In lieu of a leaflet
Touching home base on Beobab.Tree
Hello, hiii!
Instead of a transcribed Leaflet for this week, I’d like to spend time with you (that is, the time I am right now, writing this, will be spending time with future you, the present you reading this) by giving context to the environment Beobab.Tree is currently growing in. I’d also like to share some ideas that sprouted in my head, and some seeds I’ll be seeing through with care as we all enter Spring together.
The Environment; context
I’ve gotten to substitute teach over the past few weeks, which has been full of personal discovery and leveling-up on my stats in Adaptability and Patience…and it has been where most of my energy has been going to. I am thankful for the teachers and librarians I’ve met while on various assignments. They have shared with me their own experiences and feelings towards teaching and education, and how that has evolved over time.
I think what I appreciate so much in my readership — there are 49 of you who subscribe, many others dropping in from all over (I am incredibly humbled) — is that I do not feel any pressure to explain myself for my digital quietness. I trust that my readers will do their best to understand the steps I take from a place of intentional online presence.
The Sprouts; some thoughts
🌱It is wildly lovely that the word "spiritual" contains both the words "spirit" and "ritual"...and all the letters to create "SPIRAL". I cannot help but think that the word is a spell. That, whenever it is used, there are forces enacting within cells or inside the wind that produces a ritual for the spirit. The resonance found in a spiral expanding outwards.
🌱This photo I saw on Twitter has me very, very emotional... I think if Michaelangelo and whoever was there at that time had a pair of scuba goggles, imagine the paintings they'd create. It would've been cool to see some sci-fi art or sea creature worship... it would make for a more ecologically connected society for sure.
Sometimes people ask what you’d bring back into the past/Olden Days to stir shit up…I think I would bring a children’s STEAM kit or any kind of tech that would upset people with how beautiful nature is.
Like what if this painting was actually modelled after two interacting anemones that the artist saw on a daily swim?
🌱We can do so much with our bodies: play in water, sleep, respond to music, lounge, teach. One magical example I want to recognize is how we “show up” with our bodies.
Sometimes this can’t be helped: we’re just HERE. But when I think about the experience of attending the public talk from someone I admire a lot, I had pleasure in feeling the room fill as each person showed up, trickling in their corporeal forms so that the speaker can feel potentially one or all of these things 1. seen (with permission), 2. recognized, 3. supported.
Anyways, when I get to see you in-person, that is such a gift. An act of magic, really.
🌱I’m no longer concerned with whether I’ve made the right choices.
This occurrence of introspection gave me so much freedom and resolution. I think the feeling came from a several-month practice (since October?) of being honest with myself, being “impeccable with my word” before I knew that “being impeccable” was a way of framing what I was earnest on doing.
I notice how I’ve began to channel all the curiosity I can project towards my relationships towards myself and local environment instead. I love my courage to ask questions. I love my current states of internal and external self-awareness.
In late February, I chose an experience that broke me down in radical lovingness. And rather than distract from all that was coming up for review, I engaged with what I knew I have been holding onto forever. This quote from an are.na block (Thank you, Vero! >u<) captures what it meant for me to break, and recognize all the fissures, how I did:
Your traditional western therapist is never gonna recommend ceremony— and that’s the issue—white culture doesn’t have ceremony to pass on. The systems we’ve created have diagnosis and pathology to tell you how broken you are. But ceremony breaks you down anyways. Brokendownness is necessary. Disintegration is necessary for integration.
When I started to lace my life with ceremony—for me it’s in a very lunar-centric way—my inner reserves of trust became a well with an abundant source. The fissures from being broken down creates a path in which faith follows. Let’s learn from river deltas:
The Seeds; my work of cultivating ahead is grounded in…
🫘 playing with my personal mythos
🫘 reading!!
🫘 scheming…
As I ready the tree bark technologies to transcribe a Leaflet for y’all soon, I hope you take care and path of grace!
In growth,
Isabel