Hello beautiful human,
This week I’m filled with gratitude. Deep thanks to Janine De Tillio Cammarata 🖊️ who nominated me for this lovely, lovely award! In her nomination she recognizes me and her other nominees as writers “who bring joy and positive energy into the world despite life’s adversities or perhaps because of them.”
I’m deeply honored. Janine herself is a wonderful writer who holds a space here on Substack for nurturing our journaling practices and creativity. As she writes, “There’s a need for connection and curiosity in an open-hearted space. A desire to be more intentional and clearer on what moves us and to be in community with kind and compassionate people.”
You can find Janine’s beautiful, heart-full and generous writings at her Substack, Pathways of Connection, where she offers support for our journal practices, our grief, our meditations, and our dreams.
My connection to Janine is a perfect example of one of the primary benefits of being on the Substack platform - the meeting of true minds and hearts across distance through nothing more than our words and practices. These wonderful web-like networks we weave together, connections between like-minded and like-hearted individuals as we discover and create ways to support each other…this is how we grow resiliency and joy.
Welcome, Reader. I welcome new subscribers at any level. If you aren’t ready to pay for a subscription, but you feel gratitude for this post and want to support me, you can Buy Me a Coffee (and leave a note! I love reading what people share! I try to respond to everyone).
In a lovely, grassroots fashion, nominated writers go on to nominate other writers for the Sunshine Blogger Award who they consider to be creative, positive and inspirational. Here are the Sunshine Blogger Award Rules:
Display the awards’ official logo somewhere on your blog.
Thank the person who nominated you.
Provide a link to your nominator’s blog.
Answer your nominator’s questions.
Nominate up to 11 bloggers.
Here are my answers to Janine’s questions:
What do you write about?
After taking time to consider this over a number of days, I can’t say that I write “about” anything in this Space. I have the same difficulty when people ask me “what kind of poems” I write. My practice from the start here at Substack has been to attempt to use words to create opportunity for a spaciousness to grow within the reader (and myself). Or put it another way: I try to listen for stories that arise out of my own ordinary days, and interweave them with questions and invitations that hopefully open new doors and horizons for our imaginations.
I do this through my Reflections essays and the occasional foray into the Imaginary Bookshop. Lifting away from the page and screen, I also offer, for my Circle Members, audio recordings of guided meditations from my Words from the Weavery series and an opportunity to gather on Wednesdays for listening circles where we practice listening to each other and ourselves with time to reflect and create as well as share.
Words for me are the gateway to connection across time and distance, and growing real-time opportunities for writers, artists, dreamers, doodlers and other like-hearted folk to gather online or in real spaces is a natural adjacent offering.
Why?
I started this project a year and a half ago, when I was coming out of the grief and devastation of a divorce. After an extended period of wordlessness (terrifying for a poet and writer!), I invited myself to creep back to the waiting pages in February 2024. From the very start, I knew I wanted to find a way to slow down, pause, and invite quiet and spaciousness away from the noise…and I thought maybe others might find some benefit too.
At first there was windy silence, and I wrote only a few lines each day. Some days it was no more than, “Let’s try to breathe today, shall we?” Over time, the Space grew and shifted. And it continues to shift and evolve in ways that intrigue and excite me. I guess my “why” is - writing grounds me, answers me, questions me, and helps me mark my path when there are no maps.
What’s something you believe deeply, even if it’s unpopular?
I believe we can only heal the world—human and more-than-human—when we heal ourselves. By facing and accepting our own shadows, hungers, lacks and weaknesses, we become more able to walk in peace and right relationship with the world. We become able to fight injustice from a grounded and secure footing, rather than mere reaction, outrage and anger.
Gods and wights and all the good green earth, this is hard though, isn’t it. Doing the work to face our own shadowy, uncomfortable places is a lifelong commitment and not very much fun. The predominant culture is deeply out of tune and has been, for generation upon generation. There’s so much pain and fear running amok at every level. We have to listen for and to things and thoughts that we may not want to hear. I believe we have a responsibility to walk our paths in peace to the best of our ability, a peace earned not because we bypass pain and difficulty but because we ground ourselves first… and we’re called to continue to find courage to do what we must to grow that inner peace, starting wherever we are.
That was a lot. It’s where I am at the moment.
What do you long for right now?
A sense of safety for all. How can we learn to see the divine, the deeply sacred, that lives in each of us, across identity and difference, across class, race, gender, abilities and divergences of all sorts?
What would it feel like if we all put the welfare of the most vulnerable at the very center of our actions and intentions?
What’s a small ritual that keeps you grounded?
I am a committed coffee drinker, but just this year I made a switch and decided to start each morning with a cup of mindfully brewed tea. I might not do this “every” morning but most days I drink this first warm cup in the stillness of a quiet house, unmoving, simply tasting, enjoying, being present. It has helped me redefine my relationship to time.
When do you feel most alive?
So many possible answers! A few that come to mind… When I am engaged in writing and revising a poem…When I am in deep conversation with another person…When I walk through my wildish backyard and notice the diversity of what’s growing and thriving…When I’m on a road trip with someone I love, experiencing the unfolding landscape as we make our way wherever we happen to be going…
What’s a truth that you’re still learning to live with?
I have had to face some hard truths about my marriage and the years I spent (more than twenty!) in that relationship. I look at my amazing kids—my favorite people on the planet—and I can’t regret a single minute. And…I have to hold that celebration at the same time as I gaze with clear(er) eyes at my own choices and the relationship and situations that formed the grounding of most of my adult life.
What do you want to be remembered for?
Oh goodness. A writer can’t help hoping something that she’s written over all the years and pages will stand the test of time and live beyond her in some meaningful way she can hardly imagine. That may seem foolish, shallow, misguided. I’m very human.
Beyond that, I hope I make people feel safe in my presence, and whether I’m remembered or not, I hope that whatever sense of safety they hopefully feel with me can then ripple out and impact others. I long for a time when we can all be safe…to be fully ourselves, messy and glorious, diverse and brilliantly, differently abled all at once, and if I can contribute to that I feel I will not have wasted my time on this planet.
Who are you when you’re not creating or working?
I feel like my entire life is an ongoing dance with creation…but maybe I could write “I’m a listener. I drive an Odyssey so I can haul people, or plants, or furniture. And I’m a pretty good cook.”
What was your favorite hobby as a child? What is your favorite hobby now?
I have never really understood the word “hobby.” What does it mean? Something we do that doesn’t make money? Very little I love, very little I’ve done, has ever put a dime in my pocket but to call writing, uplifting other writers, cooking good food, reading, engaging with the world from a thoughtful place, growing my tomatoes and flowers…are these hobbies? Or is this just…a life?
What is the most exotic place you’ve ever traveled to?
When I was four years old my preschool class walked, two by two, across the street to a local park. There wasn’t much for a playground in those long ago years, but I wasn’t much of a playground kid. The teachers talked amongst themselves while keeping a relaxed eye on my running, climbing, squealing classmates. Meanwhile, I was sitting in a shady spot on the grass. Alone but not lonely, I began to look more and more closely, peering down into the green blades, the clover, dandelions, and other weedy broadleafs, the insect life crawling among that tiny scape…I briefly lost myself…and perhaps I’ve never quite come back.
When it was time to line up and go back to class, I tried to tell my teachers about my experience, but at four, language escaped me to convey the immensity of that minsicule encounter. Two by two we must have walked back and returned to the classrooms in the basement of the Methodist church. I have no memory of the rest of that day.
And at four, I could not understand in the slightest what had happened to me or that I would be remembering and writing about it fifty years later.
So what makes a place exotic? Who determines that designation? Everywhere on the planet is someone’s home, and ordinary to them. If you lean down close enough, a roadside ditch gets exotic pretty quickly. For me, a grassy spot in a park in a small Iowa town changed my life and set me on a path of quiet observation to attend to the small (nothing’s small!) wildernesses around and within each of us.
What is a place you hope to travel to?
At this point, my focus is on finding ways to spend as much time as possible with the people I love, wherever they are. Location is secondary to the adventures of love and relationship possible between all of us, anywhere, at any moment, if we only attend.
If you could have a conversation with anyone—alive or dead—who would it be?
I’d like to go back in time and find the people no one knows about—the quiet ones who noticed the jeweled world they lived in, who imagined big things and folded those imaginings into the love they poured into the people around them, small as those efforts might have seemed at the time. The ones who taught their children to pay attention, to be kind, to celebrate good times. The ones who made time for friends in trouble. The ones brave enough to leave a bad situation or learn a better way even as they stumbled. I want to go back and tell them, “It wasn’t wasted. It mattered. It made a difference to the planet beyond what you can know.” And since I can’t go back in time, I look for the people doing that work now and try to share the same message.
Who is your favorite musician?
A short list this particular morning would have to include The Indigo Girls, Hozier, Bonnie Raitt, Brandi Carlisle, YoYo Ma, Bobby McFerrin, Trevor Stephenson, PDQ Bach, Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington, Greg Brown, Freddy Mercury, Tina Turner, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, George Gershwin, whose ghost fingers I once listened to as they played across a player piano…
But all of these are musicians I listen to as the mood strikes me, occasionally, and perhaps none of them rate a word like “favorite.” That word might be reserved for the cicadas of summer, the crickets of September, and the cardinals of early February.
What is your favorite movie?
There are a few perfect movies I revisit regularly: The Princess Bride, Practical Magic, and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. I also love Man on Wire, a movie about Philippe Petit who wire-walked across the Twin Towers. And Disney’s Fantasia movies have a special place in my heart.
Who is your favorite writer?
How could I ever answer that in a hundred years? Thank you for ending on a truly impossible question.
THESE ARE THE HEART-FULL, BRAVE CREATIVES WRITING ON SUBSTACK WHO I NOMINATE FOR THE SUNSHINE BLOGGERS AWARD
I’m nominating the creative powerhouses I’ve connected with on Substack that have fueled my own creative practices over the past months by sharing theirs so generously:
Lisa Bolin 🌸 : Flucking Flourishing
Sarah Teresa Cook : For the Birds
Hanna Keiner (she/her) : Purposeful Connection
Monique Mulligan: A Life (Extra) Ordinary
AND ALSO
Robin Taylor (he/him): TransFriend
Robin Cangie (she/her): Creative Letters
because their work at SmallStack and in their own substack writings has made space for so many of us and encouraged us, small as we are (nothing’s small!) to know and believe in the value of what we do.
Gratitude to all of these writers, and to the readers who dance with us.
xo
S
I believe our world needs new stories. what if those stories lie curled within us like seeds? This is An Inviting Space to experience where and how we might discover, recover and nurture the secret, magical gardens of soul day by day. Starting where we are, as we are.
I feel this week like the good goodies spilled out all over the place up above, linking to so many fabulous writers and their projects! Here’s a few things I want to shout out about…
Here’s where you can find me in the months coming up:
Around here, I’m in the Circle a couple of times a week through August. On Mondays, an recorded audio invitation to the Weavery for a start-of-the-week meditation. On Wednesdays, we gather via zoom at the Well to strengthen our creative practices in community. Join the Circle here. There’s more to come!
Coming up on August 24…
…and if that five-minute taste online in August isn’t enough, you can experience it real time in Missouri October 3-5, I’ll be presenting that “playshop” experience with the wonderful Elizabeth Shepley at TLAN’s conference, The Power of Words.
November 13 The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets is hosting my online workshop, “Three Questions and a Poem,” a workshop designed to generate new material and new approaches to listening, for poets and non-poets alike.
Plans are in the works for online writing and community-growing opportunities this fall for my Circle peeps… the annual price is set low through Leo season, which means you have a few more days to take advantage of a good deal when you join the Circle! Good things are coming…
Your support is welcome, and your attention and time are true gifts. Thank you.
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