For the Birds: Community wisdom

Self-trust, creative attention, and hope: A reader-inspired guide. Plus the August installment of BIRDSEED and a newsletter recap (what this is / why I make it.)

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.

By the way: I’m experimenting with including audio versions of this newsletter for greater accessibility. Yr feedback is welcome! (w/ major gratitude to

Sam Galloway

for being my accountability buddy.)

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Dear Readers,

I am so desperate to tell you about July’s Resiliency Circle!

And to tell you that it was one of the best creative conversations I’ve taken part in this season.

And to tell you how enormous that last sentence really is, given the amount of good creative conversations I am regularly a part of these days.

“My mind was already sparkling…”

“I chose not to listen…”

“I’m lucky enough that I trusted my own curiosity…”

You don’t even need the context for those words: Don’t you hear their wonder, and assertiveness, and self-knowing? I wish I’d captured more of them, but between bursts of frantic note-taking I mostly stared out the front window, other people’s good words and affirming ideas washing over me as I watched the starlings pick at the grass while feeling completely enrapt.

I called July’s Circle a “Community Conversation,” and I kicked it off with a single question: How has your creativity changed?

What resulted was a multi-layered conversation full of threads and deeper connections—part spider web, part fractal, part portal.

Ya’ll, it was just really fucking good, and I can’t go any further without expressing some serious gratitude to the following humans: Violeta Tayeh, Tamara Seiler, Julie Hohenstein, and Kristen Huber <3

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We did not only talk about change.

We talked about curiosity, hope, learning, and the personal value of our creative experiences.

We talked about the lusciousness of time when you’re young, and the importance of (re-)creating supportive structures for yourself as an adult—yes, *scheduling time* for creative work, because some of us need a semester or an outline or a good series of prompts to bump into, a container in which we may let our devotion specifically spill.

We made metaphors for describing how our energy feels when everything’s lined up in that just right way inside of us.

And we tried to get really specific in our descriptions of the creative state we sometimes find ourselves in, where you tap into an expansive truthfulness that lets you greet the world around you in a life-affirming way. Some of our descriptions included: The feeling of continuous exploration. A trust in the natural ebbing and flowing of one’s creative impulse. A bursting-ness. A sparkling.

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For those of you who missed out—or if you’ve been wondering whether The Resiliency Circle is your kind of space—I’m sharing a few remarkable highlights below:

Three practices for building creative resilience

1) Zoom out

There’s this cultural norm that demands we assess our efforts always and only according to outcomes, which means looking at our creativity from the outside in. And because this alienates us from our personal / internal experiences, over time it chips away at our self-trust.

What to do? One helpful practice involves zooming out enough to take a larger—and more accurate—measurement of your work. I’m talking about a bigger, richer appraisal than one that tries to measure your worth in every discrete moment, as if it’s constantly on the line.

Let me make the invitation a specific one: Practice trusting yourself enough to not measure your creative worth with a 24/7 urgency. You can measure your life this way too, friends.

2) Pay (creative) attention

While reflecting on the various practices that tap us into our creative channel, we noticed that quite a few of them aren’t the typical ones we picture when we think about art. Photography, oil painting, writing sonnets, yes, but also: cooking, going for a hike, mending a sweater, exploring a new city, decorating your room, decluttering your room, cooking a new recipe…the list goes on and on. Notice how a final, permanent product isn’t a requirement for every single one of these things! So often it’s about a feeling, about an experience.

Creativity is not beholden to products and outcomes. Creativity is found in the quality of your attention—in how you approach the thing, no matter what the thing is. What’s one thing you’d like to approach creatively this week?

3) Let curiosity lead you toward hope

About halfway through the hour, I found myself wondering out loud whether most of us have more access to creativity when we’re younger, and less of it as we age.

“Nope,” my dear friend and brilliant artist, Violeta, answered without skipping a beat. Here’s what she taught us:

It isn’t an age thing. It’s a curiosity thing.

When you’re young, everything is new to you. This makes curiosity—and its counterpart, inspiration—more readily accessible: The whole world can feel like a curious, inspirational place when you’ve experienced very little of it.

The problem is not that we age.¹

The problem, if that’s even the right word, is familiarity and habit—yup, I’ve seen this all before—which dulls your desire to ask questions and makes it hard to assume that the thing in front of you might be worth your attention.

Hearing Violeta explain this to us, I felt deeply empowered. No matter what the commercials say, we cannot control our age. But we can fuel our curiosity by looking for the unfamiliar details of the world, or following a random creative impulse and seeing where it takes us, or greeting a familiar love from a new angle, or learning something new. In other words, we can control our curiosity—fund it, stoke it, fortify it. There’s no expiration date.

Which feels to me like a recipe for hope.

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If you’re looking for a steady, nurturing container in which to let your creative devotion spill, The Resiliency Circle might be the space for you!

One hour, once a month. Low stakes, high reward.

It’s an easy way to devote a small amount of time to a quality of creative attention that will, I promise, reverberate throughout the rest of your month.

Join us at the next Resiliency Circle: We’ll be gathering on Tuesday, August 20th at 5:15pm PDT / 8:15pm EDT.

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BIRDSEED

~a monthly playlist, curated by M: music lover, film buff~

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For the Birds: Writing at the intersection of creative attention, neurodivergence, and the more-than-human world.

I’ve changed the tagline of this newsletter a few times throughout its almost three-year lifespan, but the spirit has remained the same.

I want to write and make and share interesting, inspiring things.

I want to prompt, encourage, and incite creativity.

I want to hold space in my brain-heart for a quality of fortitude and resilience.

I want to let the various parts of me collaborate abundantly on the page: the ex-social worker, the eager student, the quiet mentor, the Autistic poet, the enthusiastic guide, the ridiculous companion, the angsty teen.

I want to be poetic one day, and teacherly the next day, and vulnerable most of the time.

I want to do this work with sustainability and enchantment front of mind.

I want to publish what I want to publish, and when it feels ready for the world—no sooner, no later.

I want to share long, personal essays that demand slow attention, and I want to get better at interspersing them with swift things, too.²

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Whether you’re new to this space or a long-time reader, here’s a quick overview of what you can expect from me each month:

Publishing schedule

• For the Birds is published at least three times per month.

• Busier months might bring 6 issues and/or some focused announcements.

• I generally like publishing on Tuesdays, new / full moons, and the first of the month.

Subscription Options

Free:

• Receive most letters

Paid - $7 / month OR $77 / year:

• Receive all letters

• Gain access to the monthly Resiliency Circle

• Receive one prompt, worksheet, oracle, or creative tool every month

Founding Member - $177 / year:

• Receive all of the above, plus

• Occasional discounts on working 1:1 with me, and

• A snail mail gift shortly after signing up.

Note: Founding Member rates are a flexible way for enthusiastic readers to show extra support. This number is adjustable, but must be at least $1 more than the annual rate.

What readers can look forward to this summer

• A (long overdue) essay about intrusive thinking and/versus magical thinking.

• A short Q&A interview with me about my Autism diagnosis journey, courtesy

  The Autistic Mom.

• “Traveling while neurodivergent,” an essay about un/masking and meeting one’s needs while away from home.

• More “swift letters for busy people” (read previous installments here and here).

• August creative tool for paid readers: “Creating & Discovering Your Temperament: A worksheet for self-clarity.”

• Plus the August Resiliency Circle! We gather next on Tuesday the 20th at 5:15pm PDT.

1. Good gawd: I want to claw my eyes out every time I hear a commercial for an anti-aging product that promises to make me feel “more like myself.” How is aging not a part of who I am?! This kind of stuff makes me want to smile hysterically until I look like a Shar Pei. It makes me want to wear crow’s feet like a witchy badge of honor. It makes me want to channel my inner June Squibb and my inner May Sarton. It makes me want to hang this portrait of Leonora Carrington above my bed and cry in front of it a little bit every night:

Tears = self-possession.

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2. Look: I’ve published four essays so far in my “swift letters for busy people” series, and it’s only just now occurring to me that none of them are actually very short. I’M WORKING ON IT!