UPDATE: Meeting This Moment + A Few Changes

I have been writing and re-writing this note for days. Walking and talking into my phone. Bringing it to the page. Even biting my nails. Somersaulting over my own words. Wrestling them down. Erasing them. Wanting less of them. Interesting because “fewer words” is exactly what I came here to say to you. In plain speak. Every night as I fall asleep: 1) I review the day and remember through embodied visualization the moments where I did something differently in the direction I desire (that process helps along that new neural pathway), and 2) I ask myself, “What am I doing and why? What are we (all of us) doing and why?” The latter is an existential question to keep me paying attention. Essentially: how am I showing up for this world, what am I not seeing, what are my blind spots? It isn’t always comfortable, but I’d rather be jangled up than sitting in a stagnant pond.

This is going to be short. I hope.

Modern Mammaling will retain its form of The Question of The Month, but how I deliver it is changing. Each post will be a hybrid poem: orated while walking + brought to the page and massaged. Many of you wrote to me about the last poem I shared. It hit a chord. Making it struck something inside me too. For years, I’ve had a hunch that I’ll age into an old woman whose artistic medium changes. I am listening deeply to what wants to be contributed through me. I’m growing tired of lengthy ruminations; I’m increasingly less interested in cognition or intellectual hot takes on anything, especially from myself, especially from someone with my degree of privilege and safety and whiteness unless that Elephant is named and examined; instead, I want to sit squarely in whatever the world brings and stay in my body while I feel it—alongside others near me, in solidarity with others I will never meet in the flesh—and then to engage with my hands, my art, with my leaning forward. Many of us have been schooled to float in the cloud of ideas. Not anymore. Not for me, at least. That doesn’t mean I don’t read deeply or in long-form. That doesn’t mean I don’t value that kind of work from other crucial voices right now. It just means it isn’t my work to do.

Why the hybrid poems?

The modern world is over-saturated. Inboxes are gurgling and bloated; people are drowning in information; there are so many books to read, podcasts to listen to, Substacks to follow, people to learn, news articles to sift through… I know you feel it as a consumer. I want to distinguish, though, between ‘everyday’ information and the kind of information spreading that, as we are seeing, could ripple out word about what is actually happening on the ground: recently, Motaz, Bisan. I can’t argue against any information! We need it. We need that wide-berth access to receiving and sharing of info yet the volume of the collective flow in the last 10 years has been, well, too much for our human bodies. Truly. Few ever admit it, but that too-muchness, even if it comes in the benign form of a stack of 14 amazing novels you want to read, locks a person into stress physiology all of the time. There is the rub. The eternal both/and. I don’t want to contribute to anyone’s stress physiology anywhere. I don’t want to be another long thing coming into your inbox that you don’t have time to read but wish you did but oh well it’s on top of 5,000 other things and it’s all too much and what about this and that and how do we solve the state of this world. That run-on sentence is how most people experience life right now. I’ve already established why I want to be moving more, sitting less. As a writer/maker/teacher, I don’t want to lure or claim or colonize or even innocently attract your attention. What I want—from the deepest well of my heart—is for each person to be exquisitely attuned to their own attention and to seek out the voices of those who’ve been silenced. So that we can all be the stewards of this era, these revolutions, this particular moment in time to which we were all born. We are here. Let’s be here.

I’ve said a lot about what I don’t want to do.

So, what DO I want to do?

I want to be useful.

I can’t not make. I can’t stop. It’s how I process and connect and show up.

But how? I want to drop inspiration seeds into your inboxes. Ones you might take into your own tactile communities with the people whose body language you can read. Because anything that is good and lasting is relational. I want to free your eyes from the screen for a few more minutes. You might be sitting on the bus on the way to work and see an email from me. It’s a poem with a question folded inside it. It’s short. It’s my words but it’s really about you. You read it for 2 minutes and then, because it’s not on social media and you aren’t scrolling, you look up. You catch the eye of the strange sitting across from you. Maybe you smile. Maybe you don’t. Because your eyes are already up, you cast about and notice it’s snowing outside, you can smell the heat of people’s bodies as the metallic cold of the bus takes you through space and you start to wonder about that thing your brother said and suddenly you are drawn back IN to your lived humanity, not away from it, and therefore, you are more likely to feel back into the humanity of others far away. More tomorrow (in a hybrid poem) on what feels like a new modern dance of moving between there and here at the same time.

I want art for you and for me.

I will also always be facilitating and creating space for group work. That is my vocation and the way I show up best in this world.

P.S. I’m not a poet in the sense of how some people call themselves Poet. I’m a writer of metaphor who loves how words rub together. I want to awaken my own lineage of Irish bards, the ones who carried a “vein of poetry” and orated as they traveled about, the mysterious ones, much like whales who are the record-keepers.

For paid subscribers, thank you for diving deeper with me. You have said Yes to being here in that way and therefore it feels more like a conversation and less like I’m speaking to thousands who may or may not be interested, you know? On the Vlog, I will share with you the details of my personal journey with The Question of The Month. Not because my details are special but because story open us and my details might invite you into your own details in a new way. Much like reading a memoir. When I meet a reader of one of my books, they often say they feel like they know me and know themselves better from having traveled the story. Sort of like that.

Smoother for me; smoother for you.

These changes will be reflected later this week in the About section, etc. It’s important to note that all of this shifting emerged from my walking, do-nothing moments and listening in conversation. It had nothing to do with spreadsheets, intention setting, scrolling or active thinking. A good continual reminder for me to take it (anything at all) three places: on a solo walk, to The Great Unseen and into the relational field.

Okay, that might be longest write I do in a long long time.

Love,