an additional development today that we didn’t have when this project was originally turned down? Grant focused on the traffic and road conditions. We told ourselves: be practical, don’t get too emotional, speak to the stuff that will have the most impact.

Grant had to leave two hours into the meeting to pick Jasper up from basketball, but I stuck around. A quiet man that appeared to be about my age got up and softly asked the Planning Committee, “how many of you have ever seen a pileated woodpecker.”

No one on the panel raised their hand. No. One.

First of all, how is it that eleven people who live in Noblesville, Indiana have never seen one of the largest, most striking native birds in Indiana? I’d like to believe that they just weren’t feeling participatory, but honestly, that lack of hands caused my whole chest to squeeze in on itself.

But then I focused on the soft-spoken gentleman who asked the question because by now he was describing the bird in detail: its coloring, its habitat, what it likes to eat. They come to his suet feeder (they come to ours too) right by his back window, which he told the Committee, is pretty rare in suburbia. Pileated woodpeckers prefer older, large trees and established forests, like the old woods that lie behind his home that the development plans to butt right up to. His voice was filled with awe, affection, and love, asking the Committee members to realize what his family would lose if the pileated woodpeckers move elsewhere.

That’s when I realized two things: 1) Grant and I had possibly gone about it all wrong, focusing on the practical and politically-convincing instead of our deep love of our place, the surrounding forests, the more than human life that lives and thrives in this quieter, less populated place amidst development all around and 2) while the pileated woodpecker guy had it right to be talking about his deep love for this beautiful species, he still wasn’t talking for the woodpecker, so much as he was talking about his and his family’s appreciation of it, which is a beautiful thing of course, but my realization was: who is talking for that particular pileated woodpecker that comes to his feeder?

Who is talking for the trees, the thousands of black raspberry brambles on the edges of this property that will be destroyed, and trillium stands that permeate the old growth forests, many of which will be destroyed if the development goes through? Who is talking for other bird species that live in those forests? Who is talking for the deer whose trails wind through those forests? Who is talking for the foxes and coyotes that we often see and hear? Who is talking for the mitochondria and the soil that will be pushed, prodded, and displaced?

We humans act like we’re the only ones whose opinions, comfort, safety, lives matter. We’re so f*****g arrogant. I am so f*****g arrogant - only thinking of my own concerns really, missing the perspective of all of these other beings that cannot speak for themselves at the Planning Commission meeting.

Of course, this is not new. Many other, wiser people have been saying these things - and for centuries. It’s just that this conversation happening in and about my actual backyard brought these things home in a new and powerful way.

So I’ve been trying to rally the neighbors in any way that works. I figure some of them could care less about the pileated woodpecker, but they do care about the effect on their property values. I don’t care what gets them to care, to be honest, so long as they show up - loudly.

I’m wondering if I should perhaps work to adopt that attitude about more things: the climate emergency, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, poverty, the pandemic. Maybe stop working so hard arguing with people about why they should care and spend more time imagining new ways that might inspire caring in them?

Quotable

“People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped.” Wendell Berry

Stuff worth sharing this week

* I’ve sent this AHP piece to approximately 27 people in the last week to remind them that there is a reason we’re all exhausted, short tempered, ragey, anxious, fill-in-the-blank.

* I love the questions Hawken poses in this interview as a way of thinking through the expected but still devastating IPCC report that came out this week.

* My summer break version of what I’m learning and loving over at the blog.

Seasonal pic of the week

Maeve’s sign with the silver maple from last summer.

Cheers to speaking up for those who can’t speak up for themselves in the week ahead!

Sara

Fast forward to this week: I was coming home from dropping off a child from camp, and I noticed a large, lumbering turtle crossing the road. I had to get back for a meeting, but I wasn’t going to let the turtle turn into another duckling situation that I was thinking about for weeks afterward. I stopped and put my flashers on in an effort to “set a pick” for my turtle so that cars wouldn’t hit him, but I must’ve scared him and he just stopped in the middle of the road and didn’t move. As I got out of the car, a BMW pulled up behind me and honked. I’m pretty sure he could see the turtle because it was huge, but he was not happy about being momentarily detoured for my turtle saving mission.

I pointed to the turtle so that BMW guy would make sure to avoid it and pulled onto a nearby street where I could park and run back to help the turtle. I gently picked him up and carried him toward the creek where it seemed like he was headed.

That night, as we went around the dinner table, I shared that my turtle mission was the rose of my day. On that particular day, I had actually had a very productive day of work, had made dinner, and had gotten a mountain of laundry done that had been sitting in the dryer for far too long. I realized that - by far - the most important thing I had done that day besides possibly feed my family was save that turtle. The stuff on my to do list that I had accomplished would fade from memory by the end of the week, if not sooner. The laundry is never done. I’ll make thousands more dinners. But it isn’t unreasonable that I’ll still be thinking about that turtle occasionally ten years from now.

Here was my aha moment: I want more space, more margin in my life to be the turtle lady. I don’t want to turn into the BMW guy.

I want slower. I want lingering and sauntering.

I want less schedules, less doing, less have tos, less shoulds.

I want more presence, more paying attention, more being, more pleasure.

I want to be that “someone of ease / Who feels they have all the time in the world” in O’Donohue’s blessing.

Rants and raves

👍 I found Heather Cox Richardson because of the Trump administration and needing a historian’s perspective to balance out my anxiety. I’m sure I’ve raved about her before, but I think I appreciate her even more these days because, since there isn’t a month's worth of news each day, she can dig more deeply into the historical context of what is going on. You’re missing out if you aren’t learning from her.

👍 I do this breathing practice when I can’t sleep at night. It’s been a stressful few weeks, so I’ve been using it ALOT. You inhale for a count of four, pause, and then exhale for a count of eight, pause, and repeat. I like to do it at least twelve times for a “set.” Anytime we extend our exhale longer than our inhale, it triggers our parasympathetic nervous system (the rest, digest, restorative part), so it’s extra helpful at night when you’re trying to go back to sleep and put the brakes on the train wreck of your catastrophizing thoughts at 3AM. That’s probably just me though, huh?

👎 I loooove an excuse to celebrate, but I really dislike forced celebrations like Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. I can’t figure myself out. What does it meeeean?!

Stuff worth sharing this week

* I finally got around to my what I’m learning and loving post for May, just in time to start thinking about the June post. But it’s worth reading if you ask me!

* I really loved this conversation and can’t stop thinking about it, especially that England is likely in the last thirty years of experiencing the annual nightingale song, the languages we’ve already lost, and how alive Sam sounded as he spoke throughout the interview.

* My current work from home schedule allows much more time for short walks to clear my head, a yoga break or three, dog snuggle breaks, and just getting up more often and doing weird stretches on the floor. All of which are really good for our bodies. Reading this article about how the computer is breaking our bodies made me think that this is another aspect of post-pandemic life that we have the opportunity to reimagine - if we’re willing.

* I listened to this episode of Terrible, Thanks For Asking a few weeks ago and have referenced it in at least twenty conversations since I first listened. The impetus for the episode was this Atlantic article, which I also keep thinking about. The premise of the article and podcast episode is what we’ve lost by no longer “allowing” nervous breakdowns:

For 80 years or so, proclaiming that you were having a nervous breakdown was a legitimized way of declaring a sort of temporary emotional bankruptcy in the face of modern life’s stresses. John D. Rockefeller Jr., Jane Addams, and Max Weber all had acknowledged “breakdowns,” and reemerged to do their best work. Provided you had the means—a rather big proviso—announcing a nervous breakdown gave you license to withdraw, claiming an excess of industry or sensitivity or some other virtue. And crucially, it focused the cause of distress on the outside world and its unmeetable demands. You weren’t crazy; the world was. [emphasis mine]As a 1947 headline in the New York Herald Tribune put it: “Modern World Viewed as Too Much for Man.”

Seasonal pic of the week

Wendell has the “zoomies” every night around 8ish no matter what we do with him the rest of the day. So nearly every night, we take him on a walk around Funky Farms at sunset to get his zoomies out, and, as a side bonus for us, it’s become a highlight of the day.

Cheers to finding ways to be your version of the turtle lady in the week ahead!

Sara

Since the year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder on May 25th, there have been a thousand think pieces about the meaning and impact of Floyd’s murder over the last few weeks, as there should be. On the day Floyd was murdered, Grant and I stripped our deck, a truly terrible job that I don’t ever want to do again and which took far longer than we thought it would. Because it took so long, what I remember about the weeks following Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests around the world, is that, because we had to move our deck furniture out to the yard for several weeks, Grant and I would sit out in the middle of the yard, doom scrolling on our phones, having countless conversations about what had happened that day, sharing some new podcast or article that we’d listened to or read with a fresh perspective we hadn’t considered, or, honestly, we spent many nights crying or raging over some new video that had surfaced during the protests.

Grant and I had dipped our toes into anti-racism work after attending the Evolving Faith conference in 2018, but we still had (and have) so much work to do. Those days following Floyd’s murder last year were like drinking from a fire hose: learning from and listening to so many people of color sharing their stories, their anger, their grief, trying to have honest conversations with friends and family members about what was going on while standing up for our Black neighbors and friends, trying to figure out in what ways and how much to tell our kids - and all of this while in the midst of hitting 100K dead from Covid in the US alone.

I have struggled since the peak of the protests last summer, especially as we see the polls that show how white people’s support of Black Lives Matter has plummeted since the summer, about what work each of us is called to do and, most importantly, how we sustain a movement.

I was talking to my spiritual director, Victoria Loorz, last week about this sustainability piece of activism. She said that a problem on the right is the deniability of the problems, and that the problem on the left is that there is little allowance for evolution on the topic, meaning that if you don’t have it exactly right (who does?!), don’t even try. Obviously, the denial that is prevalent on the right is dangerous, toxic, and does not leave any space for growth and healing. But the black-and-white thinking on the left stalls movement too. It doesn’t allow us to show up and make mistakes. It holds us to impossible standards.

Victoria pointed out that what we used to hold communally, we’re now expecting people to hold as individuals. In previous, especially indigenous, cultures, the entire community held the work that needed to be done, which might go a little something like this in my imagination:

Sara is passionate about caring for the natural world, so she does that work and tells those stories. Laura experienced a school shooting and gives her time and resources to pass saner gun laws. Teri advocates for LGBTQ youth in our community. Grant coaches basketball and teaches the kids about leadership and kindness on and off the court. Tom shows up to the school board meeting to argue in favor of teaching CRT in schools.

Individually, we all still do our best because our healing is all wrapped up in everyone and everything else’s, but when we’re participating in communities that are doing the work, we can go deeper into our own passions, interests, and things that bring us life. And, crucially, we have time to rest and find joy too, which are a big part of why we’re here. We can communally be more sustainable because we’re pursuing the kinds of activism that we were individually built for, instead of each trying to do it all.

One of the reasons I still go to church, despite having quite a few hang-ups about it these days, is because I want to participate in a community that is doing this healing work. I can’t carry it all by myself, but I can lean on and learn from others in community. We’ve tried the more individualistic, patriarchal methods, and we’ve seen where that has gotten us.

I’m hopeful that, despite the polling, that last summer and the pandemic broke something open in us societally that will allow us to move toward more rebirth and integration.

Rants and raves

👍 I’ve been in a weird movement rut, and I did the Peleton app free trial a few weeks ago. I’ve been mostly doing the outdoor runs, and I almost hate to say it, but I’ve been really liking it. We have a spin bike for Grant’s training in the off season, so I can use the app with that too and won’t be getting the whole actual Peleton bike, but I think I’ll be keeping up the app subscription for now.

👍 I’m late to the Olivia Rodrigo party, but, man, does this album make me feel seventeen again. Some of those lyrics are just pure genius.

👎 Saying “guilty pleasures.” Stop associating guilt with stuff that gives you pleasure. I shared this on Instagram this week and shared how I stopped saying “guilty pleasure” a few years ago and just started LIKING WHAT I LIKE with no preamble or apologies. Dare you to try it too (what’s your “love novel?”).

Stuff worth sharing this week

* My favorite recent follow is Virginia Sole-Smith. Her newsletter and Instagram are free educations every week. But I read this piece she did for Scientific American and this similarly-themed newsletter two+ months ago and think about it at least once a day. If you feed kids or eat yourself (ha!), you definitely want to be following Virginia.

* Absolutely no one who reads this newsletter or follows me on social media is surprised that I “amened” my way through this, but I think it’s worth the read even if you aren’t obsessed with this whole conversation like me. Again, this pandemic is SUCH an opportunity to rethink everything - and I see so few segments of our culture willing to do so. It makes me want to scream for days.

* Lepore is an automatic read for me, and, since we’re seeing burnout everywhere these days, this piece gave me lots to think about.

Seasonal view of the week

We made it through the weirdest school year of our lives! I’m really proud of how flexible these kids were, and I’m so thankful to their teachers for making the year feel as normal as possible.

Cheers to noticing your community(ies) in the week ahead!

Sara

I was listening to a podcast this week that veered into a bunch of Covid denialism. It was a looong podcast that I had picked because I wanted to hear from the person being interviewed, so by the time it got into the Covid part, I had already listened for awhile and picked up on some good juice. (Side note: I don’t think the podcast is worth your time; just reply to this if you want the good juice without the rest!)

The conversation centered around the dangers of fundamentalism of any variety, which is where I got confused when they veered into Covid territory because Covid deniers, anti-maskers, or anti-vaxxers are most likely to be white fundamentalist Christians. So, I guess when it comes to Covid, the host agrees with the fundamentalists even though he spent most of the rest of the interview pointing out the pitfalls of their belief system?

In the podcast, the host decried people as sheep who blindly went along with the Covid fear-tactics (as he called them), but, as he said this, he didn’t offer any actual facts, he seemed to just reference stories about scientists on YouTube that he had heard about. He said the antidote is to think for ourselves and do our own research (and I agree!), but it seemed to me that he was sitting under others’ authority as much as any of us are; he just chose different authorities to listen to.

This got me thinking more broadly about authority. I, as a rule, don’t really like people telling me what to do. I’m skeptical by nature, so I typically have to do my own research before accepting someone else’s dictates. The greatest danger of any kind of fundamentalism is how it separates us from ourselves - fundamentalism tells us that something out there is wiser than our own experience and our still, small voice inside.

Fundamentalism comes in many different forms - religious, political, partisan, familial, economic. I think many of us Americans are under the spell of some kind of fundamentalism if we really dig deep and are honest with ourselves; our work as we grow up is naming the ways in which we’ve given away our authority and freeing ourselves from those binds.

However, even after all of that, we still have to sit under the authority of others. I can’t be an expert on everything. As much as I love to research, I don’t have time to research the various sides of every topic. We have to, at some point, trust ourselves enough to seek out good authority figures and/or to go with the consensus of trusted experts. We have to find ways of continually assessing those authorities we’ve delegated to, so that we’re still flexible enough to change our minds.

I don’t know what this looks like to be honest, but I think finding ways to test our own hypotheses, our own biases, or own preconceived notions is more important than ever. In a world where so much information is at our fingertips at all times, how we go about determining whose authority to listen to and whose authority to dismiss seems like one of the most worthwhile skills to cultivate.

So I’m curious: how do you decide whose authority to trust and whose to dismiss?

Rants and raves

👍 I’m 30 pages into this, and it has already blown my mind twenty different times. The title/subtitle might throw you off, but he explains where he is going with it in the prologue so maybe just read that part to see what you think.

👍 This conversation was SO GOOD. I’ll be thinking about it for months. I’m rereading Braiding Sweetgrass and finding it even more magical than I remembered.

👍 We have four more days of school over here, and we are all four crawling to the finish line. I’m not sure we’ve ever needed the looser structure of summer more.

👎 People cheering about this decision and not protesting this one make no sense to me.

Stuff worth sharing this week

* As I’ve been thinking about authority this week, I’ve been thinking about how one thing I’ve decided as a way of discerning whom to listen to is that I’m going to tend toward sitting under the authority of people indigenous to this land. I’m going to be partial to what they’re saying, teaching, grieving, and protesting. To that end, I came across this older piece from Potawatomi writer, Kaitlin Curtice, that was a perfect pairing with that Robin Wall Kimmerer interview shared above.

* I’ve been trying not to put my head in sand about the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, but, because this situation is so complicated, I’ve been trying to listen and learn instead of have a bunch of opinions. I’ve been reading Arab News daily instead of paying much attention to American news on the subject. Pantsuit Politics has an older, primer episode that helps give some background if you’re new to this topic. And one of my favorite Twitter follows, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, signed this letter calling for Jewish solidarity with the Palestinians.

* One thing the Trump Administration taught me was a better understanding of “gaslighting.” I now notice how it’s used in so many situations. This post’s list of scripts is definitely worth bookmarking or copying down for those times you find yourself on the receiving end of gaslighting:

Seasonal view of the week

I finally got some of the garden planted this week. It felt so good to be in the soil again!

Cheers to thinking about authority in the week ahead!

Sara