For the Birds: November nourishment

Taking thin-veiled inventory of your creative channel. Plus BIRDSEED, this month's Resiliency Circle, and an update on my retreat experience.

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Thanks for being here! Dear fellow creative humans & sensitive souls, I’d love to help you close out your year with thoughtful creative attention <3

Book an End-of-year Review Session with me, and we’ll do the following:

• Identify what creative needs & obstacles came up this year.

• Shed light on what you’re currently integrating.

• Take generous stock of your creative milestones from 2024.

• Amplify your “birdknowing” (the phrase some of my clients and I use to describe our divergent intuition).

Learn more / purchase below:

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Dear readers,

My partner and I collect the tabs from our aluminum cans in a small glass jar we keep on the kitchen counter.

When it fills up, we pass them along to a dear friend, who mails them to the Ronald McDonald House. RMH provided immense support to her family during her daughter’s first year of life.

The glass is currently half full.

There’s a spider living in there! I exclaim to my partner one day in late September, pointing excitedly toward a little black and brown thing. When I drop a tab in, he moves. When I tilt the jar sideways he scuttles about, climbing over and between the small metal pieces with ease.

Still in there? M asks me after a week or so passes. Yep! Still living in there, I smile.

I say it just like that. He’s living in there. He’s living in there.

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Last month, I attended a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat; I left shortly after 48 hours had passed.

At the retreat, if we found ourselves struggling with aspects of the practice, we were allowed to ask questions of the teaching assistant—but only during brief windows of time, called “interviews,” and only for five minutes, and nothing philosophical.

Needless to say, I had—per the systems already in place, systems that have apparently worked for thousands and thousands of people before me—too many questions.

When I approached the TA for my first and only interview, I craned my neck upwards and stared at her elevated posture. She sat on a platform at the front of the small room; I sat on a thin cushion on the ground a few feet before her.

I’d requested the interview because I wanted, more than anything else, to understand the contradictions of what Vipassana promises: That it will reveal “the universal truth of suffering,” but that it will also eradicate suffering. I explain-whispered to the TA that my brain was feeling really stuck there.

She wouldn’t answer my question, of course. She said she could tell me something intellectual about how the apple tastes, could speak to me about the philosophy of fruit, but that it wouldn’t be the same thing as me tasting the apple myself.

“Okay,” I said, her point taken.

But, I thought to myself as I shuffled out of the room, a sloshy, nervous feeling growing in my stomach, it sort of helps me to know in advance something about the apple.

Dr. Megan Neff talks about this very thing in her work, particularly when it comes to emotional regulation and the neurodivergent brain: We need a “bottom-up” approach to this kind of stuff, which means (to paraphrase from Dr.’s Neff’s Neurodivergent Emotions Personality Workbook) the skills we learn must be linked to the “why”—why it works, why it’s impactful, etc.

Said differently: The why, for some of us, is not an intellectual escape. It actually brings us closer to the what.

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When I got home from my failed retreat attempt, I did the most predictable thing in the world:

I wrote.

And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote—about 4,200 words poured out of me those first 24 hours.

And, in sharp contrast to what we’d been instructed to do and not do while on-site, I let my brain go in all the directions it naturally wanted to. I continued meditating, yes, but I also had philosophical thoughts and intellectual conversations; and I talked to myself, both out loud and in my head; and I fantasized, and I visualized, and I read. (Good gawd, did I read—for hours and hours at a time.) I dreamt and, in the mornings, wrote my dreams down.

As the days went on, I watched myself closely for feelings of self-disparagement or shame, feelings I’m hyper-susceptible to: Shame that I was slipping back into the “pattern-habits” that Vipassana had been trying to help me break; or fear that I was once again letting my intellect rule my days.

With some surprise: Such feelings never came.

What came instead was an overwhelming amount of compassion for my brain—chattiness and all—and the growing sense that my literary life is my meditative life.

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On my first morning back, I drank a can of seltzer, popped the tab off, and added it to our glass jar.

He’s still living in there! I told M.

I think he might be trapped, M said, and the color of the room changed.

That the spider might not be able to leave hadn’t occurred to me. I stopped what I was doing and carried the jar outside, dumping the contents carefully onto the ground. The spider scurried away, taking refuge in some dry foliage nearby, where he would soon become invisible to me.

Most of these sentences are practical ones, all surgery and charity and explanation.

But I could make them philosophical if I wanted to.

For example: How often do you assume that a thing you find inside of you is living there?

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After two short but very long days, I let the spider go.

I am glad I did.

I am more aware of breath and habitat now.

~Sarah

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BIRDSEED

~a monthly playlist, curated by M: Prolific reader, gentle librarian, & Child’s Play 2 fanatic~

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The Resiliency Circle

The regulatory power of lists, charts, maps, & webs!

November’s Resiliency Circle is an extra fun / special one for me.

Back in July, I read this essay by Sam Galloway, about the potentially “liberating and calibrating” effects of Autistic shutdowns. Here’s the comment I left on her piece:

“Sam, I have been thinking *a lot* lately about how making charts, webs, and lists is actually a way I regulate having ‘too much’ information in my brain at all times, because something I’ve noticed is that I will remake charts, webs, and lists that I already have—i.e. it’s the MAKING of them, not the having of them, that is giving me something!”

I went on to suggest that perhaps we needed a parallel writing group session, but where we gather and make lists instead.

This month, I’m making it so! The Resiliency Circle for November will take place on Wednesday the 20th, at our usual time of 5:15pm Pacific / 8:15pm Eastern. I’ll be holding space for 90 minutes—plenty of time for us to look at a few examples, do some play-making, and share (if we feel like it) what we’ve charted.

Between now and then, I’ll be sharing a few of my own favorite lists and list-adjacent texts—stuff I’ve made, and stuff made by other people, too.

In the meantime, and as usual:

• The RSVP & Zoom link are included at the bottom of today’s letter.

• If financial barriers are the only reason you’re not attending, please reach out!

Upcoming Circles to look forward to

• December: I’ll be hosting two Resiliency Circles next month, one in the morning and one in the evening. Calling all readers & friends in Sweden, Australia, India, and any other location where attendance has been tricky due to time zone: I hope to see yr face in real time next month! We’ll meet on Tuesday, Dec. 17th at our usual 5:15pm Pacific, and then Friday, Dec. 20th, at 9:30 am Pacific. Come to one, or both!

  • If this proves useful, I’ll likely keep offering alternative times moving forward.

    • Which means: Remember to let me know what is most useful to you!

• January: Let’s open the year with a “mini writing marathon,” inspired by the sixth chapter of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (“A List of Topics for Writing Practice”).

  • I’ll be hosting this one “workshop” style, with tickets available for purchase and free attendance to paid readers. More deets to come.

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Speaking of good lists

I’ve always taken delight in this time of year—and apparently I’m not the only Autistic person who loves Halloween.

But as a creative guide, I also love utilizing the metaphor of the thin veil as a way to think about creativity through a holistic lens.

Let’s use this seasonal moment to take a more robust inventory of our creative channel.