Mixtape No. 3
Life update, links, and all that's caught my eye lately
I’m writing you today from a new ocean. But I feel as though I am also writing you from a new mind, from a new internal space, as a refreshed person.
A new season is here, and for the first time in a long time, I can feel it. Summer and autumn in Costa Rica and Panama were extremely intense, beautiful, and deeply trying in ways that permeated everyday life and the smallest of tasks and the simplest of maneuvers, overtaking everything and allowing for nothing but an ongoing pursuit of basic safety and comfort. But December brings a long-awaited and desperately welcome change in weather patterns, and combined with our new location in the protected waters of the San Blas Archipelago, where we plan to be for a while, my nervous system has settled, my attention has broadened, my creativity has awoken, my gratitude has sharpened. For the first time in a long time, a new season is here, and I can feel it.
Truthfully, creating anything (even these newsletters which I have mostly just been doing as a fun outlet, up until now) for a while has felt constricted and hard, forced and weird, and I sense it was in part because, to use a phrase from experimental psychologist Adam Mastroianni, my ability to experience was far, far outpacing my ability to describe — and a bizarre dissonance rapidly built that quickly became overwhelming.
But I think it was also because I am still learning how to create and speak from places that seem entirely void of wisdom or beauty or structure or tidy conclusions. Most (all?) of my career as a coach and writer have been spent teaching, finding the lesson, sharing the takeaway, making every post and word valuable. Because the value is what the people want, the value is why they listen or read or follow, the value is what will ultimately pay the bills and put food on your plate.
I mostly didn’t have the bandwidth to create anything during this time, and this was true — that felt like a luxury for other people, not something within reach for me. But I am beginning to see now just how much I also silenced myself through one of the hardest seasons of my life in recent memory because I could not reconcile where I was and how much I was struggling in a way that felt of value, and I judged myself for my utter inability to put a pretty bow on what felt like a constant state of clusterfuckity.
Should we make our pain useful? Can we let it not be?
I cherish coaching and teaching — sharing the bits that I learn from this life with those who may find it helpful feels like a privilege, my purpose, like my way of contributing something tiny to this broken world. And it makes me actually giddy to feel the slow engines of my creative inspiration finally starting to turn again after so much time laying dormant.
But I am also paying attention to how I can balance all that I am (now) so eager to share and teach, and remembering that to Not Be of Service is ok, and is in fact, “valuable” in its own way, in maybe the most important way. I am learning how to speak from inside the swirling mess of process with no answers or lessons in sight. I am learning how to live within the swirling mess of process, allowing it not make sense or be immediately useful, but rather just allowing it … to be.
This is a roundup of 15 things that have caught my eye lately, that I have enjoyed, that have made me think or challenged me. This list includes an examination of a much needed cultural shift, thoughts on free will, lessons on how we can learn to communicate better, “Instagram face”, the divine wisdom in attentive rest, a story about loneliness and talking to strangers that I can’t stop thinking about, a story about rising oceans I can’t stop thinking about, the impact of using war metaphors to sell beauty products, why it’s hardest for us to show up for those we love the most, and more. I also include some music I’m enjoying and some personal photos from my life lately.
Most of this will be for my paid subscribers, who I am deeply grateful for, and who literally keep me afloat — in more ways than you know! If you’d like to purchase a full year of access to everything here, I would be honored to have you:
Oh but before we jump in, I want to hear from you!
I’ve got some questions for you over here on this post and would love love LOVE to read your answers. Please come add to the conversation!
What I’m reading:
Part of the many reasons I closed my account on instagram a few years ago was because of how flat and binary and oversimplified and un-nuanced and performative and divided and destructive I found (even my progressive, feminist, mental health focused corner of ) the app had become, and I wanted to get off the ride. In this piece, the always brilliant Holly Whitaker writes about some of the ways these qualities have contributed to the “online civil war where everyone hates everyone or at the very least mistrusts everyone and discourse has almost totally dissolved”, and are part of a much bigger picture— one that warrants our attention, but also one that is currently, possibly, undergoing a shift for the better.
Any large-scale, intractable issue of our time is not unsolvable because of a lack of emergent solutions or technology, but because we cannot overcome our differences or get over ourselves enough to work across discordant beliefs and values.
We speak of rest as being healing, and it is. But it can also expand beyond basic restoration and become a portal to something profound and spiritually rich, if we are attuned. As always, Sarah Blondin explores this magic internal landscape beautifully.
I invite you to lay down with me for a moment or a lifetime and let the Earth speak to you. Feel the symphony of your own body's quietude, the relief and radical simplicity of your needs, and let the starlight hidden in your bones wake. Infinity hides out the back of our spine. Life is rich with pleasures that don't cost a dime and require nothing of you but a posture of wide-open receivership and availability in your body. Meet me in the valley bottom, I’ll be there, laying down, braiding the grass.
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a year, and now I’m devouring it.
As she says, this piece is “part personal narrative about loneliness, part brief reflection on the strange sociology of why we are so afraid to answer the door and smile at strangers”, and I think about what she writes in here often.