The ones who keep us from wilting
A catalog of unabashed gratitude
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
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.
Related reading
You can always return: On moving to Seoul, and leaning on old friends and new ones to help me break a bad habit that I couldn’t leave behind.
Mourning and re-making the real village: On learning from old-growth forests and Indigenous cultures about how to build community.
Receiving love from my Mother Trees: On how Millennials are redefining what it means to tend to those in need, particularly those living through “disenfranchised grief.”
This beautiful video art, made with backing music from Bon Iver, to accompany Ross Gay as he reads the poem quoted above.
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.