Dear ones - This email is coming to you only a day after I arrived back in Scotland - a return journey which in many ways began almost immediately after I left last year. Some places take a hold of you, get in under your skin and into your bones more deeply than you would ever have imagined. This is that place for me. At least for now. snacking on wild blackberries while foraging along the Fife Coastal Path - photo by Jack Benedetto My body is needing plenty of rest after all the travel and...
17 days ago • 1 min read
Dear ones - Did you see the email or my video on YouTube and social media from last week, talking about how safety isn’t the same as sanctuary and protection isn’t the same as refuge? I’m curious - what do you think of my thoughts there? And what does sanctuary mean to you? What does it feel like in your body? Do you know it when you feel it? One of my favorite parts of our last cohort of Sanctuary was exploring what the word meant to us over the course of the six months we gathered. It...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Happy Autumn Equinox! A time to wrap up the season of abundance and harvest our final goodness before entering into the darker season of the year. Our modern cultures often view things like progress as being very linear. One of the side effects of this is swinging between extremes like a pendulum - in the case of cycles of burnout, we swing between being full on and being shut down… with very little space in between. But our long-ago ancestors understood cycles very differently, in part...
23 days ago • 2 min read
Dear ones - The world can feel like a big, overwhelming, and dangerous place. For children and for adults. Because, in many ways, it is. Even beyond obvious dangers like violence and accidents; on some level, I think we’re always aware we’re like a fire - life consuming us, as we consume it, until our finite time is up. Every breath containing the grief and gratitude of loving and losing. Shadow work - the subject of my last podcast episode and a key component of a client’s session yesterday...
26 days ago • 4 min read
Dear ones - This email is a check-in, a new podcast episode announcement, as well as an invitation to join the upcoming Sanctuary cohort. The Check-In So… how we doing? My body has been manifesting symptoms of intense stress for much of this year and, in spite of all the tools I have, it’s only been getting worse. Last month, I stopped sleeping and my digestion shut down for a while. Thanks to acupuncture and even more shifts in my daily patterns, I seem to be back on track, but even now,...
28 days ago • 2 min read
Dear ones - Happy beginning of September and New Moon time. I'm going to aim for an email at the beginning of each month with an overview of anything coming up. This month, the monthly overview email happens to also coincide with a new podcast episode drop! A Tarot Card for September: I was doing a card drawing for a “Year-of-Tarot” member today and felt inspired to pull a card for all of us for the month: Card from Shadowscapes Tarot by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law and Barbara Moore I always...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Dear ones - “Am I doing enough?” How often do you find yourself wondering that? "Am I doing enough when it comes to my children and whether or not they're OK?" "Am I doing enough to ensure my future and the future of the ones I love?" "Am I doing enough to love myself and be myself in the world?" "Am I doing enough to love my partner?" "Am I doing enough at work?" "Am I doing enough when it comes to mitigating climate catastrophes?" "Am I doing enough about genocide, about injustice, about...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Dear ones - When people are skeptical about “animal guides” or “plant teachers,” part of their criticism usually revolves around the question: “how do you know you’re not just making it up to justify things?” Answer: You don’t. Not really. But we humans are meaning-making creatures. And we are observant. Much of our scientific and academic knowledge pursuits are based around the idea of being an impartial observer. As though we could somehow separate ourselves from the world we are observing....
2 months ago • 1 min read
Dear ones - A quick note to let you know I dropped a bonus podcast episode today exploring ancestral harvest holidays, like Lammas or Lughnasadh, which were generally celebrated on August 1st, and mark the beginning of the harvest of storage crops and the subtle shift towards Fall. Within the episode, I: muse on what the practice of these holidays, the themes and perspectives they invite, might have to show us about burnout; share some agricultural context for the season; and pose some...
3 months ago • 1 min read