FWIW: I don’t want to be talking about this, I want to be watching squirrels eat the bread I left for them outside my tiny windows and making art and artist books. But my gov is snatching bodies off the street and spending a billion dollars a day dropping bombs on sidewalk chalk. So, here we are.

Otherwise, there’s the art:

fuck the system Reiki-Infused Watercolor Artist Books

Do any of these catch your fancy? Check out the full collection of 13 books here (should open to a link for iCloud photo album), choose your favorite. Send me an email. I never check my DMs. Suggested price: $300, pay what delights you. Will be listed to the general public next week.

fuck the system ACEOs are LIVE

They look something like this. These too are Reiki-infused. You can find them at my page on ebay. Please. Don’t be bashful. Tell your friends. Start a bidding war. You have seven days.

everything works out for us ACEO Series

35 (unless I mathed wrong) tiny works laid out on the table. They really capture the wild energy I can feel, the energy of the collective. I’d prefer to throw paint at a canvas or whack it with a paint dipped pickle ball racket. Use my whole freaking body to make art. To move energy. And not necessarily make anything beautiful.

But I don’t have the facilities to make such things happen without destroying furniture, etc. So rapid fire paintings it is. I honestly wasn’t sure I could pull this kind of layering off. But I really love them. A practice in following intuition.

Titled as such because I turned otherwise 8-inch paintings that were not working, into small pieces I fecking love. Plus my intuition told me to call it that and nothing else came forward. Plus let’s make it a mantra.

Will be listing in the next day or so and will update then.

Hope you all are well, alive, and not in a detention center. I hope you are burning things down. Swearing. Expressing yourselves. I am so grateful you’re here.

be feral,

Libby

When I asked Melanie if she’d be up for writing a guest post On Practice, and she pitched writing about her reading practice, I didn’t quite realize that I’d been, through her Substack Notes posts about the books she’s been reading, on this journey with her. Melanie’s writing is daringly vulnerable and utterly human. I hope you enjoy.

Melanie Cole is a writer and poet from Tacoma, Washington. She writes about themes of family, natural disaster, the natural world, faith, and the unusual. You can find her work in Grit City Magazine, Dandelion Revolution Press, the Tacoma News Tribune, and on The Mighty. You can find her at Melanie Writes and her Stack.

My mother makes fun of me for being a “wanter.” There’s always some silly little thing that I want. It’s true. I keep a running list in my head of strange little things that I want for no real reason other than I am somewhat of a magpie of a person. I am by no means a hoarder, but I like keepsakes, if only because they are keepsakes. For two years, I have gushed over a Tiffany blue leatherbound copy of Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is my favorite book, and most of the general public is unaware that Capote wrote the story before the iconic film was made. What I like most about the novel is that it is narrated by Paul Varjak, who plays only a foil to Holly Golightly’s character in the film. Varjak’s narration plunges the story into depths that the film cannot reach. It is heavier. Disquieting.

The problem with purchasing the $100 copy of that Tiffany blue leatherbound book is that I can’t read it. I mean, of course, I can read it; I am perfectly literate. I was tested as a first grader and was reading at a college level then. But now, I live with two disabilities, each developed in adulthood, that cause severe cognitive impairments.

One of the first ways these cognitive impairments presented themselves was in my inability to read and process large amounts of information, such as that in a book, an essay, or a work report. It may seem strange that I am a writer who cannot read, but rest assured, I employ an arsenal of AI tools at my disposal to read back to me every word I have typed and every change I have made, whether it be an essay or a fictional story. These tools help me comprehend what I’m staring at, so it all doesn’t look like a babel of words.

I’ll tell you now that I didn’t hold out for that $100 Tiffany blue leatherbound copy of the book. Wouldn’t it be a nice bookend to this essay to say that I finally purchased it? But no, I’m disabled and I don’t work because of it, so there will be none of those kinds of extraneous purchases in my future. However, what I did find was a beautiful clothbound version of the book for just $15. It’s definitely a collector’s item.

I started collecting books because I could not read them. I used to go to the library and check out armfuls of books that I could not read. Just the appearance of being a reader, I thought, might make me one. Last October, I had Frankenstein, Dracula, and From Hell on my proverbial nightstand. From Hell was the only one I was able to follow because it is a graphic novel. I was able to follow some of Dracula. I gave up on Frankenstein after the letters.

I felt as if I was missing out on a big part of my life. In college, living in London, I read on the Tube constantly. Whether it was for class or fun, I always had a book in my hand. When I graduated into my mid-20s, I collected an entire bookshelf of political philosophy and cosmology. I read Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. And slowly, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was rather randomly diagnosed with epilepsy.

One day, I just dropped down on my bedroom floor and had a five-minute tonic-clonic seizure. In tandem, I developed something called schizoaffective disorder. Both of these conditions greatly impacted my cognition. I had to leave my career, partly because I couldn’t keep up anymore. I couldn’t keep up with any job I had. I couldn’t understand simple directions. More importantly, I couldn’t read and comprehend.

I resigned myself to audiobooks for the rest of my life, to which I often fall asleep and lose my place completely. This summer, however, I had an idea. Could I listen to an audiobook and read along with it?

I started with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It is dense and commands attention, and every small detail matters. There was no falling asleep when my eyes were on the page. I had listened to the audiobook about four times before, but this was my first reading of the physical book, and I have to say that I gleaned so much more from it than all of my listenings combined. It was a daunting book to start with. I could have picked something easier in my library, but I finished it, and I was proud of myself.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was next, short but filled with minute details, especially in the bullfighting scenes. Some might think this is a phone-it-in book due to its length, but it is masterfully crafted, and I felt as if I was reading the very personal journals of Jake, the narrator. My reading became quicker this time. I read at times beyond the narration, which made it a bit confusing, but I learned to course correct and move forward.

Next, I chose Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird because I thought I would find it familiar. The more I read, the more I remembered the storyline. I thought this would ignite my comprehension. It did. My experiment appeared to be working. Although, because I knew the story so well, I felt myself starting to get a little lazy and began listening to the audiobook rather than reading along with it. I had to remind myself that just because I knew the story didn’t mean there wasn’t value in the exercise. I needed to keep going. And I did.

And so, one day, I just cracked open my clothbound cover of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It had never been read. And I read it. In one sitting. No audiobooks, no Speechify, just me and my imagination. I imagined the handsome voice of George Peppard narrating the story and the likeness of Audrey Hepburn (though Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role) bouncing in and out of her apartment, ringing bells at all hours of the night because she has forever lost her key. I read about the trail of heartbroken men who loved her and of the death of her dear brother Fred. And through it all, Paul Varjak gives a disarming account of a young woman who is so mixed up within herself that she doesn’t know which way is up. And I read it. All of it.

Reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s on the page for the first time gave me something new, just as reading all of these other books did. On the page, there is more room for imagination, for character development, for the breath of a story. Finally, I can read in the way I want to again.

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Last Monday, as the Strawberry moon, near full, rose out of sight, I burned old poems and notes in my sister’s fire pit. I meant to say something cleansing or releasing, but nothing came forward. Dismantling old energy doesn’t require much effort; you’ve just got to be ready to let it go.

I’ve been sorting through things: old emails, notes and files in the digital space, printed photos, and now the two boxes of journals I had Mom bring with her when we met up a few weeks ago.

Many of the spines are labeled by year, and the older, pre-2016, have been scanned and saved digitally, though I couldn’t bring myself to read them at the time, and now, now, I’d like to throw them (or at least some of them) into a fire pit.

The journey started as a release of old energy. To use things up. To downsize my digital and physical imprint, if I organize the external, the internal follows.

I started with 26,000 emails, including the archive, and am down to just under 5k, at that particular email address. I packaged up the first round of ephemera I’d collected and sent it off gleefully, hopefully to folks who enjoyed receiving it.

I didn’t know how this endeavor might play into my writing projects, but the hundreds of drafts and notes that are spread across digital and physical spaces lingered in my awareness. I knew this practice would bring my attention to them, something I’d been frequently called to do, but for whatever reasons, resisted.

What I didn’t expect to find were so many worthwhile bits of writing in the emails themselves. But there they were. Documenting that transitional time in my life between 2008 and 2013, in which I moved from Fargo to the UK and then back again. Spent another couple of months in the UK, hoping to stay, then back again. Then, in August of 2011, off to Chicago for a couple of years before returning once again to Fargo.

While also being fun and expanding, there was a lot of chaos in all that movement. A representation of where my nervous system lived at the time. I never got a chance to sink into a place, call it home, one foot always in whatever old life I had come from, and one anticipating the transition to come. Rarely fully present or rooted.

As I work with and share the already formed poems from this time and sort through these emails, saving bits that seem worth mining for language or points of reference, a collection started to form in my head.

And while pilfering the boxes of journals, looking for the notebooks from this era, I found my first collection: single edition, hand-lettered in Bic and multi-colored gel pen, with a jean cover, published circa 1998, and folks, there were some pretty awful poems in there.

However, I was struck by the quantity. The notebook is full, and there’s a whole stack of drafts I’d completely forgotten slipped into the jean cover that were edited from my story.

I’d gone so off considering myself a poet somewhere in undergrad when I started to feel not enough in comparison to the deconstructions we were meant to do of Frost and Whitman in English 101, that I started writing micro-fictions I later tried to make into a novel, and wrote poems I didn’t call poems.

Stunned, I was stunned to find all those drafts tucked away, calling me home all this time to my true self-expression.

But some of them needed to go. The mean things people did to me and how I responded, with grace and probably feigned understanding, was just heartbreaking. I’m no longer available for that trauma energy. So I crumpled them up and burned them under a full moon.

Are there things you’re ready to burn?

in gratitude,

a hello

The other day, I posted this drawing in progress. If you’ve been around, you’ve seen it at different stages. The response has been overwhelming. And a fair few have joined me here.

Let me re-introduce myself: I’m Libby, an intuitive poet and abstract artist who likes drawing circles and lines. I’ve a number of master’s degrees. I live in Minnesota. I meditate a lot. I’m neurodivergent. This is the only job I can do and also take care of myself.

I share poems and drawings and little bits of living present. I send art and poems in the mail. I publish other folks regarding their practices, and I love publishing poets. I understand animals better than I understand humans, and if you upgrade to paid, I’ll send you a handbound journal until supplies are out and donate money to an elephant sanctuary.

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite pieces? What is poetry, art, mindfulness, practice to you? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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Corie Feiner is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Bucks County, PA, and the author of Radishes into Roses and Who Was Born at Home? She is an international performance poet and slam champion with an MFA from NYU. Called “wonderful” by The New York Times, Corie has won numerous awards for her poetry, performances, and educational workshops. Her latest project, A Poem for Every Pose, combines her love of yoga with her craft. You can learn more about her, and join her growing community of yogis, poets, and seekers of inspiration on her community-building Substack publication.

Do your works come together by accident while journaling or ironing, or are you more intentional?

The poems I am sharing here are from a series that I have assigned myself as part of a mission to integrate poetry into yoga practices worldwide. This is a new sort of project for me that has been ongoing and developing since 2021. It started with what may be considered an “accident” with my first poem for Hero Pose (written after a particularly powerful yoga practice) and has evolved since then to 89 poems.

Many of the poems are written early in the morning with a strong intention on what I am going to write. However, a good amount of the poems also came suddenly while traveling or during a yoga practice, where I stop and get it down on whatever I have, whether it is my journal, my computer, or my phone.

I am compelled to share with you that I often thought to myself, “Who am I to write these poems?” But I got support from two very close friends, got out of my own way, and just kept going. These poems came as a gift, and I realized that I could either take it or turn away.

So I took it. And actively take it every day.

What tools do you use (i.e., prompts, workshops, books)?

For my Poem for Every Pose project, I have an assignment, so my prompts are the poses themselves.

I also teach a somatic poetry workshop for women called the Bodylove Poetry Writing Workshop where we explore and write about different body parts. This is an outgrowth of my healing journey to reunite my mind/body/spirit and also to celebrate my miraculous body. During these workshops, I offer writing prompts, sacred writing time, and take this space to also write.

Outside of both of these projects, I write whatever I need to write and mostly do not share it with anyone. These poems and scribbles are just for me.

I have a simple composition book with stickers on it, whose pages I use generously. The simplicity of the Composition book gives me permission to take up space and write as much or as little as I would like. I had a lot of fancy journals, but I found myself not wanting to “waste” my pages because they were so pretty. So as much as I like the beautiful journals, I realized that my goal was not to look like a writer, but to write.

What inspires you?

I get inspired and excited about reading, writing, and life quite often. It is how I am wired. But what inspires me, in particular, to write poetry is how much I discover about myself and how good it feels to get in the zone of writing.

I am also inspired by my vision of performing my yoga poems at more festivals, retreats, and events, creating poster prints, cards, and books, and having them integrated into yoga school curricula. It is essential to work with my crazy-ambitious goal in mind in order to get past all the muck of not “feeling like it.”

How do you get inside a moment?

I used to mostly only write when a flood of feelings overwhelmed me, and the only thing I could do was get it down on the page. This feeling felt like heat in my chest – sometimes desperate, sometimes mad with smiles – and words would keep repeating in my head, then my mouth…

As I grew as a writer, I came to understand that inspiration can also be a practice. I show up to the page the same way I show up to my yoga mat. It brings to mind a quote by Chuck Close, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work." (Insert smile here.)

My routine is to wake up as early as my body will allow and just start writing. I have been writing long enough that I allow the poem to be bad, to be messy, to be whatever it wants to be.

When I am writing my yoga poems, in particular, I set my intention, start writing, and often stand up, practice the pose, write more, look up instructions and any relevant mythology, write more, and then revise, revise, revise.

Some of the yoga pose poems – especially the ones with solid metaphorical names – came more easily, like Mountain Pose or Goddess Pose, but others with more mechanical names, like Extended Side Angle Pose, took more effort.

But I have learned to trust the process and to trust and honor the vision of my project.

How do you know when a piece has come together (does it feel a particular kind of way in your body)?

When crafting a poem I intend to share, I am known to revise it anywhere from five to thirty times. I know that it is coming together when I am able to read it out loud all the way to the end without interrupting myself to change something. When I reach the end, I feel a tingle in my entire body as if someone else had just shared a gift of a poem with me, and I feel blessed… or somehow more healed. Sometimes I will touch my chest or even shed a tear.

Even after that, I send the poem to my two readers, who are both writers and yoga instructors. After their feedback, I make any final changes and share it here, on Substack.

The three poems I am sharing here, Mountain Pose, Goddess Pose, and Star Pose, are from my Starshine Salutation Sequence, which is a longer sequence of poems that align the reader/listener with their hearts and with irrefutable and unconditional self-love.

-Corie Feiner

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Mountain Pose

by Corie Feiner

Every day is a new day to relearn how 
to stand, to lift my head away from sink dishes 
and screens, to roll my shoulders 
 
from their good-for-nothing slouch, to hold 
my neck high as if there was a string 
from heaven pulling me upwards saying, 
You were born of us, too. 
 
Today, I stand like a mountain and tell myself, 
This is where everything begins. Still and solid
with arms that flow by my sides like wild rivers 
shimmering with life. 
 
Here, I become a witness to time itself 
watching my thoughts come and go 
like wind-swept clouds knowing no matter 
 
what storms come my way, my feet can hold me 
to the earth as I crumble and rise, crumble and rise 
humble and holy, dirty and divine. 

Sanskrit Name: Tadasana

Goddess Pose

by Corie Feiner

When I squat into goddess pose 
there is so much to reclaim –
 
starting with birth. 
 
My birth. Your birth and all 
the births before us that were full
of squatting and bleeding and grunting 
and knowing that we can 
make it through most any pain.
 
Next are our centers which we have been taught 
to either hide or give away. 
 
And next still are our breasts
which were made to be shown, 
to be kissed, to be sucked, to be loved. 
 
I have to stand like this—
hips, hands, and feet shining outwards 
 
as if I could become a goddess  
with nine heads and eight limbs, 
the sun as my crown, the moon 
as my core and dance                                                             
 
a divine sexy mama dance 
that can create or destroy anything – 
 
this is the only way anything new
has ever been born. 

Sanskrit Name: Utkata Konasana

Star Pose

by Corie Feiner

To be in star pose is to stand with your heart 
so open it could feel worthy of taking up 
any space it needs. 
 
It is to hold your body upright, to spread 
your arms and legs so wide you can swear
they twinkle, your breath shimmering 
with light. 
 
It is to remember that you, too, are made of 
the same stuff as all star bodies that guide even 
the most storm-tossed ships back to shore. 
 
We have seen the beginning of time over 
and over again and, each time, it seems 
like the end,
 
but know this, as you stand there, that you 
are a wish in someone else’s sky. 

Sanskrit Name: Utthita Tadasana

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? Have you recently published a book of poetry? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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When I started this publication back in 2021, I fantasized about living by candlelight, traveling by horse and buggy, and altogether moving more slowly and living a quieter (though, of course, horses and buggies are actually quite loud) life. I yearned for it.

I’d just finished a master’s degree at the UI Center for the Book, where I developed skills in book binding, box making, and letterpress printing and spent a lot of time learning about and looking at v v v old books. Like, think Gutenberg and pre-printing, scribed manuscripts.

I edited poetry while setting each letter individually in metal type on the printer’s stick. I sewed folded signatures of paper together with needle and thread. I frequently had to wait for glue to dry. Despite the demands of being in a graduate program, there was no hurrying these practices.

Below Rodgers Johns, of taken out of context, beautifully captures the essence of the slow, rhythmic practice of baking sourdough bread daily in the weeks leading up to the birth of her son, which of course launched her into a whole different set of practices and presence.

I love the flow of Tarn’s writing, and of course, baking sourdough is a much more accessible and useful historic practice than turning to horse-drawn buggies, living by candlelight, and letterpress printing.

I hope you savor her words as much as I do,

Tarn Rodgers Johns is a Berlin-based writer, creative and crack dweller, currently moving through the season of mothering a new human. She publishes to her own Substack, taken out of context.

In early February last year, on the brink of motherhood, I invited friends over to participate in a bread-braiding ritual for Imbolc, the halfway point between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, and the welcoming back of the light.

The end of my pregnancy was characterised by a frenzy of baking. The process of mixing and kneading, waiting, waiting, waiting was comforting and familiar. In those liminal days, baking sourdough bread was the perfect practice to channel my impatience.

Already on maternity leave, it structured the day: mix at 3 pm, let sit until 4, fold at 6, shape and put into the fridge before bed, bake the next day, and repeat. After a while, I didn't need to watch the clock, the process became intuitive. By the time my due date rolled around, my freezer was well stocked with loaves. In those early, messy days of postpartum, I found comfort in eating slices of rye, spelt, and cinnamon and raisin toast in stolen moments, to keep me going in the early hours of the morning.

A reminder of a different, more spacious time.

My partner will attest to the countless flat, rock-hard loaves that I produced in the years (yes, plural) that I was figuring out how to make good bread. Unusually for me, as a notorious (to myself) quitter, I stuck at it. The results got better as I picked up techniques and tips from people on Instagram and videos on YouTube. I experimented with different types of flour, proofing times, and methods of baking in the oven until my bread started to emerge in a way I was satisfied with.

Unlike commercial yeast, sourdough doesn’t behave predictably. Sourdough starter is an ecosystem in miniature, a buzzing microbial community that emerges from the most simple of ingredients: flour and water. The microbes themselves come from the flour, the kitchen, the sourdough is fermenting in the baker’s hands. I imagine in times gone by, sourdough starters would have travelled down the generations, a unique microbial footprint of a family or a village.

Over the past year, while my baby thrived, I couldn’t say the same for my sourdough starter. It languished in the fridge, developing a thick layer of grey watery ‘hooch’. Sourdough only really stays healthy through a continuity of practice; the microbes need to be regularly turned over and fed, and all of my caregiving capacity was occupied elsewhere. I told myself I’d make bread again when I had more time.

My son turned one recently, just as spring started to show her colours, and he loves bread. A few weeks ago, I collected some new sourdough starter from someone on a community forum and baked my first loaf since he was born. The new starter was made with rye, and it was very enthusiastic; the dough puffed up surprisingly quickly, and the first result came out a bit too flat and overproved.

The next loaf was better, and eventually, this unfamiliar sourdough starter and I settled into a new rhythm. For a while, I baked every day. Then my son got a cold and developed a new tooth. The new sourdough starter looked at me forlornly every time I opened the fridge. Less forgiving than its predecessor, the next time I had the itch to bake, it was past the point of revival.

One day, I will return to the delicious effervescence of sourdough once again, but this season of my life calls for something with a bit more predictability. A few days ago in the run-up to Easter weekend, I fished out a sachet of dried yeast from the cupboard to prepare some Hot Cross Buns, or Osterbrötchen, as my German family calls them.

They were delicious.

—Tarn Rodgers Johns

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? Have you recently published a book of poetry? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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It’s not because Ricki and I go way back to passing poems folded into notes in the hallways between classes that I’m so excited about this guest post and collaboration, it’s because I too fully believe that everything is the Work. Living is the Work. Existing is the Work. Whether we write it down, draw it, or directly use whatever it is is irrelevant. As long as we’re breathing, we’re still creating. And so many of us are very, very hard on ourselves when we’re not actively writing things down or making things because we forget that we are not machines and that whatever we are doing, we are still doing the Work.

Ricki Cummings is a trans writer currently living in Chicago. Her most recent books are The Failure Experiment (2025) and confessions from a drainage ditch (2023). She is the author of the chapbooks A Void and Cloudless Sky and Hypersigil. Her work has been published in Poetry, Vallum, Court Green, Calibanonline, Solstice Literary Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, and Allium, and has been shortlisted for Vallum’s Award for Poetry. She received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago.

On Practice

I should make one thing clear: what I have is not a practice so much as a set of guidelines that I attempt to sort-of adhere to, and it's a combination of two ideas, one interpolated from several sources such that I may have actually synthesized my own idea, and one specific one.

The former is Everything Is The Work. If you're an artist of any sort, but specifically a writer, everything that's going into your head, everything that you're turning around and mulling and stewing on, every little scrap you collect or write... that's part of doing The Work. Writing isn't always sitting down and banging out 4000 words or an entire sonnet, sometimes it's the act of noting the way the sun looks at a certain time of the year, or spending time you should be writing suddenly researching firearms from 1836 or the gravity on Mercury, or just staring at the wall while your brain chews on all those things.

More importantly, those things don't have to be done at a particular time of day. Strict adherence to schedule is great for some people. Other people slip a day and the whole thing goes to shit. Give yourself leeway. You're still doing The Work. Are you breathing? Then you're Working.

The latter idea, the specific one, is the daily routine of author Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote that her day looks like this:

5:30 a.m. – Wake up and lie there and think.

6:15 a.m. – Get up eat breakfast (lots).

7:15. a.m – get to work, writing, writing and writing.

Noon – Lunch.

1:00 – 3:00 p.m. – reading, music.

3:00 – 5:00 p.m. – correspondence, maybe housecleaning

5:00 – 8:00 p.m. – make dinner and eat it

After 8:00 p.m. – I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this

Note how little of it is actually structured. She is awake for almost two hours before actually sitting down to "work." Her afternoon/evening seems to be very little "writing" "work," but considering that reading feeds the writer brain, that music feeds the general creative brain, that correspondence and connection keep us grounded in our position of community (usually of fellow artists) and is still writing in the strictest sense. (Housecleaning I still haven't found a Work connection for, but I assume it's in there.)

But then there's that last one. "I tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this." One could reasonably make the argument that Le Guin was a de facto genius. Yet she still puts in her schedule a time for her "stupidity." Is that because she's decided that's the time all the stupid happens? No, that's the time she has observed when the stupid happens. Much like grammar, Le Guin's routine is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It's what works for her.

Now, like I said, I have no practice as such. I'm writing this on my laptop I bought for grad school (has it already been six years since I finished?), in a plaintext editor on Linux, an operating system I've only recently switched to. This is far from my "normal" setup. And yet, here I am. Working. Some people get precious about their tools, their time. But none of that matters so much as just Doing The Work. And so many artists will tell you that there's One True Way to do it, but fuck them. That's for their work. William Stafford would get up a six AM and immediately start writing, every day, for his entire adult life. Hell, even Le Guin got up at 5:30. All I do is remember that it takes a couple hours for my brain to spin up to operating speed, and from there I try to write in the morning, do socializing and leisure in the afternoon, and get some real rest in before bed. At any point in there I reserve the right to stupidity.

You get to set your own schedule. If you only get time to work at lunch or during your work breaks, do that. Stephen King wrote most of Carrie in the lunchroom at a laundry service he was working at. But you can bet he was working out plot while moving shirts into the drying machine. Thinking up lines. Probably a little being stupid, too. The important thing is that you get something, anything, done, because It's All Part Of The Work. The details are unimportant.

You are you. Be you.

-Ricki Cummings

excerpt from Hypersigil

by Ricki Cummings

All this time I thought your name
     meant “earth”.
Instead, your name is my name
     but older.
We are both prone to madness
     and shadow,
cave-ins and strained backs
     from lifting our lungs
     when no one else could.

excerpt from The Failure Experiment

by Ricki Cummings

Inside the solar plexus
lies ganglia and the word.
Scales fall from my eyes
and are replaced with coax
cable and copper traces. I think
therefore you are; this
cybernetic solipsism
is only fibrous networks,
only logic giving rise
to what electricity thinks
is love: salt water, silicon,
and neuropeptides.

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Just a little about the production of Hypersigil as a book object

Back in 2019, when Libby was learning letterpress printing and book binding at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, she, Ricki, and artist Jessica Wagar collaborated on this really, really gorgeous hand-typeset, letterpress printed, and handbound book, if she (Libby) does say so herself.

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What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your writer life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? What does poetry mean to you? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch, unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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I picked up circle drawing a few years back. I can’t tell you what’s so pleasing about it, but it quickly became one of my fave Zentangle patterns. It just really pleases my eyeballs and my body.

A few weeks ago I finished a 6 x 7 inch sheet of circles, filling in the negative space with black and (happy accident) brown ink and just, like, could not contain myself.

Almost every drawing I do, I want to make it bigger, but have been hesitant. It feels daunting and I fear I’ll lose interest halfway through or it’ll take too long or it won’t come out/I’ll eff it up and have wasted a larger (read more expensive) sheet of paper with nothing to show for it.

Just like some really basic fears that I fully intended to ignore at some stage, and I finally have.

And I’m so pleased because I have loved every single moment of this 18 x 24-inch drawing coming into being. Every circle (or near circle, and some not near circles at all) I put down is, if not a pleasure, then an astute representation of where I’m at.

Which, I love observing: my hand starts moving too quickly or wobbles more when I’m hungry or tired. If I slow my hand down, my breath slows with a sigh. When my eyeballs get unfocused, I need some water or just to stop and probably to nap.

And when I set the drawing on a table, I marvel at it every time I pass it by. I mean, just, like really love on it. I talk to it. I tell it how much I love it. How beautiful it is. I don’t even care if this is weird! Because I love it so much.

I can’t see the patterns forming when I’m drawing, so looking at it from a distance, especially just after adding circles, is a whole thing. every. single. time.

Last week, I had to take care of some other things and didn’t have the time or energy to make any progress and I physically yearned for it. Stopped to admire it on several occasions. I frequently wanted to drop everything and draw more circles.

And when finally I was at a stopping point between tasks and there was nothing immediately pressing, I picked it up again and spent a couple of hours with it. My hand felt rusty, and I was full of delight. (I’d prefer to be making circles right now than writing about making circles, but I also want to share it with you!)

My 8 pt Micron nib has worn down, and I don’t know how to prevent that from happening, but I’m going to eke out every bit of ink that I can from it because I am not wasteful! (I’m sure this is a Puritan virtue instilled in me.)

I’m not planning anything, just sort of following intuitive nudges to make bigger or smaller circles and so I have no idea what the final work will look like exactly and that, mixed with the sense of pleasure at each added section, slow as it may be, seems to be curiosity enough to continue on.

dreaming italy

Y’all. This has just, it’s got me. Like I am got, and I don’t think I can stop it even if I wanted to. Or maybe I have been working really hard to stop this train for most of my adult life, and it’s made everything so much harder. So I’ve just, I’ve got to get it out.

I have been reticent to want anything out loud. For so long, whenever I declared a desire or put an intention toward an outcome, things—never quite fruited. I have felt like a snake oil salesman making promises I was never able to follow through on, to myself, mostly.

The girl who cried wolf, except the girl who dreamed shit up she could never really have: qualifications I thought I wanted (ahem, still don’t have that PhD), careers I half-assedly tried to pursue, projects I only just barely started (all those drafts of writing!) and the ughest one of all: wanting to move to Europe.

In my head my life is so much more exciting than it ever has been, mostly.

I’ve been saying it for so long with no real follow through, even I began to think it wasn’t something I really wanted, just, you know, maybe it’s pleasant to dream of cruising UK’s canals in a narrowboat or having coffee under a vine covered pergola at the back of my Italian villa overlooking lush fields? It’s a dream. A fantasy. No one has it in real life. (Except that they do.)

And it tends to spike up when things don’t feel that great in my real life. So, you know, it’s just escapism. Right? A broken record of escapist fantasy.

A broken record in bullet points:

• I’m working toward getting my Italin citizenship: I began collecting the documentation to get Italian citizenship by descent years ago and went on in fits and starts whenever I had some extra money. And, actually, just a few days ago the Italian government implemented a provisional declaration that restricts citizenship by descent to only those with a parent or grandparent born in Italy.
  
  And maybe I could convince my octogenarian grandfather and mother to apply together and see where that cookie crumbles, but it’s actually quite a relief to have that longstanding to-do taking up space in my brain off the list. Like, I think it’s easier to just apply for residency. And I had a lot of fun receiving birth certificates from Italy.

• I want to move to the UK: I don’t know how many times I’ve told friends I wanted to move back to the UK, how many hours I’ve spent researching whatever graduate program aligned with a current special interest, browsing job boards in fields even tangential to my qualifications, and even just looking at the various visas to see if they’d changed, to see if I may more easily qualify.

• And now: As soon as I earn the required income I’m getting a digital nomad visa!

A couple of years ago, I found out that some countries had created digital nomad visas, and just after Italy announced one of their own in April 2024, I had an experience that brought my deepest desire to live in Europe into sharp clarity. I mean, the absolute sharpest clarity.

For a hot second, I thought a path was opening to a move much sooner than I thought I could manage, and I sprung into such momentum. Suddenly, everything seemed so clear and easy. Unfortunately, that situation wasn’t what I thought it was, and I spent a long time reorienting and healing.

But, I just haven’t been able to let the desire go. I’ve tried to convince myself that getting a campervan and traveling around the States would be wildly fun (and even easier, especially with Copper). I wouldn’t have to learn a language (something else I’ve done in fits and starts). I’ve considered a move to the PNW, after all, the weather is very Britain-like. I’ve considered small, New England towns with their Old World charm. I’ve even considered an expat village in the Mexican mountains.

But my body just keeps telling me nope. Nope. Nope. Big fat effing nopes.

So I say this hesitantly, nervously, even with just a bit of fear and shame: I have been dreaming big about moving to Italy. I mean, I am literally having dreams of sipping espresso at a cafe in a little medieval village seldom explored by tourists, the warm sun on my skin, surrounded by stone and cobbles in the middle of a mountain forest, the slowness of Italian life filtering into my very being, jotting a few lines down in a notebook, and Copper chillaxing at home, waiting for me to return and start my work day (i.e., writing and editing this newsletter or drawing circles).

I don’t know how to get from where I am to where I want to be, it feels like an impossible financial leap, let alone an emotional or logistical one. Like if you saw my bank account, snake oil salesman indeed. So right now, I’m just working on the energetic leaps. Clearing out all the fears and insecurities about attracting collaborators, growing this publication, selling art works, being able to actually take care of myself in a way that’s sustainable so that I don’t once again end up back here so burntout and in a severe depression just from, you know, being alive in a neurodivergent body trying to live like I’m in a neurotypical one, tail between my legs, feeling like a failure.

Like whatever happens going forward, it has to be set up in a way that allows me to rest when I need rest. No pushing really hard, no hustling, just ease and peace, and pacing myself. I think I’m getting closer to that in practice, but whether or not it’s working in the real world, i.e., reflected in my bank account, is another story. All this feels like a huge and improbable dream.

So I want to share all the possibilities with you, I want to dream with you going forward, if that’s okay, but can I just leave this here for now, a small whisper to the universe: please clear a path for me and Copper to easefully, sustainably, and safely get to Italy?

in the post

March: the first ephemera packets went out without a hitch last month. Readers at the Founding level (okay, my mom) and randomly selected readers at the Paid level received a random assortment of mail art, letterpress print projects, and paper art I’ve made or collected over the last ten years. I even sewed the bleeding envelopes, y’all. It was a bit extra, but in the spirit of using things up, it made a nice dent in my paper stash.

April: I’ll be sending out the remaining Thank You zines. I know a few folks have received one of these. If you’re a Paid subscriber and have one, can you remind me? And anyone who wants one, please upgrade to Founding and make sure I have your post address before the 15th. <3

invitation to collaborate

Next week, I’ll be sharing an essay On Practice by poet Ricki Cummings, along with a special surprise announcement. I know. You can hardly wait, amirite?

In the meantime, what art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your writer life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

with love and gratitude,

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Forest Bathing, or shinrin-yoku, originated in Japan in the 1980s and has since been proven to be an effective practice to increase our well-being. It’s not just that trees are nicer than houses to look at or that walking on a dirt path vs. a city sidewalk is more pleasant, though both are true. And the sound of birdsong is, undoubtedly, sweet, and hearing it does regulate our nervous systems.

But also the earth has an electrical charge and when our skin comes into contact with that electrical charge (walking barefoot on conductive surfaces or touching a tree still living and in the ground) it rights our bodies: reduces inflammation, blood flows more easily, free radicals are zapped and we feel better. It’s called Earthing or Grounding.

Walking barefoot through the forest would be the ideal health boost, but I suspect even just being surrounded by that electrical charge, without touching a single tree (though definitely do touch trees), is in fact a bath of ions balancing our bodies at the atom level.

Forest Therapy Guides are trained to guide clients through an immersive and meditative experience that supports moving into well-being with the help of the forest. shares how and why her Forest Therapy practice is essential to her well-being.

Sam Messersmith is a certified nature and forest therapy guide, writer, and poet who is passionate about helping others reconnect with their hearts and the natural world. Through her Substack, Wandering Willow, she shares reflections on nature, creativity, and emotional well-being. Sam’s work blends mindfulness, storytelling, and the wisdom of nature to inspire personal growth and connection. When she’s not guiding or writing, she enjoys creating spaces for community and heartfelt conversations.

Forest Therapy as Practice

Forest Therapy (FT) is quite focused on the practice of being present, and not prescribing outcomes.

As a Nature and Forest Therapy Guide, it has become second nature (no pun intended) to see everything through the lens of "practice." It has been hard for me in my life to let go of outcomes. FT helps me to be in the moment, not focused on outcomes, just "being."

What is practice?

To echo the above, I believe practice is the art of staying present. BE-ing in the thing that you are DO-ing.

How do you practice?

I come back to my senses, literally. The core of FT is re-awakening your senses. It is in the present moment that you hear a bird sing, taste your herbal tea, feel the fur of your pet, and smell dinner cooking in the crock pot.

What does it mean to practice?

To me, it means letting go. Forgiving myself for not being perfect. Letting go of what something "should" look like, and accepting what is here now before me.

What brings you to practice?

My mind. My mental health. It can get spiral-y and overwhelming in there sometimes. I most notice when my body reacts to these thoughts. I feel tense. The world feels rushed and I get agitated. That is when I know I need to take a step away from whatever it is I am doing, and come back to my senses, back to my breath.

What keeps you coming back?

FT helps me to relax. I am a better person for it. A better wife, better cat mom. I do it for my health: mental, emotional, spiritual, physical. Connection is a huge component as well. I feel connected to my body and spirit. Connected to nature. When done with others, it helps me feel connected to the world as a whole.

Where do you wobble?

Oh everywhere I think. Mostly when I worry, and become fixated on a course of action to protect myself and my loved ones from any perceived harm. Basically when I try to predict the future, and envision something awful to be prepared for, rather than hopeful for a peaceful, uplifting future.

How does your practice feel?

My practice of Forest Therapy makes me feel like anything is possible. My world feels so expanded. My creativity is the best it's ever been. I feel more playful. The most impactful feelings: connected, peace, freedom, and safety. I feel safe to be me.

What is your aim, if any?

I suppose I would like to master the Way of the Guide, if such a thing is possible. To be able to channel that Guide part of me in my daily life. Letting people be as they are, with nothing to fix. Letting myself be the way I am, with nothing to change. Allowing for what is to just simply be. In moments of stress and anxiety. I'm not even sure of what that would look like exactly, but that is definitely my reason for coming back again and again.

—Sam Messersmith

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invitation to collaborate

If you’d like to share about your creative, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch, unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators.

We’ve released ourselves from deadlines and are now open to rolling collaborations. We’ve also come into clarity about Poetic Musings: we’re (by we, we mean I, as in Libby) not interested in being gatekeepers to publication. We’re interested in celebrating poetry and the practice of writing poetry (and lyric essays, etc.), so we’re leaning into featuring poets (as opposed to publishing poets) some of their work, and hearing a bit about their practice. We’re not sure what this looks like yet in practicality, but we’re very excited about forming this section with our collaborators.

More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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I am a collector of materials, tools, mediums, unfinished projects, papers, journals, photos, documents, qualifications, skills, first drafts, etc.

I have carried an old sewing pattern with me on several cross-country moves, not because I wanted to sew the item designed, but because I couldn’t let it go, for a decade or more before finally finding a use for it in a book art project.

When I moved to Mom and Dad’s I gathered up all the old, kind of disgusting, and unnecessary bed linen, to use for—something and yes I brought them with me to Grandma’s in two big bins last year.

I found a waterlogged box of archived high school and college notes, neatly organized, labeled, and housed in binders in the loft storage space in my parents’ house.

As a writer, I’ve been certain that retaining journals even from junior high, is one of the most important things I can do, I scanned them all in 2015-1016, though I’m quite certain they will not serve me as well as David Sedaris’s journals have served him.

Late 2023 I had an inkling to use up some cloth I’d collected, so I designed and started sewing an ottoman pouf. Maybe you remember.

Simultaneously, I’d finally gotten around to dealing with the family archive I’d committed to organizing, including my own albums, and found I had no attachment whatsoever to so many of them: teenage boys flicking off the camera felt violent and unnecessary, random candids of people I was never that close with nor have I been in touch in the last 20 yrs, overexposed photos, photos of red splotches, half exposed/half blank photos, or completely blank photos. And everything in double.

I initially thought I’d shred them into long strips with the intention of weaving them into new images without realizing the shredder made one-inch confetti rather than long strips, so, actually, with quite a lot of relief, my intention changed. I remembered that a mentor and friend had used shredded paper to fill a pouf she made for her cats, and got to work gleefully shredding photo after photo in a productive destruction that gave me such a feeling of satisfaction.

Since then the project has been stop / start: the bobbin case in the old sewing machine I was using became incorrigible and finicky in every possible way and in the end, despite taking things apart and putting them back together several times, and with all the trouble I’ve had with sewing machines, I attached the top of the pouf by hand in December to finally finish the shell, and I got started shredding and filling.

And, folks, oh goodness, I took such pleasure in shredding past versions of myself. When I ran out of photos to shred, I moved on to the piles of school notes. And I started in on old holiday cards and non-sentimental letters but got overwhelmed making decisions. Bits of odd ephemera that meant something to me once, but now sparked little to nothing of even a memory.

The more I destroyed one thing to create another, the more I built something from the wreckage I’d been holding onto, the freer and lighter I felt. The more I let go of the past, the more I felt I could focus on the current version of myself.

Objects, photos, furniture, etc., they all carry weight and not just the literal physical weight they embody, but they’re like a mattress: the mattress you bring home on day one is as light as it will ever be, as you sleep on it skin cells, oils, dust, etc., starts embedding in the fibers (yep, it’s gross) and I’ve read that mattresses get heavier as the years go on.

All these objects (physical and digital) have an energetic weight, too, and I think this is what Marie Kondo is getting at, though I’ve never actually read her books: the objects that feel light and joyful, those that regulate our nervous systems, should definitely stay with us; the things that feel heavy and dreary (down-regulate) or maybe worse, those things that make us feel angry or anxious (up-regulate—like every time you feel irritated at the sofa you thought you loved in the store, but absolutely hate in your house) should definitely go, because though we may not be consciously aware that we’re holding onto or feeling those things from day-to-day and though I don’t understand how it works exactly, as long as we keep it in our lives, we keep it in our nervous systems.

It does really always come back to the nervous system and sometimes practicing regulation is as much a physical letting go as it is an emotional one.

I am and have been continually called to rehome, recycle, throw out, and otherwise use shit up. When I moved to Bath in 2008, I was faced with shelves of books I hadn’t even read, the thought of storing them or moving them felt like a big fat no in my body, so I donated them. Only being able to travel with a couple of suitcases, really brought these things into clarity.

When I moved from Iowa City back up to Minnesota, I was not so discerning and rented a small trailer. Over the last few years, I have quelled a growing desire to use up the things I collected and moved with me, downsize my belongings, and spend time deleting old emails and files because, I suspect, I felt I should be putting my attention elsewhere.

I should be writing (i.e., drafting something new, because going back to drafts is a whole other aspect of using shit up) or I should be making something to sell. I should be figuring out how to create a livable and sustainable income stream that doesn’t send me to the mental hospital for burnout. Not crocheting socks.

Cutting old clothes into scraps I can use to stuff the yoga bolster I have yet to sew or clearing out the unthinkably large and growing digital archive I’ve been lugging around felt like backlog projects, projects to do in downtime I never and always seemed to have, they were not the primary goal worth my attention. They can’t, after all, earn me money! (Capitalism just seeps in everywhere, doesn’t it?)

And yet, and yet, as 2025 came into being and I more or less finished the ottoman pouf (as I sit on it, the materials become compacted and it’s clear it needs even more stuffing), I noted the giddiness I felt in that productive destruction and release of all that energy. I felt how good it felt to make something from something else, and I made a decision: I wasn’t going to put off this urge any longer, though I don’t go for New Year’s goals or resolutions, 2025 is the year of putting my attention toward a practice of using shit up, clearing shit out, and otherwise offloading physical, digital, and energetic weight. (Not always because I dislike something, but sometimes because I want to share it!)

And just, you know, exploring how that’s applied to all kinds of projects and materials and seeing what happens. There’s no material end goal, such as Inbox Zero, it’s about taking pleasure in the practice, which may be a way in to a quieter inbox and finishing writing projects. Time will tell.

It’s a path to taking pleasure in watching materials and mediums dwindle: in the autumn I made a big hole in my yarn stash crocheting 20-plus hanger covers and I nearly threw a party. I cleared out a big bin of photos and documents to stuff the pouf and felt such a relief.

I’ve gotten around to using my Essential Oil diffuser and every time a small bottle goes empty I do a little dance of glee (a bottle of peppermint has only a few drops left in it!). I’m playing with some rubber stamps I collected awhile back and many have happily gone into the donate bin.

And I’ve made piles of collected ephemera, paper scraps, zines, artworks, prints, etc., some of which will be sent thoughtfully and lovingly back out into the universe to you, if you’re a Founding Member subscriber, as ephemera collections and zines. (I’m so excited, I feel like I’ve got a year’s worth of monthly things all planned out and I hate planning!)

They say it’s the little things. I know how absurd it is to feel gleeful that I’ve finished off a bottle of essential oils, but why fight it? I’m going to follow that feeling.

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Of course, each of our journeys is different, what feels like heaviness to me, may feel like lightness and joy to you.

It’s becoming clear to me that this journey my soul is on, is not about being an archive, holding onto objects as an end goal (though of course, some); my journey is about periods of collection and drafting and then periods of using things up, building things from other things, completing drafts, and most importantly sending them back out into the world hopefully creating a joyful, or at least pleasant energy for the receiver.

I think this is what draws me to publishing as well—an act of collecting submissions and then sharing them out.

in the post (March)

I’ve begun gathering the ephemera pieces for the first ephemera packet! There are eight packets and I will blind draw amongst Founding Subscribers to determine recipients. Each packet is unique with small playful letterpress experiments, collected paper art or photographs by friends and colleagues (maybe you’ll find a new artist to love), and small artworks by me.

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invitation to collaborate

unraveling, unmoored continues to seek collaborators in the categories of On Practice and Poetic Musings until March 15. I can’t wait to share your words with this publication’s growing readership. Submission Guidelines can be found on the About Page. If there are any questions, please send a message.

with love and gratitude,

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Before continuing this tale on the Autonomic Nervous System and why I love rainy days (installments one and two), offering you a breath practice feels prudent. If you feel stuck in any area of life, anxious, depressed, emotionally out of control, like you’re living someone else’s life, low on flow, frequently irritated, not enough, too much, insecure, incapable, overwhelmed, numbed out, or like you don’t know what you want or who you are, or any variation of the above, and want to jump right in, scroll down for a Yoga with Adriene tutorial on Alternate Nostril breathing.

If you want to chat some more, come along with me: Autonomic Nervous System regulation practice is my greatest wish for literally all of humanity. It is how we come to world peace, equality, and equity.

I can’t be sure about this, but I suspect that no one who ever had a regulated ANS severely, senselessly hurt another intentionally or unintentionally. And when I’m crowned Supreme Ruler of the Universe, it’s the first thing I’m implementing.

The truths are that not everyone likes you, not everyone agrees with you, not every partner will stick around, jobs will be lost, and people die, sometimes suddenly and tragically, but with a regulated ANS, the griefs, the sadnesses, the traumas, they don’t get stuck where they shouldn’t be. They move through, maybe not quickly, but they do move through you.

We weren’t made to carry these things with us or numb out from them. It’s why it doesn’t feel good and it’s why some people treat others so horribly.

With a regulated ANS, compassion starts to become big in us; both for ourselves and literally everyone and everything else. Not right away. But little by little, and then all at once.

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(who now has a Substack in case you didn’t know!) has said (and I’m paraphrasing) that the most compassionate people she’s ever met aren’t those who don’t have hurts or traumas or are blind to the devastation in the world, they are those who have created so much space inside themselves there’s room for it all.

In my own experience, when I’m practicing, the compassion is so big and so sweet, but not too much or overwhelming. My concerns, petty grievances, pains aren’t gone necessarily, but the expansive compassion holds them, cares for them, they feel seen and heard and therefore a lot less immediate.

We humans, we were born to have emotional experiences; ANS regulation doesn’t stop emotions, but most of us are so trained from an early age that our emotions are inappropriate and we weren’t taught how to manage them in ways that aren’t harmful to others and ourselves, that we spend much of our time working hard to quell them. And they get stuck in our bodies.

Modern psychology has up until recently been operating under a misunderstanding of the human mind-body. Its understanding was that medicating these things or talking them through was the best and limited course of action and that we had to learn to live with things like depression and anxiety.

Thankfully contemporary research into the Autonomic Nervous System, trauma, and a new understanding more in line with longheld Eastern insights, that everything in our bodies is connected, has shifted these misunderstandings, and ancient, as well as new tools and practices are being utilized to support coming into ANS regulation and point us toward peace.

Mindful practices are coming into therapy sessions; trauma-specific therapies are available (Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT Tapping), Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR therapy, Vagus Nerve activation, and various Somatic (i.e., body-based) therapies are all effective tools to regulate the ANS with the support of a trained professional); and there are so many more people coming to ANS regulating practices on their own (yoga, Tai Chi, Chigong, Breathwork, dance, etc.) and sharing them with others.

It does often seem that there’s a new fix-all, fad tool in the therapy world every year, people insisting you must do this or that, but the truth is, when you look at the big picture, it’s tools that regulate the ANS that contribute to effective healing and things that don’t regulate the ANS are less effective, ineffective, or even sometimes re-traumatizing.

But our ANSs are designed to keep us safe and unfortunately, they sometimes do that by making it difficult for us to utilize effective regulating tools (I’m looking at myself, every time I hit up yoga three or four times, feel super great, and then drop back for a couple of months). They may resist using effective tools (i.e., if you’re struggling to read this or it’s making you angry, that could be your ANS resisting regulation) because when our ANSs are dysregulated, regulation feels unsafe.

It’s a Catch-22.

If you find yourself in this loop, making a gentle, conscious, and intentional choice toward regulation is the way through. And, choosing the most natural tool based on where your ANS is at is imperative: if you’re up-regulated, choose a regulation tool that is movement-based; and if you’re down-regulated, choose a regulation tool you can do from bed or the sofa. It doesn’t have to be the same tool every day, it certainly hasn’t been for me.

And if you’re really struggling to utilize any tools, seek an energy healer, such a Reiki or Craniosacral practitioner.

Because regulation is where compassion lives. Patience. Clarity. Emotional sovereignty. Calm. Unconditional love. And I want those things for you.

We didn’t choose the nervous systems we currently have, at least not with our thinking adult brains, and a lot of things in this world feel out of our control and completely unrelated to where our individual ANS is at any given moment, but very little in the external world can regulate them.

In other words, we have to do the work ourselves. Our bosses may have unreasonable expectations and they may be emailing us at one in the morning or flying off the handle whenever a tiny thing gets off track (I mean, their ANS is dysregulated as well) and you do not deserve that behavior, it is inappropriate, and it is not your fault, but even if that dude does calm down, your ANS still needs tending to, to release the trauma his behavior caused and he can’t do that for you any more than your getting the work done well and on time can regulate his ANS for him.

We can’t talk or think our way into a regulated ANS, we have to practice.

So whatever we’ve experienced in our lives that was beyond our control and led us to where we are right here and right now in the ANS we currently have, our choices from this point forward are Practice or Pattern. We have the opportunity to, and are truly the only people who can, bring regulation to ourselves and the stuff living inside us won’t go away on its own. If it’s lodged in our ANS, it becomes our responsibility.

As a person with a sensitive ANS, this sucks. That person who yelled at me or treated me violently or the horrific events in the world should have to clean up the mess they created in my body. But they can’t. The only person we are all truly responsible for is ourselves, we are the only people we can be responsible for in the ways that actually matter, even if those around us don’t take responsibility for themselves.

And I don’t mean that we need to just get over the things that have been done to us, the large-scale devastations we witness, or that systemic changes aren’t necessary, but we will never get to peace when we’re navigating from a position of chaos. If we want peace we have to become peace.

So essentially, as they say, we have to be the change we want to see in the world. If you, like me, want peace, whether personal peace or world peace, ANS regulation is where it starts.

So join me in a simple but effective Breath practice: Alternate Nostril Breathing. Excellent for regulating the ANS and balancing the body. It takes 15 to 20 minutes to regulate the ANS, which may feel like a lot.

Try it for three to five minutes if you’ve never practiced breathwork before and increase your time with each practice. (You do not have to cover the nostril at the bottom like she does, you can just press on the side of your nose…)

My yoga teacher training with Raj Yoga., suggests that Alternate Nostril breathing is the place to start with a breathwork practice as it balances the energy in the body, and practicing this for 90 days can bring complete balance to the whole body.

You don’t have to practice clearing your mind, allow things to come forward if they come forward, but don’t spend time analyzing them, dissecting them, ruminating on, or judging/labeling them. Just observe the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that come forward with as little attachment as possible (this gets easier!).

But it’s all just energy in motion. Allow it to move. The less I try to hold onto something the more quickly it moves through.

In my (and others’) experience, the thoughts and emotions that come forward during these practices are being released. There may be deeper or different aspects to a particular topic that might come forward in different practices, the more complicated a particular belief or experience is, the more layers there are to it.

Ahem, the “I’m not enough” belief is extraordinarily sticky for me and comes forward in a myriad of ways in practice, but it also holds me back in a myriad of sneaky little ways as well so bring it on ANS, I’m clearing that out.

I’ll come back to the rain next time and how ANS regulation has been the key to supporting my writing and creative practices as well. Unless I’ve already said.

Until then happy breathing,

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An invitation, first, to slow with the snow:

The odd winter weather continues here in Minnesota—temps in the 30s and 40s (consistently above freezing) after a short bout of subzero gives the illusion that spring has arrived mighty, mighty early. I feel snow is coming despite the deceitful temps, which I have been taking full advantage of with leisurely walks through the trees.

Today, when I opened the door to call the dogs in, a collective of small birds chattered in the trees. Very not January, even the last day.

mentioned in a comment from my last newsletter that Imbolc, a Celtic celebration that takes place halfway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, is this week. Dhruti Bhagat at The Boston Public Library defines Imbolc as “‘in the belly of the Mother,’ because the seeds of spring are beginning to stir in the belly of Mother Earth.

A stirring feels accurate.

invitation for reflection

The stillness I’ve been experiencing, deep in my chest, these last weeks is beginning to shift. There’s a gentle stirring. A low rumble. A light current under the surface of a still lake. Almost imperceptible, but present.

I recorded the above video in mid-December, a bit of a flurry that melted. I’ve been trying to capture snow and rain for a while now and have been experimenting with slo-mo settings because my previous phone, well, was shite and couldn’t capture anything very well let alone falling snowflakes.

Watching this now I realize the snow is perfectly clear at any speed, but it’s fun to experience it slowed way down.

I offer it to you should you desire it. Use it however you’d like, but some things come to mind for me:

• What motion is there in stillness? What stillness in motion?

• How does it feel to slow down (literally, figuratively, energetically)? How does it feel in your body to watch the slo-mo start in this particular video? (I have a very visceral reaction similar to the thing my body does when it hears a song drop into deep dubstep (which I thought was a particular dance when I first heard about it)—my cells expand.)

• What have you been putting your attention to today? (Writing, creating, journaling, it doesn’t have to be complicated or philosophical, what’s on your mind?)

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sending light and love,

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1.

Friday ten o’clock on an October morning. Three minutes ago, while I was brewing my coffee, groggy after waking early for Morning Pages, charging my Reiki box, and falling back to sleep, it finally washed over me: Friday vibes.

I love Friday vibes.

Friday vibes are easeful, open, even chatty later in the day. They’re one of the few highlights the 40-hour work-week has given us, in my humble opinion.

2.

I take my coffee outside. It’s chilly now 40, 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and too cold to work, but I’ve been sitting in a chair at the unlit fire pit where I can put my feet flat on a large rock. I have always struggled to be comfortable in a chair with my feet on the ground.

It’s overcast. Lina goes off hoping to find more tomatoes my father unthinkingly threw out into the trees for animals or for ‘composting’ and she upsets a squirrel high up in a tree. A squirrel she can’t even see, but she looks around anyway. The squirrels and the crows are the only wildlife left.

At least the only wildlife left that makes noise.

3.

I saw some grouse on the ground while walking the other day, but it’s grouse hunting so they’re keeping a low profile. I also saw the remains (i.e., feathers and feathers) of another bird on my walk. There was an attempt to eat the bird on two different stumps as the feathers lay around them. Or that’s just where the fight happened.

Was it the neighbor cat who comes over and leaves bunnies and animal tails for us, or was it the bigger wild cat Dad says he sees every now and again? I’ll never know.

4.

My coffee is delicious but I fear that lately I haven’t been savoring it as much as I’d like. It feels as if there is always something to do and indeed I have been doing a lot. I’ve been doing everything except writing:

the dishes

laundry

vacuumed my car

dropped off electronics recycling

finished sewing a fat yoga bolster

the dishes

laundry

finished crocheting a rectangle bag/basket

mark making

dishes

laundry

shredding old photos I swear will be useful in a project

started crocheting a sweater

Gilmore Girls marathon

socializing

far too much screen time to the point of disassociation

So I’ve closed all the browser tabs, unpinned every icon from my taskbar except Scrivener and Word, and I’ve put this damn machine in Airplane Mode while I write.

5.

Of course, I had to do all this before I started writing. And at least seven is the number of times I have wanted to turn off Airplane Mode and look something up—the exact temperature, for instance—in the last 30 minutes.

Honestly, I think this is actually quite a low-level yearning.

And again: I wanted to see if that e-ink laptop I covet and will not connect to the net at all, has gone into production (no). Maybe I should go analog and use a typewriter…

on practice

The sky is overcast. I love an overcast day, it’s easy on the eyes. The remaining yellow leaves still shimmer and glitter as the wind blows through them. I watch. I want to sit here forever watching the leaves, but as these words form, I know I must write before they slip away. Before I find something else pressing to do instead of write them.

Catherine Aird, British author, writes light-heartedly in a 2004 essay, “Living with Writers,” that she does everything else before writing. “…I usually write when there isn’t anything more interesting or pressing to do (never yet, anyway, having succeeded in being able to sort out the important from the urgent).” She’s “convinced that the imagination works better after leaving the desk rather than before coming to it…the brain seems to carry on working better when the hands are engaged in undemanding but necessary work.”

I find I get weighted down by what I should be doing (writing), struggle to do it, and then need a long break. Big reset. I need to pull all my attention and energy from even considering writing or what I’m doing with any particular project in order that I come back fresh and clear-headed. Things do get muddled. I get stuck on ideas. Stuck on projects. Living in loops that won’t allow me forward. My autonomic nervous system, though I’ve been tender with it these last some months, still feels some kind of way whenever I think about writing.

And it certainly feels some kind of way about the long and growing backlog of many, many half-finished and new project ideas both in writing and in fiber and bookbinding, mark making. Skills I want to practice. Objects I want to make. Things I feel I should be doing vs. things I’m not sure need to be done (unable to distinguish the ‘important from the urgent’).

Of course, literally picking up any project and making a bit of progress would feel better than not doing anything at all, but nonetheless, I get stuck here trying to choose the ‘best’ project to work on. The most important. And trying to impose some level of focus, which never works. I just filter through all the projects I have on the go over and over again while playing solitaire until I collapse from mental exhaustion.

So this awkward autumn break in which I did manage to clear some tasks from the list (regardless of the fact that there will always be tasks) feels like a win. At least I was doing something. And now I don’t need to vacuum my car for another four years!

invitation for reflection

• I’m still learning what my rhythms are and how to allow them without shame or guilt (maybe I always will be). When I’m in doing mode vs. contemplative mode. When I need to absorb information vs. when I need to digest and process and release. I’m sure that a lot of this has to do with the seasons and other energetic factors. Where are you at right now? Are you able to simply allow it, acknowledge it, and accept it? Work with the mood rather than against it even in small ways?

• Are you stuck on a project? Or maybe a number of projects? Is there anywhere else you can put your attention and completely forget about said projects but still feel accomplished?

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in gratitude,

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I went to my mother. who gave me this book called Letters To A Young Poet. Rainer Maria Rilke. A fabulous writer. A fellow used to write to him and say: “I want to be a writer. Please read my stuff.” And Rilke says to this guy: “Don't ask me about being a writer. lf when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing, then you're a writer.”

I’m gonna say the same thing to you. If you wake up in the morning and you can't think of anything but singing first, then you're supposed to be a singer, girl.

–Sister Mary Clarence, Sister Act 2

My precious people, I’d forgotten the above quote included a Rilke writing reference, so had to include the whole of it, for the singers and the writers.

That I wish I could share this gorgeous Saturday morning with you.

I fell asleep last night administering a self-reiki session and woke once, bizarrely, drawing something or softly massaging my face (the things we do in sleep!). I placed my hands on the next position on my lower abdomen, too asleep to realize I should have turned off the recurring timer that lets me know when to switch hand positions, and promptly fell asleep again.

When I woke, it had been two total hours (a session usually takes me an hour), I turned it off, used the toilet, fell back to sleep quickly and peacefully, and slept soundly until 8:50 am.

I have been starting and ending my days with a reiki session, but this morning I felt the call to write first before my brain woke too much. And so I didn’t make the bed or brush my teeth! I got dressed, prepared a coffee, and headed up to the deck with my new, ridiculously fat notebook.

And y’all, I have to tell you, the weather has been my absolute ideal.

It’s 67 degrees. The skies are mostly clear but the sun is soft, still filtering in through the trees from the east. There’s a breeze that offers the perfect chill. And, as if that wasn’t pleasure enough, there have been two small squirrels playing on the pines nearest me.

A nice squirrel-related experience after last weekend when Dad moved the fifth-wheel to bring it in for evaluation after a biblical hail storm. When he returned he found he’d knocked two nests off the top: some feathered chicks not yet capable of flying (they did all, I suspect with the help of their mother, hop away eventually, though I couldn’t tell you what happened to them from there) and a nest of baby squirrels Dad thought were only capable of wiggling around.

We were both horrified, of course.

I did not have the opportunity to examine the squirrels so I don’t know what their ages might have been. Dad covered them with the remaining grasses so they weren’t exposed and as the internet suggested we left them. Unfortunately where they were on the property was out of view from any window so I couldn’t monitor their rescue.

All I know is that I went out to check things out for myself and there was one baby bird remaining and, what I assume, was the momma bird losing her shit at me nearby, and the baby squirrels were still moving around under the grasses. Some hours later I saw a small squirrel nearby with a large tuft of grass under its arm who kept a close eye on me, there was no longer movement under the former nest.

I have been much too afraid to look to see if they’re all dead under there.

And if Dad has, he’s not mentioned it, and no wonder given my horrified and accusing reaction to the whole ordeal to begin with (“You MUST always check these things before you go driving away, unnecessarily killing wildlife?!” etc.).

Given the life cycle of squirrels (they’re immobile for up to five weeks and have another six to fourteen weeks in which they struggle to gather food on their own!), it’s unlikely the two, surprisingly loud squirrels, playing near me are from the same litter, but it’s pleasant to think they might be. Or at least that the mother rescued her babies and took them to safety somewhere.

The thing about living here, in the woods, is that there’s so much evidence of impermanence: the changing light from day to day, even to some extent throughout the day (though the weather’s not nearly as dramatic as, say, Ireland’s); the detached tails, murdered bunnies, and random animals and bones the dogs find and bring back to the house; the new growth on the trees and plants that you might miss if you aren’t paying attention, like how our bodies can change without us noticing because we look at them every day (or don’t, as the case may be); and of course, the big seasonal transitions that are so apparent in this part of the world.

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I sent myself to the deck to write first thing this morning because I decided that Julia Cameron is probably right: Morning Pages within 45 minutes of waking is optimal. There are a number of reasons why this is an effective strategy: silly, foggy morning brain is proven to be more creative and less judgemental (studies also show that you can get there after a couple of drinks, too, so pick your poison) and I personally have more ideas in the morning.

But most importantly for me right now, turning to writing first, prioritizes it in my brain. By putting meditation and reiki and yoga first (all important, even necessary, practices for me), by the time I’m done, all those ideas spinning around in my brain in the wee hours of the morning, as my little eyes start to open, are less potent, if accessible at all.

Later in the day, my brain is so on and so full of all the nonsense of life and living that I really have to write double the Pages just to get all that out

.

It slowly, and then all at once, occurred to me that having deprioritized writing, even if it was necessary to do so for a time in order to move through some healing, and even though I continued to do daily Pages, material fit for an assay has been harder to come by, distant. So I’ve recommitted.

And not just to Pages, but to expanding my practice.

I’ve built a lot of trust in myself in my Pages practice, but I’ve known for some time that there’s still a sizeable gap between where I am and where I want to be. Namely in my follow-through, especially on bigger projects.

Not only do I have seemingly hundreds of essay drafts and ideas hanging around (not all of which, of course, are necessarily worthy of finishing or working with, but I can barely bring myself back to them to find out), but there are also a couple of half-written book-length projects I’m blocked in finishing.

On my very first day in my very first class at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Janet Desaulniers told us to recognize our refusals. The worst in capitalism has been imprinted in my bones and I was taught to soldier on, push through, keep going blindly even if everything in my body is screaming at me to stop, rest, and reevaluate, so as I’ve carried this advice with me, I still need reminding of it.

It’s often offered permission to intentionally leave a project and move on to something else (maybe permanently, maybe temporarily), but in this case, I feel further digging is necessary. Are none of these projects ready to be completed? Or is there something else happening here?

Two angles have occurred to me: One) I seem to be in a perpetual pattern of leaving projects half-finished for something new. My neurodivergent brain and my seeking of dopamine and begrudging long projects may be a problem.

So I’m recommitting to a bit more structure in my practice. Re-engaging a system and a workflow. Breaking projects into small bite-size pieces to, hopefully, prevent my brain from becoming overwhelmed by the big picture or all the steps that need to happen to get an idea to a finished piece. And I’m getting clear on each, next, tiny step, written down, in order. “Organize myself,” is the top item on my to do. And, it’s probably too vague to be useful.

Two) I’ve been concerned that I, like many, may fear success, whatever that means in this context. My refusals may not be so much internal resistance to projects not yet ready to be completed, but blocks. So I’ve been doing some clearing on that, because, y’all, I really, very much, like deeply, deeply desire to finish a large project.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but sometimes I wonder if this isn’t important stuff to incorporate into grad programs. Or, even, primary and secondary school? How to get out of our own ways to do the things we most want to do and the easiest systems by which to do them?

I wonder if schools like Naropa and Maharishi School, institutions that interweave somatic movements and mindfulness with traditional study and practice, provide an environment in which students will, even if accidentally, release wounds and traumas that might hold them back otherwise while offering a path forward in their careers.

Would something so monumental even be possible? Dance therapy replaces sport. Mindful meditation and emotional awareness at 1 pm. Nervous System theory at two. Nonviolent communication techniques and practices at 2:30. Trauma-informed education every single day, every single year, for 12 or 13 years, across the whole of the country (and every country?).

And if we’re really, really lucky we educate the parents as well, creating the best possible circumstances for every student to reach adulthood with self-awareness, a resilient nervous system, and mental clarity on who they are and what they want (for now, because hey, life is long), and most importantly, the steps or the next right step to get there, which we cannot possibly predict given how quickly things change in the career sector!

Maths and spelling and stuff? Oh, that’ll fit in, surely.

Sigh. I digress. Watch it. If I’m ever made Queen of the Universe…

Now, I must get on watching these squirrels rabble-rouse.

Sincerely,

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Invitation for Reflection:

Is there something you really want to do but can’t seem to get yourself to? Big or small. Write it down on the top of a sheet of paper and then take a moment. Close your eyes, feel your feet on the floor, and take three deep belly breaths, feeling the air reach down into your low back, the bottom of your spine, and slowly, slowly release it through a straw-sized hole in your lips.

Come back to the page and tenderly, compassionately consider your refusal. This is not the time for shame or admonition (though those feelings could be precisely what’s holding you back), this is a time for exploration and gratitude. Maybe this thing you think you want to do isn’t something you actually want to do. Maybe you’re already pushing yourself beyond your limits and what you need is rest. Maybe it’s just not time yet and it’s necessary to intentionally backburner this project and put your full attention elsewhere.

Or, like me, maybe it’s time to shed some old stories and fears. Time to implement more (but gentle) structure.

Then write at the top of a new page: What’s the next right step? And free-write for three pages. You may have to give this a go over a series of days, but it won’t take long before answers start coming out through the pen about a page and a half in.

The first year of this endeavor to finally be the writer I think I can be was difficult.

I wasn’t struggling to write, I was struggling. Period.

I often slept 12 or 14 hours a night and still could barely lift myself out of bed. I was stiff. My joints ached. I moved at the pace of a snail down the hall to the bathroom. Each footfall was heavy and labored. The skin on my back experienced swaths of tingling and a roving warm sensation. My heart palpitated so frequently that I admitted myself to the emergency room more than once. My brain was buried deep in a fog. Thoughts swirled at speed, making it impossible to grasp onto one.

I was scattered, unmoored. It was hard enough to get myself in the propped-up position for writing in the first place, let alone tend to single essays. All I could really manage was Morning Pages, which I rarely did in the morning, and the best I could muster from myself was one or two drafted and edited essays a month, and then burnout struck. I’d need rest for weeks before I could put my attention back on my work with any kind of focus. That’s all I had: one or two good days and then a long rest.

In other words, writing, or some aspects of writing, writing with focus and intent, despite all the doors I’d wandered through in my practice, was still really, really difficult.

This inability to work consistently or as much as I needed to build anything substantial contributed to a shame cycle I was already living: the I’m not enough shame cycle. I’m sure you know the one. It seems to be the base layer shame cycle alongside I’m too much.

Not feeling enough in regard to work and money-earning endeavors has been a particular sore point for me. I have literally failed at every job I’ve ever had in the ways that are necessary to keep said jobs: being on time and being consistently attentive for as many hours as is needed to make the appropriate amounts of money in order to survive, let alone live, or hope against hope: thrive.

I tried not to contribute to the shame, but I beat myself about it. How could I become a solvent writer if I couldn’t manage to write anything at all? All the dreams and desires I finally believed possible were slipping away. So I took a step back and asked myself what I might offer a friend who was experiencing such a crisis, and as much as I was capable, I began to relent to the exhaustion: I stayed in bed as long as I felt I needed to. I indulged in it. I lowered my expectations: brushing my teeth and washing my face was a win. Morning Pages were a bonus. I bought frozen dinners and soups and as many premade and easy meals as I could find since cooking felt impossible. In other words, I brought as much ease into my days as I could.

And I started to wonder whether or not there was anything I could do to bring more ease into my writing. Into bringing pieces to fruition. For all I knew, this was my life going forward, so I had to figure out how to work with myself, rather than against myself, or I’d spend more time hating myself than I would writing.

Hoping to explore some ideas, I posed this consideration, making writing more easeful, to a writer friend, and she comes back at me with “I don’t think writing should be easy.” I was completely caught off guard. Though I distinguish, however arbitrarily, a difference between easy and easeful, if writing shouldn’t be easy, the implication is that it should be difficult.

If it should, that’s not worked for me.

Early in my MA at Bath Spa University, we gathered for a weekend in Dorset.

We went rambling and heard lectures from some of the professors and other invited writers and instructors. A new cohort bonding experience!

One of the profs, in their lecture, tried to make the point that writing every day is key, even when it’s difficult. She emphasized that writing that flows is often bad writing. I can’t remember her exact words, but that’s the impression they left. In other words, writing that’s easeful is generally bad writing, and writing that is difficult is good?

Back in 2008, writing was difficult, and I often felt like I was doing it (along with everything else) wrong, to the point that I thought my flash fiction had to be a novel. I worked to make my stories fit the ideas I had for them, rather than allow them to be whatever they were. I painstakingly coaxed and stretched and molded them. I worried over them and hated them and hated myself for not writing them better. So, I got this joke and laughed along with everyone else.

I now know that at least part of my struggle last year was the wheat.

I had stopped eating wheat for years, but I did some testing and really, truly thought that eating imported organic and sprouted Einkorn wheat was totally fine. Not making me sick at all!

And I really thought I’d done my due diligence. Really thought that my body had no response to it.

So slowly over the course of a few years, or maybe all at once, my life was full of glorious pasta and chewy toast. My tongue enjoyed this very, very much. But just as slowly, my body began to react, and I ignored the symptoms. Ignored isn’t the right word; I refused to make the connection for a very long time.

I declined slowly enough that I couldn’t see it. My doctor had me come in for monthly Vitamin B shots, and I saw a physical therapist to help with the pain. I was convinced the digestive symptoms weren’t that bad. Nothing like I’d experienced before, after all! The hair loss was aging. The arthritis, too.

Then I got COVID in August and spent a month, more or less, isolated in my room. I wasn’t capable of shopping for myself, and sending my parents out for very specific bread wasn’t a high priority, so I had them stock me up with more GF/DF frozen dinners and soups.

Even before I was virally well again, I understood, finally, that gluten had once again screwed my life, and so have not gone back.

Writing that is a slog to write tends to feel like a slog to read.

I spent years struggling with humanities essays. I’d find myself reading the same sentence over and over again, and knowing, in theory, I understood each word individually, but the way they were strung together was incomprehensible. I assumed I just wasn’t smart enough to understand academic writing.

But after 20 years in and out of academic programs, working with PhD students agonizing over their dissertations, and observing that academic burnout is a real problem, especially amongst the untenured and systemically disprivileged academics, it’s become clear to me that academic writing is often hard to read because those writing it often aren’t in a state of ease through the process.

This is pure observational conjecture, but it seems that many become blocked around topics that once ignited passion, and the writing that comes through those blocks is difficult to read.

Many of us feel it’s just as it should be when we show up to the blank page and agonize. That we don’t know where to start, that we can’t keep focused on and finish projects. It’s such a struggle to write that many of us who spend one to seven years of our time and money earning advanced degrees in writing, stop writing altogether because that struggle is real. And anyone who comes by writing easily is met with skepticism.

The words flow in the same way shit flows. Was that the joke made that day?

And I wonder if we believe writing should be difficult because we associate difficulty with work. Hard work is often synonymous with work worth having been done. Work worth the money it earned (no matter how little that money was!). Working at McDonald’s is, people say, an honorable job, and it’s hard work. McDonald’s employees go home smelling like grease and burgers every night, develop back pain at a young age, are regularly yelled at by irate customers who just, like, didn’t get their dipping sauces, and every time I go into any fast food restaurant, the mood, one I remember viscerally from my days at Taco Bell, is apathetic despair.

Most of the employees are under 20, and this is how they start their working life. This is how I started my working life at the tender age of 15 and what it left me with is an understanding that hard work is the only morally and theoretically valued work, that we must all suffer in our work lives, and that though ‘hard work’ is valued, it’s not so valued that anyone wants to pay a decent wage for it.

Those working the hardest are typically the least paid and the most miserable, and the most likely to be abused and exploited. So I think this idea that writing should be hard is internalized, capitalistic, industrial revolution, neoliberal mumbo jumbo that lives in our bodies.

Does it make you uncomfortable in your body to engage in work that feels easeful? Do you know what that feels like? (I still don’t.) How does it feel to earn gobs of money for doing very little? Yeah, I don’t know the answer to that question either.

But if there is any truth to this theory, if writing that is fun and easeful, and playful, feels less valuable, we need to deprogram it. I wonder what would happen if we were able to shift our expectations, if we fully embraced and embodied the idea that writing can and should be easeful, what might we find there? And how would we do that?

Julia Cameron’s, The Artist’s Way, was my first toe dip into releasing some of these things from my brain and body.

Morning Pages have been my guiding light on this path (and of course also the food I put into my mouth).

While at Bath Spa, well before I’d learned about Morning Pages or Julia Cameron, I began heading into the centre for a tea with my journal. I always intended to work on writing that was meant for classes and my thesis, but instead, I wrote, by hand, everything that was in my head until I felt completely spent, an hour or so later. I then closed my notebook, had a look around at all the cosy conversations happening, packed up my things, and went home. Soon enough, I started waking in the morning with lines running through my head, or I’d see pieces emerge amongst the rubble of one of these coffee shop free-writes, and I slashed out words until I had something.

My thesis, a novel that’s still not finished, probably benefited, but it’s hard to tell considering there was so much anxiety around it. And frankly, I’m not sure I considered these other pieces, the ones that came effortlessly, easefully, worthy pieces of writing. I called them ‘things’ rather than writings, and though a couple of them were published, I was too embarrassed by them to take them seriously (though that’s maybe how I felt in general at the time).

Writing freely for three notebook pages every day, even if not in the morning, loosens things up and lowers the stakes, and it has created trust in myself as a writer. Keeping my regular Morning Pages practice, even in extreme circumstances where I’m struggling to write anything more polished, keeps me rooted in the knowledge that I will find my way back. And that, once again, a sense of ease and effortlessness around drafting pieces will emerge.

Sincerely,

invitation for reflection:

Whether or not you practice or have ever practiced creative endeavors, what areas of your life feel really, really hard right now? Can you allow them to be 5 or 10% more easeful?

If not, are there areas in our life that feel more easeful? And can you turn your attention to them and lean into that easefulness and set aside the stuff that feels difficult, giving the rest a chance to percolate in the background?

If you are or would like to practice creative endeavors but find it difficult, can you pull back from staring at a blank page and hoping a poem just pops out through your fingertips and lean into doing the most easeful, easy, fun, creative thing you can think of right now?

Three Morning Pages is a good start, but cranking up Spotify and having a sing-along or doing a bit of coloring are low-stakes options as well.

invitation to collaborate

What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite pieces? What is poetry, art, mindfulness, practice? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.

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When I was small, we all gathered for big, fat Italian American family reunions on Big Floyd Lake in Detroit Lakes, MN. My cousins, my sister, and I burned black snakes, threw bang snaps, and performed our favorite songs as we stepped through smoke bombs in the alley between my great-grandparents’ cabin and my great-aunt and uncle’s cabin.

My uncle or cousin pulled folks skiing and tubing. A big spaghetti dinner was eaten, and nearer dusk, we all piled onto my great-uncle’s pontoon for a trip around the lake to settle into a bonfire and fireworks after dark.

Someone always managed to gather us all to take one of those large family photos with 30 or so people in them, but inevitably two or three people were always missing, usually absent for whatever reason, from the year’s festivities, and their faces were cut out from other recent photos and pasted in, in the times before photoshop.

As we kids got older, we started getting together with friends to slow-tube down a nearby river and hang out in downtown Detroit Lakes for the fireworks and the drunken drama. Bars and restaurants, of course, line Detroit Lake beach; there’s almost nowhere to park within walking distance, and cruising the two or three-mile strip can take hours. Exactly the thing 16-year-olds were into in the late 90s.

In my 20th year, I decided that I would spend the day in my swimsuit. Though it was a bit cloudy and chilly for July, I was determined and succeeded until nearer dinner when I was cold and put on trousers and a T-shirt. I headed over to my cousin’s house across the lake where we were eating and was minding my own business in the living room-kitchen area with 20 or so of my mostly female relatives when my great-grandmother, tactful as she was, looks at me and says, “You look a lot better without your belly hanging out.”

And—the shame washed over me. I couldn’t speak. And bless her now departed soul, my cousin Bonnie, some years my senior, cracked a one-liner at my grandma, diffusing the situation, and drawing attention away from me so that I could leave the room and eventually find a lift back to the cabin to cry.

I stopped trying to be physically attractive by any standard measure years ago. If only my great-grandma could see me now: never any makeup, hairy legs and pits, wrinkles, naturally greying hair even though I’m only 40, bra-free, and my belly is still hanging out whenever I want it to. I can’t say that I’m completely body-shame-free, but mostly my aim when I started making these choices ten years ago was to just be able to forget about my body. To exist in my body without having to think about how it might be imposing on someone else or upsetting to someone else. To exist in my body without all the time, energy, and money women have to spend just to be considered human.

I ditched mirrors except for in the bathroom to, you know, make sure nothing was in my teeth or on my face. I got rid of my heels (they’re never comfortable!) and over time, went feral.

Initially, I wobbled a bit about these decisions. I held onto my makeup for ‘special occasions’ like weddings, where the expectation is that I look more like a ‘woman’, I have mostly kept my legs and pits covered, even on hot days. But in How to be a Woman, Caitlin Moran points out that all that’s required of men (generally speaking) is to be polite and relatively clean. Or clean and relatively polite, either way, it solidified an indignation at the expectations that I must make certain alterations to my body before leaving the house in order to be considered an acceptable member of society.

Outside of amorous situations, I have firm boundaries around anyone speaking about my body. Even compliments. I’ll take compliments on my clothes, accessories, and hair because (to a certain degree) these things are all choices I make. Objects I’ve collected or styles I’ve chosen. But unless it’s a trusted partner objectifying my body in an amorous situation, I don’t even want to hear that my physical body is beautiful. Not because I think it’s not, but because it’s irrelevant: I am not my body, and my level of physical beauty does not determine my value.

Unfortunately, this memory of my great-grandmother drawing attention to my apparently unpleasing body is the memory I come back to every year. It, of course, wasn’t an isolated incident. Our (folks assigned female at birth) bodies haven’t belonged to us since, as I understand it, in the Western world we moved from hunting-gathering peoples to landowning peoples (men) in which women also became property to sell for more land/resources (though maybe it’s wishful thinking that we were freeer prior to then).

And everyone feels they have the right to make comments pleasant or unpleasant: family, friends (apparently my knees aren’t very well defined), classmates (yes, yes, my legs are very pale, thank you, Kyle, but no I don’t need to tan before I wear shorts in the spring), random men on the street (yes, my ass is quite nice, but I didn’t ask for your opinion), random women on the street, lovers, and ourselves.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about how we (folks AFAB and transwomen) should exist in our bodies and whether they’re worthy of being classified as women (whether we want to be classified that way or not).

I learned that my body was an insult to the world. That being seen meant being disliked and unloved. And these little moments added up until, much too soon, I made myself small. Tucked myself into myself as much as I was able. Took up as little space as possible. Tried to blend in. Played small across all aspects of my life. And it’s been a long journey, that I am still living, to allow myself to be the expansive ball of light and love that I am (that we all are).

So this year, as I sit outside, mostly alone in the woods (my dad is inside watching TV), shielded from the rain by an eave, listening to the birds and watching the perfect circles ripple out on a shallow puddle on the cement, I burn this spiritual contract I never meant to sign. Playing small hasn’t been serving me, nor does it serve anyone living that way.

And this memory of my great-grandmother it’s not the one I want to carry with me. She had a particular way about her that grew from her own traumas and lack of bodily autonomy. What I want to remember is her house smelling thickly of garlic, her runny eggs (shudder), and the tiny re-used pimento jars that were strictly for orange juice, spaghetti dinners at the long table at the lakes, the plastic over her furniture, and her dancing late into the night at wedding dances, from my memory, until her dying breath.

I don’t particularly uphold the whole freedom aspect of the Fourth of July celebrations, considering only certain peoples obtained, and currently have, total freedom, and fireworks terrify both me and the poor dogs, but I suppose it’s not a bad day for a bbq and boating activities if one chooses to indulge.

The kind of freedom I am excited about, however, is freeing myself from the internal blocks and generational traumas passed down that have been preventing me from being my whole, authentic, human self, whoever she is. Like Thích Nhất Hạnh says, “Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.”

What kinds of freedoms are you savoring tonight?

with love,

invitation for reflection

It’s a bit woowoo, burning a spiritual or social contract (metaphorically, of course), but it’s a practice I learned from the master of emotions, Karla McLaren. I hadn’t thought much on it since reading her books four or five years ago, but a couple of days ago I was in some intense, uncomfortable emotions, crying and tapping and crying and tapping (EFT Tapping, for the uninitiated) and the emotional energy just wouldn’t shift. I was recognizing patterns that keep coming up for me, and I couldn’t stop going over and over the same thoughts regarding them. Burning spiritual contracts just popped into my head.

So as silly as it sounds, I visualized a piece of paper with all the details on it about those patterns, visualized my reluctant signature, and then took a lighter to the corner of the paper and watched it burn.

Because it’s in my head, I took pleasure in really letting the paper alight into a blue ball of fire, which is incongruous with how typical paper actually burns, but it was much more satisfying. Then I watched the ash fall to the floor. Dust. And I found I was suddenly dry-eyed, feeling much, much lighter and much freer, and frankly, thinking on it, I can’t even recall specifically what was on that contract, as if it’s no longer a part of my story.

Since then, I’ve burned a number of contracts I’ve unwittingly signed over the years and am eager to write new contracts more intentionally going forward.

So, I ask you, gentle reader, is there a spiritual or social contract (a pattern that keeps playing out in your life) that you’d like to see go up in smoke?

If nothing comes to mind, you might write this question at the top of a blank page, stop thinking about it, and then free-write for three solid pages on nothing in particular and see if anything comes forward through the pen. Then feel free to visualize (or literally) burn this contract.

If you try it, let me know how it feels!

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Let’s everyone take a deep breath in through the nose for 1—2—3—4 and hold for 1—2—3—4 and slowly now, through a straw sized-hole in your mouth, breathe out for 1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8 and hold for 1—2—3—4.

Repeat three to five times.

This calms the nervous system. I don’t know about you, but I’ve needed a bit of that lately.

It’s Tuesday afternoon: 87°F (31°C) and windy. Despite my aversion to sweating, I am sitting outside. I have been trying to acclimate myself to heat and expose my skin to the sun so that I might be less of a vampire (I have a diagnosed sun allergy, it’s called solar urticaria. I break out in hives on any sun-exposed skin. It used to last only the first month or so of spring, but the less time I spend in the sun as an adult, the longer it sticks around. My left foot is ghastly looking and itchy.

It’s 46% humidity, so as long as I sit in the shade and am v, v still, I’m not—completely—miserable. I’m told the elements give us energy, but sweat runs down my side body and I’ve been napping a lot.

Y’all, I have to be perfectly honest: I fried my Writer Brain writing emails.

It seems impossible that a person who doesn’t work a normal job could become burnt out, but as it is, my neurodivergent brain has the ability to hyperfocus. I gave all my attention to these emails until I was depleted. I haven’t mastered my energy systems yet, and before I knew what was happening, it was too late.

I lost myself to old patterns.

I slowly neglected my practices. And our choices are, after all, practice or pattern. I forgot to check in with myself. And to be frank, now that I’m recovering, which I only partly understand how to do, things are coming along a bit slower than I thought they might.

However, a few fun things have happened: One) In retrospect, I’m aware enough to observe what happened in a way that’s new for me. Two) I’ve re-dedicated myself to meditation and learning more about energy work; as I understand it, the more capable I become at working with energy the more I’ll generally have and the easier it’ll become to transmute blocks (yes, this is where I’m at in life, everything is energy).

Three) I’ve had more energy in the direction of tactile and visual activities. In fact, outside of writing, I have more general energy, which of course could be the longer days and all that elemental energy I’m soaking up, but I’ve been drawing a bit, unraveling crochet projects that didn’t work out (I find this soothing and metaphoric), exploring some painting and stamping projects I started months ago, and am very nearly ready to dig into the bolster sewing projects I’ve had on the backlog (every meditating energy worker needs a zafu, right?).

And of course, the birds. I think I heard my first oriole the other day! It was the most exquisite sound. It’s hard to describe what it did to my body and brain, but it was transformative.

Essay ideas and drafts have happened in the last few weeks, but they’ve been a struggle. I mean a real struggle. I mean pulling perfectly healthy teeth with a rusty needlenose, not particularly equipped for the job. They’ve got no flow or ease. They just don’t feel right. I sit down to write, and every single word I put on the screen just doesn’t fit. Even the Morning Pages are dragging in their nonsense. So I’m setting it all aside for at least the remainder of the week while I put my attention where it actually wants to go, hoping that this helps me to move through whatever blocks and shortages remain.

It wasn’t that long ago that I might have felt like this was the end. Prior to a few years ago, I was in a continual state of this kind of disconnect from my Writer Brain to the point that I wondered if I was a writer at all (and, if I’m honest, I’ve asked myself that question recently, that’s how deep the well goes). I’d get little snippets of interesting language and maybe I’d note them down, only to find the note months or years later and feel no energy or connection to it. I had absolutely no idea why it sparked a need to be saved.

Liz Gilbert and others have written and talked about creative ideas sort of happening to them rather than being something they actively thought up. And this feels like evidence of that. Of course, one has to create the environment that lets these ideas in. We have to recognize them when they happen, but it also seems, given the loss of those ideas I did jot down, they can leave us.

Gilbert, in, I believe, Big Magic, suggests that the ideas’ll find someone else who’s ready to work with them if we don’t heed them. And, I have read a number of essays that were ideas I’d been sitting on for years. I didn’t think I was qualified to write them for one reason or another, and they left me to find the next available and willing writer. Those moments were always humbling and infuriating. It makes me shiver for the hundreds of drafts I’ve not been able to come back to. The book ideas that are laying waste.

On the upside, there are a hundred more ideas where those hundred came from, and sometimes letting go of an idea makes space for a better one.

I’m not as worried as I might have been. Through practices, like Morning Pages, which I put into place in 2020, I learned to trust that these kinds of dips are only temporary, no matter how long they last.

In a recent essay on loss and trust, at Creative Attention, explores the relationship between trust and practice:

If you ask me (tell me!) to trust before I even begin, then I have already lost.

What I really believe: Trust flows out of practice.

Let it never be the prerequisite to practice.

It is through these practices that I have, and continue to, build a trust with my Writer Brain that provides a sense of security. Without them, I would feel completely unmoored. Even writing this brief essay, which has become much longer than I suspected it could be, seems a sign of light in that direction. A clearing, I suspect.

And I must be on the right track as a small butterfly has been, off and on, circling my head since I started writing. A sign of growth and transformation.

Now, it’s bloody hot out here, so I’m going inside.

With love and light,

invitation for reflection

• Maintaining my practices, both creatively and emotionally (though they seem to go hand-in-hand the more I explore), is clearly imperative for me to maintain balance, even when, and maybe especially when, things feel good and it becomes easier for me to let them slip. What practices in your life (creative or otherwise) have been necessarily stabilizing? When are they hardest to maintain? How do you get yourself back to them?

• Not that long ago, on this creative healing journey I’ve been on, I developed the notion (or maybe it was more of a hope) that there would come a day when I wouldn’t need practice. I’d be completely zen and pain-free 100% of the time, no meditation, yoga, or Morning Pages required! I eventually came to an understanding that healing is a practice. Every day, I had to wake up and choose to practice healing.
  
  And as I reduced resistance to that concept, it became easier and less painful. The same might be said for creative practice: it’s a choice we have to make every day but from my own experience and the experiences of those I love, there are so many blocks that pop up around creative practice (and I’ve experienced a number of them, including TIME: practice takes time I didn’t feel I had when I was already burnt out and pushed to my edges). I invite you today to consider, if you’re feeling stuck creatively (or emotionally), if you couldn’t integrate just five or ten minutes of non-negotiable creative practice into your routine?
  
  Here are some ideas: free writing nonsense, draw something you see, doodle nonsense, play a riff on the uke, color!, etc., you get the point.

  ---

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What did you learn from your parents about play and art? Living with them at this time of my life, with a bit more objective awareness and far more conviction than I’ve ever had, has been almost exhilarating (and sad) in witnessing exactly where some of my programming comes from as opposed to a vague feeling that it exists and has been a block.

My father fully believes that the only things worth doing are the kinds of things one can be paid for or that provide things that support our survival. Working, of course, for pay, is at the top of the list. But barring that: hauling in trees for our wood burners, planting and tending a garden, pushing snow/mowing the grass, sealing the seams of the log house, building things like shelves and a bathroom.

The only true pleasures he occasionally indulges in (while he complains he doesn’t get to do them more) are hunting and fishing, which could be argued originate from a position of providing food, however, I’ve learned he catches more fish than he brings home and, don’t tell his brother, but he’s said more than once now that he’s not that bothered if kills a deer, but really enjoys sitting in the treestand watching them and other wildlife at 6 a.m. in the cold (he must really enjoy it).

But he does those things under the guise of being productive. He does not take the boat out to sit in it without his rod, and he does not sit in the treestand in the off-season (which is 49 weeks of the year) just to see what he might see because that would be a precious waste of time, that limited resource most are so worried about.

Don’t tell him I said this, because he already goes on and on about how much work he does and how he never gets to rest, but it’s true he really doesn’t know how to stop. Neither did his dad, who I found, at 70-something and near immobile outside in the driveway on a warming spring day chipping away at the thick layer of Minnesota ice surrounding a three-foot square patch of driveway he’d managed to uncover over the winter months, painfully aware that it would all melt well before he ever managed to clear the ice entirely from the driveway.

So it didn’t surprise me that when I made some crack about fantasizing about being on The Voice (which he watches religiously) and all four chairs turning for me, and then four famous fucking musicians get to FIGHT over ME! It’s not so much that I actually want to be on The Voice or even want to be a great singer, it’s just that I’d take oh so much pleasure in being valued by people already established in their careers.

Oh, you all want little old me? Who’dathunkit? Then they get to tell me how amazingly fabulous I am and how they long for me to be on their team. Because, obviously, we all want to be fabulous to someone, and especially to those who have some idea of what fabulous is in our given practices.

But Dad says something like: “You’re not good enough for The Voice. It’s a shame, too, we both like to sing so much.” As if not being good enough for public consumption and winning competitions (read: earning money) and finding joy for joy’s sake in singing are mutually exclusive. We can only engage in and find joy in belting “Unchained Melody” out to our little hearts’ content if we are in some form being compensated for it?

How is that the point of anything at all?

He also firmly believes that 100% innate talent is everything and that practice and skill-building are more or less inconsequential. Here, folks, he is making a strong example of a “fixed mindset.”

And by some miracle, I’ve learned, despite this dude being my father, a “growth mindset,” in which I may not ever be a fabulous singer, but just a browse around the internet tells me there are vocal warm-ups to keep my vocal cords warmed and healthy. There are skills I can learn to improve my technique.

And, frankly, there’s a whole catalog of music that proves one doesn’t always have to be a fantastic vocalist to have some success at singing. But shrug, I’m happy wailing to “What’s Up?” alone in my bedroom. No audience or judges needed, but you’re welcome to join me in a sing-along.

In Freedom Manifesto, Tom Hodgkinson points out that music in the Middle Ages wasn’t centralized and commodified as it is now, oh sure there were troubadours and artists and playhouses that hoped for your hard-earned shillings, but music, art, poetry, and playacting also happened in the home and in communities for little to nothing often carried out by amateurs. There were no gatekeepers or capitalist barricades insisting that the only quality music (and that’s arguable) is offered to the public by the music industry at a price (not that those artists don’t deserve to be paid for their work).

People just did as they enjoyed, often together.

Back when I lived in Bath, my local, The Royal Oak, hosted an Irish Music Night, which is a lingering example of inclusive and joy-filled music-making. One musician starts a traditional Irish song, and those who know it jump in. Those who don’t play have feet: they dance.

I started learning the trumpet when I was 10 or 11 years old. I absolutely loved to sing so much that I walked around the playground as early as first grade with my Walkman, singing Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. I performed in plays and skits. All of which were part of the school system. I was also part of a dance company that wasn’t affiliated with the school. None of it, not even the primary school performances, had the vibe of a community coming together to amuse themselves or merry-making for its own sake, not like an Irish Music Night. However amateur, it was arranged, practiced, directed, and presented to an audience of spectators (our parents).

It didn’t take me long to see that art, music, dancing (outside of wedding dances) were things kids did, and then kids grew up. Though, of course, there were examples all around me of grown-ups making things (I mean, the TV was always on in our house, what better example of grown-ups playing than acting?!), I got the impression that I was precluded, and subsequently that I wasn’t creative enough or artistic enough (i.e., not good enough for The Voice). And this is probably why I loathe becoming a grown-up.

Grown-ups aren’t encouraged to play and be playful. To dink around. To be weird and messy and silly (unless they have or make loads of money doing so), which is how artists learn and develop and make innovative things. That’s where creativity thrives, not sitting at desks in an open-floor office plan checking one’s email 300 times a day or being overloaded with assigned projects and fires to put out, which is common in our contemporary working world, or even in the regimented practicing of scales or carefully drilled dance numbers in which I took part as a child.

What’s it they say about writing? You must learn the rules of grammar first, and then you can creatively break them? Well, I’ve seen some really bloody lovely lines come from non-native English speakers precisely because they didn’t quite understand the rules of grammar.

But, as such, I learned that play had to happen in private, where it wouldn’t be judged or silenced or cajoled into being made better. In fact, I hardly learned to play at all without someone guiding me.

During my MFA at SAIC, I was introduced to so many art disciplines and fortunately for me my soul is drawn to making things and exploring things and learning things and whatever setbacks I’ve faced and whatever programming I’ve internalized, very slowly I have allowed myself to gently press up against my boundaries and develop new skills and play with new tools and ways of making.

I recently forgot that for some months. But thank the universe for my soul, because the other night I just felt like I needed to do something visual. The things I was doing last spring didn’t feel like the things I needed, so I pulled up the courses I purchased on Domestika to find something new and landed on watercolor.

Aaaaaand I found myself crying as the instructor introduced us to her practice. A clear sign that this is what I needed.

Take your brushes out for a dance, she says, and so I did, just making silly marks to explore what the different brush shapes and sizes did, and I was reminded of that feeling the brush makes in my hand that just feels right somehow. And whether or not I ever paint anything that’s worth any money or is even admired by any member of the public is beyond the point; none of that matters, it’s the joy in the doing that truly matters.

Because it is true, time is a precious, limited resource, and each moment we live in joy, play, love, none of which are inherently related to compensation or even admiration, is what gives being alive value.

I think deep down, Dad knows this, we all know this, it’s part of our DNA, our soul’s DNA, if you will. Because, to some degree, I think we all yearn for it. And maybe your things aren’t painting and singing and writing, but playing a game of football (the American kind or the rest of the world kind) in a park or bird watching or building things or cooking things. I mean, whatever it is you’re drawn to doing with or without the money, is your deep knowing and believing that the doing is where the joy is.

And though he complains about all the stuff he has to do, deep down he must enjoy it, all those productive things he does, for he in fact chose this house with its 70 acres of trees, he dug his first garden, he has a garage full of tools, he takes pride in his tractor and his planer. And if he didn’t find joy in it all, he would have bought a much smaller house on much less land and hired someone to take care of it for him while he fiddled with the bass he once learned to play on his own time in the practice rooms at school.

The only shame is that he doesn’t allow himself to do a lot more singing while he’s out there pulling in trees and tilling the garden.

Sincerely,

P.S. It was a privilege to have music and art options available in school. Many countries don’t generally and in the U.S. those programs are constantly under threat by legislation that considers them unnecessary and a waste of public spending for exactly the reasons my father thinks it’s a shame we’re not good enough singers to be on The Voice and therefore shouldn’t bother: there’s little chance of capitalistic gain if we teach everyone an instrument. But, in case you didn’t know, studies overwhelmingly show that kids who engage in music and art do better in math and, therefore, are valuable to capitalism.

So, you know, tell your legislators.

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The holidays put a warm fuzzy in my tummy, usually in the form of dark ale, vodka sodas or, in the early years, Jack diets, a taste I share with both my grandfather and my father. This, I joke, is the only way I can handle everyone all at once for as long as I'm required because I am an introvert hiding in an Italian American family of extroverts (or masking introverts). "Small" gatherings are similar to that of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (15 to 20 people, many of who have the same name).

I climb the steps out of my Sunday afternoon basement cave, still in my pajamas, looking for food I am not hungry for, and I find my barely five-foot-tall mother on a step stool standing over a dough roller and a floured counter. I place my dirty plate next to the sink, open the fridge, but forgo food.

"No one gets any ravs except me! I'm the only one doing any work! They're mine," she hollers at me as I find my way back down to my sofa and a movie. My sister also at home, surfs the net across the room. She snickers something over her shoulder, but I hear her get up. (In my defense, Mom hadn't technically asked for help.)

A few minutes later Kristan yells for me.

Our family has been making ravioli for as long as I can remember. Days or weeks before Thanksgiving, aunts, uncles, cousins, got together to press dough, mix cheese, and fork edges. We each had a designated station. Traditionally, we ordered Duane's Pizza: Canadian Bacon and Pineapple. Yes. I am a pineapple-on-pizza person.

We spread out around the flour-covered dining table and the kitchen counters to make enough ravioli for the family for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Hundreds of little square dumplings stacked on trays and frozen until needed.

A few years ago my grandparents sold their house in Dilworth and our ravioli-making tradition became scattered. Since then it's been done at my cousin's in Detroit Lakes, sometimes at my parents’, a roving ravioli party. My dad, the non-Italian, has done the job himself, or so he claims. It hasn't been the same.

I begrudgingly make my way upstairs, but maybe this is perfect: just us three girls makin' up a batch of ravs. Wrong. We bicker and criticize. We each think we know the best way. But, then, I remember the holiday vodka that's been so successful at warming my belly over the years. Mom mixes us some drinks and we go about our work with giggles.

We make a hundred ravioli stuffed and sealed in an hour. (It had taken Mom two to make twenty.) Flour's spilled onto the floor and squishes between my toes like silky sand.

In his memoir, Invisible, French painter, videographer, writer, and traveler, Hugues de Montalembert, emphasizes that the "sense of life is life... eternity is now." These moments, whatever they are to you, are fleeting, so break out the booze and have a happy holiday.

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It occurred to me today, as I woke with language in my head that demanded to be written down, that I may be finding my way back to a time in which this happened daily.

Some of you know that I define my life as before I lived in Bath (England) and after I lived in Bath.

In many ways, this state change was a shift into a very long and arduous healing process that may continue until the day I die, and for that, I am ever seeking to return to Bath, however, this morning I realized that I may also desire a return to this place and TIME for another reason.

Sure I desire the things I had there: a time outside of time and away from my home place, financial freedom (even if it was borrowed), dedicated writing time, and the full ability to do what I wanted when I wanted (which to be fair wasn’t much), but it was also the time just before the dings and beeps of modern tech started.

Back in 2008, the iPhone had yet to make its way to Fargo, and even if it had, with a CDMA connection rather than a GSM it would have been useless in the UK. In either case, the phone I did have did not work there and I went overseas without a working phone. Can you imagine?

How did I navigate? Keep in touch? What on earth did I do with my time? Days I turn off the phone now seem so long and empty.

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A few years ago, when in Iowa City, I arrived at work at the UI Writing Center and realized I had forgotten my phone. I don’t know why I brought it up with two of the students I was working with, but they were incredulous. WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS ON YOUR WAY HOME?!

I assured them that there was literally nowhere between the school and my house in which there wasn’t a store, a house, a human with a mobile in a passing car, that I couldn’t stop and ask for help. I literally moved to Europe without a phone for goodness sake. I met the father-in-law of a friend I’d just met through my aunt and uncle at the airport without, I think, even knowing what he looked like! (To be honest, he looks a bit like Sir Elton, just a bit, with blonde hair.) I think he had a sign with my name on it! The absolute only time that has ever happened to me.

I traveled from Colchester to Bath, by train with changes in London, with two heavy suitcases. With those suitcases I could literally not even lift myself, I waited exasperatedly in a pub for a future housemate who’d wanted to meet up to travel to Bath but she didn’t show, I just had to wait as long as I possibly could and then give up.

(When she finally arrived at the house a few days later without much of an apology, I learned quickly what to expect from her in the way of courteousness at the expense of another’s time and energy.)

Once arriving in Bath, I took the second cab I had ever taken because hell if I knew where I was going and bedamned if I was going to roll those suitcases along to get there.

It was messy and awkward and irritating and I had a lot of help with those suitcases up and down the endless Tube steps from people I would never see again (I have learned to pack lighter and ship boxes).

I had to take the time to pause and orient myself. I had to look at maps before I left. I had to write down the address of my new house and keep it accessible. I was not able to play endless games of solitaire on the two-hour train from London.

There are a lot of steps sans phone and a lot of seemingly empty time, but I did do it and so did hundreds and thousands of people in the thousands of years prior to the smartphone. I mean, people literally walked from Rome to northern England back in the day. They WALKED!

My Great Great Grandpa Frank stepped off an oceanliner after weeks at sea, got separated from his family, and when the equivalent of a TSA Agent was about to send him back to Italy, a kind Irishman greeted him like they were family even though they didn’t speak the same language, and pulled him away which allowed Grandpa Frank the opportunity to spot his wife and daughter.

NOW THAT is a moment in which a smartphone would have been handy.

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But in truth, I can hardly imagine traveling without one now. I got the iPhone as soon as it was available in Fargo. When I traveled it was useless, but I brought my old pay-as-you-go phone and bought SIM cards before I even left the airport.

I upgraded my iPhone 4 to the 5 strictly because it had a dual internal CDMA and an unlocked GSM SIM slot so when I traveled again I could pop in a UK SIM and still have not just a smartphone, but my smartphone. I strictly purchased the iPhone 5 for this reason. Not because I needed a new phone. And I’m not even sure I ended up traveling with it.

I canceled a contract with whomever, Verizon, I think, to join T-Mobile because it had adopted free international text and data. I tried to convince myself it was the shattered screen of my iPhone 5 so I needed an upgrade anyway, but I never even considered simply replacing the screen.

In short, I have been a woman possessed.

And the sad truth is, I don’t travel enough to warrant any of this and the sadder truth is, aside from maps, text, and calling, don’t phones just take away from, rather than add to, the whole idea of being on holiday in the first place? It’s meant to be a time to disconnect from screens and connect with life, to look up and around us or look down into that book we’ve been meaning to read for eight years but the endless hours of work and obligations got in the way.

It’s a time to slow down.

And so despite my nonchalance at having left my phone at home on a random Wednesday morning, and these two young women sounding, I suspect, a lot like their mothers, I have been right there with them at the detriment of not only my writing but of my brain.

I can’t just sit anymore. I can’t allow myself to be bored. Even now I’m fighting the urge to pick up my phone just to see if there are messages or to navigate over to an Instagram or Facebook tab. Check my email. Get my little drops of dopamine. My little drops of love.

Everything I try, short of literally ditching all digital devices altogether, has had no lasting effect. So what is there left to do?