For the Birds: July nourishment

A "Publishing 101" video talk! Plus BIRDSEED, this month's Resiliency Circle, and easy comfort.

Thanks for being here! Paid readers directly support the growth and longevity of this project, and that’s true whether your subscription lasts for a few years or a couple of months. Our ability to support each other ebbs and flows, and that’s not a bad thing, just a truth.

When you can—and for however long you’re able to—thank you for reading closely, sharing widely, and upgrading to a paid subscription.

Speaking up for justice doesn’t interrupt the creative work—it deepens it.

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Dear birds,

There’s a steep curved road near our house that I often take when I’m walking to or from downtown. A couple of springs ago, just after our cat, Boots, passed away, I was heading down it when I saw, for the first time, a daffodil with a bright orange middle.

Boots was a Persian, all fluff and drama and orange. The daffodil felt like a message. I’d never seen one like that before—aren’t daffodils yellow?!—and I thought: It’s him.

I immediately fell in love with these flowers! Since then, and every year, I see more and more of them. Orange-centered daffodils, tucked into the margins or shooting out before someone’s bordered front yard. Incredible, I think to myself, my blood coursing with pure sincerity. They’re everywhere now! He’s everywhere now.

You might see what’s coming…It turns out orange is a common color for daffodils, along with white and some shades of pink. There’s nothing special or rare about the ones I’d been seeing.

In fact, I’d almost certainly seen them before, maybe even on that same steep curved road. I just hadn’t registered them until Boots died.

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There’s a name for this kind of brain trick: The recency illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. I know about it because I’m not immune to the cultural demand that we account for—by which I mean thoroughly and scientifically explain—everything we experience. To be credible and believable, we’re encouraged to dissect our encounters, taking anything that veers toward magic and folding it neatly into logic. (And I say this as someone who really, really enjoys logic.)

I’ve fallen for this impulse, too, many times—turned the daffodil into a footnote. But lately I’ve been craving something different.

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Over the past year, unmasking has shifted from being a thing I write about to a thing I practice in real, embodied time. “Brave and awkward” is the rallying cry my therapist and I reach for, and I now have a little bit of data about what those qualities feel like in my actual body. How they push back against the people-pleasing I’m all too familiar with.

As a result of the bravery, I’m also feeling tiny, more frequent embarrassments. The kind that surface when your awkwardness bumps into someone else’s poise. Or when you realize how tenderly your brain wants to make meaning out of every single moment. It was, after all, so very easy for me to think those daffodils were just for me…

Confession: I like being tricked by my brain in this way!

I like how uncomplicated it was to assign emotional purpose to a flower, to read it as a direct line of contact with a creature I miss so much that, two years later, I still cry on command just thinking his name. It was effortless to let the daffodils mean something more than they did, an easy comfort. Couldn’t we all use more of that right now?

I don't want to categorize these kinds of experiences as delusion. I’d much rather call them devotion. Or affection. Or simply, love.

And how great, really, that our brains are capable of such loving mistakes.

Dear bird: I’m wishing you so much easy comfort as we drift into peak summer. Keep fighting the good fight.

xoxo, S

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BIRDSEED

~a monthly playlist, curated by M—my other favorite flower~

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July Resiliency Circle: New moon guided writing session

~Thursday, July 24th at 5:15pm PST / 8:15pm EST. 75 minutes~

The Resiliency Circle is a once-a-month virtual space I hold for paid readers of For the Birds. Born of my belief that we need strengths-based, trauma-informed lenses in our creative practices as much as our therapeutic ones, I craft these 60-90 minute gatherings so that they’re nourishing, generative, and fun.

This month’s Circle will be a curious and reflective hour of guided writing, befitting both the new moon and the mid-summer energy that invites us to look inward while slowing down a beat.

We’ll spend 60 minutes writing together, with me providing gentle (and optional) sentence-starting prompts every 10 minutes. These prompts will work for journaling, poetry, personal essays, fiction, or whatever nameless genre is calling to you in the moment.

Expect encouragement up top, a nourishing and quiet community space throughout, and a closing prompt—from

Emily Stoddard

’s surfacing—to help us end with intention. (Writing needs ritual and ritual needs writing.)

Zoom link + RSVP included at the bottom of today’s newsletter.

→ The Resiliency Circle is where paid readers of For the Birds gather in order to write, reflect, and nurture our artistic selves. Learn more here.

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“Publishing 101”

~a 45-minute video talk~

This month, paid readers are getting access to a recorded version of June’s “Publishing 101” Resiliency Circle talk!

Whether you missed the gathering or just like revisiting ideas more than once, the video below includes a thorough mix of tangible and emotional support for your writerly journey. Inside you’ll find:

• Clear, beginner-friendly steps for getting started with publishing

• Grounded guidance for building a resilient relationship to sharing your work

• Helpful metaphors, rigorous ideas, and a little bit of quirky charm (for digestibility!)