The Practice Sessions: 10 minutes a day
Growing our reciprocity and resilience with the more-than-human world
Hello beautiful human,
I’m curious how the month has been for you. I’m interested to know if you tried any of the easy ideas around growing and nurturing our social capital, aka, our circles of friends, family, and besties? Do you notice any shift in how you feel and how your calendar is shaping itself?
I’ve been leaning into appreciating my work colleagues this month, a great group of people that I never would have met or known without working at the pharmacy. Life is so random (or maybe it’s not) and getting to know my coworkers has been a joy I never expected.
I also just got back from a weekend celebrating my mother’s birthday - and amazingly, the whole family could be there! Not just my two kids and my partner with me, but my brother’s whole fam too. That so rarely happens! It was a joy to have the entire crew together under one roof, loud, laughing and food-addled.
I love my family and I enjoy my coworkers. Not everyone is so fortunate but whatever our situations, I bet there is someone that we can appreciate. I bet there are one or two relationships we can nurture in small and not-so-small ways.
And here we are, almost to May. Which means, for me, garden centers and digging in the dirt. It’s about time.
And. Here within the well-defended garden walls of this inviting space, we have an opportunity to stretch, breathe, and maybe imagine and begin to create something different and more resilient, not to mention healthier for ourselves and the planet.
We recognize that within the chaos of the present moment new things are possible. We can remember other ways and try them out in the privacies of our practices.
In March we focused on reconnecting with our own physical, emotional and mental health in small incremental actions. Then in April, we expanded our lens to focus on the people we’re connected to: family (given or chosen), friends, colleagues and even the strangers we cross paths with as we run our errands and move through the world.
Now, for May, can we expand even beyond our human circles to shine some awareness on our connections and interdependency on the more-than-human world we are enmeshed in?
Can we learn to appreciate the resilience and abundance available, when we work WITH nature rather than trying to tame, subdue and extract all the resources around us? What would that feel like?
A lot of you reading this will protest that you already know to respect the Earth our mother, that you don’t see it as a promise of wealth to be used and extracted. You know it helps us ground to literally walk barefoot outside. You already donate to environmental causes, try to avoid single use plastics, plant flowers for bees. I believe you.
And I also believe these patterns and paradigms are very deeply rooted. Where is your growth edge? Understanding other species as peoples also? Learning that “weeds” have value? Listening to trees?
Everything is budding, leafing, and getting ready to bloom. Everything is tender, new, vulnerable. It’s not supposed to be a comfortable season. Let’s stretch a bit.
demonstrates beautifully the sort of reciprocal and relational moments we can have with the natural world in this post which features (no surprise if you know me) a dragonfly.
The pdf embedded below offers thirty-five daily-ish prompts—more than enough for a month—designed to help us appreciate and deepen our connections to nature, wherever and however it appears in our lives. Have fun with it. For some of us, that means the satisfaction of ticking each one off daily like a fun extra-credit assignment. For others, we’ll skip around like a hopscotch on the page, and take breaks when we need to. We might find one we love and do it repeatedly. Maybe for some of us one of these suggestions will take us right off the map entirely, leading to a next step and a next in a way and direction that feels right.
Here’s to the adventure—one day at a time!
Nestled within An Inviting Space, we already practice the radical notions of gift economy and reciprocity. This is another in a growing series of Practice Sessions that emerged from my gratitude for the individuals who support my writing with their paid subscriptions. Members within the shelter of these paywalls have opportunity to deepen and explore ideas and notions, practices specific to resilience and creativity: in other words, we’re learning and/or remembering how to THRIVE, as individuals and in community. Wisdom comes through the collective, and the invitation is always present to join us.