In Tending: Essays

Want to talk about this live, with other folks who really Get It? Check out these related writing + meditation workshops from our spring lineup, below.

Re-Claiming Our Power: A Meditation + Writing Workshop

Wednesday 3/25, 12pm-1:30pm EST (11am CST/10am MST/9am PST)

About this workshop:

Capitalism and patriarchy love to tell us, especially women, that there is an expiration date on our personal power. That our wisdom and talents become irrelevant at midlife simply because our bodies and faces look different. That we need to buy new things for those bodies and faces in order to become “relevant” again. In this workshop, we put our K-12 teacher hats on to share stories from history that reveal that our communities have always needed our gifts, and they always will.

About our guest expert for this workshop:

Kate Carson (she/her) is a somatic love, sex, and relationship coach. After experiencing major shifts in identity and intimacy in her marriage following a late pregnancy loss, Kate left a career in science and engineering and education and re-trained as a coach, supporting women moving through other major life transitions, from pregnancy loss and infertility to menopause and cancer treatment. Kate’s work focuses on how to work with big life changes that feel out of our control, and how we can still live well, connected and alive inside of exactly what’s happening right now.

Read more about Kate in Part One and Part Two of her interview with In Tending.

»Register here for Re-Claiming Our Power on 3/25.

Clearing Space for Grief: A Meditation + Writing Workshop

Wednesday 4/1, 12pm-1:30pm EST (11am CST/10am MST/9am PST)

About this workshop:

In grief, we need the time and space be held in community, a space big enough to hold both our grief and your love. In this space, you will be supported in creating your own rituals and writing practices to help you heal what hurts, while also sustaining your ongoing connection to what still matters.

About our guest expert for this workshop:

Emily Marlowe, LCSW, PMH-C (she/her) is a licensed clinical social worker based in Louisville, KY, who specializes in trauma therapy. In 2021 she experienced the devastating loss of her first pregnancy when she was 21 weeks pregnant. This experience, while earth shattering, has allowed her to re-grow into someone who is able to truly witness and hold grief. Since then, she has been honored to guide others along their paths of grief and healing through her work as a support group facilitator.

»Register here for Clearing Space for Grief on 4/1.

Marking Complicated Mother’s Day: Tools for Self-Compassion

Wednesday 5/6 12pm-1:30pm EST (11am CST/10am MST/9am PST)

About this workshop:

Parents and caregivers deserve a space to mark Mother’s Day in the way that feels authentic for us–especially if it’s complicated. Together, we will talk about what it means if we do not neatly fit into the boxes prescribed for women and femmes on this day. We will share our stories of struggle, estrangement, loss and everyday awkwardness. We will learn how to harness the power of both fierce and tender self-compassion practices to bring healing awareness to what feels hard about this day.

About our guest expert for this workshop:

Lisa Sibbett (she/her) is a career educator, proud auntie, and longtime meditator. She lives on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people (Seattle, WA). Lisa is the founder of The Auntie Bulletin, a newsletter and community for people who offer meaningful care to children who are not their biological kids – also known as alloparents. Lisa’s readership includes extended biological family members, child-free chosen family members, grandparents, foster parents, godparents, step-parents, and educators, who spend significant amounts of time helping out with other people’s kids. It also includes people who have decided, after long and difficult family-building journeys, to embrace a different kind of caregiving path.

Read my interview with Lisa about why Mother’s Day is so complicated here.

»Register for Marking Complicated Mother’s Day on 5/6 here.

Removing the barriers we've built against love

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:05:16 GMT

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. — Rumi

Last week, I wrote about the Five Hindrances, an ancient Buddhist teaching on the five ways that we get stuck when attempting to start or maintain a meditation practice. These include:

#1: Torpor or sleepiness

#2: Restlessness or anxiety

#3: Ill will or anger

#4: Grasping or craving

#5: Doubt.

This week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re exploring what it might look like if we viewed our relationships, and not just our meditation cushions, as a space of practice.

For example:

If we feel too tired to make the effort to connect, how can we become more curious about that?
If we feel so distracted and busy that it’s hard to make time for real relationship-tending, how can we re-center ourselves?
If we’re blaming someone or something else for our discomfort, how can we re-claim the agency we have to shift this dynamic?
If we or our loved ones are serving Veruca Salt vibes in our relationships, frequently chasing golden-goose proxies for safety, happiness and belonging instead of the real thing, how can we gain insight into what we really need?
If we constantly wonder if we’re even worth loving, or if we really matter to the people around us—how do we work with that?

In my experience, these pressing questions can arise can arise even if we’re not in an intimate or monogamous relationships. They can arise with our children, our parents, our in-laws—anyone with whom we share a life, a set of vulnerabilities, and a desire to truly connect.

Of course, sometimes allowing the connection to become slack, to allow distance and quiet to fill the space between us, can be a form of skillful means.1 As Prentiss Hemphill has said, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” However, working with the Hindrances in our healthy relationships can help us to build the muscles necessary to forge coalitions across much bigger chasms of perceived difference. I truly believe that is the work that is needed in the world right now.

P.S. You’re also invited to join me and Kate Carson, sex and relationships coach, as we take this framework further in Re-Imagining Intimacy, a meditation and writing workshop for In Tending readers, coming up on Feb. 28!

#1: Torpor

What parent/caregiver is not exhausted much of the time? Please raise your hand. And then tell us where you get your drugs.

For real, though, tiredness can be a huge but ultimately ho-hum-common hindrance within loving relationships. It’s just hard to maintain real, authentic presence when you’re pooped. Parents of young children know this. People caring for aging parents know this. People doing both really know this.

On the cushion, if you feel tired, the guidance is simple: take a nap. You’re allowed to sleep. Just try again later. Especially if you’re new at this.

I find this works in relationships, too. Trying to do our best to help each other rest, without bringing judgement into it, can be an excellent antidote to everyday torpor.

That said, there are some forms of torpor that can manifest as long-term patterns of behavior, and these can derail a relationship as easily as they can a meditation session. These are areas in which a secondary piece of advice on torpor—practice with your eyes open—can take on deeper resonance.

Practicing with eyes open

Practicing with your eyes open on the cushion means just that. You open your eyes, widen your perspective, and focus on what you see. You consciously decide not to go to sleep.

Practicing with your eyes open in relationship might mean you bring greater awareness to:

Disparities in your relationship around rest and leisure. Instead of pretending you don’t see them, you can ask your partner if they have ideas about how to make rest feel more equitable around here.
Avoidance disguised as torpor. Often this manifests in a mental pattern I call “hard = impossible.” If you’re constantly “too tired” to share the labor of tending the relationship—co-planning the date, reading the parenting book, showing up fully for couples therapy—practicing with eyes open might involve imagining how much more tiring it will be to get divorced2, and then acting accordingly.

Note: If you experience chronic fatigue, your tiredness might be related to underlying health issues—hormonal issues, iron or vitamin deficiencies, depression. (I have endometriosis, so I experience all three, and can relate.) Skillful means in this case might look like enlisting the help of a healthcare professional to find out more.

#2: Restlessness

Parenting, especially amid the current poly-crisis, is a non-stop masterclass in tolerating uncertainty. When kids are little, we’re constantly checking to see if they’re breathing as they sleep. When they’re older, we worry about cyberbullying, school shootings, and red-pilling. These are all legitimate concerns. However, restlessness doesn’t look like mounting a legitimate response to these legitimate concerns. With restlessness, everything seems urgent, but nothing ever gets truly resolved. Instead, this pattern looks like putting banal concerns and status-seeking behaviors ahead of things that would lead to true resilience.

This might look like:

Being “too busy” to engage in self-care. I.e., we might get so busy decorating the house for the holidays or planning a big splashy kid birthday that we forget to find time for that doctor’s appointment we’ve been putting off.
Missing bids for connection due to distraction. This might look like assembling the the perfect fantasy sports team, but failing to actually be a team member to your partner. Or getting so caught up in solving the Times crossword puzzle that you don’t notice your kid needs help with an actual academic struggle in school.
Feeling too restless to focus on tending connection. This could look like burning up so much energy folding the laundry and mowing the lawn that there’s no energy left to engage in loving touch and presence at night. Or being so focused on keeping the train of extracurriculars going while a loved one is sick or grieving that you don’t see these as opportunities to teach kids about how to slow down and show care.

In each of these cases, it’s not that you’re “not doing enough.” It’s that you’re not noticing and then doing what is most needed.

Bringing more focus, prioritization and intentionality to your relationships, in this case, could look like a weekly meeting with your partner where you decide on how to triage what matters. Following through. And/or getting outside help and accountability if ongoing issues like impulsivity, distractibility and avoidance have been hard to resolve in the past.

#3: Ill will

Anyone who’s hit a rocky patch in an important relationship has likely heard of the Four Horsemen of Relationship Failure. These terms, coined by the Gottman Institute, are all different forms of ill will. They include:

Criticism: Coming in hot with a verbal attack.
Contempt: Using your body language and tone to convey disrespect, even if you’re not saying it out loud.
Defensiveness: Refusing to own your role and help repair what was broken.
Stonewalling: Ignoring your parter. Giving the silent treatment. Acting busy instead (see above) to avoid resolving a conflict.

On the cushion, if you’re having a hard time cultivating peace inside, the guidance is to slow down, breathe, and practice metta meditation. This style of meditation, also known as loving-kindness meditation, invites us to offer ourselves safety, good health, happiness and peace—and then to extend this wish outward. Even to a loved one who is being annoying.

I am sorry to say that despite how treacly and overly sentimental this sounds, it actually works. This practice has likely saved my marriage many times over, and also probably saved me from being thrown in jail at least once.

That said, if you’re too fired up for loving-kindness practice to feel authentic, I get it. I’ve also found it helpful to engage in RAIN meditation to work directly with the anger, or to offer myself some self-compassion.

The point of all this inner work is not to let someone off the hook for their bad behavior. It is to direct the inherent power and clarity that comes with anger in ways that actually benefit you, and that also look more like love.

Conflict without violence

When you’re ready to engage in conversation with a loved one, you might also practice non-violent communication3—another sentimental-sounding concept that works very effectively, in my experience.

This can look like:

Starting conversations with observations rather than judgements (“We agreed to meet at 9am and you arrived at 9:15” versus “You’re always late!”).
Claiming agency over your feelings using “I” statements. (“I feel anxious when we’re late.”)
Stating a positive need or request—what you want to see happen next time. (“Could we leave earlier next time to grab coffee?”)

These things are hard to do when I’m very, very angry, which, again, is why I meditate so often. My husband can confirm.

Per the Gottman Institute, you can also learn to de-escalate conflict through these actions:

Expressing any appreciation that might be relevant. (“I appreciate that you thought of stopping to get us coffee on the way.”)
Taking any responsibility that might be yours to take. (“I know that in the past I’ve said how much it means to me when you remember how I like my lattes, so I get why you made the choice that you did today.”)

#4: Craving

In my experience, craving can look a lot like restlessness. But rather than being an experience of being “all over the place,” in craving, we do have a single-pointed focus. We’re just focusing on something that’s not going to bring lasting peace—only a temporary reprieve from discomfort.

Craving also often co-arises with torpor or ill will, when we are confronted with the harmfulness of our behaviors and cling tightly to them, denying or fighting reality rather than accepting it and taking action. Craving co-arises often with doubt as well, when we find ourselves craving a level of reassurance, control or certainty that is unrealistic and unsustainable.

If you find yourself frequently arguing about the following in your relationship, craving may be a part of this complex picture:

Focusing finances on wants vs. needs: Too much money being spent on gambling or shopping, in such a way that you find yourselves going into debt, or shackling one or both partners to a toxic job.
Focusing time on wants vs. needs: Too much time being spent on “virtuous” activities at the gym or office, beyond the point of necessity and to the detriment of your home life.
Focusing energy on feeding or fighting cravings vs. tolerating discomfort: One partner is engaging in addictive or compulsive activities, while the other person tries to manage the fallout.4

On the cushion, one common tip for craving—for coffee, or food, or a different kind of meditation space—is to ask yourself, What do I really need?

In our relationships, this question can be confronting. A partner who’s willing to go into doubt in order to fill the house with fancy decorative pillows might have a hidden, misdirected need for safety or loving touch. Sitting with this need, investigating where it comes from, feeling the well of grief that accompanies it, and considering how to get this need truly met—that’s harder. But more honest.

Craving as consolation prize

In my experience, craving also arises when we believe that we won’t be heard if we ask for what we really need. We know that the pretty dress or the delicious cake is only a consolation prize, not the real thing, and yet we cannot give it up, because if we did, we would not get everything we need; we would get nothing.

This feeling is so real, and so hard. In cases like this, we need support and space to truly grieve. This RAIN meditation, and this Internal Family Systems-inspired meditation, may help you more deeply connect with the parts of yourself that deserve to be heard.

That said, you also deserve to be heard by other human beings. This is why we have parent/caregiver support circles here at In Tending, and why therapy can be so helpful. Because ruptures in belonging call for relational healing, not just solo self-helping.

Consider the consequences

Life is full of uncertainty; ideally, our communities and/or healing containers teach us the skills to cope with this reality, not to hide from it. Otherwise, we’re wasting our time. Considering the consequence of wasted time, and other downsides and opportunity costs of craving, is another way that we can move differently when it comes to craving. For example:

“When I smoke, it tastes gross, wastes money, and puts my health at risk. I need to develop other ways of coping with my anxiety.”
“When I drink, I get mean, feel awful in the morning, and regret it later. I need to develop other ways of quieting my mind and relaxing after work.”

Mindfulness training itself can be very helpful for developing these coping tools.

#5: Doubt

Doubt is a many-headed hydra. I find that when we strike down one form of it, another often arises in its place. Doubt manifests as our inner hater, a voice that tells us that we’re not ____ enough. Not serious enough, not smart enough, not talented enough… the list goes on. In relationships, doubt can manifest in similarly varied and sneaky ways:

Doubt about yourself and your own lovability. For example: when our partners reassures us that our bodies are perfectly lovable, but we don’t believe it, so our intimacy suffers.
Doubt about your worth as a partner. For example: when we avoid planning dates, reading the parenting book, or showing up fully in therapy—not because we don’t want to or can’t be bothered, but because failure feels terrifying. What if my lover doesn’t like the restaurant I chose? What if the book reveals that I’m actually a bad parent? What if my partner figures out who I really am through therapy, and they hate what they see? The problem is that when we do nothing, it looks like torpor and it hits like stonewalling for the ones we love. This can leads to accusations that we are intentionally slacking off, which obscure the real issue: we do care, but sometimes we are deeply confused about how to show it.
Doubt about your contributions to the family. Some of us do all that we can to help our partners, but we also struggle with a chronic illness or disability, so we may question whether or not we’re “doing enough” physically. Or we work hard, but in a field where low pay and/or frequent layoffs are common, so we wonder if our loved ones really respect us, even when we’re not “bringing home the bacon.”

Though doubt is by far the most complex hindrance, in my experience, the guidance couldn’t be more simple: just keep going. Do the thing.

For example:

Do it in the body you have. Dress yourself with dignity. Allow yourself to surrender to both giving and receiving in relationship. Don’t wait to become more physically perfect first. This is how we actually practice unconditional love—and model it for our children.
Do it scared. This is especially important when someone is grieving, as our many posts and interviews on this topic can attest. Just show up. Bring some soup. Do not allow your minor discomfort to become more important than someone else’s life-shattering levels of suffering.
Do it as an experiment. Will you fail? Maybe! Will you succeed? Maybe! Do you know everything there is to know about doing it “right”? Not until you actually have an embodied experience with it. And isn’t that what love is, ultimately? A wild experiment? Why pretend it isn’t?

As the poet Rumi purportedly said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” In the case of the Five Hindrances, we can see how this might be true. How easy it is, how common, for us to allow exhaustion, anxiety, resentment, grasping or self-criticism to come between us and the ones we love the most.

Fortunately, this framework shows us how the inverse is also true. Real love doesn’t have to involve going out and getting something expensive, planning something publicly lavish, or wearing something with underwire. (Because: ugh.) Instead, it shows us that one of the best gifts we can offer to our loved ones is the inner work we do to stay open to connection. It is the labor we do to shovel our proverbial sidewalks, over and over again. To allow love to come in, come in, to come back in.

Five ways we get stuck--as activists, partners and parents

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:05:02 GMT

I’ve been working with caregivers for many years now as a writer, teacher and parent. I’ve gotten to know hundreds of families and dozens of school communities. I’ve made connections across across racial and linguistic differences, across cultures and classes, across different ages and stages of care. You know what’s cool about us? We often seem to want the same five things.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You want to be more present with the kids in your life.
You want to be more effectively engaged in the world.
You want to be more connected in your relationships.
You want to feel nourished and fed in your creative life.
You want to feel like what you are doing matters, whether it’s paid or unpaid.

You know what doesn’t feel so cool? When we get stuck. Often in the same five ways. Maybe not all at once, but often, more than one at a time.

Tell me if this also sounds familiar:

You often feel exhausted and brain-foggy despite wanting to show up for your life.
You often feel consumed by your fear around what-ifs instead of taking action on what is, despite being a conscientious person who would really like to make a difference.
You often feel avoidant and irritable around your loved ones, despite the fact that you also crave connection.
You often experience craving on a deep-down level for an unnameable something, despite having a plethora of social media, TV, and food options at your disposal.
You feel ineffective despite also being needed in so many different places. You wonder: does anything I’m doing really matter?

If this describes you, you’re not alone. Below, I’d like to offer thoughts on getting un-stuck, as well as some compassionate reframes for these common points of stuck-ness.

The Five Hindrances

The first time I ever attended a silent meditation retreat, I encountered all of these challenges, writ small, on my very first day. These challenges are so common in meditation that they are known as the Five Hindrances.

If you’ve ever meditated before, tell me if this sounds familiar:

Torpor: I felt incredibly sleepy.
Restlessness: I found myself re-playing the past, over-planning the future, and getting increasingly worried about that weird twinge I was feeling in my knee.
Ill will: I found myself fighting with people in my head.
Craving: I found myself really regretting not drinking that second cup of coffee, and wondering how many more minutes were left until lunchtime.
Doubt: At some point—especially as the twinge in my knee and the craving for coffee peaked in my mind—I began to wonder why I ever thought this was a good idea. Why I had chosen this retreat, these teachers, this community. Did it even really matter?

The reason why silent meditation retreats do matter is that they allow all of these things to arise on Day 1, and you can’t do a damned thing about it. All you can do is notice them, and then notice them some more.

This way, by Day 2, you’re good and ready to hear what your teachers have to say about how to work with these extremely common—like, ho-hum, no big deal common—problems on the cushion.

When you can finally hear what your teachers have to say about the problems you’re having, then you can finally learn what to do when these problems arise. Meditation practice gives you the time to learn this.

When you begin figure out what to do when these problems arise on the cushion, you learn you can apply these insights off the cushion, too.

When I hear people say they’re “bad at meditation,” sometimes I think they’re just meditators who have never learned about how common it is to encounter the same obstacles as everyone else—or how to work with them in a skillful way. When I hear people describe themselves as “bad activists” or “bad parents,” I think the same thing.

Working with the hindrances on the cushion

So, how do we work skillfully with the Five Hindrances on the cushion? Here’s my brief riff on the classical advice:

If you’re sleepy: Take a nap. You’re allowed to sleep. Just try again later. Especially if you’re new at this.
If you’re restless: Choose one point of focus for your awareness and keep coming back to it. Look at something colorful. Listen to sound. Focus on the breath in sitting meditation, or the sensation of the soles of the feet in walking meditation. Just pick something you can be consistent with and practice returning to it, like a harbor in a stormy sea.
If you’re stewing in the juices of anger: Practice metta or loving-kindness meditation, remembering that all sentient beings—even the annoying ones—just want to be safe, happy and free. This doesn’t give them a pass to be a@#-holes, but it can grant new insight into previously puzzling behavior.
If you’re craving something that’s not here: Ask yourself, “What do I really need?” And then sit with that question. Sometimes it can be wildly confronting to do so. But it’s also confronting to realize that you’ve spent the last hour, or day, or weekend, wishing for what calls “a different now.” And that these are moments of your life you’ll never get back.
If you’re consumed with doubt: Remember why you started. Was it a good reason? Then just keep going.

Working with the hindrances in real life

From here, we can see how you might apply this wisdom to situations off the cushion, involving activism, parenting or partnership.

If you’re tired: Rest, so that you can keep going. Trust that you have sufficient love for your family or community. You just need to rebuild capacity.
If you’re feeling anxious and restless: Find one effective thing to focus on — clean five things in your space, make one call to your reps — and do it. Trust that you don’t lack compassion or even conviction. The antidote for restlessness isn’t doing nothing; it’s doing one thing well.
If you’re angry: Stay on the cushion for this one. Let your anger cook, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, like potatoes, which aren’t very good when they’re raw. Try engaging in self-compassion or loving-kindness practice for yourself, then see if you can extend this gradually outward. Trust that you don’t lack tenderness. You just need time to figure out how to connect and protect more effectively.
If you’re having trouble staying here because you’re craving something else: Ask yourself again: What do I really need, right now? Then try to follow the intuition that arises. Remember that your family doesn’t get to decide what you need—you do. Know that sometimes you need to divest from doing their work to create space for your own creativity and nourishment. You might even need to tolerate some temporary conflict or look more closely at your own avoidance. Trust that you can build the skills necessary for getting your real needs met. You just need to accept that no one else but you can know what they are.
If you’re consumed with doubt: Start somewhere. Start small. Start now. Start over. And if you can’t do that alone, get help.

The hardest hindrance to fight

I know that this is all easier said than done. I would not be writing about this topic if it did not apply so acutely to me—including right now, in this very moment.

Doubt is my particular nemesis, both on the cushion and off of it.

I’ve written before in this space about how I grew up as an outsider in a tight-knit religious community, and internalized the faulty message early on that in some essential way, I didn’t matter the way the other kids mattered. I continue to live in a body that just won’t do what the other bodies do, to have a family that doesn’t look the way we imagined it would look, and to have a non-traditional career that’s hard to explain at cocktail parties. This makes it difficult to feel confident when showing my face (and my body) at big events and online, or to speak out in a timely fashion on social justice issues, like Gaza, that do not already fall within the realm of my professional expertise. Not because I lack the courage or conviction or desire to show up, but because doubt tells me that I don’t belong here. Not in this outfit, not in this clique, not in this conversation. Not anywhere.

This is why doubt is considered the worst of the Five Hindrances. Sure, spiraling is unpleasant, and so is feeling sleepy when you don’t want to be. But doubt is the only thing that can stop you from doing the things that you’ve set out to do, that you’re meant to do, that the word needs you to do. It stops you in the sneakiest, cruelest way possible—by convincing you to stop yourself.

“I see you, Mara”

In Buddhist mythology, the Hindrances are sometimes personified in the form of the demon Māra.

In layman’s terms, this dude is the worst. In the ancient sutras retelling the Buddha’s life, Māra has a long rap sheet.

When the Buddha chose to rest, Māra called him lazy.

When the Buddha tried to focus, Māra tried to scare him by smashing boulders, and appearing as a loud elephant and a snake.

When the Buddha assumed a position of peaceful contemplation, Mara attempted to provoke him by launching rocks and storms at him. Rather than fight back, the Buddha turned them into flower petals and sweet-smelling sandalwood powder.

When the Buddha meditated on what he really wanted—to understand the roots of suffering, and how to end it—Mara sent his daughters to try to distract him.

And when the Buddha rose up from beneath the bodhi tree with the answers he sought, and began to share his insights with his fellow meditators, Mara attempted to convince him that he didn’t know what he was talking about. That no one would believe him or listen to him anyway.

The Buddha just kept on doing what he was doing.

For the rest of his life, Mara would continue to skulk around the edges of the places where the Buddha taught others about how to get free. The crowds who came to learn from the Buddha only grew over time, proving that the demon of doubt had been wrong from the start.

The Buddha would simply nod when he saw the demon approach, and say:

“I see you, Mara.”

Sometimes, the Buddha would even invite Mara into his tent for tea. Over time, he made friends with his personal demon. Eventually, there was nothing left for him to fear.

One thing you can do this week

In honor of Valentines Day, I’m inviting folks in my network send encouraging notes to kids in Minneapolis, as part of a grassroots project called Friends to Friends. Want to join? This Instagram post below has all the details, or you can reply to this email and I’ll give you the scoop.

Note: Credit for this idea comes from my friend , who writes an excellent newsletter on parenting amid the multi-crisis. Highly recommend!

Questions? Comments? Cute stories about kids sharing kindness and love during this season of chaos? Please drop ‘em below.

I want to upgrade and come to all

Tending Adults is returning in 2026!

Our Tending Adults sangha circle is back! We will meet monthly for the next four months, then break for summer. Sangha is a word that refers to a group of fellow travelers, meeting together for mutual aid. This circle focuses on the challenges of juggling our midlife responsibilities with tending adults who may be ill, disabled, aging or all of the above. Each session includes:

Time for introductions + Intention-setting (Feel free to bring your lunch for this part if you’re on the East Coast)
Discussion
Guided practice
Q+A

Here’s the logistics for our next meet-ups:

Tuesday 2/10 at 12pm-1pm: Mindfulness and Aging: What the Research Tells Us

Tuesday 3/17 at 12pm-1pm: Practicing for Clarity: Creating an Anchor for Stormy Seasons

Tuesday 4/14 at 12pm-1pm: Practicing for Compassion: Building Resilience through Metta (Loving-Kindness) Meditation

Tuesday 5/12 at 12pm-1pm: Mother’s Day Debrief/Mindful Communication: Navigating Challenging Conversations with Clarity and Compassion

How to join our caregiver support circles

Tending Adults circles will continue to be free for paid newsletter subscribers (at any level). Paid subscribers can scroll down to see the Zoom link, just past the paywall, as can anyone who upgrades their subscription here.

Note: Paid subscriptions cover these monthly circle offerings and get you discount codes for some of our upcoming paid things, like this meditation + writing workshop on Re-Imagining Intimacy later in Feb, and this one on Re-Claiming Our Power.

If you wish to make one-time donation to support folks in Minneapolis this month, you can also make a donation here for $25 or more and send the receipt to ryanroseweaver [at] substack [dot] com, and I’ll upgrade your membership for the month. (Meaning, if you’re a free subscriber, you get to join this circle and test-drive the rest of the paid experience; if you’re a paid subscriber, you get to test-drive the Mentorship Program, which gives you instant access to this workshop replay + a 1:1 support session from me.)

I want to help MN!

My goal is to record these calls for posterity for paid subscribers at all levels, so that others who can’t make it at this time can still participate and get the benefits of being in community. So if you want to do the above but can’t just make it at 12pm EST, we’ve got you covered.

But wait, I still have questions

Please visit this FAQ post, which has many common questions and answers about our circles, and how they work. If you still need more info after reading that post, please post your questions below! Otherwise, paid subscribers can scroll on to get the Zoom link for 2/10 and a discount code for our 2/28 workshop.

Reclaiming our bodies--and our time--in 2026

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 20:04:58 GMT

For a while now, I’ve been working with a brilliant nutritionist who specializes in treating medical conditions, to figure out the best ways to support my body in midlife. I have endometriosis, a chronic illness with painful symptoms that can sometimes be helped or exacerbated by what I eat. As with many conditions impacting women, there’s a dearth of up-to-date data on this topic, so whenever a new study or health tool does appear on the horizon, we often stop to check it out.

Unfortunately, any time the word “health” or “wellness” enters the room in 2026, biases like fatphobia, racism and sexism seem to sneak in the back door. Because we live in a culture in which we cannot just aspire to take care of our bodies—we have to constantly be making them better, and this requires some bodies to be deemed less good. So part of the work my nutritionist and I do together is to constantly separate what is useful to me personally from what is abhorrent to us both, morally and politically.

For example: recently, we pulled up a tracking app used by my new gym. It’s hooked up to one of those fancy scales that use electric currents, or something, to tell you things like your basal metabolic rate, using purportedly cutting-edge science. As I flipped it open, however, we both raised our eyebrows in surprise. The first thing you see on this app is a “leaderboard” that uses your proprietary health information to rank you against strangers who are also using the app. (Why? Who cares?)

On another tab, the app tells you, unbidden, whether you or not you meet the criteria for obesity, based on your Body Mass Index (BMI). If you’re not familiar, the BMI is concept developed in the 1800s that’s been dismissed as irrelevant again and again, but continues to shamble through the modern health world, like a zombie that will not die.

So much for the cutting-edge science.

“There’s nothing useful here,” my nutritionist said flatly. “It’s another product that’s designed to show you whatever information is going to motivate you to use this product more—no matter how accurate that information is.”

We both sighed.

“I guess I’ll have to keep coming up with my own criteria for knowing that I’m trying really hard to care for my body,” I said. “That I know what I’m doing.”

“We can do that together,” my nutritionist said, and smiled.

Our conversation turned to Audre Lorde’s famous 1970s manifesto, “The Masters Tools Will Not Dismantle the Masters House.” In this short essay, Lorde, a Black queer woman, describes a similar experience of trying to find the information necessary for living a good and free life—and finding herself disappointed.

In Lorde’s case, she was invited by the organizers of an academic feminist conference to talk about “differences between women.” As a woman who was aware that she stood “outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women,” she was curious to know what insights this event might offer to her and others facing racism and homophobia.

Unfortunately, she was the only Black queer person to be invited to speak. Apparently it was her job to tell the audience the answers to her own pressing questions of survival.

Afterwards, Lorde wrote this famous passage, which could just as easily apply to a modern fitness app as it could to a 1970s academic gathering:

“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable… [T]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

This sense of “nothing useful here” is palpable throughout the rest of Lorde’s essay.

She writes that she is tired of constantly showing up to talk about collective liberation, only to find that the conversation will be limited to discussing how individual women can make individually, incrementally more freeing choices. Ones that don’t unduly spook the men in their lives, upon whom they are still presumed to depend.

She is tired of watching academics with privilege come together to talk about their lofty goals and ideas about women’s progress, when they really mean “white women’s progress”—while saying nothing about the caregivers “who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences.”

She is tired of being told that white folks just need everything explained to them one more time, by Black women, before they really get it. Then the work of liberation can really begin.

Lorde suggests that these people begin doing their own work now, and let her get back to hers:

I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

What I love most about this piece is the fact that Lorde doesn’t just critique what isn’t working. She identifies where there is room to claim agency. To grow up. To make different choices.

We can keep running in the same circles, hoping that the master’s treadmill is going to take us somewhere. Or we can step off, and take ourselves somewhere else, together.

A few days after I met with my nutritionist, I joined a call with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), where 2,500+ people showed up to figure out what they can do to act in solidarity with those being targeted by ICE in Minnesota.

On this call, the organizers also invoked Audre Lorde. This time, they ran with a different rousing quotation, from her book Sister Outsider:

“Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means fighting despair.”

The SURJ organizers in the Zoom room calling in from Minnesota were clearly in awe of the “Midwestern moms and dads,” as they described it, who were finding their work and doing it. For example, parents in MN are:

Organizing neighborhood action groups to escort children into the school building at pickup and drop-off. (Sidenote: How has it come to this?!)
Showing up in droves at Home Depot and Target, which have allowed ICE to set up shop in their parking lots, to clog the checkout lines and disrupt business as usual by purchasing a single container of salt. (Get it? Salt … melts ice…)
Planning for a general strike this upcoming Friday, January 23, which means that many teachers will stay home, and many parents will take off work in solidarity to allow them to do so.

These are the kinds of actions that are necessary for survival. For public health. For truly taking care of ourselves.

They are also choices. These Midwestern moms and dads could have chosen, for example, to get up early and hop on their treadmills instead. Maybe with headphones on, to drown out the screams.

The truth is that most of us tired moms and dads—and teachers and aunties and nurses and grandparents—can no longer do both. We cannot spend hours and hours trying to squeeze ourselves into a shape that is pleasing to the patriarchy, and also have the time and energy left over to dismantle it. As Lorde says, we all have a choice to make. We all have our work to do.

In 2026, in solidarity with those in MN, I am committing to doing my own work. This work is two-fold: It involves critiquing, blocking and divesting from violent systems that dare to claim that some bodies are more worthy of care than others. And it involves exploring what it means to re-invest my energies in collective liberation over individual achievement.

This work involves linking together with other like-minded people, rather than allowing myself to be ranked against them.

Really caring for one another, not just “tolerating” one another.

Not tying my sense of self worth and specialness to metrics like the BMI, but finding true belonging by remembering my connection—and my responsibility—to all other living beings on earth.

This work must also include having more vulnerable conversations about how these tensions live side by side in our own bodies. How they are arising in whatever life stage we are in: dating, marriage, pregnancy, infertility/loss, postpartum, perimenopause. How there are still some mornings when we wake up and think about getting back on the treadmill instead of out in the streets, because we will face negative consequences either way.

In my experience, when people approaching midlife like me talk to one another about our bodies, often there is a deep sense of wanting to come back home. Here, I don’t mean “get our bodies back” in the bounce-back culture sense. I mean remembering a time—and perhaps it was very long ago—when we lived fully inside of our bodies, instead of surveilling them constantly from the outside. I mean, as Lorde writes, that we long for “a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative.”

One wise friend I love to talk to about this is Kate Carson, whom I interviewed a few months back. Kate survived a devastating loss during her family-building years, then became a sex and relationships coach for others doing the same. She’s also an activist for reproductive justice, advocating for people who lack the power or legal standing to advocate for themselves. She is the perfect person to talk to about what it means to reclaim our bodies, our energy and our time, for good.

Recently, we decided we’d like to open up our conversations to anyone who is hoping to divest from diet and optimization culture this year, and to re-invest their time in creating healthy, safe communities for ourselves and our children. To create spaces where everyone can simply be–not in order to be used, but to be creative.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be hosting the following workshops:

Coming Home to the Body – Weds January 28 at 12pm EST (recording available)

This mindfulness and writing workshop is for those who are interested in learning meditation and somatic practices for coming home to the body, and remembering our deep connection to the living world around us. From there, we will also explore ways to divest from hierarchical systems that deem some bodies more worthy of care than others.

Re-Imagining Intimacy – February 25 at 12pm EST (recording available)

One of the ways in which the patriarchy keeps us all on the treadmill, distracted from larger political battles, is by telling us that if we don’t work hard to remain attractive, available and youthful-looking, we will die alone (see: “childless cat ladies”). In this meditation and writing workshop, we’ll explore less coercive, more equitable, and more trauma-informed ways of giving and receiving caring touch, with someone you love or even on your own. When we are rooted firmly in relationships of care, care that we don’t have to earn by having the right kind of body, we become more powerful.

Note: This workshop falls within the same month as Valentine’s Day; you might even invite a loved one to purchase this for you if you’d like to come, and then share the learnings with them.

Reclaiming Our Power – March 25 at 12pm EST (recording available)

Capitalism and patriarchy love to tell us, especially women, that there is an expiration date on our personal power. That our wisdom and talents become irrelevant at midlife simply because our bodies and faces look different. That we need to buy new things for those bodies and faces in order to become “relevant” again. In this workshop, we put our K-12 teacher hats back on to share stories from history that reveal that our communities have always needed our gifts, and they always will. Then we’ll spend some time writing new narratives of power for ourselves.

One of my favorite images from this workshop series comes from Frida Kahlo, an artist I have long admired. She made art about her miscarriages, divorced her husband, cut off her hair, and painted herself in a man’s suit, all before such things felt commonplace or even possible. And then she went on to do some of the best work of her career.

I think it is no coincidence that we are so often shown the portraits of Kahlo in her youth: married to an influential man, with flowing long hair, surrounded by flowers. Capitalist patriarchy loves a manic pixie dream girl, who exists to prove that women who are “different” are fine, actually! As long as they serve a man’s “journey” and ask nothing in return.

But these earlier works, as gorgeous as they are, don’t capture the full, insurgent truth of who Kahlo was, and what she did. The real Frida Kahlo cut off her locks in midlife, and got free.

Kate and I have created this workshop series for all of us who are ready to cut off our real or proverbial locks. Who were raised in the master’s house, where only the most narrow parameters of change were possible and allowable. Who grew up unaware of the powerful paintings we were not being shown, the feminist sex education we were not receiving. Who have waited for far too long for the permission to simply be, and not to be used—a permission we can now give to ourselves.

In the master’s house, continuously ranking our bodies against one another keeps us isolated, in a state of constant exhaustion and doubt. But in a world of parents and caregivers who are connected to one another, to themselves, to their communities, and to their deepest knowing, the possibilities become infinite.

—> Purchase your ticket for Coming Home to the Body here.

How to join us for these upcoming workshops

These workshops are a brand-new offering here at In Tending! And while we recognize the irony of using certain tools (i.e. Substack’s subscription system) to dismantle the master’s house, our aim is to hack this system as best we can, to ensure equitable access for all.

Here’s a few pricing options we’ll be trying out for this series.

Sign up for each workshop a la carte:

These will be offered on a sliding scale, from $1-25. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. In keeping with the spirit of collective vs. individual action, paid subscribers to the newsletter will also receive a discount code that allows you to bring a friend.

—> Purchase your ticket for Re-Imagining Intimacy here.

—> Purchase your ticket for Re-Claiming Our Power here.

—> Upgrade from free to paid to receive your discount code (via separate email).

Sign up for the 3-workshop series:

Don’t want to spring for a subscription today? You can still get a discount on these workshops by booking all three together.

—> Choose the “Reclaiming Our Time” 3-workshop series option at checkout here.

Join the Mentorship program:

This is a new offering for 2026, and one that I’m excited about. This allows me to provide you with a personalized 1:1 support session to kick things off, and to provide you with open access to every single workshop in 2026 after that (including video and recordings if you cannot attend in-person). Plus, you get all the other paid subscriber benefits—everything from creative prompts and playlists to interview sneak peeks and curated reading lists.

From now until the end of January, I’ll be letting you name your own price (from $75-275) for your annual Mentorship program subscription, making this the best offer of the three.

—> Upgrade your subscription now and receive a code granting you free access to ALL In Tending workshops in 2026 (via separate email).

Save the date!

For those opting to join the Mentorship program in 2026, you’ll be getting a huge amount of value out of it in the coming months, as we’ve got a great slate of other workshops planned. (Other folks can still sign up for each one a la carte.) Registration info and paid subscriber discount codes coming soon, but for now, please save the dates for the following:

Thursday, March 26 at 12pm EST: Rituals and Writing for Grief, with Emily Marlowe
Wednesday, April 8 at 12pm EST: Tending Your Spiritual Truth, with
Wednesday, May 6 at 12pm EST: Marking Complicated Mothers Day, with
Thursday, June 4 at 12pm EST: Where Mindfulness Meets Internal Family Systems, with

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Please let us know. And we hope to see you on Jan 28!

Your family doesn't get to decide what you need

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 20:07:48 GMT

“When we are clear and connected to ourselves, there’s nothing that we like better than to contribute to one another’s well-being. But there are a number of things that can happen that disconnect us from that. So for me, reconciliation is connecting people again so they enjoy contributing to each other’s well-being rather than contributing to each other’s suffering.” — Marshall Rosenberg

Picture this: you’re five. You’re headed to the airport for a family vacation. Your family is running late. And you desperately need to go to the bathroom. You tell your parents so.

“Just hold it!” they say. “We’re going to miss the plane!”

Fair enough. But you still need to go to the bathroom.

Here’s another scenario: you’re thirty five. You’ve just given birth to your first child. You’re postpartum, wan from blood loss, and potentially breastfeeding besides. You arrive at your in-laws’ place for dinner, ravenous with hunger. You gobble down the plate they set before you, then cast your glance about the kitchen for seconds.

“That’s all we have,” they say, with a mixture of apology and disdain. “We’re both on a diet. We’re doing portion control.”

Fair enough. But you still need food.

Another snapshot in time, a few years later: Your baby is now a regulation-size child, one who’s old enough to have dropped their nap, but young enough to still need constant supervision, lest they fall down the proverbial well. You’ve been home with them all day. Your partner arrives home in the late afternoon. You’re exhausted. Maybe even battling a cold. You tell your partner so.

“You’re tired?” they say, with exasperation. “I’m tired too. I’ve been in meetings all day. And I’ve still got an hour’s worth of work to do after bedtime!”

Fair enough. But you still need rest.

These scenarios are constantly unfolding in care settings, every day. They’re often upsetting for all involved, because unmet needs lead to feelings of anger, sadness and fear.

These feelings ripple out from the one who feels the original need to the other humans around them. This is our nature, as social mammals who can sense into one another’s physiological states, to greater or lesser degrees.

Sometimes, when there is attunement in a family system – meaning that the needs that arise are noticed, witnessed, validated and more or less met – these feelings can peak and dissolve as quickly as they arise.

Other times, when there is misattunement in a family system – meaning that some members are oblivious or resistant to the needs of other members – the needs and feelings go underground.

After all, it’s not very helpful, when you’re a child, to notice what you need, if you have good reason to believe those needs will not be met. It’s more adaptive to go numb.

Many of us live our lives in this state of numbness. The family members around us may not be the same ones as those in our family of origin, but if they frequently respond to us in the same invalidating, misattuned ways – with impatience, incredulousness, dismissiveness, even defensiveness, as if the very existence of a need or feeling is in some way a threat, demand or indictment aimed their way – then the numbness continues to serve our survival.

But most of us don’t want to simply survive. We want to thrive. And that means claiming every disowned part of us, loving it back up to the surface, and moving forward in a way that honors our full humanity. Including the occasional need to hit up the bathroom.

The rest of this post is about that.

A family photo featuring many different needs, in different stages of being met or unmet, snapped at Disneyland in the ‘90s. I’m over there on the far right, freezing inside of my t-shirt.

This tension between what we’re doing to survive and what we desire in order to thrive, to me, can be a very confronting aspect of nonviolent communication.

Nonviolent communication invites people to do four important things:

Observe what is happening in the present
Note their feelings
Acknowledge that their feelings arise out of needs that are either being met or unmet in the moment, and to name those needs
Communicate all of this coherently to the people around them in a way that is nonviolent, meaning non-blaming and non-demanding. Often, this communication takes the form of a request related to the need: “Would you be willing to….?”

For people who have adapted to environments in which their needs are chronically unmet, it can be like ripping a bandage off a very old wound to ask them to simply notice what’s happening, notice how they’re feeling, and most importantly, notice their needs.

Out of this wound come all the feelings and sensations that went underground at the time of their earliest benumbment. Some of these hurts may also be currently kept captive there by their current family dynamics and care scenarios—for example, a parent whose partner is deployed or otherwise absent doesn’t have much downtime to contemplate how infrequently their needs for rest, empathy, and collaboration are going unmet. And so becoming aware of those unmet needs also means seeing more clearly how unsustainable our present-moment dynamics might be.

This, I suspect, is why many Western meditators say they “don’t like mindfulness.” Because who enjoys the sensation of bleeding alone, without anyone else around to tend the wound—or without a plan to stop it? Given this, in my experience, nonviolent communication, like other forms of mindfulness, is a skill best developed in the context of community.

It is through communal witness, and not just our individual focused attention, that information about our needs becomes possible to safely feel again, and potentially to speak aloud.

Sometimes a parent or a partner can offer this kind of community. But sometimes people who occupy these positions and roles in our lives can be the least validating, the most threatened by our needs, for reasons that are entirely their own.

However, a loved one’s inability to witness and validate your needs, as we’ve seen in the examples above, does not diminish the needs, or make them go away. Nor does their lack of capacity let us off the hook for listening and responding to the call of our own needs, coming up through the floorboards.

The community we need to surface our needs could just be one other person in your life who is willing to say to you, “You are right to feel this way!” Or, it might be a whole circle of people who deeply wish to both receive and give this affirmation. (My friend Kwonyin even leads workshops in which participants can shout that phrase aloud. They’re very satisfying.)

Validation often comes more easily from a person or community who knows you not as “wife,” or “dad,” or “child,” but as a fellow human with a body, a body that has all the same needs as any other human body. A need for food, water, shelter. A need for connection and touch. A need for autonomy and freedom of movement. A need for other people’s actions to align with their words, and for a sense of closure when those words have been uttered aloud and integrated.

It is my hope that In Tending can offer such a sense of community to people who want to practice nonviolent communication. Including but not limited to those who do not have the conditions in their lives to do so with the people around them.

Because having your needs validated is something you deserve, no matter what your current care scenario might be.

Given this, in our last discussion about intergenerational conversations on care, we discussed the possibility of going deeper with nonviolent communication, offering a workshop in which participants can be guided to:

Anchor into the present moment with guided meditation
Notice and name their feelings
Gently surface their needs, and speak them aloud in a workable space where they can be witnessed
If desired, workshop possible requests for their loved ones–ones that are not coercive, but aimed at increasing compassion and collaboration

After all, our loved ones have needs too. They need to catch planes in order to meet their deeper needs for connection or play. They need to rest after a long work day. They need to have the autonomy to take care of their bodies in the ways they see fit, even if those ways wouldn’t be right for us.

Fortunately, the intention of nonviolent communication isn’t just to get our own needs met, or to prove that they matter more than the needs of others. The intention is to honor all needs as valid.

Put another way: The point of non-violent communication is not just to brainstorm solutions for ourselves, but to co-create the conditions for collective thriving. To figure out how both we and our loved ones can eat, rest, and play–together.

Isn’t that what most of us want here? Not just to have our own needs met, but to live in a world in which all of us have what we need? If so, then learning how to do nonviolent communication is one of the essential skillsets we need to acquire, in order to begin building that better world, right where we are.

If you’re interested in signing up for a future workshop on nonviolent communication, personalized for those engaged in paid or unpaid care work, please fill out this interest form. Once we have gauged interest in this workshop, we’ll be in touch with more details!

Other upcoming offerings:

Please be sure to mark your calendars for our next donation-based circles for caregivers: Holding Space for Grief on Tuesday 10/28 at 10:30 EST, and Burnout Prevention on Tuesday 12/2 at 10:30 EST.
Starting on Tuesday, Oct 28, I’ll be facilitating a 6-week container for healing from pregnancy loss, via the organization RTZ Hope. We’ll meet each week at 6:30-8:00 pm EST (3:30-5pmPST) from October 28th to December 2nd, 2025. To sign up, please click here. Equity spots available. For more information on RTZ Hope and this unique, transformative cohort-based experience, please click here.
If you live in Central MA, please come meditate in person with me on Sunday evenings in November! Click here for more info and to register.

How family drama unfolds–and how to heal it

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 11:05:19 GMT

“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” – Ram Dass

Last month, we talked a lot about what it’s like to care for other adults. Before that, we held circles on raising kids amidst the multi-crisis, and affirming neurodivergence in people of all ages.

A recurring theme in several of our past circles was: intergenerational family drama. At our next In Tending circle, on Oct 9, we’ll be digging into this further.

As luck might have it, I’ll be traveling soon to support a relative who is ill, and seeing multiple generations of my own family. If you’ve been reading in this space for a minute, you also know that my mom moved in with us this summer. So this topic is relevant to my own interests, and I’m looking forward to learning alongside our community members on this one.

What I do know is that many of us would like to have better-quality connections with our loved ones than we do, and to make the most of our time together on this earth. Some of us feel quite guilty or ashamed that we haven’t been able to singlehandedly fix our family drama, whereas others feel checked-out or angry about it. Below, I’ve sketched out some thoughts on how we can go easier on ourselves, and each other, while still acting in alignment with our values.

Photo by Dan Parker on Unsplash

When it comes to caring for other human beings, two things tend to be true at once.

Truth #1: Vulnerability is a part of life. Almost all of us will at some point need or give care. There’s no getting out of it. Humans need 24/7 help from our fellow humans to survive our earliest years. At some point, we will individuate, meaning that we will grow beyond depending on adults for care, and others may come to depend on us. If we continue to survive, some of us may then become parents, teachers, community leaders and/or elders who advise others on how best to handle that. In this, we are not so different from plants, who nurture their seeds, set them aloft on the wind, and spend most of the rest of their time nurturing their own growth or that of their neighbors. This process repeats itself over and over again.
Despite its repetitiveness, however, this process remains inherently uncertain and uncontrollable. No individual is in charge of the whole thing. Human needs change all the time. Care never gets done and stays done, and we don’t ever get to feel like we’ve really nailed it. Thus, it’s terminally uncomfortable to care, even if it’s also required for the survival of our species.
This leads to the second thing that is true:
Truth #2: There are predictable, habitual ways in which humans resist Truth #1. Humans are mammalian primates who must invest an enormous amount of time in protecting and raising the youngest members of our species if they are to survive. Sometimes they don’t, despite our investment. This investment in them at times even threatens our own survival.
Thus, many of us fear the pain that is inherent in care. We fear either losing our own lives and autonomy, or losing those we care about, or both. Most of us also want good things to happen to us. If we are going to invest in care, we may wish for those we care about to also enrich our lives through their presence and contributions.
In some ways these survival-level anxieties and goals are entirely reasonable, in that they have kept us alive for thousands of years. But the desire to either avoid the responsibilities of care (also known as aversion) or to control the outcome (also known as grasping) can also quickly become unreasonable if we’re not careful.
When we respond to the human call to care for others with grasping or aversion, it creates drama, stress and suffering – or in Buddhist terms, dukka. This drama is also intensified if we also lack awareness about the fact that it is our resistance to the realities of the human condition, and not our differing views on how best to make gravy, that is creating our suffering. (This lack of awareness is also known as ignorance.)

This episode of Bluey features low-key holiday drama at its finest.

I wish I could say that these are my own original ideas, but if you’re a Buddhism practitioner like I am, you may notice that Truths #1 and #2 are variations on the first two of the Four Noble Truths. These pithy teachings articulate the Buddha’s insights on suffering and the path out of it. They are about 2,500 years old.

The Buddha had enduring ties to family and friends of his own that informed his perspective. One of his closest friends, Ānanda, played a pivotal role in preserving his teachings after he died, and also convinced him to grant his adoptive mother, Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī, permission to become the first Buddhist nun. But the Buddha also disappointed his father, Śuddhodana, when he declined to take over the family business; instead of passing on material riches to his son, Rāhula, he offered him enlightenment instead. Thus, despite his reputation for attachment, the Buddha also had plenty of lived experience with the complexities that come with care and family.

You may also have clocked the words grasping, aversion and ignorance above, which are known as the Three Poisons in Buddhism. (Buddhism is full of lists.) If you add poison to an ecosystem, it throws things out of balance. If you add grasping, aversion and ignorance to a situation, the Buddha reasoned, the same results arise.

While conflict and tension between members of different generations in a family can occur at any point in a being’s growth journey, below are a few arenas of conflict that I hear about frequently in our community:

Drama in families with small children

Pregnant and postpartum parents, newborn humans, and small children are all quite vulnerable. They have a lot of needs. When needs are met, harmony ensues. When needs go unmet, as Marshall Rosenberg reminds us, conflict ensues.

Unfortunately, many parents in our community feel as though their needs, and those of their young children, are not being met. The most acute needs I hear about include rest, autonomy, connection, collaboration, and empathy.

See this prime example of how this goes awry in families, from the brilliant Kristen Knutson:

Why are we like this?

Capitalism as an ethic encourages aversion of discomfort, including the discomforts associated with care work. Those with privilege are encouraged to side-step and resist taking on the worst of these discomforts; those who cannot opt out are overworked both at home and in the workplace.
Patriarchy as a system has mostly shunted women into the latter category of overworked caregivers, and men into the former group of care-resisters, despite their individual gifts or preferences. The modern money and power disparities between these two roles make it hard to move fluidly between them, further locking people into pre-determined roles and identities. People can become painfully over-identified with these roles, relying on outdated gender scripts to guide their actions rather than actually seeing the human beings in front of them. See above: how dare this postpartum mother meet her present-moment needs for rest and connection when there are sheets to iron?! Doesn’t she know that’s her job?
Each generation has been exposed throughout their lifetime to a potent mix of the two ideologies above, but in each generation, that mix has also been different. Different educational and life experiences may also have exposed certain individuals in each generation to more criticisms of those ideologies, and/or to events that made those ideologies feel less credible. This leads to family members with very different belief systems about care, which leads to many arguments (and painfully funny Instagram reels) about who “should” be doing what at any given time.
The resulting conflicts in families tend to center on a spouse’s individual failure to calm down or step up, or the in-laws’, or one’s own. These arguments, if they are productive, may or may not take the edge off of our suffering. But they do not recognize nor solve the larger systemic issues at play.

In the past, I have written about my own experience with books on domestic labor equity like Fair Play, and have heard more than one man say that bell hooks’ The Will to Change helped to sweep away the veil of ignorance they carried about this state of affairs. Yet I think we need far, far more people to awaken to the truth of our interdependence: we are all bound up together in this tangled net of care. It will take all of us to untangle it.

Drama in adult communities

From the Buddhist point of view, it is better to take refuge in community, or sangha, than it is to put one’s trust in any individual family member, given the issues that can arise above. And walking the path with fellow travelers can be a huge blessing. It can help us to see truths and meet needs along the way that we could not otherwise by ourselves.

That said, there are still problems that can arise in community that can reflect and magnify the human flaws already discussed.

The primary problem I hear about in our community here is the ways in which other families and communities have let folks down, leaving a vacuum of safe belonging that feels hard to fill. Many come from families (or religious groups, or nations) that meet the needs of some members, while excluding, oppressing or silencing others. Because unmet needs = conflict, these are not peaceful places to be.

This kind of resistance to communal care has many faces, most of them familiar to those reading here:

Only men can lead here; women must follow.
White folks set the standards for what is “normal” or “professional” here; people of color must suppress parts of themselves to be accepted.
Straight folks represent this movement; queer folks must occupy the margins.
Able-bodied people design the spaces and what happens inside of them here; disabled folks must petition for “special” accommodations.
Thinness is synonymous with healthy, moral, hard-working and credible here; people in bigger bodies must provide constant proof they can be any and all of these things.

Of course, in many of our communities, there are people who are resisting these injustices. If they can be heard, it can lessen suffering. But often, this just kicks off another round of resistance to the resistance.

Examples:

Some families will engage in the “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” strategy of dismissing family members who protest the family’s dysfunction, while sending out holiday cards that suggest nothing is amiss.
Some families will sweep abuse or sexual misconduct under the rug so that they can continue to project an image of themselves as good.

In the past, I have written in greater detail about the problems that come with mounting a resistance to the resistance. In what is known as Tuckman’s theory of group development, the process of forming, storming and norming allows groups to come together, to surface needs, and to work together to meet them. It is often when groups move through a “storming” season that people begin to talk openly about unmet needs in the space, including the need for fairness, justice and dignity for all.

If the unmet needs in our families can be surfaced and heard — for example, through nonviolent communication, or couples/family therapy — they can sometimes be more easily met. Storming is what allows norming to occur, and thus harmony to arise, as an actual storm can allow us to see every color of light refracted through it in the form of a rainbow.

Attempts to control family dynamics through suppression of conflict, however, often backfire. The relational ground becomes parched. Eventually, nothing new can grow there. Those who desire real connection and communal thriving have no choice but to seek out alternatives, such as divorcing or going no-contact.

Often the person making this kind of choice is accused of “giving up,” but in my experience, these strategies are more often employed when all “courage to change the things I can” options have been tried and exhausted, and it seems clear that it’s time to cultivate “the serenity to accept what cannot be changed.”

So, how can we begin to heal our conflicts before this happens?

Sometimes we can’t. But if you’re in a place where cultivating the courage to change something still feels available, then here is the good and bad news: the change starts with you.

Here are two key skills to cultivate in situations where conflict feels frustrating but still-workable:

1) Get clear on your own needs. This journaling prompt may help you. Then tell someone you love what they are.

Unlike generational perspectives on things like paternity leave, corporal punishment or diet culture, human needs are relatively universal and static. They are easier to hear, relate to and validate than complex stories about right and wrong.

2) Consider how you might soften the ways in which you habitually resist the uncomfortable realities of care.

For example:

If you tend to resist being vulnerable with others, caring for them or engaging in conversations about their unmet needs, consider how you might soften this resistance. You may benefit from reading this interview with therapist . He articulates how men in particular can heal from this pattern without further over-burdening women. Jeremy points out that you do not have to engage in self-criticism around this pattern, as often there is an unmet need for safety inherent in avoidance that deserves your compassion. That said, you might explore how you can get this need met while remaining committed to staying engaged and accountable, which helps others get their safety needs met too. If you are part of a family or organization that is resisting the invitation to incorporate new and diverse perspectives, and to meet all members’ needs, you might appreciate reading this interview with , who has a wealth of experiences with cultivating rich, diverse communities (and awesome dinner parties).
If you tend to resist the unpredictability that is inherent to care by attempting to do everything yourself, or keep things under control in some other way, you may resonate with ’ perspectives in this interview on the uncertainties of parenting. You might also see yourself reflected back in this piece about setting boundaries around how much you will do for others. Here too, there is an unmet need for safety, and an opportunity for self-compassion. That said, you might explore how your resistance to the realities of your own physical and emotional capacity — your imagining that you have more power or strength than you really have, or than others have — has the potential to make you and your loved ones less safe, not more. If you lead a family or organization that is quietly drifting apart due to widespread overcommitment — another form of resistance to the realities of our own capacities — you might appreciate the wisdom shared by in this interview.

We’ll continue to talk about how to grow and apply these skills at our upcoming circle on October 9. If you’d like to join us, please sign up to receive the Zoom link here.

For now, I think it’s helpful just to consider the fact that, as Ram Dass has said, spending time with your family will often reveal the tensions we all experience when it comes to reconciling our human vulnerabilities with our desires and fears. Even if we consider ourselves pretty evolved. Being party to an intergenerational conflict doesn’t make you wrong or bad. It just makes you human.

Making the most of our time

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:05:21 GMT

After my brother Dave was diagnosed with brain cancer at age twenty-three in 2011, we felt constantly bombarded by new information, new challenges. We began to meet this sense of overwhelm with a running joke: “Hey, give us a break. We don’t know what we’re doing. After all, this is our first brain tumor!”

No one plans and prepares for an illness like cancer the way they do for college. And yet, I have long noticed, in myself and in others who have found themselves caring for a fellow adult who is disabled, ill or dying, a nagging sense of something akin to shame: I should be better at this, somehow.

Better at planning ahead for accidents. Better at taking notes. Better at staying patient with someone who is irritable or forgetful. Better at making all of their suffering go away.

I believe we feel this way not because we should be better, but because we are not permitted to see how bad this can get for other people. Our culture hides the evidence of our own vulnerability and mortality from us until it is upon us. There are no good memes for this.

Recently our In Tending caregiver circle members explored this complex knot of emotions, as it relates to caring for another adult. We agreed to keep meeting, to remind each other that we are not alone, and that we are all basically good people, making the best of a very difficult situation. If you’d like to join us for our next circle for caregivers of adults, please fill out this poll and make sure you’re signed up here for our Zoom invites.

Me with my brother on my twenty-fifth birthday, before he was diagnosed with cancer. He picked up my tab at the bar that night, with money he made by working at our hometown CVS.

In the meantime, this week, I’m sharing my brother’s full cancer story, from diagnosis to treatment to denouement, in the post that follows.1 I am doing so for two reasons.

I want to remind others in this situation that “you are not alone” is not just a comforting cliché. Illness and death, as the Buddha once taught, are universal aspects of the human experience; they come for us all. Caring for someone who is sick or dying, though it can feel deeply isolating, also connects you to the rest of the world as few other human experiences do. To me, the healing power of this kind of connection is what the In Tending community is all about.
I want to remind caregivers that we, too, have important stories to tell. While patients receive a treatment plan, we often have to make these stories up as we go along. Sadly, we do not have the power to write a “happy ending” into these stories. And yet, as David Foster Wallace reminds us in This is Water, we still have the agency to decide how we tell them.

Telling us how you see it, as a caregiver, is a gift for the rest of us, born of your own agency and courage. May my brother’s story live on as a gift like that for you. And in the comments below, in the upcoming circles to come, I hope you too will give it a try.

Our first brain tumor

At age twenty-three, while sipping coffee with me in a South Korean coffeeshop, my brother turned blue and blacked out, the result of a sudden seizure. An avid traveler, Dave was stopping by to see me on his way from China to Australia. Riding with him in an ambulance through the streets of Seoul, where I was living and teaching at the time, I knew instinctively that this episode would change the course of both of our lives.

The doctors in Asia were the first to suspect a tumor, but could not explain the implications in English. So, one week later, we flew my brother home to Buffalo for a biopsy.

In a biopsy, surgeons take and test a sample of a tissue, and, if it’s cancerous, remove the tissue. After going into surgery at Millard Fillmore Gates Hospital, Dave came out the other end minus one anaplastic astrocytoma. A Stage Three brain tumor, the same kind as Ted Kennedy’s.

Thanks to the seizure, they’d caught it early enough to operate. But many questions remained regarding how to keep it from coming back. Radiation? Chemotherapy? Some combination of the two?

Words like anaplastic astrocytoma roll off my tongue now, but they didn’t then. Trained as a reporter and raised as a big sister, I wanted to read everything I could about Dave’s prognosis, to take control of the situation. Instead, the more I researched, the more I simply scared myself silly.

Instead, I learned to ignore the average prognosis and listen to the human experts in front of us. The ones holding Dave’s one wild, precious life in their hands.

And boy, could Dave’s new oncologist talk. Not just about cancer, either. As Dave transitioned from the surgery part of his process into the treatment phase, we met with Dr. M. monthly. Tall and elegantly attired, with an auctioneer’s speedy spiel and a politician’s handshake, the middle-aged Dr. M. struck a memorable figure in Roswell’s neuro-oncology department. Our appointments always began with a quick update on my brother’s most recent MRIs, blood results, and chemotherapy treatment plan. (My brother’s first treatment was Temodar, for the record.) But as my brother returned to school, returned to skateboarding, returned to dating, the two of them began to riff at greater length about these things. Soon, they had a regular comedy routine going.

“Hey Dave, nice hair, man. Now that it’s back, it looks like a mess. What, didja just wake up? The girls must love you, man.”

“Not as much as they probably love those shoes, doc. How much those things cost?”

It was clear that Dr. M. had places to be and things to do, but that these riffs were part of the treatment. From the beginning, Dr. M. and his colleagues very purposefully steered every conversation back to what made life worth living for Dave — in this case, girls and skateboarding.

Looking back on these exchanges now, as someone who has worked in the helping professions for a decade, this approach also likely preserves quality of life for the oncologists themselves. Teachers don’t go to work to help someone learn how to write the letter F; they do it to help a child they love write a letter to a grandparent. Oncologists, I imagine, are the same. It’s not very satisfying to declare your own raison d’etre as defeating tumors, because often, you don’t. But giving someone with six months to live another two years on top of that, to skate and travel and fall in love? Now that’s a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Still, getting out of bed in the morning was a hard thing to do for all of us, at first. But we got better with practice. After all, this was only our first brain tumor.

Dave with his then-girlfriend in 2011, shortly after losing his hair to chemo.

The second opinion

Sometime in 2013, Dr. M. was preparing for our usual monthly visit with Dave. Dave, by then, had defied all odds by surviving treatment after treatment for two and a half years. He had skated, traveled, and fallen in love. He was even preparing to graduate from Buffalo State in a matter of months. I had just been accepted to grad school myself. We talked eagerly, often, on Skype about our plans for the future.

Yet while previous scans had showed a brain that was blissfully bereft of new growth, this time, Dr. M. discovered… something new.

At the time, he did not know—or chose not to divulge—the nature of the thing. Radiation damage, a new tumor, a Crackerjack prize? He wouldn’t say. Instead, he told my brother Dave that it was time for us to get a second opinion.

"Pick a city, and I'll send you there," Dr. M. told my brother.

My brother chose New York City, because by then, I lived there. Though I had quit my job in Seoul to be in Buffalo with him during his first stages of treatment, I had also gotten romantically entangled with a dear old college buddy who lived in Brooklyn — the man to whom I am still married today. As my career and bank account took a huge hit when I left my teaching job in Korea, my then-boyfriend had offered to shack up with me in then-affordable South Slope to help me save money. This way, I wouldn’t have to get a full-time job, and could keep focusing on being there for Dave, albeit a bit further away.

The doctors gave Dave an appointment at Sloan-Kettering, a hospital home to the oldest cancer treatment center in the country. Inside of that center, we learned, there sits a second-opinion-giving machine of an oncology office, housed in their outpatient facility on East 53rd Street.

The first question our second opinion doctor asked when he entered the room, towering over us in his white coat and pinstriped pants, ever so polite in his British accent, was "Did you travel far to be here?"

"Just from Buffalo," my brother said.

"How long does that take?"

"About nine hours on the train."

Dr. P. did not confirm nor deny that a nine-hour train ride qualified as "far," from the perspective of the Sloan-Kettering second-opinion machine. He had already turned his back to us, and began fiddling with the computer, which contained my brother's life story, as seen through the lens of his cancer treatment.

The computer was one of six objects total in the room. The others were: the desk on which it sat, the cushioned stool on which Dr. P. sat, the hard chair on which I sat, and the examination chair on which Dave reclined. There were no posters on the walls, urging us to quit smoking or examine an esoteric part of the human anatomy in detail; no swabs or other testing elements to suggest the dynamic messiness of medicine. This room did not seem to be a place for gathering or providing new information to the freshly-diagnosed. It was a place for examining the truth or falseness of what was already thought to be known.

Dr. P. quietly traveled along the timeline of Dave’s treatments on the screen, reading while we waited in silence, sometimes swiveling around to ask for directions on his journey.

"When did you receive your first gamma knife treatment?" he asked Dave at one point.

In May 2011, I knew immediately. Right before my birthday. Even though he was still recovering from surgery, Dave had still made me a birthday dinner, and served it al fresco on his porch in Elmwood Village.

"When did you stop taking Temodar?" came the next question. This one was more difficult. Dave simply knew he had been itching for months to cease swallowing poison. Temodar had caused sores to erupt in his mouth and his urine to burn with exiting chemicals, poison that caused him to vomit and go numb, his bones to rubberize and his skin to feel always numb. Finally, sometime recently, his doctors had said yes, no more Temodar. (We would learn later in this appointment that it had not been working anyway, that his sense of taste, of warmth, had been traded for ... nothing.)

Whenever Dave said, "I don't know," Dr. P. swiveled back towards the computer and its objective account of things, away from our faulty human memories, etched in emotions and not in black-and-white images.

But certain emotive details impressed even Dr. P. He noted that Dave had, in the span of time between his first seizure and this second opinion, visited South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Guatemala, and several domestic destinations besides.

"It looks like you've really been making the most of your time," he said, admiration in his voice. "Some people get their cancer diagnosis, and they don't do anything different."

It had never occurred to me that someone might interpret my brother’s traveling, something he would have done with or without cancer, as some kind of bucket-listing, Make-a-Wish world junket. But of course, that's how it must have looked to an oncologist who didn’t know him like Dr. M. did.

As I turned this moment over in my mind, the hair began to stand up on the back of my neck, as if an eerie horror movie soundtrack had begin to play inside of the room. Dave's doctors at home had centered his wishes for how he wanted his life to look, to be sure. But they had never actually uttered the phrase, "make the most of his time.” What did these doctors know about his time that Dave didn’t?

We found out when Dr. D., the head of the outpatient cancer clinic, joined us in our cell. Petite and pixie-cutted, D. eschewed the chair by the computer for a low stool, arranging herself so that her compassionate eyes were level with mine.

She asked Dave to follow her fingers with his eyes, the way you'd do with anyone who'd been knocked upside the head. He could move his eyes like a champ. I cheered for him and his eyeballs silently from my chair.

But then came the other tests, walking tests, the kind the cops might give to you on the side of the highway if they'd seen your car wandering towards oncoming traffic. Heel to toe, heel to toe. The kind I could have passed easily, even after a New York happy hour.

Dave had told me he'd been losing his balance lately. He had a bruiser of a scar on his right cheekbone from a skateboarding spill he'd taken a few days earlier, while on this visit to New York City. But still, I was surprised to see how much Dave struggled with this test, staggering from side to side.

It was clear that Dave's tumor was coming back, and it was affecting his brain. There was no denying it now.

After two and a half years of treatment, the Sloan-Kettering team told us, Dave was now playing host to a hardened guerilla force of aggressive survivor cells, cells who could not be killed by chemotherapy and were becoming resistant to radiation.

More bad news followed. The kind of low-grade radiation his doctors had been using to keep the guerillas in hiding, radiation that could be delivered to large areas of his brain at a time in order to tamp down the tentacle-like growth of his tumor throughout his brain, could no longer be used, because they would "fry" his brain beyond redemption.

They showed us the tentacles on another computer screen, moving steadily forward, with nothing left to stop them.

"Nothing is going to kill this," Dr. D. told us finally, sadly.

After a long pause, I asked, "So what does the future look like now for Dave?" I asked. Dave had been working part-time. He’d been conducting job interviews over the phone for positions in other states. He had been hoping to buy a new car, and perhaps get a new place of his own.

"Well, things are going to start to slow down for him," Dr. D. responded carefully, meeting my gaze. "It's going to become tougher for him to keep his balance. He's going to lose the ability to control certain parts of his body. He may lose the ability to walk. You may see personality changes. He probably shouldn't live alone."

"So what about jobs, in the near-term?" I asked, still looking for loopholes, focusing on words like "may."

Dr. D. now turned to Dave to answer.

"You probably shouldn't take on jobs that are mentally demanding," she said to Dave. "In a little while, you won't be able to handle it."

We looked at the ground. After a while, we realized that the appointment was over.

"Well, thank you for your clarity," I said, meaning it.

"Absolutely," said Dr. D. I could tell that she meant it too.

With no further plans for the afternoon, we bought some overpriced roast beef sandwiches and hiked a few blocks to Central Park's southern boundary. At a traffic light en route, Dave snaked his arm around my shoulder, and we crossed the street like that, side-hugging in silence.

We sat. People scurried past, flagging down horse-drawn carriages, exiting the nearby Apple Store with big plans for their new technology, imagining that their past and future stretched out ahead in equally infinite directions. We tried to keep our sandwich wrappers from flying away in the wind.

"How are you feeling?" I asked Dave.

"Pretty bummed," he said.

There wasn't much more to say. Two and a half years of injesting poison and losing hair. Two and a half years of first dates and birthdays. What should we hope for now? I wanted to marry the man with whom I was shacking up in Brooklyn. Would my brother be able to dance at our wedding?

If someone could tell us the answers to these questions more clearly than the Sloan-Kettering doctors had, would we want to hear them?

Dave was never the type of person to lose his cool in public. He walked me to the subway. He told me he was going to keep his plans for the evening: to meet some fellow skateboarding friends at a secret pizza party being held at a posh downtown boutique.

In other words, he was going to make the most of his time.

The next morning, my boyfriend cooked us all a big breakfast before Dave was slated to leave on his train. I was five minutes into my first cup of coffee before I looked ad Dave’s shirt. It was oversized, neon yellow. Emblazoned across the front were the words "CHOOSE DEATH,” in giant black capital letters.

In retrospect, I wonder now how he knew to pack that t-shirt for this second opinion trip. If Dave, like Dr. M, had already known more about his time than he had chosen to let on.

Back at home in Buffalo, Dave met with Dr. M. again, who had, as my mother described it, a "much more hopeful take."

Dr. M. felt that Dave was special. He said that he might have given him the same second opinion, had he been seeing him for the first time, and seen the snapshot on the screen that the Sloan-Kettering second-opinion doctors were given. But now, Dr. M. had a different opinion.

Unlike the second-opinion doctors, Dr. M. had seen firsthand the way Dave recovered after the diagnosis of his initial tumor, which had brought him under Dr. M.’s jurisdiction. He had seen Dave change his diet, change his address, change his plans whenever his health demanded it. He remembered the same surgeries and birthday dinners and adventures abroad that I did, the same long nights of vomiting and early-morning appointments filled with gallows humor. As subjective as those human memories could be, to Dr. M., they made a difference in shaping his medical opinion.

So when Dr. M. talked about the future, he did not talked about what Dave would not be able to do, but what we could still do. He told us that while the chemotherapy and low-grade radiation that they had been using thus far were, in fact, off the table for now, as the Sloan-Kettering second opinion doctors had confirmed, there were still weapons in our arsenal that we could use against the aggressive tumor. There was still the gamma knife, precise and deadly, that could be used on small parts of his brain. There was another medication that could be given to him in lieu of the poisonous Temodar.

I could see in my brother’s eyes that he was tired. And yet, a new travel opportunity had just recently arisen. My brother had been invited to take a whitewater rafting trip with my father down the Salmon River in Idaho. Seven days, early September, something new to look forward to. He'd make my father's birthday on the first of September, always a lovely time of year out West. He’d have some time in the sun to read books and drink beer, navigate rapids, stare down at the aquamarine water rushing by. He would still have some time to make the most of it, if he wanted to.

Dave always wanted to.

So Dave chose to submit to one more treatment. In the meantime, he tried to skate, with his terrible balance, as long as he could, accepting that more bruises would come. He stopped applying for full-time jobs and started worked on pro bono projects for cancer nonprofits he knew he could complete, with the skills and abilities he still had. And he rode the Salmon River, one last time.

Those last months of my brother’s life were, in their way, more instructive than the many years of grad school that followed for me, in terms of how I now show up as a teacher, a mother, and a human being.

Dave’s news was terrible, horrible, the worst imaginable. But for Dave, I also saw how much it liberated him. Finally, there was no longer any pressure for him to keep pretending that death didn’t exist, like everyone else. To get a job, kid. To head mindlessly now, after graduation, into a lifetime of mediocre work and spiritual banality.

Not everybody, when reminded that life is a terminal condition for everyone, makes the changes they could. Nor is it some sort of silver lining, one that makes having cancer okay. But I think there is something to be said for receiving permission, a doctor's note, to make the most of our time. Not many of us get that, but we all deserve it.

Before diagnosis: Dave in China.

After diagnosis: Dave at Angkor Wat.

After diagnosis: Dave skating in Buffalo. (Credit: Jenkem Magazine)

Facing grief

On December 5th, 2013, four months after our meeting at Sloan-Kettering, my brave little brother died. A dozen years later, I continue to try to make sense of his passing, and his absence.

I do not do this alone; many, many people who knew Dave continue to reach out to me on his birthday, or his death day, to tell me: I remember too. I’m telling his story, too.

When our friends first found out Dave’s last tumor would likely take his life, so many rallied around us then as well. So many asked, "How can I help?" or wrote to us, "If there's anything I can do..."

Others simply took the initiative, perhaps sensing that a person caught in the midst of a paradigm-shattering trauma is not the most capable delegator. These people brought common-sense items like hot soup, clean sheets, funny movies and homemade mac 'n' cheese.

Inspiringly, some went in a more creative direction, assigning themselves projects geared around their particular strengths and making offerings of the best things they could muster.

A letterpress artist created a custom artwork for David for everyone to sign with their best wishes as they visited him.

A professional skateboarder asked his company to create a special board with David's name on it, to be hung in his room.

An art therapist came with a stack of her paints and sketchpads, tied neatly with ribbon, in case Dave wanted to paint in his bed.

A number of friends brought CDs with Dave's favorite songs, and we watched with joy as he listened with eyes closed, mouthing the words even after he lost the ability to speak.

A touring musician friend brought her guitar and played the blues, her clear and perfect voice filling the room with a feeling of deep calm and human comfort that was hard to find during those last dark days.

The actions of these amazing friends spoke so much louder than words. They communicated to us just what we needed to hear:

We know we can’t fix everything. We know we can’t cure his illness. We know we can’t make the tears go away. We may not even be able to understand how you feel. But we can step in to help change the sheets and make you soup.

As many people who have fought and lost and grieved can attest, it is impossible to predict which people in your life, when pressed, will choose to face this process of loss and meaning-making with you, or shrink from it. And sadly, some of our closest loved ones did not.

I heard in their silence a sense of terror, of incompetence, of paralysis, of obliviousness or denial. And while I couldn’t know how all the silent ones felt for sure (I was, frankly, too busy to call those who didn’t call us), I did have one opportunity to talk with a close friend who seemed to be avoiding me, after I had helped this friend through many hard times. I told her how much her avoidance had hurt me.

"I've just been afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing," she explained. "I don't want to fail you."

I told her I had sensed that. I understood it. To try something and risk failure or rejection from a friend in need—that is a scary thing.

But that scariness, I felt — and still feel — is not a good enough excuse for staying silent.

"The only way you can fail is by doing nothing," I told her. It is still the most common piece of advice that I give to people who want to be helpful in the wake of someone else’s loss.

That, and bring soup. It is never, ever the wrong thing to do.

Since my brother passed away, I have often found myself in conversations with other grieving people. Ironically, despite the unavoidable fact of death in every human life, the most common refrains I have heard from the grieving are “I don’t know what to do,” “I feel like I’m not doing this right,” and “I feel so alone.” The same feelings that many of us have when we first receive our loved one’s diagnosis in the first place.

We seem to have gained so much as a secular and diverse society, a country of people who can move around, do as they please, rewrite old rules, right old wrongs. But what we have gained in individual freedom we seem to have lost in timeless community traditions, especially those surrounding death, that help ease these feelings of “wrongness,” and allow us to heal. Religious Christians still have wakes, and Jews still sit shivah, but the rest of us, especially those belonging to a younger and less traditional generation, are often left improvising without a script. Of course the results feel sloppy sometimes. But that doesn’t make them less precious, or sincere.

What matters, in the final days of a loved one’s life, is that you gave them the best everyday magic you had, whether it was clean sheets or sheet music.

What matters is not that you were able to exercise superhuman powers and strength to fully comprehend and control the march of human mortality, but how you showed up for it, imperfectly.

What matters is not just how they made the most of their time, but how you made the most of yours.

Sign me up for Zoom invites!

"Perfect" is not how great things get started

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 11:05:16 GMT

Save the Date for Our Upcoming Circle Series!

Our last circle of caregivers was so delightful that we’ve decided to keep the Tuesday morning time the same for the rest of 2025. Please save the date for these upcoming conversations!

Caring for K-12 kids: Tues July 8, 10:30am EST
Affirming neurodivergence (ours and/or our kids'): Tues August 5th, 10:30am EST
Caring for other adults: Tues Sept 2, 10:30am EST
Navigating cross-generational conversations about care: Tues Sept 30, 10:30am EST
Making space for grief: Tues Oct 28, 10:30am EST
Burnout prevention: Dec 2, 10:30am EST (note: this is the week after Thanksgiving)

Note: if you’re not signed up to get the Zoom invites for our community gatherings, please click the button below to get on the invite list, which keeps the Zoom container secure and workable for all.

A few years ago, a dear mom friend and I stood on a playground, talking about this new writing project I was working on.

“I’d be so scared every time I hit publish,” my friend told me. “Scared that I’d sound crazy. That people would hate it. But you don’t seem to be worried about that.”

“Oh, I definitely worry about that!” I said. “I just do it before, during, and after hitting publish.”

When I first started writing on Substack, I hadn’t published much in a while. While I began my career as a journalist, covering music, food and culture for a wide range of publications up and down the East Coast, I’d then gone to school for a master’s in education. Afterwards, I found myself consumed by the 24/7 demands of being a K-12 teacher in a high-needs community, while also getting certified as a yoga teacher, doing fertility treatment and then parenting a baby through a pandemic.

My intention with this newsletter in the beginning wasn’t to start a long-running publication or a community. It was probably more akin to taking an instrument I was re-learning to play out to a public park, and throwing my instrument case on the ground in case other people liked what they heard enough to throw a couple of dollars down. I was simply trying to re-discover my relationship to creative play in order to heal from burnout.

And then, something magical happened.

You.

Every person who showed up in those early days, and then kept coming back, encouraged me to keep writing. About grief. About listening to the needs of our sensitive brains and bodies. About using mindfulness to slow down and stay sane while doing so. About realizing that there were many other caregivers out there, doing the same, with their own wisdom to share.

You are the ones who taught me just how many of us are looking for one other.

And thus, In Tending was born.

In Tending was launched exactly one year ago! (Photo by Adam Kring on Unsplash)

It feels fitting that the first anniversary of In Tending should fall upon the Community Tuesday on which we are scheduled to talk about the f@#$s we’re no longer giving. Because giving a f@#$ about perfection would have doomed this project from the start, and I think it continues to doom so many projects like it that this world really needs.

I am haunted sometimes by the thought that I might have actually listened to that voice inside of me that said, “Don’t write anything. It’s not perfect yet. They’ll think you’re crazy. They’ll hate it.” That I would have walked away from such an important part of myself. That I never would have met you.

To continue to make this thing, I have had to constantly experiment with the Buddhist notion of Right Effort — a sense of not being too loose with this thing, but also not being too tight. I’ve had to set intentions, and check in with my body a million times to see if I still have the capacity to carry them out, and scout the rapids ahead to navigate any external challenges I’m lucky enough to see coming. But I’ve also had to release any sense that I know what I am doing in some unequivocal way, that I have all the answers, that I am privy to some sort of long-term plan. Writing a newsletter, like caring for a loved one, is primarily a series of lessons in tolerating uncertainty.

If you feel me, you are warmly invited to ditch your perfection-related f@#$s here in the chat now. For a few more insights and highlights from this past year, scroll on.

When I first started writing on Substack, in January of 2023, I wrote under the newsletter name Initiation Writes, and focused primarily on stories of personal transformation. In my first post, I mostly wanted people like me to know that if their prior lives and plans had recently ended in ashes, they were not alone.

In the post in which I changed the newsletter name to In Tending, in the summer of 2024, I knew I was no longer alone. And thus I wanted to better convey the sense that my writing and community-building work here, going forward, would no longer be about me, if it ever was. I wanted to make it clear that the focus would now be on supporting all kinds of caregivers, in following their own Calling to clarity and liberation.

This year, we’re celebrating the fact that I am no longer facilitating our community conversations alone. Because Meredith Rodriguez, that dear friend who once stood with me on the playground and said she wished she too could find a space to speak her mind, has now joined me as a collaborator on this project, co-hosting our community Zoom gatherings.

While I might have gotten this creative endeavor started, very imperfectly, Meredith has encouraged me in so many ways to let it continue to be imperfect. To allow it to breathe, to grow, to evolve. To embrace the life-changing magic of not knowing what the f@#$ is going to happen next.

In these two conversations below, Meredith lays out her own down-to-earth, wise-but-accessible philosophy on caregiving and mindfulness. Our community, and my own caregiving practice, is so much the richer for it.

Now, the two of us get to remind each other regularly that wherever and whenever we choose to show up creatively, nothing has to be perfect.

And sure, some people still might think we’re crazy, or hate it. But in my experience so far, many more people will say, “Thank you. This is exactly what I needed to hear.”

We all need people to climb alongside us

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 11:05:02 GMT

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

– Václav Havel

After the election, our family traveled, with some trepidation, to my home state of Utah. There, I had the privilege of staying in a hotel that doubled as a vast community space for the city’s hippie-punk counterculture. In this hotel, there is a cool coffee shop inside with a giant rainbow Pride flag hanging from the ceiling. There are flyers on the bulletin boards featuring information on finding Black birth workers and promoting queer-youth meetups on the local ski slopes. There’s a skate park on the ground floor offering affordable lessons for tiny kids to learn to kick-flip.

This may surprise some readers, but it doesn’t surprise me. This counterculture has long thrived right alongside Utah’s red-state, Mormon-Church majority. In November, Salt Lake County broke for Harris-Walz by ten points. Growing up in the heart of this kind of community led me to believe that even when you are surrounded by people who disagree with you, in a political context in which you seem outnumbered, incremental change is still possible.

Often, what makes sustained movements for change possible, even under difficult conditions, is a shared sense that there are plenty of other people who are willing to put in that effort right alongside you. It’s knowing you’re not alone.

My five-year-old son is growing up in much more liberal surrounds than I did, in coastal New England. But it is becoming clear that the fight ahead of him, and his generation, might transcend the turf wars over protecting this or that patch of wilderness, or the culture wars over this or that pop star, that characterized my red-state childhood. With this in mind, I began, on that trip to Utah, to give him some preliminary lessons in how to fall down and get back up again, and to gather strength from the effort of other people doing the same alongside him. Lessons I think that many of us still need.

This story is about that.

Peering out over both solar panels and polluted valley air, atop Salt Lake City’s stunning Natural History Museum.

My son loves climbing any structure he can outside. So I was excited to learn that our hotel had a bouldering gym inside, open 24/7. He was excited too, the first time he saw the vast warehouse-like space, filled with soccer-ball-sized footholds in all colors of the rainbow. I rented him a pair of very tiny climbing shoes. And then I stepped back and waited, to see what he would do.

First, my son ran toward one of the inviting footholds immediately, and hauled himself to the top of a large orange semi-circle almost as wide as he was, sitting down with a big grin on his face like a frog on a lily pad.

Then, he fell off.

Fortunately, the floors of the bouldering gym were deep and soft, like gigantic mattresses. No harm done, save to his pride.

He tried to climb it again, and fell off again.

Then, he declared, I quit, I quit.

I had predicted this part.

We sat down together, to consider what to do next.

As my friend Jess Van Wyen and I discussed in this interview, I don’t think we are obligated to finish everything we start. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to change course.

But we do have choices, beyond the binary of “grind” or “quit.” We can also take breaks. We can get help. We can let go of the last attempt and simply begin again.

As Roshi Joan Halifax would tell us, it’s best not to get too far ahead of ourselves, whether we’re learning to climb up vertical walls or break down oppressive systems. The Zen approach to activism she espouses is one in which you just do the next right thing. You grab the next available foothold, even if you’re not sure where it will lead. And you try to let go of the belief that you can map or control every step after that. Otherwise, you’ll get discouraged the first time you fall off the wall, as my son did.

As she says:

As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what might actually happen. To make matters worse, not getting what we hoped for is often experienced as a misfortune. If we look deeply, we realize that anyone who is conventionally hopeful has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. Ordinary hope then is a form of suffering. This kind of hope is a nemesis and a partner with fear.

Hoping to make it all the way up the wall is fine, of course. But quitting when that doesn’t happen, or fearing the fall so much that we never attempt the climb, creates more suffering.

What is the alternative to “conventional hope”? Roshi Joan calls her Zen version of hope “wise hope.”

Wise hope is a hope that is unattached to any particular ideology or language or established way of doing things. It is also a hope that is unattached to any particular outcome of our actions.

Wise hope is a commitment to getting up and trying again, regardless of whether you ever make it to some imagined top, in any situation where trying makes more sense than quitting.

Wise hope is choosing a skillful response to situations in which we see a way to reduce suffering—our own, or someone else’s—in that moment.

Here are some examples Roshi Joan gives of things that make sense:

It makes sense to shelter the homeless, including those fleeing from war and climate devastation; it makes sense to support compassion and care in medicine in spite of the increasing presence of technology that stands between patients and clinicians. It makes sense to educate girls and vote for women. It makes sense to sit with dying people, take care of our elders, feed the hungry, love and educate our children.
In truth, we can’t know how things will turn out, but we can trust that there will be movement, there will be change. And something deep inside us affirms what is good and right to do.

Back at the wall, I wondered aloud to my son if there were other options besides walking away that felt good and right for him to do. With Roshi Joan’s framing in mind, I also gave him some examples.

“I wonder if there’s a feeling of being intimidated, or overwhelmed, in a space with so many things going on,” I said. “Would it make sense to stop climbing for a moment, and just observe? There are a lot of experienced climbers around us. By watching them closely, we could probably learn a lot.”

All around the gym, pierced and tattooed Utahns were hauling themselves up the walls, laughing and cheering each other on. I pointed out each time one fell down, then bounced back up. My son hadn’t noticed this before. He sat up a little straighter.

“I wonder, too: would it make sense for me to put shoes on and climb next to you?” I asked. “Sometimes feeling like we’re all by ourselves is what makes it tricky to try again.”

He nodded. I went to get some shoes. I chose an easy ascent in the center of the gym, noting that the ones for beginners were marked with yellow footholds.

“I want to warm up and build my confidence,” I said, thinking out loud for his benefit, the way I’ve often done for my older students, when teaching them writing or math— processes that also include a lot of false starts and frustration. “So I’m going to start with something I know I can do.”

My son looked around the gym, taking note of all the other yellow footholds in the room. He watched me scramble up the wall about halfway, then drop down, huffing and puffing. Whew, that “easy” one felt hard, I thought. I must be a little out of shape. I noted that thought and let it go.

“Wow, okay. So I just fell down. Hmmm. Maybe what we can both do is practice falling off the wall and landing, and falling off the wall and landing, and falling off the wall and landing. That way, like those other experienced climbers, we’ll just get used to it, and then it might not be such a big deal,” I suggested. “What do you think?”

My son didn’t answer me at first.

“I guess you could also sit here on the ground, feeling helpless, or like you have to leave,” I said. “But I just want you to know, you belong here as much as anyone else.”

More sullen silence. Sometimes these little encouraging speeches are as much for me as they are for my son. Sometimes I just have to trust that these mostly one-sided parental pep talk moments are sinking in, even with zero evidence. That is my wall to climb.

Eventually, we discerned that my son’s sullenness was due in part to the fact that he needed a snack. (Relatable!) So we sat down with some power bars, and then we made a new plan. My son would pick two more places to try to ascend before we left the gym. We talked about which ones, analyzing the first footholds and the ones above it, to assess whether the ascents were right for his body. When he got started, I cheered him on. Then, I hauled my own body up the knobbly neon-colored footholds a few times next to him, as did his dad.

My six-year-old never did get very far, at least by an experienced climbers’ standards. But he climbed more than twice, because by then, he was having fun, and we were doing it all together.

Perhaps more importantly, my son learned how to begin again, the next time he chose to try.

Right now, I have a kid. Right now, he’s learning to fall down and get back up. Right now, I’m the best person to climb alongside him. Right now, that’s my right thing to do. That is what makes sense to me.

I have this instinct that all across the country, caregivers are offering the same kinds of lessons to the future activists growing up around them.

We are teaching our kids that they belong in any space where big things are happening, even if they have to start small.

We are teaching our kids that sometimes, the first step, when you’re feeling discouraged or intimidated, is learning from people who are one step ahead of you—heroes and heroines from history, spiritual warriors and clever queens from myth and legend, people who are leading movements of resistance right now.

We are teaching our kids that it’s normal to experience ups and downs, that change is the only constant, and that there’s no shame in falling off the wall sometimes. The alternative is never to attempt the climb.

We are teaching our kids that even though a vast number of people in this past election said, “Screw this, I’m gonna get mine, no matter what that means for anyone else,” there are countless others willing to climb alongside us, even if that means they have to slow down so we can keep up.

Right now, many of us may feel like we are facing a vertical wall, one that’s daunting and difficult to scale. But I think there is wise hope in remembering that there are kids all around us who have never climbed at all, who are watching us to see what we do.

For those of us who are in a position to raise or teach this next generation of kids, it may help to remember that showing a child how to get back up after a fall is just as important, if not more so, than teaching them how to be on top.

Where I’m finding wise hope these days:

When I’m feeling low and need inspiration, I visit ’s work for a spiritual perspective that is different from but complementary to my own (“Give me the strength to do the next right thing”). I look to and her Engaged Dharma Book Club for great reads on nonviolent activism. I read
’s essays on taking a wider perspective. And I revisit, again and again, the wisdom in this talk between Lama Rod Owens, Prentis Hemphill and the great Angela Davis, which invites us all to “go to the frontlines of our work.”
When I need to pause and look around, to learn from others who have been in this work a long while, I tune into the wise leadership of (“Dear White Women: This is Where the Work Begins”) and the bracing pep talks of (“I feel overwhelmed by the brokenness of the world”), (“Hope is a woman who lost her fear”) and Mariame Kaba (“Letter to a Young Organizer”).
When I’m not sure which foothold to grab next, I also consult wise writing partners like , whose work on building community beyond the nuclear family is always deeply nourishing and generous. I also often read Chop Wood, Carry Water, New Means, , and the work of to remind myself of how many good people are already climbing alongside me, and pointing the way ahead.

Your turn: What wall are you climbing right now? And what keeps you going?

Love and liberation in the land of Rebecca Yarros

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 12:05:51 GMT

“Joy has to become a discipline and a practice, even when we feel like it is not something that feels like it is in solidarity with the moment—the heaviness, the density, the realism of the moment. We have to choose joy, because joy, for me, becomes a way that I restore myself for the work. You can get too tight and serious about liberation, and it ends up spinning you further into incarceration.” — Lama Rod Owens

Recently I found myself with a lot of time on my hands in the hospital, and a stack of books by Rebecca Yarros to read, delivered by some folks who knew I needed a distraction. And wow, did they deliver, as anyone familiar with her smash-hit Empyrean series already knows. I read all three brick-size hardcovers in a week.

What interested me most was not just the content of the books, which follow the adventures of twenty-something Violet Sorrengail as she navigates life and love, in a world full of government corruption and smoldering revolutionaries. (More on this later.)

What intrigued me was the excitement with which my stack of books was met by over half of the nursing staff.

At least six women stopped what they were doing — and it was a busy time in the hospital, with the ER at full capacity — to talk to me at length about the series, and in particular the third hyped title, Onyx Storm, which just dropped. One nurse gave me the latest goss from TikTok about the fan reaction to the series. Another said that the buzz reminded her of the late ‘90s hype around the Harry Potter series. A colleague of theirs overheard us and said wonderingly, “How do you all have time to read? I barely have the energy to cook and sleep.”

“Just read these books,” one of them told her, adjusting her cool-girl clear glasses. “Then you’ll understand.”

As a former romantasy skeptic, I could stop here and tell you to do the same. (I would also tell you to stop here if you don’t want to read any spoilers, and come back when you’ve finished the series.)

I think there’s more to say here, though, about what these books can teach us.

Via @hphalfdrunk, a podcast dedicated to heroine-centric fantasy books.

Right now we need art that helps us fight oppression. We need art that reminds us of why life is worth living. And we need of community organizing efforts that offer us the same.

The sense of community and cohesion around these books proves my point. People will come together around meaning and joy and belonging, even when they supposedly don’t have time, far more often than they will come together when they are being whipped into a state of fear or shame. Including by people who would otherwise be their natural allies.

This is a sentiment other longtime meditators and activists have shared recently as well.

As Lama Rod Owens said after the election, building on his comments quoted above:

“Some of you really struggle to build communities, to build movements, because you're too intense. I think it's time to say that. You don't invite people into the work. You push people away. People are like, ‘I can't live up to this intensity. You have a standard of liberation that's unattainable. And if that's your liberation, I don't want it.’ One of my favorite quotes is by Emma Goldman: ‘If I can't dance, it's not my revolution.’ If I can't drop it like it’s hot, then don’t invite me.”

Caregivers are already weighed down by unattainable standards in so many ways. Our lives are already characterized by inescapable intensity. So if the art I consume in my downtime doesn’t revive and inspire and even delight me — if it doesn’t restore me for the work — then don’t invite me.

Rebecca Yarros, a Millennial mom with six kids and a chronic illness, clearly knows from crushing responsibility, and has understood her assignment. So let’s talk about what she’s actually done here, and why it might help us to create better stories and movements to meet this particularly dour historical moment.

Rebecca Yarros, signing copies of The Fourth Wing, the first book in her Empyrean series.

As a thought experiment to prepare you for what I’m about to say, imagine the following: Star Wars begins not with Luke but with Leia. She’s tasked with living up to the standards set by others in her lineage. She has to overcome sexism, learn to use a weapon, and ultimately figure out how to win a revolution against a foe that is far more heavily armed and organized. In the meantime, she has to choose between the guy that seems like a safe bet and the rougue-ish loner who stumbles onto her path and seems intent on making it more treacherous. Is this a story you’d like to see on the screen?

Now imagine you’re reading Hermione and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The author is not a deeply problematic crank; the muse has in fact skipped her and dropped her blockbuster-series ambitions on a different author, one who actually seems to like queer and nonbinary people. Rather than treating us to fatphobic diatribes featuring the Dursleys, we see more scenes of Hermione dealing with dudes in her school who seem hellbent on second-guessing her choices every minute of her day. That is, until she eclipses them all in smarts and talent, and finds better allies (and romantic partners) who love and value her. Would a story like that get you off the couch and into your nearest bookstore?

If you felt some small thrill as you considered the above, then you now have some sense of what the Empyrean series offers to readers. Which is to say, the same fantasy and sci-fi tropes we know and love, but with a female gaze and voice. It’s almost like publishers and moviemakers could have been giving us this all along.

“Romance is this beautiful place where women get to say on the page what we want, what we deserve, what healthy relationships should look like.” — Rebecca Yarros

In The Fourth Wing, we meet Violet Sorrengail, a Leia-Hermione hybrid who is born into a military family. Though she aspires to be a scribe — a kind of librarian-cum-journalist who narrates and organizes the history of Navarre, their nation — her general mother forces her to train as a dragon-rider instead.

This is inconvenient, because Violet has a condition that makes her physically fragile. Given this, her childhood bestie spends half the book trying to “save” her from a life of warriorship by smuggling her out of dragon-rider school. Eventually, though, she realizes she’s capable of simply outsmarting the jocks in her classes that she can’t overpower. So smart, in fact, that Violet uncovers some big government secrets that are leading to the deaths of many innocent people, and has to team up with the leaders of an underground revolution — also dragon riders — to make things right. Luckily for her, one of them is very attractive and thinks she’s a badass, even if she does have bad knees. (Truly a tired millennial mother’s dream!)

I haven’t read A Court of Thorns and Roses, aka ACOTAR, the series by Sarah J. Maas to which this one is most often compared, but thanks to , I’m familiar with common reader likes/dislikes vis a vis that series, and the romantasy genre in general. People say that it’s mainly a vehicle for hotness, with scenes that only loosely connect in order to drive forward a sexy and explicit storyline between monogamous straights.1 While I don’t judge folks for enjoying that, this wasn’t my experience of Yarros’ series (and ACOTAR fans may not find those critiques fair, either). There’s a fairly elaborate plot and cast of well-rounded characters in Yarros’ books. Women in this series hold leadership positions, express and fulfill desires, and regularly pass the Bechdel test.2 They do so while being Deaf and chronically ill, queer and ethically non-monogamous, ambivalent about their mothers and protective of their chosen family.

At the same time, the overall effect is not distractingly politically correct. People casually swear, insult, and kill each other on the regular in Yarros’ books, in ways that make it clear that ableism and toxic masculinity are alive and well in the militaristic society of Navarre. While talk of diets and food is blissfully absent, many characters are fixated on physical fitness and allergic to displays of “weakness,” as you might expect warriors to be. What we see is not the absence but the frequent transcendence of these cultural forces. It is strong relationships, as much if not more so than individual grit or merit, that allow characters to rise above self-doubt and prejudice to dream their way to a better nation. For a series that seems to be set in a vague, pre-industrial past, it’s a good fit for the emerging themes of 2025.

“Like, why am I into reading about a world that’s trying to figure out how to, like, fund the arts, and rectify past misogyny, and work towards equality, and no one [is] hung up on weird sexual mores and the planet isn’t dying? Weird that that’s a pleasant place for my mind to hang out for several hours every day!” — Anne Helen Petersen on the appeal of romantasy

Does this series have literary, manicured sentences a la Hemingway, though? Will it make you feel sophisticated as you carry it around on the subway? Will it impress the trolls in the New York Times comment section? Heck, no.

The gilded covers and larger-than-life titles make it clear that you’re reading a capital-F fantasy book. (There’s always Kindle.) Some passages clearly needed one more editing pass; as written, a few are so confusingly composed that they require multiple re-readings. (One might argue that this is the price you pay for actually getting the next book in the series in a timely fashion — looking at you, George R.R. Martin.) The characters speak like they’re in “Mean Girls” even as they sit astride dragons in a European-ish setting, in rapid-fire dialogues laden with dirty jokes and sarcasm. So do the dragons themselves, when they deign to speak at all. (When you’re recovering from surgery, as I was recently, one might argue that this too is a feature, not a bug. I would imagine the same is true for any exhausted nurse or tired mom picking this up at the end of a shift.)

If you can handle all this, you’ll easily survive a semester at Basgiath War College. In fact, you’ll probably really enjoy your time there. And joy is restorative. Does it matter so much where you find it these days, if it’s not hurting anybody? Are we really willing to grind people into the ground, for the sake of keeping supposedly more “literary” speculative fiction authors like Orwell on their dusty pedestals? Would we prefer to have would-be readers read nothing at all? I think the author of 1984 himself would hate that, not to mention most of our nation’s teachers and librarians.

I guess what I’m asking is this: in 2025, are we pretentious literary types ready to finally get over ourselves and have a little fun, given everything else that’s at stake in the world?

If you can’t, then maybe you're too intense, and I think it's time to say that.

This guy (a fellow educator and activist who enjoys “Love is Blind” in his spare time) gets it.

Here’s where this connects to the real world work of community-building and activism. Caregivers, as I’ve noted, are tired. We are time-poor. But we are not apathetic, nor are we without organizing talents.

If activists are to create new movements to respond to the oppressive actions that are sure to come in the next four years, and we want them to include caregivers, we need to design calls to action and communities that are life-giving. That are joyful. That bring us not just justice but glee.

We need to draw in the same nurses who are binging these books on their Kindles after work, and heading in their thousands to see Rebecca Yarros speak on their weekends as if she were T-Swift, because they feel that they belong in the psychic and physical spaces she inhabits, and the stories she is telling have the power to restore them for the work. We need them to feel that way when they show up to the next info session for [insert your favorite nonprofit here].

The most successful and long-lasting organizations for which I’ve worked, as a longtime activist, are already doing this. Glee is an essential part of their strategy. As a twenty-something myself, I found that hosting African wine tastings to benefit Many Hopes, which supports girls’ education in Kenya, was a much more effective way to attract booze-loving Millennials to the cause than yet another 5k fundraiser email. In my thirties, I’ve hosted karaoke nights for grievers via The Dinner Party and benefited from big communal dance classes hosted RTZ Hope that are designed to help the body release trauma. And no one plans a week-long fiesta in D.C. like my friends at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which has been fighting drilling leases for decades now, and mobilizing voters to come tell their Congressional reps to do the same. People come to Wilderness Week to defend their public lands in Alaska or Virginia or Utah, sure, but they also very openly come to get the digits of other Teva-wearing hotties who are doing the work.3

As my friend Lissa likes to say, por que no los dos?

Anyone who dismisses the Women’s March in 2017 along similar lines, as “just a party,” is missing the point. I was there. The point of the Women’s March was that it restored us for the work ahead, not that it completed it. The point is that public displays of activism can and should be an outpouring of our most life-giving impulses, not a panopticon populated by our judgiest and most anxious selves, or a recreation of the warlike displays of our oppressors. The point is dropping despair like it’s hot.

By this, I don’t mean to say that we should spend all of our time at one-off demonstrations that don’t lead to long-lasting change, or use them to avoid our feelings of grief and/or helplessness in this moment. Most activists I’ve encountered, who are doer-fixer types by temperament, would benefit from cultivating practices that allow them to simply sit with these feelings, whether through self-compassion meditation or reflective writing. Grief work is a part of activism, just as it is with great literature. If we’re so busy organizing that we don’t allow ourselves to process our emotions, we’re bound to act out of rage and thirst for revenge and unprocessed trauma, which is to say we are bound to re-create these things, and perhaps to burn ourselves or others out in the process. If we do that, we will never have the peace we seek.4

But grief is just that — a part of the work. And I have written enough words on grief to know that grieving alone does not make us whole.

We need joy.

If we can’t have a horn section and some sparkles, then it’s not my revolution. (Via Wikimedia Commons)

The. notion that we need to feel both joy and grief to make sense of the world permeates the best fantasy books, the ones that draw us in and stay with us.

The guardian angels of A Wrinkle in Time are clear that they exist to fight the darkness, but they also show Meg O’Leary planets full of singing and light. Those images have brought me comfort since my first encounters with the series as a child, when I would lie awake listening to my parents fighting in the room next door.

The characters in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness must traverse an endless, alien winter landscape together, but they survive because they love and trust each other. When I was going through infertility with my husband, the bittersweet resonance of this story was a balm for my own possibly-infinite longing.

The village elder in The Giver knows that he must tell Jonas the truth about death and war, but before that, he teaches him about the softness of snow, and the lights on Christmas. When we locked down in 2020, when my son was eight months old, it was Lois Lowry’s classic that carried my fifty students and I through that first terrifying pandemic spring. As I wrote of that experience here:

They were not benumbed by our circumstances, as it turned out, nor were they cynical… these teens who had been trapped inside for months were sure that something worth trusting was still coming out of the dark, to meet our brave hero halfway.

I still tear up, reading those words, and remembering what that book meant to us all back then.

Now, we are confronted with an administration that wishes to erase our history, and use our country’s public resources for private gain. We are joined in solidarity by the cadets in training from Yarros’ books, as they too face down an existential threat to which the supposedly-seasoned leaders around them seem unprepared to respond. In these books, as in real life, there are people brainstorming new solutions with great earnestness, who are also finding time to grab drinks down at the pub, and even and especially to get busy with each other.

I love that they do that.

I love being reminded that joy has an important place in any successful revolution.

There is one scene in Iron Flame, the second book in Yarros’ series, that stays with me, as I heal from my own recent trauma. In it, Violet has recently been hurt badly. She is still on the mend, physically. But her soul is also at risk of being broken by what she’s been made to endure, in the interrogation rooms below Basgiath. To heal this part of herself, she rolls over in bed to look at her fellow revolutionary, and she propositions him. He’s surprised, but this is a series about female desires being fulfilled, so he also consents. What follows is a scene in which she reclaims her strength, her voice, her body. She reclaims ownership of herself, from the men who have tried to take it all from her.

She doesn’t do it with grief. She doesn’t do it alone. She does it with play. And she does it with love.

In the years to come, can we as activists remember the lessons we learned from books like these, when we were children dreaming of saving the world like our heroes? Can we remember now that we are still as worthy of play, of humor, of magic as we were back then?

Can we get serious, as Lama Rod Owens suggests, about making joy “a discipline and a practice, even when we feel like it is not something that feels like it is in solidarity with the moment—the heaviness, the density, the realism of the moment”?

Like him, I think that we must. If not, we risk doing the work of our oppressors by incarcerating ourselves, as much in a prison of pretentiousness and self-imposed austerity as in a real prison of laws and guns. We risk, like the cadets of Navarre, doing all this serious training to protect the lives of others, while forgetting to ask ourselves what makes our own lives actually worth living, and fighting to protect that too.

I don’t want to risk all that. Instead, I dream of building rooms in the revolution to come in which some people are dancing to 90s hip-hop, and others are reading joyful romantasy books and dressing up in leather, and still others are clinking glasses with the future loves of their lives.

In my mind, this is the only way we can win.

What do you say? Wanna join me? There’s room in this revolution for you, too.

On a quick personal note: Thanks so much to those of you who checked in on me while I was in the hospital, and who even chose to upgrade to a paid subscription, despite the fact that I was unable to host our January In Tending get-together as promised. Your support means the world, and has allowed me to return to this work feeling excited and honored to create more offerings for this community of incredible caregivers. Thank you.

Your turn: What are your thoughts on romantasy as a genre in general? On Yarros and her books in particular? On how tired caregivers can work joy — with or without reading — into their already busy schedules? On how movements can make more room for tired caregivers to contribute their talents, by making our time in activism less white-knuckling and more life-giving? I’d love to know.

For a deep dive on A Court of Thorns and Roses, no one does it better than AHP here.

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary: The usual criteria of the Bechdel Test are (1) that at least two women are featured, (2) that these women talk to each other, and (3) that they discuss something other than a man.

My childhood best friend is now married to one of these fun-loving wilderness folks; I wrote about them in this post.

See also: the discussion and I have been having since she wrote this piece along similar lines.

Taking refuge in community, in sometimes-scary times

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 11:06:04 GMT

“Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life.” — Gautama Buddha

Last week, I attended a five-day silent retreat at the beautiful Omega Institute in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was not because I had finished my personal to-do list, that’s for sure — but because I needed to step away from my to-do list in order to come back to my community with some semblance of sanity and intentionality, after a life-changing move. (It was also because my husband willingly went on solo parent duty for a week, so, thank you husband.)

In my ongoing interview series with skillful community-tenders, this is emerging as one common thread:

Rather than seeing time in solitude or silence as being the opposite of showing up in our communities, these actions are interdependent, like our inhalations and exhalations. We breathe in spaciousness; we exhale patience. Conversely, if all we are breathing in is stress, anger, resentment or oppression, that is often what comes out of us.

No one else can breathe for us. But the implications of our space-taking are big for all of us.

Heading for sanctuary, in solitude, at the Omega Institute.

What I found in the silence was not loneliness, not isolation. It was solitude within sangha — within a community of fellow-travelers who were all there to cultivate greater compassion and wisdom, in order to offer those things back to the collective. There were therapists and early childhood educators who were looking to show up with more patience with the people they serve, and to shed layers of secondary trauma incurred during the pandemic and aftermath. There were app developers looking to make products that promote mindfulness and those who teach it. And there were talented teachers leading us who spoke touchingly of their own children and partners, and the ways in which their practice on retreat has nourished their ways of caring at home.

This kind of travel is very different from taking time away to go on, say, a raucous road trip to Reno with friends. (Both are great, don’t get me wrong — I have done the latter, and still have the delightfully cringe memories to show for it, though lamentably no longer the bejeweled satin heels I picked up in a thrift store.)

What I am saying is that the intention to take space in order to offer more peace to the collective, I found, infused my time away with a sense of purpose that previous trips for pleasure could not give me.

On retreat, I was not seeking to escape the horrors of the world through consumption. I was not looking away. I was looking and looking, for hours and days on end. I looked at the horrors my own mind is capable of manufacturing, all on its own. I looked at the fear I feel just being in this ever-changing world. I looked at the madness that other bundles of synapses and bone like me can inflict on other bodies. I looked at the harm I myself can inflict when I am in a place of reactivity around all of that.

Many of us go our whole lives looking away from these things. What a gift to get to see them clearly.

I was able to do so, I think, because I was staring into this howling storm of hurt while surrounded by a sangha of well-intentioned people whom I trusted not to hurt me. I walked back to my cabin at night and did not feel the need to tuck my keys between my fingers for safety. I sat at various tables and benches with my “In Silence” badge on and knew that if any person approached me and saw it, they would respect my personal space and keep walking. I felt each person’s quiet grace, offered in my direction, each time I grew weary of sitting or walking, or sitting or walking, or once again f#$% sitting or f#$% walking, when my back drooped or my mother-hips ached. This quiet communal comfort helped me to achieve a level of personal clarity through my practices that I could not have found at home by myself.

This is the difference between everyday friendship and sangha. In sangha, you don’t even have to know everyone else’s name. You simply have to share a commitment to helping other people to do hard things in the name of non-harming, ahimsa — a value that is inherently relational, one that we cannot honor alone.

The Northern Lights, as seen with my sangha above our little cabin classroom.

I returned from my retreat and immediately launched a new peer support circle via RTZ Hope with my friend Emily Marlowe, offering refuge and community to people who have recently had to end a wanted pregnancy, due to fetal or maternal health factors. Here again, I saw the magic of sangha at work. As I’ve written previously, every time we do this, the first call is the same. One by one, isolated faces appear on a screen, ashen and disbelieving. By the end, they are laughing together at the deep frustrations and exhaustion inherent to surviving stigmatized grief. They have become more than themselves, more than their losses, more than their bodies and the things that have happened to them, more than the ill-informed stories that other people tell about them. They have become a sangha.

I have also watched an outer circle of advocates forming around folks like us for some time, since the Dobbs decision dropped just weeks after my would-be due date in 2022. Recently, I read in anger and awe as reported that since misoprostol has been declared a controlled substance in Louisiana, even in hospitals where it is used to prevent fatal hemorrhaging in patients, “those who work in hospitals are running timed drills to ensure that they can get to the locked away medication and back to a patient without her hemorrhaging to death.”

To be clear: These helpers should not be placed in this position, in the same ways that teachers should not have to run shelter in place drills to ensure children don’t die at school, and in the same ways that aid workers should not be shot while shuttling food to starving people. Yet as a helper myself, I relate deeply to our shared determination to protect others, in spite of and not with the support of the powers that be. That they are doing so collectively and not as individuals gives me hope that they will succeed.

Zooming further out, I read another story this week, via , about unionized Greek dock-workers who banded together to block ammunition from being shipped to continue killing innocent civilians in Gaza. As the union declared before they took action: “It's time to shout loudly that we won't allow Piraeus port to become a war springboard.”

These people — people who almost certainly did not know each other’s names at the start — were able to accomplish something in the name of peace that no single one of them could do alone.

What a powerful teaching. What a powerful example of sangha.

As Joshua writes:

We are so conditioned to individualism that we take the horrors of the world and ask “What do I do?” And we should take action, of course, but our framework for assessing actions should be collective rather than individual, but so few of us are really, meaningfully, plugged into groups that allow and encourage us to take meaningful collective action. In short, we are not conditioned to think in the collective and we rarely have the infrastructure to act in the collective.
It might seem counterintuitive, but that slight shift from “What can I do?” to “What can we do?” can be the first step towards individual action. When we fixate on our personal culpability and responsibility, the weight of the world can sit heavy on our shoulders. When we realize that we are part of a larger whole, and that the only way for us to be effective is to be part of something larger than ourselves, we can plug into existing organizing efforts and try to do our part. We may still be worn out and pessimistic, but we rightly understand that our actions alone mean little, while our actions as part of a collective could mean the world.

The Yearning Pond, at Omega Institute.

Sitting alone on my meditation cushion, I could contemplate forever how fragile I feel in this human body, and allow this to paralyze me. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. I would be lying if I said it didn’t.

This is inarguably a very scary world. Many of us carry trauma that tells us so — that lives, as Stephanie Foo puts it, in our bones. This trauma can make us believe that we are alone in that scary world, that our efforts will never be enough, and we might as well give up now.

This is why the Buddha once remarked to his dear friend Ananda that “Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life.” Cultivating connection, and not just personal discipline or effort, is grounds our spiritual and ethical ideals in the soil of what calls “the human scale.”

On the human scale, it may take everyone you know to weave “a tiny raft that could just barely hold your weight.” But over and over again, history shows that people will do this. I believe they will continue to do this. It would also be a lie to leave this part out.

You don’t have to believe in anything bigger than that, than that tiny raft, to have faith in something bigger than yourself, and in the future. And I do believe in that.

Sangha is what I am talking about when I say I was loved back to life after loss by a grove of Mother Trees. It is what I am talking about when I share how I have been held by another grove of mothers as we all stared into the void that is the massive suffering in Gaza. It is what I am talking about when I talk about the red thread that connects us all in times of uncertainty.

Sangha is what I felt during those precious five days on retreat, where I was silent and often solitary, but never really lonely or alone. I felt more like a tree shedding its leaves and preparing for the long winter ahead, knowing that the strong root systems beneath me will continue to hold me, even during the storms to come.

And there are storms to come in the next few weeks, friends. I remain fearful about this coming election. I remain angry about all that is at stake. But I hope that this week, each one of us can find a moment of solitude to go inward and connect with the sad and scared parts of ourselves. And then, as we emerge, I hope that we can reach out, and connect with someone else who is sad and scared too. (If you don’t know anyone like this, you can reach out to me.)

Alone, we will likely remain sad and scared. If we can re-learn togetherness, though, then we all may stand a fighting chance of not just surviving, but building a better, more joyful world than the one we’re living in now.

Banding together to protect pregnancy loss survivors

October is Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month. This year in the U.S., we are having important conversations about the fact that abortion care is healthcare — not only for people who are choosing to end unwanted pregnancies, but also for people who find themselves losing or needing to terminate profoundly wanted pregnancies. The Center for Reproductive Rights has been pushing back on authoritarian approaches to pregnant people’s bodies, and advocating for much better policy that meets all needs. All proceeds from this post and others in October will go towards supporting this organization. (For other organizations who are doing great work in this field, see this deeply-researched roundup from Jessica Valenti.)

Also, if you live in the U.S. please remember to vote! Many local ballot initiatives concern reproductive justice in this election — not just which person you think should be President. You can find details about your local polling stations and early voting logistics here.

Your turn: Is there a community that is giving you hope and support right now? Are they looking for more hands to help carry the heavy work of easing suffering, in some form? Please feel free to include links if you’d like to invite us to your party.

Rebuilding the village was never going to be easy

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 11:05:15 GMT

And make no mistake, cohering

is the hardest task history ever wrote,

but tomorrow is not written by our odds of hardship,

but by the audacity of our hope

— Amanda Gorman

Last year, we moved out of New York City and into a caretaker’s cottage by the Massachusetts coast for the year, to be closer to friends and family. It was wonderful to move through the honeymoon phase with our village—oh gosh, my old friends from college, this beautiful water, the penguins at the aquarium, it’s just like I remembered!.

It was less wonderful to move into what my Outward Bound friends would call the “storming” phase of community-building.

These friends are referring to Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development, a theoretical framework authored by psychologist Bruce Tuckman in the ‘60s. This framework lays out four stages of building community — forming, storming, norming, and performing. While forming is self-explanatory, many people don’t know to expect storming — the part of new beginnings during which we’re longing for what we’ve left behind, cranky from expending lots of time and energy trying to resource ourselves in a new place, and sometimes cynical or checked-out instead of fully engaged when it comes to doing the work to ensure all needs can be met respectfully.

In our case, moving elicted most of these feelings. But I’ve also found them to be relevant to many other folks charged with creating a new community from scratch (educators creating a cohesive classroom community, caregivers starting or blending their families and determining a shared set of values).

I have also found these stages to be relevant to our national politics here in the U.S.. where we are witnessing a rapid re-organizing of platforms and coalitions, and the reactivity that comes with that.

Bringing mindfulness to this kind of reactivity recently has helped me to navigate this season with a bit more equanimity than I might have during previous transitions (like that time I took up chain-smoking again after vowing to quit). So I thought I’d share more about these four stages of group development below.

May this rundown on group dynamics be of benefit to anyone looking for a few new ways to navigate, or at least to think about, the rapids of coalition-building that lay ahead.

Rowing with Scott Braden, the Outward Bound alum who first taught me about “forming, storming and norming” (and his wife, my dear friend Karen).

Forming

We typically come together to form a new group in order to achieve a shared purpose. This might be jamming together into one big house for a family vacation, gathering for a wedding, or founding a new nonprofit.

The extroverted, novelty-seeking, and connection-oriented parts of us may love this stage of things. However, there are often other parts of us that may be skeptical or even fearful about joining a new community, especially those of us who have been rejected or harmed by prior communities, or even our own families. Those of us who are highly sensitive can also feel activated when noticing and absorbing the anxieties of others.

This is true for me in this moment. Each day, I encounter new members of my community: teachers, neighbors, plants and animals. There’s a feeling of wonder and fear that arises in each one that makes it easy to pay attention to the present moment. And, it has felt important to me to create space for a consistent meditation practice, so that I can tend not only to what is happening outside of me, but all that is happening inside of me.

Getting ready to raft on high water, with a half a dozen other under-slept boaters. What could go wrong?

Storming

During the aformentioned “storming” part of community-building, the work for each person is to figure out not only how to connect safely with others, but how to get our individual needs met. There is often some conflict during this stage, as the ways in which we’ve learned to meet our needs compete and clash.

In my work as an educator, I see this all the time. In the forming days of September, kids are remembering what they loved and missed about school — their friends, their teachers. A few days or weeks later, however, the storm has arrived, as they remember all of the things they decidedly did not miss — the cafeteria food, that kid that always calls them names. As the temperatures outside cool, it may seem to some teachers that it is increasingly feeling very hot inside the classroom.

Experiencing some tension during the community-building process is not necessarily an indication that there is a problem with the vision, the plan, or the people, per se. It is simply an indication that as long as there are unmet needs in a community, there will be conflict.

In my meditation practice now, I’m noticing “storming energy” arising in moments when I’m missing supports I enjoyed in the past and no longer have, like my irreplaceable writing group. I’m noticing anger, frustration and confusion arising when I’m missing some important object that brings me comfort. In these moments, it has felt both very difficult and very important for me to sit down wherever I am, follow my breath, and by so doing, remind myself that even amidst this mess, it’s still safe to be here. As Kate Bowler quips, real life can never be good vibes only — it’s all vibes only around here.

Norming and Performing

If we attempt to avoid conflict by dismissing legitimate needs as “complaining,” “negativity,” “insubordination,” or “slowing us down,” then we risk imperiling the very good things we wish to build. So, if the community is a healthy one, it will anticipate and allow what John Lewis called “good trouble” to arise, like a predicted storm front coming through on the Doppler.

What I’ve learned as an educator is that my real power lies not in trying to direct the course of the storm, but in co-creating norms with the people I serve that lay out how the storming process can unfold, respectfully. With teens, this is essential, because they do not take kindly to feeling silenced. (Nor should they!) We talk at length about how our basic needs will be met together, and how conflict between needs will be resolved. We create clear systems, like circle talks, that allow for all people to feel heard. We create high expectations for compromise and collaboration among community members in service of our goals. And if we forget why all of this is important, we also agree to remind each other of the values and goals we still share, even despite our differences.

As people begin to see and to trust that their needs will be met, the temperature of the group begins to drop to a comfortable and sustainable level. This is norming. Then, the real work of creation can begin. When communities arrive at this stage, they are considered to be performing — flowing more or less smoothly from one moment to the next, with a clear understanding of how each person plays a role in the collective thriving.

During our moving process, it has been helpful to me to begin the day as a leader of my family by meditating on my own needs, and how they might get met. Then, I move off the cushion and try to share what I’ve discovered, and to elicit my family’s feelings as well. These meditation sessions and conversations are now informing the creation of new schedules at home that reflect how we’ll all get our needs met. To me, this is so much better than succumbing to the usual fall energy of allowing other people’s schedules to drive our lives, and to squeeze our needs to the margins.

I can’t afford to live in a world of uninterrogated positivity… I am not suggesting that a win is impossible or that we shouldn’t be hopeful. I am saying it’s important to prepare for the fight.— Austin Channing Brown

Healthy vs. unhealthy conflict

Greed, aggression and ignorance — what the Buddha called the Three Poisons — can easily derail this whole process and prolong the discomfort involved. When we see people grabbing more power than they need during the forming process, silencing other people’s voices through aggression in the storming process, or refusing to exercise the agency they possess to help the community reach the more sustainable norming and performing stages, we are no longer talking about “good trouble,” but unskillful human behavior. If a community seems like it is stuck in storming phase, these poisons are often the reason.

In these cases, acceptance might not be the right move. It may be more skillful to bring attention to these harmful stances in ourselves and others, if it’s safe to do so, and then actively work to shift things — in the direction of meeting more needs and cultivating more peace.

When I’m meditating, I’m typically beginning with myself, asking myself if I am bringing my own dose of poison to the proceedings. I consider whether I’m seeking more control than is realistic (greed), being crankier than I need to be with my loved ones (aggression) or neglecting to carry out necessary tasks because I’m too distracted (ignorance). I see these moments as small acts of resistance against the forces that want to see us all so stuck in striving, consuming and conflict that we cannot come together to imagine a better way forward.

Norming and performing with some of my favorite former team members, Holly Gordon Perez and Morgan First.

Zooming out

America is unique in that it is not a nation of people who are united in their shared history, language or culture. We are united instead, at least theoretically, by our dedication to living in a participatory, multi-cultural democracy — to the idea that regardless of our differences, every person deserves to have a voice in creating what’s to come.

However, as Amanda Gorman memorably put it four years ago, this project is still unfinished. We have also destroyed much Indigenous wisdom on community-building along the way, which has made it even more difficult to reach a place of norming, of sustainably meeting everyone’s needs. Because we are ignorant of this history, and quite attached to greed, aggression and confusion in our culture, it often feels we are stuck in storming mode.

That said, there is so much that’s inspirational about our current storming season here, so many essential and valid perspectives arising from our community around how to better balance and meet all needs. I have been particularly enjoying the work of , whose nuanced writing makes beautiful space for the both/and of the needs of the Black community and those of us who would like to see an end to the war in Gaza. I have also enjoyed being introduced to of the (via also-excellent newsletter, ), who outlines an expansive, clear, and aspirational vision for future consensus-based community structures here that I think would resonate with many readers here. These perspectives deserve a wider hearing on the national stage as well, and I hope they get it in the coming months.

Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished.

— Amanda Gorman

Here in Massachusetts, I am trying to trust that we’ll get to the “norming” part of our family’s journey eventually —the part many of our loved ones have referred to when they ask, “Are you settling in yet?” I’m writing this from the sunny patio of a new-to-me coffeeshop, which delights me. My husband has three concerts with friends lined up this week, so there is new delight in his life too. My kid has already made a few friends in kindergarten, and hopefully, they’ll soon come over to play in a living room that hopefully no longer has boxes stacked to the ceiling.

That said, I know that the thriving of my family, and the thriving of our national community, isn’t going to come about as a result of my waiting passively for the arc of history to bend my way, as I ommm away on my meditation cushion. The point of meditation in this moment, for me, is to cultivate the discipline, inner calm and clarity I need to get off the cushion and show up as my best self, for all parts of this messy and imperfect process.

Responding in solidarity to those without homes

I am also continuing to amplify the calls to action of Operation Olive Branch (OOB). The latter org, “steered by a diverse core council of global advocates including Palestinian and Jewish voices,” is supporting families in Gaza with this GoFundMe, and is also issuing a call for volunteers to amplify and support upcoming campaigns in Sudan and the Congo here. In collaboration with Pal Humanity, OOB is launching a Family Encampment this month, which will accommodate approximately 300 individuals (30 families), providing shelter, food, water, medical services, WiFi, electricity and other necessities. All paid proceeds from this post will be donated towards this GoFundMe.

The ones who keep us from wilting

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 11:05:54 GMT

oh thank you thank you

for leaving and for coming back,

and thank you for what inside my friends’

love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod

gleaming into the world

— Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Photo by Tracy Adams on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my husband’s Birth Cactus.

Wait, hang on, that sounds wrong, somehow. But there’s no other way to say it. My husband has — had — a Birth Cactus.

The Birth Cactus was a tall spindly thing, given to my husband’s mother upon the occasion of his birth in 1985. It spent over thirty years snaking calmly up the side of a sunny wall in their New England home, to the point that it rivaled him in height. When his folks decided to retire to warmer climes, they asked him to come and take it to our then-home outside of NYC.

Of course, my husband said.

Our house was full of thriving plants at that time, many of which we’d adopted during the comings and goings of other New York transplants — the wily spider plant we’d taken from the Polish family vacating our Brooklyn apartment building; the inchplant in a hand-thrown pot, adopted when its potter decamped to Providence. We assumed the Birth Cactus would fit right in.

However, all of these plants had already spent a long time adapting to the New York climate. The Birth Cactus was not so lucky. After thriving for decades in New England alongside the same community of people and plants, it wilted in a matter of weeks without them.

This story, to me, illustrates the power of sangha — of community. Severed from a sense of belonging, even the strongest among us struggle to survive. And the inverse is true: when we are able to stay connected to community, we are more likely to weather tough seasons of transition.

Welcome to In Tending (fka Initiation Writes)! This is a newsletter exploring the intersections between mindfulness and caregiving. Most posts here are free, but I’m working on some affordably-priced offerings coming up in the fall that may be of interest. More on that below. For now, if you’re not already signed up to receive the free stuff, you can do so here:

Thanks so much for reading! 🙏

This lesson has been further driven home to me (pun slightly intended) as we’ve moved out of New York, tracing the Birth Cactus’s trajectory back to Massachusetts, where my husband was born and where we met. Due to the timing of the sale of our home and the needs of our family, we’ve been staying in a succession of short-term rentals, both in NY and MA, while we wait to officially move into our new digs. I’ve made many, many moves before this — at last count, seventeen of them — and consider myself a hardy traveler. However, this move has taken a lot out of us, given that we’ve been parenting, packing and re-packing all at the same time. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes multiple villages to relocate one.

As we packed up our things in New York, my friend Meredith reached out to tell me not to worry about where my son might spend the day when our movers arrived — she’d already blocked off her calendar for hosting him, and had stocked her refrigerator full of popsicles.

When a heat wave descended on our steamy cabin, my longtime friend Lissa offered up her air-conditioned living room, putting our son’s favorite Miyazaki movie up on the projector and taking him to get a gigantic ice cream cone rolled in rainbow sprinkles.

On the last day in the mountains, parched and tired, we picked our son up from his nature-based camp on the edge of the Ashokan Reservoir, which feeds several million New Yorkers downstate. We were there to spend time with his magical camp teacher, A., a local mother who had hugged our son through his tearful first day, introduced him to her own son, his soon-to-be-camp-bestie R., and sent him home raving about a picture book she’d read called Listen to the Language of the Trees, about the ways in which all living things are connected under the soil. We were also there to celebrate how far our son had come, from refusing to take his coat off on the first day, to conning other children into carrying his backpack for him on long hikes through the woods, to gamely making charming art out of sticks and twigs, and now, finally, sending his wild yawp over the hills with the many friends he’d made.

Pulling us out to the edges of the reservoir, my son and his new friends plunged in, fully clothed, like a gaggle of Augustus Gloops, despite the signs saying please don’t. It was long moments before we could coax them back. Like us, our children know a source of deep nourishment when they see it, and it is hard to leave that behind.

As we crossed over the border between New York and Massachusetts, we continued to rely on the help of our friends. My husband and I both attended college in Boston, and so the first few days were a college reunion. We saw our friend Ashley Locke, who has been featured in this space before, and who plied our child with applesauce pouches. My old college roommate Jess and her family showed up with fresh energy and beach toys to distract our son as we settled into our next location. We also saw my husband’s cousins, who took us out to dinner at their favorite seafood spot with their four delightful, rambunctious children, and refused to let us pay.

Thanks to the love offered by all of these generous members of our sangha, I have been able to rest, and to feel joy, and to find slivers of space to work, even while on this very tiring journey. I have not been able to keep up my usual writing pace as I’d hoped; like the Birth Cactus, this transition has thrown me for a loop, and my sense is that we will need to be more deeply rooted before my writing routine can make a full comeback. I’m working to accept that.

In the meantime, being uprooted from one community and having to make my way across many new ones has made me profoundly aware, once again, of what a miracle of mycelial connection it is when any mother makes any art, ever. May we all be held and carried as carefully by community, during our threshold moments, as I have been during this one.

Coming up: In Tending Interviews Series, Sangha Edition

This summer, to help keep the momentum going with In Tending, I’ve been working behind the scenes to arrange for some of my favorite community-tenders to share their own hard-won wisdom, here in this newsletter, about what makes for a steady, supportive sangha — and how to cultivate strong communities in our own local spaces. I can’t wait to share these interviews with you. Be sure to subscribe now, if you haven’t already, to get them sent straight to your inbox.

This upcoming series feels timely given the larger conversations we are now having in the U.S. about what kind of country we want to have after November’s election. Do we want to have the kind of community that helps and heals what hurts, or that further contributes to the environmental devastation, violence and disconnection all around us? Do we want to create a place where only a few organisms can survive, primarily by hoarding resources meant for all of us and co-opting our creative potential for their own ends, or do we want to have a space in which all of us can thrive? When we talk about community writ small, or community writ large, I find I’m sitting with the same questions. I’m grateful to be able to pose these questions to some of the wisest people I know in this upcoming series.

Other announcements

New interview: Last month, I had the opportunity to speak with Kiley Hanish, founder of RTZ Hope, about the role of community and peer-led circles in healing perinatal trauma and grief — for myself and for those I now serve as a facilitator. You can view the interview here (just skip over the first few minutes of technical difficulties, as we both attempted to figure out the new functionality of IG Live).
New circle: I will also likely be starting up a new circle for loss parents in October of this year (Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month), so if that is of interest to you or a loved one, please keep an eye on rtzhope.org/register in the coming weeks for this circle to go live on the site. I’m also happy to answer any questions about this in the comments below.

New sangha for subscribers and friends of this Substack: My friends and I are pulling together a group of caregivers interested in practicing, creating and connecting this fall over Zoom. We’re thinking of offering some guided meditation, brief teachings and writing prompts, and opportunities to share what’s coming up in your life as a caregiver, in a mics-on circle format. Are you interested in joining our small startup sangha? If so, please share your info here in this brief form. (All info will be kept confidential, and we won’t share your email address with anyone.) We’d love to hear from you!

Responding to those who have been uprooted

In solidarity with those who have been uprooted abroad, I am also continuing to amplify the calls to action of Operation Olive Branch (OOB). The latter org, “steered by a diverse core council of global advocates including Palestinian and Jewish voices,” is supporting families in Gaza with this GoFundMe, and is also issuing a call for volunteers to amplify and support upcoming campaigns in Sudan and the Congo here. In collaboration with Pal Humanity, OOB is launching a Family Encampment this month, which will accommodate approximately 300 individuals (30 families), providing shelter, food, water, medical services, WiFi, electricity and other necessities. All paid proceeds from this post will be donated towards this GoFundMe.

Your turn:

What has your experience been with making big moves? Did you wilt, thrive, or just barely survive? What helped you through? Do you find that you’re more inspired and prolific when you’re traveling, or do you need to be at home, rooted in routine? How does this connect to other beings in your care, other responsibilities you carry? I’d love to hear more from you in the comments. (If you received this in your email, and prefer to respond privately, you can also respond to this directly from your inbox, and I’ll read and respond to you as soon as I can.)

You can always return

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 11:06:03 GMT

Home is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there

— Talking Heads

Two weeks ago, we moved out of our home north of New York City, and into a small cabin in the Catskills for the month of July. We’ll ultimately land in Massachusetts this fall, for the forseeable future. My partner grew up in North Attleboro, MA, and I lived in Boston for several years during college and afterwards, before leaving to move to Asia. So while this move feels like a fresh new direction for our family, it is also a welcome homecoming.

This transition has had me thinking recently of how I came to be serious about mindfulness, while setting out along that path. The path that first took me away, and is now leading me back home.

Perhaps you too have such a story. Below is mine.

Thanks so much for reading! 🙏

My move to Asia, like this one we are in now, was motivated in part by feeling drawn to having a smaller and simpler life. At least, I hoped it would be like that. It was also motivated by feeling as though I had some self-sabotaging habits to break, and I needed to make a big change in order to do so.

One of those habits, among many, was smoking. In the early aughts, I was not the middle-aged, monklike mother and teacher I am now. I was a journalist in my twenties who wrote about music and food. At that time, the writers and musicians and chefs I spent my time around smoked cigarettes, and I’d often take them when offered. It was actually quite a helpful habit, then, an opportunity to step outside, take some deep breaths, and have some focused time to talk with just one person, especially if they were a possible source (or a possible crush). I remember those conversations fondly, if not the cigarettes themselves.

When I moved to Korea and became a teacher, I vowed to say goodbye to all that.

Seoul in the early aughts, however, was even more smoke-riddled than the puritanical city I’d left. Cigarettes were cheap, and people smoked them everywhere — in the clubs, on the streets, and even on the crowded mountain trails. I suppose I imagined that becoming a teacher might place me in more buttoned-up company than the tattooed chefs and whiskey-swilling writers I’d left behind, but the work culture at my school was like that of many other Korean workplaces — built around long hours during the day, followed by long nights of drinking, smoking and singing K-pop songs in karaoke lounges.

I welcomed these opportunities to bond with my coworkers at first. We hailed from all over — not just Korea, but Australia, Ireland, Canada and the U.S. — this holy trinity of intoxicants helped us all to manage the anxiety that comes with communicating across several cultural and linguistic boundaries at once, with half of us speaking in our second language at any given time. (Not to mention — cringe — singing.)

When a pack of my own cigarettes materialized in my bag for the first time, however, and I began smoking them even when by myself, in lonely moments on my doorstep in Mok-dong, I knew I was in trouble.

I had watched my parents try and fail to quit smoking over and over, and now, half a world away, I was caught in the grip of the same cycles. Like them, I realized I had never really been taught to work with the sensations that came up when I tried to resist or quit, well, anything. How could I quell the anxiety around whether I would be able to navigate my internal experience, or the fear of missing out on connecting with something or someone around me? And what about the deeper fears I was feeling — that I was lacking something, something unnameable and elusive, and that no matter how hard I looked, how deeply I read, or how far I traveled, I would never, ever find it?

Graffiti inside a bar in Haebongchon, Seoul. (Haebongchon literally means “liberation village.”)

From reading Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön, one of the few books from home I had squeezed into my suitcase, I knew that I was feeling craving and suffering. I had been reading her instructions on things like sitting meditation and releasing thoughts as they arose. I had removed what I thought were all the negative influences on me back at home so that I could be free to practice these skills. But I realized that I was missing a crucial element of success in mindfulness, what Buddhists call The Three Jewels: not just cultivating personal insight and motivation (the first jewel) or connecting with texts and teachers (the second), but with community. Sangha.

Having sangha means having the company of wise and loving beings in your life who can remind you of who you are and who you are trying to be. It means getting to connect with yourself in the company of other people who are developing this same capacity. It means learning from the example of people who have already cultivated the power to step outside, take some deep breaths, and give other people their full attention in conversation, without a cigarette in hand.

The irony was that I had many friends like this in the States, and very few in South Korea. In setting out to seek my fortune in a new place, I had left this priceless third jewel behind. Oops.

It was very lucky that one such friend came to visit me a few months into this new adventure – my oldest childhood friend, Karen. Since we both grew up in Utah, we were excited to spend our time together hiking in the mountains, as we did as children. However, during a hike up Mt. Namsan, in the center of Seoul, I found that I couldn’t keep up with her. My lungs were straining. My brain was crying out for nicotine. My budding mindfulness practice only made me more aware of these unpleasant sensations. I caved under the pressure. We stopped halfway up a hike to the top so that I could sit on a bench and light up.

My friend didn’t say anything. She just sat companionably next to me, though I could tell she was surprised. Suddenly, I saw myself through her eyes. Struggling, clearly, but still lovable and worthy. Worthy of something better than this. Worthy of being able to breathe freely, all the way to where I wanted to go.

In the end, I did not break this cycle of suffering because I experienced some massive surge of internal willpower. Nor did I do it even after making massive changes to my external surroundings.

I broke my “bad” habit because my friend did not treat me like I was bad. Because she gave me, instead, a felt sense of being held in genuine, non-judgmental compassion. And that helped me to begin offering it to myself.

Snapped at the top of Mt. Namsan.

Me (left) and my sweet friend Karen (right), at the top of Mt. Namsan.

After my friend left, I threw away my last pack of cigarettes, and I bought a bicycle. I started riding it in the early mornings before work instead of staying out late with my coworkers. At first, I felt lonely. But now I knew what I was looking for.

Once I’d recovered the full use of my lungs, I biked over to the International Seon Center, a Zen temple and educational center. Soon I had made the acquaintance of some friendly bilingual monks there, who invited me to come back if I liked. As the summer tipped into fall, and fall into winter, I continued to visit. I brought friends. We had tea.

I also discovered a small temple close to my home on one of my rides, and when I couldn’t bike to the ISC, I would sit there under the trees, trying to ignore the puzzled looks the Koreans gave me as they entered to do their prostrations or to sweep the wooden floors. I was the only white American woman in my entire neighborhood, and thus quite an oddity, albeit a welcome one; sometimes the other folks at the temple would invite me to join them in their meals, excited to have a chance to practice their English with a friendly lady waygukin (foreigner). Especially a fellow meditator. One even invited me to her home to learn how to make kimchi from scratch.

These joyful moments of sangha filled my days and brought me connection. When I sat alone at home, however, it was still often tough going. Some days, I was exhausted – a common side effect of starting a meditation practice. You realize how tired you are, how fast and hard you have been running. I would often fall asleep. Some days I’d even miss my practice window entirely, snoozing through my alarm and then dashing, panicked, straight to work to teach.

One day, I confessed this to one of my new Zen monk friends over tea.

“I’m really having trouble maintaining my practice. I still can’t seem to stick with it some days,” I said, a little sheepishly.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about maintaining anything,” said my friend, cheerily, as he set out our cups. “You just notice when you forget, and when you notice, remember to come back. You can always return. The practice is about that. It’s not about maintaining. It’s about returning.”

This, to me, is one of the things I continue to love most about the world of mindfulness. No matter where you go in the world, the practice, the teachings, and the fellow meditators you meet can all serve to remind you of this compassionate truth:

No matter where you are, or how far away you have gone, you can always return.

The sign outside Blue Cliff Monastery, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen monastery in the Catskills.

Your turn:

Have you ever tried to quit a self-sabotaging behavior, or to create a new routine for yourself in a new place? How did it go? Who or what helped you? I’d love to hear more from you in the comments. (If you received this in your email, and prefer to respond privately, you can also respond to this directly from your inbox, and I’ll read and respond to you as soon as I can.)

Also: Are you looking for a Zoom-based group of fellow caregivers with whom you can meditate? If so, we invite you to join us at an upcoming In Tending gathering. This post has all of the info, including our sign-up form. We hope to see you soon!

The children are always ours

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Fri, 31 May 2024 11:05:02 GMT

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

―James Baldwin

For the last several months, I have been writing in one way or another about mothering. Mothering as defined broadly, as puts it here:

[B]y mothering, I’m not referring to a gendered act, to an act performed exclusively by females, or performed exclusively for children we physically birth.
By mothering, I mean the care we all give to all living beings across generations, the innate love that transcends our best attempts to label and divide.

Since I began this project, Initiation Writes, I have realized I have been doing this. Tending a small grove in which we talk about what it means to tend. To tend our bodies. To tend grief. To tend hope. To tend children. To tend fellow tenders. To tend villages. To tend the earth itself.

I think I will never tire of talking about tending. It is who I am and what I love, in my deepest heart.

And, writing about tending — often writ small, on the scale of a single seed — is how I feel most connected to the larger initiation that we are moving through as a global community.

What is this initiation all about? I feel it is about the crisis of care in which we find ourselves, one of many such crises in history, and the collective tension we’re feeling around how this one might be resolved.

There is one part of me, one part of many of us, that anticipates a sinister end to the world as we know it. This is the “rough beast” that stalks through Yeats’ poetry, written at the end of World War I, and Didion’s essays, written as she contemplated the possible outcomes of America’s mid-century culture wars and misadventures abroad. And perhaps they are right.

There is another part of me, however, that sides with James Baldwin, and the vision he lays out in ”Notes on the House of Bondage,” an essay he wrote in 1980 that is being widely circulated this week, thanks to the relevance of the quotation above. In this essay, Baldwin — ever elegant, ever weary — puts forth the case that the moments that call up in us the deepest cynicism (like, say, the prospect of electing Reagan) can also contain the potential to dismantle the “house of bondage.” Meaning, the world in which racism, colonialism and modern state-sponsored greed run rampant.

As Baldwin writes:

One can speak, then, of the fall of an empire at that moment when, though all of the paraphernalia of power remain intact and visible and seem to function, neither the citizen-subject within the gates nor the indescribable hordes outside it believe in the morality or the reality of the kingdom anymore-when no one, any longer, anywhere, aspires to the empire’s standards.
This is the charged, the dangerous, moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new; when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

This charged and dangerous moment — it is still unfolding. Certainly, nothing right now can be taken for granted. Not our reproductive rights. Not so-called safe zones. Not our government’s accountability to its citizens. Because of course, the old world won’t go quietly. The bodies of those of us still held in the house of bondage remain, for now, contested territory.

But I think Baldwin is right in another way, too: that the opportunity remains, even in the ashes of this no-longer-aspirational Empire, to realize a better world. To return to tending what is sacred and composting what is not. To bring healing to what Jon Kabat-Zinn calls the current necrosis of the human body politic.

In the coming weeks, I will be dropping back to my summer schedule, posting bi-weekly rather than weekly, as I consider how my own work in this space might be composted and re-planted, made to better serve the work of liberation and peace. (There may even be a new name in the works for this newsletter.)

I will also be focusing this summer on sharing the voices of those who are already tending communities, online and offline, that are guided by this kind of mother-love: that is, the innate love that transcends our best attempts to label and divide.

I welcome any suggestions for future interviewees or guest posting along these lines in the comments below. You can also respond to this email directly if you’re a subscriber, or reach out to me at InitiationWrites (at) gmail (dot) com.

For now, I’m continuing to support the unfolding work of World Central Kitchen, which provided 100,000 meals last week despite impossible conditions, and to amplify the calls to action of Operation Olive Branch (OOB). The latter org, “steered by a diverse core council of global advocates including Palestinian and Jewish voices,” is supporting birthing mothers and babies in Gaza with this GoFundMe, and is also issuing a call for volunteers to amplify and support upcoming campaigns in Sudan and the Congo here.

New paid subscriptions this month will go towards these two organizations. (If you cannot afford a paid subscription or do not want to give Substack your money, you can also make a donation in any amount to either org and forward the receipt to the email address above, and I’ll be happy to give you one, no questions asked.)

I am also once again grappling with the graphic violence and grief of this week by reading and writing poems, including the one below. And look, I’ll be the first to tell you: the ones I write may not be great poems. But they are my way, as I have said before, of claiming what little additional power I have here. The power to witness and be witnessed, during another difficult chapter in the history of the house of bondage. To create a space big enough to hold the both/and of this time — this feeling of increasingly unbearable constriction, as well a wild and improbable faith in future growth.

May this imperfect offering be of benefit for those of us who are trying to stay grounded this week, to dig for hope in impossible places, and to grow something good out of the ashes.

Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen (Public domain)

The Mothers

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1. 
Did you know that olive trees 
have been around since the Ice Age, 
When humans moved out of their birthplace 
and into the rest of the world

Leaving a ream of dead 
mammoths and mastodons
And blooming olives 
behind them? 

Did you know that 
Scientists call
This time 
“The Great Break”? 

Did you know the word for “oil” 
Comes from the word “olive”
Because olive trees offered fuel to the lamps
That lit the first homes of humanity? 

Did you know that the ancient architect
Vituvius discovered that 
if you char olive wood
It only becomes stronger

A material so resilient
That neither decay, nor harsh weather, 
nor even seemingly time itself 
can pierce it?

Did you know that the oldest living olive tree 
Has been growing for three thousand years
From before the time of Jesus, 
Buddha, and Muhammed? 

Did you know the first olives in America
Arrived inside the pockets 
of Spanish colonizers,
Blazing their way to California
 
In the 18th century
And that it is from there 
that they grew through the talons
Of the eagle in the U.S. Seal --

Enshrining, even in a nation 
That would soon be 
At civil war with itself, 
The enduring power of peace? 

2. 

Did you know that an olive tree
Can be re-grown from a barren trunk, 
A buried branch, a tiny twig
The deepest of roots? 

Did you know that olive trees must
Be planted in pairs
Because one olive tree cannot 
Fertilize itself? 

Did you know that Palestinian tradition holds
That during the harvest, those who lack
Land may still eat the fruit from 
Their neighbor’s trees? 

Did you know that olive is still the oil
Jewish mothers use to light the shabbat candles, 
Because, they say, Eve extinguished the first man
Under the tree in the Garden of Eden

And so she is is duty-bound to re-enlighten the world? 

3. 

It is remarkable when biology texts and biblical ones 
Converge upon a single truth: 
Olive trees are the mothers of humanity
Of all that makes us human. 

Olive trees are the teachers of humanity, too
Speaking of lighting the way, 
Of becoming stronger through fire
Of springing back from the cut-up stump. 

Last week, they pushed a teacher
To the ground. But you cannot bury 
An olive branch without planting 
A new line of trees. 

Can’t you see, now, how fruitless it is
This endless attempt to extinguish
The source from which 
your own light springs?

A web big enough to hold the both/and

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Thu, 09 May 2024 15:39:04 GMT

Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash

Note: This post is a bit more personal than the last several. It’s heavier. It’s coming out a bit early as well, because some of the content here is timely. This post is publicly available, so please feel free to share it, but note that comments will be limited to paid subscribers on this one. If you received this in your email, however, you are welcome to hit “reply” and I will do my best to respond. I’m grateful for your support either way.

For the last several months, I have felt constant tugs on the red thread that connects my heart to the rest of the world. Maybe you have too.

In October of last year, I began work as a grief group facilitator for bereaved parents who have experienced pregnancy loss, and felt the impact of the attacks on our reproductive freedoms here in the U.S. on mother after devastated mother. I listened in shock to the news of mothers and children taken as hostages from Israel. And I buried my face in my hands in the weeks that followed, as reports flowed in about the people under attack in Gaza who were giving birth, or losing pregnancies, without adequate medical care.

In November, I fought to keep my son in his school despite rumblings that he was not going to be able to stay due to his “special needs.”I listened as friends shared their fears of taking their children to Hebrew school amidst a rising wave of antisemitism here in the States. I hosted a friend whose ex-partner was engaging in dangerous behavior around her child. I felt the emptiness, on Thanksgiving, of knowing I am living on stolen land. And I absorbed the misery of those who cannot keep their children in safe spaces anywhere right now.

In December, our family marked the ten-year anniversary of losing my brother to brain cancer, and in January, the two-year anniversary of losing our daughter-to-be in late pregnancy. To add insult to injury, our whole family came down with COVID, which then led to a cascade of related illnesses and inflammatory events for me as someone with endometriosis. And I wrung my hands over the bombing of hospitals and the sight of innocent people fleeing with their sick and dying in wheelchairs, over roads turned to rubble.

In February, we made the hard decision to sell our home so that we can move closer to our networks of family and friends in Massachusetts, after over a decade in the NYC area, tracing our two threads back to the place where I met my husband. We packed and cleaned and cried. And I watched small children trying to carry suitcases from one evacuation zone to the next on social media.

In March, my oldest friend in NYC, who works for the U.N., was summoned back to his home country to continue doing important work on behalf of peace, while his spouse remains here. I walked and talked with another friend, a descendant of Holocaust survivors who teaches about the history of colonialism, who shared that he feels like there is no place in the current discourse that feels like “home” to him. My dad entered experimental trials for cancer treatment after a lifetime of smoking and an initial round of chemo. And I felt acutely aware that men all around the world are being forced to serve on the front lines of conflicts that they did not cause. Or they are dying silently, in loneliness, out of compulsory obedience to a code of masculinity that treats them like a gun or a paycheck, instead of a complex human being with a heart.

I once read that a spider’s mind exists not only in its body but also in the web around it. For six months, I have felt like this. My awareness has seemed to move constantly from my own body and struggles into the bodies and struggles of others around the world. I have felt unable to light upon anything that felt like solid ground. For a long time, I felt as if I were waiting for the whole thing to stop shaking so that I could finally make sense of it, discern what set it off, commence repairs.

But it didn’t stop shaking.

In April, I learned that a friend of mine, a fellow mother, had gone to a peaceful demonstration and spent half an hour being called a damaging slur by a counter-protester who stood inches from her face. Another friend, a teacher, told me she had lost income after calling for a peaceful ceasefire in her community. College students and their teachers across the countr were pushed to the ground for doing the same, including at my alma mater, Emerson. And I wrote this piece explicitly critiquing the targeting of caregivers in Gaza, and the lack of care currently being shown to caregivers around the world.

As in this post, I paywalled the comments, so that I could better manage any negative comments that came. But they didn’t come, not really. The most constructive feedback I received was a simple request: say more.

Thank you for reading Initiation Writes . This post is public so feel free to share it.

What could I say, though? I have no unique, individual perspective on, say, the plausibility of a two-state solution, that has not been shared elsewhere. I wish I did.

I took this problem to my writer’s group, all mothers, where it became clear that my lack of a solution was not my unique, individual problem. We all feel fear, sadness, and anger about the images of death we are exposed to daily. We all want to do all that we can to channel those feelings effectively. We all struggle to know how.

Many of us mothers are also already exhausted from the constant pressure to come up with original, individual solutions to so many things that are clearly collective problems. How to keep our elementary school children safe from shootings. How to keep our middle schoolers safe from the increasingly scary world of social media. How to keep our older children and students safe as they learn how to use their voices to call for peace, when across America we see them being tasered and tear gassed by the people we’ve paid to protect them. All while living in a society of people who have made it clear that they do not care whether mothers and children live or die.

This is why I wrote at length about the painful ask of being called, as a full-time caregiver, to give anything “your all.” Or to be seen as apathetic, unambitious, uncaring, or a “bad mom” when you cannot. (This last bit, as points out, is a particularly effective political cudgel, one used to keep us quiet, busy and in silent competition with one another, instead of rallying together for change.) In this era of pandemics and forest fires, labor inequity and unchecked greed, many mothers have no more “all” to give. We are threads stretched too taut already, always on the brink of breaking.

One friend called our circle of mother-writers a “grove,” however, and this gave me such hope. A grove of Mother Trees. Yes. A mycelial web of care, big enough to hold the both/and of it all. A place to re-weave our roots together, gather strength, and find direction again.

In this newsletter space, which began as a highly personal set of essays, I have only ever shared prose. I realized this too was part of my problem.

Whenever I am in this “grove” of mothers, I always find myself feeling beautifully unblocked, and what comes out is always poetry. As I discussed here with the Rev. Molly Bolton, who uses poetry in her chaplaincy practice, the magic of poetry is its ability to hold the both/and:

Ryan: Something that I think makes poetry unique is that it exists in that liminal space, between structure and spaciousness, between boxes and what is outside. We’ve talked about this as what Keats called the negative capability of poetry — the ability to sit with “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” What has the role of poetry in your life played throughout [your] initiations?
Molly: Well, I love poetry. It's been a very good friend to me for the reason that you've stated – of holding mystery, of allowing space, of often inviting and not telling. And when it's telling and it lands in you, it's often very compassionate. I mean, you do not have to be good. That's a telling. It's a place where you can be playful. So I have just been naturally drawn to it for a very long time.
I started using poetry in chaplaincy, carrying grief poems with me as a way for people to enter in, to feel seen, to feel heard, for spiritual non-religious folks as ritual. I used poetry when I was with young people in the pediatric and adolescent psych units. Just creating frameworks and spaces for them to express themselves, to feel seen and heard, for them to offer kindness to themselves and each other. I’d say, “Today, you may be in the psych unit at the hospital, but you get to offer someone a gift today, which is to receive the poem that they wrote.”
Ryan: When you feel so powerless, what an empowering thing to think, “Oh, I have something to offer: my presence.”

It took me a long time to “get” this about poetry. To understand how something so small could also be so big. To understand that its value comes not through its ability to make a point and support it, necessarily, or to tell a story that makes sense, but through the creation of its own anchor points and patterns, the tensile quality of its strength. (Consider, for example, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which doesn’t hang together as a traditional narrative the way, say, Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” does, but still delivers consistency and clarity through its rhyme structure.)

Poetry is the form you want if you’re striving for a web-like interweaving of ideas that don’t always seem to tell one clear story when you write them down in list, like the one I made above. At the same time, it is a form that allows us to decry the very real forces that want to tear us all apart. Take, for example, Nikki Giovanni’s near-perfect “Allowables,” one of my favorite teaching poems:

And so it was poetry, not prose, that grew out of my meeting in the mother-grove this week.

Below, I offer up one of the poems that took root in that session. It is not a pragmatic or policy-level solution to any problem. I wish that it were. But it is my way of responding to the invitation to say more, about a situation that continues to defy words and logic. (At least, my words, and my logic.)

It is my way of claiming what small power I have to be present, here, for you.

As the world teeters on the brink of a ceasefire that could save countless lives, may the webs of love we weave hold strong, whatever shape they may take. May we send silken threads of invisible strength out now, to all of the mothers and children who desperately need relief in this moment. May we feel them tug back, and find the strength to respond, even with our exhausted hearts. May the work we do along these lines deliver a more peaceful world, one day, to our children — all of our children.

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Bad Guys

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I am thinking

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About ashes everywhere

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The mothers digging through them

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To find their children

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I am fighting not to lose

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My son to the carelessness

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Of the fire-starting culture all around

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Recently the police came

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To visit his classroom

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And teachers sent home photos

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Of children smiling inside

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Bulletproof vests, behind the bars

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In the back of the patrol cars

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My son now builds jails with Legos

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Pretending to put the bad guys away

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As I tell him that the people who believe

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In the realness of things

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Like all-bad guys and all-good jails

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Are the ones who are playing make believe

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My heart strains against its cage

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He is not yet five

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He still wants to snuggle

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Under warm blankets in the mornings

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Asks me for consent before

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Wrapping soft arms around my neck,

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Then we blow kisses across the space

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Between us, as he shoulders his little load

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And heads to school

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The olives and the hummus

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Are packed neatly in plastic

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Never to touch

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Inside his brown paper bag

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I pray every day he comes back to me

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As himself. As a curious, caring little boy

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As a messy, misguided teen

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As an angry, exhausted man

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As long as he remains alive, I will take him

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In any form he takes,

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Even if I have to reach through

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The bars they are teaching him to build.

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Please. Please.

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                      I will take anything but ashes.

NOTES:

If you have a Complicated Mother’s Day coming up this Sunday, you can sit next to me. I wrote about this last year here. May it bring you comfort — and your loved ones some more concrete suggestions about how to support you.
If you are a mother who is feeling despair about the state of the world, this read by may help.
If you’re in the tri-state area, I hope to see you at Hudson Valley Books for Humanity in Ossining, NY tomorrow (May 10), where you can hear other missives from the Complicated Mother’s Day Club, and the members of my mother-grove. Plus, my friend Jess will be there, singing very funny songs about motherhood, which you can listen to here. As Dr. Becky says, you can’t change the hard, but you can change the alone.

The Red Thread that connects us all

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Sun, 05 May 2024 11:05:51 GMT

“There is a word in Korean, in yeon. It means ‘providence’ or ‘fate.’ But it's specifically about relationships between people. I think it comes from Buddhism and reincarnation. It's an in yeon if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush. Because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives.” — Past Lives

In light of the recent series I’ve been writing on showing up as ourselves, in solidarity with others around the world — and in honor of Asian & Pacific Islander Heritage Month — I’m re-publishing a revised version of an essay I wrote over ten years ago about in yeon (인연).

In yeon is a uniquely Korean way of thinking about community and love that I learned about from my friends in Seoul, during an unforgettable season of living and teaching there. In yeon is often symbolized by a red thread, tied around the finger, that connects us not only to our one true love, but to everyone else we will meet on the path to our destiny.

As I wrote back then:

“The idea that your destiny dead-ends at the object of your everlasting love is very romantic, of course…. But I liked the emphasis in yeon places on the journey rather than the destination–on the compassion you are supposed to share with everyone, not just your one-and-only.”

In particular, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my dear friend and teacher Lee, who helped me to create this piece. I have never forgotten his lessons; they continue to guide my life. (Nor could I forget, because now, thanks to my friends in Korea, I have that red thread tattooed on my right hand.)

May this piece be of benefit to all who are pondering how best to heal the wounds of what Tara Brach calls a sense of “severed belonging,” during this divisive time. May it continue to remind us of the most important lesson of in yeon: we are all in this together.

Love and in yeon (인연)

In the spring 2011, I swung by the coffeeshop after work one night to give the owner, my friend Lee, some strawberries. As usual, I ended up shutting the place down with him. We talked for hours as our coffees cooled, and sampled some “prototypes” of his latest “invention,” a new recipe for a peppermint-flavored latte. (Lee’s a retired chemical engineer, and had been tinkering with the perfect technique for steaming the milk.)

Lee’s wife Yoon brought us a late dinner of topokki, rice noodles with spicy sauce, and twigim, fried vegetable fritters. We all sat around together afterwards, drinking sweet lemon tea. At some point, talk turned to in yeon (인연).

This untranslatable term relates to a uniquely Korean concept of destiny, symbolized by a red thread that connects all of us.

My Korean friends have told me that our in yeon thread is spooled out by the ancestors. That at the time of our birth, one revered grandmother or grandfather spirit comes forward to tie a gossamer strand around our fingers. This weaver of fate winds and loops the thread through time, tying each person to all of the other people they are meant to meet and support in this lifetime, until finally the thread ends at the finger of the person he or she will love forever.

The catch is, to actually find this person, you have to keep your eye on the thread, take each interaction seriously, because that is wonleh geuleonkeoya (원래 그런거야), the way it’s supposed to be. Each meeting is a clue. It’s kismet. It’s maktub. It’s ayni. It’s a bread crumb on your way to your destiny, and it is also the destination.

It is said that “there is in yeon in even the mere brushing of sleeves (옷깃만 스쳐도 인연)”, seuchada (스차다) being the onomatopoeic Korean verb which means “to brush in passing.”

Conversely, if you ignore someone or mistreat someone as you follow your red thread, some believe you will be lost, in a profound metaphysical sense. The thread will fall off your finger, and you will never find your love, or your destiny.

Lee at his mother’s home in Samcheong-dong on Chuseok, a holiday on which Koreans honor their ancestors.

I told Lee that I often felt that this red thread of destiny brought me to Korea, and specifically to Lee’s coffeeshop. I had come to Seoul for so many reasons: to study the food and the language, to try my hand at teaching, to walk in the mountains, and to deepen my Buddhist meditation practice. But the relationships I had come to form with the people I met there had surprised me with their warmth and depth, and I valued them now above all of those other things.

Despite our different cultures and languages, Lee and his wife Yoon had become like a second family to me. While I use their names now in this context, I would more often call them ajashi and imo, respectively — Korean terms for elders that mean “uncle” and “aunt." I also sometimes called Lee “sunsangnim,” which means “teacher,” as he so often took the time to school me about Korean language and culture while wiping down his espresso machine.

On this occasion, Lee was eager to tell me more, but wondered, “How did you come to learn about in yeon, as a waygukin — a foreigner?” Ironically, I told him, through a another waygukin friend’s encounter with a tea shop proprietor.

Tied together with tea and string

My friend Jess, whom I had met in Korea through a mutual friend, first told me of in yeon in the context of a story about getting stranded in the Korean countryside. All the rooms were booked in the small town she and her husband Carlos had chosen to visit for the weekend due to a festival, and they were beginning to panic. Exhausted, they stopped to take a rest in a tea shop. They struck up a conversation with the kind proprietor, who spoke a little English, as many Koreans do. Once she heard the couple’s predicament, Jess told me, the woman invited them both to stay the night in her home, “without hesitation.”

There, Jess and Carlos learned that the kind woman’s daughter was living overseas, where the daughter planned to marry a Canadian man. The woman and her husband hoped that the people in their daughter’s new hometown would show her the same care that they were showing my friends. In a bout of parental pride, they even showed Jess their daughter’s wedding dress, hanging up in the closet – and as they peered more closely at label inside, they realized with delight that it read Jessica.

That love should link these two unlikely parties together, the teashop owner said, was surely in yeon.

The tea shop owner who helped my friend Jess out of a jam. (Photo credit: Jess Perlaza)

In yeon: a brief and incomplete history

After I heard Jess’ lovely story, I told Lee, I’d been very taken with the idea of in yeon, and had begun interviewing all of my Korean friends about it, to better understand what this term meant to them. I’d also begun to research its history online, like I do.

It appears likely that this story was adapted from an older East Asian myth about a red thread of destiny, used by the gods to tie two lovers together. In China, the grandfatherly god Yue Xia Lao is responsible for this cosmic matchmaking; in Japan, the concept of the thread is known as akai ito or unmei no akai ito, and has launched more than a few manga storylines. Apparently, the concept is so well-known in certain areas that “merely holding up the thumb is used as shorthand for girlfriend, and holding a pinky up would indicate a boyfriend.”

The idea that your destiny dead-ends at the object of your everlasting love is very romantic, of course. But I told Lee that I liked the emphasis in yeon places on the journey rather than the destination–on the compassion you are supposed to share with everyone, not just your one-and-only.

Lee agreed with me. He added that as he understood it, an important aspect of Korean in yeon is how it relates to one’s family, and to a belief in past lives. He told me that the people whom you meet and become close with through in yeon, and especially the people in your family, are thought to be people you’ve met many times before.

“I think me, you and Yoon have deep in yeon,” he said. Yoon and I both nodded in agreement.

Lee said husbands and wives are said to have met each other one million times before. “Sometimes meeting with anger, sometimes with love,”

Yoon interjected with a big smile. “Sometimes lots of anger, sometimes lots of love.”

The mirror in Lee’s old bedroom, where he lived until he met Yoon at age 32; her picture is still here.

Lee also said that some Koreans believe their children are people to whom they owe a great debt from a past life – which is why Korean parents often seem willing to sacrifice everything for their children. Korean children are not expected to work until they graduate from university (which will, in most cases, be paid for by their parents). They often live at home well into their late 20s, so this is a great commitment indeed. (Later, when his youngest daughter bounded into the coffee shop to ask for a bit of money for dinner with friends, Lee opened the shop’s cash register with a baleful smile and said to me, “See? I owed her a lot from a past life.”)

Family members are connected by deep in yeon and destined to keep meeting. This is because, Lee said, “When you see the suffering of another person and you do not know them, you can choose to look away. But when you see someone in your family suffering, you cannot look away. And regardless, you must keep meeting them. You will always see them again. Even in the afterlife, it is said that I will see my ancestors, my father, and I will bow to them. Your family is your highest in yeon.”

Yoon in 2011, standing in her mother-in-law’s kitchen

I still love the idea of being tied to all the many special individuals I’ve met in my lifetime, not just one soulmate. In yeon feels like the opposite of the claustrophobic, Cosmo Magazine kind of love peddled in the West, where you exist to please only your partner, and they must meet your every need. It’s the kind of love you feel for the person sitting next to you in the rocking chair or, inexplicably, for the stranger sitting next to you on the plane. It is also the love you feel for the people around the dinner table with whom you’ve fought, it seems, a million times before, and yet you still aren’t walking away.

I think the beauty of the concept of in yeon lies in the way it ties us to our loved ones, past and future, like so many lovely pearls on a string. To keep us from walking away. And when that thread is leading toward your destiny, toward love, toward the repayment of millienia of grace, why would you ever want to walk away?

In yeon, then and now

I would have liked to stay in Korea forever. But my ancestors, it seems, had other ideas for me. My brother was diagnosed with brain cancer that year, and I flew home to serve as one of his primary caregivers. I was devastated to give up my life in Seoul, but resolved to follow my thread, to honor my family as my highest in yeon, as my sunsangnim had taught me. Shortly after I returned home, I got together with the man that would become my husband.

Was it coincidence, or fate, that pulled these threads together? Until I meet my ancestors, I suppose I’ll never know.

I continue to meditate on what in yeon means to me, and where my thread of compassion is leading me now. I am grateful to my Korean friends and colleagues who have generously given their time and emotional labor to my understanding of this topic since I left Korea, in the context of my ongoing research as a writer and historian. Among these are my friends Lee and Yoon above, as well as Young-Joo Lee and Dawn Kang, my friends from Seoul; Lisa Gross, founder of League of Kitchens here in NYC; Kyong-nak Kim, a Korean-American Methodist minister in Queens, NY; and Annie Shin, formerly the ESOL Adult Literacy Program Coordinator at Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York.

There is a wide diversity of views on this topic within the East Asian diaspora, which, like South Korea itself, is very ideologically diverse. For example, Lee and Young-Joo, as Seoulites, grew up with the concept of in yeon. On the other hand, Lisa Gross, a Korean-American who was raised in the Jewish faith, said her family never spoke of in yeon.

Not all views on in yeon are as romantic as mine, either. Annie Shin’s mother is Buddhist and believes in karmic cycles that span lives, yet Shin prefers the philosophy of Christianity and its notions of starting fresh, with a clean karmic slate. Feeling responsible for the dysfunction of an entire family line can otherwise feel like “too much to bear” for some. Kyong-nak Kim notes that other Koreans who are Christian might feel uncomfortable professing a belief in past lives, or predestination in general. The debate between free will and determinism is also an old one that spans generations and cultures.

More recently, the film “Past Lives,” released in 2023, has now introduced in yeon to many of my film-going friends, which delights me. Greta Lee’s character in the film, Nora, grew up in Seoul, and explains it much like any other Seoulite would:

“There is a word in Korean, in yeon. It means ‘providence’ or ‘fate.’ But it's specifically about relationships between people. I think it comes from Buddhism and reincarnation. It's an in yeon if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush. Because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it's because there have been 8,000 layers of in yeon over 8,000 lifetimes.”

At the same time, Nora, who moves to America as a young girl, also puts her own tongue-in-cheek twist on it, when her soon-to-be beau, a Jewish guy from New York, asks her wonderingly, “Do you really believe that?” There’s a long pause, and then she grins, slowly. “That’s just something Koreans say to seduce someone,” she says.

(You can watch the full movie here and the trailer below.)

This wide range of perspectives underscores the difference between describing the cultural and linguistic heritage inherent in a word, and the individual beliefs of the people who share that cultural heritage. To honor AAPI month, for me, is to honor this diversity of views on in yeon within the East Asian diaspora, and all the ways in which these views have enriched my life. I can only hope for a few more lifetimes ahead, in which I can repay this debt.

It’s up to you, dear reader, to decide what you believe about in yeon. But it can’t hurt to treat each person you meet today with kindness, just in case the tale of the red thread turns out to be true… 🧶

Your turn: Had you heard about the concept of in yeon before reading this post? If so, where did you first encounter it? If not, what do you make of it? I’d love to know.

Celebrating Earth's Birthday with my son

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 10:05:40 GMT

My partner and I have been slowly making our way through the Hayao Miyazaki catalogue of magical cartoon films with our son. We finished “Ponyo” (2008) last night, and “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988) has blissfully supplanted our son’s regular diet of Lego-assembly videos on YouTube. While some elements of these older films haven’t aged well (such as Satsuke’s faux-Indian pantomime in the first five minutes of “Totoro”), their magical realism and realistic depictions of childhood dialogue is far preferable, to me, to the violence- and sexism-infused movies of today. And their thoughtful ecological sensibility manages to feel both timeless and ahead of its time.

It would have meant so much to me to view Studio Ghibli’s films when I was a child, growing up in rural surrounds not so different from the Japanese countryside depicted in these films. They would have affirmed my intuition that there are spirits great and small standing guard over us and our earth, from the tiniest “trolls” of the forest in “Totoro” to the great Goddess of Mercy and her sometime-consort, the Bowie-esque wizard Fujimoto, in “Ponyo.” That is what I want for my son.

Photo by W il on Unsplash of the magical forest spirit Totoro.

Today is Earth Day, so I am thinking a lot about how we are fostering a sense of respect and reciprocity with regards to our environment, as well as to other living beings.

My posts recently have centered on this value of reciprocity above all, and what happens when we as humans fall out of balance with the ones who tend us, and with the figurative gardens of mindfulness and creativity inside of us that only we can tend.

In particular, I’ve been exploring the notion that framing resting and activity, researching complex issues and taking action, or receiving fair compensation and providing selfless care, as forever existing in opposition — or those who engage in both as hypocritical or uncaring — isn’t helpful to the long-term project of tending our world. Theorists like Paolo Freire would hold that in fact, these inhales and exhales of existence are how we build a more durable network of care, one that doesn’t depend on saviorism or martyrdom, but solidarity between equals, who all have a role to play in protecting the whole.

Over time, through rhythms of rupture and repair, through contractions of pain and peace, through the embrace of both the dark night of uncertainty and the bright clarity of morning: this is how life on earth slowly evolves, and us along with it.

To that end, I’m re-sharing an excerpt of a post from last year, in which I told my son “The Story of the Earth” as a bedtime tale. Below that, I’m closing this series with a shortlist of “further reading” links in lieu of my typical extensive resource guide, on what it means to live in reciprocity with each other and our sacred world.

In the meantime, I’m off to take my son to Central Park for the day. May you enjoy a meaningful Earth Day, wherever you are. I hope it comes with cake, and sprinkles.

The Story of the Earth

In the beginning, it was dark. There are many names for the dark. I think of it as The Great Mystery. All was black, and then – boom! Out came the suns, and the planets, and the moons, and the asteroids. All went flying, in all directions.

Eventually, our Earth found her place near the sun. She gathered close to it with the other planets, like a family sitting around a campfire. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

At first, all that you could see on her surface was water, black and shimmering, as in the Great Mystery. But she had fire in her, too. It rose up above the water and cooled into land. The continents emerged. And soon, from the place where fire and water and earth met, life emerged too.

First it was just one little germ. And then a bigger germ. And then a water bug, a jellyfish, a shark.

The animals in the water became curious about the land. They grew legs so that they could explore. Giant plants grew on the land, and the animals ate them. The animals grew tall and became the dinosaurs.

The earth was so proud. She had created such beauty. She loved her creations.

But then – boom! An asteroid that had been careering through space since the first boom created another one.

Why? We will never know. That is the way of the Great Mystery.

What we do know is that instead of new things coming out, her creations disappeared into the black space created by the boom, and more blackness rose up, shrouding her from the sun.

(Did the asteroid say sorry? My son always wants to know.)

Perhaps it was very sorry. Perhaps it cried alongside her. Perhaps it didn’t even notice her as it went flying off in a new direction.

In any case, the Earth was forever changed. Her teeming waters and tropical forests were covered in sheets of ice. She spun silently, alone and cold, for quite some time.

But then, another quiet boom emerged, from the deepest, darkest part of her – the place where fire met water and became land. Life was asking to return.

What should she do? She had every reason not to try again. But she thought of how much she had loved her first creations. And she decided to hope.

Once again, she welcomed and nurtured new little things, which became big things. The big things became curious, and they grew legs to walk upon the land again. But the land was still very cold, so they needed not only to grow legs but coats to keep them warm. Some grew feathers and became birds. Some grew fur and became the little chipmunks and other small creatures we love, and later, the monkeys. And the monkeys ate the leaves from the new trees and grew tall, though not as tall as the dinosaurs before.

The monkeys came down from the trees and began to explore the land. They became curious about the water, and how it could teach them about change. They became curious about the land, and how it could be shaped and worked to create a home for them. They became curious about fire, and how it could both take and give life. They made a practice of gathering around it, as their mother had once done, when she found her place near the sun. Here, they made many different creations, just like their Mother. They made dance. They made art. They made song. They made tools. They made cakes!

Somewhere along the way, in their thinking and making, these curious monkeys became what we think of as human.

The humans asked themselves what they should do with all of these creations. They thought about their Mother and all she had done for them. They decided that the best way to celebrate her was to throw her a party. A thank you party for their mother, who had been through so much, and who still loved them, after all these years. With dancing, and art, and songs. And cake!

(A cake with sprinkles, my son always adds. Yes, with sprinkles, I always say. And then he’ll say, The End.)

The stories mothers tell in order to live

After a few nights of making and remaking this story, I realized that I was telling it to remind myself that I’m not alone. I was telling the story of how I have healed, after losing my son’s sister-to-be in late pregnancy. About how I came back to life again, for my family.

I also realized that in a way, I have been telling the story of my own mother, who lost a son to stillbirth before me, and about how I am here because she and my father did their best to come back to life. Of my grandmother Marion, who was born after two stillbirths, ten years apart from her older sister. Of her mother, Evelyn, a shy and anxious woman who had every reason not to try again, and who still did. Of my grandmother’s grandmother, Rozilla, who supported her family through her work as a poet and teacher after losing her father to an untimely death. Of Rozilla’s mother, Harriet, who married that man, as did Harriet’s two sisters, when they were orphaned in their teens.

I am also telling the story of the Indigenous and Black people who were displaced and disenfranchised by the devastation my ancestors brought to their lands, which I wrote about here. I am telling the story of the people who have survived and perpetrated cataclysmic life-ending collisions with one another, around the world. The continued resilience and survival of their descendants is also the story of the earth. A story big enough for all of us to live inside.

My son, taking some of his first steps in the mountains of PA.

Also: If you’re a gardener, what are you growing this year?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Remembering the humanity of helpers

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 11:05:36 GMT

A few weeks ago, I wrote in this post about solidarity — about remembering that many of us, whether we live here in America or in the Middle East, are living in contested territory, as we struggle for safety, self-determination or both. Things overseas may seem far away, but we are all in this together.

This week, this notion was brought home to me when seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen, an org I’ve been supporting this month, were killed on their way to deliver aid to starving people in Gaza. The global staff of World Central Kitchen have reached out to say they are taking time to grieve, to honor their memories, and re-think their strategy in the region.1

These are their names and faces:

In solidarity, and in honor of these seven helpers, I wanted to offer a space to do the same. A place where we can grieve, and honor, these unique human beings.

I also wanted to offer a few thoughts below in solidarity with all who sacrifice their time and energy to respond to human suffering. About how we can not just “look for the helpers” in moments like this, but really see them.

By this I mean:

Seeing what helpers are like in their full humanity.
Understanding who is impacted and what is at stake for those who choose to take on difficult care work on behalf of the rest of us.
What happens when the helpers and those helped are alienated from one another
How we must all work towards better care for the ones who care for us.

Whether you are a self-identified helper yourself, or you love someone who is, I hope you’ll read on.

“If you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope”

The phrase “look for the helpers” comes from Fred Rogers — in my opinion, a truly enlightened being — who offered this memorable remark in an interview about times of trouble like the ones we are in:

“My mother used to say, a long time ago, whenever there would be any real catastrophe, in the movies or on the air, she would say, ‘Always look for the helpers. There will always be helpers. Just on the sidelines.’ That’s why I think that news programs [should] make a conscious effort of showing rescue teams, of showing medical people, anyplace that there’s a tragedy ... Because if you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.”

I have never had to look far for the helpers. I have written here about my mother, who was a disability advocate for her entire career. I have written here about my father, who is a social worker like my mother, and has also long volunteered to support environmental causes in his free time, often in humble grunt-work ways. I am proud of them. I am proud also to have followed in their footsteps as a helper myself, who continues to uphold their values of inclusivity and ecological literacy in my work as an educator, writer and activist.

But there is a both/and here. I have many memories of not only my parents’ noble choices, and the hope they created for others, but also of their less-than-pleasant consequences. I remember my parents struggling to be present or patient with us at home because they’d been keeping it together for hours upon hours at work, without sufficient breaks, due to financial cutbacks that decimated the ranks of their already underpaid staff. I remember having to make Spaghetti-Os for my brother because one parent or the other was stuck at work with a client in crisis, or hadn’t had time to go to the grocery store. I remember that at one point, my mother told me she had to go and donate her blood plasma regularly following her divorce, because her salary wasn’t enough to cover the bills, even though she held a college degree and a leadership position.

These are not my only sad childhood stories. My therapists over the years (yes, therapists, plural) have heard about a million more. These stories are not unique to me, either. They are common in many families where one or both parents are helpers. These stories are also relatively mild in comparison with those of my peers who hold other marginalized identities, or whose parents worked for even less pay, even longer hours.

Most importantly: these stories are not inevitable. They’re not folksy anecdotes I trot out on occasions like this with a shrug and sigh, like, “Yep, what can you do? That’s just how life is for people who work these jobs!” It is not a foregone conclusion that people in the helping professions should be poor, overworked, and exhausted. It is not necessary for our collective thriving as a species that the children of teachers, nurses or social workers should be overlooked so that other people’s children can be seen. If anything, my research on nature would suggest that the opposite is true: that cooperation and reciprocity, not exploitation, lead to far better outcomes.

The imperiled nature of care workers, and their work itself, is the result of cultural selfishness on an unparalleled scale, selfishness that is then cloaked in the language of the compliment. Notice how often helpers are described as “angels” or “superheroes.” Angels do not have bodies. Superheroes do not have vulnerabilities. This is convenient for people who would like to shut down striking care workers who are agitating for better wages or safer working conditions. The powers that be will never oppose strikes or other collective action by saying that these helpers don’t deserve what they are asking for. They will side-step their hypocrisy entirely by projecting it outward, claiming that helpers who are attempting to remain safely and gainfully employed in their work are the ones who don’t really care about the people they serve. Otherwise, why would they be so obsessed with money?

These compliments serve the same function as compliments that praise women, without evidence, for being “natural multitaskers,” in order to get them to take on far more than their fair share of the mental load. The apparent intent is to praise, but the impact results in subordination and oppression.

If you have ever met a checked-out teacher or an unusually grumpy nurse, you might tell yourself that they are simply less intelligent or driven than you, or more weak or flawed in some ineffable way, or “they would have gotten out before they started hating the job.” That might be true. Some helpers, like people in every other profession, do suffer from a lack of motivation or even from mental illness. But most helping professionals I have met are as strong and brilliant or more so than the people I have met in the context of mingling with Ivy Leaguers or Silicon Valley tech tycoons. They have to be, because they have to find a way to keep swimming upstream against the current of the kyriarchy, protecting the most marginalized among us, instead of allowing that current to carry them gently along.

The truth is that sometimes, helpers enter their professions out of genuine passion, then find that the low wages and high demands of the work have essentially locked the door behind them. Teaching in a high-needs school does not earn your partner extra protection from the police who are unjustly profiling people of color in your neighborhood. But you may not be getting paid enough to be able to move from that neighborhood to escape said targeting. Being a nurse who spends far more time than the average human providing care to the sick does not mean there are more proportionally resources available for you when your own young child or elderly parent needs care. The fact that your hours are so long means you will likely have to arrange for even more wildly expensive hourly care for them than a typical 9-to-5 employee might. This state of affairs leaves too many brilliant helpers too broke to quit or re-train in another profession, and too burned out from swimming upstream to find a different way to shore.

Living in communities where there is a particularly fraught or frayed connection between the helpers and the helped can even be fatal for helpers. I am always dismayed at the loss of life in any police brutality scenario, but as a food industry alum and educator, I was especially devastated by the death of Philando Castile in 2014, who was the nutrition services supervisor at a Montessori magnet school. His dedication to feeding children, and even the presence of a child strapped in the backseat, did not keep him safe from the police who shot him. They had no sense of how he fit into the web of connections to which they too belonged. They thought he was someone else, someone more objectively “bad.” He died because they did not look closely enough.

“It shouldn’t have happened”

The story of the loss of these seven aid workers in Gaza follows similar contours. They are located within the same web, even if they seem far away from us.

The workers were driving in a convoy with aid supplies. Military personnel opened fire. Officials have claimed that this was an error. That the shooters mistook the aid workers for someone more objectively “bad.” (WCK has disputed this account.)

According to NPR:

The Israeli military's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said "the strike was not carried out with the intention of harming WCK aid workers. It was a mistake that followed a misidentification — at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn't have happened."
The Israeli military has also praised World Central Kitchen for bringing humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, as well as to Israel after the Oct. 7 attack in the country.

Perhaps the powers that be, as in Philando Castile’s case, hadn’t realized that their targets had in fact been feeding their children, too.

If they had looked more closely, they might have seen people like Zomi Francom, below. Not just heroic angels, but fragile human beings. Beings with bodies, and vulnerabilities. Beings with family and friends, who miss not just the services they provided but the wholeness of who they were.

Zomi Frankcom, an Australian aid worker who was killed this week in Gaza. (Photo credit: WCK.)

“This is not a stand-alone incident”

The story of World Central Kitchen’s lost helpers, like my own, is not one be told with a shrug, like, “Yep! They put their lives on the line to help the starving in ways that others have been too scared or selfish to do. What did they expect? Reciprocity? Respect? Protection?”

A better question might be: Who taught us that helpers should not get to expect those things? Who benefits from us continuing to believe it?

Pres. Biden is on record as stating the obvious — that this is not the way the story should go.

In a rebuke to the Israeli government, Biden also said "this is not a stand-alone incident," noting the high aid worker casualties in the conflict. "Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians."

Here’s the thing: are any of us doing enough to protect the helpers?

The bodies of helpers everywhere are contested territory. They are not more precious or valuable than the thousands of innocent civilians who have already been lost in this conflict on both sides. But the bodies of helpers are where the consequences of our collective failure to face reality — that we are physical beings living in an interdependent world — are perhaps playing out most poignantly. We know this, or we should. This particular failure simply happens to be occurring on a human scale — seven precious lives — that we as statistics-addled, violence-desensitized viewers can actually comprehend.

The heroic narrative surrounding these seven lives, and the wrongness of these deaths, is what is causing people like Biden, and even myself, to feel moved to comment in clear-eyed ways about this conflict, where before we might have felt more cowed or confused by the “complexity” of the situation. Because killing helpers who are feeding the hungry, like killing children, is not complicated. This shouldn’t have happened.

The fight to ensure that all governments, including our own, do “enough” to protect the helpers, is far from settled.

We should absolutely condemn the actions of the people who killed these seven brave aid workers. But we must also be willing to look at the ways in which we are slowly killing the helpers all around us, in ways fast and slow, every time we fail to recognize their humanity, their limitations, their fragility, their needs. If we truly wish to honor these seven, not to mention the thousands more who have been lost, then we each have to find a way to take up small piece of their work and carry it forward. Not just those of us who already identify as helpers, who may already doing too much — but those of us who don’t see how we can help, yet. Who have gotten a little too used to just looking.

If we do not each do our personal version of enough, the less-than-pleasant consequences will keep coming. One day, we may even wake up in need ourselves, reaching desperately for a number to call for food, for shelter, for childcare, for a real village — and find that there are no more helpers left alive to answer our call.

Because this is a quickly-developing situation, and one in which misinformation is likely to spread quickly, I am intentionally not including more biographical information about these aid workers, or logistical information about this incident, at this time. I hope to add more as the dust clears and we learn more, potentially through an independent investigation as called for by WCK.

Doing enough vs. burning out

Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 10:05:30 GMT

“We are living in bodies that are contested territory.”

— Das Rush

Last year, around this time, I spent a long time walking in the woods, thinking about what the trees had to teach us about living in healthy ecosystems. I had just read Suzanne Simard’s “Finding the Mother Tree,” and was struck by the way she described the generosity of trees.

From Simard’s beautiful work, I think we can learn many lessons about how to be in community in sustainable ways. For example:

Forests are anchored by “Mother Tree” — keystone plant species and individuals that allow whole ecosystems to thrive, through acts of coordinated care. When these Mother Trees reach maturity, they will send nutrients to their seedlings, often planted just around her “drip line,” throughout their lives, to ensure they grow tall and strong.
When a section of the forest is razed for logging, trees around the periphery will send in new seeds, then work to connect the seedlings that grow to the existing underground system of nutrient exchange to ensure those seedlings grow tall and strong too.
When trees are sick, their neighbors send them nutrients through underground root systems, nurturing them until they’re well enough to begin thriving on their own again.
These tree villages make some distinction between species, but not nearly as much distinction as you’d think. Birch and fir support each other readily; their differences make them complementary species rather than enemies. Remove one from the ecosystem to help the other “compete” — as foresters once did in stands of profitable fir trees, removing birch because they thought it would help the fir to grow better — and instead, they wither.
Notably, however, no tree gives all or even most of their nutrients to another organism, not even to their children, until that tree’s death is imminent. (At this point, trees “bequeath” the vast majority of their nutrients to the beings around them, much as a person might in their will.)

Clearly, we humans have lost touch with nature’s intuitive dance of give-and-take, between self and other, in service of our collective thriving. But I hope that one day we can regain it.

I see reasons to hope every day. Below, I’ve included several. These resources and calls to action all offer the invitation to engage in what Paolo Freire calls true “praxis.” That is, a cycle of reflecting, and doing, then reflecting again, on how best to call a more balanced world into being.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

What’s bringing me hope in this season

I’ve been inspired daily by the work of World Central Kitchen, which has more or less side-stepped distinctions of nationality — much like trees who pay little attention to distinctions of birch or fir. They have offered food and capacity-building support to all sides of the conflict in the Middle East, as well as in other struggling communities around the world.
I was glad to help my friend Ashley Locke, whom I interviewed here, to source this story about the facts of IVF, for those who are still struggling to understand or act on the implications of this recent court ruling in Alabama. Her interviewee, Belle Boggs, wrote The Art of Waiting, a memoir which helped me enormously in the early days of my battle with infertility: check it out here. Indivisible.org, which built up enormous capacity in the wake of the 2016 elections, also has a great campaign and call to action for this here.
As some readers here know, I work part-time as a support group facilitator at RTZ Hope, which creates additional root system connections between birthing people who have been recently impacted by harmful reproductive legislation and mentors who have moved through and healed from their own initiations in infertility and loss. I’m continuously inspired in this work by my fellow co-facilitators, reproductive justice advocates and Mother Trees, including Jess Van Wyen (also interviewed here and here). If you know someone who is currently healing from pregnancy or infant loss, and would like to connect with community in a trauma-informed, queer-affirming, antiracist environment, please send them to https://rtzhope.org/register.
I appreciated the way has used his expertise as an educator to pull together this recent resource for talking about Nex Benedict, and taking action on behalf of trans youth.
I’ve also been in deep talks recently with my friend Das Rush (interviewed here) about other ways to offer allyship to trans loved ones during this time. Das, who identifies as trans, pointed out that all of the crises above, while they seem unrelated, are actually all connected, in one big mycelial web: whether you are living in a trans body, a birthing body, or a body stranded in the borderlands between man-made lines on a map, “our bodies are contested territory.”
Thinking about all of the above struggles to survive in “contested territory” as connected has helped me to feel good about the work I’m doing inside the boundaries of my own “drip line,” even if my capacity and expertise are not infinite. It means we don’t have to do it all, all at once, all the time.

“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.” — Mary Oliver

In each of the situations above, someone stepped forward to use their lived experience and professional expertise to respond quickly and competently to a situation in which they already had deep expertise — while also maintaining and building ongoing capacity for that work to continue. This is Mother Tree work.

This generous give-and-take approach offers a healthy alternative to some of the other trends I’ve been seeing lately. I.e.

Some of us have begun confusing real activism and bravery with the creation of social media content. Creating a lovely Canva carousel can be very helpful for the purpose of education, reflection and even collective grief. It’s a useful skillset. But it is not, in and itself, the same as political action. Unless you are a celebrity or a billionaire, it is unlikely that the local reps and overseas leaders who are calling the shots right now are viewing your reels. Please don’t let “speaking out” on socials be the primary form of your activism. If you are calling and writing your congresspeople, or you’re showing up in person to offer a meal or an ear to those in need, but not posting on social media, this is still effective activism.
Some of us have begun to confuse acts of authentic, compassionate witnessing, which are best done in real non-hierarchical relationship, with the pressure to engage in doom-scrolling behavior. The former has benefits for all involved in this act of co-regulation, and can increase our individual capacity to heal from trauma and take brave action. But doom-scrolling is associated with a battery of poor health outcomes that strip our capacity to do the work that’s needed in the world. Moreover, the creation and consumption of content that objectifies suffering human beings in the service of philanthropy, rather than centering their dignity, agency, creativity and wholeness, comes with its own problems. (For more on why, see in conversation with Amy Schiller here.) If you’re engaging in a few minutes a day of responsible news consumption, taking some small action to heal a hurt or honor another’s humanity, then taking some time to breathe, reflect and rest, this is still effective activism.
As Becca Piastrelli discusses here, many of us have become too used to relying on a small number of deeply caring people, people who are all-too-often giving at full capacity already, to salve the wounds of the world. We’ve created entirely separate social classes of “tenders” and “tended” (or, more ominously, classes of “policed” and “policers”) rather than creating a world in which every community member can resolve conflicts, contribute what they can, and receive help as they need. If you’re already a nurse, teacher, therapist or other maxed-out caregiver, and you’re still managing to do your job under the current difficult conditions, this is still effective activism.
We engage in the above distractions while people with far more power and influence over the problems we face continue to hoard resources and engage in dehumanizing rhetoric to justify this behavior — and we fail to hold them accountable. We get all fired up about a friend’s “appalling post,” but continue to allow what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “Windigo thinking,” in Braiding Sweetgrass, on a more widespread societal scale.
As Kimmerer writes:

In the old times, individuals who endangered the community by taking too much for themselves were first counseled, then ostracized, and if the greed continued, they were eventually banished. The Windigo myth may have arisen from the remembrance of the banished, doomed to wander hungry and alone, wreaking vengeance on the ones who spurned them. It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for.

If you’re working to care and share without taking too much for yourself, and working to hold others accountable for not taking more than they need, this is still effective activism.

If you have been contributing to the collective liberation this week in ways big or small, I invite you to take a breath now, and consider how you might fill up your own nutrient stores for the work ahead. And to release any guilt or shame for not “giving your all.”

Remember: Among trees, “your all” is never required for beings who desire to live to give another day. “Your enough” is quite enough.

Here are a few ways you might resource yourself this week:

Peruse this roundup of resources from last year on rest and reciprocity.
Journal on what work is truly calling you in this moment, and let the rest go.
Explore this series of short meditative practices from last week, created by Kristin Neff especially for caregivers.
Try this mindfulness exercise that invites you to consider: what does your body actually want? And then go do that.

The work will still be here when you’re finished, I promise.

What work is calling to you in this season? What does it mean for you to rest in between giving seasons? And how do you balance the two? Asking for a frequently-burned out friend…

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