on not being able to sleep
As soon as I have my authors copies of my new chapbook I’ll be having a release party! There will be one online and one in person! Come to both if you want! I’ll make sure you know when and where.
To continue celebrating the chapbook release, I'll be continuing to run a sale for the newsletter! For paid subscribers you will also be getting a copy of the Home of Milk in the next few weeks in the mail with other special things! Become a paid subscriber today to support this on-going work and get a chapbook in the process!
Another thing is happening! After a long while I am finally getting these creative practice workshops going again. For many years of my life I have returned to creative practice as spiritual practice as aliveness practice as remember practice. It has allowed me to work with the medium of my life as a place of continual inspiration and return.
This workshop series is about how to do just that with simple ways of engaging that allow for this kind of fascinating exploration. I am starting a seasonal workshop series about creative practice. This will be free for paid subscribers, info will be sent to you soon! And for everyone else, consider becoming a subscriber or sign up here!
These past weeks sometimes the air becomes unbearably still. Sometimes there is no position that my body will relax into. But usually it’s the mind, chattering and chattering away.
Listing and un-listing each thing.
This is a season of I can’t sleep. Do you have those? I lie down and its a whole river of thoughts, noisier and noisier until I am awake or just hovering under what might be called sleep.
I miss the way dreams soothe me and invite my life to filter in with color, metaphor, with a different rhythm.
A few days ago while in the car my seven year old was naming fractions starting with one half and then one fourth, one eighth. She got up to somewhere in the thousands interrupting my conversation in the front seat each time with unbridled enthusiasm at categorizing the world before I said that she could tell her sister but I was done responding to each fraction announcement.
That is what it is like to sleep with my mind right now.
Sometimes it is loud to have a body and a mind. Sometimes there are many alarm calls. Sometimes we are just hearing them.
I write about this because I also see summer coming. The oak trees are turning dark green and holding shade. Each day something new is creeping into bloom and then exploding. I spent a few hours this weekend in the surf, face in the sand, riding tiny waves with giggling girls to the shore.
Both can be happening. And this morning as I was late to ride to school to take care of someone or something I took a breath: exhaust, citrus trees, fog starting to burn off, something spilled on the pavement. This noticing is what living is. This is hearing the alarm. This is the soft air tickling me. This is half awake conversations about rashes, what size our bodies are, how no one will ever eat breakfast again, how the shorts with the rip in the butt can be worn under dresses.
These are the food of my practice, of living, making, remembering, and imagining. In June let’s gather and delve into what these tools are together to float us through a summer of making and becoming.
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I invite you to join me for the upcoming workshop in June, to join into the creative practices that already are in your life. We will meet and remember together that we know how. And in that knowing there is space to become and become again.
For paid subscribers you will also be getting a copy of the Home of Milk in the next few weeks in the mail with other special things! Become a paid subscriber today to support this on-going work and get a chapbook in the process!