My mom has been sewing masks for us. Here, I’m getting ready to go to the post office – I’m smiling under there, you just can’t see!
Hello hello hello –
Hey, I have a new book out! I’ll tell you more about it at the end of this post, ok?
Tag Archives: radical self care!
writing into this new reality
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Tagged radical self care!, Write to Restore, writing the pandemic
grateful that you are in this world
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Gratitude is a funny, complicated, and sometimes difficult thing.
Thanksgiving can be a challenge for many reasons (not least of which the fact that the story many of us are told about the holiday — that it’s to honor the native peoples of the Americas, who kept the pilgrims/first colonizers from starving to death after settling here — wildly sanitizes and white-washes the true history of European peoples on this continent).
We are told this is a day to be with family– the message is everywhere around us, on television, on social media. But what happens when time with family is toxic for us, or harmful, or just leaves us feeling depressed and sad?
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Tagged family, gratitude, holidays, poetry, radical self care!, survivorluv, thanks
December writing retreat! Join us for a day of writing in the East Bay hills…
The view from our writing room!
Meridian Writers
an all-day writing retreat!
Saturday, December 1, 10:30am-5:30pm.
(Light breakfast from 9:45-10:30am)
Lunch provided.
Open to all writers, regardless of writing experience or previous participation in Meridian Writers.
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Tagged commit to your writing, meridian writers, radical self care!, upcoming workshops, write anyway, writing retreat
we don’t have to take all of it in
Yesterday I shared this message with the writers in a couple of my workshops, and wanted to expand it a bit here:
Last Thursday, I decided to turn off the news.
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Tagged power of words, radical self care!, rape culture, the power of our desire, turn it off
Sometimes the grief rides up and knocks you down
Good morning, good morning. I went to bed at quarter to 9, and still it was difficult to get up when the alarm went off at 4;15. I am aching today, still, and heavy and exhausted and sad and overwhelmed.
And how are you doing so far today?
These are the times when I need the hiding places. The big loss is stalking me, and so I curl up on the couch or crawl into bed or wake up as early as I can so that the darkness itself can become a cocoon for me for a while.
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Tagged be easy with you, grief, long work of healing, radical self care!, working around the void
all violence is domestic violence
(There’s language of domestic and racially-motivated violence in this post. Just be easy with you, ok?)
Good morning, good morning. What’s the sky like where you are today? Here it’s still grey with night fog. The sun’s coming though, I think. The sun’s coming.
October was Domestic Violence Awareness month, and just this week another man killed a lot of people out of what looks like domestic-vioence-related rage. That’s got me thinking about the larger systems at work in our country right now. I’m trying to work something out in this post today, something that feels complicated, that has to do with what’s happening in our country to support the escalation in extreme violence that we’re seeing. Here goes:
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Tagged domestic violence, male supremacy, radical self care!, safety planning with one another, white supremacy
in the aftermath of more mass violence, how do we grieve?
Not again.
I’m sending you love and gratitude on this Monday morning after yet another mass shooting in America. These are difficult days in this country and around the world. It seems that every day we are confronted with another — often more than one — report of atrocity, violence, or hatred. We witness hostility in our own communities, both online and off. Somehow, we are expected to just keep going — go to work, go to school, keep appointments with friends, get together for beers, act like everything is normal.
Yet, many of us insist that this is not what we want our normal to look like. We don’t believe that violence should be normal. We don’t think we should be able to just pick up where we left off in our conversation when we hear the news that twenty-six people were shot at church. We believe something should come to a halt, there should be a moment or more of silence, we as a people should acknowledge the tragedy, acknowledge what it does to us as loving human beings to live in a place where such actions are considered acceptable.
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Tagged freewriting, grief, mass shooting, radical self care!
they love it that we’re distracted
Good morning, good morning.
there was a cat out on the porch just now, a shadow that smoothed across the morning deck, and stopped at Sophie’s water bowl. I watched her there, looking for bits of food. Then I turned to catch the kettle before it boiled, and when I looked back, the shadow had disappeared.
The morning is a quiet candle and a peaceful place. In two days we’ll get on a plane. In three days we;ll be in Dublin. Just now the temperature in Dublin is… I make myself not pick up the phone to check, not open a safari screen to check. It’s all I can do to remember how to do one thing at a time. The urge to look is a tightness in my belly and throat. Why do I just have to be sitting here typing? I could be reading a book and checking news and listening to news and have bread rising and doing all kinds of other things at the same time. I could be getting information right now — why that need? What’s the urgency about?
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Tagged radical self care!, turn it off, undistracting ourselves, world enough and time
uprooting and untangling the binds of rape culture
Squash seedlings almost ready for transplant!
Good morning, good morning. What’s the sun doing where you are right now? How is it feeding your heart?
Even though it’s possible, here in California, to garden year-round, I still live with the rhythms I learned growing up in zone 5 out in the midwest, where one had to take a break in gardening overwinter because, you know, snow. But every late February, something about the quality of light changes, and I get called back out into the garden. We moved last fall, so I have a new garden to build here. I’ve put in some carrot and radish seeds, have peas and chard and onions and herbs and nasturtium and sweet pea growing, and I can just barely see the tips of gai lan seedlings. It’s hard not to want to do it all right now, to have the garden bursting with color and fruit and flower that we left behind in Oakland. I’m re-learning the slow work of cultivation.
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Tagged garden, metaphor, radical self care!, rape culture, upcoming workshops, weeding as practice
trusting that moment of release
We push ourselves hard to relax right. We give ourselves too little time after too long working too much for too many days in a row, and then we expect ourselves to relax at the drop of a hat. Relax, damnit! There’s only these two days of weekend before we have to get back to work! Hurry up and unwind! The pressure to unclench just adds more stress, when we’re supposed to do it both correctly and on a timeline. We tighten more, knot up a little harder, and can’t understand what people mean when they talk about self-care. Who has time to relax? we want to know. There’s just so much to do. And what does relax mean, anyway, for those of us who tensed up as a way of protecting ourselves from the violence that forced its way into our bodies? Don’t those “Just Relax” people know that, for us, being clenched was our radical self care?
What can relax mean for us, then, when being curled into a tight ball was the safest position? What does it take for us to unfurl what has been bound and rigid within ourselves, to trust that we can be safe when we are exposed?
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Tagged beach love, dancing, flow, learning to relax, ocean, radical self care!