June Musings
Happy Solar New Year lovers,
If you would prefer to listen to this newsletter, you can find the audio version below.
A prayer for the year's nadir
I hope the year's nadir is helping you to shed old skins. Here in the Dacy-Hingee family, we are shedding the skins of our beloved house. Preparing it for rental achingly slowly with a rumbling, wiggling, little girl attached to our chests.
I hope the year's nadir is holding you. We are learning a lot about holding in this household. As Ember's stormy periods blow through, we learn that there are some nights when the only way to feel safe is to have full-body contact with your parents. To be held without interruption. Cuddle without end.
I hope you are decomposing what no longer serves you. Three years ago, moths found the scarf I crocheted with the first person I fell madly in love with. The moths feasted. That scarf got me through a master's degree and three Canadian winters. I have been holding onto the bones of the scarf, trying to work out how to knit it back together. But there were just too many holes. The thing was more hole than scarf. As the light waned on the solstice, I buried it in the forest behind our rapidly emptying house.
I hope you are growing the things that you need to grow. Every day I am emptying my body of liquid, of calcium, iron. I drink and drink, I eat and eat, so that my body might become food for a hungry girl. Every day, I am giving my body forth, and in return, my little girl grows rounder and rounder.
I hope you are feeling love. Here in the Dacy-Hingee household, we are learning to feed my infinite thirst by visiting tiny bites of rainforest. I gush over the decomposers: take endless photographs of lichen, mushrooms. Recently, we took fifteen minutes to watch a throuple of black cockatoos feed a tiny baby. We held our own tiny baby. We walked back to the carpark. Our tiny baby mewed and mewed to eat. It was bone-achingly cold. We turned the heater on in the car. We watched the sunset. We placed her on my lap, and she melted into my body as she began to eat. The tree trunks were painted red with the crepuscular hour. My whole tiny family sitting inside the sunset with me. I have everything I have ever wanted I thought.
Prescription for hyper- and hypoarousal: learn to be a mammal
I found the below piece of writing in my morning pages from 2023, written just after my cousin died. I was thinking a lot about addiction. These days I am in my own small, exhaustion-driven addictions: dragging myself through the days on caffeine. You know the feeling when you find something you wrote in the past, and it speaks to you about your present moment? Perhaps with a lucidity you didn't know you possessed? I hope this little heartbroken note from 2023 holds you as much as it held me last week. Sitting in my cold, rapidly emptying house, with my daughter on my lap, feeding her. Stroking her head. Thinking about breaking cycles.
In addiction, in hyper- and hypoarousal, presence can be frightening. Moments of presence bring us back in touch with a ravaged mind and body. Photos of my beautiful cousin, washing her beautiful baby's head.
The one cure I've learnt for our epidemic of hyper- and hypoarousal is to very, very slowly learn how to be a mammal. To spend time with a good therapist. Time in gentle nature. To spend time with loyal, kind friends, and to take in the moments of clear joy in tiny sips. Slowly. Slowly.
Teach your exhausted body that the world can be safe. That underneath the terror, there can be gentleness. This has taken me years. Learning to walk in the forest without needing to distract myself with music or more potent substances. This has taken me years, and has given me my life.
Everyone is the protagonist. My cousin was the protagonist. And now she is dead.
So? Go slow. Be gentle. When the numbness rises up, be slower, be gentler. Don't try to fix yourself. Don't "push through" your pain. Treat yourself like the precious fragile thing that you are. The sweet little mammal that you are.
You are the protagonist. We can't afford to lose you.
Thank you
I am learning more each month about what this newsletter does. It is a place for me to share my work without the creative straightjacket of making for institutions. It has also become something richer: allowing me to understand my life as it happens. These musings give my months a rhythm and a filter. It is an honour that you take the time to read them.
