For the Birds: June is full of good things! Here's four of them.
1) Bird Oracles are back! 2) This month's Resiliency Circle is a solstice-inspired check-in. 3) BIRDSEED (a monthly playlist). And 4) "Unmask your Creativity" starts *next week*
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.
Happy June, friends!
A few days ago I stumbled upon one of the many cryptic notes I leave for myself, always with the assumption that I’ll definitely remember what I meant when I wrote it down. This one was dated mid-April:
Relationships.
Nature (not separate).
Getting to see or not see the results of our work.
Political will —> immediacy…resolve.
Oh you wonderful, funny brain! I never. ever. know what I meant. My house and notebooks and text threads are full of well-intentioned lists, some of them shockingly specific, that might as well be in a language I don’t speak. A language I nevertheless created.
When I read the note above, I see a part of me hard at work, full of bright momentous efforting, but the clarity stops there; I have zero idea what she was talking about or hoping to say. Was it going to be an essay? A newsletter? A single piece of writing about all those things? I see her puzzling, but there’s no image.
I used to find this frustrating. But these days, right now? I’m sort of charmed. For a long, long time—my partner can attest to this—one of my biggest fears was that I would one day run out of things to write about, and I carried with me at all times the feeling that a permanent absence of words was just around the proverbial corner. More than writer’s block, I was afraid that one day my brain would just…stop producing written language.
Or rather: I hadn’t yet learned that the writing is a result of the willingness to engage. To pay attention. Your creative signature lives in the quality of your attention, and mine lives in mine. I’ll never stop writing because I’ll never stop looking around me, never stop feeling impacted along all the edges where I end and every single other thing begins. I can’t just turn it off. Can you?
Nowadays, when I come across these sweet, bizarre notes, I feel very little pressure to *make* something out of them, because I have notebooks full of scrutable ideas, texts sent to myself that do occasionally make sense, a Substack dashboard with 112 newsletter drafts, and whatever else I’m going to see and have big thoughts about later today.
I guess I’m trying to say something about creative abundance. That it’s possible. That it lives in the attentional space.
June feels especially abundant to me. Outdoor lunches and farm visits abundant. Hannah Gadsby at the Keller Auditorium abundant. Watermelon June Beetle abundant. There’s Pride, and the solstice, and the first gentle sunburn of the season. Everything wants to glow, not just my skin but my affections, and that place inside the front of my brain where light turns into images.
Let’s have a beautiful, creative month together—like, alone-but-together (my favorite way to be with people #actuallyautistic). But also, in a few very special and intentional ways, together-together:
1) BIRDSEED (let’s be together through music)
BIRDSEED, a new monthly offering for all readers, is a thoughtfully curated playlist brought to you by Mo: hiker, librarian, frequent contributor of photographs to this newsletter, and my life partner for the last 10 years and the next 90.
Mo’s ability to take in and synthesize knowledge about music old and new, and then craft a playlist every. single. month. (for as long as I can remember), is so skillful that it genuinely baffles here. Like, wtf Mo? How are you so good at music?
Now you get to be baffled / delighted / inspired, too! Listen here:
2) The Resiliency Circle (let’s be together for an hour on Zoom)
The Resiliency Circle is something I host once a month for paid readers of For the Birds. Less workshop and more casual gathering, I hold these strengths-based hours as a chance for us to be in each other’s company and do some writing and thinking—and a little bit of talking—that will nourish your creative channel as a whole.
For June, let’s use the seasonal shift as an anchor for some reflective writing. We meet on Wednesday, June 19th—aka Juneteenth! And one day before the solstice—at 5:15pm PST. I’ll bring some thoughtful prompts; you bring your curiosity and some paper.
Zoom link at the bottom of today’s letter! Upgrade to a paid subscription ($7/month) to join us. On the fence? Learn more about The Resiliency Circle here.
3) “Unmask your Creativity” (let’s be together in a small, strengths-based container whoops, we filled up!)
UPDATE: The spring cohort of “Unmask your Creativity,” the small group program I co-facilitate with
, has hit capacity!Holy cow: I’m so excited to be in time and virtual space for three months with an amazing group of humans. If you’re sad to have missed this round and/or you’ve been on the fence about joining, click here to be added to the waitlist for our next cohort!
4) Bird Oracles (let’s be together via something like divination)
If you’re new to my bird (& bug) oracles, welcome!
Once every couple of months, I create something kind of like a series of horoscopes, but weirder; instead of looking to the zodiac, I look to the bugs and the birds.
I craft these oracular messages through a strange mix of creative effort, intuition, choice, and a quality of attention that looks a lot like magic. Maybe all attention carries the possibility of magic. Maybe all writing, too.
This season, I felt inspired to turn to the birds for guidance on what we should be asking about our current creative pursuits. You heard me correctly: The birds aren’t giving us the answers this month. This month, the birds are giving us the right question.
Here’s how it works
The next time you spot one of the following birds, that’s your bird oracle! Return to the corresponding message below and glean wisdom accordingly.
As always, you have my full permission to read these messages at a slant. Maybe you’ll see an entirely different bird, and you’ll use the questions below to prompt you in crafting your own cosmic-avian wisdom. Maybe you read all the messages at once and choose whichever one gives you pause. Maybe the bird isn’t a real bird, but a creature that showed up in a recent dream.
Maybe you just know, inexplicably, which message I wrote for you. Of course you do!
The point is not to do this right or wrong. The point of these nature-inspired oracles is to open yourself up in a slightly different way to some creative guidance; to remember that all creative work is a little bit incantatory (both the input and the output); to play at the intersections of magic and reality; and to pay a little more attention, in one way or another, to our bird friends.