Two Fridays ago, my mother in law, Stephanie Patricia Almskaar, Penny to some, GaGa to her grandchildren, died or “passed” as my husband keeps saying (which is also irritating me because I don’t want euphemisms)!!! She’s dead. She’s dead. She is dead.

And I am so sad. I am so exhausted. and I am angry.

I’ve lived next door to her on the ten acres she’s tended for over 50 years, for the past eight years. We ate dinner together most nights of the week. She loved horses, animals, her dogs Ping & Coco (who both died in the past few months), her family, her friends, rural life, peace and justice. She studied astrology and Ayurveda for many years.

It’s tough to begin such an intimate relationship while also watching her diminish to Parkinson’s and dementia. We were able to have her at home until this past March. The burden of caregiving, while also shared with part time paid caregivers over the past two years, has been exhausting, and yet, like any person you love and take care of, the burden is simply part of the experience- and thus, the absence now is striking me harder than I could have imagined.

After my friend left today yet another splitting headache overcame me where just the sounds of my children’s voices is too much.

We came outside. I hung laundry on the line. I scrubbed the wading the pool and then refilled it. The children scampered to the garden to pick peas. I checked my email and saw three notifications for the meal train our church as set up and felt a little weight off my shoulders.

Amidst the grief and the kindnesses, still there is a longing and a hunger for something that I don’t know what it is. And then there is this terrible guilt of all the ways I haven’t shown up -my brain is the type that unfortunately can’t let go certain things like the families I know with new babies with meal trains I still didn’t make anything for. The young people I know who just graduated or made a big move and I meant to send a card or a housewarming gift.

And yet …. These ages of 2 and 5 feel nearly impossible for me… THEIR NEEDS SO PRESSING EVERY DAY ALL DAY. As soon as the baby turned 2 end of April, he weaned, dropped his nap, and we potty trained. They still just want so much from me and only me. I continue to be both completely over touched as the days of an independent sleeper are now co-sleeping and waking me several times a night - to severely under-touched in any meaningful consensual adult kind of way. I long for the grounded presence of long time friends, fellow mothers, family on a daily basis and yet it’s once a week IF I’m lucky. As someone in my babywearing/parent group on FB commented “The people you expect to show up won’t and the ones you least expect, will.” And while that’s not been exactly true there is truth in it. Which brings more grief about the lack of family/community support or even just a text message that says “thinking of you” beyond a brief & initial flurry. A text or call of “I can come out and help go through her house” (Which my friend who came today has helped me with so much but she’s also a busy Mom with no local family support like me). Which is why I’m thankful to the fledging community of my church BUT IT’S NO SUBSTITUTE FOR HISTORY or long term relationships.

This afternoon I wandered the yard with the children and picked flowers since no one brought us flowers after Stephanie died, and for some reason I expected them. And I wanted to arrange them alone, get back to the memory of first farming and how we’d make bouquets every Friday afternoon for the Saturday market. And yet my children wanted to help of course so we did it together and my 5 year old daughter said “I just love you Mom.” People truly are missing out on my kids.

I thought of Lilacs brought from a friend postpartum. I thought of all the things I haven’t done and all the ways the culture at large prevents us from showing up. And yet is it really an excuse?

My therapist of three years says part of my gift is systems/picture thinking but when you reach out to people you think are your people saying “hey? I haven’t heard from you? Is this what grief support looks like? I am not ok!!!” and get very little back it sure doesn’t feel like a gift to “know” how numbed out and grief illiterate our culture is/this is yet another facet of white supremacy/settler colonialism…. when all you wanted was some consistent communication…. and then as the story goes I AM ONCE AGAIN MADE TO FEEL OUT OF LINE b/c no one likes an angry woman.

It feels so similar to early postpartum….

The loss, the lack of spatial awareness, sleep disruptions, discomfort, the physical pains, so much administrative work to take care of amidst adjusting to this new reality, the tenderness, the lack of boundaries, the raw edges of the broken open heart - the looking around for someone somewhere ANYONE WHO GETS WHAT THE FUCKING PORTAL WE JUST WENT THROUGH to bear witness…. to be there…. For some wise old person to visit every day and affirm for you YES (for me it’s my therapist of 3 years last Monday morning affirming me because who else is there to do it)? And the grief and rage that this is how it is.

Today my husband Carsten picked up his Mother. Her ashes are in this canvas bag inside some vessel. I don’t know what to do next. He likes my idea of an ancestral shelf.

We need to do something soon.

I don’t know how to proceed other than proceeding while not knowing how to

Always this with that / the food $$ from a beloved high school friend / an unexpected perfect time call/ the reception and kindness of relative strangers post my speech at church

Seeing my mother in law in my children every single day. The altar of crystals my daughter keeps expanding on, all procured from her GaGa’s impressive crystal collection downstairs.

Giving thanks to these beautiful Lilies in the bouquet we made today that Stephanie planted years ago. The web of connection between all things in all ways. Trying to make a little meaning /bear my own witness by writing this on my phone while the children interrupted me and a cold wind blows the browned pink Dogwood leaves off the tree. And now I am so hungry and it’s dinner time.

"small things matter most.”

I cannot find her book of poems right now, because uh… children and open book shelves at toddler height, but the power of that sentiment is with me now.

(If you’re unfamiliar with her work here’s a good poem to begin with, Burning the Old Year).

This past Saturday I attended a party and it was held at a local park by a lake we frequent in the summer. My daughter has to go in water whenever she sees it- puddles, ponds, creeks, rivers, lakes - no matter the season. Her whole presence took on a different state of being as she knelt by the edge of the water in a kind of playful reverence. Her approach itself was akin to courtship- she didn’t just immediately jump in- she knelt by the edge, touched the water to see how cold it was, threw some rocks in. Then she put a toe in while still in her shoes. I told her she was welcome to take her shoes off and that I had a change of clothes for her (of course). Too late, both shoed feet were in and then I fussed at her and she skipped over… already lost in the pleasure of being with the lake. I took her shoes and socks off. She gingerly made her way across the rocky beach back to the lake edge. She put her toes in, then both feet, and next I knew she was in up to her knees; then spread her arms out and began to sing a song I could not catch the lyrics of, but a song I knew she was making up there on the spot, as she sings to herself all of the time. What a powerful thing to witness for me as her Mother, my only daughter- singing a song to the lake, completely un-self conscious as only certain people are allowed to be, in such a state of joy in her body and union with this cold body of water that I wish all people could experience all of the time.

She turned to me at one point as if jolted by a thought and said something akin to…

"This my place! This is my home! I’m from here. I know this water. I know this place! This water knows me!”

I nodded and said "Yes, you were born in Bellingham. You’re made of this land and these waters. I swam in this lake when I was pregnant with you growing inside me. We brought you here when you were just a baby. I can’t wait til summer when it’s warm again and we’ll get to swim together like we did last summer!”

And she smiled, nodded and went back to singing to Lake Whatcom.

P.S. some notes on writing and money

I’ve hemmed and hawed over the past few months about dissolving this writing project. Instead I’m going to honor my capacity and write what I want when I can. I turned off paid subscriptions for a while because I felt guilty for taking money from people when I am not producing consistently. This blog made me $534 last year after Stripe takes its processing fees. Hiring a writer on a freelance site costs around $35 an hour. Often I write anywhere from 10-20 hours a month, and by writing I also mean reading, researching, vetting sources, choosing images when I need too etc. When you do the math then, if I were to try to assign a monetary value for the care and effort I put into this space my take home pay ought to be closer to $8,400 a year; wouldn’t that be nice? It is hard to keep going sometimes without witness from the other side of the screen. Writing by definition is a solitary project. Thus all of your comments, your likes, and your emails mean a lot. But sometimes I’m left to wonder are writers only valued if they can produce neat enraging/witty/or inspiring content on a weekly basis?

There are a lot of good writers on here and I support several of them financially. Being paid for creative work is reassuring as it’s also a way to bear witness and a way to say "I hear you. I value what you are doing. Thank you.” With the ever gutting of social supports, the funding of endless war, the intensity and terror I feel when I think about the prevalence of artificial intelligence and the surveillance state, the endless corrupt webs of money and power…. I think however we can put our money in small ways towards people, projects, and places we love matters more than ever right now…

Thus, I am turning on paid subscriptions again as a way to honor my small writing efforts.

If you appreciate my writing please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’ve recently lowered fees so that a monthly subscription is $7/ a month as opposed to $8, and a year subscription fee is $75 as opposed to $96.

If you’d like a send a one time tip my Venmo is @EleanorJBurke

Thanks for being here regardless! A free and easy way to support this writing project is to like this post and email it to a friend.

Maybe you’d like to read more about raising kids as a fledging animist? If so may I direct your attention here to something I wrote in 2023?

Or maybe you’d like to go back to my original post in 2023 on my thinking of what it means to be a "Wannabe Animist?” My thinking and practice of these matters continues to ebb/flow/deepen/change course. I love to learn from others what practicing Animism means to them.

Feel free to leave a comment below or email me! How are you practicing the simple instructions of "small things matter most.” How is your love for Earth being practiced right now? I’d love to hear.

Thanks and welcome to several new subscribers! Thanks for older subscribers for being patient. I am toying with dissolving this newsletter but can’t quite bring myself to do so just yet. Last month I turned off all paid subscriptions because I haven’t had capacity and don’t think it’s right to take money from folks when I haven’t published anything since September.

I wrote about the recent floods in WA and destroying indigenous lakes and slaughtering keystone species like big old trees and that actions have consequences- but didn’t publish it.

I wrote about abortion, my own in 2016 that saved my life, and others-how data tells us that most people who get abortions already have children; the rage I feel at men like Senator Richard Cash of Anderson SC (my home state), who introduced legislation to charge women with murder for seeking an abortion- but didn’t publish it.

I wrote about my almost two year obsession/ADHD hyperfocus with baby wearing, and this amazing online niche community and Moms around the country who’ve bought, sold, traded, and sent me wraps on holiday and how I cried and cried and cried after I stood up to a gun loving baby wearing comment thread and a moderator of an international baby wearing group chose to remain anonymous and told me I was fear mongering and took my post down because deaths by gun are now the NUMBER ONE WAY CHILDREN ARE DYING - but didn’t publish it.

I wrote about the legacy of white supremacy and how I fell in love with hippies and WHY I think I did, and how I used to be an anti-vaxxer, Raw Milk drinking, herbal tincture slingin’ mama who didn’t understand survivorship bias, the nature fallacy or truly how science illiterate I was and (mostly) still am- but didn’t publish it.

Does anyone have any interest in reading those pieces of writing? If so please comment below or email me. I need some encouragement to keep going.

For now I wanted to share a more personal piece of writing about current events because this past week has been really tough. All spelling and grammatical errors are my own as I don’t have an editor. It’s just me typing away at my desk in my messy living room in between child rearing.

Sending care!

Share Tears of Things

Last week after traveling cross country with my two youngest children I ended up in an emergency room in a wheelchair just north of Seattle. We still had over an hour drive to home. My husband kept asking me if I could just make it through. But I couldn’t. The pain was the worst pain of my life as if someone was stabbing my skull, my neck, my temples. We left the airport and the traffic on I-5 north just outside of Seattle was thick as ever. I leaned my head on the window of the rental car as waves of nausea rolled over my body. I cracked the window for fresh air but the thrum of the cars ricocheted inside me and the pain intensified. I could feel the panic rising. I saw the graffiti on the underpasses. I saw the invasive English Ivy threaded through the slopes on the east side and thought of how ivy chokes out any native tree it can. I saw the tarps and tents and bags and waste of the homeless, whose areas of making home have grown and grown and grown further past the city limits over the past eighteen years I’ve lived in western Washington. Every aberration in the pavement I felt in my body. Every slight bump felt like a stab. It was hard to breathe. I knew I needed a Tree, I a nap in warm Sunshine on a bed of grass, at the very least I needed a warm bed, I needed rest like I’ve never needed rest before, I needed loving arms around me. None of which were possible or available. My husband rubbed my neck and his touch was stabilizing but also too much. hadn’t slept a wink the night before in anticipation of rising at three a.m. We had flown on two separate flights and traversed the expanse of the Chicago airport while carrying small children, so many bags, wearing KN95 masks while an unmasked man on the flight to Seattle sneezed and coughed and sneezed and coughed across the aisle from me. Where the children bucked and whined and I could not breathe it was so hot. Where an older white man with a toupee snapped at me before we’d even taken off to quiet my toddler who kept loudly exclaiming "WOW!!” at all the airplanes. My reaction was slow. My husband’s always better with the come backs but he was one row back kitty corner and couldn’t hear this exchange. "I can’t really tell a toddler to be quiet. He doesn’t really get that.” "Well you need to discipline him then!” the man snapped. "That’s not even developmentally appropriate!” I snapped back. I wish I had said "Like how? Beat him? Muzzle him?” And I thought to myself that this is the kind of man who hates children who hates women who wants us charged for murder if we need to abort a pregnancy we did not want, while never holding men accountable for their irresponsible ejaculation or rallying for mothers to be paid for their never ending free labor. And then we still had a four hour flight in front of us.

We landed and waited and waited to get off the plane. We relieved our bladders. We drank water we could taste the chlorine in and missed the well water of my parents rural place of the well water of our rural place we thought, in that moment we were less than two hours from. We went to the food court first and ate clam chowder and french fries and a woman sang folk music and Fleetwood Mac and I gave the 4 year old a $5 dollar bill and explained about tipping for music and pointed out the open guitar case. The children danced to the music. I rubbed the back of my neck. By the time we got to baggage claim our bags and extra car seat were off to the side being guarded by a man who smiled at us and then helped us schlepp them across the way. My husband took the toddler to the rental car area. I took off my mask and sat by the long windowed wall past the baggage claim and fed sour gummy worms to my 4 year old and drank an icy blue Gatorade, stopping to press my palms firmly into the nape of my neck, or massaging my temples. I could feel the pain searing throbbing growing and nothing I did lessened it. It was close to an hour before my husband was back with the rental vehicle and its automated touch screen that blasted me with hot air and the nausea rose up. We got through Seattle and I began retching again and again into one of the animal printed wet bags we use for outings with the children. I felt my bowels let go into my underwear and hoped it wasn’t leaking through my sweatpants onto the rental car. The intensity of the pain was akin to labor contractions where there is no out, there is no escape, except for in labor there is an out, there is escape there is the respite of the rest period between contractions, for which by the time you are birthing your third child as I did in the Spring of 2024, you are over the moon in gratitude for. This pain did not rest. I could find no comfort.

We pulled off the road and parked behind a Winco grocery store. I listed off names of my girlfriends, I texted another… "They know about pain! They know about migraines. I don’t know what to do!!!!!!!” I wailed to my husband. I got out and vomited again in a dirt patch. I leaned on the car, I tried to walk, nothing helped, nothing mattered. We got my friend M on the phone. "Take her to the ER! We had a friend who just died last week after having a migraine.”

It was so cold when I got out of the car. South Carolina had been sunny and in the 60s. The cold air and the sad as fuck never ending grey sky and chilly damp air that settles so quickly under your skin that north west Washington is known for felt like yet another assault.

In the check in of the emergency room a young woman had wheeled in her mother into the bay next to me. The mother wailed and whimpered. They were brown skinned with lustrous long black hair.

"She won’t stop crying.” The daughter explained to the check in nurse who came to take the mother’s pulse, who was a white man with a strawberry blond beard and dark tattoos snaking up his arm. Who had just taken my blood pressure as well.

"She just keeps screaming. I keep asking her what’s the matter.. but she’s not talking. We were just here last week.”

My family came in and my daughter saw me and she cried and held my hand. The toddler had been in his pajamas all day. They took me back after a 20 minute wait and from one room to the next. My daughter sat on the lap of a nurse while a doctor interviewed me. "Do you feel safe at home?” The nurse asked me with my husband behind me. "Yes. Yes I do.” And I thought of the history of my bad temper and a hole in the wall from a slammed by me door. I thought of my rage and my shame at my rage. I thought of the psychologist who explained that rage outbursts are common with autism/adhd/neurodivergence. I thought of the rage corner during a community grief ritual. I thought of women truly not safe at home. I thought of good guys everywhere who claim to have never raped a woman yet every woman i know has been assaulted or knows someone who has been. They wheeled me to another room and a nurse asked what vein they use and I showed him. He tried it but it wouldn’t take so I was handed off to another nurse. She wheeled me to yet another room and got the needle in on the other arm. Out came vials of blood. In went a saline bag. I popped a pink pill of Benadryl. I was still sitting in my shat upon underwear in the wheelchair but still felt too out of it to walk. There was no comfort. I had my husband bring me a change of clothes. The toddler ran around the room. My husband took him to get food. The 4 year old panicked and tried to open the heavy glass sliding door and knocked to try to get the nurse to come back but no one listened to her; she knocked and every nurse who walked past just smiled but did not acknowledge my daughter as a full human. We felt so trapped and there was no comfort. My phone had died long before and I had no charger. I could not let her watch Angelina Ballerina on YouTube or make a digital collage on Pinterest. The bag of Saline dripped into me but they left the lock in my arm. I found my way to the bathroom and cleaned myself up with rough thin brown paper towels. I attempted to wash out my high waisted mint green underwear in the toilet bowl the way I do with the soiled cloth diapers but the automated flush sensor tripped and the toilet roared and sucked my panties down the pipe. I scrubbed and scrubbed my hands. I bundled my dirty sweatpants which thankfully were not soiled, and walked slowly back to the room. A kind doctor came and asked me a whole lot of questions, wanted to know if I’d had these headaches before, "no,” seen a gastrointestinal specialist, "No” and ordered a CT scan.

For three hours we had waited and juggled children melting down between us. By 8pm my body had taken in the saline drip, the pain relief and the benadryl. My teeth rattled in my brain, and my jaw was aching more than prior to the medicines. My mouth was so dry. I had no appetite though I’d not eaten in eight hours. They wanted me to go for a head scan but the children were doing circuits over the padded furniture, barely missing a bearded burly man waiting for something, while a woman in a fleeced hooded blanket sat facing a wall in a wheelchair as a bag of saline dripped into her and her boyfriend reassured her and they smiled and chuckled at my children.

"How long do we have to wait for the scan?”

"Well trauma and stroke have priority so I really can’t say.” The male nurse at the desk told us.

"I get it. I have littles at home too.” He smiled kindly.

Then I put the toddler in the baby carrier and he arched his back and wailed and wailed and wailed and the doctor came out and she asked again if i wanted a turkey sandwich, to which I again declined, and I said "We have to go. We still have over an hour til home. We just can’t wait any longer.” To which she said "I understand.” And handed me a prescription for anti-nausea medicine, (which I promptly lost until two days later) and encouraged me to follow up with my doctor and still see if I can get a brain scan. Yes yes. My husband drove us home and I passed in and out of a light sleep tracking the weigh points- Mount Vernon, the low area in Acme before the lake the speed changes, and then the Bellingham exits, getting closer and closer to our own.

We got home in the dark cold.

I chucked the vomit smelling wet bags into the perennial bed underneath the cherry trees and had a moment’s pleasure that the snow drops are up- their bowed white bell shaped heads gleaming in the dark. Upstairs in our apartment I breathed in comfort. Clean, calm, incredibly cold, our beautiful small home with the windows on either side looking out across our ten acres of fields. I could feel the kind loving presence of our house sitter. I somehow got the toddler into a fresh diaper and the four year old stripped down to her underwear and we all belly flopped crawled into the king side bed that only fits in the room because its up against a corner wall. The sheets were cold and the children snuggled up into the crooks of my arms… I didn’t even brush my teeth. I slept until 4am when the of course, the toddler woke us.

The day before we flew from Columbia, South Carolina to Seattle Tacoma international airport, I was inside making one last dinner for my husband, children, and my Uncle. My husband was playing in the front yard, pushing our daughter on a thick rope swing my Uncle set up for her a couple years ago on a thick branch on a Magnolia tree I loved to climb as a child. Meanwhile the toddler was walking near by when out of the sky Barred Owl swooped down, claws stretched out going after my son; our small boy instinctively ducked to protect himself and then cried out. Later, eyes wide as he gets, "Haw! Haw! Haw!” He told me about the near Owl attack. (Hawk is what he calls all birds). We checked his neck and Barred Owl just grazed him, leaving a curve of a long white scratch, a surface mark really, along his left occiput.

The next afternoon after my trip to the emergency room, we drove thirty minutes south to a hospice house. My daughter stroked her grandfather’s hand. My blonde sister in laws, their mother, and my toddler niece were there. The room crowded around my husbands father, who looked feeble and sick. I started crying. The toddlers ran around. I sat outside at a picnic table shivering in the cold with the low afternoon sunlight peaking behind gray trees, waiting for a telehealth call with a provider from my doctor’s office to get a prescription for migraine medication and anti-nausea medication since I didn’t know then that the ER doctor had given me a written a prescription for the anti-nausea medication instead of calling it in so my usual pharmacy had no record. Just the drive to visit my father in law had triggered my symptoms and the nausea flooded me again and my jaw was aching in pain again. Soon he drifted off to sleep and we quietly snuck out to the gathering room. There were comfortable chairs, coffee pots, clam chowder, an array of packaged cookies and crackers, all type of tea. We helped ourselves. I looked at the pamphlets with titles like "How to talk to children about Death.”

Two nights ago at around 10:30pm in this small calm building on the south part of town, with just twelve beds available to those who need them, my father in law, Roger Almskaar of Bellingham, WA, took his last breath. Only a hospice nurse was with him. We were asleep by the time my sister in law called my husband to let him know.

Less than a week in hospice. He did not linger.

His body is now at a funeral home in Stanwood, WA, not far from their Norwegian family’s burial plot. He will be cremated shortly. He asked for his burial to be on the Summer Solstice.

post script

I’m struck by the woman next to me in the ER who was wailing and weeping. What is she grieving?

I’m struck by my daughter saying "I don’t want to cry!” When we told her about her Grandfather being close to his Death time. But when faced with saying good bye to him she tenderly held and stroked his hand.

I’m struck by Barred Owl who visited us at my parents/my teenage home/now my Uncle’s home, many times over the past two months. How Barred Owls are known to be territorial. How I do blame Barred Owl for attempting to strike my son. Was it an omen for my father in law’s impending death? I’m struck by how mythologies around the world connote Owls with the supernatural, as messengers of Death, foreboding fate, and wisdom keepers.

I’m struck still now with a resurgence of pain and nausea six days after my emergency room visit. The frayed seams of my nervous system. I don’t know what’s going on or how or when it will unwind.

I’m struck by despite all my learning and practice in the ways of grief I feel illiterate, bereft and unmoored. "Shouldn’t we go sit with his body? Sing something in Norwegian?” I asked my husband. Will there be consequences that we couldn’t/didn’t?

And I keep thinking of my friend M’s text when I told her about my father in law’s death- simple, perfect, followed by with the broken heart emoji

"Aw. I’m glad he didn’t linger.”

what a mercy that is.

1. This Saturday I’ll be hosting a baby-wearing event in Bellingham, WA. This a great class for any parent/caregiver or birth-worker who wants to learn more about the baby wearing. Sign up here.

2. I am slowly returning to doula work for both birth and postpartum clients. I have openings for clients October- December right now. I am not sure yet about 2026, but feel free to reach out. You can learn about those services here.

   Thanks for reading Tears of Things! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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This past weekend I hopped on a late afternoon Friday ferry boat and by 8pm I was dancing in a dusty field next to some of my favorite humans to a band I’ve seen play many times over the past 15 years. But as soon as that ferry boat docked at Lopez Island I burst into tears. I sat in my parked car waiting to unload, feeling the boat gently rock beneath me, inhaled that salty sea air, gazed out at the rocky treed edge of the island and cried. I cried and cried and cried, and am embarrassed to say I felt ashamed of my tears; they caught me so off guard. Grief is funny like that; and it makes perfect sense to me that given this grief-illiterate culture where we don’t have regular communal grieving practices like I think we should, Grief sneaks up on us because how else is Grief gonna get us to pay attention, to give Grief its propers? So there I was, crying into a crumbled rough bathroom paper towel in my non-tinted windowed car. Crying from grief, relief, for longing like always, from exhaustion, and old tender places that a single harmless text message tripped me up. So I took a breath and just let the tears come. I was still crying when I drove off the boat and on to the island, but they were mostly all wept by the time I got to my friends’ place. There I was greeted by her neighbor, another old friend on the path who hugged me and validated my cry. And then I crossed the threshold into the house, felt the welcoming arms of my friends home where I have spent countless hours over the years, and entered a new space where Grief didn’t need so much room. I set down my bags and freshened up. I changed into my "going out outfit,” swiped on some gold shimmery eye shadow, fastened on some dangly earrings, packed my bag with extra layers, refilled my water bottle and headed out. I drove down to the Southend blasting this song that I can’t stop listening too because being boy crazy has been a central theme to my life and there’s more to that later…. By the time I got to the music festival I was saved by the cover of the night, and could enter the space relatively incognito. I don’t leave the house much these days and feel that my social skills have atrophied some. I met friends on the new moon darkened road, who greeted me with good cheer, so that when I entered the field next to the stage it did not come with any surprised to see not one but two men I have sexual history with. So sometimes tears are preemptive protection. Making space inside me so I could walk in the present moment, sloughed off from all I’ve been carrying, to greet the inevitable rich/dark/wonderful and sad history that island holds for me; and in particular be able to cross that threshold from mainland time and space to island time. It’s a thing you know and the more I spend time away from there the more I see how full time island living really shaped me.

Next up I wondered if I still knew how to dance. I can’t recall the last time I went to see live music, to dance in a non-choreographed way (come see me perform as a Venus fly trap lol)?!! I long ago figured out how to dance sober and for that I am forever grateful. That pat phrase "dance as if no one is watching” takes on new meaning when you realize most people at live music shows are dancing drunk. I like a drink (or two or three) from time to time), and yet often I want to meet the music sober prior to letting the cloak of Alcohol have its way with me. I am so accustomed to small humans always reaching/needing/taking for-and-from my body, it has become much harder to find my body, to place my body in time and space- to re-member it is MY BODY at the end of the day. But like muscle memory, I did and do indeed remember how to dance- to stomp, to dust up and break in my new leather boots. To dance next to familiar women I’ve danced besides many times before, to dance next to strangers. Communities need to dance together like we need to weep together.

A friend came up and acknowledged me with “QUEEN!!!” Another told me some big news and we sat in sadness together. I made a new queer friend and hung with my trans friends all night- we talked about INCEL life (involuntary celibacy), online dating, and being over-touched as parents. I wandered around alone and chatted up a young man who is living away from home for the first time. I drove home alone to my friends and slept in the bed, alone at her house, while she stayed at her boyfriends. I ran into many people I love. I got to see the fruits of my friend’s labor who is just hosted several queer artists for an artist residency. I had many many hear to heart talks. I took long walks - one with one of my best friends, and one all alone with nothing but Cedar tree and Salal shadows and Chimpmunks chattering off in the brush. I took a nap. I started reading Beloved again; it stunned me and broke my heart open just like it did when I was first assigned it as an AP English 11th grade student under the care of the brilliant and one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, Mr. Bob Raven, at Irmo High School. Reading it now as a 43 year old woman I cannot think but "Damn Mr. Raven! You had some courage to assign us to read this book- uninitiated mostly white kids, in that painted cinder block room in the corner of the high school, where you let us write our favorite quotes from the books we read on the bricks.” I’m praising now the fact I read this book in those formative years given that it’s frequently on of the most banned books from so many English classes across the country. I wondered about Toni Morrison and learned that she was 56 years old the year of 1987 when Beloved was first published. What she carried with being that age by the time this heavy gorgeously written book about slavery and its legacy was published. I think it’s an apt book to be reading right now. There’s too many ghosts out there still not being reckoned with. What if we started referring to more ghosts as Beloved? I know I need to do this and I’m scared.

Sethe in Beloved lives in a house with her daughter and a ghost- also her daughter. Anyone who walks by their house can feel that a ghost lives there. The family is lonely because of it as no one wants to get close to them, to be invited into the house-but the ghost is lonely too - for many hard sad reasons I won’t go into. Read the book.

There was a celebration of life for a long time community member on the island. I knew her, most everyone knew her- she was kind and warm and welcoming. I did not know her well enough to think I ought to attend her celebration of life but now, I regret that I did not go since the purpose of a funeral or an event to honor the dead is supposed to be a village making thing- even with out recently shared life, I was once part of her village and she mine. I asked a friend after how it went. I said "did anyone wail or weep or cry?” She said "no. not really.” She knows me and she knew exactly where I was going with this. I said “I wonder when that will change?” These celebrations of life are quite popular these days. There is some sadness, but mostly everyone gets together to talk about how much they loved the person; which is all fine and good, but what about that part of weeping and wailing that the person is no longer alive and walking amongst us? What happens to us when we no longer hear those sounds in public? The Irish keening tradition was such, that the keeners were hired to cut through that loving and sentimental talk- TO GET PEOPLE TO WEEP, because they believed that the sounds of grief were instrumental in helping get the person’s soul on over to the other side, and that communities need to actually cry together to remain healthy. It makes sense to me. Later I got stern with my friends and I said something to the effect of, "Look. When I go, I want a traditional Irish wake. Come sit by my body. I want you and others who sing to come keen and wail over me. And I want you to tell the truth of how I was. That I was wonderful and that I could also be a hell of a mean bitch some times.” So now y’all know too it’s in writing here. And I want this song and this one and this one too especially please, played or sung or performed.

This was my second weekend alone away from children in the past year. A friend told me "thank you for modeling taking such good care of yourself.” This is because so many women don’t take time away from their children JUST BECAUSE. We make up stories that no one else can care for them like we do. We refuse to spend time apart from them. I’ll never forget being invited to a local full moon femme gathering and a woman I know refusing to go because she couldn’t bear to be away from her children for bedtime; one would presume she had attended to countless bedtimes prior, so why would missing one make that big of a difference? It also makes me wonder now about the nature of the care work in her marriage to a straight white man- was he not capable of doing bedtime? Why was he not also reading stories and attending to the transition of bedtime? I just don’t believe that one missed bedtime will ruin a child. I do think that the lack of women gathering in ritual, in regular time together will ruin us as women and our ability to collectively organize. I miss my monthly coven like hell and have yet to find anyone to commit and create a new one. Sigh…. I see this time and time and time again-women burnt out, men who won’t step up-and it goes around and around. On the one hand it’s true that one cares like us - the mother, the birth giver, but it’s also true that no one parents like the non-gestational parent; that our children need more than us. Care work is not gendered remember? It’s the work that makes the world go round. Just because a person has been socialized to believe that certain people do it "naturally” does not make it so. Yet I’m seeing this narrative reinforced all the time and in women I am frankly, surprised to see it in. Yet recently I’ve been asking myself why am I surprised? Do not most white women in the U.S. more than likely have a christian nationalist tradwife buried so deep inside that they haven’t even cracked the door on saying hello to her? And our refusal to begin to reckon with her keeps us tethered in relationships with white men who really don’t want us to be free? White men who don’t give a fuck about legislation being passed that will charge us for murder when we seek to obliterate a tiny bundle of cells that would bind us to our rapist/our abuser/or just some sad fuck of a man who can’t be bothered to care about anyone but himself…… In more ways than ever I’m seeing how white women (myself included) cling so hard to the little bit of power/privilege/social/economic clout we get in our proximity to straight white dudes, and by our clinging, how captive we remain.

Having dated and fucked many many (mostly) straight white dudes, I can say that holding out for marriage was the best thing for me. My marriage is by no means a cake walk, but it is a relationship that was founded on principles of honesty rooted in some understanding of the systemic forces in which we fuck and marry and love in. It’s understanding the state sanctioned and cultural privileges that come with marriage, that we did as way to protect the children we have together, and to provide me with some legal assurances to the generational wealth my husband (in particular has) as acknowledgement for sweat equity (not to mention birthing our children). Most people I know in cis-het relationships don’t even know how to have these conversations to start, much less create a relationship where you can have some degree of autonomy. I had a splitting headache the entire weekend and now a few days out it’s gone. Did the island cause the headache? Was I truly relaxed away from my family? It’s hard to say. Was it caused by seeing men I had relations with (albeit how warmly they both greeted me) that I now recognize how much I compromised myself right from the start? Was it hearing about a powerful writing practice a friend took on to reckon with and re-member her womb? Was it watching a weekend of music where pretty much everyone singing and performing on stage was men? Was it watching so many drunk men leer after beautiful and in one case a much younger woman? Was it hearing a man reject any of the good parenting advice the three Mothers around him, digging in his heels as I’ve known him to do so many times it’s boring as fuck… will he ever self reflect? Do generational healing work? Nothing new, nothing unexpected…. all things certain to give any one paying attention a head ache.

Throughout the weekend I found myself repeating a particular sentence to anyone that would listen… words I can’t set down ever since I read them. Paraphrasing writer Hannah Leffingwell’s analysis of feminist Catherine MacKinnon’s work; Leffingwell uses some of MacKinnon’s writing as a lens for which to discuss the much lauded and talked about film on women’s sexuality, Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman. I took it as this- are women ever truly sexually free in a patriarchy? That’s what I kept repeating to my friends over the weekend and it’s alive now - in Toni Morrison writing Beloved, in my own life and it’s long trail of male lovers, in the South Carolina legislature. I’ve known this for some time now but haven’t felt this clearly able to name it until Leffingwell articulated it in her brilliant piece of writing.

The Dykegeist

Toward a Feminist Theory of Babygirl

Halina Reija’s 2024 film Babygirl opens with a fairly rote scene of heterosexual intercourse. First, we hear a woman’s labored breathing. Then, these sounds are matched to visuals: we see the face of Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) as she seems to have an orgasm while riding her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) in their marital bed. After they both come, he…

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a year ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · Hannah Leffingwell

I’ve written before how relieved I am to no longer live full time on the island- the pressure of it is too much and I start to feel like a caged animal. And yet there is nothing like that place and the friends-like-family I have there. To say I LOVE YOU so freely, to hug warmly, to be in time/space with people who helped me grow up in so many ways. To say to one another "I don't care if it’s been a year or two… you are always welcome in my home.” To talk about some of these things I’ve been wondering on. To grapple out loud with friends how these dynamics of gender, of sex, of capitalism, of able-bodiedness are being lived out second to second, minute to minute in our days.

I may sleep through the night most nights thanks to this 3rd baby being such a great sleeper, but for those of us whose bodies bring humans into the world, I think sleep is never fully restful when those tender ones are living under our roof. The constant state of hyper-vigilance being both a Mother and a neuro-divergent human is something I am getting more and more in tune with and is a main cause of my perpetual state of soul/mind/physical exhaustion. I would like to return to a more analog life, but it’s near impossible given the tentacles of big tech which is now surveillance tech. I am not able to tend this writing space right now because of it. I cannot divorce myself entirely from social media, of which Substack is quickly becoming another form or, nor do I want too. There are too many brilliant thinkers doing amazing work in spaces like Instagram (like Erika Hart for instance) for me to quit these platforms entirely any time soon. I am trying to figure out how to have both a writing life, which is, by its nature, a solitary life, and a public community life, since stay at home motherhood (for me) by its nature is often a solitary and lonely endeavor.

I do know that most of us are treading water these days. I used to love treading water in swim practice just like breaststroke was my favorite stroke- I felt like I could just go and go and go- find a pace and set it- figuring out ways to take rests in between certain strokes or kicks- almost like the blessed rest in between contractions. This summer when I went lake swimming though I kept going for backstroke- feeling my arms pull up and over my head in long strong strokes was a wonderful antidote to all the hunched reaching I do all day long- through the postures of slinging, baby wearing, wiping butts, harvesting, chopping, and nursing. In back stroke I was held by the water; and I see now how being held is something deeply missing from my life, even in my marriage unfortunately simply due to the stretched nature of our current family/work load. In back stroke I could see the beautiful sky above me and the sounds of the noisy lake crowds mostly muffled. I was sandwiched between water and sky and felt so perfectly anointed by them, so seen, so held, and like I almost always do when swimming, I was in rapture- utter peace & joy. So yeah I think backstroke is where it’s at for me right now. And this idea of how to find rest in the pauses between strokes, between contractions.

While I try to find my own rests here and there so I can keep going, I also think daily, how black and brown people have been living under the violence of white supremacy culture for generations. How little rest they are granted. How terribly loud the white supremacist propaganda machine is- how so many activists I follow keep reminding us that "hey white folk, we’ve been under fascism for a while now.” And it’s true. They are long over due for reparations, land back and so much more. The political propaganda machine wants only to divide people in this country while billionaires are raking it in. Scapegoating, red herrings, and all the classic logical fallacies are par for the course these days, which I take personally as someone who loves intellectual life, who values critical thinking, and also acknowledging my own blind spots, internal biases, privileges, and hypocrisies. Trans people make up an estimated 2% of the population- their existence does not affect your life negatively. Lax gun control laws are a negative. Cutting medical benefits are a negative. Deporting people who grow and harvest our food is a negative. Bullies love a scapegoat now don’t they? It’s been really fucking hard for me to see friends I loved in high school post on facebook about this bull shit- calling Charlie Kirk "non-violent” and such, and it does make me wonder how people have lost sight of what VIOLENCE truly is.

Poverty is violence.

Dying from lack of medical care is violence.

Homelessness is violence.

Black women dying at 4x the rates of white women from pregnancy/childbirth related things is violence.

Demonizing the only "safe” pain relief that pregnant people can take is a yet another form of violence against those of us with wombs.

Denying people gender affirming care is violence.

Deporting family members and splitting them apart is violence.

Spouting off hate speech and propagandist rhetoric is violence.

Funding genocide is violence.

Slaughtering trees, damning rivers polluting water and soil is violence.

I think right now if there are any hackers worth their salt they’d cause a nationwide internet outage so the white christian nationalism propaganda machine could finally shut the fuck up. So working class people could actually come together to take down the billionaires to recognize they have far more in common with that farm worker living in the trailer across from the raspberry farm with its big white fancy house and the signs that say "Samson” (true scene just a bike ride down the road from me), than you do the Peter Thiels/Erika Kirks/Curtis Yarvin/Taylor Swifts/ of the world. (and before you come for for lumping Swift in this category- I don’t care how popular your music is, billionaires should not exist).

I went to the island and I had a good time.

I came home and I was happy to be home.

A woman I’ve never met called me on the phone as she and I connected thanks to facebook and we are both in the throws of loving and caring for boomers with dementia. We said we will share resources. In this moment a moment of village making happened in the local sense. These are the kinds of opportunities I want to create more of. Another friend said she is spending time with an elder every week- getting paid a little just to do some cleaning and care, and she loves it. This is the kind of movement work we need. We need actual grown ups reaching out to young people instead of constant handwringing over teens and their phones and red dye. The bard and writer Martin Shaw once told a class of us "If you haven’t been fed, become bread.” In the words of the late great poet, singer, philosopher and I’d argue holy man, Leonard Cohen, (and I quote this often)…. "I’m tired and I’m angry all the time.” Thank goodness too because it means I’m here. It means I still give a fuck. And it means I will keep showing up.

If you’re glad to hear from me, and I know it’s been a while, (thanks especially to paid subscribers for not giving up on me), please like this post and share it with a friend. The Substack algorithms are now making it nearly impossible for smaller time writers like myself who don’t have the capacity to put out weekly content, to get our work circulated beyond our intimate circles and subscriber list. It’s also hard to keep putting out writing work when I don’t get a lot of feedback. Just hit the like button is all I ask of you!

There is still a part of me holding on hope that my writing work will become a small source of sustenance for others and for me in the form of paid subscriptions or other writing projects (which I do have one right now). I’m also taking heed from Queen Toni Morrison in that some of her greatest writing work was not achieved until she was well into her 50s.

Let that be a reminder and a blessing for all of us- not only that black women continue to teach us and to lead the way in so many facets- but that good work- the kind that is willing and able to reckon with the horrors of what humans can do to other humans, like Morrison does in Beloved, takes time, and that it’s healing work more people need to take up.

Until I’ve got more things to get off my chest, take care. Give your money to black and brown organizations. Talk to your neighbor. Attend a community grief ritual. Stand up for trans people. Learn how to keen. Resist resist resist.

I want to preface that the theme of the Sunday service was creativity. I took an essay I’ve been writing and musing over for a Mother’s Day publication (come and gone) and then tweaked it to a six minute long talk. In the talk I focus on the innate creativity that is required of ongoing unpaid labor of Motherhood and care work in general (as care work is not and has never been gendered contrary to the dominant North American cult of white nationalism/conservative Christianity telling us otherwise).

The essay I am working on encompasses more on the work of feminist scholars like bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Silvia Federici as well as contemporary writers and scholars like Amanda Montei and Angela Garbes. The essay reckons more deeply about the elements of systemic racism, capitalism, white supremacy culture, and gender than the talk I gave. The main point I wanted to make is that care work IS work and it deserves to be compensated as the highly skilled and creative work it is.

After reading or listening I’d love to know your thoughts. Comments are open to free and paid subscribers and many of you here have my number. Enjoy and thank you for your care work - I see you. You make the whole world go round.

If you’d prefer to listen to the talk here is the recording. I go on around 51:20.

Please like this post and share it!

Liking and sharing are simple actions that help this writing project gain a little more traction in the vast universe of Substack newsletters. Thanks to paying subscribers for helping to lessen the cost of childcare just a bit. As of this posting this newsletter generates $500 a year just for perspective and nanny care is $25/hour for two children.

Good Morning

My name is Eleanor Burke

I am the mother of 3 children. Weston age 16, Aubrey age 4, and Lars age 1. I am also a full time employee for the department of invisible labor. This job requires an on-call schedule of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It is understood that this job ends when a child turns 18. But the creative work of parenting, of relationship tending does not magically end when a child turns 18. For this work I receive no salary, no vacation time, no benefits, no 401k, no pension plan, or social security. Ironically though in order for me to have time off I must pay someone else for the work I do like a nanny or a daycare (shout out to our nanny Alison). There is little to zero public recognition, accolades, or opportunity for career advancement.

Why then, would anyone take on such a position?

Well - this job requires a multitude of highly trained skills and is inherently creative! From the physical, emotional and spiritual preparation of bearing and birthing babies in a country without universal health care or paid family leave, to the approximate 2,542 days and counting of breastfeeding humans I’ve got down; this job keeps you on your toes. There is the ongoing work of meal planner, grocery shopper, chef, birthday cake baker, gardener, administrative assistant and financial planner. I am the mender of ripped princess dresses, finder of MORE princess dresses, soother of head bonks, researcher and scholar on so many things: forest school gear, car seats for small cars, age appropriate sex education, teenage brain development, best shoes for new walkers, to woven wraps for baby wearing. I also work as a conflict mediator, massage therapist, hair stylist, interior designer, low level medic, house cleaner, laundress, chauffeur, and in some of my favorite roles as a singer, songwriter, and a storyteller.

Creativity is the thing that nourishes life. It is also the thing that nourishes the long, often tedious and boring days of stay at home Motherhood. Reading the same fairy tale again but ad libbing feminist commentary. Conjuring stories about herbs in the garden. Making sure the dress up bin is stocked. That the coloring books are fresh and the markers aren’t dry. There are movies and shows when I’m too tired and have no help. Impromptu dance parties to Pink Pony Club; walks outside when cabin fever is high and squabbles burst out; greeting our more than human neighbors by name “Hello Thimbleberry! Hello Chickadee!” I am both the theatre director and back stage props manager- making sure that the stage is set for my children’s creative work, their imaginative play, making room for their big feelings, and determined that the show must go on in spite of everything.

As bell hooks wrote in 1984 in her essay Revolutionary Parenting,
“Although early feminists demanded respect and acknowledgment for housework and childcare, they did not attribute enough significance and value to female parenting, to motherhood.”

hooks goes on to remind us that that care work is not gendered. That raising children is not supposed to happen in isolation like the nuclear family forces upon us. That the work of raising children is also the creative life’s work of a community. It’s been more than 50 years since the Wages for Housework movement began. Yet the world is nowhere close to meeting the goals of that movement- primarily, to pay financial dues for the biological and societal work of reproducing the whole human race that women and birthing people do.

I cannot parse out my creative work as a Mother from the systemic forces I mother/with/and in. People say they value creativity, that they value Motherhood and care work, but legislation says otherwise, child free spaces say otherwise, unpaid labor says otherwise. Sometimes I want to holler “can’t you see this stunning human I made with my blood and sweat and milk? Where is my Guggenheim fellowship? Where is my MacArthur genius grant?” I am still waiting. I type at my messy desk while my children shriek behind me and peel off dried food from my stained t-shirt (getting dressed up for BUF is a highlight of the week you see). The sheer act of creating and raising humans will never be enough- for me or the culture at large until we acknowledge that care work is essential labor, that care work is inherently creative and that it makes the whole world go round.

May it be so.

P.S. Support awareness around invisible labor and buy a t-shirt from the Department of Invisible labor to rock out in public- whose business name inspired the opening of my talk.

This week’s song is All My Tears by Norwegian singer-songwriter and guitarist, Ane Brun; Brun is of Sami origin who sings primarily in English.

Listen here on YouTube; support her music on Bandcamp here.

Share Tears of Things

All My Tears
performed by Ane Brun
written by Julie Miller
Rarities
2013

When I go don't cry for me
In my fathers arms I'll be
The wounds this world left on my soul
Will all be healed and I'll be whole

Sun and moon will be replaced
With the light of Jesus face
And I will not be ashamed
For my savior knows my name

It don't matter where you bury me
I'll be home and I'll be free
It don't matter where I lay
All my tears be washed away

Gold and silver blind the eye
Temporary riches lie
Come and eat from heaven's store
Come and drink and thirst no more

So weep not for me my friend
When my time below does end
For my life belongs to him
Who will raise the dead again

It don't matter where you bury me
I'll be home and I'll be free
It don't matter where I lay
All my tears be washed away
All my tears be washed away

The apple trees are half pruned.

The blueberries at the edge of the yard are over taken by field grass and invasive wisteria. There is a gardener snake who hides under the blue tarp who startled me the other day and is the biggest one I’ve seen in years - its body at least an inch around!

Hummingbirds delight in the bold red of Crocosmia as they do every year! Woodpecker notches up the grey spottled bark of the Rowan/Mountain Ash as they do every year and Chickadees flit in and out. The 4 year old went out all by herself with her harvest basket to pluck snap peas for the saute for dinner the other night while I wore her brother on my back; she ate all the peas in her dinner and normally she will not eat the store bought snap peas or my favorite the English peas shelled out of their pod. This is a clue for how to help humans fall in love with the earth.

There is an unruly vase of flowers that are mostly oranges and yellow - Yarrow, Feverfew, Tithonia and Nasturtiums. We made our dream come true and now the Nasturtiums are trailing over the garden bed edges.

The Raspberries have not been cleaned out since I planted these canes three years ago and they are prolific, way too crowded and delicious as ever. This fall I swear I will give them their proper!

Everywhere I look is something that needs tending too. I am lucky if I get an hour a day outside to focus in the garden. Right now though is that sweet spot in mid summer… enjoying the fruits of our simple first-year-back-to-gardening garden. Maybe all we have is some Kale, some berries, peas and some not-sweet-enough carrots. It’s more than plenty. And it’s only possible for it to be more than plenty because I can rely on the steady stream of underpaid hardworking farm workers like the crew who has been up and down and up and down are road as of late harvesting at the local raspberry farm. Because I live on a road in an agricultural valley with a blueberry farm, a chicken factory, beef cows in the fields, and a raspberry farm, and because I see farm workers in and out in and out and b/c I have grown food I think about farm workers pretty much every single day. If you eat food, how can you not think of them? And if you are not thinking of them why not? Let them be your nightly dinner time blessing.

There are still some Cherries to eat but recent rains have them molding quickly.

The baby can reach the plum tree’s lower branches and keeps tugging off the unripe fruit. I have now seen the first Muskrat of my life and it’s living in our neighbors pond!!! There are small rabbits on the edge of the driveway and last week we saw a Racoon saunter down and then run into the Blackberries. I have never seen a Racoon here in all the seven years I’ve lived here.

We walked past a sadly flattened Opossum in the road and my four year old got so mad "Freaking people!! Why did that kill that Opossum! They need to watch where they are driving.” She’s mimicking me and for that I am glad. She picked a frothy sprig of purpley-pink Spirea the other night, inhaled deeply and passionately said, "IT SMELLS LIKE THE WHOLE EARTH!!!!”

I think this is what is really the matter for so many people now. They don’t care that they killed Opossum. Or Hawk. Or Frog. Or Deer. Or Rabbit. Or Snake. I have never killed an animal with my car except once for a small Frog that hopped out right at that moment… so I don’t understand how easily people murder animals with their cars…. if you just think of beings besides Humans and now that animals love to come out at morning and dusk that if there is one Deer crossing the road there is usually at least one more if not two or three more. That Snakes are cold blooded creatures and so seek the road in summer time so they can warm up.

I am guessing most people don’t remember picking peas for dinner in a garden or how much time and labor it actually takes to grow and procure food.

That’s what I’m thinking about this lovely summer time of mid July here in western Washington; where a new friend last weekend said that we have the prettiest summers in the whole country. And I tend to agree.

I think our main work these days ought to be how do we not calcify? How do we love our neighbors and in particular our more than human ones? For they just keep blossoming and singing and showing up and feeding us. I think we need to really remember them in this human focused world we’ve concocted and how those relationships are tantamount to our survival and thriving.

AND here are some things as of late informing my thinking as I try to push back on MAGA parroting racist bull shit about how we need to keep criminals out… while they think it’s ok that a convicted felon and rapist is in charge of the country….

1. A 6 year study done in Texas shows that undocumented people commit on average 50% less crime than native US born people. Surprise surprise

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG-119-JU01-20250122-SD004.pdf

2. Farm workers are scared to come to work so if you voted for this mess or aren’t calling your reps or aren’t pushing back don’t you dare complain when food prices continue to go up

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/07/08/labor-shortage-cherry-season

3. Wal-mart sucks but if you’re in a rural place it’s often the only place you have to shop - here’s a reminder of how they ruined the very rural places they now have way too much power over. It saddens me that the old adage of “you don’t know what you don’t know” is true with all these republicans online who show up on pages I follow like Occupy and Democratic Socialists…. just to parrot their sad and stupid talking points about how it’s ok that an 85 year old is still working at Wal-Mart b/c "everyone works and no should be forced to fund welfare” instead of being angry that billionaires exist in the first place and … saying how great Wal-Mart is…

https://financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/small-towns-devastated-after-wal-mart-stores-inc-decimates-mom-and-pop-shops-then-packs-up-and-leaves-they-ruined-our-lives

4. apparently Peter Thiel is the anti-christ

https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-on-whether-hes-ushering-in-the-antichrist-um-uhh-buh-um-uhh-th-th-uhhhh-2000621428

5. And some people are leaving MAGA and telling their stories!!!

https://leavingmaga.org/

CW- sexually explicit content. dating in the patriarchy.

The air here late morning is warm and beautiful, soft with a strong breeze that interrupts moments of calm. There are red dragonflies by the pond. A fawn nibbles grass at the far end. The bus I’m staying in is in its own private glade. The bed in the bus is at window height so I can see out and look to the field and scrub woods in all directions. Languid is what comes to mind. I feel for the first time in a long time erotic energy course through my body. Like a layer of lush goldenness lightly coating every inch of me. Such a departure from the state of anxiety and rushed energy that defines my days as of late. Such a joy to feel this! A coming home in so many ways as this land of my friend’s is dear to me. We went to a party last night by a magnificent bay on a rocky beach with a fire and potluck and two of my other favorite women friends of all time were there. Women I can laugh and weep with that I’ve known for over 16 years now. As well as new friends and friendly old acquaintances.

I used to believe in magic and meant-to-be and synchronicity. Seeing connection and fate in the smallest of things - a map of a place, a sense of deja vu, a text of a song at just that moment, the timing of a memory long buried arising after catching a smell on a breeze; the way the world looks just before sunset & then- all the dusks of all the leaving of island potlucks are alive within in me flooding me/filling me up. But now it seems magic is hidden from me. While the magic of my younger children is alive and well, the magic of my own life is hard to find. So now the wonder of meeting and connecting with a new person, the timing of that and us kissing for the very first time the night before I came to this island I love so much. How now I can’t stop thinking about kissing him. How I texted my friend at some point earlier in the evening while he had stepped away from the table "I like him!” The joy and nervousness of kissing - this thing I’ve not done with another human in close to two years beyond the chaste peck kisses exchanged with my spouse/or the millions of kisses I’ve given to my babies all over their rosy cheeks.

So to kiss a grown man! To feel the texture of his slight beard roughing up my face. Keep the beard! I want to tell him. The warm bulk of his body against mine. The soft familiar feel of his sweatshirt. All evening I wanted to pull him towards me, on the bench trackside drinking beer - to press my thigh into his, lean on him put my arms around him. Why did I hesitate? I don’t know exactly… old stories in muscle memory … like I don’t know you yet & do you like me too & do I need permission/must I always ask first now? I used to know how to be in my body with a person I feel connected too… when to make a move… I could trust the spark…and sometimes sure maybe I didn’t choose wisely in the long wrong; for chemistry is a strange bird when trapped inside a patriarchal culture insistent on monogamy without question or consent…so I cannot leave out how shame has ground me down… but today I want to recall the erotic woman I have been… how bold and vulgar and almost liberated I have been... going up to a man I made eyes with, who I knew I knew from somewhere/his big toothy grin, lanky frame/his warm brown eyes that kept my gaze from across the bar/did not waver/ so that when he came over, asked to buy me a drink/the only question I had was "Do you want to fuck?” and yes yes he did and yes we did many times that night and many times over the weeks that followed….

But now in this aged/changed/heavier/and softened fourteen month postpartum body that is only accustomed to the hands of children and babies/to baby wrapping and baby slinging, small hands and mouths reaching for my nipples again and again and again and again/my slouched posture to accommodate all the picking up and putting down and picking up and putting down, and wiping bottoms/my arms always being the ones to hold and hold and cuddle and cuddle/but who is holding me? I do not know exactly how and where to find that bold vulgar trying-to-be sexually-liberated woman. And I miss her.

I keep writing and telling people "I am touched out and under-touched.”

I can only touch myself so much longer. There are places I want to go that I cannot get there on my own. So many women writers whose work I read regularly are embracing bouts of celibacy, asking if we as women who sleep with men (mostly) are EVER TRULY FREE TO LOVE AND FUCK HOW/WHO WE WANT IN A MISOGYNISTIC CULTURE???? Now I cannot stop thinking about that fact. These writers are going so far as to write and publish books about the inspiration that comes when you stop having sex; when you step out of the game of the chase/the longing/the wanting/the waiting with baited breath, when you (at least in their cases temporarily) put a pause on desire. I can get down with that. But for me fourteen months postpartum I see how hard it is to find my way back to any semblance of an erotic being via the celibacy that’s been forced upon me by a variety of factors- many of which I have zero control over. It also hard to be in a body so marked by the 24/7 days a week 365 on call nature of the unpaid work of Motherhood. How do I locate myself within that?

Marriage and long term relationship and the children in the room with us because our home is so small there is no other room for them does not spark my erotic self nor the erotic self of my husband. Mostly we have been o.k. with this. But I am starting to not be o.k. with this and so a couple months ago I said to him "Summer is coming and I want to date again. I put myself on an app” and he said "o.k.” We are not as far along as some and we are further along than many is how best to explain. Our marriage like most has ebbs and flows and our consensual non-monogamy exists on a spectrum on a continuum…. it is rooted in anti-oppression and feminism and a wing and a prayer and a lived practice for liberation…it is something we began talking about and navigating on our second date back in January of 2018.

On the dating app I swipe and swipe and swipe. I swipe past a man I saw last Sunday who is the ex of a friend. I swipe past a man I haven’t seen in over a decade from the islands who I slept with in the lofted bedroom of my converted school bus after a fun night at the local bar dancing to a band in town. I swipe past the couple looking for fun with the cute woman in glasses I have done multiple trainings with. I swipe past young people and anyone with face studs and lip piercings or not enough text. I swipe past the several old men who all claim to be silver foxes. I swipe past the circus performers and the pleasure doms and the sad profiles and the full of themselves profile. I get a few matches early on but now I’ve swiped all there is to swipe. Eventually I swipe on my ex lover’s lover and for a flicker I think why did he choose her and not me, and I swip right on her just to see but she doesn’t swipe back on me… and then of course I think about my ex lover and the first time we fucked- fucking in his kitchen up on the counter with the lights turned off so the neighbors couldn’t see in seeing as there house was far too close for anyone with better sense than me- how I almost fell to my knees on the the floor when he stripped down naked after months of texting and flirting and several dinner dates.. he was so gorgeous and I was so thrilled to finally get him naked. And man do I miss fucking him.

Already in my inbox are men I have never met asking me "Can I see your body?” telling me "You are so sexy” and I do not know why they say these things. My profile does not include any overtly sexy pictures in the least. Then the inevitable dick pics slide. And why? Why do they want to send me a picture of their penis so soon? What flex is this? When I ask them "does this work for you? do women like it?” their answers are thoughtless and stupid; eventually I will block them/delete the conversation with nothing more to say... but for now I humor them as I wade my way back into the ocean of misogynistic culture of united states sexuality. I ought to send them a close up of my hairy armpit, or maybe my tangled pubic hair area, or a black and white one that highlights my dimpled thighs or my still-looks-pregnant soft belly/ my deflated breasts from nursing. I want to brag on my profile that I birthed a baby unmedicated in less than 3 hours catching him in my own hands while the sun rose. But you are not supposed to mention children beyond the fact of having them. Instead I write about being an introvert, lure me off the property, let’s go for a walk, and mind you know about the orgasm gap and the fuck it matters. I also mention that I am married and practice consensual non-monogamy. That I like all the classic PNW stuff- plants and swimming and hikes and farm food and gardens and music and coffee and long talks blah blah blah blah.

This weekend as I sat alone in my meadow glade, air drying after an outdoor shower, feeling the late morning sun drying me, I took notice again of how good I felt. How absent my anxiety. Every day it seems my heart races/my stomach churns/my chest seizes as I try to get from one moment to the next and to the next. I have never felt this long sustained level of anxiety the way I do now with these two small children, the ongoing murder of babies in palestine the congo and this stupid fucking regime we have/this bougie town of bellingham and the family I saw last week begging on the street corner/the mother in the FB group asking for help who is living in her car with her 6 month old baby. How the hell are you supposed to have an erotic life when this is the political scene every second of the day?

"You do know what burn out is right?” my therapist asked me last week.

"Yes of course I do.”

"You need to take a break. Get away. Go to Lopez. It’s a place you know and feel safe. You have good friends there.”

So I sent a text. I lined up the sitter for Friday. I brought the manual breast bump and a cold bag and a freezer pack. I packed not enough warm things but I read both my books and wrote and recorded a talk I’m going to be giving soon. For two nights and two and half days I mostly only had myself to tend. I get almost no cell reception on island and there is no wi-fi at my friends so I could not distract myself with any type of internet fun. One morning I woke at 5am with the birds and the air was crisp and cold; I made tea and got back into bed and felt how soft and peaceful my body was/ how much I have missed that feeling. The feeling of lingering in bed. But more keenly I felt the absent of a lover to linger in bed with. I began to recall what that is like… and now I want to be in that time space continuum again where there’s no clock - stay in bed all morning or get back in bed in the afternoon- get naked and play - see what happens. Kiss and kiss and kiss. Fuck and fuck and fuck. I want to be back in this erotic body of mine that simply cannot do what it needs and wants to be done to it alone. To be divorced some how by the mother lode to be back in my body with another- if only for half an evening. An hour. One hundred and twenty seconds of kissing. Five minutes of holding hands as we turn down and head outside of the city.

Text conversations dwindle inside the app and on my phone. The man I kissed last week texts me back vague answers and I’m chomping at the bit. We are both coming at this from similar but dissimilar spaces and all I want to know is what does a woman have to do to get fucked around her I say to my husband? I text a man I had a one night stand with two summers ago as I hear he is visiting. Maybe he’ll come through before the week’s end. I text a much younger man I dated a bit while I was pregnant and he gets back right away. He is kind but young and inexperienced; we plan a hike for later in the month. I have a picnic planned with another man I’ve matched with multiple times over the years, a fellow partnered human navigating non-monogamy in a puritanical culture and he is kind and asks me what foods I like and is already letting me know when the low tide is and texted me right away "I’m quite familiar with the orgasm gap.” But you see of course all I want to do is hear from the man I kissed last Thursday night up against my car with the inky night sky all around us and him smiling when I asked him "well do you know if you like me?” and he answered "Oh I know that I like you. I was just about to make a move.”

Edited post script to note: use of gendered language throughout. Not all pregnant and birthing people are women.

In case you missed the launch interview, in which I interview yours truly, it’s here or last month’s interview with writer Laurie Parker, which one reader texted me after reading with "I teared up”- find that one here.

This month’s interview is with a community member near and dear to me- local Whatcom County, WA based midwife Eloisa Cary. Eloisa has been attending births for over twenty years. She was our midwife in 2024 for the home birth of our baby Lars.

Please support this work by liking this post and sharing this post. Liking this post is a SUPER SIMPLE and quick way to show support AND increases the chances that this writing might get circulated to a larger Substack audience!

In Bellingham [WA] certified nurse midwives and licensed midwives together attend up to 35% of the births in this area, whereas across the nation it’s still about one percent. - Eloisa Cary

If you have someone you think would be a good fit for the TENDERS interview series- please send me an email. I always looking forward to hearing from you.

Tips welcome via Venmo - @Eleanorjburke or Paypal eleanorjburke@yahoo.com if becoming a fully paid subscriber is not feasible or something you’d like to fully commit to but you appreciate this project. Thanks for being here.

Tenders Interview Series
with Eloisa Cary

1. How is the weather in your corner of your world these days? Your physical, mental, spiritual weather? (note- Eloisa answered my interview questions over this past winter)
   

   The weather in Bellingham is rainy and gray with some cold sunshine breaks here and there. My physical weather moves a little slower, this time of year without the energy of warm sunshine. Mentally it’s a time of cocooning and cozying up. Although, with the return of spring and more sunshine, I definitely feel the lightness returning.
   

2. What are you tuned into/praising and/or grieving in particular?
   
   These days I spend a lot of time praising the presence of my husband and children as well as being given a gift of doing work that I have full passion for. I know our time together in this life is fleeting which is something I also grieve.
   

3. You’ve been working as a midwife for several decades now. How did this calling come to you?
   
   For as long as I can remember, I have loved babies. When I was six, my mother was called to the neighbor’s house to help with a baby being born quickly. I joined her given small tasks of bringing washcloths and water, oils and blankets. That was the moment I knew this was something I wanted for my life. At the time, I did not know about Midwifery. My path to this calling took a windy route, but after going through the pre-med program and shadowing a doctor, I realized there has to be another way and I went seeking out options. Shortly thereafter, I became pregnant with my first daughter and got to experience all the positive outcomes of having my own home birth. This transformation left me longing to share my amazing journey with other women and their families. This blends into the next question… Why did you want to be a midwife? During my first pregnancy, I found the program at Seattle Midwifery school and I knew there couldn’t be a better calling. Bringing babies into the world gently and riding alongside women during this transformative experience was what my heart longed for. What challenges have you faced? I think there are two challenges that have been hard for me. First, is that I am a very empathetic person. So, if there is an unfavorable outcome or the family is unhappy in some way, I carry that with me forever. I do believe it makes me a better care provider, but sometimes the weight feels heavy. Second is balance. I am getting a little bit better at this in my older years, but I have a big heart so it is hard for me to turn people away if they need care. Sometimes this creates an over full life which can be hard to balance the caring for a large family at the same time as caring for a high volume of clients.
   

4. For readers unfamiliar with the work of home birth and freestanding birth center midwife- tell me a little about what differs from Midwife care from say a certified nurse midwife or even an obstetrician/gynecologist.
   
   I am a licensed midwife, so I have to abide by Department of health guidelines and can care for normal, healthy, low risk women and babies. Certified Nurse Midwives primarily work in the hospital and can sometimes care for women who have slightly higher medical needs. For example, we cannot use Pitocin for induction because it’s a little higher risk for the baby, but a certified nurse midwife can. Obstetricians are high risk providers and surgeons. They are specialists for women and babies who are high risk. For example, obstetricians are trained to care for people carrying twins, those with epilepsy, insulin-dependent diabetes, heart conditions, etc.

4. At the turn of the 20th century most babies were born at home attended by midwives, now planned home births make up less than 2% of all births in this country. What happened?
   
   It is a complex answer but I am aware of several factors. One is that anesthesia became available in hospitals, and the wealthy were encouraged to think of using anesthesia during childbirth as a more evolved or civilized option. They also were public smear campaigns using propaganda to personify midwives as dirty and untrained, even as many of them had delivered thousands of babies with excellent outcomes. Additionally, transportation became more readily available, which allowed people to travel to a different location than their home. The hospital was a new experience that early on only a wealthier economic class could afford.
   

5. In ancient Ireland and Scotland the midwives were also the keeners- the ones who performed grief sounds over the dead. I feel like there's a fine line between ushering life and ushering it out. How does grief inform your midwifery practice?
   
   Before I became a midwife, I worked in an Elder Care Facility that was very small with just seven sweet little old ladies. Providing care as they were on their way out did feel very similar to midwifery and providing care to tiny humans riding earth side. During the child bearing age 30% of women will experience a loss at some point. I believe the experience I had caring for families whose loved ones were finished with this life has helps me to guide women who have a loss during the child bearing stage of life.
   

6. You are a Mother to five daughters. How do you make time for yourself and your family given the on-call nature of your work?
   
   I do my best not to commit to anything other than the very most important things in my life which does mean I miss out sometimes but free space in my life is extremely limited, I am continually learning about boundaries and the importance of them. I also do my best to combine tasks, for example, walking while I return emails, standing leg workouts while I fold laundry, squatting, while I do a task like chop veggies or brush my teeth, stretching during movie night etc. I have a very supportive partner who works part-time as a massage therapist. He is also a great father and very invested at home. I do believe this is the only way I am able to do the work that I do. I have done this work from the time that my children were being born, most of whom accompanied me to work for the first year of life and have only ever known me being on a call. The work I do has been a prevalent topic in our lives so they are not sheltered from the critical need for gentle loving medical care in our community. This helps them to understand the importance of this work and do their best to be forgiving when I must shift gears from caring for them to caring for laboring women and babies. What self care or community care practices have you found most helpful in doing the work that you do? Self-care for me is few and far between only because it’s not something I have an historically struggle with. In my older age, I am learning the importance of this. I feel best when I combine it with bonding with a friend or family member. So, I try to walk with a companion or do my gardening while including my family. We have a small farm, which is a team effort. It is important to me to have a some amount of playtime each week where we do board games, artwork, puzzles or family meals in a celebratory way.

7. What teachers/practitioners/beings and or places (lived or dead) have been instrumental in your life?
   
   What teachers/practitioners/beings and or places (lived or dead) have been instrumental in your life? The most instrumental person in my life I would say, has to be my mother, second my grandfather, and third, my father. From a very young age, I would say the author who got me through the most of my challenges during childhood an early adolescence was Dan Millman. As an adult most of my instructors at Smith College and amazing midwives who proceeded me, including: Ina May Gaskin, Penny Simpkin, Susie Myers, Marge Mansfield, Audrey Levine, Traci Palagi, JoAnne Meyer Ciecko, Annie Moffat, Cynthia Jaffe*, Winni McNamara, Catriona Munro, and Christine Gibbs were definitely some of my most influential teachers. Additionally, a local practitioner whose guidance I have cherished is Connie Feutz. I also feel very much in sync with the teachers: Brené Brown, John and Maya Kabbot-Zinn, John Gottman, Sue Johnson, Tino Hahn, Marshall, Rosenberg, and Harvelle Hendrix. The teachers that I continue to learn from on a daily basis and those who have truly taught me so much over the years include husband and children, my current business partner Haley, my student midwives, and my clients.

8. We know that around the world costume, clothing, and adornment carry rich meaning especially when it comes to ritual and ceremony. Do you have any particular items of clothing or accessories that are sacred to you and why?
   

   A priority for me is something comfortable as I am often up and going in the night. So items that look, professional, but feel like pajamas are are lovely. I almost always wear layers, including a skirt with a pair of cozy pants underneath. Primarily this is because it can be very warm in a birthing room but when you step outside, it’s quite chilly. I have never really worn jewelry because I have found it can get in the way if I am leaning over a birth tub to have my necklace go swimming or a ring feel painful if I am touching a client. However, I have always worn my wedding ring and will continue to do so. It is a symbol of the other, most transformative, experience in my life. Most recently my two daughters have gifted me with some very special jewelry that I love. One is a necklace that can have essential oils in it and since I don’t wear perfume due to sensitive smells with women it is quite perfect. I can wear it with a tiny amount of something pretty pure, but take it off if it’s bothering someone. The other is a spoon necklace that feels like a right of passage from my eldest, it is long enough that I can throw it behind my back and tuck it into my shirt if it’s in the way.
   

9. I think a lot of people don’t understand the political climate that out of hospital midwives are navigating in and how much of a community service midwives offer. How is it going now and what do you see as the future of midwifery care in this community?
   
   Currently, I would say the political climate is mediocre. In the past it has been more difficult to navigate. Previously, some of the hospital providers seemed very anti-midwifery and home or birth-center birth. Out of hospital midwives would more often be reported to the Department of Health for assisting women when something might be on the edge of normal. We currently have a Smooth Transitions** program at Saint Joseph’s Hospital, which is a tremendous help for improving continuity of care for clients when an emergency comes up as well as acknowledging that humans have the right to choose their birth experience. I am hopeful that the future of midwifery will continue to improve and thrive in Bellingham. In Bellingham certified nurse midwives and licensed midwives together attend up to 35% of the births in this area, whereas across the nation it’s still about one percent.

10. And… last but not least- what is a favorite sad song of yours that can be added to the ongoing Tears of Things playlist?
    

    This one is hard for me to choose so I will list some top picks that have particular significance for me in some way: Skin (SaraBeth) by Rascal Flatts, 2004 Dear Mr. Jesus, Next Thing You Know by Jordan Davis, Don’t Laugh at Me by Mark Willis, Wish You Were Here by Mark Willis, How Do You Get That Lonely by Blaine Larson, What if She’s An Angel by Tony Steiner, Never Grow Up by Taylor Swift, Supermarket Flowers by Ed Sheeran, Butterfly Kisses: Bob Carlisle, Jeff Carson, the Raybon Brothers, Westlife and Cliff Richard

Thank you Eloisa!

*Cynthia Jaffe was my first midwife for my oldest son Weston’s birth in 2009 and ran the Greenbank Birth Center on Whidbey Island. She retired from midwifery practice a year or two ago.

**Learn more about what the Smooth Transitions program here

The Monthly Delights is an end of the month round up where I share all the things I’ve been enjoying lately. This month it’s basic clothes, sour things, ADHD reckonings… and the never ending grind of caregiving!!!!!!!

"We are prone to fall in love” - Dr. Edward “Ned” Hallowell (on folks with ADHD)

and

“Learn how to manage your dark side”

b/c

"Contentment is too bland”

and

"We pick up on the tiniest things.”

Thank you for being here!
Now for the end of the month wrap up!

Read more

- Leonard Cohen, You Want it Darker

Share Tears of Things

CW: genocide, murder of innocent babies, domestic violence, misogyny

Dear Reader-

I’ve started and stopping writing about hippies more times than I can count now. From my brief stint in Northern California, my decade in the San Juan Islands, living in a tipi and a bus and a tent, my anti-vaccine and raw milk journey to vaccinating mom and pasteurized dairy, the thousands I’ve spent on things like herbal medicine and homeopathy ahem sugar pills, healing modalities, life coaching, classes and more…. sigh….there are probably at least half a dozen posts to write on the subject.

For whatever reason though I really went off on a Facebook comment (that I share later on) that took me an hour or more to write; in I tried to weave together some of these observations I’ve been formulating and chewing on for years now about about hippies. All the while juggling a long Memorial Day weekend with no childcare and a baby who cries nearly every single time I put him down.

Here’s the back story…

An acquaintance recently posted some thoughtful shares on his Facebook wall about grappling with his personal and community responsibility on how to respond to, in particular, global horrors like the Palestinian genocide. In case you somehow missed it- where recently, Alaa al-Najjar, a paediatrician, while at work, had her home attacked by an Israeli air strike and 9 of her 10 children were burned to death in their own home- one was a baby only seven months old. About 70% of Israel’s military budget comes from the United States- which is paid for by our tax dollars. Thus, we are complicit in genocide. Meanwhile Trump and his cronies just presented their “Big Beautiful Bill” yes that is what they are actually fucking calling it which has one of the largest poor to wealth transfers and cuts funding for MEDICAID and SNAP while surprise surprise increasing funding for WAR. I highly recommend watching/listening to this report and analysis by historian Heather Cox Richardson.

When you type in "Palestine” to the Substack Stock image options here’s what you mostly get - image above- some flags or landscape scenes.

But when you type in "Genocide” you get images of concentration camps, mention of the Uyghurs in China or this image below which you’ll notice signs of Palestinian love via flags and the keffiyeh, so that’s something at least for these images to be here in Substack- a platform that is also just fine with platforming Nazis because “free speech.”

But now back to the hippies…..

So this guy I kinda sorta know…. he runs and organizes community gatherings and festivals. We are loosely connected to a variety of, for lack of a better term- "hippie and hippie adjacent communities” (sub in "conscious” or "spiritual” or even "new age” and that can work too). Some examples of these: the now-shuttered Orphan Wisdom School, Imagine Fest (held on Orcas Island WA now called Imagine Convergence or something like that), Global Earth Repair Summit held in Port Townsend, Okanogan Barter Faire, local things in Whatcom County like Rising Moon Festival, community grief tending, song circles, drum circles, many herbal gatherings here in the PNW, Dance Church or Ecstatic Dance, and by extension larger gatherings in other states that I would guess by a few degrees of separation we’d be connected to like Spirit Weavers Gathering in Oregon (started in California), that Spirit Man/Spirit/Sacred??? Sons or whatever the hell they call that man’s gathering, of course, Burning Man, Rabbit Stick and other primitive skills gathering, the Matriarch Rising Festival (Free Birth Society) gathering in western NC (the equivalent of Bellingham, WA/San Juans/Port Townsend region), Midwives/teachers and doula trainings like Innate Traditions with Rachelle Seliga, Whapio Bartlett’s school The Matrona and her “Quantum Birth and Wisdomkeeping” training; Yoga festivals held all around the world and related things like kirtan gatherings…. oh and let’s not forget Permaculture classes/"PDC’s” as they are known, as well as online spaces like ancestral song circles, goddess pyramid schemes, "ancestral” nutrition skills and so many more!!!

HOLY GODDESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel exhausted already just typing out all those gatherings that are mostly attended by WHITE PEOPLE!!!!

Because if there’s one thing about white hippies I do know is that we LOVE to gather in the woods together with like minded folks. Ideally in a space that is clothing optional where we can practice our EARTHING SKILLS by walking barefoot after sunning our yoni or lingam or anus and then drinking our vortex charged non-fluoridated spring water out of a non-plastic bottle, followed by a delicious meal of a raw T-bone grass fed steak that we eat while crawling around on all fours wearing. brain-tanned buck skin since sitting in chairs is soooo bad for you and b/c that’s what our "ANCESTORS trademark” WOULD HAVE DONE!!!!!! which we then livestream to our followers on Instagram with an affiliate code for 20% off our raw meat diet masterclass. We LOVE to gather together to witness and be witnessed in our inherent divinity, by entering into conscious sacred relationship (or at least until we flow out of this one six months later to greener pastures; but then we call it “conscious uncoupling”; a term made famous by Gwyneth Paltrow when she and Chris Martin of Coldplay fame, divorced. HOWEVER! This phrase "conscious uncoupling” term was first used in the book Calling in the One by Katherine Thomas Woodward, and why do I know this? b/c I held a book group in 2013/2014 about this book b/c I wanted to call in THE ONE soooooo badly!!!!!!! Spoiler- I did not call in the one- I called in an marijuana addicted alcoholic 20 years my senior b/c I was SOOO LONELY and b/c I had gaslit myself so badly and was on a tiny island where every action I did was supposed to have some bigger meaning to my life about my soul’s journey i.e. "I manifested this relationship b/c I wasn’t doing the "right” things” - not ever rooted in systemic oppression or institution like PATRIARCHY or the fact that this was a total trauma bond where he reminded me of my ex in South Carolina- another much older alcohol who once left me with finger print bruises up and down my arm, threw me down a flight of stairs and loved to show up outside my apartment and holler “You cunt you fucking cunt you cunt you fucking cunt!!! Open the door!!!! c’mon baby open the door!!!!!!” I was 22 years old. Yet already my worth was shaped by misogyny to the point that I took him back time and time again until after 14 months I stopped being able to orgasm with him and that broke the spell, as well as my friend’s Mother - Fran, who saw me- and knew something was up and told me about SisterCare- the support circle for victims of domestic violence- it took me six months of regular groups before I even considered leaving for good. Shortly after I fled for the West Coast… for a hippie man who now says Trump "isn’t so bad.”

BUT back to us THE HIPPIES!!!!!! By gathering in the woods together we affirm for one another that we are indeed living our BEST MOST SPIRITUALLY ALIGNED LIFE; we are not sure how we achieved such a state of being, but the Universe works in mysterious ways and we trust that all will come in good timing and truly it is the result of being in FLOW STATE and letting go all RESISTANCE that which does not serve us!!! BLESSED BE!!! ALL PRAISE TO GAIA!!! AHO!!!

Copied and pasted as is from my FB comment…. I’ve put it in quotes so you can distinguish it from my commentary after.

All images here are from the public domain. They are what you get when you type in "Hippy” or "Hippies,” into Substacks stock photos.

"Slightly messy ramblings here of an ADHD mom brain...

It's hard to be in a world where I can KNOW so much suffering and horror is happening and then turn back to my cozy corner of the world and feel pretty powerless and not well organized. Beyond calling and emailing and donating I am not doing much in what I call political action. I want to take place in work strikes, divestment strategies and take a play book from the very serious and strategic organizing that SNCC and MLK Jr. did and what many indigenous people around the globe have been participating in. There are ways to do this. And they sustained momentum.

Frankly after 20 some years on the west coast I do not see white "conscious" people making any headway with this. To not politicize work when you have a platform is strange to me as everything is political. It's like not caring about healthcare when you have it until it goes missing. We take for granted things like the ability to vote, publicly funded schools and roads and EMS services upon which our society functions well. I think this is why I've never been back to Imagine fest since the only one I attended in 2017 or any other other gatherings that feel adjacent to it here in the PNW or beyond in CA beyond community grief rituals. It just feels very for lack of a better word "tone deaf" to see a bunch of fairly able bodied white folks frolicking in the woods together who then don't speak up to the murders of indigenous women, the criminalization of abortion, the targeting of trans people who literally make up less than 2% of our population, the gutting of social services in favor of privatization or critiquing the billion dollar supplement industry that has not surpassed "big pharma" etc etc. to acknowledge and critique consumer capitalism that's upholding all of this would be a good start...

there's something so uneasy to me as so many adjacent to these festival/gathering worlds/overlapping PNW circles are self-employed... myself included... and that's interesting to me in how it fits under the most problematic ethos that governs dominant north American society- that of bootstrapping...except with west coast new age language of calling it "manifestation" or "spirit led" or "calling" - I do believe in soul work AND yet I am so weary of language like this b/c it is starting to cause very real effing harm.

I spoke to some of my misgivings to a FB "friend" who was in Stephen Jenkinson's school as well about articles he was sharing about RFK jr (that I read in a village minded attempt and quickly pointed out the very apparent holes and flaws in logic, rooting it back in a feminist minded ontology) and instead of hearing me -he told me I was too angry and unfriended me. I continue to be unimpressed with most white men and women associated with, for lack of a better word- new wave new age spirituality. I go to local gatherings of adjacent friends b/c I need community but I am often left continuing to feel lonely b/c political discourse and white supremacy rarely make the table at the potluck. b/c greater organizing to enact political action is not happening.... And I don't know what to do about it b/c I fear being ostracized right? I see how folks continue to charge for their yoga, charge large sums for their healing practices from non-white cultures but refuse to grapple with the inherent racism that allows them to profit off these traditions or even say donate a portion of their causes to these cultures who continue to BEAR the brunt of our country's historical and current political policies of which many of us I would guess have benefited from even if we don't know how to name that. .... and it's all shoved under a rug. To me this is plain old white fragility and it's getting really boring and tiresome. There's always some cop out. There is a lot of disdain for research and science and for intellectual life in general that really bothers me while deification of "energy" and "spirit" and the nature fallacy. Throw a stone or two of many people who attend these gatherings and you are taken to some pretty egregious wellness influencers and characters who are doing more harm than good as they seem unable to understand what systemic issues means or how things like social determinants of health afford you your life to begin with - all the while building their businesses and "best life" on the backs of brown and black people. Now there's a new line that's becoming popular- "well whiteness is made up. who were we before we were white?" as a way to erase the very true history of this country. While yes I have and continue to learn and re-connect to my own Scottish and Irish ancestry to better understand my own inherited cultural impoverishment- I see too how even the ability to study and find teachers and resources is a consequence of my unearned privileges... I took a singing class about this earlier this year that I paid a very significant amount of money too and they platformed a teacher who said some really problematic shit and when I emailed them my feedback they did the version of new age gaslighting that makes me want to kick someone's teeth in "Eleanor we have taken your feedback to heart. We ask you to sit with this, feel it in your heart and reflect on what upset you." Not- "thank you for calling us in to the very real fact that gendered violence is a true global phenomenon and to platform teachers who are spouting off dated binaries and new age word salad is not the wisest or kindest example we could set and we will make efforts to be more inclusive and thoughtful in the future."

Thus- where is the mention of the very real hippie to alt-right pipeline that folks like Derek Beres, Julian Walker and Matthew Remski have thankfully been tracking since 2020?? I met my oldest kids dad at a Peacemakers Training Institute sponsored by one of the oldest peace organizations in the US over 20 years ago- now he is a full blown Trumper and everyone in his community acts like they don't know and still supports his business and gatherings all that thrive b/c of unearned white privilege, environmental factors etc etc etc but is that ever named or grappled with or seen as then a responsibility to help others????? ... I dunno but I think that is very off- why are there no consequences to our actions? There is a lot of doubling down from what I can see. I can speak to countless other examples here and in the San Juan islands where I lived for a decade but I am not just going to throw people under. I see each of us as symptoms of bigger issues but we are all connected to these systemic issues- but when I have tried to advance or make suggestions or offer mild critique of things- all I get is push back. So then I wonder if a BIPOC person pushed back on them how even more so would they double down? ok I'll stop for now.... but I still have a whole lot more to say on this.... hhahah!

Signed- a very tired Mom of three whose next door MIL is slowly losing her mind and faculties to parkinson's and doesn't have near enough support..... and (among other things) masters level of education in anti-racist teaching who is waking up to all the inherent regressive nostalgia, misogyny, racism and monotheism I see in white hippie spaces that I thought I was escaping when i fled the DEEP SOUTH lol!!!!!!!!! thank you to anyone who made it this far.

Here’s the first comment I got back

I turned off the notifications after that one as once again I was reminded of how deep misogyny runs. Any time I’ve gone off or pushed back to these men they call me "crazy” or "too angry” aka “hysterical” which hopefully you know some of the history around the word “hysteria” and "hysterectomies.” It’s not worth it to me right now to engage.

That’s all for now.

I’ve debated hitting publish on this for a few days and pre-school pick up is looming. Feel free to email me your thoughts on hippies!!!

Thanks to Matthew Remski, Derek Beres and Julian Walker at the Conspirituality Podcast, Katya Weiss-Anderson of Love and Light Confessionals and the Instagram accounts Healing from Healing and Mallory of This is Mallory. Many many more writers and researchers have informed my thinking but those are the few that I see really diving deep into the hippie to alt-right pipeline and have helped me connect a lot of threads.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you for the feedback on this month’s interview with writer Laurie Parker. I’m so glad it landed well with many of you.

But please oh PLEASE just hit the tiny HEART BUTTON to say so. Liking a post is a small and easy way to show appreciation and increases odds that this wee newsletter can get circulated to a larger audience here on Substack.

In case you missed it -read it here!

I also forgot to mention that the upcoming TENDERS interview for June is a local Whatcom County, WA home birth midwife. As I re-read her interview it brought tears to my eyes and once again reminded me how more than ever we need compassionate, skilled caregivers who understand and respect physiologic birth, and can be in relationship with their clients as opposed to relationship over them. She was so generous with her answers and I think you’ll come away impressed by this interview as much as I was.

My tentative plan for the TENDERS interviews for those to be released on the 15th of each month/or mid-month more or less.
If you have an idea for someone you think would be a great fit for the TENDERS interviews please email me.

Yesterday it was sunny after days of rain.

The Lemonbalm or Melissa officinalis has taken over (like it does) one of my perennial garden beds. Lemonbalm like mint and other invasive things, if one must have them, ought to be planted in pots, but sometimes you forget and put them in the ground anyways. So while I ruthlessly pulled clumps of Lemonbalm out and showed my daughter how to strip the leaves from the stalks to dry for tea, in order to keep her engaged with the task and not bother her baby brother - I made up a story about a Queen Witch named Melissa.

What sets humans apart from many other creatures on planet Earth is that we like to make meaning about just about everything. Now I could go into all the medicinal qualities associated with said Melissa/Lemonbalm or I could craft a magical story about how she came to be based solely on the fact that I think her leaf when turned one way looks like a tear, and when flipped the other way looks like a heart. It’s easy to see then how people made creation stories and children-behave and lover-come-over stories all by simply paying attention to the shape and/or habits of a thing. (Fun fact there’s also a pretty woo woo principle in western Herbalism called "the doctrine of signatures” which loosely refers to the idea that the physical design of the plant itself clues you in what it’s medicinal properties are for. It’s kind of a fun hint hint- wink wink kind of a thing.. oh this dandelion root is strong and snaky and brown and fibrous- great for digestion or how walnuts look like little brains and they’re good for the brain)

I also know that had I prattled off certain words found to describe Melissa and her healing properties- tannins, terpenes, anti-spasmodic etc etc, I surely would have lost my soon-to-turn-four year old’s rapt attention, and more than likely yours as well. And more than just have lost her and yours attention, I would have lost the opportunity to create some lore, deepen the moment, tether ourselves back to this plant - invasive and maligned as the native plant dogmatic devotees like to make it, and in that way remind us that we humans aren’t the only ones taking up space.

Thus I made up a story about a Witch who was also a Queen and also a Mother of three- two boys and a girl, who just happened to be named Melissa. I won’t tell you the story here… for I fear I cannot re-tell it and many stories can only be told in person and don’t work well to be typed down or written out. But if you have read a fairy tale or two in your day you can probably guess what happens….. Queen Melissa’s children go missing, she sheds a tear, and out of that tear a plant grows to guide the way by instructing her to make a tea of it’s leaves…she does and in the night has such a vivid dream with clear instruction she shakes her husband awake…and yes it’s a happy ending kind of story with even a generous scene of the royalty taking food and provisions to the robbers who kidnapped the children for we all know that poverty and crime and inexplicably linked

Of course my daughter loved the story and soon enough we had a very full basket of Lemonbalm leaves that are drying on the collapsible mesh rack. (which I highly recommend as a space saving way to dry a reasonable amount of herbs for a family of 5-7 or small community house of people or a lively book group who like to drink regular amounts of herbal tea).

I have been thinking a lot about Witches for the past few months (let’s be honest I’ve been thinking about Witches now for years…) as my daughter Aubrey, like I was at her age and for years since has become entranced by classic fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, The Wild Swans, Thumbelina, and more, as well as Disney movies- her favorites being Frozen 1 and Frozen 2, The Little Mermaid, Rapunzel and recently since she is "brave” enough, Brave. Over winter holiday while I was visiting my parents in South Carolina I described a game I used to play with my father; I’d direct him to lie down on the pine wood floor while I draped my blue baby blanket (knitted for me by my maternal grandmother Catherine) over my head and down along the backside of the couch while he called out “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down you hair.” He has no memory of playing this game with me. And yet- that game and that story are woven into me. I have a vivid memory of reading the story or perhaps of having it read to me so much so I can conjure a feeling or a picture of that place and in particular the garden- the tall old stone tower where Rapunzel was locked up in, and the garden below filled with the rampion her mother so craved while pregnant with her. It would be decades before I’d understand how such a craving might make you do such foolhardy things as tell your husband to repeatedly trespass into the garden of a powerful sorcereress but anyone knows that a pregnant woman’s desires especially for certain bitter greens must not be denied. In the story version I remember hearing the greens were “rampion” a foreign word to me then and now; though in later years I’d re-imagine it was arugula that she craved- a leafy sharp bitter green I only came to know once I moved west, which I fell in love with- both the taste of the bitter rocket and the name Arugula. Arugula then imprinted on me and held a certain mythic spirit of "I have made it” from South Carolina and running from an abusive relationship and the stifling humidity to what I perceived as “freedom” to a hippie man and northern California. Thus, the rampion of my childhood and the arugula of my mid-twenties became one and the same.

As so happens when we re-vist things we loved from our youth, we see things in different light all together. I read these stories now that I adored- and in particular, illustrated versions by Susan Jeffers, Mercer Mayer’s collaborations with his first wife Marianna Mayer, Trina Schart Hyman’s work (who I only just learned was a lesbian and that makes me love her illustrations even more) and I see mostly whiteness, thinness, rigid gender norms and expectations, female frailty and lack of agency. All of these fairy tale books I am reading the witches are categorized simply as BAD. We never learn why witches want to eat children. Likewise in Disney’s famous version of The Little Mermaid, of which I’ve now watched half a dozen times in the past year, Ursula’s motivations for wanting to steal Ariel’s voice seem to be rooted in nothing more than plain old spite and shits and giggles, maybe some jealousy; the original telling of Hans Christian Anderson’s classic tale is much more harrowing with an ending that feels less tightly tied up in a pink satin bow. These stories I’ve been reading, more often than not it’s not even a witch but an evil step mother - whose husband is always portrayed as a bumbling cuckold who just lucked out to have the sweetest most generous most pure of heart most beautiful daughter on the planet, and yet really needs an older woman telling him what to do - you see this time and time again from The Wild Swans to Cinderella to Beauty and the Beast to Hansel and Gretel. There’s much more to be said about these themes, like those who analyze folk tales have done and will continue to do. While this remains worthy for phd candidates and others, I don’t have time and capacity for that right now. But I am interested now, in how do I read these stories now to my daughter and how do I reckon with their long standing influence in my own imagination and mythic sense of myself in the order of things? Re-visiting an image from Hyman’s Canterbury Tales made me think how deeply ingrained romantic monogamy culture has been and was for me, as I searched and pined and pined and searched and fucked and cried and cried and fucked and journaled and dreamed and pined for "the one.” Which frankly, is not a designation or a pressure I would ever put on my now husband Carsten (yet another benefit I supposed of waiting to marry til "later” in life. A visiting friend didn’t want their child to read our copy of The Wild Swans when Aubrey pulled it out, after they learned it’s not exactly a lighthearted story. Yet my daughter like myself, is already drawn to themes of power, loss, entrapment, heartbreak, transformation, and spell casting. But who can blame her?

The illustrated stories we are reading are copies I have procured via various second hand book outlets online. These versions by the authors and illustrators I mentioned prior, were published in the 1970s- 1990s. Susan Jeffer’s The Wild Swans I loved then and now, if only for her stunning illustrations, came out when I was seven years old. The Mayer’s version of Beauty and the Beast, when I was nine. When I was between three and four I sat still enough to listen to my father read me The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, first published in 1900, not exactly a picture book. To my daughter now, almost four years old sometimes I read these illustrated books as is. Many times I read them and skip words. Sometimes I change the words altogether to try to shine light on a character, invoke empathy for a situation not given in the original, or add my judgemental commentary altogether- like telling Thumbelina to get lost from that awful Mr. Mole already!!

Last week my husband took our daughter up to the library as they like to do together. He helped her find all the princess books and sparkly books they could because this is what she wants. Later that night I read her one of the new books. It’s a re-telling of Cinderella and the origin story of how the Cinderella Pumpkin came to be. It’s a great story and spoiler- Cinderella wants to decide her own fate and turns out she falls in love with a (lady) farmer. Go read it!

After I told the story about Queen Witch Melissa who in this case as you’ve guessed, Witch means healer and herbalist, my daughter wanted more stories. Which didn’t surprise me and yet it was time for baby’s nap time and mom’s mental rest- i.e. boop on my phone in the rocking chair and see what's happening in my online babywearing community. It’s fascinating to me to consider how we learn the spectrum of right and wrong. Around the world cultures have employed storytelling for a variety of purposes- such as my impetus to get this chore done and keep the peace between sister and a cranky baby. I read a little more about the Brothers Grimm while writing this piece, which was a book we were assigned to read when I was a student in the now shuttered Orphan Wisdom School. I was reminded that that the majority of the stories collected so methodically by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were not meant to be told to children; they were adult stories and thus the rampant sex and violence that eventually became associated with earlier versions of the stories. Those that were meant for children like Little Red Riding Hood, were supposed to instill fear as a cautionary tale and way to keep children in line.

What wonders when we don’t have stories to tell about the way things are? It seems most of the stories running the culture right now are far from rooted in any community or place based setting? As much as we may like to critique the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm Brothers grim tales- they were all birthed for certain times and places and employed magical elements that seem to elevate or at least temper the hard truths sown into the story’s lessons. My parents didn’t let us watch TV growing up except for occasional VHS tapes procured from the local library when we were sick or on special movie nights- my favorites, and probably unsurprisingly if you've read this far, were Shelley Duvall’s Fairy Tale Theatre, Watership Down, and The Princess Bride. While Fairy Tale Theatre was pretty tame, both Watership Down and The Princess Bride have quite a few elements of violence and grief. I think many children and young people come to Earth already knowing Life is rife with grief and violence- and I don’t mean coercive abusive violence- I mean a ocean wave swallowing a boat during a storm, an Eagle hunting a rabbit, a man lost to the woods on a hunting trip…. stories aren’t just for bedtime fun but they are necessary for survival. Perhaps this is a bit of a philosophical leap- but it seems that without local stories say that describe a child getting lost in the woods to which eventually you might learn how to get your way out of there giving offerings to the Trees that live there, or learning to follow Deer Tracks, we are left only with stories about feelings, love, longing… these often fleeting things that are not often tethered to the actual elements we need to get by. When was the last time you heard a love song to an Apple tree on Virgin radio- sure apple bottom jeans- most modern storytelling doesn’t tell you much about what it actually takes to live in the place where you live.

I have wondered here and there over the past year on whether or not I have introduced these older illustrated fairy tales and Disney to my daughter too soon. While we set age appropriate limits for screen time, in a time of childcare crisis and not much extended family help, like many modern families screen time is a sanity- saving invention. I don’t put limits on books and her access to books except the two book at bedtime rule. I see how entranced and curious she is about these fairy tales and these princess movies. Sometimes she reads or watches them alone while I am across the room cooking dinner or writing or nursing the baby etc; often we read and/or watch them together. And I do love to see how the princesses have changed over the years- Elsa and Ana’s story shows a much more healthy sister relationship than Beauty and her sisters in Mayer’s book; Merida in Brave is a wholly different red head than Ariel (which could be, of course due to the fact that Merida’s mother is named Eleanor, and we all know that women named Eleanor are quite something while Ariel was raised by that hot head King Triton).

Last night at bedtime as my daughter begged me to stay longer, I asked her to tell me a story instead. I told her it has to start it my favorite way of all.

And so she began with "Once upon a time…”

and proceeded to tell me the sweetest story of birds and turtles and robins bursting out of their blue eggs and "bees getting nectar” and a great blue heron dipping its beak into the pond.

Other things tangentially related elsewhere on the web!

Botany lesson related to Rapunzel

More on Melissa

Jack Sipes knows The Grimm Brothers.

Of course the version of this tale I loved is now $100 for a used copy

Peggy Orenstein’s 2006 OP-ed asking is Cinderella really that bad for my daughter?

All the illustrations from Susan Jeffer’s The Wild Swans

Queer authors of magical children’s books were formative on boomers and gen x!! Margaret Wise Brown?!?!?!?

For a fun and wildly inventive subversive take on fairy tales check out Kelly Link’s book of short stories, White Cat, Black Dog.

In case you missed the launch interview, in which I interview yours truly, it’s here!!

This month’s interview is with one of my favorite people in the world, my long time friend and mentor - Laurie Parker, Mother, writer, Emmy award winning producer, abolitionist and Buddhist.

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Tenders Interview Series
with Laurie Parker

1. How is the weather in your corner of your world these days? Your physical, mental, spiritual weather?
   

   Today is March 3rd; I’m in Portland Oregon, working for the Concrete Rose Foundation, a non-profit that serves women and families impacted by incarceration, and spending time with a family member who’s going through some hard challenges. I like being in the city, I take the metro and ride my bike and walk a lot and go to the local swimming pool. North Portland is a very kind place, people look one another in the eye with the feeling of understanding that we are all going through it. There are signs of spring everywhere and still long gray stretches and heavy rains happening too.

2. What are you tuned into/praising and/or grieving in particular?
   
   Of course the grieving is reactivated from minute to minute with fresh assaults on the planet and on communities of people I know and love personally as well as the vast others around the country and the world who are suffering. The praise is for all the ingenuity of resistance and for the disruption of complacency.

3. You are an Emmy award winning producer for a documentary about foster youth; you’ve traveled the world working on movie sets, work as a producer and screenwriter; you’re a Mother and grandmother, a tender of ten rural acres, a yogi and Buddhist, a gardener and amazing home cook, and you freely give of your time and energy to so many of your friends as well as projects like Underground Writing where you teach writing in the Skagit Valley, WA prison system- what drives you to cultivate peace and justice in these trying times?
   

   The story of how I started working with system impacted people (former foster youth, currently and formerly incarcerated, people impacted by migration and immigration, people struggling with not having housing or finances) has to do with coming to feel that the world view that defines America and the globally exported American systems of exploitation is based on deeply malevolent lies that are designed to perpetuate the well-being of a very small group at the expense of the vast majority. The manipulation and deception in the system is infuriating and debilitating. Working hand-to-hand with people to help build a web of mutual benefit feels like a way to be genuinely helpful to myself and to others.

4. Without going too much into your personal story you have endured a tremendous amount of heartbreak in your life, including the death of your Mother, Jane, an accomplished painter who died when you were just nine years old. How have you handled sadness and grief over your life and what rituals and tools have helped you bear it?
   
   I didn’t get any help with grief when I lost people in my life as a child and I had no rituals then, no religion or family that could help. I left home at a young age also and had to figure out jobs, places to live, and school on my own. That situation created some good qualities in me as well as some maladaptive qualities. What helped was studying and performing dance and theatre; the inherent discipline required gives way to surprising freedom. Once you’ve gotten through the barriers of memorizing lines and learning choreography so completely that it’s second nature, then you lose all self-consciousness and it becomes like flying, exhilarating and transformative. After I moved into film making that transformative process came through writing rather than performing. I think that grief is a creative and regenerative force that stretches people into both grotesque and beautiful shapes and gives meaning to people’s lives.
   

5. You have been working in the Hollywood film industry for over 30 years now… how did you come into this work? What are you currently working on? Any exciting projects on the horizon?
   

   Everything I’m working on now is related. I am making short documentary profiles of people who have had lives shaped by challenges and struggles: one series is life stories of queer elders, another series is about formerly incarcerated people soon after their release. This summer I’m working on a film about the creative process of system-impacted artists. Those are all documentary film projects. I am also working on a short story collection that I would eventually like to make as an episodic fiction series, called A Virtuous Circle, about people in an unhoused encampment and the surrounding community of householders in a city neighborhood that takes place during the pandemic and BLM protests after the murder of George Floyd. I have many additional projects in the works that I want to finish. I think I can work nonstop up to the point when I die. There’s a funny line, “she worked till noon on the day of her funeral” something like that would be the way I want the rest of my life to be. I also want to do more real world mutual benefit work and make gardens and environmental projects.

6. What self care and/or community care practices sustain you?
   I listen to new music all the time and go out to concerts. I try to spend a lot of time in the water.

7. What teachers/practitioners/beings and or places (lived or dead) have been instrumental in your life?
   

   I was lucky to have parents who were musicians and artists and their friends in my life from birth. My mother listened to R&B, gospel and jazz singers and I loved songs by Mahalia Jackson, Odetta, The Mighty Clouds of Joy, Al Green, the Temptations, and Abbey Lincoln. My mother took me to see painting and sculpture; some of my favorites were Francis Bacon, Paul Klee, Rodin. My father read me adventure novels like Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, and Call of the Wild, and recited lyric poems like Dover Beach and Invictus and sang songs from musicals every night at bedtime, which I think gave me my theatrical bent. Being accepted into a Baltimore City Arts Program gave me an arts family after my family of origin fractured. My dance teachers in high school, Edward Villella, Bill T. Jones, Zakariya Diouf and Liz Lerman, changed my life. I first found filmmaking through dance films and then through films that were filmed like dances.

8. We know that around the world costume, clothing, and adornment carry rich meaning especially when it comes to ritual and ceremony. Do you have any particular items of clothing or accessories that are sacred to you and why?
   
   I love fashion as an art form and spent a lot of my life in costume, first as a dancer and actor, and then as an artist and filmmaker. I always loved boots and could dance nonstop for seven hours in five inch heels. My go-to power fashion as a young film producer was to wear vintage dresses from the 1920s, 30s and 40s with contemporary (1990s/2000s) designer shoes and boots.

   As an older person now, I am having fun expressing myself with fashion; my current confidence-wear are this B&W thrift store shirt and romper from Buffalo Exchange on Hawthorne.

   

   these wood snake earrings made by a North Portland artist,

   

   and this ready to wear Calvin Klein dress from Ross with this vintage scarf from Kiriko made in downtown Portland.

   

9. You have started your own artists residency program with 404 Found, tell me more about your vision behind this, how it’s going and how people can learn more about it.

   Over the last ten years I have worked with “system-impacted” people, meaning incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, former foster youth, migrant-immigrants, and unhoused people. During the same period of time I taught university MFA and professional arts programs, and I was able to attend various arts residencies as a writer and filmmaker myself. I came away from these experiences with the realization that there are a lot of creators with extraordinary talent and value that are not being supported to develop their artistic careers. That made me want to start an arts residency program for system-impacted artists. Arts residencies grant recipients time, space and finances needed to create intellectual property that will help emerging visual artists, media makers, writers, musicians, theatre and dance performers launch or build careers in the arts. The pilot residency will happen in August 2025 and will provide “radical hospitality” - funds, materials, studio, lodging, meals, a residency community of fellow artists to collaborate with, and opportunities to preview and audience-test their work in a fully supported environment. There are many ways to support this work, with funds, expertise, in-kind donations, and by helping get the message out.
   

   https://www.404foundation.org

10. And… last but not least- what is a favorite sad song of yours that can be added to the ongoing Tears of Things playlist?
    

    Here is one song that came to mind - Desperado, by Rihanna - the reason this is a sad song to me is because desperation is a powerful force, I think it’s the fuel that propels samsara, the endless cycle of suffering. But I love this song because it is beautiful and honest, and that beauty and honesty holds the promise and possibility of redemption.

This week was a soft gut punch reminding me that it’s always poor and working class men’s bodies on the line of industrialized jobs and behind the machines contributing to the ongoing destruction of the more than human world… men behind the tractors, behind the guns, men behind the excavators, men manning the trawlers, lineman balanced on the high tension wires risking electrocution, men in the prisons, digging and building and sawing and banging and jackhammering and soldering and welding and of course lying on the factory floor.

Whoever was DJing the other morning at KUGS- the college radio station for Western Washington University, thank you. That set was just what I needed to make the morning commute a bit more sweet and I got to hear this song for the first time.

This week’s song is
I Hear You Calling by Bill Fay.
Listen here.

Enjoy!

Share Tears of Things

I Hear you Calling
Written by: Bill Fay
Album: Time Of The Last Persecution
1971

I hear you calling from the riverbank
I will be coming when the air is black
All my time is lying on the factory floor
And all my time is lying on the factory floor

Some say messiah coming got to get it right
Some say messiah coming give me back my time
All my time is lying on the factory floor
And all my time is lying on the factory floor

I hear you calling
I hear you calling
I hear you calling

P.S. I have a new public Instagram page if you’d like to join me there @eleanorjburke

P.P.S did you know there’s an entire Tears of Things playlist you can play on YouTube? It’s all the songs I’ve featured here over the past couple years plus some. Enjoy!

In addition to my writing work, I am also a trained full spectrum doula, community grief ritual facilitator, folk herbalist with a focus on clinical skills, former Perinatal Support WA peer support volunteer, have a Masters degree in public school education rooted in a social justice anti-racist pedagogy, and I once ran my own Sex and Love advice booth for a couple summers at the Lopez Island Farmer’s Market!

Which means you can hire me or recommend my services to someone you care about!

If you want to pick my brain beyond 15 minutes I am for hire!

$45-$75 an hour. In person or from a distance.

Doula packages have different rates.

Scroll down to learn more.

Doula Work

What does “full spectrum” mean? It means I offer support around/related to birth, postpartum, abortion, miscarriage/loss. I have a particular passion for postpartum education/preparation and ritual support for the rite of passage that is becoming a mother/parent/father. I am also a baby-wearing enthusiast so if you want to learn more about ring slings, woven wraps or soft structured carriers I’m here for it.

Herbal Work

Plant matchmaking is one of my favorite things to do. While I no longer grow herbs to sell to clients, I still work with clients one on one. I offer consultations to help you decipher which herbs are a good fit, how to incorporate herbs into your daily rhythm and where to source quality herbs and products.

Grief Work

"Shared joy is double joy. Shared sorrow is half sorrow.”

I don’t know where that quote comes from, but I’ve been carrying it with me for at least twenty years. We were never meant to carry the immense complexity of sorrows modern times ask of us all alone. Want to host a Community Grief Ritual or work with me to craft your own personal ritual? Earth grief, birth/motherhood/parent grief, ancestral grief, and grief of white supremacy culture, are some of my particular threads of grief that I continue to learn about and work with.

Sexuality Peer Support

From my own personal experiences as a sexual being raised in the deep South and misogyny to begin with, healing from domestic violence and rape, to following my intuition and starting a Sex and Love Advice booth in 2013, to my graduate research on the link between sexual violence and the lack of comprehensive sex education and what an animistic framework to relationships might look like, to coming to terms with my own inherent neurodivergent non- monogamous pan-sexual self… I have been wondering, thinking, healing from, studying, listening, failing, and trying to put into practice what liberatory sexual and intimate relationships can and ought to look like for many years. While I don’t believe we can ever truly achieve sexual freedom under white supremacy and capitalism, I do believe the more we get free the more we undo generations of harm going forward and back.

General Peer Support

Sometimes we need a compassionate perspective from someone outside our immediate circle. I offer peer support virtually or in person at our beautiful rural property in Whatcom County, WA. From reviewing a birth plan to preparing to set boundaries with in-laws postpartum, from navigating intimacy in parenthood to non-monogamy; from creating ritual to support a transition in your life, to trying to de-center the human experience and court a more animistic way of living; or simply, you’d like to wonder out loud with someone about the generational effects of settler colonialism and who understands what it’s like to live broken hearted all of the fucking time…. reach out. My soul callings, the red threads I’ve been following for decades, along with my education and life experience means I bring perspective and insight not often easily gleaned from dominant North American culture.

Email me !

Some “formal” Education

• 2005 BA in English- creative writing, University of South Carolina

• 2008-2011 seasonal organic farm work, Horse Drawn Farm, Lopez Island, WA

• 2010 Sacred Doula Training, DONA, with Carrie Kenner, Orcas Island, WA

• 2014 Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault volunteer training, SAFE San Juans

• 2014-2016 Orphan Wisdom School, with Stephen Jenkinson

• 2014 Herbal Medicine for Women, Dr. Aviva Romm - ongoing

• 2016 Stirring the Cauldron, Sexuality Training, with Elfi-Dillon Shaw

• 2018 SAR- Sexuality Attitudes Reassessment with Dr. Roz Dischavio of ISEE

• 2018 Clinical Herbalist Training, Wildroot Botanicals, with Leslie Lekos

• 2019 Masters in Teaching, Secondary English, WWU

• 2019 FLASH training (sex education for grades 6-12), Bellingham Public School District

• 2020 Herbal Practitioner Skills- Blue Otter Herbal School

• 2022 Holistic Doula Training, The Matrona Institute, with Whapio Bartlett

• 2022 Postpartum Doula Training, Whole Body Pregnancy, with Erika Davis

• 2022 Permaculture Design Certificate- Inspiration Farm, Jane Campbell &Paul Kearsley

• 2022 Certificate in Perinatal Support Washington, Best Practices in Prevention, Identification and Treatment of Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders

• 2023 - WARM line parent volunteer, Perinatal Support WA

• 2023-24 Community Grief Tending facilitation training with Thérèse Charvet, Laurence Cole, and Mary Hart

• 2026- Grief and Loss in the Perinatal Period- PS-WA

  ---

The Monthly Delights is an end of the month round up where I share all the things I’ve been enjoying lately.

Become a paid subscriber to join the fun! AND if becoming a paid subscriber is not financially possible for you, email me and I’ll comp you a subscription, no questions.

This month: animal names and how they are wielded, a book my daughter deemed as “spring time” we’re enjoying, butter yellow, and a show I’m watching and yet also kinda wondering why?

Hopefully you’re making time to dance barefoot in the grass with a bouquet of wildflowers in your hands. If not, are you even really living??!??!

Read more

In graduate school one of my mentor professors jokingly said from time to time that I needed to start a podcast, "You could call it A Piece of my Mind with Eleanor Burke! or "Don’t get me started…” Other people have said this over the years, and so last summer I decided it was time, working with my therapist to figure out a time line to make it happen for a goal of launching in January 2025.

A long distance friend was in town last summer and came over for a visit; he is a professional musician and also runs a music school online. I told him my idea of starting a podcast and he also loved the idea and thought through some logistics with me. Later he texted me a link to a good starter microphone he recommended, "Look! It’s even pink like your studio!”

Share Tears of Things

Alas… do you even know HOW MUCH TIME it takes to produce a podcast?

While you are also keeping a trying-to-walk baby from too many head injuries and eating dried up old food from up off the floor? While your oldest child is working on getting their driver’s license and yells at you every time you push down on the imaginary brake pedal and holler “ten and two!!”? And the almost 4 going on 17 year old is fussing at you while you prep garden beds- “Mama don’t dig that Worm!!” AND you are also fielding your Mother in Law’s Parkinson’s induced anxieties and memory issues- “Are there people in the house?” she asks… and the next day breaking into her automated pill dispenser and hiding important papers despite her writing herself a note that says "DO NOT TOUCH.”

Unless a person has no children, has also a very well paying job or is willing to take out a sizable loan in order to have the start up costs to fully produce a podcast- and pay people for their time to consent to being interviewed- all things I do not have time and capacity for- I conceded, rather quickly last year, that a podcast, a well executed, regularly programmed, well edited creation, is not feasible in my current stage of life. In lieu of that I am turning to a less labor intensive form of interview- the written correspondence type!

The TENDERS interview series aims to introduce you to people I think you’ll appreciate knowing are in the world. Tender people tending good things!!! You’ll hear from writers and artists, midwives and doulas, grief facilitators and song birds, educators and activists, carpenters and gardeners, elders and young people…

In my monthly mothers support group the facilitators follow the same guidelines month after month. One of those guidelines is that they don’t ask anything of us that they themselves aren’t willing to do. After the reflection and opening prompt is read, a facilitator always shares first to break the ice, risk vulnerability, and help us feel more comfortable to share what’s on our hearts and minds.

So in the spirit of that guideline… and to give you some idea of what the bones of this interview series will look like, I present to you this month’s Tenders Interview Series… with me! Thanks for humoring me! By answering my own questions, I can feel out how I want this go and tweak prompts as needed. Month to month I have planned for a blend of stock questions I ask everyone and personal/avocation specific questions. I suspect this series will illuminate though, that there are more common threads between TENDERS than not.

Next month you’ll hear from one of my favorite people in the world, an Emmy award winning producer, writer, Mother, grandmother, homesteader, Buddhist, abolitionist, and one of the biggest hearted people I know…. stay tuned!

And if you have someone you think would be a good fit for the TENDERS interview series- please send me an email. I always looking forward to hearing from you.

Please support this work by liking this post and sharing this post. Liking this post is a SUPER SIMPLE and quick way to show support AND increases the chances that this writing might get circulated to a larger Substack audience!

Tips are also welcome via Venmo - @Eleanorjburke or Paypal eleanorjburke@yahoo.com if becoming a fully paid subscriber is not feasible or something you’d like to fully commit too. Thanks for being here regardless!

Tenders Interview Series
with Eleanor Burke

1. How is the weather in your corner of your world these days? Your physical, mental, spiritual weather?
   

   It’s SPRING here in western Washington and the local weather Facebook page I follow said we just passed a record mark for how much rain we’ve had recently. We had a torrential rainstorm that was so loud it reminded me of rainstorms in my home state of South Carolina so that thrilled me. We got for our first Nettle harvest recently and tromped around our neighbors woods so that really filled me up! It’s a beautiful lively time of year with the pacific chorus frogs singing us to sleep every night in our seasonal pond, trees blossoming, mud- luscious (as ee cummings calls it) as it is, and everything greening up. I’m logging 5-6 hours of sleep a night unbroken, which any parent of young children knows is a win! Noting seasonal transitions is more and more my spiritual practice and keeps me tethered amidst the awful political climate we have found ourselves in. Attending my local Unitarian congregation most Sundays I can, after not being part of a church community in over twenty years keeps me going.
   

2. What are you tuned into/praising and/or grieving in particular?
   

   Rage and grief wise- in the past couple months it’s become clear to me that my ex-partner, my oldest son’s father is a Trump supporter. That’s been really weighing on me- more than I’d like to admit and I got into a stupid text argument with him- yes I know…. What’s wild to me is how beyond-critique MAGA folks are of Trump- like I don’t know a single Democrat who was not also critical of Biden, Obama and any other democrat we’ve ever had in presidential office. He and I split up almost 13 years ago, but met in our early 20s at a retreat for young people hosted by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which is one of the oldest peace organizations in the the US. He was a key influence in a lot of my alternative and hippie views- got me into the organic food growing movement, supported my desire for a midwife out of hospital birth and we were really active in community building work for many years together. I’ve been surprised by how deeply hurt and betrayed by this I am. He’s also refused to answer a straight question about concerns I have like most MAGA and it’s bewildering to say the least. We already don’t have a great relationship to begin with so this isn’t helping things.
   
   I’ve been following the recent case of ICE illegally and violently seizing local farm worker activist, Alfredo "Lelo” Juarez; it’s clear he was targeted for his organizing work for farm workers. So if you’re WA based please call your local and state reps, Governor Ferguson’s office, as well as Attorney General Nick Brown’s office and ask for Lelo’s immediate release if you have not already. Link to ways to support him are all here.

   Praise wise- I’m going into my second month of solo parenting three children while my husband works out of state. I think I’m doing a hell of a job all things considered! I’m putting my first garden since 2021. My basic needs are met and I’ve got some wonderful people in my life. I finally have jeans I love that fit my postpartum body!! The SUN is returning to western Washington which is always a huge relief.
   

   

3. You’ve been writing for many years. You are also a Mother. I think Mothering/parenting can be a form of art as well. Has your definition of being an artist, being a writer, changed since having children? How does your work as a writer inform your parenting and vice versa?
   

   I think I am still debunking the ingrained myth of what being a WRITER is "supposed” to look like, i.e. Thoreau in the cabin alone, undisturbed. (Lest we forget, Thoreau’s MOTHER brought him food she cooked for him and did his laundry!!!! I mean damn!) The reality for me as a MOTHER WRITER is that I write when and where I can- especially not having consistent affordable childcare.

   
   When I was pregnant with my first child, my son Weston, 2008/2009, a local writer mother raved, "just wait til after your baby is born, you’ll write so much, all this creativity will flow out from you!” That was a hard expectation to put on me. I very much did not experience this. In fact quite the opposite- any writing life I had was subsumed and halted by Motherhood. I put together a collaborative zine with a handful of people but only had time/bandwidth to produce one issue. I had postpartum depression and anxiety that no one caught as there was hardly anyone talking about PMADs back then. I wanted to start a blog but my partner frowned on that idea and was too cheap to buy us internet and I was the default stay at home parent so had no money of my own and my imposter syndrome got the better of me and I didn’t start a blog until after we broke up.

   Then, after my daughter Aubrey was born in 2021, a Facebook ad targeted me for writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s school Corporeal Writing, and specifically for a class about writing and motherhood with writer-mother Amanda Montei. That class was really powerful for me, and it was Amanda who later encouraged me to start this Substack newsletter. In class I met other Mothers who were/are in the process of figuring out what being a MOTHER WRITER looks like- turning that hermit in the woods and very masculine trope on its head. I’ve learned to embrace the notes app on my Iphone as well as voice memos to capture ideas- I also do a lot of thinking out loud with my husband and some close friends, via text with certain friends, and I use my Instagram stories to “think” out loud about things I am connecting the dots about. Writing as a person with ADHD can also be incredibly challenging as my brain gets CROWDED with so many brilliant thoughts haha, connections pinging quickly/I’m time skipping all over the place trying to piece it together- so in that way I am so grateful for this practice and my training as a writer where I can SLOW down enough to write it or type it out. Like any creation the VISION realm moves much faster than the physical realm and that is something that has stymied and depressed me. I am getting better at recognizing that the socially sanctioned pace for creative work is not in alignment with my particular pace. I love looking to other creatives like Fiona Apple - genius writer/poet-pianist/chanteuse that she is, who has taken seven and eight years between some of her albums.
   

   Over the past few years of mothering I continue to be inspired by bell hooks who was writing about the need for tax funded childcare in 1984, that care work is NOT GENDERED and that black women in the US continue to bear the brunt of so much systemic injustices; Silvia Federici tracing the roots of capitalism to the violent persecution of witches- aka traditional midwives and healers aka women, Amanda Montei on standing up for feminism, Robina Khalid on midwifery and raising activist children, Angela Garbes on essential labor, Virginia Sole Smith on mothering and diet culture, and Ericka Hart on sexuality, queerness, blackness and parenting.

   I’m trying to weave the personal-is-political and vice versa more so into both my writing and my Mothering work. Writing as art in the sense that an artist’s role is to resist dominant culture, speak truth, make beauty, bear witness, and IMAGINE other modes of being and loving. Mothering as a form of resistance work.

   I keep this print in my living space to remind me.

   

4. In 2023-2024 you completed your training to become a community grief ritual facilitator while pregnant with your last child. Tell us about this work, why grief work, and what do you hope to do with this training?
   
   I attended my first grief retreat in 2020 a month before WA state went into lock-down. I had a full body feeling of "THIS IS IT!!” like total kinship/attraction to/with this work and knew I had to figure out how to be more involved. I’ve attended several more retreats virtually and in person since that first one, and then got the opportunity to apply for the mentorship program fall of 2023.

   
   Now, end of this month I am going to be facilitating my first grief ritual for the women of my Unitarian congregation at our annual women’s retreat (which will also be my first time attending). I would love to incorporate community grief ritual into birth work as well- so many people are walking around with birth trauma or fraught origin stories because of the medical industrial complex, infertility, pregnancy loss, birthing and becoming parents in a village-less time where you can literally go into debt for having a baby. Birthing humans and becoming mothers and parents when healthcare is not a guarantee and family leave is nearly non-existent is not ok. Not to mention the history of systemic racial gynecological abuse, the legally sanctioned and violent pushing out of black and indigenous midwives from practicing and serving their communities - you understand how that history then is directly linked to the horrific outcomes we see now for maternal outcomes in those communities, and why it’s so important to support projects like Jamaa Birth Village a black owned midwifery center in Missouri, or here in WA- Hummingbird Indigenous Family Services.

   As a trained full spectrum doula who has supported people around miscarriage/loss, abortion, traumatic birth, perinatal mood disorders, being trained in grief ritual facilitation is a great tool to have. Grief work and birth work absolutely go hand in hand. In the future, I would love to collaborate with some other Birthworker/Grief Tenders I know to offer retreats focused on pregnancy, birth and postpartum.
   

6. What self care or community care practices have you found most helpful in doing the work that you do?
   

   ALONE TIME!!!!! (which I rarely get). Writing and reading. Getting outside. Dancing, walking, swimming, listening to music, singing. One on one deep friend time. Keeping an intellectual life is key to my sanity with small children right now. Staying engaged to local issues, networking, cooking good food for my family and not giving myself a hard time when I go on my regular cooking and cleaning strikes. Setting and re-setting boundaries. Resisting the very real hermit that lives inside me and getting out of the house. ADHD medication seems to be helping? Weekly therapy with my wonderful therapist and for WA state low income health insurance for paying for my therapy. Baby-wearing my baby in one of my beautiful carriers that I’ve collected over the past year so I can get things done.
   

7. What teachers/practitioners/beings and or places (lived or dead) have been instrumental in your life?
   
   My mother Anne in particular has been a huge influence in my philosophical and intellectual life, in my mothering, in my home making, in my multitude of intersecting interests. My father Lewis and his work as a law professor, a birder, and a historian and civil rights activist. I’m one of six siblings and we all get along and they are amazing Aunties and are all doing good work out in the world.

   THE SOUTH as a region/zeitgeist/climate where I was born and raised has had a huge influence on my life- so much more to say on this- from being raised adjacent to southern good old boy white christian nationalism to southern hospitality in a very real way to the deep and sustaining contributions of black people.

   The suburbs and mall culture and a very cliquey hellish public high school.

   So many kind and brilliant writing English teachers and professors.
   
   So many singers and musicians!
   

   The sea islands of Fripp and Edisto off the coast of South Carolina.
   
   Lopez Island, WA where I lived for a decade and where I became a mother. It was such culture shock to me coming from the suburban South. The back to the land hippie culture, epic potlucks and summer weddings, the inter-generational community, the anti-capitalist means of bartering and support that people still engage there, the deep female friendships I forged there, the small town intimacy of it all, all really challenged and wooed me. BUT it’s very much a bubble existing within/and because of things like Seattle wealth and white privilege; there’s truly an aspect of what I’d call 21st century feudalism that just felt really hard for me to ignore after all. (Some day I’ll write more on this)

   
   My husband Carsten and I have navigated a lot in our relatively short time together of seven years- me completing graduate school, moving in together pretty quickly, him taking on my son, then us getting pregnant and having two babies in the last four years, non-monogamy off and on, global pandemic, his mother’s declining health/Parkinson’s (he is her only child), countless renovation projects, food growing, tending ten acres, buying a complete fixer upper of a house across the country in South Carolina, and getting legally hitched. Not only does he have a brilliant mind and we can really engage on that level, but he can also fix or build just about anything. He’s a wonderful friend and father.

   
   And of course my children- Weston -15, Aubrey age 3, Lars- about to turn 1. I feel really in awe of these humans I get to share life with.

8. A key influence in your life, Stephen Jenkinson, grief practitioner and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, often told students that “to look good you gotta look good.” By which he meant that looking deeply at things, sometimes means we need to dress in certain ways to aid our approach. We know that around the world costume, clothing, and adornment carry rich meaning especially when it comes to ritual and ceremony. Do you have any particular items of clothing or accessories that are sacred to you and why?
   

   Two things come to mind:

   
   1- This very faded gray green bandana that I was given at a community building workshop close to 18 years ago in Berkeley, CA. It was given to me by an older friend George Moskoff, who was really dear to me and my partner at the time, as we were all into this form of deep circle work called community building from FCE- Foundation for Community Encouragement. I ended up crying buckets of tears and snot, and at one point, George kindly, handed me this bandana. I’m assuming he said I could keep it as I never gave it back. At this point this bandana is incredibly thin, edges frayed and I’d estimate has had gallons of tears and snot wept/blown into it! Any time I go to a grief retreat now or a deep ritual of any kind I bring this bandana.

   

   and
   2- Horse hair earrings (I have the long pair on the right) made by a friend of a friend on Salt Spring Island- these earrings were made for me in a trade for some herbal elixirs I used to make. They have traveled to Scotland and back with me. Any time I wear them I feel like a key part of myself- sexy, grounded, fierce as fuck.

   

9. What are you working on these days?
   
   Tending home. Driving children to and fro their various schools and play dates every day of the week. I do SO MUCH DRIVING RIGHT NOW it’s wearing on me. Getting my seeds in the ground- marveling again at the work it takes to grow food and praising the genius of SEEDS- all that information and energy and power in a tiny ass seed- it’s truly humbling and inspiring.

   
   Making key decisions about our house in SC as well as dreaming and planning for projects here at our home/my mother in law’s land here in WA.
   

   Trying to figure out how to get the folks I asked to interview for this TENDERS series to answer the questions hahahah- I am realizing due to the nature of these questions it’s not an interview you can just sit down and answer in an hour- full disclosure- answering my own questions thoughtfully took close to four hours- and all the people I’m interviewing are not being compensated for their time, so I need to figure how to cull some of these questions!
   
   I’m hoping to do a TED talk style presentation/show and tell about my baby-wearing carrier obsession sometime this Spring. And end of April, I am facilitating my first ever Community Grief Ritual to women in my church community at our annual women’s retreat- this will be the first time I’ve attended this retreat, and so I’m excited all around - my husband will be home by then since being gone from Washington since December!!! And I will finally get a weekend away from home and children, to connect to myself, to connect to other women, and facilitate work I deeply love.

10. And… last but not least- what is a favorite sad song of yours that can be added to the ongoing Tears of Things playlist?
    

    As folks know I LOVE a good sad song…. what comes to mind right off, is not one I’d classify as sad so much, but is definitely tender to me, and deeply personal to me as this song has been a steady companion for the last year.

    It’s called You and I, and was written by Port Townsend based community song leader and elder, Laurence Cole. Laurence was one of of my mentors during my Community Grief Tending Mentorship. In March of 2024 we gathered in person for a four day retreat, and I was nearing my last month of pregnancy. So baby Lars was with me for the duration of that training, which makes me wonder what role grief work will take in his life. The last day of our grief retreat, they got me and the other pregnant mama in the middle of a circle and sang this song to us- right to our wombs and the babies inside- it was over forty people or so- I cried the whole time. Later, we sang this song as a church congregation to dedicate ourselves in a community way to baby Lars, my daughter Aubrey, and our family. Now It’s the song I sing to Lars every night when I put him to sleep, so it feels very much a part of me these days. My daughter sings it to him too now.
    

    It’s also a great song to sing with others!

    https://www.laurencecole.com/album/you-and-i/

I have completed one whole week of solo parenting three children (with five more this go around still to go). In addition I am dealing with my mother in law’s continuing aging and cognitive and physical decline due to Parkinson’s.

It’s been a hell of a week.

I do not think people understand how a baby’s nap schedule is every thing.

How I must time my day around his naps. How last week’s time change fucked everything up and I am still dealing with the consequences of that.

If the baby does not take his naps, then he doesn’t sleep well at night.

If he doesn’t sleep well at night, guess who else doesn’t sleep well at night?

I cannot write at night. My brain needs fantasy, comedy, humor, decadence- it needs the third season of the white lotus, it needs the moms clamoring back and forth about the Sakura Bloom simple silk carrier drop that just dropped 10am PST Monday 3/17, it needs Ebay scrolls and Cup of Jo recommendations and Hannah Louise Poston make up tutorials.

I am creating all day long. I can’t understand Moms who also sew and make art and lift weights- what is not getting done? who is watching their children- where is that money coming from to pay someone else to watch your children- people saying being a stay at home mom is a privilege and yes in many ways it truly is, but also I have simply have never had a job that paid me enough to afford the expense of childcare - is making a baby not enough? I just kept the baby from pulling a plant on top of his head- aren’t you thrilled for me???? My body is making milk to feed a human 24 hours a day seven days a week in addition to making scrumptious nutritious food to feed my offspring who are always hungry!

I scramble to find a minute to write between nap and school pick up and setting mouse traps in my car and scheduling.

Yet why do so few people understand the work I am doing? Why do we think it’s o.k. that so many of us are doing this in almost total isolation?

If I am trying to make it seen that the invisible work of Mother hood is indeed a sacred work long over due for compensation, and yet I am not able to bear witness to it, will anyone ever know it?

If I am a writer and a writer is an artist and an artist is here to bear witness can I hit “publish” on this piece as is and unfinished? Can we frame it and hang it up in the gallery and people will study it and ask what does it all mean? Why don’t writers who are also artist publish drafts, notes, unfinished bits and bobs? This piece of writing, witness bearing while the baby now needing a diaper change punches the printer button below me and the timer for the muffins goes off and I have twenty minutes now before I need to gather the keys and the wallet, and the post school snacks and the diaper bag and the diaper carrier, dig out the re-usable shopping totes, double check I have all the things I need before I head out for the first school pick up of the day.

Will we continue to simply sweep women’s work, mother’s work, care work under the rug?

Nearly half of all children are on medicaid in this country. Medicaid healthcare has been my primary healthcare the entire time I’ve lived in Washington state. It paid for both my midwives, it paid for my babies vaccinations, my children’s teeth cleanings, it paid for the horrific boil I had to have lanced last year from an infection I got during the fragile time of early postpartum. But as many women note - in this country you can go into debt simply for giving birth.

How can I write then when my work of home tending prevents me?

Am I still worthy of the small monetary compensation this writing project generates via paid subscriptions? For weeks now I’ve thought I ought to turn off paid subscriptions since I have not finished a post for you readers in ages.

What if I kept the paid option on and only write twice this year…would that still be worth it to you? Some writers have turned off all subscriptions to make their content free, and I admire this as I have always had a hard time charging for any work I’ve done. Yesterday I went to see about a part time job for a disabled, single mom of two who needs help in cleaning and de-cluttering. I told her my hourly rate was $20-$25 sliding scale, knowing full well that local cleaners start rates at $35/ hour and that’s on the low end. Am I selling myself short? Is this simply b/c I know I have a husband who has money, parents who can bail me out (yet again if need be)- maybe so… or simply b/c I want work to be accessible and this is a way I see my ongoing life’s practice of mutual aid and community tending?

I have now solo parented three children while managing massive changes in my mother in law’s care team as her Parkinson’s continues to wreak havoc in her and our days- do you know how many hours of my days have been spent just orienting and educating new care givers? How ironic they are paid for their work, but also at a pittance, and am I not

Out of the blue I got an inquiry for a doula client which excites me.

And I am helping support this wonderful class coming to my town in May.

You can register here.

Western Washington is dreary as all get out and I am pining for the South Carolina sun.

My ex- partner- a man I fell in love with when I met him at the age of 21, who taught me so many things, who tried to support me in the ways he knew best how, who left me for another woman going from one shared bed to a next with no space in between proving to me once again that men need women way more than women need men, is now a fucking Trump supporter.

My heart is so heavy.

"Thank you so much for all your help.” I said to our/my son last night. He is 15. He is so handsome and kind and capable. He cooked us dinner. He bathed the babies the other night. He got the 3 year old ready for bed. The baby fusses when he sees his big brother because he wants to be with him. While my husband works out of state on our fixer upper house in SC, my teenager is helping keep things at home balanced and sane.

"I need to compensate you. I ought to give you an allowance.” He nods.

"Oh I see how it is” I say. "You’ll take my money for this work of helping tend our home and the little kids, but you don’t think I should get paid for this?” (referencing a family discussion we had with my mother the week before about care work and how he said he doesn’t want kids because ti’s so much work, and yet tells me that it’s not a job and therefore doen’’t require compensation.)

He nods, looks sheepishly at me, and concedes,

"Damn. yeh you do have a point.”

Now off to change a poopy diaper and rush off knowing I’ll be late for first school let out pick up all so I could write off this missive to you.

*SAHM- stay at home mom

The Monthly Delights is an end of the month round up where I share all the things I’ve been enjoying lately.

Become a paid subscriber to join the fun! AND if becoming a paid subscriber is not financially possible for you, email me and I’ll comp you a subscription, no questions.

Is it just me or did January speed by? With me JUST wrapping up this end of the month post shortly before dinner time here in eastern standard time.

Here in South Carolina we’ve see 19 degrees Farenheit to a balmy 65 degrees today and yes I’m wearing a tank to as I type this. I also put on lipstick to write this- sometimes I need that little extra motivation, as in lipstick makes me feel more put together, so yes, whatever helps keep my butt in the chair so I can write and research and put together a fun little digital collage for y’all.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, or as is the nature of LIFE- the Tears of Things interview series is off to a sloooowww start as uh, trying to track people down in their already full lives is a lot to answer interview questions has not yet happened... I’m hoping to get something published for February but we shall see. Especially since the people I have asked to interview are the types of amazing people who are already giving so generously of their time, monies, resources, and more.

If you know someone you think would be a good fit- justice minded peace loving kind radical types from artists to poets to midwives to community grief facilitators to doulas to farmers to chefs- feel free to email me!

Thank you for being here!
Now for the end of the month wrap up! And yes we’re getting take out

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This year
I am going to grow food
I am going to grow food
I am going to grow food
again

I am dreaming of a garden
a garden of gardens
a garden to bring to life
this year of 2025
of Nasturtium lined beds inspired by Monet’s garden
red orange gold spilling out into the paths
I will defrost the placentas
buried deep
in the freezer
I will go to the local nursery
or my teacher’s farm and buy Hazelnut trees
I will plant Hazelnut trees over the placentas,
these two organs
that grew my babies
that kept my last two children alive
inside my womb.
we will give thanks
pour oblations of honey, mead, milk
on the damp dark Spring ground

Later on I will bury cut potatoes in long trenches/hill them over
like Ken taught me to do oh so many years ago
I will slip tiny clay encased carrot seeds into rows
I have marked by dragging along the end of my hoe
I will sprinkle Kale seeds or arugula or flashy troutback lettus across the top
I will build a trellis for pole beans
to grow to the sky
I will plant all the flowers
and all the herbs
I can fit
into my fifty by fifty foot kitchen garden
I am telling you
I am dreaming to life
Towering SUNFLOWERS, re-seeding Calendulas
Ballerina tutu cosmos, Bells of Ireland,
the best-blue-of-all-time Bachelor buttons,
frothy Queen Anne’s lace and baby’s breath,
dangling red Amaranth, spikes of Snapdragons
Borage, Yarrow, Feverfew
Zinnia, Tithonia, that lime green Nicotiana I love so much
Echinacea, Elecampane, Marigolds and Poppies that never keep
no matter how long I hold the flame to their ends
I will make bouquets of odd numbers
like Kathryn taught me
I will make bouquets and bring them to my mother in law
who in her parkinson’s hoarse voice told me
on a beautiful day last fall when I invited her outside - “I don’t belong
outside anymore”
I will visit the gardens of my gardening friends
swap starts, take a small cutting, share seeds
snap off a pea, take a whiff of a cottage rose,
linger in the sun with them this coming summer
I will ask them
again
to show me their magic
plant-whispering ways

When I look at my garden I will see
loved ones and failings
Valerian from Kristin
Motherwort Grace gave me
miniature alpine strawberries from Heather -
the strawberriest strawberry I’ve ever had!
Lynden Blue grape I let die
fingers crossed Bruce gives me another
their concord grape flavor unparalleled!
the starts I ordered from the herbal nursery in CA
all dead save Cramp Bark
(and thank you for asking - she’s thriving)
Sambucus Cerulea I planted as a wee bairn
only to be eaten down by Deer, now well over my head
Joe Pye from Kristin
Ladies Mantle too
some flower seeds in a jar I still haven’t spread out
Purple Irises and crazed Honeysuckle I should have known better
than to plant as she’s well over six feet high,
but the neighbor round the corner said "Here!” & pressed a small vine into my hands
I will look at Blueberry and Plum, Pear and Apple (Florina, Akane, and Spartan)
planted by my husband and mother in law long before I came along,
and I will groan
knowing the bounty come fall -
there are only so many apple pies one can eat,
so much pear butter ones need,
but still, what a problem to have!!!!
I will check to see if tiny Witch Hazel by the back door still lives
Shasta daises Lillian dug from a job and brought home
Nootka Roses I missed from the island; I bought a bundle from the conservation sale - there will be even more blooms this summer

My last baby will walk this summer
he will walk into this garden of gardens
stumbling as he goes from all fours to two
my daughter will turn four this summer
and she will walk into this garden of gardens
knowing she can eat this, pick this, share this
my son will turn sixteen this summer
and he will walk into this garden of gardens
harvest food for a dinner he will help make,
grumble this spring about the digging and the raking and the shoveling
my husband will walk into this garden this summer
and he will help finish all the tasks he knows and I know I will forget/ get distracted by nursing the baby/soothing a nerve/cloud gazing/ starting a meal/returning a text/ looking at this beautiful garden of gardens in awe and delight

This year
I am going to grow food again
this year
I will grow food
this year
I will grow food again

P.S. here is one of my favorite local places to buy seeds from