This is the bi-weekly-ish newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore a little bit of everything that’s on my mind as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. You can listen to me read you the newsletter by hitting play above - or you can click the little link above and to the right to play in your favorite podcast player. If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it!
I keep a perler bead cow taped up on the wall above my bathroom sink. It’s an icon to remind me of the kind of loving I want to do in the world. A few years ago, Maeve was making this elaborate cow out of perler beads - those teeny tiny plastic bead things that you arrange in patterns and then iron together to create something new. We were on vacation at a house we had rented, and, unbeknownst to her, she was working on it on a wobbly table. After working on it for hours, she went to iron it together, and the whole thing crashed to the floor. She completely lost it. My first instinct was to rationalize her grief* - all the beads are right here, you can redo it, we’re on vacation, get over it, a perler bead cow isn’t worth losing your mind over, etc.
But I said none of those things. I held her, told her I was so sorry, and whispered to her to let it all out. She screamed and cried - getting progressively louder for a few minutes, until she stopped, resumed position at a more stable table, and started over. She gifted me the finished cow, and it’s been hanging on my bathroom wall ever since.
Of course, there were a hundred (thousand?) times prior to and there have been since the cow incident with my children, my husband, and loved ones when I haven’t handled their grief well. When I’ve skipped straight to sunny skies ahead or given them solutions when they just wanted to be held or any number of other rationalizations because I’m really good at those, but I keep the cow because it reminds me of who I want to be.
I also keep it where I can see it several times a day to remind me to offer this same gentleness toward myself. I was a kid who was often called overly sensitive. Heck, I’ve had employers say it to me as an adult! I remember when I was around Jasper’s age now that I finally mastered that ability to swallow my tears back down so that I could still talk. I could never (still haven’t) figured out how to keep my eyes from watering, but I learned quickly that using my contacts as an excuse covered that up, even though in hindsight, I’m sure I wasn’t fooling anyone. Having your own children is this beautiful invitation to reparent yourself too, to be gentler to your own kids in the ways you were wounded, and, in so doing, somehow healing yourself in the process.
All of this has been on my mind lately because fall is associated with grief. Sadness is more prevalent this season if we’re tuned into it. It too is an invitation - to get curious about what we need to grieve or what new layers of old griefs are resurfacing, to lean into our grief about who and what we’ve lost, to feel all of it.
I love how Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about grief in Braiding Sweetgrass:
If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again…Until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health.
Grief as a doorway to love. If we don’t grieve what needs grieving, we can’t be as fully open to love as possible. If we don’t grieve what needs grieving, we’re somehow spiritually cut off from wholeness.
I have a long list of things that I love about my yin practice, but the space it provides for me to do this hard work is at the top of that list. Americans don’t do grief well. We don’t do “big” grief well - the things we think about as worthy of grieving like a really close family death - but we’re really terrible at the so-called “smaller” griefs that we all experience after having lived for even just a bit on this planet. And we have no clue how to do communal grief (just take a look at the pandemic for exhibit A).
This season - especially, especially in the Fall of 2021 - is inviting us to sit with our so-called big and little griefs, as well as that communal grieving that continues to well up because we refuse to face it in a meaningful way. It is the doorway to more love and wholeness on the other side.
*I feel a little squirmy about using the same word we use to describe the devastation my friend’s children are facing at the death of their mom as I used to describe my child’s hurt over her wrecked craft project. I’m doing it anyway because I think it demonstrates the deficiency of our language around these kinds of things and because I think grief, like trauma, is a continuum whose intensity varies tremendously based on whether or not it is given space and validation in relationship.
Rants and raves
👍 I make this every other week (do yourself a favor and go ahead and triple it like we do), and I just wanted to share it in case you’ve been missing out. #soupseason
👍 Grant and I both really loved this - mostly great acting (Vignette annoyed me at a few points), several storylines, romance, underlying political and sociological themes, and fairies. I would like to get sucked into another story with more than one season please. Reply to this with your suggestions!
👍 More stuff I’m loving lately over on the blog!
👎 I am so mad at Senator Manchin, but then I’m annoyed with myself because obviously the entire Republican party isn’t even willing to discuss any of the actual “Americans first” proposals included in Biden’s infrastructure package. No paid family leave this week was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. [excuse me while I go scream into the void and figure out how to help fund challengers to my equally maddening senators and congresswoman].
Stuff worth sharing
I’m only picking two things this week because I think dismantling of body and beauty norms is so necessary for our flourishing - and dear God, I desperately want things to be better for my kids in this department - and these two writers have been really instrumental for me in that work over the past year or so especially:
First, read this from Virginia about recovering the joy of clothes - for ourselves but also warning for our kids (especially daughters). Aha moment of the month was this line: “flattering is just code for slimming.”
Then follow up that with this adjacent piece from Anne Helen talking about when fashion become more about sameness for her as a child and further fleshing out how problematic the idea of flattering is:
“Flattering” is the vernacular of body discipline. It is a way of convincing ourselves that an item of clothing is or is not for us, simply because of how someone else thinks a body should look in clothes. If that sounds weird to you, it’s because you’ve been swimming in this understanding of how your body should look in clothes your entire damn life: that legs should be long, breasts contained, skin smoothed, waists pronounced, measurements proportional. That if something does the opposite to our body, it should be rejected.
Seasonal view of the week
When it’s not raining, my walks on the trail have been breathtaking this last week or so!
Cheers to a good cry or scream into the void or however else feels good to let it all out in the week ahead,
Sara
but first, let it all out