For the Birds: August nourishment

For paid readers: An 8-page worksheet for self-clarity, plus The Resiliency Circle deets & link.

Thanks for being here! These letters are born of my own artistic vision, but they carry the hope of encouraging you in yours. Paid readers gain access to The Resiliency Circle & receive nourishment all month long: stories, essays, and prompts to support you in bringing creativity to the surface of your days, always with sustainability + enchantment in mind.

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Fellow writers! Creative peers! New & old friends!

The next Resiliency Circle is happening on Tuesday, August 20th, at our usual time slot of 5:15pm PDT. Whether you’re new to For the Birds or you’ve been reading along for years, if you’re looking for gentle, strengths-based creative support, I hope you’ll try joining us.

As I narrow in on the curriculum for that evening, I thought I’d say a little more about the possibilities currently on my mind:

Creative exploration

This is directly inspired by the rich conversation we had in last month’s circle, and the notion that our creativity is both a place wherein we can be our most curious, experimental selves, and a tool with which we can do such exploring.

I’m envisioning part guided writing (so we can get clear on what this looks like for each of us) and then—and this feels most important—some sharing out loud so that we may glean wisdom from each other’s current interests and curiosities.

Full moon writing & rituals

For a few months now, I’ve been toying with the lowest of low-stakes: What if I have two designated writing days per month—once on the full moon, and once on the new moon?

Don’t get me wrong: I write more often than twice a month. But I struggle to meet daily and weekly writing goals that revolve around consistency. (Is it brain chaos? demand resistance? I’m still parsing this out…)

But consistency can happen in lots of different ways, and the moon has been good to me so far. I’ve found it totally achievable to show up to the page every 15 days. I’ve even started looking forward to it.

Let’s be good to the moon back! Let’s pull from the moon’s witchiest seasonal metaphors and see what kind of writing we might generate. Let’s remember, too, that any instance of putting words on a page can be ritual.

“Parallel writing” session

Call it “body doubling” or “co-working,” this is quickly becoming a go-to favorite of mine. I like calling these quiet, community writing hours parallel because I think it’s a good word; and because it carries the notion of “parallel play,” which is just as important for us divergent adults as it is for kiddos; and because I do want all my seriousness and reflection to be tempered with playfulness and pleasure; and because aren’t we a collection of parallel worlds when we gather our imaginations in a room?

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Whatever direction we go in, this hour promises to be low-stakes, highly nourishing, and fun—a valuable combination!

We gather on Tuesday, August 20th at 5:15pm PDT / 8:15pm EDT.

Zoom link included at the bottom of today’s letter. Learn more about The Resiliency Circle here.

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“Creating & Discovering Your Temperament: a worksheet for self-clarity”

A few months ago, my partner and I got into a meta conversation about values.

I can’t latch onto that word anymore, he declared, and I knew what he meant: Like self-care, feminist, and even trauma-informed, it’s a buzzy term that’s easy to co-opt, advertise with, or claim without a corresponding depthfulness of thought.

So I get why doing values work might not feel compelling to the discerning, language-sensitive person. But as with all those other terms, I also feel protective of the true, useful thing beneath each of them. In this case, I care about the process of taking an overview of my life and my feelings, the things about me that are true, and the things about me that I want to be true, and coming up with some kind of framework or description or set of words that can serve as both anchor and north star.

Our conversation was an electric one. Throughout, we kept landing on a specific word: temperament.

I thought and thought and thought about it—about the word, about language, about prompting, about how to build good questions.

Then I went into my little monotropic worm hole, my happy place, and by the end of the day I re-entered the world having made an 8-page worksheet that synthesized the scope of everything we had talked about.

A typical Monday.

It was a gift for M that I hoped he’d find useful.

And it’s a gift I hope you might find useful, too, so I’m sharing it this month with paid readers. Download the PDF below: