Here for you, Volume 1
Exactly eight months later...
::taps mic:: Hi friends! Hello!
We made it to 2020!
It feels like Move and Groove ended a lifetime ago, and also yesterday. New Year’s week feels like as good a time as any to rename my newsletter (Here for You, because it is, and I’m trying to be) and dust it off, even if I’m not ready to make any promises about frequency.
I don’t have a year in review — let alone a decade in review — Greatest Hits list to share. Here’s the scattering of seeds I can offer tonight:
Dandelions, roar!
For the second half of the year, my newsletter labor of love was Dandelions, which I launched with Joanna Eng on Mother’s Day 2019. We’re rooting (get it?) for empathetic, brave, social justice-hearted families, and yes that is a mouthful, and yes we do try to live up to the tagline in every issue. On the first and third Sunday of each month, we send a roundup of resources and articles related to social justice, families, and a loose theme — like family separation, climate change/climate justice, bodies, thoughtful summer reading and travel, and more. Sometimes we share our innermost thoughts, too.
Read why Dandelions will take up even more of my time in early 2020, or just head here to subscribe if you haven’t yet.
Our next issue goes out this Sunday and will come with a stellar* Spotify playlist. *I can call it that unabashedly because Joanna made it, which will surprise no one who knows us both.
Reflection time
If you’re still in the mood to look in the rearview mirror at the year that was, or a compass for the year that will be, a few links I’ve appreciated this week:
Alicia Garza’s 2020 visioning exercise and worksheet (via the Healing Justice podcast) — worth the half hour if you can set one aside
Courtney Martin’s 20+ Questions to Ask for 2020 (via her newsletter) — fans of the three birthday questions will like these
An ambitious decade in review exercise from Tiff at The Wild Mama Project (Instagram)
And I love this idea from Ava DuVernay (Twitter)
Links
Just a few that I’ve been slowly saving up to share here:
Bresha Meadows Thought You’d Understand (Huffington Post). Tons of folks shared this and it took me awhile to read. I’m glad I did.
Need to buy a birthday gift for someone soon? Idea: Pre-order a book that’s coming out later, if you feel confident the recipient will enjoy it. They get at least three sub-gifts as a result: anticipation, then snail mail, then the joy of reading! Two I meant to put on my Christmas list are Molly Wizenberg’s The Fixed Stars and Rachel Wilkerson Miller’s The Art of Showing Up.
From the summer: On things that go viral, on this country’s sickness: This piece about the photograph of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria (Rewire.News), and this podcast episode about video footage of counter-protestors in Charlottesville (Terrible, Thanks for Asking).
Eve Tuck’s very specific, revolutionary ways to make the Q&As that follow panels and conference talks better for everyone. (Twitter; hat tip: Prerna Abbi-Scanlon of Moxie.cc)
How do our habits create burnout in others? (Anne Helen Peterson’s weekly newsletter, which is one of my most favorites) “If you’re actually serious about treating burnout — yours, your partners, your future children’s — you have to be serious about treating it for people you might not even know.” Related: Self Care Isn’t Enough. We Need Community Care to Thrive. (Mashable; hat tip: Loryn Wilson Carter’s newsletter); Deanna Zandt’s Unspoken Complexity of Self Care.
Also related: If you practice yoga and haven’t done so yet, take a deep breath and let the Yoga is Dead podcast into your brain and heart. And if you are a white person who practices or teaches yoga, read these blog posts from Bear Hebert: Beyond appropriation: A letter to my fellow white yoga teachers. (If you’re here in Chicago, my good friend Rajya Karipineni is about to start leading a restorative yoga class on Friday nights; it’ll be worth your investment! I’ve also heard good things about Inner Sense Healing Arts.)
For everyone, not just parents and teachers: 10 Surprising Ways to Help an Anxious Child Calm Down (Psychology Today); “every single Friday since Columbine” (Readers Digest).
Poem
Via the recently-rebooted Pome daily newsletter:
The Conditional
Say tomorrow doesn't come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun's a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt's plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.
Ada Limón (2013)
Thanks for reading.
Wishing you good health and restful sleep, much love and many potlucks, and the fierce determination to get the people we need into Congress and the White House in 2020.