It’s me, hi, I’m exhausted, it’s me.
And I know I’m not the only one literally crawling through these last weeks of the year.
All I can manage these days is the bare minimum, and anything extra, including this newsletter, has fallen by the wayside. I started shopping for Christmas presents less than a week ago. Expectations are being lowered left & right.
And you know what? It’s fine.
I don’t love it. It’s easier to feel ok about life and about myself when I have the capacity to do things. It’s more fun. But what I’m not gonna do is shame & berate myself for not performing for capitalism after three years of pandemic, and in a season when my mammalian body is designed to curl up in a cozy nest of blankets, commune with my kin, and make offerings to the gods that our harvest will last through the winter.
What I’ve learned through experience is that, when my body is rested and I have capacity, sitting down to work, to write, tackling tasks & projects feels easeful and joyful. And that when it doesn’t feel like that, when it feels like an impossible slog to even open my laptop, this is a surefire sign that I don’t have the capacity, that I need to rest, and the wisest thing I can do is hunker down like a bear in winter and not fight this need to rest.
I re-shared this post from last year on IG and thought I would share it here too because we can always use the reminder and the permission.
YOUR BODY KNOWS IT'S AN ANIMAL AND YOUR BODY KNOWS WHAT IT NEEDS.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️You are part of nature.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️Sleep & rest as much as you can. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️Be useless to capitalism. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️Disappoint everyone. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️Grief is exhausting.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️Hoard your sleep like a bear.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️Betray your allegiance to busyness.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️Let yourself lie fallow.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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❄️This is my Solstice prayer: for you, for myself, for all of us.
The beautiful thing about our bodies being part of nature is that, like nature, we are subject to cycles, and that the fallow season of winter is surely followed by the new life of spring. We can literally just trust our bodies to follow the cycles of life/death/rebirth symbolized by the cycle of seasons. We can allow ourselves to rest because spring is going to come again. (Your experience of these cycles may be very different if you’re disabled, chronically ill, or experiencing harm from systems of oppression.)
When we’ve been as deeply traumatized by capitalism as our bodies have been, letting ourselves lie fallow might mean doing so while having a constant nagging voice in the back of our heads whispering “You should be writing your newsletter right now,” and that’s ok. It’s ok for it to be a both/and experience.
I was deeply impacted this year by my reading of Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance, and I cannot think of a more important or worthy read for Solstice. I literally just opened the book at random just now and came upon this passage.
The body has information. The trauma response is to keep going and to never stop. Grinding keeps us in a cycle of trauma; rest disturbs and disrupts this cycle. Rest is an ethos of reclaiming your body as your own. Rest provides a portal for healing, imagination, and communication with our Ancestors. We can work things out in Dreamspace. What miraculous moments are you missing because you aren’t resting?
That’s just literally one random passage. I could copy down the whole book here, but I won’t, instead I will invite you to give yourself permission to disappoint everyone and anyone, including yourself, and give in to your body’s mammalian urge to rest. And if you’re looking for some comfort reading to support you through the liminal portal that is the holidays, I can’t think of a better volume to nourish yourself with.
This is a weird segue to make, but we’re all about that both/and life here at Resourced, so while I am inviting you to rest & to be useless to capitalism, I also want to share with you that I am teaching a workshop with the good folks at Seagrape Apothecary in January that’s all about setting trauma-informed intentions.
I’ve wanted to teach a workshop like that for years now, and while right now all that I am feeling is tired (I do have a little bit of juice today, which is why you’re getting this newsletter!) I am STOKED to teach this material, oh my god. I’ve been gathering insights and downloads for literally MONTHS now and it is gonna be SO GOOD. I am so so excited for this.
SETTING INTENTIONS FOR TRAUMA REPAIR IN A CHARIOT YEAR
with Seagrape Apothecary | Saturday, January 14th 2023, 12pm-3pm Pacific
// $45-$65 sliding scale //
The Chariot, the card of the year for 2023, is a wonderful ally when working with intentions. With its theme of harnessing resources of intuition, momentum, and motivation to pursue our heart’s desire, The Chariot can teach us how to bring all of our seemingly disparate parts into working together towards the same goal.
In this 3-hour workshop, we’ll explore:
The Chariot card through the lens of developmental trauma repair.
Why many standard intention-setting practices have the potential to reinforce our trauma patterns.
How to discern whether our intentions support patterns of protection rooted in developmental trauma, or patterns of connection that will facilitate trauma repair.
How to be a safe caregiver to ourselves through the challenges of pursuing our intention.
How to open to receive & celebrate the moments when our desire becomes reality.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
This will be a highly experiential workshop, and will include a blend of lecture, personal reflection, and group sharing, as well as ample time for working on our intentions for the year, for integration, and for questions.
🌈 READ MORE AND REGISTER HERE. 🌈
I have a lot of thoughts & feelings about this past year, and particularly about starting this Substack and what it has meant to me so far (hint: it’s a lot, I fucking love it here, AND I am still getting used to it and thinking about how I want to show up in this space) but I’m too tired to get into all that right now.
The one thing I want to say is, THANK YOU. Yes, you, who are reading these words right now. I can’t tell you enough what this means, this connection we have of me writing these words, and you reading them once they’re released into the world. What it means to have you read these words far from the reach of The Metaverse (hint: it’s everything.)
For now, for what will probably most likely be my last missive of the year, I want to say: thank you, I love you ( I mean that), and I hope you find rest, comfort, joy, connection, and nourishment amidst the chaos and grief and expectations of this season in late-stage capitalism and collapse. Whatever it is that you celebrate at this time, I celebrate with you, and I hope it brings you joy. Because joy is what we’re made for.
I just have a couple of quick recs for you today:
🌈 It was a great honor and a great joy to be hosted by Asher Pandjiris for their Living In The Queer Body podcast alongside of my of very favorites (and friend of the newsletter) Erin Fairchild of Journal As Altar!
We talked about being socialized in a fat queer body, navigating societal decay, the queer power of gardening, grief, generativity, and spontaneous good days in the midst of 'meh' seasons. It is a very tender episode. Perfect listening on this winter solstice!
🌈 Speaking of Erin, you bet your ass I signed up for her year-end journaling workshop, Your Journal Holds You: 2023 Intentions For Your Practice, on December 30th. I probably won’t be able to join live because I will be in Canada with family (and with real-ass winter for the first time in over a decade! wish me luck!) but I will be eagerly awaiting the replay. Erin’s workshops are the fucking best, that’s just facts.