Wherever you go, there you are again
Announcements of offerings & the longing for home in a world on fire.
Before diving into today’s letter, I wanted to share two announcements:
First, my upcoming movement, meditation and journaling series, Practice Not Perfect, is now live! It will begin the week of the autumnal equinox (September 21) and will conclude on the winter solstice (December 21). It’s designed to help ease you through this seasonal transition with kindness by tapping into your inner nature. Four previous students of my past offerings are already signed up and I think this series is going to be so fun and packed with delicious movement, gorgeous music and insightful reflection.
Second, I’m delighted to share that Catherine Andrews and I are now recruiting for our upcoming Intentional New Year’s retreat in western Maryland. If you’re ready to be soothed by a clear vision for the year and eager to embrace the ritual of the new year in a low-pressure environment with like-hearted women, this retreat is for you. Several retreaters from last year loved it so much they’ve decided to join again, so we know it’s going to be special.
Happy Friday before Labor Day weekend.
I hope this summer has been kind to you.
Today’s letter started with a tiny musing on my morning walk to the post office. I’m not sure why I never realized before how close my house is to the local post office, but it was so delightfully quaint to be able walk a half mile through the quiet streets lined with mesquites, little free libraries, hummingbirds, bunnies and dogs walking their owners to accomplish a single task of mailing an envelope in 30 minutes which I had previously put off for the last three months.
It feels just right to be back home and settled after a summer of travel and (I counted) not sleeping in my own bed for a total of 88 days since November of last year. Here in Tucson, after a brutally hot and dry summer, the monsoon has arrived and we will be treated to a Labor Day weekend of markedly cooler temperatures. I can feel my body relaxing.
The monsoon however feels a bit like an unearned reward. Ben and I spent half of June in North Carolina, followed by a long weekend in Taos, New Mexico. Then we spent all of July in Big Bear, California with the dogs, who would have driven us crazy if we had gone that long without running and hiking them as much as they require, a task that would’ve been next to impossible during the heat wave that rocked Arizona this summer. Then we spent 10 days in August exploring the Pacific northwest from Portland and the Oregon coast to Seattle and the rainforests of the Olympic peninsula. Having arrived back a couple of weeks ago, that first monsoon felt blissful but also a little like driving to the Grand Canyon to take in the view: awe-inspiring but not quite as bone-deep as an overlook I had to bust my butt to see.
Due to the dramatic altitude changes and the still pretty hot temperatures, it’s mostly been a summer for easy, early walks for me. Also: a lot less screen time. After my latest reflection on needing to curb my phone reliance, my body screamed out in agreement and I developed tendonitis in my right hand/wrist for about a month. I couldn’t do a lot of basic tasks (let alone yoga or bearing weight), and both typing and phone use seemed to flare it up. I decided to seize the warning signal as a chance to delete all non-essentials from my phone, including Zillow, which had become one of my most abused apps.
Ugh. Zillow. I’m not even actually house hunting right now, but Zillow is so painfully alluring. I keep wanting to type “I don’t know why that is” but that would be the biggest lie on the planet because I do know why that is. Zillow is so alluring because it is selling me on the idea that somewhere out there would offer the perfect, free-from-climate-catastrophe, free-from-natural-disaster place to land one day.
The sense of “where will I go?” continues to creep up. More specifically, where will any of us go? But this is not quite the right question and I know it, but I entertain it nonetheless. As my parents hunker down for another hurricane, or my friends in Rochester coop up in their house to escape wildfire smoke from Canada, or I listen to a horrifying account of what happened in Maui, or I read yet another news story about the dire water crisis in my current home state of Arizona, or I tossed and turned before my trip remembering the pacific northwest is overdue for “The Big One,” I fret and calculate. My nervous system is never calmed for long by my compulsion to assess the risk of all future decisions, specifically the one of buying a home one day. By not making that decision, it’s not like I’m opting out of the broader existential dread of the climate crisis, nor am I excused from playing a role in it just because I’m a renter.
All the same, I am so desperate to prove that this elusive and fictional place of safety exists that I have started a spreadsheet called “Home Exploration” with the following columns:
Name of city/town
Median listing home price (total and by square foot)
FEMA risk index score
Do we have friends there?
Proximity to hiking
Population size
Proximity to airport
Is there a yoga studio/community?
Proximity to metro area
And yes, in that order of prioritization, because it feels oddly satisfying to the part of me that wants certainty in terms of physical risk. But it also feels unnatural in a way, this spreadsheet. Like, is this animal-body really going to feel OK just because the statistical analysis made it so? I think not. Our bodies understand safety through connection to other people. Yet my body has learned to seek safety through financial security. It wouldn’t matter if the tides never rose and the wildfires never came — if I felt lonely in a home I could afford but had no friends nearby, I would start to feel unsafe.
And so this afternoon I will go to an event at the Desert Museum for a book release from a friend of a friend. And Saturday I will go to yoga with a friend and then we’ll go shopping for drums, because I want to buy some drums. And on Sunday I will do the weekly ritual I’ve missed for most of the summer and join the hippies that dance in Himmel Park when our DJ/host, Michael plays fun music and people ecstatically dance on the patchy grass.
If you ever were to come visit Tucson, you’d find that unlike Phoenix (yes, I’m throwing shade), there are few residential swimming pools and few grassy lawns. Most Tucsonans understand how valuable water is in the Sonoran desert. But we do have parks where grass is grown and in most cases it is effected by prickly plants and weeds, especially the dreaded puncturevine plant, the goathead, which produces small, multi-spiked fruits known to pop bicycle tires and travel inside homes on shoes like little demon thumb tacks.
There’s a man named Vytas in my neighborhood who many mornings walks barefoot in the park with a small weeding tool, digging out goatheads to the benefit of us all. He’s one man on a mission and he’s made an incredible impact as they’ve been kept largely at bay. Thankfully, my wrist is feeling better now and so on Sunday before the music starts, I plan to join him with my bucket and my big hat on to help clear the dance floor. It’s so much better when you can take your shoes off.
Like all places, we take the tough with the easy here. I am learning not to run away from it all and to stay in one place. I’m learning there are no perfectly safe places, there are just places with people who are willing to act in ways that acknowledge the reality that what we do here in our place also impacts your place over there, and vice versa. We are imperfect people, but we are also trying our best, and whether we like it or not we’re all doing it together.
Wherever you are, may you find some small way to be present in your body, to connect with the people around you, to preserve the land where you live, and to find good music to dance to while you’re on it.
Reads and Listens I’ve Been Loving Lately
It’s been a long time since I did a round-up, but thought I would throw in today as I’ve been enjoying so much incredible work out there!!
I’m in the middle of reading a lot of non-fiction books and strangely it’s working, kind of like listening to podcasts, I can jump in and learn something, mull it over and digest or journal on it, then come back later.
Here is what’s in my Audible/on my bedside at the moment.
No Bad Parts by Dr. Richard Schwartz
The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck
The Baby Decision by Merle Bombardieri
Wild Power by Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer
So. Many. Newsletters! Here are a few for which I’ve become a paid subscriber lately and editions I’ve particularly loved:
I have this idea of starting a podcast where I just read, do the exercises and review books that fall under the genre of non-fiction/self-help/self-improvement genre and I will call this podcast “Self-Help Yourself” — please let me know if you would ever listen to such nonsense or if you would ever join me as a guest/co-reader, as I am halfway serious.
Speaking of podcasts:
This podcast from Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things about the Enneagram is pretty terrific and will likely result in multiple follow-up essays.
The BBC podcast, Witch, is absolutely incredible. It is both historical deep-dive on witchcraft and witches and also part practice and current culture. I devoured it in less than a week and learned so much. Here’s to helping to make magic mainstream. ✨
That’s all for this week. See you next time!
Love,
Kelly
The Tuscon story was interesting since my only knowledge of Tuscon is from the “Last Man On Earth” series. I was intrigued to learn more about Vijay. I wonder what his story is, why he goes out everyday to weed out the thrawny flora.
Btw here is an article I stumbled across today that will help you in your search for the perfect city: https://apple.news/AsazFN1BzQ9a88vPbZDSbXA
Loved the article, especially the Tuscan story about Vijay. What he does barefoot is impressive. I wonder what his story is, why he decided to clean up the thrawny flora. Btw, Here is an article I stumbled upon today and I thought will help you narrow down your search for the perfect city. https://apple.news/AsazFN1BzQ9a88vPbZDSbXA