Is this a newsletter?

or what? some questions, thoughts on practice, a small hello, a moody & watery winter playlist, and the brightness of rosehips, for you.

Is it a newsletter?

A writing-around-the-edges of a practice of making cloth and color and the grand attempt to live the question of how to be at home well as a human, hoping to reweave myself - and anyone willing to come along with me - into a more embodied and sane relationship with the living world…?

A place to dump random - but not really, they are all related if you zoom out enough - writings and stories as they want to be flown out into the world?

A consistent practice?

A now and then thing?

Should I even continue now that I’ve sort of started and then stopped?

who knows! good questions.¹

*

I do know: I prefer writing in notebooks with pens to writing on keyboards (and write better and differently there too)

Writing seems to go best in my life when its somewhat consistent (this dosn’t necessarily mean shared) but also not the main menu: something I do in a day as a part of a variable, diverse and embodied existence of being a human in relationship with life, engaging with the tangible regularly. And when I actually have something to say - or something very much wants to be said through me - then, the practice that has been developed helps me find the words and they come through clearer. Or having a bit of a practice plain old just helps ground myself in the midst of the wild whirlwind that writing; engaging with words, the mind, the invisible & imaginal world, can be.

Writing practice helps me talk too, and talking helps me write. Listening deeply and paying attention helps both. Singing and dancing and making music helps everything. Helps life live. Daily; in the kitchen while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil; when I get up in the morning after an awful night that’s been weird and I haven’t slept and I know I gotta do something to greet the day with courage and shake off the bad night², when I’m happy, exuberant, excited. When I’m feeling grief. When I’m angry. Really it’s good medicine for whenever, to be engaged with on the daily.

And simply living and not bothering to write or talk about it too much is also sometimes very important in this overly diced-up, mined, over-explained world we modern people are prone to making with our minds.

Walk first, talk later… my dear friend likes to reminds me that I apparently used to say quite a bit in my 20s

*

So, this is a short and sweet hello to send out to all of you who signed up to follow my words here thus far (um, close to a year ago now!) and say hello! Hi out there to all of you - friends family and folks i do not know - reading this. Greetings from here. From where I woke up to a little bit of ice glinting on the bucket of rainwater on the porch, the neighbor’s roof shingles white with frost, and the dawn sky was fish scale pink but now the grey is still and settling in as the next storm rides just off the horizon somewhere.

I still regularly feel like humans these days spend way too much time with their eyeballs trained on the screen in front of them, consuming whatever is there, and there’s that part of me that really dosn’t want to be a part of any of that. But I am. These are modern world issues. I get addicted to the scroll as much as anyone else³. And also, I write. I have things to say, and writing is one of the ways I do that, and well, I do live in the modern world. So at the moment, gonna keep up (or start again) the experiment of writing here on this online space.

Mind your own eyeballs folks! ⁴

That’s it, Just saying hi and feeling my way into writing here again. Perhaps I’ll just write intros for a month (Kidding… maybe…) Lots has been moving and old and new writing needs to be tended to, and i might need a place to put ‘em out in the world. See what lands. Practice making jewelry for folk’s minds (I believe this is from Tom Waits, I might be wrong). Thought actually - scattering seeds in the cracks of the cement of our modern minds that rigidifies and paves over the deeper mind that’s still there too -

is maybe more what I’m aiming for. And to see if its possible to build real community through this space, and what that looks like, and just plain old starting again, right where I am.

*

Lastly, a couple small treats. Some music, some color, to close out this brief missive.

a winter playlist i’ve been adding songs to as i come across when listening to spotify… moody, watery mystery music. Liquid, deep, and good for winter starting to bud into spring. For the deep feelings. All instrumental, lots of strings and wind. Some bubbling up of early spring sounds in there too, like: how the air has that electric fresh spring smell around the edges these days when I step out the door in the morning and hear the raucous robins flying about between the cypress trees & the cotoneaster thicket across the street.

13 songs, less than 1 hour. Like a cd! remember those? I forgot how much I loved making mix cds and mix tapes. I didn’t spend a lot of time rearranging these songs to make transitions between songs that felt really really good, (but I took a moment to actually learn how to do it, and did a small bit of it…) maybe next time i’ll share my funky mix and get you dancing! (I’m determined)

*recommended remedy: lights off, light some candles, lie on the floor (preferably on a sheepskin with a cat purring on top of you- or maybe you’ve got your own version) & do nothing else but feel whatever you feel & fill up with music for a while. ⁵

And finally. ROSEHIPS : vitamin C… (and vitamin COLOR)

Since the rose family trifecta coming soon stories I promised in my intro a year ago are still patiently - or not so patiently - waiting in the line up to perhaps one day make it to your eager eyeballs and perhaps ears

These rose hips are from Penelope, who is right outside my window from where i sit. When I first moved in this house, some neighbors walking by told my friends who were visiting & hanging out on the porch (not sure where I was) that the rose next to my house was named Penelope. I love her. I was incredibly lucky to inherit a garden full of the most glorious roses. Somehow I have never really gotten into a pattern of rosehip harvesting. Ive harvested a few here and there, but picked a bunch the other day, and spent an hour or so before dinner listening to music and slicing them open, carving out the fuzzy hairs and seeds and laying them out to dry. (And the must make a note of the tool I was using: what I call my fava bean knife - a very cool tool, and a gift from years ago that someone had made out of a cheap utensil: the metal up top that used to be a knife or whatever it was carved away to make a small hook perfect for slicing open the inner casing of a fava)

Now I’m dreaming up things to make with them… (the rosehips)

do you harvest rosehips or make anything with them? let me know in the comments if you do…

ok. back to life off the computer, to this knitting project, to some deep cleaning out, sorting, renewing, that is underway. The things i didn’t do in January. And also to tending to Goblin’s ear, if he will let me.

What music are you listening to? (or making!) What colors are feeding you, or are you noticing around you these days?

Feel free to say hello and leave a comment, or just touch the little heart to leave an echo back if you made it this far, and would like to. You have to go all the way into the app (not just read via the email to touch the heart or leave a comment.

1. ok, I’m being a little silly. But here is what I am currently thinking: yes, I am continuing! To be published Tuesdays, (for now) maybe small tidbits weekly with bigger things woven in here and there… we’ll see how that goes & adjust as needed…

And apparently I’m learning about footnotes. I hope the over abundance of them isn’t too annoying :) my exuberant mind can have a lot to say when i get started& want to go in a lot of directions all at once. i can rein it in a bit if it is.

2. SO recommend this. Works like nothing else after a bad night, or for a bad mood, which, well, happen from time to time as part of this being human thing. Be careful though, powerful practice! go slow ;)

Recommend just starting to move and groove. start small, ask your chopsticks to help you if you need some help finding a rhythm, and start to make some noise and move, whatever feels. feels good, feels true, feels you, and keep going, til something shifts.

3. Though I am officially quitting most extraneous internet stuff like looking at facebook & instagram for February (except perhaps to direct people here if they would like to read my words).

4. I just took a very helpful break over the weekend which opened up so. much. space. & is helping me to commit to fully stepping away from some of those bad habits & mind-numbing consumptive scrolling kinda things in February that just take up too much mental space and pollute my ability to think well and deeply…

And oof, if ever there was a time to really need the full capacity of our hearts and minds, I’d say this is one of those times?!

5. Also, Divan Gasparan’s I will not be sad in this world album (i thought one of his duduk songs was on this playlist and i am just now realizing somehow he’s not on it , but very much fits with the vibe of these sounds) is one of the most hauntingly beautiful albums ever… discovered in a few years ago this time of year… And Duduks! They are Armenian flutes made out of apricot wood. How beautiful is that. My neighbor actually gave me one (not knowing I listened heavily to this music a year or two before he gave it to me… Anyhow, they take serious lung power to play, and he has just one (lung), so he passed it on to me, complete with two very amazing reeds and a cool case from Armenia.