For the Birds: January nourishment

A short-but-depthful new year worksheet. Plus: highlights from the archive, a BIRDSEED best of, this month's extra special Resiliency Circle, and video game metaphors for trying times.

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Dear readers birds,

I’ve begun the year slowly, much more tired than I’d planned or hoped to.

It’s partly a generic mix of seasonality + aging. In my case, it’s also illness-induced.

But there’s a third thing, and I keep reaching for the language to describe it and coming up empty-handed. I don’t know what to call this…thing…making me so tired and slow right now.

All I can muster are video game metaphors.

“It’s like wall-jumping in Mario Odyssey,” I said to my therapist last month, trying to describe a nameless feeling: The feeling of having to move back and forth, and back and forth and back and forth, just to keep going forward. Or the pushing-away feeling that is sometimes progress and sometimes just strain.

I don’t remember what incited the conversation, but it launched a doubling down of my efforts to better notice my needs. Better, as in, more accurately.

To notice, for example, when I’m needing softness and pliancy. Something that will unclamp the clamps, so to say, and let the rigid parts of me eventually bloom.

And to notice when what I’m needing, actually, now that we’re talking about, is firmness. A god damn container. Something stern and parental I could hold my erratic mind against or inside of.

I am looking so closely, and so so hard, at where these two qualities might (might!!) intersect that I worry I may burst into flames.

Flames, tears.

“It’s like there’s a Moon Rock in my chest,” I imagine telling my therapist during my first session back after a holiday break, the break during which I grew tired + sick + _____.

Moon Rocks are large, square stones found in almost every kingdom of Super Mario Odyssey. They are silvery and metallic, and they look as if they’re made of smaller silvery metallic geometric rocks of various sizes welded together, as if you should be able to, with enough force, break them apart.

Except you can’t break them apart. You can’t crash into them or throw your hat at them or even ground pound them.

First, you have to beat every level and every boss in every kingdom.

Then, you have to go to the moon, where you will interrupt a non-consensual wedding and beat Bowser, the king of bad guys.

Then, after temporarily becoming Bowser, you must use your large reptilian muscles and the swagger from yr spiked shell to break apart a bunch of rock walls as the very floor beneath you disintegrates and you run toward what I presume is a kind of ur-Moon Rock. A pop song will be playing loudly in the background, one that sounds like it’s been put through google translate too many times. And at that moment, and no sooner, you will smash the ur-stone to pieces.

Then—and only if you’re a completionist like me—you will go back to each and every kingdom, where you can finally break those mysterious cubic rocks wide open, releasing more game play, even though you’ve technically already won.

The only thing that came later-in-life than my autism diagnosis was my interest in video games.

“I know I have to smash it up,” I imagine saying to my therapist this week, today, right now, about the foreign thing in my chest. “But there’s clearly something else I’ve gotta do first. And I can’t figure out what that is.”

Speaking of foundations and uncertainty, here’s autistic environmental hero Greta Thunberg:

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Cathedral thinking. Moon rock smashing.

Whether 2025 is your year of building up or your year of taking down, there is likely to be uncertainty between the You of this moment and the You you are working toward.

May we meet those scary, in between moments as the neutral moments they are, armed with a mix of firm and soft self-regard.

Firmness around the things we know. Softness toward the things we don’t.

Below, you’ll find five gentle creative invitations, things you can read or hear or attend or respond to. I hope you find something useful & nourishing, something that feels right-timed for today.

May your uncertainty be counterbalanced with possibility and resolve,

xo, Sarah

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1) Now that’s what I call BIRD SEED: Volume One

~a monthly playlist, curated by M~

This month’s liner notes:

Dear Birds,

This month’s mix is the culmination of my first year of making BIRD SEED. And so for this tenth installment, I’ve made NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL BIRD SEED (see: the late nineties). Less greatest hits and more clip show (see again: the nineties), this mix is a gleaning of all the others I’ve made this past year.

New music is a funny thing in our current era—where time and genre all seem to flatten and co-mingle into a single stream. It isn’t necessarily bad, but it is certainly different from when I was, very briefly, making mixes on cassette and then CD-R. As a result, I can’t help but feel this new era is one primarily of consumption—a word I do not use lightly—over listening.

So it has been my hope with BIRD SEED to curate mixes with the intention of listening first. Lofty, I know, but then again I’ve always been a pretentious little twerp, happily so these days.

Thank you for listening, and here’s to another year of sick tunes!

~M

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2) Fragments: a collaborative collection

I’m grateful to have a poem included in Fragments: a lyric book, a collaborative experiment conducted by Michigan-based poet

Lily Tobias

.

From Lily’s website: “Fragments is a cento project. Poets craft a poem using the same set of lines in the given lyric book. Participating poets can use as many or as few fragments as they’d like to create their poems, which should be no longer than a single typed page. At the end of the writing period, each poet will submit their poem to me. I’ll then compile the poems into a volume and publish it virtually.”

The lovely first volume, which includes work by

Kortney Garrison

,

Melanie Bettinelli

, and 10 other poets, can be downloaded for free here.

This small, gentle collection celebrates, among other things, the novelty found within repetition, which feels like perfect winter reading to me.

Fragments Volume One Is Here

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3) The Resiliency Circle: Mini Writing Marathon

This month’s Resiliency Circle is an extra special workshop I’ve been daydreaming about hosting since last fall!

In chapter 7 of her acclaimed book, Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg writes:

Sometimes we sit down to write and can’t think of anything to write about. The blank page can be intimidating, and it does get boring to write over and over again for ten minutes of practice, “I can’t think of what to say. I can’t think of what to say.”

She goes on to provide a substantial list of writing topics, and in this 2.5 hour “marathon” workshop, we’ll walk through the majority of them as we stretch our getting started muscles and generate new batches of words!

THE DEETS

• We gather Friday, January 24th at 9:30am Pacific / 12:30pm Eastern.

• This workshop will be 2.5 hours of writing, with two short breaks. (The workshop itself will go slightly over 2.5 hours, to account for a brief intro & settling in.)

• Strengths-based opening invitations and encouragement mean this workshop is about challenging ourselves without sacrificing or ignoring our needs. If you’re burned out, low on energy, and/or in hibernation mode, this workshop welcomes you as-is.

• Cost is $22, but tickets are free for paid readers of For the Birds. (Zoom link / RSVP can be found at the bottom of today’s letter).

• Tickets can be purchased here.

The Resiliency Circle is where paid readers of For the Birds gather once a month in order to write, reflect, and nurture our creativity. Learn more here.

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4) From the archives

For those seeking seasonal creative inspiration that’s as playful as it is supportive, may I recommend: “This one’s about the season’s of writing,” originally published in May of 2022.

Show us what it looks like to listen more closely, Poem!

Pull me out of the clay. Pull me up from the dirt. Or put some dirt on my head so that I might feel grounded for once. Bury something in the dirt on top of my head and walk away tout de suite, because you’re a poem, Poem, and you don’t wait around for proof of what you are. You’re a poem that tills and sows and buries, and you don’t confuse labor with result, and you don’t get all buffaloed when sprouts don’t sprout on time.

For the Birds: This one's about the seasons of writing

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5) A new year worksheet that’s short, but depthful

At the start of winter, before my energy dipped and the brain fog settled in, I followed a rare intuition and created a short but depthful workshop for myself, one that could prompt some end-of-year / beginning-of-year reflections without asking for too much of my time or energy. I just had a hunch that I was going to need something like this.

And now, I’d like to offer the same worksheet as this month’s creative tool. If you, like me, are craving weird but truthful and deep but easy journaling prompts, this one’s for you.

Download the worksheet below: