Are You Feeling Supported?

Why I've Been Gone, What is Next + The Circaseptan Rhythm

Dear Everyone,

I’m back. I took a break over the New Year and then facilitated a retreat in California minutes before the United States entered a portal of extreme destabilization; like many of you, I felt like a baby bird swamped by a large ocean wave. I didn’t want to add to the noise. I didn’t want to insert my voice. I wanted to listen and watch and learn and tend and localize. Behind the scenes, influenza A visited us and I began to restructure my Substack offering to meet this moment and prepared to launch my long-planned course on Attention and then, after a two year tumble with pancreatic cancer, my beloved sister-in-law rapidly declined and died three days ago. Now I’m writing to you from my brother’s house in Texas where we have gathered to grieve and take care, care, care, and facilitate the cousins doing the supportive weaving of play. I thought I would abandon all work things; I have mostly, but felt called into writing here, to beginning anew.

Art I saw last month: Filippa Edgnill on my friend Jen’s studio wall, retreat loves creating, cloudscape over the Pacific, Amy Sherald’s “American Sublime” exhibit at the SFMOMA, my friend Jen Bloomer’s calendar art

Creatively Rooted

, and Mary Cassatt’s sketch of two girls plotting, sharing, visioning together

Maybe we will all look back on 2025 and say it was the year we stopped greeting each other with the bland and almost meaningless, “How are you?” and instead began using the only decent question for this era when we encounter a fellow human:

Are you feeling supported?

That might be all that matters. One of my mentors shared with me and a friend that perhaps the only thing to say to children or each other is that we DO NOT KNOW that everything is going to be okay, it actually might not be, and still we will be here for each other, we will stand alongside each other, we will walk it together.

No sugar coating. No pretending. Visioning still. Collabs still.

I have new clarity about the what and how of Modern Mammaling.

Same focus while igniting more inquiries and experiments around attention, a topic that has been my obsession and has now slipped through the birth canal in the zeitgeist, thank goodness.

Welcome back Prompt Cycles! If you’ve followed me for years, remember those?Thousands of you LOVED them. This time: 4x a year, Seven Days Long. There’s a rhyme and reason to that rhythm. Plus a Prompt of the Month.

I have realized that, for paid subscribers, I can offer the most value with a prompt cycle, an experience, an opportunity, as opposed to more thoughts and ideas. The first Prompt of The Month (March 1st) will be for everyone so that you can get a taste. Then our first prompt cycle happens March 18-24 over the spring equinox. Not sure the exact theme yet but it will be GOOD. Read more below about circaseptan rhythms and how rad they are and why we biologically need them in our lives.

Process in a group is medicine.

Here’s our new shared Modern Mammaling WAY.

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 collective air 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 every seven days. 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.

  Are you prompt-curious? Upgrade here and join us.

That’s it for now. Back to presence where I am: fielding questions from the girls and my niece about bubbles in the backyard, deep cleaning out the fridge and pantry, sorting unopened mail, and listening and crying and laughing and being WITH.

Love In the Time of ___________, (fill in the blank).