Every Day in May
Week 4
This month I’m doing a little thing I’ve called Every Day in May, where I’m posting and writing a little something over in instgram. I’ll collect the week’s worth and stick them here as well. Since these posts will effectively be up and free for everyone on IG, I’m opening the weekly emails to all subscribers, and will be offering paid subscribers a few extra treats.
Thanks for being here.
A Reminder
Holding my program in mass today, I got a little overwhelmed.
There is a new moon this weekend, and every where you look there are people telling you what to say or do to maximize the energies and get in alignment with the planets.
The programs at mass are really helpful, especially if you’re new. They tell you when to stand and when to sit and what to say and what to sing.
But sometimes I get over saturated with all the prayers and spells that the professionals tell me to do. I can’t hear my own prayers in the static of all the other voices.
This is a reminder to myself and anyone else who might need it…
It’s okay to pray or to manifest or spellcast by just simply lighting a candle. Or sitting on the edge of your bed to sigh before you get all the way up. Or walking very slowly or very quickly or at whatever pace you want while looking down at the pavement. Or by cooking a meal. Or by weeding the garden. Or by dancing around the livng room. Or by soaking in a bath. Or by building a shelf. Or by having a cup of tea. Or anything, really.
It’s okay to not know all the right steps or words sometimes. It’s okay to let yourself be lead to a time of action or time of rest through your own inner pull. It’s okay to use words or not use words. You won’t miss anything if you’re paying attention to the gentleness within.
Rest Crisis Rodeo
Even though it’s Monday, it’s my day off. I’ve accomplished only one “productive” thing besides the physical necessities of washing and eating. No, two productive things. This second one reluctantly but gratefully since someone was helping me with something and needed to know what I needed.
Everytime I declare a day off (I don’t have typical 9-5 nor a relationship that requires the rhythm of the usual work week) there will be a point of crisis in my attempt to rest. I am in it as I write this now.
It comes like a trickle and then a waterfall and then a tsunami of guilt and anxiety and sadness about all the things I should be doing instead. No matter that I just worked 5 days in a row, ending in an 11 hour shift. No matter that I know I need rest. No matter that I know that everything on my to-do list is absolutely achievable in the coming days. No matter logic or reason.
I don’t have dreams that I remember very often. Once every few months at best. But last night I had a really nice dream and I woke up so curious about it. It’s been bouncing around in my mind’s eye all day. Don’t worry people who hate listening to other people’s dreams, I’m not going to describe it for you.
I believe dreams can be really important messengers that bring us information about some of what’s going on underneath our surfaces. They can be prophetic and literal, but I believe they are always symbolic. And symbolism doesn’t always translate very easily, so we have to apply nuance and association and gut feeling when we work with them.
The sense of peace and “home” that I felt in this dream was so clear and so strong, and right now as my rest day crisis is at its crescendo I can feel two things tugging at me simultaneously. One is that I have been specifically invited by certain parts of myself to accept an invitation to integration that will allow me to feel this sense of peaceful alignment in my waking life. Yay! Two is that I will never reach that fleeting feeling ever again and I am doomed to feel sad and alone and lost no matter what I do. Sob!
[writing paused for a snack and hunt for the cup of tea I made an hour ago that I left somewhere to steep and cool…]
Fortunately, today is not my first rest crisis rodeo, so I know that while both of these two seemingly opposite tugs are a little bit true and a little bit untrue, right now is not the time to split those hairs. Right now is the time to actually drink the tea I made an hour ago and forgot about, put on some music, and go paint my toenails the brightest tomato red I can find. Then, I will need to quite literally put my feet up and rest.
It Would Be Funny
It would be funny if it were only ironic in concept that the brightest parts of your life make the darkest parts even darker.
There is no end to knowledge or clarity, only about an exhale’s length of respite before the inhale of more questions rush in to fill the void. The Void of Knowledge. It would be funny if it were only ironic in concept.
The brighter it is, the more we seek the shade. We cover our eyes and our skin to protect them from attempting to absorb too much light too quickly. Too much of the very thing that initiates so much life is also the thing that can suck the life right out of us. It would be funny if it were only ironic in concept.
Movement changes the shapes, changes the levels, changes the ratios of light and dark. These things never stop moving. Like our breath, autonomic, it moves around us if we stay still, but we can also consciously move it around when we pay attention. It would be funny if it were only ironic in concept.
Though it can feel like total immersion in one side or the other, we’re always somewhere in the middle of it all. Perspective matters, but it’s not everything. We’re incapable of all of the sight lines, internal and external. It would be funny if it were only ironic in concept.
The tension between the wonder and the horror of Life is so intense most days right now, and swings wildly between the two. Amazing things are coming to light while terrible things are going on in the dark. And terrible things are happening in the light while amazing things happen in the dark. It would be funny if it were only ironic in concept.
It would be funny if it were only ironic in concept that we get to be the meeting place of these extremes.
Every Day in May - Wrong Coat Season
Spring is an in between season. It starts off cold because it touches up against winter, but it ends warm because by then it’s touching summer. The rules for what constitutes warm and cold here in Scotland are a little different, but the principle remains.
This is my 4th spring on this side of the Atlantic and I have yet to master being properly dressed for the in-between seasons. I usually end up going for the warmest and most wet-proof option because if caught out that’s where I’d be most uncomfortable. Just as often as I’m sufficiently warm and dry, I am insufficiently cold and wet. Here in the height of Wrong Coat season I spend a lot of time shedding layers or wishing I’d brought more.
It feels like Wrong Coat season existentially too. I’m wearing things from both the season I’ve outgrown and the season I’m growing into and nothing is comfortable anymore or yet. In the face of the unknown, I’m making choices that reflect the ways in which I think I’ll be the most prepared for the most uncomfortable of the possible conditions. Which means I usually just end up uncomfortable, trying to shed the excess or wishing I was better prepared.
✨Grace for the wrong coats in the right weather. ✨Grace for the right coats in the wrong weather.
✨ Grace for the adolescent awkwardness of the in-between seasons.
Notes App
I love notebooks and journals and the notes ap on my phone. I’m not the kind of scribe that writes in any of them with any kind of linearity. They’re all just full of scribbles and half sentences, grocery lists, dreams, a thought-path I wanted to find again, phrases I overhear from other people, and all kinds things I completely forget why or how they were interesting to me in the moment of capture. Sitting in a waiting room or a queue or a lunch break, I’ll scroll through them. Sometimes I use them as writing prompts. Here are a few, see what you can make of them…
1) Be right back unknown person
2) The stuff that holds it all together
3) Talk about the attractiveness- contextual??
4) What do your bones know?
5) Predict whether it will work: Enable an old behavior in a new way OR build a brand new behavior.
6) Viking chicken
7) The Tension and The Pop (french kissing ground cherries, aka golden berries)
8) Some pockets aren’t made for holding.
Warmest Day of the Year So Far
I had to get up early for an appointment first thing this morning, then I ran an errand and was back home by lunchtime. After lunch, I sat down at my desk and tried to make myself open up my laptop to work on one of the many tasks on my To-Do list, but I just couldn’t do it.
So I thought, “Okay, just ease yourself in. Let’s start with checking emails. You can do that on your phone, and open the laptop when you need to have multiple pages open.” Great! It’s working like a charm, I’m deleting, and responding as necessary…tap, tap, tap, until I get to one of the local what’s-happening-this-weekend updates and start clicking links and find that the oldest herbology shop is celebrating their 165th birthday with a pop-up event in a big fancy hotel on this very day! I clicked the link and registered for my free ticket with a 5pm entry time.
And that, my friends, was the nail in the Trying-to-Do-Some-Work-Today-Coffin. I texted a new friend to see if she was free to meet me at the Royal Botanical Gardens in an hour and she said, “Yes! I am also looking for every excuse to not sit in front of my laptop this afternoon!” So I gave two fingers to my laptop, packed a keep-cup full of raspberries, and set out for the Botanics.
After a few hours of chatting and walking and a cold drink in the warm sun, I went to the fancy hotel where a very handsome doorman opened the door for me and pointed me towards the room where I was handed a very sweet herb-chic-cottage-core tote bag with a discount code inside, a man made me a custom tea blend (marshmallow root, nettle, rosemary) to take home with instructions for proper brewing, and then I sampled and sniffed a bunch of face creams and tinctures before saying goodbye to the handsome doorman on my way out.
Drunk on sunshine, warm weather, and the power of my own freewill, I popped into a few nearby shops to poke around. Several weeks ago I saw a hat I liked but did not like the price of, so I tried to find it again to see if it was on sale. I did not find it, which is okay because I don’t need another ballcap anyway. Home again for tea. Yes, thank you, more please.
Around or Through
I just wrote a whole thing here but had to pop over to a different app for a few seconds never finishing and when I came back, it was gone. Honestly though, this illustrates my day as well as whatever else I’d written.
It was the kind of perfectly sunny and warm (the warmest yet!) day during the bank holiday weekend that is also the weekend closest to my birthday, so after a slow morning I felt some pressure to go out and make it A DAY! But all I could think to do was walk the mile out to the supermarket where I buy gluten free flour for half of what they charge for it in the shops closer in.
When I was still using map apps to get around, it would show me a path to the supermarket that went around the perimeter of an old cemetery even though going through the cemetery is both more direct and more interesting. Humans are so good at skirting around uncomfortable issues that we’ve even built it into our machines.
Around and Through are very different ways to experience something. It may seem like it doesn’t matter because you’ll end up in the same place either way, but if the journey is as important to you as the destination then you’ll not be fulfilled by going Around.
At the entrance, just inside the gate, there is a Little Free Library that usually has romance novels on the top shelf and crime dramas on the bottom shelf. One time, not long ago and to my delight, I opened the door to both shelves heaving with the David Sedaris oeuvre. Not only was it delightful to spend some time with an old book friend, it was exactly the kind of strangeness Sedaris himself would write an entire essay on while connecting it to something from his childhood and the strange neighbor he encounters every summer when he visits his beach house.
Transformation can’t happen when we go around. Change can happen though, and it can be easy to mistake one for the other. But change doesn’t guarantee a transformation, the only thing that guarantees a transformation is Through.
Maybe it feels too morose for social media, but going to sleep at the end of the day is a form of it, winter is a form of it, an exhale is a form of it. All day every day we’re moving through so many transformations. The blueprint is coded within us.
Fringe Cringe Fundraising
I’m doing a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and that means I’ll need to wave this cringy little fundraising flag for the next several months. Since the beginning of time, creatives and artists of all types have been waving similar flags within their communities. If you know any cash-solvent patrons looking for creatives to support with loads of money and resource and connections, I’d be happy to bother them instead of you.
https://www.paypal.me/baerjenna
https://wise.com/pay/me/jenniferlaurenb
Every day (except Mondays) from 8 August to 30 August at 3:45pm I’ll be performing a show at a venue called The Outhouse. I’m pretty sure this is where they put new performers when they’re willing to give them a shot but still think they’ll probably stink.
The title of my show is The Spider Witches of Appalachia, and it’ll be listed as theatre but delivered mostly in a traditional oral storytelling style due to the fact that the venue is a bar that is willing to set up the barest black box style theatre situation in one corner (this is every Fringe venue unless you’re already famous and can fill an actual theatre).
The story is about five generations of women in my family, and it explores the ways we pass things to and through each other and what happens to those transmissions when connections are broken or fragmented.
My biggest costs now will be for advertising and printing because I am solely responsible for gathering all of my own audiences for 20 performances. Fringe flyers and posters are already starting to go up around the city, just a few here and there for the big names with big agencies and big budgets and big ticket prices. This is not quite the echelon I’m working in yet, so it’ll be up to me to start plastering my own face on any available square inch of city I can find. Then, in August, I’ll be out on the streets with the other thousands of artists, and/or the folks they hire to do the flyering, handing out flyers to anyone who will take them, trying to convince folks to go off the beaten path up to my little venue to hear my little story.
So here I am, posting the QR codes and links to Paypal and Venmo and Wise, and hoping you’ll help me print my flyers.
Isn’t this so insane?! Thank you for being here. I love you.
Uncanny how we (meaning lots of us fellow humans) link up with each other—#17 is How. I. Feel.
And ooh, what an extra moody spring it’s been back here in Appalachia! 🧥👙🌪️☀️