✍🏽 December Writing Workshop is LIVE! Grab your spot here (Sunday, December 18, 10am - 12pm PST). This is our last workshop of 2022 and I hope to see you!
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➡ A reminder that if you register BEFORE December 1st, it’s $250 off and you get an additional 60-minute coaching session with me before we kickoff in January.
Read details here or check out the application here.
💡 Over in the SELF MADE community, November is for NOURISHMENT. We’re exploring nourishment through the lens of BASELINE, a foundational tool we reevaluate every quarter or so.
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Forms of Love
Daniel Baylis
Sometimes I wonder,
what’s the point?
Why be good? Why care? Why try to change things?
Why—when we continue to wreck each other?
Yet I keep moving forward.
Not because I am confident of any outcomes,
But because I am still susceptible to sweet things:
a sunset,
a cup of coffee,
a warm blanket,
the smell of lilacs,
the sound of my mother’s laughter,
and all the other common forms of love.
Sometimes I wonder,
what would the world look like,
if each of us decided to become,
a form of love?
💖
The holidays are already a time of nothing-time, of not doing, of not knowing what to do with not doing, of sitting around, of eating one too many of all the things we wouldn’t usually eat, of sleeping in and trying to let ourselves off the hook for sleeping in, of nostalgia and grief and sadness, of loneliness, of loneliness made more acute by being surrounded, of bad moods and feeling guilty for them, of crankiness and trepidation but also joy, if only small sparks of it, of a can’t-help-ourselves-but-look-forward turning, of orienting by no more than a few-fifths of a degree back toward the sun, which, chaos be damned, is where we’re heading now. And I’m talking about a literal sun, about the next-up solstice that blessedly comes no matter how awful we are to each other, but also, of a metaphorical one, the one you feel as a star in your gut upon reading this poem and taking a beat to wait for the answers that come when we pause along enough to wait for the answers.
The answers to these questions are what remains underneath all the terror of living inside this terrifying, neverending, time as a spiral, full-of-death year. It’s the banal chatter with shopkeepers and grocery store cashiers and the man ringing up the half-rotisserie-chicken-dinner-meal. It’s holding babies and sniffing the crowns of their soft skulls. It’s that last choking sip of dregged up chai after a whole cupful of smooth sweetness. It’s memories of offering some muscle when a neighbor struggles to carry an unwieldy box to their car, springing to help without having to think twice. It’s winking like a nerd anytime anyone makes eye contact to counteract the absence of smiles. It’s the staggering grief of losing a loved one and then staring in wonder at the soft shoots of baby blades of grass emerging on surrounding hills and at the planets aligning in rare formations in the sky and the hummingbirds that chase each other around and through the plum tree outside the window every single morning like clockwork.
Part of what it means to be human is to mostly careen through life without noticing the mundane holiness of the every day. Poetry offers a pause. It’s that weird thing that happens when a small, or messy, or routine life moment we’re mostly just trying to get through is suddenly and without warning elevated to the realm of the sacred. It’s the overwhelm that hits when our bones recall the fleeting nature of life. It’s visceral, tangible, but so slippery: we can’t live there long, and this is another part of what makes us human, another thing we’ll have to figure out how to forgive ourselves for.
The thing about holidays and poems about love is to acknowledge the passing of time. It’s a humbling down, a remembering that as much as we crave the light, as desperate as we are to bask in a patch of it on the kitchen floor, it won’t be long before we’re back hunkered down under blankets and in front of space heaters, ubiquitous chai in hand. It’s embracing contraction as kindly as we do expansion. It’s remembering our animal bodies, it’s owning that whether we notice or care or not, we are in conversation with the world around us: with the tides, and the planets, the presence or absence of the sun. With each other. With the dogs and the cats and the squirrels and the rats and the crows and spiders and snakes. The light is coming, but so is the dark, and there’s nothing we can do about it, no real way to prepare (we’ll try anyway).
And I’m sitting here, cozy by a fire, staring out the window at a quiet redwood scene, and I’m fantasizing about warm, sandy beaches, and minimal clothing, and fresh coconuts, and then I’m back inside the questions and yes, it’s uncomfortable. I am hollowed out, and what is pressing its way in are not goals and intentions and trips and milestones and celebrations, but the tenderness of gratitude, for our smallness and flaws, for all it took to get us here, yes, through this year, but through all the years before, too, that have us looking together at a future that is not written, that has us scared and uncomfortable but also earnest and reaching, despite our best efforts, despite knowing better. Because we can’t help ourselves.
Sending every last one of you all my good everything today. I hope your holiday, if you’re celebrating, is full of softness and ease.
🪐
If you long to deepen into yourself and your practice (which is to say—your life); if you desire the richness of community and the magic that can happen inside a safe container; if you have big dreams and a wild imagination but feel scattered and unsure how the fuck to get started, EVOLVE will offer new ground for you to stand on—and then launch off. We’ll be learning, adapting, growing. We’ll be HAVING FUN. We’ll be accountable to each other. We’ll be making friends. We’ll be fucking up the status quo. We’ll be creating beauty and joy and delight.
SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, coach, and recovery advocate based in San Francisco, CA.
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