rest/soft/sweet

Whew. Anyone else feeling exhausted? My energy levels are humbling me right now. But I’m taking my hyper-awareness of my own exhaustion as a signal of change. Pema Chödrön (and all the wise ones) reminds us that all we have to do really, is notice. When we notice, when we allow something to swim up to the surface of consciousness and hold it in the gently cupped hands of awareness, then we have the capacity —opportunity?—to choose how to engage it.

Toni Bernhard has a handy four step approach for this:

• Recognize it

• Label it

• Investigate it

• Let it be.

I’m recognizing that I’m tired…much of the time. More of the time than I think may be actually necessary but exactly the amount of time that seems a logical embodied response to the too-muchness of human-centered life right now. I’m working on letting it be and choosing not to feel like my tiredness is some sort of personal failure but instead allowing a kind of curiosity about its root causes:

I sense my body and its needs are changing. It’s super interesting and kind of beautiful. I’m experimenting with supplements and exercise and hydration and vagal nerve shit and sleep and eating. I’m changing. Like we’re supposed to. And it feels kind of exhilarating to respect and lean into that as an adventure that I’m on with my body/home instead of wrenching it into a litany of doom.

I sense the ever-present undercurrents of collective grief around ecological and civil rights losses churning. This Tuesday evening, as I type, a couple of hours before neighborhood fireworks start, I'm thinking about the deep irony of getting the day off to celebrate Independence Day. Fireworks, 4th of July sales, and a day's respite even as the freedoms and rights of my Black, brown and LGBTQIA sistren are being hacked and eroded. A boat-full of brown refugees gone, over six decades of affirmative action gone (not saying it was a perfect system just that attacks feel ...systematic), 303 Creative V Elenis "chipping away" at our range of movement and the world literally burning. Degraded air quality from Canadian fires made its way to the deep South this last week, reminding me of the ways we are all connected--inextricably so-- in our deep, collective grief. ugh. And the undercurrents grow stronger. I need the very energy I am mourning more than ever.

I sense the effects on my spirit of the long durée of what Tricia Hersey calls grind culture and I long for the rest she frames as political imperative in her book Rest is Resistance. I’m also looking for ways to incorporate more of what Rachel Cargle would call a soft life. And, as this hopeless sugar worker would put it, I am keen to lean into the sweetness that is my inheritance! *

I’ve been learning how to surrender to the exhaustion. To listen to its wisdom in my body. I want to understand what it’s telling me about what might be different. Experiments: more daydreaming, more water and veg, intentionally shorter to-do lists, more acceptance of the fact that dinner might be all that gets done when I get home from work at night. Some evenings I can surrender to that idea, sink into it. I turn on music, and take my time chopping and roasting vegetables, engaging my senses, expressing my gratitude, and eating with no tv on or laptop open, actually tasting the food I prepared. Other times I pull into the garage and already all I see are reminders of a growing To Do list (the kind that seems to write itself whether we want it or not), the exercise and project “shoulds,” and a resultant flagging will…to do.

There’s been admittedly less writing lately. Thank you for staying with me. I don’t like when Substack starts circling my consciousness as a “should.” This newsletter is therapeutic for me. And I hope it is for you too, because I know I am not the only one trying to remember how to slow down, pay attention, reorient to patterns of season and ritual, and show cake the love it deserves.

So, right now, what I can do is say hi. I can thank you for being here, even as my writing schedule has grown temporarily irregular. I can share that I’m recalibrating towards softness and sweetness and that I hope you are too. I can share that I’m working on a short piece in honor of Magnolia Grandiflora, which is in magnificent bloom now and expressing all of its Empress energy!  Inspired by what I’m reading about rest and these sleepy Georgia summer evenings, my imagination is also sketching out something about sleeping porches and Carolina wrens. I’ll post one or the other soon.

In the meantime, I leave you with a sneak peak of the Grandiflora doing the damn thing, a poem by Lucille Clifton and a big, restful hug from Atlanta.

I am not Done yet

Lucille Clifton

as possible as yeast
as imminent as bread
a collection of safe habits
a collection of cares
less certain than i seem
more certain than i was
a changed changer
i continue to continue
what i have been
most of my lives is
where i’m going

Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, 1987

How are you being soft with yourself through all of your own gorgeous changes? xx

* Just like LyandaLynn Haupt writes in Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, I do not mean sweetness in the sense of “a Hallmark-saccharine sort of sentimentality, but I want [instead] to reclaim the earlier, spiritual meaning—dulcis—a sense of sacred presence, and the uncommon peace this brings.”