For the Birds: Brave noticing

IT'S APRIL!! Poetry Month, Autism Acceptance, & birthday celebrations; The Resiliency Circle; and a (paid) prompt for stewarding your attention

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: prompts, stories, and tools to support you in bringing creativity to the surface of your days, always with sustainability + enchantment in mind.

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Hello readers, friends, fellow neurodivergent humans, and creative souls…

April is National Poetry Month, Autism Acceptance Month, & my birthday month!

And I’m celebrating all three—including my first Autistic birthday—by filling these pages with extra creative nourishment; some revelatory writing about neurodivergence, creativity, & mental health; and a series of guided writing prompts that will help you accumulate creative insight, joy, and really good data about yourself.

I’ll be in your inbox a *tiny* bit more than usual the next few weeks, but I’ll be bearing good goods. Think of me as your spritely companion during a very important month of noticing and celebration!

What’s coming up this spring

• A longform essay about Autism, succulents, (not) knowing, and worms.

• Reflections on intrusive thinking and/versus magical thinking.

• David Bowie!

• The next installment of “Struggling Toward an Artist Statement.”

• More swift letters for busy people.

• Spotted towhees, self-recognition, & animal love.

• Journal as oracular medium.

And more. Readers with paid subscriptions will receive all prompts, essays, & creative insights, plus access to The Resiliency Circle (more on that below).

Maybe you want this stuff, too? I thought you might, so I made a celebratory discount:

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Photo by

Neil Barker

, from Meditations on Nature | Korean-style Sijo poems

It’s National Poetry Month!

Let’s read & write & share our poems with each other—yes, even the imperfect** drafts:

   
It Goes Sonnet

love that lands like a limb
or a leaf. crunchy, fallen.
love that hands like a ticket--
admittance, then souvenir.

love that bands like brothers
but like sisters, or a strand
of dna, coloring book technology,
a child's happy drawing of a skull, daisy-

filled, or the osprey that lands on the river before
pulling their body back up into the white sky.
the pulling, the lifting, and the fishing, too.
one creature diving, another being held.

human or avian, it goes the same: we know, we forget, we 
remember again. fishy. love like again. love like the slippery again.
   

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With gratitude to Audrey & the Wednesday Writing Crew.

And to Tim Seibles, for the line, “So easy, that gesture, so light— / the kind of love that lands like a leaf,” from his poem, “Naïve.”

**Feedback my brilliant editor-slash-partner gave me on a previous draft: “I feel like I would like this poem more if it had fewer tendons of sense connecting things.” He was right. I removed many tendons…and then left a bunch of them in, too. I am experimenting with a more fibrous poetry. And with declining brilliant suggestions that originated outside of me. Oh that really good idea? What will happen if I just…don’t?

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Brave noticing

Like all workshops I lead or co-facilitate, The Resiliency Circle is a strengths-based and trauma-informed gathering.

That means I’m showing up with the assumption that you have wisdom, experiences, and creative insights that I do not have. It means I’m holding space for the full context of our mutual humanity, which includes what both of us know, and what both of us don’t. And it also means I see these relationships—all relationships, really—as collaborations.

My role in this collaboration is to hold the right kind of space for you, where brave noticing can occur. I do this by utilizing a slew of skills and teaching / learning experiences, asking bonkers-good questions as often as I can, and devoting my own enthusiasm to every single person in the room with me.

What do I mean when I say, brave noticing?

• Practicing observing your inner truths—creative, emotional, and otherwise—without judgment. At best, with curiosity; at minimum, with neutrality, even if it’s temporary. Can we notice something tender for 20 safe minutes together? Or even 10?

• Being willing to look for value in your real self and your real ideas.

• Witnessing a slightly fuller scope of your creative channel, which is also to say: letting your definition of what counts be as big as it wants to be.

  • It wants to be big.

That kind of stuff.

Brave noticing is the work of learning to trust your inspirations & creative impulses, of no longer trying to stuff them into the premade shapes so many of us inherited (and without consent) somewhere along the way.

What does your writing want to be?

Writing as the wanting, and writing as the letting. Writing as the listening, too.

“Send an energetic question to the spirit of your creativity,” I said to participants at the last Resiliency Circle, my hands interlocking over my chest, “and then let the page be the place where you listen.”

Brave noticing is thoughtfulness, intersecting deeply with play; that’s the kind of space where Creativity likes to hang out, which is the kind of space where I like to hang out, too.

Let’s hang out together! The Resiliency Circle is a small, rotating group of creative humans, divergent in who we are and how we spend the bulk of our time, but driven by a shared sense of soulfulness and curiosity. We are ferocious lovers of art, art-making, & the healing power of written words, whether we’re reading them or writing them ourselves.

The Resiliency Circle: spring dates & deets

• Tuesday, April 23rd - The Resilient Rejects: Full moon work share opportunity (5:15pm PST / 8:15pm EST. 1 hour.) *Zoom link at the bottom of today’s letter! Reminders sent one day before.

  • Let’s honor the work we’ve made, but which we’ve struggled to develop or publish or have chosen not to share with the world. Why? Because subversion + reclamation + asserting the value of our creative experiences. And because I think it will be a fun way to reinforce the right things. Trust me on this one!

• Wednesday, May 15th - Parallel Writing: strengths-based co-working hour (5:15pm PST / 8:15pm EST. 1 hour and a few minutes.) *Zoom link at the bottom of today’s letter! Reminders sent one day before.

  • Inspired by the neurodivergent concepts of parallel play and body doubling, let’s gather for an hour and write in each other’s company. I’ll open the space with brief ritual & encouragement, and then I’ll set a timer and we’ll write for a full hour. Let this be a boundaried chance for you to devote 60 minutes to something really important in your creative world.

    • Would more consistent neurodivergent + strengths-based co-working spaces be supportive to you? Let me know!

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Noticing = medicine

A prompt for stewarding your attention

I say that word, “medicine,” a lot, because I think it sounds better than the word, “vitamins.”

But I really mean the latter: Creativity can bring us back to health when we’re ailing, yes, but it also keeps us more robust on a day-to-day basis. Emotional optimization, I might say, if I weren’t so allergic to the capitalist vibes of that second word.

I want us to think of April as a big, poetic month full of opportunities for celebration and devotion, the lightness of the one paired with the deep satisfaction of the other. A month wherein our awareness can (as it must) spill over into acceptance.