june: what's helpin'

field notes from a life being rebuilt

as i reorient myself into the ecosystem of this work and allow my own growing and unfolding to occur along with the easing into summer, i’m honoring the call to expand this publication.

in the spirit of connectedness, community, and the knowing that sometimes, we just need someone to tell us: this is helping right now—i’m adding a monthly letter here on touchstones called: what’s helpin’

this is going to be a simple, round-up style letter that offers my own field notes from a toes in the dirt life being rebuilt and constellated inside of while navigating trauma, estrangement, and grief.

field notes:
the peas have grown over two inches this week.
i harvested my first stalks of kale on sunday.
the rivers peaked in volume ten days ago.
three strawberries have begun to ripen.
the nasturtium are starting to climb with gentle training.
i have identified three different types of grasses on the trail i walk daily.

rituals:
in sophie strand’s memoir: the body is a doorway, she shares a morning practice that has turned into a relational prayer. i have adopted it as a prayer of my own while moving into summer and it looks something like this.

each morning when i wake, i step outside as soon as possible, even in the rain. i address every living being i can see from where i stand with my feet in the wet grass. there is the giant spruce, the lilac trees, the mountain ash, and apple trees.

there is the grass i am standing in, the robins, the magpies, the mourning dove, and chickadees. my dog.

now, there are the radishes, carrots, peas, pole beans, tomatoes, marigolds, zucchini, kale, lettuce, chard, onions, shallots, cucumbers, strawberries, nasturtium, chamomile, yarrow, basil, and parsley.

i take special care not to forget about the beings we so readily write off as inanimate—there is the sky, the morning stars, often the moon still shining, the sun rising over the spruce, the clouds. i turn to say good morning to the little house i live in and love.

and finally, i turn upon my own body, and begin to say hello. i say it all out loud and move my body as i do. good morning feet. good morning legs. good morning back. good morning womb. good morning belly. good morning arms. good morning chest. good morning lungs. good morning hands. good morning heart. good morning head. good morning mind. good morning spirit.

to call all of these beings by name invites me into relationship with the entire animacy of the world as i am experiencing as soon as i am up and moving. after, my whole body buzzes with aliveness. my awareness has roamed over every inch of my self. now, i can choose to embody that perception however deeply my participation will allow today. by addressing all of the beings that my body is constellated with allows me to remember my family in the place of all things before i lose myself in the nebulous screen world we have been conditioned to live within.

suddenly i see how the gold in my hair is enlightened by the rays of sun. how my blood rushes like the river. how my own morning song mingles with the birds. who’s to say this life matters more than all the other beings intermingling in this ecosystem? what could i learn from this kind of relational embodiment?

restorative writing practice:
find a quiet place with your notebook and pen. offer yourself the space to move through these questions with openness. keep writing and try not to edit yourself.

close your eyes and sink into your body, ask yourself gently:

what is the one thing i can’t seem to ever “fix” about myself?

why do i want so badly to “fix” this part of me?

when did i learn that this part of me was “broken”?

what would it mean if i didn’t have to spend all of this time trying to fix this brokenness?

what if this ache never goes away?

allow whatever comes up through these prompts to be enough. there is no goal of this writing but to witness ourself. to recognize the places we’ve been so zoomed in on that we might let go of our grip.

reading:
so much of the healing that i experience flows through me from the books that i read. i’m not sure if anyone else has this kind of enspirited relationship with books but somehow, they seem to show up at exactly the right time in increasingly magical ways. this month, lisa olivera’s when the ache remains and sophie strand’s the body is a doorway, are the texts i keep returning to when i’m feeling adrift in the grief, disconnected from the collective, or teetering somewhere on the edge.

friends don’t let their friends by books on amazon, so get these on bookshop.org for 20% off using this link here: support independent bookstores

magic words:

my hope with this monthly letter is that you can begin building your own practices of relationality within the ecosystems you live inside. whether that means more days than not you take your coffee outside instead of staring at your phone when you wake up. or, walking the same path each day without headphones and paying attention to the ways the landscape changes over the course of a week, a month, or even a year.

one of the most powerful tools we have as humans for nurturing these relationships is the language we use to talk about them. i want to offer you a few powerful words to explore as you constellate yourself into these greater webs of connection.

grammar - in robert mcfarlane’s, is the river alive, he explores the power that our language has to put in into relationship with the animate world we live in. he writes,

“grammar is that which orders the relations between things… in middle english, ‘grammar’ also meant ‘magic’— a grammarye was a book of spells or sorcery. a good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. to imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. new possibilities of encounter emerge—and loneliness retreats a step or two.”

just like when i address all living things in my backyard and each part of my body—using this grammar to acknowledge this kinship enchants those connections further into a sense of true aliveness.

spell - david abram explores how human language and writing has developed inside of the natural world over centuries. his book, the spell of the sensuous, encourages a grammar of animacy, too.

he writes, “to spell, to correctly arrange the letters to form a name or a phrase, seemed thus at the same time to cast a spell, to exert a new and lasting power over the things spelled. yet we can now realize that to learn to spell was also and more profoundly, to step under the influence of the written letters ourselves, to cast a spell upon our own senses. it was to exchange the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world for the more concentrated and refined magic of the written world.”

language has always felt enspirited to me in a way that is beyond my own explanation—this understanding of the meaning of spell is part of the explanation i’ve been searching for. to be under the spell of our relational ecology is to be in relationship with them in new ways and therefor moved by that reorientation.

support:
i get a lot of dm’s on tiktok asking where to even start with this kind of work. people share about their deep grief, the experiences they have survived, and the ways in which they feel they are broken. the bravery with which they share is unmatched. i am left always in awe of the courage that this community carries with them daily.

when i get messages like this, i am reminded that when we are traumatized, one of our biggest fears is going it alone. one of the biggest things that reminds me that i’ve never been doing this alone is my therapist. my relationship with her is one i return to no matter the season of my life, no matter the issue that is coming up for me.

when i get dm’s like the one’s i mentioned earlier, my first suggestion is always a relational return through therapy. finding a licensed therapist who can begin holding space for you and unpacking the layers of trauma that have built up over the years is one of the first steps in participating in your life again. it’s the first place you can acknowledge, hi, i need some help.

over the past few months, i have been working with rebound health. they are an online resource to find licensed trauma therapists in all 50 states and they take most major insurance companies. if you’re looking for somewhere to start finding some professional help, rebound can help you get there.

---

until next month, may you find one thing worth paying attention to—

with so much love,

m