Welcome to Modern Mammal-ing!
This weekly newsletter is for YOU—my highly sensing, deep feeler, fellow human mammal living in the modern era. That’s a mouthful because the world is a mouthful these days. Expanding. Crumbling. Changing faster than we can blink. So, how do we live well amidst it all? If you are wondering too, pull up a chair (or lounge on the grass).
I once cracked myself up by creating a hashtag I couldn’t ever use due to my breakup with social media: #mammalingwhilemodern. I wanted to know: how the hell do we mammal (yes, it’s a verb) while living in this fast-paced time of high volume digital information, over-saturation, distraction, ill-health and general crush? As in, c’mon! Are we all accepting this? Am I really supposed to grow my capacity to tolerate the new normal? Can I preserve my attention, and be here instead of disassociated and avoiding and de-sensitized? Is it possible to stay connected with myself, my animal body, the people and our earth? How do we live as opted-in members of current society and still create a sustainable life for ourselves and others. What are we to do?
I am living these questions actively and daily.
My intention is to write into these raw questions and create a space where, together, we boldly approach a wall of closed windows and begin to open them. Side by side. Hand in hand. Community is the way to freedom. Crowd-sourcing fosters a steady and healthy ecosystem. The comment section is for you! Bring yourself to it if you like.
I believe we are all the medicine for this moment. That may be melodramatic and wildly exciting and a bit devastating. Even so, do you smell the opportunity? I want to listen within and with one ear to the ground. In this newsletter, I abandon the soundbite culture and explore the messy. Real-deal, straight talk. Unapologetically mystical and here for the mystery of it all. Playful too. My lens will be what I know best: story + nervous system.
Years ago, one starlit night, my mother and I burned my grandmother’s old chair in a bonfire—to my amazement, these gorgeous metal springs emerged from the coals. Look how sturdy! Animated. Alive. They now hang on my wall, interlocked in a dance, a reminder of well-made functional art and the profound and possible transformation available to all of us. We grow up and down spirals. We take many shapes. We are change-able. “We” meaning individuals and communities and humanity. Evolution is decidedly not a lone wolf path. It can’t be. We are designed to be social animals.
What’s the rhythm?
Right-pace is my motto. That doesn’t mean even-keeled; instead, I’m tracking and adjusting as desired. *I’ve been writing my newsletter since 2019 and many readers asked for an archive so I’ve created this home. I won’t bring all my old material over here (because I don’t really believe in back-tracking or “catching-up” and why add more noise?), but it’s good for you all to know that this newsletter is riding in the wide wake of the old one.
As of February 2025, I have brought Prompt Cycles back into the mix!
For Free Subscribers:
2-4 Personal Essays per month. Long or short. Related to the overlap between what I’m earnestly chewing on in my own life and what seems alive in the zeitgeist around the tensions and possibility of modernity. I will share my own artistry (words, paint, stacks of laundry, any medium). Weird and wily and raw. Devoted to story as fluid. Tracking my own nervous system and sharing my finds.
The Wondering (and Wandering Column): I answer a question from one of you. These are longer and I take them seriously and approach with a lot of care.
For Paid Subscribers: All of the above + …
Prompt of The Month: On the 1st of every month, I release a juicy prompt. It’s an invitation to notice, play, self-reckon and engage with your most golden resource: your attention. The prompt will be simple. It will involve your nervous system and your beliefs about who you think you are as an individual and in community. As a crew, we all spend that 24 hours with the prompt. Anyone can do almost anything for one day. Titration is everything. Bite-size is how our mammal body actually lays down and integrates new sustainable patterns. You can share and report back in the comments. We learn from each other! I will also scale the prompt so you can further explore the theme for the rest of the month.
Prompt Cycle 4x a Year: Let’s do this. Around the Equinox (spring and fall) and the Solstice (summer and winter), I will lob out a seven-day exploratory prompt cycle centered on being a modern mammal during that particular time of year. Why seven days? It’s do-able. It’s contained. People tend to fall off month-long prompt cycles. Most importantly, it’s a circaseptan rhythm—one observed in many different species, a biological rhythm of rest on the seventh day as essential. Many religions have made a practice of it and it’s innate in living organisms, even in bacteria, a repeated phenomenon. Basically, we need a pause day. Need. Need. Need! 100 languages have a word for Rest Day. The ancients all over the globe found that music also builds on the number seven. Let’s lean into SEVEN and see what happens. As with any prompt experience, doing so in a group amplifies the learning and builds a culture to support new neural pathways in the individual and the community. Misson: bring your people.
You also get some discounts on workshops, retreats, etc.
What might I cover in Modern Mammaling? Art-making, the body (my fave), re-negotiating relationships, existing with tech, parenting, coupling, health (mental, physical, physiological and psycho-spiritual), anything animist, anything unseen, mysticism, climate realities, daily rhythms, old ways intersecting with new ways, a life beyond burnout, creative practice, Nature, being in community, being a responsible global citizen in a world needing to find new ways for everyone, dismantling stuck patterns and anything that moves me or feels alive for me and alive in the communal and global water. Provocative and with the focus being useful to you and supporting everyone’s individual and collective orientation to this unprecedented era.
If you can, thank you for paying: $5/month is one latte or tea or two chocolate bars or 1.5 subway rides. Creativity is undervalued by our capitalist system. Paying for art is essential, especially if we want a vibrant and functional world. It also helps support me in supporting you. Boom!
Here I am with the two humans who keep me going and growing. So much growing. Textured and tactile. Just how I want to live life.
Also, mammaling is a gerund. Mammal-ing. It’s a verb in action. We are living it as we go. It doesn’t end. It isn’t tidy. But it sure is interesting.
If you don’t know my work, you can read more about the why and how and who of it. Do you know someone who might dig these topics and exploration? Loop them in. We grow in community. Thank you!
Backward, forward, upward, downward and inward,
