or some other gentleness

yellow nasturtium growing out of a hole in some wood, maybe out of the side of an old boat...For me, today, self-care looks like sleeping until 9 even though the alarm went off at 6.

It’s also about to look like drinking my chamomile-nettle-green tea and eating my oatmeal out in the backyard while reading a book, instead of at a computer.

Self-care today is also going to look like a trip to the beach and a short visit with the ocean between my first and second workshops today.

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I want to invite you to find and read this essay: “Writing for Our Lives: The Power of Memoir for Marginalized Students,” by Shelley Vermilya, about the ways our lives contain and create knowledge, and how we can use memoir or autoethnographic writing to access and understand and explain that knowledge. It’s not online as far as I can see — go to your local univ. library and get a student to get you a copy.

You can also read her chapter, “Memoir: An Academic, Democratic, Political and Liberating Framework” (in the Power of Words: A Transformative Language Arts Reader), which contains this: “These…self-referential studies inspire an epistemology that is disobedient to the power relations of traditional pedagogy.” Yes, yes, yes.

Re-reading Shelley’s work is reminding me other ways to talk about what I/we do in the workshops.

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Been feeling overwhelmed and like there was just no time for a break. And now, look: I’ve flexed a little, and made room for some much needed downtime today.

No prompt today: if you have that ten minutes for writing, you might write about your favorite ways to care for self, or you can take that time for a walk or some other gentleness…

Thanks for your you-ness.

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