Hello from the Clearing

Hello again, from a pause.

Since November, I’ve been reorienting myself and my writing after transitioning into a new position with a lovely, local non-profit. The position is meaningful and wonderful and part-time, but adding it has required adjustment as everything has felt overflowing. I’m gently pruning and finally I’ve reached enough of a clearing for my writing to feel the sun.

After the landscape of my garden shifted so drastically, I needed to take a little more time to taste to see what I needed from my writing in order for it to still feel nourishing to me.

And I think I’m sensing into it now.

Every day I am drawn to that which connects me to the world around me. Even as I type this, I am staring out the window into a thousand shades of green and yellow and brown of the forest and spring grass outside this wall. I share an instinct with others that there are more answers in those thousands of shades of greens than anything AI can provide us because we are of these colors and scents and minerals and matter. We share the same beauty and magic of being alive and together.

I am drawn to this through writing. I’ve also been drawn to it lately through painting. Everything feels like a prayer of connection to this world, and the art that results, an invitation for others to join.

I know that this is a deepening into what Sirens Rising has always been about. As we finished the writing retreat on this beautiful land in November, what stuck with me most was how much more deeply we can connect to ourselves and to each other while we are also in meaningful conversation with the natural world around us.

And the connection to ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world–this is the foundation of the healing of our world, of finding direction when everything can feel lost.

So of course I’m drawn to it now, more than ever before. And so I’m making room for those seedlings here in this garden.

This garden is just as much for me as it is for you. I hope you benefit as much as it fills me to tend.