Celebrate the First (+ A Creative Birth)

Today, I complete my 36th year on this Earth, in this body.

I remember when I was 24, watching a talk online by an artist. She had slides being projected up front as she spoke. I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember the topic she was speaking about.

What I do remember is that at one point, she projected a photo of one of her first paintings. And she made fun of how “bad” it was, cringing to the audience, expressing embarrassment at everyone seeing this early work as she skipped ahead to the next slide. Audience members laughed as the speaker expressed her distaste.

My body recoiled.

It felt so wrong to turn on a creation and belittle it. A creation that your body brought into existence, in a context of a time past. A creation through which you explored, became, were changed, and thus affected the entire Great Web.

I knew then, in my bones: I will celebrate the first!

The playfulness, the curiosity and exploration. The courage, when it’s required, to try something you’ve never tried before, and see what it feels like in your body.

***

Not having an audience helps me be more present to my experience, to playfully create, listen to the whispers, and have Many Firsts! And, for the purpose of the message, I’ll gladly share:

My first time playing with watercolors as an adult, in 2015:

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2024: The Year in Podcasts

While I’ve always loved having a documentation of the books I’m reading, podcasts have been a notable force shaping my consciousness for years. This year I want to capture the listens in a post, a bookmark of sorts, that I can look back on and remember a texture of this year.

And, while it doesn’t need to be said, I will make it visible that books and podcasts (easily tracked, measured) were not the main weather system of my year. I spent 5 juicy hours each month in four gatherings with my story/somatics community, plus many more hours interacting on our loamy Mighty Network. (The Loam is a large part of my year.) Ayla Nereo albums were the only music that accompanied me on my drive east. A blessed Fairy Friendship with nearly-daily Marco Polos. The Mountain Lion. The story of Root Living. Relationships with the more-than-human world. Connection with my widest, most loving self (also, The Great Mother). Etc. Read more

2024: The Year in Books

Update on March 2, 2025: I recently learned of StoryGraphs, an alternative to Goodreads, and that Goodreads is owned by Amazon! StoryGraphs was founded and built by Nadia Odunayo, a Black British woman who slowly brought her vision to life. Her platform lets you import from Goodreads, and I like the specificity of recs (one feature, for example: you can filter to avoid books with specific content, which is slick!).

I made a profile on StoryGraphs and will be using that in 2025 to document my reading. Check it out for yourself and see what you think!

 

Here’s what I read in 2024 on Goodreads.

Since joining the site, I have participated in their “Reading Challenge” each year, where you select a numerical amount in January that you want to read by the end of the year, as I like keeping a record of what I read. I’d have to look back to see at what point I stopped sharing the total # of books read here; the number is irrelevant to me.

While this has been my view for a while, last year I selected “1” as my 2024 Reading Challenge goal on this website, to more closely represent this Inner Truth: it’s about the experience, not the measuring of the experience.

As in, person A could read 30 books this year, and each is a slog that they force themself to finish. This takes a lot of effort (as there wasn’t delight in the process), draining life-force and using up life-hours the person could have been enjoying something they actually like.

Person B could read 20 books this year, 15 books that some part of them thinks they “should” read, in order to be perceived a certain way by others. And 5 books required by some certificate or education degree, chosen by an institution or singular teacher.

Person C could read 5 books this year, each juicy and life-giving. Those 5 could be read in exactly Right Timing, reaching for the book exactly when it feels aligned, going at the pace that feels right in their body, being completely in the experience of reading while reading, (not finishing to finish). You get the idea.

A measurement of one piece of an experience does not tell us the whole experience. Read more

A Patchwork Quilt: Tell Story, Cultivate Power-Within, Imagine, Try on New Lenses

A patchwork quilt for you, today.

Letting thoughts be here as they flow, like in the early internet days of blogging.

Remember: All life is sacred.

[First, a freewrite shared with my intimate story+somatics group two days after the election. There is so much shared understanding in that group–which I won’t be able to name here–but one important piece is respect for and knowing that each person’s system responds differently. Everyone can be in their own experience. Our shares are not prescriptive. We are sharing our lived experience.]

I had a restful night’s sleep on Tuesday, and woke up Wednesday to get ready for a day of outdoor shed organizing for my housekeeping client. I did a news search to see the election results. I had a split-second “damn” feeling, and then, “well, okay.” Shoes on, let’s go breathe some new life into this shed on perhaps the last warm day of the season.

My body was able to accept what was. Challenging emotions didn’t arise. I stayed in my tactile life, and my daily purpose remained the same. This was very different from the me in 2016. I wonder if some part of me knew this would be the result, if that’s why I was pulled to read Melania’s memoir in October, why I wrote a public 3,400-word reflection about what she and I have in common–when I hadn’t written online since 2019.

The me who has emerged from these last 5 years, that dark night of the soul, is now deeply rooted in the unseen. In Truth. In divinity. In the Great Mother. In the knowing that we are all connected. I now know that waking life is only a fraction of the experience, and it’s unfolding in each and every moment, each breath. Most of what appears to be is illusion, or was built without loving intention.

I’ll never forget my shock and naivety the first time I worked at a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge my first term in a conservation corps in 2017. Nevermind that we were spraying poison onto the plants, into the ground, into our food/water, our home. Killing plants which were simply being, living, adapting to changing environments as they always do, growing where they are needed, where the environment is right for them to grow. I couldn’t see that clearly yet. What shocked me was hearing gunshots, and subsequently learning that this was open hunting season. In a place called a “wildlife refuge,” people are allowed to come here with guns and murder the wildlife? I was confused. I’d thought “refuge” meant something, and had trusted that meaning. Until I learned otherwise. At the time I still believed thin-binary-narratives of words like “conservation” (good) and “invasive species” (bad). Language is powerful. The narratives that are crafted can last generations, keeping folks from asking deeper questions, from taking a second look. Read more