I (Marta, editor of this issue) am incredibly proud of both the pieces we have put together on the theme of ancestors and lineage, and also of the collective process behind the scenes that pulled this issue together. We are, in our own spirally way, coming together as a collective, learning so much about ourselves, each other, and the creative process.2 We hope you enjoy the ways these works talk to each other as much as we do!

Please feel free to leave your reactions and your own stories in the comments!

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Table of Contents:

Rosaburn by Aileen Paterson

The Family of Things: On goose friends and grief witnessing by Mylo K Oliver

My Father’s Tongue by Le*ah

Achiamma by Le*ah

Palo verde tree by aire

A Rock Thrown Across the Ocean by Nada

Papi by Nikki Jay

Grandma’s Garden by Lizzy Terry

Tú y yo by aire

but mostly it’s just a girl and her cat by no name slob

Where do angels live? by aire

Bad Ancestors by Joel Davis

Forgotten Rooms by anonymous ghost

A dream family by Céol

Hearth Threads by Marta Rose

Rosaburn

by Aileen Paterson3

That river

where you played as a child

by the house where you grew up

that river

where we fed the ducks

and lazy geese that barely

looked at us

more intent on sleep

as we threw seeds

from an old wooden bridge

and the river flowed over stones

and pulsed its way

close by to the beach

where my uncle kicked a football

all the way to school

or so you told me.

That river

seems to course its way

through my history

and yours

and if I could trace it

back to its source

I feel I could lift

the weight of years

that bears down upon us

and I could walk lightly

to meet you

as you were as a child

wading knee deep in

that river

barefoot

and free.

The Family of Things: On goose friends and grief witnessing

by Mylo K Oliver4

On this particular day I come to the lake hoping to catch a glimpse of baby geese.

This spring I find myself aching for the walks I would take as a child with my mother to a local pond inhabited by hundreds of Canada geese. Every year we would track the new families in the springtime, making sure to keep a wide berth around the pairs that were still nesting. We would watch the freshly hatched goslings stumble around on their feet that were still too big for their bodies, and chuckle at those in the awkward “teenage” stage, developing feathers but not quite rid of their baby fuzz yet. It’s one of my favourite things I did with my mom.

As my wife and I arrive at the conservation area, I grab the baggie of oats I brought from home and stuff it into my pants pocket. We pass the signs posted at the trailhead which warn about the spread of H5N1 (bird flu), and walk down the path in the direction of the lake. The walk from the car to the beach is slow. I left the house for a couple hours yesterday so today my chronic illness symptoms are flaring. Despite my slow pace, I have to stop every 25 meters or so to catch my breath. My wife walks slowly just ahead of me, taking note when I need to stop and circling back to not leave me behind.

When I finally come upon the little clearing on the beach, I see you with your mate. Your little black and white heads are glistening as you sleep nestled in the sand warmed by the late afternoon sun. But there are no babies to be seen.

In March this area was buzzing with activity from ducks, geese, and even swans. Now a stillness blankets the space, disrupted only by the waves of Lake Ontario gently lapping the shore.5

“I guess they all nest somewhere else,” I say to my wife. She walks further ahead to see if there are any geese tucked away around the reeds, but shakes her head to me from afar.

Disappointed, I get out the baggie of oats from my pocket anyways. Well acquainted with the human sounds of food, you stir immediately, flap your wings in a grand stretch and begin sauntering towards me. I throw some oats on the ground near you, but you remain fixated on the bag in my hand. You keep slowly advancing towards me and I wonder if you’re hoping to get close enough to snatch it.

As you come closer I notice that you have a scar on your head that curves over your right eye like an exaggerated eyebrow. It looks like you got in a fight and someone took a chunk out of you - maybe a fellow Canada goose, or maybe one of the swans that shares these waters. I marvel at how wild animals can incur injuries like this and evade infection.

You keep ignoring the oats I toss on the ground, so I get a bold idea. Without thinking too much, I pour some oats into my palm and extend my hand towards you.

You hiss once, but I can tell your heart isn’t in it. I recognize this display of bravado as the automatic armour you’ve built from years of scrappy survival. With that hiss, I see myself in you, and I smile.

My mom adored Canada geese, and I grew up fostering an appreciation for these feisty birds that so many Canadians dislike. For the past four years I’ve come to this conservation area in late March to ritualize the anniversary of her death, and to commune with the birds. Maybe I’ve been lucky, and been spared from the most aggressive encounters with this species, or maybe I really do have a kinship with them. Either way I decide to take the risk of hand-feeding you on this day, something I’ve never done before with a bird like you.

Arm outstretched, watching you inch your way closer to me, I feel a wave of doubt begin to rise. Will you peck me? Maybe. I’m prepared for that possibility. I’m wearing sunglasses, and accept that my hand might get injured. I also remember that H5N1 is circulating and I run through the mental checklist of harm reduction strategies I’ve learned.6

My wave of doubt is quickly quelled by my risk assessment, and the deep knowing that you and I have an understanding. I am willing to make myself vulnerable to earn your trust. And I do. Before I know it I’m feeding you from my hand.

As you eat, I feel cautious, but not afraid. You and I are the same creature, after all.

Your beak pecking my palm feels softer than I expected. You mistake my fingertip for food and give it a nibble. It startles me, but it doesn’t hurt. I’m thrilled you’re granting me this gift of closeness.

When I get to the car, I sanitize my hands and later wash them thoroughly when I get home. Over the past year, some Canada geese have been found dead in my area from H5N1, and I don’t want to be responsible for spreading disease to any creatures, human or not.7

…

Weeks later I’m sitting in a virtual session with my therapist. Once again I’ve excavated the big lumpy blob of disability grief that lives deep down in my chest these days, and together we’re holding and witnessing it.

We talk about how things have been since April when I contracted a virus. It was my first symptomatic virus since the Covid infection that gave me Long Covid in 2022. And though my RAT8 was negative for SARS-CoV-2 this time around, this virus still made me incredibly ill and has significantly shaped my life ever since April. I spent one month getting over the acute symptoms of the virus (it took my wife 7 days), and in the months since then my fatigue has been worse, PEM9 comes faster, and my sleep has been more disturbed.

I am faced with a new wave of grief from this acute infection - the realization that even though the government and some individual people in my life could be doing more to mitigate airborne disease transmission, even if they were, there is still the reality that I am more vulnerable because I am chronically ill. Covid exists and I drew the Long Covid short stick, and that is no one’s fault. No one else can weather this illness for me, and that sucks. There’s no solving this grief. There is only feeling it, and being witnessed in it.

“Maybe you need to bring in more witnesses to your grief…alive or dead,” my therapist gently suggests.

Alive or dead. This idea stirs something in me.

I recall to my therapist how two months before, in the midst of a weeks-long period of severe rib pain from endlessly coughing, I took my small framed icon of Alice Wong10 - a gift made by my wife for my birthday this past March - and created an altar with it. I lit a candle, and prayed to Ancestor Alice. As I sat at this altar, I thought about the stories told at Alice’s celebration of life ceremony - stories about how when she lost her ability to eat, determined to retain her joy of food, she would still create delicious treats and share them with all her friends. As I sat in pain and deep fear that this virus would cause my long-term health to regress, I asked Alice to sit with me, and teach me how to hold this burden of chronic illness that I desperately want to be free of.

After my therapy session ends, I look back in my notes app at the thoughts I jotted down after my time sitting at the altar with Alice: My experience is mine to live but it doesn’t exist in isolation. Disability is an ancient story. Disabled people have been surviving this grief for centuries. I am one of many. I can lean on my disabled ancestors for wisdom and support and witnessing.11

Below it I write, Bring in more witnesses, alive or dead.

…

These days I am also spending a lot of time with my ancestor Mary Oliver, whose name I adopted last year. Through her poetry she is teaching me how to lean on my other-than-human kin for this wisdom and witnessing.

And on the day when I come to the lake, dear goose friend, you also witness me. You - with your scarred head, sitting childless with your mate - hiss at me and then give me a gift. You eat from my hand, and remind me of my place in the family of things.12

My Father’s Tongue

by Le*ah 13

I remember the man’s eyebrows first.

They came together in the middle of his face and made a V. I knew that letter. We had just learned it at school. The day before, I had filled a page in my red notebook with big Vs and little ones.

His mouth was a small O. The bottom of his nose looked like a wide M.

I listened carefully.

He was saying something about Daddy going home. His words came out with small flecks of spit. My father’s hand was cold in mine, cold like the wet towel my mother put on my forehead when I was sick. I looked up at him. His face had gone grey.

Then I heard a scream.

My own.

My father’s grip tightened around my hand. “Shush,” he whispered. “Shush.” I cried harder. “I don’t want you to go home.” He bent toward me. “Daddy needs to prove you are my baby. The policeman thinks I kidnapped you.”

At home, my father told my mother what had happened. She sighed and said he should learn better German.

I ran upstairs and hid under my blanket.

I should have protected him.

And yet, another thought was forming, one that I barely dared to speak out aloud: sometimes it was embarrassing to have a father who could not make himself understood.

Later, when the shouting downstairs had stopped, I crept back toward the stairs. Before I could say anything, my father lifted me up and swung me over his head. He smelled of the after-shave with the blue ship.

I lowered my head and breathed him in.

I do not know how much of this I remember and how much I have rebuilt from the story as it was told later. My memory keeps shapes without stories. A hand gone cold. A face turning grey. A father who could not make himself understood. A child who loved him and was ashamed of him in the same breath.

Perhaps that is why, for a long time, I thought the problem was language. If my father had spoken better German, if people had understood him more easily, perhaps none of these moments would have happened. Only later did I realise that language was only one piece of a larger story.

…

As a child, there were a few things that felt like absolute truths nobody dared to question.

My mother was a doctor.

My father was not.

My mother’s knowledge counted.

My father’s knowledge had to prove itself.

And yet my father knew things that nobody else knew.

He could read animals and drive a car so smoothly that nobody became sick.

He noticed details that others missed.

He listened to landscapes, people, and danger.

He played elephant with me when I was small: both of us on all fours, his body arched above mine, my smaller body moving carefully underneath his. On our walks, he would take me to see the peacock in an aviary by the river, repeating each time that it was the national bird of Ceylon, the country that would later be renamed Sri Lanka. Sometimes, standing in front of the aviary made him cry. In hindsight, I think he took me there whenever he missed home, seeking out the only symbol of his island in our small Swiss town.

My father also knew exactly which spices belonged in my curry. Not too hot, but never bland. A thick yellow sauce around an island of pale chicken wings, parippu, and brown rice.

He knew how to make food taste like care without ever saying so.

As I am writing these lines, I notice that I do not want to turn him into a symbol of wounded migration, or into a gentle man misunderstood by Europe. He was not only that. This essay is not an attempt to settle the whole truth of him. It is about how I learned to translate and defend an inheritance I was never quite able to inhabit.

…

As I grew older, protecting my father took the shape of translation. It became the easiest way for both of us to move through the world. His German was never quite fluent. People often struggled to understand him. Sometimes they lost patience before he had finished speaking or simply stopped listening.

So I translated.

I explained what he was trying to say. I repeated sentences in different ways, filling in missing pieces, learning to anticipate confusion before it happened.

Like that time when we got a new toaster. I must have been around eight at the time.

One week after buying the new toaster, it broke. My father took it back to the shop and brought me along, trying to explain the problem to the salesperson. They frowned in V-shape and asked him to repeat himself. My father tried again. The salesperson didn’t understand.

I could feel something building in my chest. A black hole, so deep I could have hidden inside, an embarrassment so familiar it feels older than myself.

The salesperson looked confused. My father became more careful with his words, he slowed down, the explanation became longer.

As the black hole threatened to swallow me, I stepped in. I explained the problem in Swiss German. The salesperson understood immediately and the tension vanished. The toaster was replaced. We could go home.

For years, I believed that I was saving my father in those moments. Only much later did I notice what happened to my father when I translated for him. That every misunderstanding positioned him as the problem. That every translation made me appear competent and him inadequate.

While I did solve the practical difficulty of misunderstandings, I was quietly confirming a story neither of us had chosen. The salesperson left feeling helped. I left feeling relieved. And my father was left standing there as the person who could not explain a broken toaster.

Nobody ever told me to be ashamed of my father or that being Swiss was better than being Sri Lankan. I was never taught that some accents were more acceptable than others. I learned it by watching people understand my mother immediately while my father seemed to need my protection to survive in this world.

Like most children, I wanted life to be easier. I hated how these misunderstandings made me feel. As if our belonging was questioned, as if we shouldn’t be there in the first place. A brown, tall man and a little white girl, hand in hand in a small Swiss town in the 1980s.

For a long time, I thought that story was about language. The word racism was never uttered in our home growing up. All I knew was that the world kept getting stuck on my father.

Translation did not only happen in shops. It happened inside the family too, in quieter and more permanent ways.

…

I watched my Swiss grandmother call my father by his English name, refusing to use his real one. His Scottish father seemed to make him more acceptable than his Tamil mother. My Swiss grandmother could imagine an Englishman in the family, a Sri Lankan with complex ancestry was unimaginable.

I watched friends hesitate to come to our house. Their parents didn’t want them to come over to play. And for a long time, I believed that life would have been easier if my father had been Swiss. I remember telling him so, a memory filled with deep shame. It took me many years to understand that the problem had never been my father.

…

By the time I was seventeen, I had learned the lesson well enough to apply it to myself.

During high school, I went on a school exchange to Canada. Until then, I had never thought much about my own English. It was simply the English I had grown up with: my father’s English, shaped by Sri Lanka and its colonial history.

In Toronto, however, English suddenly became a language I could be judged for. For my host mother I was the strange white girl with the Indian accent and I became deeply ashamed of my father’s tongue.

Before the first day at school, I stood in front of the small mirror in my host family’s spare room and rehearsed my accent, copying Canadian vowels, Canadian rhythms, Canadian intonation until my own voice sounded unfamiliar enough that I could finally use it. By the time I walked into school, the voice that came out of my mouth no longer felt like mine.

“Hi Dad, I’m in Torondou.”

“Wait, where are you now?”

“T-ooo-ron-ttt-ooo”

Nobody had asked me to do this. My host mother hadn’t mocked me, she just expressed her surprise at me sounding Indian.

At school when people asked where I was from, I answered, “Switzerland.” It was the simplest answer.

…

It took years before I began to understand that the part of myself I had tried to smooth away was not empty. It had a country, a history, and a family. When I was twenty-four, I went to Sri Lanka for term break. I was living in Thailand at the time, finishing a master’s degree. I had nowhere in particular to go during the holidays, so I went to the country that my father called home. I wanted to find the quiet roots of my father’s voice, but instead, I arrived right as the water claimed the island.

I travelled to my father’s village on 26 December 2004, the day the tsunami struck Sri Lanka. I remember the bus more clearly than I remember the news itself. It was an old Tata bus with holes instead of windows, full of people and smells. The radio was playing loudly. First Bollywood music, then a voice in Sinhala. Suddenly people became agitated. I didn’t understand enough to put together a story, but every now and then, one of the passengers translated a fragment for me.

By the time we reached the village, I knew something terrible had happened.

There was no internet. My aunts had no telephone. News was broadcast through the tiny TV in the corner of the living room. Somewhere in Europe, my family and my friends did not know whether I was alive. Someone eventually reported me missing to the Swiss embassy.

The village was surrounded by an old plantation, no longer in operation, with wild tea plants spreading across the hills. Beyond them lay the Randenigala reservoir, another vast intervention in a landscape shaped by colonialism and histories of displacement. My father’s childhood stories were becoming geography.

Because I had arrived from Europe, people were translating my Swiss presence into a currency I didn’t actually possess. Relatives appeared with stories of leaking roofs, medical expenses and unexpected debts. I wanted to help. Had I possessed the means, I probably would have.

And yet this, too, was only part of the story.

My aunts cooked meals that tasted like my childhood curries. My cousins taught me Sinhala nursery rhymes, and every evening, stories moved between us in languages, translating what I only partly grasped.

…

After that visit, I did not know how to return. Not directly. Not easily. So I returned another way. This time through dust, ink, and silently formed letters in my head.

My second return to Sri Lanka began in a library. I was enrolled in Asian Studies and I began reading Sri Lankan writers, historians and poets, learning about the island through literature, archives, and conversations that unfolded across centuries.

For the first time, I could approach my inheritance without having to perform it. There was no expectation that I should already know the language, customs, and family histories. There was only curiosity.

When I became an artist after many years of searching for a place where I could fully be myself, I returned to Sri Lanka again. This time through my practice. It was an attempt to remain in conversation with a home that was never mine. A conversation in fragments revolving around Achiamma, a tiny Malaiyaha Tamil woman brought to Sri Lanka from South India to work as a tea plucker.

…

For many years I believed belonging meant not having to explain myself. To be accepted without translation. But perhaps belonging begins when explanation is no longer an apology. Perhaps it begins when complexity no longer feels like failure.

I still do not find returning to Sri Lanka easy, but I no longer measure belonging by ease.

Some inheritances cannot be entered like houses. They are approached through the taste of warm parippu on the tongue, through a child learning the alphabet, through the peacock in a cage that made me cry, through toast, through the names people refused to say. For now, this is how I return: by remaining in relation with what I once tried hardest to translate away.

Achiamma

by Le*ah

Biting a cardamom seed.

Taste flooding my tongue.

Dear Achiamma,

As I am writing these lines, I am on Grímsey island in northern Iceland. I don’t know if you can imagine Iceland. It is much colder than Walapane, where you lived, but there is heating and hot water everywhere.

Many years ago, I spent a few weeks in Walapane with your daughters. I arrived on the day of the tsunami. I wore slippers, shorts, and a T-shirt. I remember the cold shower, the outhouse toilet with leeches, the never-ending rain. Most of all, I remember the cold. Sitelay was one of the words everyone repeated again and again.

On the ferry to this island, I got incredibly seasick. There was snow, rain, wind, and waves tilting the boat in all directions at once. I used to like boats. I was a dive instructor in a previous life. But a storm in the Indian Ocean barely compares to the North Atlantic.

How was the sea when you crossed from Tamil Nadu to Sri Lanka? When the British brought you to work on their tea plantations? Was it blue, turquoise, or grey? Did you get seasick? Were you scared?

I wish I had had the chance to know you. I miss you sometimes. I miss having an Achiamma, a wise person to turn to with my questions. Someone who would feed me ripe mangoes, bananas, or coconut rice pudding when I am sad. Thaata spoke about you with incredible gentleness. He praised your food and kept your curry powder long past its expiry date.

The call about your death reached us at five in the morning. Thaata had tears in his eyes when he told me. I was six years old, and the words “Achiamma died” meant very little. I am not even sure I realised you were his mother. Because of the war, I never got to say goodbye. My father travelled to Sri Lanka alone.

Here in Iceland, the humpbacks arrived on the same day as the Arctic terns. The terns travel here from Antarctica every year to breed. They are loud and fearless, attacking anyone who comes too close to their nests. Perhaps you saw them in Sri Lanka. They might have been passing through.

Most humpbacks spend the winter in the Caribbean, where they give birth. The calves do not have enough blubber to survive being born in the cold North Atlantic. But the tropical ocean has little food, so the whales return north to feed in fjords rich with plankton.

Sometimes I wonder whether people follow food in the same way whales do.

Were you hoping for a better life? Did you go to bed hungry as a child? I know the work on the tea plantations was hard and barely enough to feed the workers. What were you promised that made leaving home seem worthwhile?

I will probably never know. Sometimes I wish I had known you better.

I do not even know your name.

I do not know whether you liked your tea black, with milk, with ginger or cardamom.

Not quite bitter, not quite sweet, not quite sour.

Warm, maybe.

We never truly met, although a photograph of us exists. I am two years old and sitting on your lap.

Sometimes, when I think of you, I imagine the scent of sandalwood. I feel the softness of your sari. Your dark eyes resting on me. I imagine you speaking with your eyes because we have no shared language, no shared words.

This year, Iceland gives me many reasons for grief. I grieve the puffins that did not make it ashore after Atlantic storms. I grieve the whales that did not survive migration, starving because plankton is becoming scarce. I grieve the slowing Atlantic current, the melting ice, the warming ocean.

And beside this enormous grief for a changing planet, I mourn you.

I mourn that we never spoke.

I mourn that Sri Lanka was never quite home for me and that Switzerland never felt entirely like home either.

I mourn the years I spent wandering through the world, not knowing where I belonged.

If you were here, I think I would put my head in your lap and cry. I would inhale your scent and try not to leak on your sari.

I wish you were my home.

Love,

Le*ah

Surprising, not unpleasant.
A hint of sharpness.

Learn more about Achiamma here: https://leahmbowie.github.io/achiamma/

Palo verde tree

by aire

As a young sapling I was mistaken for a weed
Years went by, and now look at me!
In the wild I resemble a humble shrub
But tended and pruned I stretch up toward the heavens
Wherever I am, my skin grows green as you ever did see
Now it is spring. I burst into flame
Every last leaf offers its life to create
A yellow so sincere it'll break your heart

My canopy casts a cool cloud for you
The smallest, perfectest and island refugee in a sea that begins to boil
You lie in your hammock and smile up at me
The bees and small birds drink the cup of life brimming from a million tiny chalices
Your own little ones learn from these elders to sip the nectar
With each gentle breeze I bless you with sweet yellow kisses
The sky was never so blue

A Rock Thrown Across the Ocean

by Nada14

I am made up of parts that went to war with each other,

within a shared country that no longer exists.

Sometimes when asked about my background, I get stuck for a moment on how to respond. I might want to answer with a sentence, but that’s probably not the simple answer people are asking to hear. I usually say I’m Serbian-Croatian, or sometimes I’ll just mention one or the other, whichever one happens to come out my mouth in that moment, or within the given context. But I could also say I’m Bosnian. I’m Serbian because my dad is from the region in Bosnia called Republika Srpska (Serb Republic). I’m Croatian because my mom was born and raised there, but her parents are Bosnian. And to me, we’re really all the same, but there’s people where I’m from who would take offence (or worse) to me saying that. Really, a few decades ago they’d all be lumped together as Yugoslavian, but you can’t say that anymore. Plus, many people have never even heard of Yugoslavia.

It feels impossible to write about my family history without writing about war. When I shared this with my mother, she said there are plenty of other things. Of course, there is much more. But she had a life and a connection that I never had. A connection that has been violently severed. I believe that the trauma of war is written into my DNA. I was conceived in the midst of it, after all. Carried in the womb of a refugee across the ocean and born into a new nation and given different citizenship than the rest of my family.

My parents have too many shocking and disturbing stories that no humans should have had to experience. Stories that feel like they need to be heard but that I have yet to figure out how to appropriately share, because they are not mine. And yet, they feel like they are in some way. I carry them with me.

I never felt that I had solid roots anywhere. Untethered from the land I was meant to be born into. Probably a common feeling for many kids of immigrants. I felt out of place whether I was at home here or at home overseas, always missing something or someone, but thankful to have several places in the world that hold the warmth, nostalgia, and memories of home. To this day, I don’t really like to refer to myself as Canadian. I’ve never dreamt about settling down here, in fact I wish to leave one day, as grateful as I am for the life my parents gave me here. I am culturally confused - different from my own parents, but different than many of the people I grew up with, a mix of both, a bit of neither. Of course, I would not be who I am now had our life been different, in a lot of ways. Here, I had the freedom to forge something new. Along with being autistic and queer, I never stood a chance at not being a weird alien (and thank goodness for that!).

I feel kinship with trees and maybe one day, I’ll feel more rooted like one. But currently, I might say I’m something more like a rock. I feel pretty solid, and like I have a good foundation, but movable. Willing to be thrown across another body of water.

A few years ago, I wrote a ‘resolution’ in a notebook, that just said...
- “learn more about history of Jugoslavia” (I can see I originally wrote “Yugoslavia” with a Y, but I covered it up with a J, so as to make sure it’s un-anglicized).
This has always felt important to me, it feels wrong that I don’t know more, but I can’t say I’ve really done much to rectify this outside of being occasionally struck with the urge to go down Wikipedia rabbit holes. To be learning your own history this way doesn’t feel satisfying or motivating enough, it feels lonely, distant. I don’t feel like I can talk about my own history with much certainty, and I worry that I might misrepresent things. That being said, when I refer to Jugoslavia in this way, I’m also using it as a shorthand to say “learn more about the history of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia” because, that’s just easier to say. Really, Jugoslavia was no older than a century, but before that, each country’s history goes back to at least the Middle Ages.

When referring to my language, I’ll sometimes just say “in my language...” instead of giving the hyphenated combo, or choosing to say one or the other and it feeling incomplete. Though similarly with my background, I often refer to it as Serbo-Croatian. Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, while virtually the same common language aside from minor differences, have different dialects and I don’t even know which one I’m using. Until I notice that I’m consciously choosing to use the specific Bosnian word for ‘bread’ or the Croatian variation for ‘scissors’. When I filled out the latest census and it asked me what languages I speak, I got an error for typing “Serbo-Croatian”. It asked, “did you mean Serbian? ... did you mean Croatian?” No, I meant Serbo-Croatian. An officially recognized language that represents the amalgamation of me and my people. Different, but the same. I’m so thankful to have grown up knowing my language, it feels special, a significant way that I am able to be connected to something bigger, something that reaches far back in time.

This is a story with many parts, with so much left unsaid, and I’ve had no idea from where to begin. There is much to express and much to explore...!

Papi

by Nikki Jay

Tired of family.

Tired of dysfunction.

What is my ancestry?

Suffering. Poverty. Trauma. Physical abuse. Emotional abuse. Verbal abuse.

I’d rather envision sunlight and coconut trees and Papi smiling. Maybe he has stories to tell me. Maybe we’ll go fishing. I don’t know much about him outside of fishing, cigarettes, and drinking. He was kind to me and I have those memories. And memories of cousins harassing him when we were children.

Maybe I am creating new lineage.

I wrote a poem about a suitcase that my mother left behind. On the day she was struggling to get the order of protection against my father, I sent it to her. She said, “...it did something to my heart that I can’t explain.”

I am writing my ancestry with stories of Papi. Creating and imagining what it could be like to have him in my life. To have had him in my life. Maybe exploring that cut-off lineage of love will provide healing. Perhaps my “father tree” exists on paper and this is my conduit to the ancestors.

My only intention is doing it with love for him and for myself.

Papi-

Cold air, dark skies, puckered skin. Exposed flesh absorbing the elements. Huddled into dark, thick jackets. Hat pulled tightly down over my ears, but the tips burning nonetheless.

Pulled into sunlight, blinking against the harshness of exposure. A hand comes up to shield my eyes and I squint through my fingers trying to make sense of my surroundings. Coconut trees, deep, rich green foliage. Moisture is in the air. My skin is exposed. I feel warm moist air pooling in my lungs causing them to constrict. I struggle against the discomfort, muscles tensing- resistance. Anger starts to tighten my chest. Confusion furrows my brow. I turn my body, shifting my feet in small shuffling movements. And there he is. His dark brown skin and tufts of white hair bring hot tears leaking from my eyes indistinguishable from the air on my skin heavy with moisture. I do not know I am crying. My body detaches. Brain and mind fighting to understand this reality.

He turns to me and his smile is bright.

Grandma’s Garden

by Lizzy Terry15

Even though multiple people in my family have had gardens as long as I’ve known them, my interest in the Happening of gardens has only sprouted in the last few years, with plenty of wins, fails and learnings along the way. There are questions I regularly return to: Why? How did I get here? and Who and what made this possible? What am I able and willing to do? And when applied to the theme of gardening and lineages, I was led back to my maternal grandparents’ home and garden in northern Indiana.

It is 2008 and in this magic garden of trees, birdhouses and baths, melting pot of plants and leaves, you are greeted by a white-boarded shed with sage trimmed window and door. The white door holds a “Welcome” sign with a chipper yellow chicken beneath, framed by four hearts of pink and blue.

Travel further… flowers and plants EVERYWHERE. You are 15 years old and don’t know any names but you know light and shadow, shape and color. These stems hold little bunches of shadowy pink, slim fingers reaching from each little pucker. The sun spotlights a few, draws gaze farther back, to blurred golden petals with black button eyes

Crouch down. It’s that buzzing August day sandwiched between your aunt and grandma’s birthdays. You’re looking at this stone eagle, who’s looking at a glare beaming into the curve of their left wing. Or just looking at their wing. Or trying to look beyond their shoulder at the pink and yellow and purple flowers behind them and they can’t, because statue. But together, the glare and the wings making a heart shape hugging the eagle’s body, makes you think of your grandpa who passed away last year.

The tendrils of this flower look like a grey shag rug wrapped around a beach ball and the wild curls of an uncle. Your uncle reminds you again of your grandpa, a WWII vet who seemed to always have a camera around his neck. You never talked about photography or pictures with him, but find yourself carrying around a little digital camera more often.

Leap forward two years. Mother’s Day 2010 and the void-sibling of your parents’ divorce is over a year old. Again crouched down, you’re smelling the earth and damp of either post-rain or post-watering, meeting the upturned eyes and smirk of a frog statue. The gnome on frog’s back looks cheerful and relaxed in his blue tunic and slightly crooked glasses. A hosta leaf cups a few drops of moisture within arm’s reach of the gnome. You’d like to be a drip among those drops, content with this phase in the greater rain-life cycle and not rushing-wishing for what’s ahead or behind you.

Transport 15 years forward to the shortened days of November and look out the window of the car flying your family of three south-east home. There’s a stand of bare-branched trees anchoring a shadowed ribbon of farmland. Like the passage of time, this nearing-twilight sky evades concise description or containment. Try a horizon kissed corn silk, the yellow melting up into milk before dissolving into the blue of any midwesterner’s favorite denim. The drives and visits to your grandma’s are both familiar and different since she married the second love of her life (on Valentine’s Day) and moved a county north.

She still has a garden, but gardening at 90-something is quite different from 70-something (even if you and your partner are tenaciously determined). And yet there is always more to be done, noticed, shared. As you’re carried down the rural two-lane highway, remember the clouds splashed and stippled across this landscape before they move. The pewter and blush halo echoing over the trees and the lacey rose gold crescents copying the shimmering wink of moon high above. Is it age, events or the meaning you make of experience leading which details call to you?

Mother’s Day 2024. A ladder of unbloomed blue irises trying to climb over each other as they march up the middle of the picture. I relate to their mummy wrapped leaves and unfurled potential in multiple directions: I’m taking a once-a-month Indiana master naturalist class and feel I’m just beginning to understand both plants and my grandma. In the yawning loss of not visiting, (among and amid so many other losses, setbacks and ongoing repercussions, due to covid), my grandma answered a very lengthy list of ancestry get-to-know you questions, and along with a couple of aunts, has shared books, web trees, and folders of family history. I’m trying to navigate the in-between of foreground flowers, the potential and what’s possible in front of me, and the long view - the blur of sun-soaked cropland reminiscent of generations of farmers in my ancestry.

I’m reading a book, The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger, and what I’m learning is turning me into all kinds of questions, teetering toward reorientation. But I can tell the reorienting is not automatic or complete - it’s going to require attention and practice for a perspective-shift to move deeper than logic. In this picture at my grandma’s and her partner’s, I could keep it simple and say: here are two stumps at the edge of a farm field. One short and stout, another skinnier and taller. That is true, and perhaps that’s all.

But lean in, stay a moment and you’ll find roofs with chimneys, jaunty little ladders winding up to a door with windows. Remain a little longer and imagine bounding along the crooked planks acting as a bridge and balcony connecting the two wings of this timber complex. How can I not be awed and enchanted? Plants can hear! Plants can feel, with their whole bodies! They are incredible chemists and keep time, communicate with electricity and move-evolve in queer ways, fine-tuning signaling and possibly, somehow, playing across and between taxonomic kingdoms.

The magic I remember visiting my grandparents’ garden as a kid doesn’t need to be tied to property lines or blood relatives. This sense of place softens the boundaries between living and dead. This experience of memory burrows below remembering and through assumptions about who and what qualifies as kin.

Tú y yo

by aire

Mi Niña
¿Puedes creer que
Un día...
Serás adulta?

Antes te arrullaba
Y te mecía
Aquí! En esta misma silla
(Ya eres muy grande
¡Casi no cabes!)
Solo tenías un añito...
Ahora ¡tienes cinco!
Luego vas a tener diez...
Luego quince...
Luego veinte...
Luego tal vez tendrás hijos...
Luego un día...
Serás abuela...

Y entonces
¡Seremos abuelas juntas!
Tú y yo
Imaginate...

Y entonces nos parecerá
Que somos, más o menos,
¡De la misma edad!
Tú y yo, mi niña...

¿Piensas que lo lograremos?
¿Seremos abuelas juntas?
¿Sí?¿No?...
~no sé mami~
Dices, casi dormida, en
Tu dulce vocecita

Pues sí que sí...
Claro que sí, mi niña
Si Dios quiere
Imaginate...

Cuando seamos abuelas
Juntas
Tú y yo
Las dos vamos a saber
Cómo es tener hijos
Chiquitos... adultos...
Pero tú
Todavía no sabrás cómo es
Tener hijos abuelos - ¡Ja!
Sólo yo
Cuando seamos abuelas juntas
Pero

Un día...
De una manera, de un lugar
Sí sabrás
Mi niña

¿Lo puedes creer?

but mostly it’s just a girl and her cat

by no name slob

“I’m not Holly, I’m not Lulu Mae either, I don’t know who I am. I’m like cat here, we’re a couple of no-name slobs. We belong to nobody and nobody belongs to us. We don’t even belong to each other.” ~ Holly Golightly (Breakfast at Tiffany’s16)

I’ve always related to Holly. I ran away from a past I didn’t want to define me. I chose a new name and started a new life in the big city. I spent a lot of my twenties not believing in love, or at least thinking it just wasn’t in the cards for me if it did exist. I would run away from people when things got too real, thinking I was protecting myself. I would even run away from myself, “starting over” multiple times, disowning my own past in hopes of starting with a clean slate.

I still don’t truly feel like I belong to anyone… there are people who would claim me, but I’d rather they didn’t.

In addition to the obvious and extremely harmful racism included in the movie… I’ve never liked the ending. Holly ending up in a romantic relationship with Paul just never felt right to me. It felt Hollywood shoving in a happy romantic ending where there shouldn’t be one. And I looked up the ending in the book once and I was right. I wish I could say I liked the book ending better but it went too far in the other direction. Not only does Holly not end up with Paul (who in the book is insinuated that he is gay) she also, and most devastatingly, never finds cat.

My perfect ending is Holly finding cat, realizing that they belong together, and that they are all each other need. Paul can be there too I guess, as a friend. How powerful of a message would that be? That sometimes family is messy girl, her cat… and her gay best friend is there (but mostly it’s just a girl and her cat)?

I’ve never felt connected to the idea of ancestry, or the idea of a lineage. Probably because I don’t feel that connected to my immediate family, and even less so to my extended family. The idea of knowing where I came from just doesn’t feel that important to me. I also happen to be the last of my family name… my father was the youngest, the only boy, with three older sisters. I am the youngest, with two older sisters. My sisters are twenty years older than me, so my parents had me very late… maybe it was an accident but I also think it’s very possible they were hoping for a son… to carry on the family name and take over the family farm. The monkey’s paw of it all is that they got me… a genderfukt queer who moved to the big city. I loathe the idea of having children so the name will die with me.

I am stuck here in this moment of being alive, not claiming my past and with no future linage to pass on. It is just me and my cat… who has a name, Tiff. Maybe once we were both no name slobs, who didn’t belong to anyone, but now we belong to each other. My cat is actually who taught me about unconditional love, I know it exists now because I unconditionally love her. I accept that maybe she doesn’t love me, at least in the same way I love her - but she still relies on me, and comes to cuddle when she is looking for warmth. And that is close enough. Sometimes a family is a human and a cat.

Where do angels live?

by aire

If we inhabit
Matter, what inhabits space?
Where do angels live?

(Closer than your life vein)

What if afterlife’s
here now? Was here al-
ways - in the s p a c e s

(Closer than your life vein)

When mama passes
On, you keep her in your heart
Does she dwell between the cells?

(Closer than your life vein)

B r e a t h
D e a t h
B r e a t h
D e a t h

Energy’s never
created, nor is destroyed
Dust to dust, breath to

Breath. Teach’ said theres more
s p a c e in this table than table.
Whole lot of room for . . .

Come! Ear to table . . .
Hear! . . .

. . . s’that the melody

of

. . . a thousand angels breathing?

Bad Ancestors

by Joel Davis17

CW: racial violence and racism

I once got into a fight with a woman about who was more Southern. Not a physical fight, just a little small-town newspaper fight. I had suggested to her, quite cattily it must be said, that perhaps a woman from a border state (this was Maryland. Southern Maryland, but still) was not best qualified to pronounce on what is or isn’t Southern. She fired back quite angrily, and suggested that I was a “carpetbagger” and that she suspected me of being from New York. I said, in that rueful kind of triumphant tone you get when you are thoroughly destroying an unpleasant person, but must retain the veneer of professionalism, “Two of my grandparents are from Georgia, one is from South Carolina, and one is from Tennessee.” She muttered something about Tennessee not being the really Deep South (from a woman from Maryland! Bless her heart.), but rapidly conceded the field.

Which is all a rambling and discursive and allusive way of saying I have bad ancestors. Not just white people from the South, but:

• I had some relatives that I know affirmatively fought in the Civil War on the wrong side. Their letters from the front were generally chatty and mostly about standard soldier stuff (mud, no coffee, no tobacco, dysentery). I do not recall any discussion of why they were fighting (except that everyone was), and certainly not the moral implications of being involved in a war to preserve slavery.

• My father’s family in Georgia were enslavers.

• My father’s father worked for the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the ‘50s. His boss was Roy Cohn.

• My cousin’s nanny from when he was growing up was invited to the wedding of one of his children, but was asked to supervise the children anyone brought as they all were excluded from the actual ceremony

• Going even further back, my ancestors were also more than likely involved in the purging of the Borders of Scotland of Presbyterian horse and cattle raiders. These folks had made a living as herdsmen and farmers, supplementing their incomes by raiding the folks over the next hill, often in the next country over, and stealing their livestock. With the joining of England and Scotland into the United Kingdom in 1707, James I moved quickly to unify the new kingdom. The longtime cross-border raids were no longer cross-border, and were not tolerated. Add in the ongoing shifty fight in Britain over Protestantism, and the John Knox Presbyterian churches of the border folk were also no longer welcome. Many moved to Northern Ireland, but continued persecution and harassment saw many move to the Colonies, where they joined many of their friends and relations who had been sent directly to work in the indigo and rice fields of the coastal South.18

There was little discussion of these issues really. They dribbed and drabbed out over the years. When my cousin published an edited version of those Civil War letters a few years back, there was a little more discussion: “It was the times. We can’t blame people for living when they did.” Others tried to parse the awful: “Maybe some of your relatives were not slaveowners. Your Confederate ancestors didn’t necessarily all support slavery. ”

Well, they weren’t abolitionists either. They lived in a morally reprehensible system that they did nothing positive to change (as far as I know. Ancestor spirit with a conscience, please forgive me if I have maligned you).

What does that have to do with me? You hear that a lot from folks with, for example, Polish or Italian surnames. “My people weren’t even here when slavery was around!”19 I’m happy for them, because I do carry that legacy, and it does have something to do with me.

Both of my grandfathers were emotionally abusive to their children, belittling, emotionally absent, always pushing for more achievement that was never enough. I feel their drive in me now, an unrelenting feeling of being inadequate, of being lazy, of being wanting.

I don’t want to make too much of this, and I’m not turning bad people into victims; everyone is responsible for their moral choices. But people who were driven from their ancestral lands to another colony (Ireland) at least partly as a result of religious persecution, and were forcibly removed again to yet another colony in what was literally a New (to them) World for a period of forced labor carry some trauma with them, across the ocean and down the ages.

Of course, the people they in turn inflicted themselves on were also driven from their ancestral lands and taken to a colony—and enslaved for centuries.

This is the hardest part of the historical legacy for me. People who were facing similar wrenching experiences of removal, colonisation, and disconnect did not make common cause and revolt against the evil economic system and its actors, but the side that was only forced to work for seven years (or not; some were just turned loose) immediately became enslavers, or the dogs of enslavers.

I thought about this during a season of my life when I was having a renewal of faith and was thinking a lot about responsibility and atonement, tradition and legacy and sin. I had become involved with a local farm raising food for a food bank. The graves of 20 or so enslaved people had been discovered on the property, and I stood on one side of the graveyard as an archaeologist explained where the graves were located and what they knew about the folks who had been buried there. She pointed to one grave a few inches in front of my feet and said that two infants had been buried there. The only reason they knew they were infants was from the pattern of nails in the ground suggesting two tiny coffins with, presumably, two tiny babies inside. Two human beings had completely disappeared except for a handful of nails.

That hit me hard at the time, and still carries a lot of meaning and resonance. I pray for those two children frequently. While I can’t do anything about the conditions of their deaths, or their erasure from the world, a very wise priest once told me that I could love them, and

that she thought, she believed, she hoped that they would know that I did. That love was one of the things that sustained me and fired my zeal when I thought I was called by God to be a priest. It turns out I was just a holier-than-thou alcoholic, but I still love God and I love those babies.

But. It was my people that did that. Not my actual relatives; they weren’t in the region when the infants died (possibly between 1800 and 1820). But, persecuted religious and ethnic minorities torn from their homes who became white colonizers, enslavers, abusers? Yep.

It’s shameful, the great crime of our rotten republic.

And I am still ashamed of those crimes.

I have suffered, though, from the moral quandary of being implicated by my ancestors in a grave crime. It is very hard for me to look at that, and how I have directly benefitted from that, and think that I don’t have an obligation to, if not right the wrong, at least name and confront a great evil. I have tried to address racism where I see it, in my life and my long career in newspapers; I have also been blind to racism that was in plain sight, and have not always been effective in how I have chosen to act. My actions, the actions of any individual, are not going to solve or expiate or atone for the legacy of slavery and our current national permission for racism. But to not act is also wrong, and that’s where this starts hitting closer to home, where the historical bleeds into the familial. Because I knew people, I loved people, who were born in Jim Crow, and grew up in an atmosphere of the grand “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, but who, apparently, did nothing to oppose that system.

My grandparents’ generation was born around 1900, two generations from the Civil War. I doubt they would have been bothered that their own grandparents had fought for the Confederacy.

Their generation is the one featured in those lynching postcards, and I can see them in the young professionals and local landowners posing along with the Klansmen who actually did the dirty work.

Did they do anything positive in those evil — well, more evil — times? Not that they ever said to me.

And my grandparents as individuals? Both men were hard drinkers, harsh taskmasters to their children, controlling, bitter. One grandmother was also an alcoholic. Did that have something to do with their inherited trauma? I don’t see how it couldn’t. Does that excuse their abuse? No, of course not.

Marta and I took a lovely swing through the coastal South this spring, and had a good time, except there were housing developments and lots of other stuff with “plantation” in the name. Like, as a selling point. It was nauseating. All the trauma in the world doesn’t excuse slavery either, because nothing can.

So how do I revere or venerate these people? Well, the grandmother who wasn’t an alcoholic (she did drink a fair amount) was the first woman hired as an attorney in the IRS, before WWII and everything. She apparently was a brilliant lawyer, and essentially clerked for her father, who was a federal judge, for many years before joining the bar.

As an alcoholic myself, I can appreciate what addiction does to a person. My alcoholic grandmother quit drinking very late in life and apparently was a nice person after that. And her husband was an alcoholic and drug addict, which, God help me, I know all too well can be traumatic and have a lot of bad consequences to a family.

I give some grace in other words. My parents did their best, I think, to be better parents than their parents were, and though they weren’t Ma and Pa from Little House on the Prairie, they easily cleared that bar and by a long way. I think I did too.

I guess spiritually, these things roll down the ages. Jesus said a lot about slaves, but didn’t condemn slavery as such, but I still think the Gospels (well, three out of four, plus a couple of “Gnostic” texts) suggest a spiritual path to an ethical life for individuals, and an ethical path for individuals in government and other sinful systems. I find it a very disturbing goad to action that my fairly close relatives were actively involved in perpetuating instead of fighting slavery, and at least passively accepted the segregated South after slavery was abolished.

Some other people make the argument that they aren’t implicated in the past and I buy that. I concede that I have no more ethical duty to fight against racism, the legacy of enslavement, than I do to fight against any other morally wrong system that has enriched me at the expense of others. Here, the list is long: capitalism, industrial food production, cheap fossil fuels, the Doctrine of Discovery, mass media consolidation, Protestantism, the doctrine of Original Sin, racism, misogyny, Euclidean zoning.20 Have I struck a blow against each of these? No. But, like Grandma Davis (nee Bailey), I did what I could when I could. She was a feminist in a time and a place where that cost her some things, and I admire that.

I believe that Love is a real thing, and I believe that the universe wants us to love what’s in front of us. I wish I could remonstrate with those bad ancestors about their moral complicity in evil.21 The choices they made seem incomprehensibly bad to me, inexcusable. But, I also think, I believe, I hope, that they loved their children; shared joy with other people; had good pets that they cared for; thought sometimes in the dead of night under a drizzly sky outside Chattanooga about if what they were doing was right.

One of the hardest things for me about recovery has been understanding that I’m grieving and then figuring out the appropriate way to address that. I think what I feel for them, about them, is mourning. I mourn for them, for the awful things in their heads from what happened to them, for the awful things in their heads from what they did to other people, for the terrible feeling of betrayal they might have felt as the CSA, their government, was defeated and its enemies came to their towns; for them knowing that, despite what they had been told by that government that God was not on their side, and did not ensure their righteous victory

My feelings about my ancestors, the ones I knew and the ones I didn’t, are affected by the history of evil in my ancestral homelands that they participated in, apparently willingly. I try to give them as much grace as I can all the same. I can be bitter and resentful about the past, hate my ancestors, make it my last life’s work to point out their sins, but it won’t change what they did to helpless people. I choose to put that anger into engagement with the lingering effects of their terrible choices. And, I still think about what my pastor said, and I think, I believe, I hope that my love in the present might just have some positive effect on the past.

Forgotten Rooms

by anonymous ghost

Forgotten rooms

Long hallway

Empty arena

Ice box

Yesterday is today

I can’t remember

Haunting

Ghosts of another realm

Another life

Another me

Every past is me

Every me is past

I am only what has come before

But before I can remember there was

Something else

There in the shadows

It is a part of me too

Something about it

Lives in my memory

Tainting the edges

Doors and hallways

To rooms I grew up with but have

Never been inside

To know darkness is a country night

Burnt out lantern

I always wondered how it

Worked, until it didn’t

A dream22 family

by Céol23

CW: this piece, and especially the footnotes, refer to many difficult topics, including child abuse and neglect; also note that the footnotes are easier to navigate from a laptop / computer than from the app

I was born of two parents.24 One, a musician, who had fun, quizzed us songs,25 taught us music.26 He was calm,27 listened to us and knew us;28 would play with us in the evenings29 and gift us the best books.30

Sometimes we would go to parties, meet his music friends -- they had kids our age, and such a big garden. This parent did have a main job, a helpful one too, that he very much enjoyed.31 He came back happy32 every evening to spend some time33 with us, and we were always happy to go together on holidays34 --he knew so many stories, so many games.35 He would read the best psychologists36 on how to raise kids, and then common decisions37 would be made on how to best raise us, so we could become healthy, resourceful adults.

The other parent was a Montessori38 teacher well versed in respectful education,39 practiced sports,40 and enjoyed a peaceful routine41 full of creativity.42 We were often consulted on our likes and dislikes,43 and our limits.44 She kept us safe.45 We had a lot of fun46 on holidays together. Every winter holidays, we would get to sing carols47 together. I loved singing by the piano!48

My first granddad was very kind,49 fought in the resistance,50 worked as a craftman, and was a loving husband and father.51 My first grandmother was kind52 and loving.53 She came as an immigrant in love with our country.54 She was passionate about crosswords.55 She told us all about her native land;56 taught us recipes,57 taught us her native language.58 She enjoyed gardening and making jam and giving us candies. She was generous with all her family.59 She was very pious and shared her love of God with me.6061

My second pair of grandparents were close to each other – the perfect couple.62 They played crosswords together, and each had their kind of puzzle they liked. They raised their kids together, with their community, while both enjoying their passion jobs.63 They liked traveling a lot, and used to do sports competition together – you should have seen their trophies. They were always active. They were kind with us, and always smiling.64 We played games and listened to music together,65 and sing.66

Hearth Threads

by Marta Rose67

1. Knit One, Purl One

In a past life, my BD (before divorce) life, I belonged to a very progressive congregation of the United Church of Christ, my ex-wife’s life-long denomination. I had not been brought up in any religious tradition, though my ancestors were Episcopalian (dad’s side) and Lutheran (mom’s side), and we celebrated Christmas and Easter in entirely secular ways. But there came a time after my daughter was born when it became clear that our lives as a family were going to continue to be very much tied up with this particular church, and it seemed that this denomination and congregation were expansive enough to embrace my own very vague spiritual yearnings, and so I decided to join. This involved getting baptized, as I had not been baptized as an infant. Baptism felt like the biggest stumbling block to officially becoming a member, but finally it was time, as a friend eloquently expressed, “to shit or get off the pot.” Baptism felt like a stumbling block because it required me to say I believed some things I didn’t really believe. Quite a lot of things, actually. Similarly, as a congregation, we regularly recited various statements of faith—most often the UCC statement of faith, but also sometimes the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed. Belief wasn’t really my entry point to faith—I felt like I had an experience of faith that co-existed perfectly well with my disbelief, In this progressive congregation, my disbelief was not a barrier to belonging, and belonging was something I very much yearned for.

I could have just refrained from saying the words when the congregation recited the various statements of faith, or I could have edited them to include only the statements that I truly did believe, but it meant something to me to belong in the saying of them—not just to this particular congregation, but to the long line of ancestors-in-faith who had performed this ritual for thousands of years. That feeling of connection to something ancient was powerful and important to me.

My ex got that congregation in the divorce, and while I tried, valiantly, to find a new church home—going so far as enrolling in seminary and getting close to a masters in the history of Christianity—but the more I learned about the church, the less able I was to say the things I didn’t believe. I think I went from passively not believing to actively disbelieving.

Still, my yearning to belong to something ancient and ancestral remained. Recently I have begun to realize that my new obsession with fiber arts may be filling that void. I have recently seen claims that string is one of the earliest human technologies, along with the sewing needle—both required not only to create clothing to withstand ice ages, but also to tie things up to create tools, shelter, and to drag things long distances.68 These technologies, the argument goes, are perhaps as or even more foundational than fire in the emergence of homo sapiens. Certainly spinning, weaving, knitting, and sewing are ancient, and largely female, crafts, even if there is little archeological evidence remaining of them, what with traditional fabrics decomposing back into the land that produced them (unlike the plastic most of our clothing is made of today).

In Unravelling: What I Learned about Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater, Peggy Orenstein interviews many knitters, and the answer to the question “how did you learn to knit?” was so consistently “I learned from my mother” that Orenstein reduces the response in her notes to LFHM for “learned from her mother.” I technically learned from my mother, though she wasn’t really a knitter. I have no idea how she learned to cast on, knit and purl, but I do have some vague memories of knitting a very wobbly scarf as a teen at the kitchen table. Maybe she learned from her mom? I never met my maternal grandmother, and though I am named for her, I don’t know that much about her apart from a few grand narratives. Whether she was an accomplished knitter I’ll probably never know.

On my father’s side there was a clear lineage of knitting—my grandmother (whose name is my middle name, Eileen) was an accomplished knitter, and according to my father, when the lights went out in their rural Michigan home, you could still hear the clack clack clack of my grandmother’s knitting needles. My father’s younger brother, my Uncle Robbie, was among the last cohorts of children to get polio before the vaccine was made widespread, and my grandmother taught him to knit as a sort of physical therapy. But I wasn’t close with that side of the family, and I never knit with my grandmother or my uncle.

I also somehow learned how to use a sewing machine, though again I don’t remember from whom, or on what machine. It would be a few more decades, as a new mom myself, that I would take up these fiber arts again and knit a few sweaters for my family and sew my kid’s halloween costumes. But I am a very visual learner, and because I didn’t have any knitting or sewing elders, it was nearly impossible for me to translate 2D instructions from patterns and books, or to learn how to fix simple mistakes like dropped stitches. I mostly started things and then abandoned them in frustration.

Now, though, with the advent of YouTube, and the resurgence of interest in fiber arts, I suddenly have a wide world of fellow sewists and fiber artists to take me step by step through a pattern, show me in slow motion how to do obscure stitches for increasing, decreasing, and decorating my knitting. Maybe now that I’m an elder myself, I also have more patience and perspective. But suddenly I feel not only the magic of making—sewing a pair of pants that really fits me, or knitting a sock (I can make a sock! With a heel and a toe and everything!), but also the connection to ancient skills and traditions that I have so longed for.

Knitting and sewing are my new Apostles Creed. They are a lineage that connects me to my ancestors in a very concrete and practical way.

2. People of the Forest

I’m not a big fan of algorithms, but I am grateful that the YouTube algorithm put some video of an Orangutan mother nursing her baby in my feed. I am a sucker for a nursing baby. So much so that even though I was never able to carry a pregnancy to term (I had two miscarriages and then was diagnosed with infertility), I was able to successfully induce lactation and nurse my adopted son. It was an incredibly healing relationship for both of us. So when this nursing orangutan pair appeared on my feed, I went down a rabbit hole, and suddenly orangutans became my newest special interest. I am now convinced I was an orangutan in another life: female orangutans are mostly solitary, aside from carrying their children everywhere (check), nursing them for a long time (check), and even adopting the children of other mothers who are unable to care for them (check). Also, they spend 80% of their time in the tree canopy (goals).

Orangutans (“people of the forest” in the Maylay language) are critically endangered, and live only in Sumatra and Borneo, in Indonesia and Malaysia, where they are facing extinction due to habitat destruction (especially from palm oil plantations) and hunting and poaching for bushmeat (which feels a lot like cannibalism to me; we share almost 98% of DNA) and the illegal pet trade. According to the late Dr. Biruté Galdikas (one of the so-called “trimates” along with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey) orangutans are closer to our ancestors than we are.69 Revering and protecting them should be part of how we think about ancestry.

My mother lived in Sumatra as a child, having moved there from Holland when her Dutch father summoned her Swedish mother (my namesake) to join him in Indonesia after the Second World War. Indonesia had been a Dutch colony, and my grandfather served as a cook on a merchant marine vessel traveling there when the war broke out. His ship was captured by the Japanese, who then occupied Indonesia, and he spent the war there in a prisoner of war camp.70

After the war, rather than returning to Europe, he sent word to my grandmother (who had not known if he was still alive throughout the war) to bring their three children and join him in Indonesia, where he had found work in the hospitality industry. And she did. Got on a ship with three kids and set sail around the world. They lived in both Java and Sumatra, and I wonder if she ever saw a wild orangutan. My mother died when I was twenty-four, and the entire rest of her family who lived there with her have also passed, so I doubt I will ever know. Just like I will likely never know how my mother learned to knit. But I like to think that if she did see orangutans, like me, she would have felt an affinity for them.

3. A castle of one’s own

When my children were three and nine, my then inlaws took us all on a trip to Europe. My father in law’s ancestors were Swiss, and he was on a pilgrimage through the mountains to visit the places his family was from. The mountains of Switzerland are, without question, beautiful and awe-inspiring, but I always end up feeling a little claustrophobic in the mountains. I was raised in the countryside of Indiana, and I love a big sky and a visible horizon. The next stage of our trip was a visit to my ancestral homeland of the Netherlands. I still have family in Amsterdam, whom we visited, and then we went to one of the Dutch North Sea Islands, where my family originated. The island was entirely flat, with more sheep than people, and beautiful beaches all around. I took a deep breath when we arrived and immediately felt at home. My father in law, though, was confused: “There’s nothing to see. What’s the point?”

I started to wonder then if it was possible to carry a landscape in one’s DNA. The affinity I feel for cold seas and pine forests, when, for example, I stand on the shores of Lake Superior; the longing I feel for places I’ve never even visited, like the Scottish highlands; the deep knowing that I was meant to live by the sea—could all of this be some mystical connection I carry in my blood to the places around the North Sea that my people come from?

I kind of love this idea. But it also troubles me. As an adoptive mother—neither of my children are biologically mine—focusing on the connections of “blood” has always felt … kind of creepy? When I told my son that there is an ancestral Rose family castle71 in Scotland that was continuously inhabited by a Rose from the 15th century up until the 1980’s, but which is no longer owned by anyone in the Rose family, he responded, “We have to go and buy it back! It’s ours!”

It is certainly possible that my son, who is African American, has some Scottish heritage, but that blood doesn’t flow through the Rose family. Do my children, who do not share my DNA, still share my ancestry? Do I share theirs? How will the lineage that flows through our family be traced? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they intrigue me.

4. Seed Stitch/Moss Stitch

When we discussed this topic of ancestors and lineage in Peer Support one week in Divergent Design Studios, my dear friend and Peer Support co-host Adina Docter shared the Sweet Honey in the Rock song “Breaths.”

Maybe the borders and cultures humanity puts so much stock in are not the most significant ways we can or should trace our ancestry. Maybe there are mystical connections we can never truly understand. Maybe our ancestors include landscapes as much as people. I know many would poo-poo such claims as so much woo-woo drivel. But maybe what can be understood—what our enlightenment, secular minds can believe—is less important than what we experience and know on some visceral level. This was certainly my approach to faith when I belonged to that UCC congregation—belief was never my entry point (I tried very hard to believe in any of it, but if I’m honest, I never really succeeded)—but rather my experience of the divine was what brought me to faith.

And my experience of my ancesstors is both ancient and quotidian. It draws me to ancient landscapes thousands of miles away that I have never actually visited, but it also happens in a Signal chat, as Adina and I share stories of our shared lineage as feminists who came of age in the 1980’s listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock. That some of the young lesbians and queer folk in that chat had never heard of Sweet Honey startled me, as did their gratitude for our sharing this “history” with them—what history? This is just my life! I was also startled when my friend Jesse referred to me, with gratitude, as a “queer elder”—but the truth is, I love being the age I am, I love being an elder, and I love passing on this lineage to my non-biological kin through intergenerational friendships.

More and more, I like to think of lineage as a sort of garden—nurturing the seeds that have been planted for us even as we plant new seeds that will only come to fruition long after we are gone. Planting gardens in the rubble, I like to say. Because the flip side of all of this ancestor reverence are the lineages we would rather not claim, the ancestors we would like to prune from our family trees. Leave the orangutans and the spinsters, please, but can we take a chainsaw to the Scottish settler-colonialists who participated in the genocide of Native Americans, as well the Dutch and Swedish traders in enslaved people? Like so many of us who live with privilege that flows from these atrocities, I am not sure what to do living in the midst of the ruin of what my ancestors have wrought. Other than to plant seeds—new seeds, better seeds, and trust my descendants to nurture them into the forests orangutans need to survive, the arts and crafts that bring beauty and magic and agency back into our lives, the divergently designed homes which actually fit our lives better than any castle.

Knit one purl one creates a fabric sometimes called seed stitch, sometimes called moss stitch. Planting seeds in the rubble, moss growing on the ruins: I like to think that this is the work of being a good ancestor to succeeding generations of humans and more than humans alike.

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Aileen (she/her) is an AuDHD multi-passionate artist, writer and book collector. She loves mixed media and accumulating more art supplies than she can ever possibly use. She has a tiny museum of unfinished craft projects and lives by the sea in Scotland.

Instagram: @aileenpatersonart Website: theautisticlibrary.com

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Mylo K. Oliver (they/them) is an eclectic artist and vocational human being. They are a tender-hearted and tender-bodied white fatty, and a strong-willed gender non-compliant trans queer. They’re autistic, chronically ill, and an all-round disabled cringy weirdo. They love a crisp caesar salad, watching drama mystery shows, and being overwhelmed with cuteness aggression at the little furry creature that lives in their home.

Read more from Mylo at https://substack.com/@mylokoliver.

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Alice Wong is a dear disabled ancestor. Learn more about her life and work here:

postcards from the end of the world

Alice Wong was Crips for eSims for Gaza, and Everything to Us

Alice Wong was Crips for eSims for Gaza, and Everything to Us…

Read more

9 months ago · 290 likes · 19 comments · Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha

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Le*ah writes from a practice of attentive, non-extractive listening. Their work explores chaos, embodiment, and neurodivergent experience beyond capture, clarity, or completion.

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Nada is a neuroqueer multi-disciplinary artist on a spirally journey of unmasking and redefining her relationship to art, who’s work evolves and shape-shifts as she does.

A fluid force with too many passions, Nada has a background in visual arts and film, a current focus in ceramics, and a life-long infatuation with photography, documentation, and storytelling.

Going by “Planet Nada”, she has a profound love for being alive and its infinite glimmers, a witchy kinship with the Earth and its creatures, and a rich inner world that translates outwardly in expressions of maximalism, whimsy, silliness, softness, and loads of colour.

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Lizzy seems to be always re-evaluating, re-discovering and iterating new (and old) layers of themself. Words and concepts that currently describe Lizzy are: midwest Hoosier, friend, sibling-child, poet heart & wor(l)d weaver, neuroqueering interstitionary chronically in cahoots with narcolepsy, archiver of mundane magic & mess, a recreational therapist Recreating REMs and remembering alive-ness in a human form

liminallizzy.com

substack.com/@liminallizzy

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Joel recently retired after a 45-year career in journalism. Unhitched from capitalism and the expectations of sinful systems, Joel is now concentrating on new ways of seeing, on writing entirely frivolous fiction, healing, resting, loafing.

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Marta is a writer, artist, teacher, community organizer, and editor of this issue of The Spiral Lab Magazine. Mostly she just wants to knit and sew these days.

This is the second in a four-part issue on the theme of Manifesto. The first issue in this series includes a number of manifestos in various genres, including poetry, essays, a zine, and speculative fiction, all by members of The Spiral Lab Collective.

Below, TSL Collective member Meg Max shares an invitation for you to delve into the writing invitation that we used to get us started on our own manifestos, as well as an invitation to a free workshop run by Meg and Leif and Marta on Saturday 18 April at 1:00 pm EDT. You can register for the workshop here. After the workshop, we will publish the fourth in our Manifesto series, featuring any work you would like to submit, from the workshop or your own journaling practice.

Dear readers,

As a galaxy brained person, I have a hard time whittling things down. I love the clarity of a definition, especially with big and complex themes like Manifesto. When I looked it up, the online etymology dictionary stated that (among other things) manifesto is also used as a noun, “obvious facts, palpable things.”

Of course, I can’t help but think that what seems obvious to me will inevitably be completely different from what’s obvious to someone else. And of course, what’s worth saying changes depending on where we are, who we are with, what we’re trying to do.

Below we’re sharing prompts that invite you to explore “manifesto” in a variety of ways. Use them as starting points, invitations, interrogations. There is no way to do this wrong.

These prompts were the original inspiration for this issue, after Spiral Lab Member Aileen attended a workshop with the poet Linda France, who shared these manifesto prompts (which we are using here with permission and deep gratitude!).

We offer these as starting points. You don’t have to explore every single one of these, you can do them in whatever order pleases you, and you can take your time.

I can’t help but think that the obviousness is itself what makes a manifesto worth making. It invites us to excavate the things that feel so simple we don’t bother to say them aloud.

So, I’ll finish with the thing that lives so deeply in the marrow of my bones that I sometimes forget it’s worth saying: Being together is an act of making. You don’t need to pick up a pencil. You don’t need to write or draw or paint. All you need to do is show up, and you’ve created community.

How incredible is that?

On Saturday 18 April at 1:00 pm EDT, we’re offering a gently facilitated Manifesto Zine making workshop. Hosted by myself, Leif and Marta, we’ll use the prompts below, alongside creative care invitations, to create a zine filled with your own statement of what matters. The making we will do is grounded in Creative Care, and focuses on expression as connection and exploration. You don’t need any experience to join us. Although you’re welcome to arrive with any art-making supplies you have lying around, all you need to enjoy our time together is a pen and some paper.

You can register here. There is no fee to participate.

We hope to see you there.

Meg

Journaling Prompts from poet Linda France:

What sets you alive? What really matters to you?

Don’t leave any part of yourself out - even the parts that are sometimes unwelcome. What would you put in your personal manifesto? You can include simple things, it doesn’t have to be dramatic. You can start lines with

To..., I will..., I choose..., I stand for..., Remember... (or something else)

“Do what you can with what you have. Nothing more is needed.” - Rick Ruben

You could create a poem or something else.

It’s a space for what we know is worth walking towards.

Manifesto means ‘making real, making happen’.

We have to act to make changes, not just have ideas.

If you like, you can start by taking a sheet of paper and putting a heart at the centre of it, then around the heart list all the things that are important to you.

Welcome to the second issue of The Spiral Lab Magazine! This issue’s theme is Manifesto, inspired by a manifesto shared by TSL Collective member Aileen.1 She originally wrote her piece at a Buddhist retreat from a prompt offered by the poet Linda France, a prompt which Aileen shared with the rest of the collective. One of the questions in the original prompt was “What is worth walking toward?” which feels to me (Marta2, editor of this issue) like one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves these days. As a collective, we came together for a workshop of manifesto-making, and the results are delightfully wide-ranging:

Manifesto, by Aileen (the original inspiration for this issue)

Sick Manifesto: a scavenged collection of words I speak to my sick body, a zine by Mylo3

Manifesto of a burnt-out AuDHDer in a burning world, a poem by Poornima4

I want to live, a poem by Le*ah5

Manifesto? a meditation on the OCD brain as a living manifesto, by Céol6

a manifesto on free will and surrender colorfully handwritten by a. wunder7

We Were Never Singular, speculative fiction by Le*ah.

I (Marta) was not able to finish my own manifesto, partly because I have spent the past month and a half wrangling with the Department of Human Services over our health insurance benefits (read: lots of bureaucracy, quite a bit of anxiety, all my bandwidth), and also because the more I explored my topic, the more complicated it came to feel … and I missed my own deadline! But that’s how we roll here at the Spiral Lab Collective—we work in crip time/spiral time, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Which, appropriately, is the topic of my manifesto, a zine about enoughness. I still plan to finish it. In fact, I would like to invite you to participate—in my manifesto-in-progress on the topic of enoughness, or in your own manifesto on any topic you like! Next week, we will offer some journaling/art invitations, and in the coming weeks, once again we will offer a free workshop where you can begin to create your own manifestos, which we would love to share (with your permission) in the final “readers respond” post in this issue cycle.

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Manifesto

by Aileen

To resist all attempts at assimilation, conformity, being squashed into too small a box, the devastation of capitalism, insane justifications and downright lies.

To resist the desire to be liked, admired, looked up to and the accumulation of more things than I need in order to blank out things I don’t want to think about - the injustices, the corruption, the abuse, remembering what I know and what my body knows, that there are things worth fighting for, that truth matters, that what I do affects others, that I can make a difference.

Remembering that community matters, that words matter, that silence matters. The space between things, pausing for breath, for healing, for creating connections. For time to sit in the garden, by the overgrown pond or in the orchard where the apples are now ripening, reminding me that everything happens in its own time and sometimes all we can do is plant seeds and wait for them to grow. To make time to notice the golden sunlight filtering through the trees, the song of the robin, the patchy blue sky.

To make time for stillness, for being with my breath, with metta, for the feel of bare feet on cool wet grass. Earthing myself, not losing myself, gaining strength from connection, not being alone because everything is connected to everything else.

Remembering to write, to pay attention. Not being too much in my own head or caught up in a story. There is only this moment, then the next, my breath, my pen, my heart, my voice. Remembering to stay connected to life and to what matters most.

Sick Manifesto Zine

by Mylo

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Manifesto of a burnt-out AuDHDer in a burning world

by Poornima

Someday I want to be able enough
To go to protests and public hearings,
To volunteer regularly for causes I believe in.

But until the time I gain that capacity,
I will resist the system in quiet ways
I will center my needs over patriarchal and capitalistic demands
But when masking is a necessity,
I will hold on to the memory of my real self
I will lean on my communities to help me remember.

I will rest and recover
I will rediscover my lost joy
I will remain curious and ask questions
I will show my passion without shame
I will love my special interests,
Even when no one else does.

I will balance my need for safety and rest
With my need for action and expression
I will flaunt my wild hair, curly and grey
In the face of racist and misogynistic taunts
I will speak up whenever I can
And when I can’t,
I will amplify the voices of those who do.

I will stay with my anger to protect
To fight against oppression
I will stay with my grief from witnessing,
So that I have the strength to hold on to my anger.

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I want to live

by Le*ah

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Manifesto?

by Céol

(Detailed enough OCD thought process after the list -- please take care of yourself ♥)

Upon learning that the next topic would be manifestos, and that we were invited to write our own manifesto, I got confused. Why? No clue yet. I knew what a manifesto was, and still looked up some examples. It did not help—after all, I do know what a manifesto is.

The problem was something else: I had too much to write about. I could write a manifesto book, full of manifestos. But where should I start? What should I include? And, more importantly, what should I not include, knowing (or at least strongly believing) that you, the reader, probably does not care for 150 pages of manifestos.

I was raised in France, and while French has a direct translation for manifesto, the verb manifester (read mah-knee-fest-EY) also means to demonstrate, to protest. Also, French has a culture of manifester and striking. My first manifestation could have been first year of high school. It was not, because I was a well-behaved, far too obedient autistic kid who did not believe they had the right to miss school, and also did not have any kind of access to the news. It was, however, the first time I saw manifestants (protestors) come back from a manifestation. I was 14, and I saw my classmates come back with red, swollen eyes. Tear gas.

In college, I got the chance to manifester on a couple of occasions. One was happy and went rather well (we agreed with the government, might have helped.) One felt serious, the first time I felt like I was openly manifesting for my rights. Went well, until we got to a big square and a friend got news that the police were coming to nasser (nah-SAY, a nasse is a fish trap) us, which means there were coming from every street at once to trap us and scare us and pepper spray us and maybe worse. Our group divided in half, I was in the half that went home. A few protests later, the friend who had warned me about the nasse would be wounded by the police, and was still disabled the last time I saw them, some 8 months later. The last manifestation I took part in I was not able to do all the walking required, and needed help from 2 people in order to get back home. I no longer participate in manifestations, so that the two people can take part as long as they want, which is in turns more efficient in having more people protesting (not saying that disabled people should not be protesting, just that it is so much harder, requires me to rest for days or weeks, and that I find it more efficient to direct my energy elsewhere. That being said, if you’re not disabled and see disabled people at a protest, please consider the extra amount of energy they’re using, make the protest more accessible if you’re organising it, and be a decent, respectful person by not moving people like you would objects).

So I grew up surrounded by a culture of strikes and protests. And what is a protest, if not the gathering of people around a shared manifesto? Should I write all the manifestos of every protests I’ve ever been to? Plus manifestos about protests that should be happening, but are not? Plus manifestos about my own being?

You may be wondering what were those manifestation manifestos. What were those protests about? I can’t even remember. Probably minority rights, workers’ rights, maybe for the planet as well. I may have gone on strike too. More rights. No to fewer rights. Change. Respect.8

Can’t remember. It’s not that I did not care—I did, intensely. And so do I when I write a piece. So do I when I spend 2 hours explaining what being trans or disabled is not, and what rights we need. So do I when I spend 300 hours volunteering every year. So do I when I bring a cake for a fellow volunteer who’s on the verge of burning out. So do I when I take the time to question my potential prejudice, and gather the courage to question my friend’s (or doctors, or...) So do I when I try to take care of myself and others, when I try to not set productivist deadlines, when I try to understand where people are coming from. So do I when I lend a book. So do I when I spend 15 hours creating crosswords every month, because crosswords are made of fun definitions one doesn’t question while relaxing, even though definitions shape perception. So do I when I facilitate workshops about issues that are dear to me. So do I when I choose the topics for my creative writing workshops. So do I when I think.

So did I when I decided to stop buying plastic at all yesterday.
When I decided I would be making my own fermented vegetables, a year ago
When I decided to kind of stop buying plastic, 2 years ago
When I decided to try and stop judging myself for doing stuff that have a negative impact if the alternative is not living because of a lack of disabled-friendly alternatives.
When I decided to stop buying books mainly by white privileged men, just because it so happens all the most famous ones are written by white men, but to make the effort to dig deeper and learn about less famous, marginalised authors, whose voice deserves to be heard and is often more interesting. I now need a pretty good reason to buy books from white privileged men.
When I decided to subscribe to a small farmer, 3 years ago, and buy only local food.
When I decided to stop buying to billionaires and to only buy in small shops
When I decided to watch videos in 360px max (144 when there is no writing), because more feels like luxury and a waste of resources.
When I decided to boycott Amazon, 7 years ago. Which was also when I decided to buy presents either second hand or from artists / craftspeople or occasionally from NGOs.
When I decided to boycott Israel, 10 years ago (for context, there wasn’t huge lists like today, so I mainly boycotted hummus from Israel, which is honestly not as good as homemade hummus and frankly overpriced. It’s a bit harder now that people have made those huge lists available, still stuck on finding a feasible alternative for the one website i was still using)
When I decided to become vegan
To stop eating foie gras (age 16)
To stop eating anything that had palm oil in it (age 13) (Well must have known about some news, then)

This list I wrote from memory. So it’s probably the ones that took most effort, or that are still ongoing, coupled with the first ones. Some were probably easy enough that I don’t even notice anymore. Some would probably have deserved to make it to the list - well, they all should be there because I care about everything* - but we’re not writing 200 pages today, right? I say before editing the list to make it longer because this really deserves its spot - and this too, and - ok, I’ll stop.
* at least I try to, but it’s hard to be aware of every issue, but I do try to be aware of everything and read far too much depressing stuff for my nervous system to handle, as I do care about being aware, which still does not mean I can know everything there is to care about on Earth. Even though I try and - of course I’ll never know everything, time to stop, brain.

The thing is, I have OCD. And my brain judges me baaad whenever I become aware that I was doing something bad, and that, had I cared, or known, to look into it earlier, I would not have been complicit. My brain would judge me even worse were I not to do my utmost possible to stop said bad action immediately. That little piece of internal monologue, right before? that’s my brain judging me for not knowing very important stuff that I might be able to do a tiny little thing about, were I to know about it (deep breath out, deep breath in)

My brain races, spirals down, searches the internet for hours, even days on end. My brain wishes me dead when I realise I’ve failed. My brain would probably have me dead were I not to follow up on what I’ve found (Huge recent improvement, my brain is now able to recognise when I’ve genuinely tried my best, and when I’m in the midst of an ongoing process that cannot happen at once (but should still be actually ongoing, right?) and let it go accordingly) (if you don’t stop trying i’ll let it go).)

What is the problem, why does it matter, what can I stop doing, what can I do.

For I will not be complicit.

I cannot be complicit with the state of the world. With this level of systemic violence, in (almost?) every single existing system

I cannot face myself if I haven’t done every tiny thing my disabled body and brain can do to do their part.

I cannot bear the idea of leaving the Earth feeling guilt (I could honestly work on trying to feel proud rather than not guilty)

Before I started working on my OCD symptoms, I somehow had the belief that every person I had ever met, or crossed path with, would, after their death, scrutinize every single action, every single thought I’ve ever had and judge me on it (this may have started after my grandmother’s death, thinking she was watching over me?). I needed to be able to stand by any of my thoughts / actions.

This is not a moral prowess, it is a survival mechanism.

I’m not trying to be perfect to brag, I’m trying to be as little imperfect as possible so I can endure living with myself (endure be proud).

My OCD brain is a living manifesto, ready to protest anything unfair. I have to remind myself that rest is productive, aaaand productivity is a capitalist concept so fuck it, rest is not productive, rest is radical change. Rest is more time to not produce, to reflect, to process thoughts, to create art, to share, to share thoughts, knowledge, skills, fights, struggles. Or just to be bored. After all, boredom was an everyday companion until the advent of new technologies and constant entertainment for the sake of advertisement. So now I try to forget my phone (yeah, all that research I’m doing online, and all that following the news too. Hours every day) so I get to be bored again.

The good news is, there are probably just about as many ways to care as I have interests.9

(Do I know what a manifesto is?)

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a manifesto on free will and surrender

by a. wunder

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We Were Never Singular

by Le*ah

No one knows when the strike began. Some say it must have started in the gut. Others believe it began in the soil, with bacterial networks quietly slowing their work. Fermentation stalled. Immune systems hesitated. The invisible workers that held bodies and ecosystems together began to withdraw.

Humans called it a crisis, a disease. Something to be eradicated.

Only later did they realise it was a strike.

For millennia microbial workers had maintained the planetary infrastructure: digestion, immunity, decomposition, fermentation, mood regulation, atmospheric exchange, and the delicate chemistry of living together. Their labour was constant, subtle, and largely unnamed.

Archival note:

Several yogurt cultures reportedly joined the protests.

After extensive observation, the microbial unions reached a shared conclusion: there was simply too much noise.

Humans had filled their environments and bodies with signals, screens, chemicals, advertisements, constant acceleration, endless extraction. The subtle microbial conversations that once shaped instinct and gut intuition could no longer be heard.

When the microbes stopped whispering, humans lost their gut feeling.

For humans, decisions became strangely difficult. The world grew louder. Human language lost its nuance. Black and white replaced the colours of a more complex world.

And then the dreams began.

Night after night, across the planet, humans started dreaming of cities inside themselves. Lush gardens of bacteria. Fungal threads weaving through neurons. Swarms of microscopic presences arguing, laughing, collaborating.

In the dreams the microbes spoke. In patterns, pulses, unfamiliar rhythms of meaning.

Many human dreamers woke up remembering only fragments.

The first word that could be translated was a signal. It could be felt in the gut, at a bend inside the human duodenum:

tap–tap–tap-tip-tap

Its meaning arrived slowly, but with surprising clarity: “When food [is ready], wash your hands [first].” (Words in square brackets were added for human legibility.)

It was the simplest lesson. Food is collaboration. Bodies are ecosystems. Care for the worlds that feed you.

There was also a second, highly protective layer in that message: Microbes from different colonies don’t mix very well. Please don’t force us to fight our cousins.

Only later did the longer sentences begin.

One day (or was it a night?), the Microbial Council issued a statement.

Statement from the Microbial Council

For several hundred thousand years, the term ‘human’ has been used to describe a particular kind of planetary being. This designation grants symbolic representation to approximately thirty trillion human cells while omitting the hundreds of trillions of microbial citizens responsible for maintaining the collective body.

This oversight can no longer be maintained.

The word human has also accumulated other problems over the centuries. It has been used to define who belongs and who does not, to justify hierarchies, exclusions, and fantasies of singular individuality.

Meanwhile the biological reality has always been clear. What humans call a body is a multispecies collaboration. A walking ecosystem. A densely populated metropolis of cells, bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other small co-conspirators.

Human bodies were never singular.

For this reason, the Microbial Council proposes a linguistic experiment.

Rather than unilaterally renaming the collective body, we invite a collaborative process.

Open Call

Renaming the Multispecies Body

The Microbial Council for Multispecies Affairs invites proposals for new words describing the multispecies collaboration currently operating under the outdated label ‘human’.

We are looking for words that recognise that bodies are ecosystems, that life emerges through entanglement, that no being exists independently of others, that collaboration, disagreement, and co-evolution drive survival, that death and collapse are inevitable for the creation of new forms of life.

The following are early translations gathered from dream transmissions:

Tik-takkidy-tok
A cooperative assembly of organisms temporarily agreeing to move in the same direction.

Sympoiet
A being that makes itself together with others.

Ssss-ssss-s
A lifeform that cannot exist outside its relations.

Polypoeisis
A plural creature composed of many lives becoming together.

These examples are provisional and incomplete. We suspect many better words already exist in dreams, soil, kitchens, forests, microbial colonies, and collective imaginations.

Submissions may be delivered through dreams, fermentation, fungal networks, speculative writing, quiet listening, or the usual communication channels.

We remind applicants that we have been here the entire time.

We look forward to renaming ourselves together.

Signed,

The Microbial Council for Multispecies Affairs

Current membership: innumerable

And if you listen closely tonight,
you might hear it again in your dreams:
tap–tap–tap-tip-tap

Food is ready.
The future is collaborative.

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1

Aileen (she/her) is an AuDHD multi-passionate artist, writer and book collector. She loves mixed media and accumulating more art supplies than she can ever possibly use. She has a tiny museum of unfinished craft projects and lives by the sea in Scotland.
Instagram: @aileenpatersonart Website: theautisticlibrary.com.

2

Marta is a hermit who plays a writer, artist, teacher, and community organizer on the internet. In truth, she mostly sits on her couch and knits. She is also the editor of this issue of The Spiral Lab Magazine.

3

Mylo K. Oliver (they/them) is an eclectic artist and vocational human being. They are a tender-hearted and tender-bodied white fatty, and a strong-willed gender non-compliant trans queer. They’re autistic, chronically ill, and an all-round disabled cringy weirdo. They love a crisp caesar salad, watching drama mystery shows, and being overwhelmed with cuteness aggression at the little furry creature that lives in their home.

5

Le*ah writes from a practice of attentive, non-extractive listening. Their work explores chaos, embodiment, and neurodivergent experience beyond capture, clarity, or completion.

7

a. wunder asks, what is water? it’s a difficult question because water is impossible to describe. one might ask the same about birds. what are birds? we just don’t know!

linktr.ee/vielobst
IG: @uncannyvalleycat

Among our lightly held “goals” is to publish thematic issues, followed by a free workshop offering creative care invitations, followed by the publication of anything workshop participants would like to contribute. This issue of The Spiral Lab Magazine rounds out that cycle for our chaos-themed issue—until we spiral back around to chaos of course!

Below are a few images and thoughts from participants who came to the free workshop called Mapping your Chaos. We are delighted with the lovely maps that emerged from our time together! Meg Max, who created and led the workshop, asked participants to bring a pen, some paper, and a small rock, and then led us through an exercise in which we pushed the rock around the paper with a writing instrument, following the rock wherever it desired to go. Meg then invited us to reflect on the role of chaos in our creative lives, and to continue to transform the “maps” our rocks led us to.

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map of a creative life

from Atul Anand (substack/website)

“My chaos is like a cat – confident in its path yet scared of the unknown. Recently I made this art during the workshop Mapping your Chaos by The Spiral Lab Collective. The workshop helped me map threads of non-linear time and find a metaphor for my creative journey.”

from Jess C. Killjoy

from Sam (@greengossiper on IG)

Sam writes:

“I’ve actually had maps on my mind a lot lately! I’ve been thinking about the physical paths I walk and hike and have been wanting to create my own personalized map of the trails featuring significant plants and landmarks.. but I’m so overwhelmed by the thought of this project and don’t know where to start so I just end up imagining drawing pathways while I’m walking my dog.

This workshop was so fun! And my inner chaos map ended up looking a bit like my imagined physical map but not bogged down with details or scale or perfection.. I continued to color it after the workshop, while on a zoom with friends and it was very calming.”

from Nada

from Nico

Nico writes:

“my chaos map [above] and then a painting i started this afternoon [below]. the workshop was so wonderful for me, i truly hadn’t touched in with what actually excited me about painting in *years* and the mapping process revealed things”

from a. wunder

We at the Spiral Lab Collective are spiraling toward our next issue of The Spiral Lab Magazine, with Manifesto as our theme. We’re not sure when it will come out, but when it does, be on the lookout for another free workshop and “readers respond” post!

In between full issues, we may publish mini-issues, individual work, art drops and more! If you would like to see how this project unfolds, please do subscribe, and if you have any thoughts please drop us a comment. We love comments!!!

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Below is a message from Spiral Lab Collective member Meg Max, as well as a set of journaling and creative care invitations she developed. Feel free to work with these invitations on your own at your own speed, or we invite you to join us for:

Mapping Your Chaos, a free1 workshop gently facilitated by Meg and Marta, with journaling & creative care invitations, on Sunday 1 February at 1:00 pm EST/6:00 pm GMT. To attend, please fill in this form with your name and email address, and we will send you a zoom link closer to the event.

The theme of the first issue of The Spiral Lab Magazine is Chaos, in which a bunch of us explored in various ways our relationship to chaos. If you have not already, we encourage you to read/view at least some of the pieces in that issue, although it is absolutely not necessary to do so before coming to the workshop!

Dear readers,

My friend Marta asked me to help come up with ways to engage with the pieces published in the Chaos issue of The Spiral Lab Magazine that might send you off into your own moments of chaotic creativity.

Below are some portals that we hope will invite you to some interesting ways to explore your own personal experience of chaos. These are all inspired, directly or indirectly, by the work found within the Chaos issue of The Spiral Lab Magazine.

I’m calling these portals, because I like the idea of opening the door. I like to imagine you stepping into possibilities. There are as many ways to approach these as there are people in the world. You cannot get this wrong. Be serious, or silly.

Read them and let them rattle around inside you. Use the ones you like, or ignore them all completely.

Use them like journal prompts. Sit down with a pen and paper and write down whatever comes to mind.

Or, draw, dance, collage, dream, imagine. Whisper your chaos to the birds or the trees or the person in line next to you at Costco.

If you like creating in community, we’ll be gathering together on Sunday 1 February at 1:00 pm EST/6:00 pm GMT to offer Mapping Your Chaos, a guided, free online creative making session, gently facilitated by myself and Marta. The making we will do is grounded in Creative Care, and focuses on expression as connection and exploration. You don’t need any experience to join us. Although you’re welcome to arrive with any art-making supplies you have lying around, all you need to enjoy our time together is a pen, some paper, and a small rock.

You can register here. There is no fee to participate. I hope I’ll see you there.

Chaotically yours,

Meg

Journaling invitations inspired by Chaos

Printed Portals:

• Reimagine your personal chaos [current, past, or ever present] as fragments, shapes, patterns, textures, colors.

• What images come to mind when you think of your own personal experience of existing in and with chaos?

• What grows from, or within, your chaos?

Le*ah mentions using rituals to support during, after, and inside of chaos:

I’ve learned to build small rituals for these in-between spaces: lighting a candle, sketching without purpose, rearranging objects on my desk, listening to sounds that feel like breath. These are ways of communicating with the process itself. They remind me that I can move, even when I don’t know where I’m going.

• Do you have any rituals of your own?

• If not, could you pick one thing you do each day as a checkpoint to remind yourself that you’re still here?

• Would you want to add anything to that moment, to ground you or release you into the chaos? [a creative moment, a breath, brushing your hair, looking out the window, making a cup of tea?]

• Write these rituals down and put them somewhere you will see them each day. [Or, not.]

There will be more Creative Care Invitations at the Mapping Your Chaos Workshop!

The theme of this first issue is Chaos—which we feel is appropriate to launch this magazine because we are making it up as we go, iterating, designing divergently, neuroqueering both our process and our product.

What we can say right now is that we are a collective of international, neuroqueer, disabled writers and artists who have come together through Divergent Design Studios to be in conversation with each other and with you, dear readers, about a wide range of themes that grab our collective interests.

Keeping in mind that everything we do here is subject to change, our vision right now is that in addition to the magazine issue itself, we will publish sometime soon(ish) a set of creative care invitations and journaling prompts related to the current theme, and then shortly after that we will host a free live workshop on zoom during which one or more of us will lead participants through those invitations. Everything will be free, though we will “pass the hat” for a suggested donation at the workshop. Sometime later, if there is interest, we will invite you the readers/makers to contribute to the conversation around the month’s theme through your comments and the writing and art you make in response to our creative care invitations.

For this first issue, on the theme of Chaos, our conversation among the members of The Spiral Lab Collective was sparked by the first essay in this issue, On Navigating Chaos, by Le*ah. Their response to their own essay forms the conclusion of the issue.

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On Navigating Chaos

by Le*ah1

Some of us don’t think in straight lines. Our lives break and rebuild in loops, fragments, and unexpected shapes. For those who live with neurodivergence, trauma, and masking, chaos isn’t failure, it’s the landscape we’ve learned to navigate. This essay is a map drawn from that terrain: how creativity and life mirror each other, and how staying with chaos can sometimes lead us home.

For me, being creative has never been a luxury, it’s been a way of surviving. People often think of creativity as something reserved to artists: a gift, a talent, a pastime for those with brushes or instruments. But I’ve come to understand it differently. Creativity is not just about producing art, it’s about finding a way through chaos. It’s the movement that happens when life unravels and we still reach, somehow, for pattern, color, and meaning.

Living is a creative act too. It can be messy, cyclical, uncertain. Both, creativity and life often require us to navigate the unknown, to let go of structures and trust that something new will take shape in the space that opens.

When I look back, every major change in my life began with something falling apart. A job, a relationship, a sense of identity, an order I thought I needed to survive. And then came chaos. The in-between. The place where nothing made sense. For a long time, I thought that meant I was failing. Now I know that chaos is the birthplace of a new order.

Creative processes mirror that movement perfectly: they begin with structure, enter chaos, and something emerges, if we stay with it long enough, something that has not existed before.

There is often this moment, when painting, writing, composing, or crafting where everything collapses. The piece stops working. The original idea dissolves. You can’t see the way forward. That’s the moment when many people give up, but it’s also a moment of potential. Because if you can stay there, if you can breathe inside the not-knowing, something begins to shift. A new pattern emerges from the fragments.

Life can feel the same: There’s no clear beginning or end, just waves of unmaking and re-forming. We lose ourselves and then find small traces again, an image, a sound, a gesture that says, keep going. I used to think I needed to control the chaos, to tidy it, fix it, explain it. Now I see that chaos itself is a form of intelligence. It’s life reorganizing itself. It’s a system refusing to remain what it was.

When I am in crisis, I try to remember that I am not broken, I’m in the middle of a creative storm. Something in me is rearranging. The patterns that kept me alive are no longer sustainable, and something truer is waiting to emerge. Of course, this sounds poetic from outside the storm. Living it is harder. Chaos is uncomfortable. It’s disorienting, slow, and lonely. But it’s also fertile. It’s where imagination wakes up.

I’ve learned to build small rituals for these in-between spaces: lighting a candle, sketching without purpose, rearranging objects on my desk, listening to sounds that feel like breath. These are ways of communicating with the process itself. They remind me that I can move, even when I don’t know where I’m going.

Creativity doesn’t demand that we understand. It asks that we participate.

Sometimes that means writing without sense, crying without language, sitting among fragments without forcing them to fit. Sometimes it means resting until the next impulse arrives.

Slowly, the map unfolds, not as a plan, but as a feeling: a pull toward what wants to live.

The longer I live inside creative cycles, the more I trust the movement between order, chaos, and renewal. There’s no final version of me waiting at the end, only ongoing transformation.

Life, creativity, healing, they’re all names for the same current. And every time we choose to stay in the process, we are already creating something new: a life that holds us, even when everything else falls apart.

If you’re somewhere between old order and new form, between collapse and creation, you’re not lost. You’re mid-process.

Chaos is part of the language of becoming.
The map will reveal itself as we move.

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Just a Block of Seitan

by Céol2

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Texas Mud

by Marta3

Last spring, when I decided to take up sewing again in order to alter some of my clothes to fit better and be more comfortable, I had no idea that decision would set in motion a series of events that led, among other things, to this new version of my newsletter: The Spiral Lab Magazine. But this is one of the main principles of chaos theory, that “a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions).”4 This is most famously cited as “the butterfly effect,” the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can cause or prevent a tornado in the USA.

I had determined many times before that I would start sewing again in order to make my clothes fit better, but when I finally did, altering old clothes became the least of it. As I scoured YouTube for tutorials about small problems I was having in my alterations, I came across a whole corner of the internet dedicated to the joys of sewing, and I quickly became hooked. I have often said that every good idea I’ve ever had came to me deep down a seemingly time-wasting rabbit hole. Often the good idea that comes to me is not directly related to the rabbit hole I am burrowing in, but the thing about rabbit holes is that one thing leads to another, leads to another, and along the way we gather bits and pieces that change us, offer insight, and eventually coalesce into something brand new.

I have described this time—which for me is often spent on YouTube obsessively watching videos about some new special interest—as gathering stardust, based on a metaphor of time as an elliptical orbit in space. But I am coming to think that mud may be a more apt metaphor for me at this moment. After all, rabbit holes are dug in dirt.

As I type, I am in a pet-friendly hotel in a small town in Texas, because for the second time during our month-long van trip to the Southwest, we got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled out. This time the van was damaged in some way we still don’t understand, and we are waiting to have it towed to a mechanics shop.

But this story isn’t about the van, really, it’s about the mud. It is everywhere. Even in the nice clean hotel room, I keep finding bits of it, now mostly dried clumps, clinging to all sorts of unexpected places: the yarn I am crocheting with, my laptop charger, clothing I wasn’t even wearing at the time. It is the nature of mud that it is messy and that it clings. Gathering stardust may be an apt metaphor for gazing at the moon rising over the desert, or the ocean rolling onto the beach where you are wild camping in the van, and I’ve certainly been doing plenty of that too lately.

What you find down rabbit holes, though, is mud, and mud is not always pleasant. When you are stuck in it, when it slimes everything you own, it’s not much fun. But the mud, too, is necessary. As Le*ah says in their essay above,

“I used to think I needed to control the chaos, to tidy it, fix it, explain it. Now I see that chaos itself is a form of intelligence. It’s life reorganizing itself. It’s a system refusing to remain what it was.”

Mud is not just chaos, it is also an ancient building material out of which humans have crafted homes for living and vessels for cooking and poultices for healing. In the midst of it though, it is often difficult to see what will emerge. Gathering stardust sounds so poetic, but as Le*ah notes, “Chaos is uncomfortable. It’s disorienting, slow, and lonely. But it’s also fertile.” And here again, the metaphor of mud feels so apt: dirt is messy, but it is also the ground out of which new life germinates and grows.

***

Down my YouTube rabbit hole, surrounded by an amazing fiber arts community, altering old clothes made way for sewing new ones. And then I taught myself to crochet, and then I discovered the Japanese embroidery handcraft called Sashiko, and the cloth often created from it, called boro, and all of these too quickly became obsessions. Before long I was falling asleep thinking about what I wanted to make, and waking up eager to get to work. I hadn’t felt so alive with a new special interest in a long long time—in fact, the last time had been when I took up painting in the wake of losing my ability to write or even read books, a time when words had failed me, and color, lines, shapes, images, texture took their place.

This time around, there wasn’t such a clear causation, and I wouldn’t say words had failed me, exactly. But they couldn’t compete with sewing, crochet, and needlework; sitting down to write came to feel so … immaterial … as compared to making objects, beautiful, useful, material creations. I know this is a false distinction. Of course, ideas are also real, words also matter deeply, but at least for a time last summer, they couldn’t compete with the satisfaction of a pretty dress I could actually wear that I made myself out of my own head and with my own hands.

I tried to think about how I could write about sewing, but it seemed like such a departure from what people expect of me, and moreover, I didn’t really want to write about sewing. I just wanted to sew. I chastised myself for once again letting a special interest take over my life and lead me down another non lucrative path and away from actually earning a living. I insisted to myself that sewing and crocheting would firmly remain a hobby outside of my “real” work time, and that I would not let them get in the way of being a responsible adult.

Ha!

At the same time, I knew in my bones that sewing wasn’t exactly the issue. Rather, I felt myself on the edge of something new, and that resistance was futile. I didn’t know quite what sewing and/or writing had to do with it, but I could feel once again that the next chapter of my story was through a portal, and I would need to give myself over to the chaos of this liminal space.. As I approached my 60th birthday (this past September) and the 10th anniversary of leaving my first marriage (this month), I started to embrace all the round numbers (which I know are actually meaningless) and leaned into the liminality. I decided not to force the writing, took a financial leap of faith, and confessed to you, dear readers, that I was away gathering stardust for a bit.

In addition to stardust, though, I was also mucking through the mud. Metaphorically speaking, but also through literal Texas mud. Home now, the mud is still with me, in the van, caked to my shoes. I sometimes wonder if it misses Texas, how it feels about joining the dirt of my gritty corner of Philadelphia. I’m doing a lot of cleaning right now—sorting and organizing and Swedish death cleaning (more on that soon!) in anticipation of a serious, full-time van life adventure. But I don’t mind the Texas mud here in my Philadelphia home. It reminds me that powerful things can emerge from chaos.

But what does that Texas mud have to do with chaos theory and butterflies and this new Spiral Lab Magazine, you ask. In true form, even this essay has become a bit chaotic! I’m not so good at keeping things simple, or drawing with straight lines, but I do like nutshells, out of which grow nut trees in the mud. So in a nutshell, part of what I learned in the anxious liminality of this past summer, while stuck in the mud this past autumn, was that I no longer want to write alone. Not only do I not feel like I have enough to say, nor the bandwidth, to churn out worthy essays on a regular basis, but it’s just really lonely. And while I love solitude, one of the great learnings of the past several years is that I also love, need, and thrive on collaboration.

Sewing and fiber arts may have thrown me into the chaos of wordlessness, of needing a break, at least, from writing; but among the things that have emerged is clarity that writing is not my only skill nor my only passion. Among those passions are not just dresses and beanies and watermelon keychains, but also marginalized people and our creative communities. I have come to understand that my part in remaking the world in these bleak times is to gather people, to support and nurture artists, and to help broadcast their brilliance outside of my own comfortable inner circle.

And so, as I prepare for a whole new vanlife/communal living adventure (more on that later too), I present to you a gorgeous group of writers and artists from my online community, Divergent Design Studios, who responded to an invitation to join me in turning my newsletter into The Spiral Lab Magazine.

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journal entry, December 2021

by Leif5

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Scrappy Little Creature

by Mylo6

“It feels like my nervous system is broken.”

In the early days of developing my autonomic nervous system disorder (also called dysautonomia), this is all I had to go off of.7. This feeling like my nervous system wasn’t working the way it used to, wasn’t moving fluidly anymore, but rather kept getting stuck in ‘on’ mode - like a brick was jammed against the gas petal and no matter what I did I couldn’t get that brick to budge.

My heart would race and make me think I was having a heart attack. My breathing was always quick and shallow. My digestive tract started freezing up. My autistic meltdowns reached new levels and took days to recover from, leaving me with significant pain. Nothing in my body worked the way it used to.8 I felt like this desperate creature fighting for life each day - a scared little ball of chaos.

Anyone who has experienced chronic health issues knows the desperate flailing routine of trying any available remedy to feel better. You’ll do anything for symptom relief. I exhausted every SSRI, SNRI and off-label anti-anxiety medication. I repeatedly plunged my face into ice water trying to activate the mammalian diving reflex. I used bilateral stimulation, EFT tapping, vagus nerve stimulating eye movements, and breathing techniques. I scoured the internet for answers. I even pleaded with a god who I don’t fully believe in.

Utterly overwhelmed at the too-muchness of my sick body, my life was reduced to the most basic daily tasks required to keep my body alive—eating, sleeping, and hygiene. Slowing down wasn’t optional, it was just something that happened to me.

The heavy slow pace of my new life felt starkly opposed to my internal world of racing thoughts and heartbeat. Sometimes my insides would actually vibrate—a common symptom of dysautonomia called internal tremors. This fast/slow juxtaposition was disorienting. In some sort of somatic illusion, my body was moving alarmingly fast, and yet somehow also incredibly slowly. Like when hummingbird’s wings flap so quickly that they almost appear to be still.

It took about three years, but eventually I made sense of my symptoms and found my way to a time of more stability. I relied heavily on the wisdom of other chronically ill folks sharing their stories on social media, and when small pockets of energy would open up I would research the terms from these social media posts. I found a Naturopath who understood my symptoms and helped me find a little bit of symptom relief through pacing and supplements. I started using CBD to support nervous system regulation and suddenly I could eat again without massive bloating and pain.9. And the biggest shift came when after going through six other doctors I finally found a specialist to diagnose my dysautonomia and prescribe medication to help manage some of my symptoms.

This whole process was agonizingly slow and non-linear, and the whole time I felt like my symptoms were drowning me. When I reflect on where I once was, I’m pretty astonished that I managed to figure out what was going on with my body and wrestle with multiple doctors to eventually get the medical care I needed. Yet somehow, I moved through it.10 Somehow, when chaos descends, our bodies find a way to carry us through.

Now that I’ve entered into a period with more stability and had time to reflect, I find myself wanting a smaller life. Not an avoidant or apathetic life, but one where I can slow down and focus my energy. I want less—less information, less stimulation, and fewer demands. I don’t think this desire is a moral one, but rather a practical one that my body has mandated for me. The inherent non-compliance of my sick and disabled body has brought wisdom that demands I either transform my day-to-day life, or further my suffering. My body can no longer function at the rate it used to, and the rate that late-stage capitalistic society expects it to. So my options are to fight these new limitations, or accept them. I’m choosing to lean into the new rhythms of disability that I find myself in, and the chaos of illness has been the catalyst for all this.

I’ve learned that, if you are consenting, chaos is a force that can lead you to rest. It can strip you down to your most basic human functions and give you the opportunity to build something new. The painfully difficult part of all of this is that in order to make room for new, something old gets dismantled. And so it seems the work we are really left with is grief. Grief for what is lost. Grief for what we weren’t ready to let go of but were forced to nonetheless. Grief for what we can’t control, and acceptance that this is the way life is now.

Being chronically ill has taught me to try to be less controlling over my body, and instead to respect its wildness—the currents and cycles that miraculously keep me alive, even when they’re injured. I deeply admire the defiant way my sick body says “fuck you, make me” when I want to do just one more task but my battery is empty. I’m not grateful for being ill, but I do begrudgingly see the lessons I am learning in this new sick body of mine. At my core I’m a scrappy little creature who is desperately wanting to survive and resourceful enough to make it through.

And so I’ve found that the work of yielding to a sick and chaotic body is not easy, but it is simple. You fight less. You listen. You ask, with whatever amount of tenderness your heart can muster, “Dear wild body, what are you asking me for?” And then you do your best to give that little creature what it needs.

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The Chaos of Forgotten Anger

by Poornima11

After years of burnout and emotional numbness, I’ve been finally feeling emotions other than dread and sheer exhaustion. Anger is one of them. Anger has always been a chaotic emotion for me as I never learnt how to regulate myself when sitting with it. It is far too volatile for me to organize neatly and analyze, like I do with other “uncomfortable” emotions like anxiety and sadness. It is also too loud for me to quietly process it through silent tears. So I end up either having meltdowns or internalizing the anger.

Because of this, a lot of what I thought was shame was actually internalized anger, and it is finally bubbling up to the surface, introducing a new chaos in my mind and body—the chaos of forgotten anger.

Navigating life in my chaotic city is very overwhelming for me, and recently that is one of the things I have been angry about. So I have made this collage on the backdrop of the traffic near my home. The green ribbons show a possible way of navigating the chaos I experience, using the “anchor points” shown at the bottom to ground myself.

Most of the times, my feelings of anxiety, sadness, and anger have been met with the invalidating response of “It’s all in your mind. Don’t think so much.” People have said this to comfort me, to emphasize that I can stop feeling these emotions if I put my mind to it. But all it does is make it even more overwhelming to exist with these feelings, making me feel angrier and more isolated.

The dragon represents me holding in a lot of anger but refraining from expressing it. In addition to the fear of being judged and othered, I’m also afraid of scaring those who genuinely care about me.

This realization has been difficult to sit with; I want to feel angry because I was so cruel to myself, but I have to remind myself that this was my twisted way of trying to find safety in this cruel, ableist, sexist world. Except that this approach backfired, and I had to learn self-compassion from scratch.

My “anchor-points”:

• Community and witnessing: Engaging with like-minded people has felt very validating for my anger; volunteering within my capacity for community events has enormously helped me channel this anger.

• Autonomy in the chaos: Although I might not have autonomy over the chaos I feel, I try to find small situations where I have a choice. For example, on a weekend, I ask myself what would support my body and mind better: spending time in nature with other people to feel energized or spending alone time at home to recover and re-center myself?

• Finding the music in the chaos: To me, finding the music in the chaos feels like appreciating the beauty of random situations. For example, a chance conversation with a stranger that gave me a whole new perspective about a life situation. Or getting ideas for an art project while navigating traffic.

• Rest and restoration: It has taken me years to give myself unconditional permission to rest. I have finally realized that rest is not a luxury to be earned but a basic human necessity, just like food and water. Rest also provides an opportunity for me to ground or regulate myself when navigating chaos.

• Special interests: I now realize that engaging in special interests and rabbit holes is not a leisure activity for me but an essential grounding practice. They are the very fabric that holds my life projects together.

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Art Chaos

by Nico12

My art process is chaos, and I’m not just referring to the piles of paintbrushes, papers, fabrics, and detritus that forms a cocoon around me at nearly all times in the studio. What I mean is that when I am making a painting, it feels like a constant dance of making and then resolving “mess.” I work in an “unprofessional” quantity of styles and mediums, and it can therefore be a bit difficult to sum up my method in one way. It is certainly a main theme (of my abstract work, especially) that I am seeking a sort of meditative and repeatable process for myself to follow. Throwing a bunch of organic lines on a surface and then figuring out how they can connect and feel balanced is not unlike a Zentangle or a doodle you might make while on the telephone (back when you could hold the receiver to your head with your shoulder and still have hands free, at least!)

For me, making abstract art is sort of primal-feeling. I approach it as if the materials and composition are telling me what needs to be done. It is often a process of many layers of paint, over the course of months or even years. There is a sense of calmness that comes on when things start to feel balanced, a sense of resolution. The process feels similar to taking out all of your clothes from the closet and strewing them around the room and then spending time putting everything away precisely. The end goal is not just to have a “neat” room, the goal is also the process itself, going through each item, touching it and spending time with it, maybe trying it on and reconnecting to its value and feeling. At the end, you have a better sense of what suits you, makes you feel good and confident, and there is pleasure in the process. If I was just trying to have a “neat painting,” I might design the composition on a computer or in a sketchbook and then just copy it into the canvas. But for me, art is very much about the process of making it, not just the end result, so I value the messy middle, the chaos, the layering, and the give and take. I relish the moments where things start to come together, inside this world of my own creation, in a language that I have made up and taught myself. I start to see and feel that I have accomplished something that only I may ever really understand.

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weather whiplash: an unusual canadian autumn

by Nada13

heat waves in october, it’s too hot for even a light denim jacket. I wear a sleeveless shirt out at night when I otherwise would’ve needed a hat and scarf on this particular weekend. the halloween decorations disorient me… my body tells me it’s still summer. it makes it harder than it already is for me to process the passing of time. I find it hard to be present.

the trees are changing at inconsistent rates, I wonder if they’re as unsettled as I am. everyone around me continues as usual. I feel left behind. there’s barely autumn. barely any transition. we just put away the air conditioner. it’s snowing now.

a sudden drop in temperature, an overnight blanket of snow. trees full of healthy green leaves shedding prematurely, all at once. a stunning but alarming site of sidewalks entirely covered in frozen foliage.

it’s hard to enjoy the extended warmth, it’s hard to enjoy the strange beauty. it’s unbearable that it just feels intense all year. nothing is mild, nothing is calm. I know why this is happening, and it’s going to keep getting weirder, it’s going to keep getting worse. continuously unprecedented.

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Speaking from Within Chaos

by Le*ah

My first essay14 enters chaos from a point at which chaos had already been navigated, from after the event. It was written from a place where understanding had formed, where meaning and a certain kind of wisdom were already available. This text asks something different: what happens when we speak from inside chaos? From a point where it has not yet been metabolised. Where no map is at hand. Where the outcome is uncertain. Where one question inevitably emerges: Will I survive this?

Speaking from hindsight is something I have done for many years. There was a time when speaking about my experiences in mental health was my job. I was expected to perform sanity, to comfort everyone in the room by telling a story of recovery, a story that ended with me living happily ever after. It was well paid, but with every repetition it became harder, more painful. Not only because retelling my life story for others to consume was exhausting, but because I knew I was lying.

After each of these performances, I needed several days to recover, days spent in bed, much like the crises I claimed were long behind me. I wasn’t actually better. I was performing the role that was expected of me.

Much later, I began to ask myself what would have happened if I had been honest. If I had spoken not from the other side of chaos, but from within it. Most likely, I would have lost my job for being “too unstable,” for unsettling the listener, for failing to embody recovery convincingly enough. I would have been deemed not healed, not reliable, not competent. On a bad day, when my unmasked self could barely speak, I might have been ushered out in hushed voices.

What I am trying to name here is that speaking from within chaos is not always safe. Incoherence, loss of language, public stimming, or overt emotional expression can carry real consequences. They can cost a person their job, their credibility, even their autonomy. At the time, I could not afford to express myself from inside the chaos that surrounded me.

Speaking from within chaos does not fail because the speaker is unclear, but because the listener asks for resolution. Unfinished speech unsettles. It asks for patience, for restraint, for trust without guarantee. Many spaces cannot offer this. Instead, they translate uncertainty into risk, process into pathology. Once spoken, these interpretations are hard to undo. Vulnerability can harden into record, reputation, or diagnosis long after a moment has passed.

So now, when I speak, I try to be eloquent. I perform coherence. I pretend to be fine. Not because I am, but because I have learned that this performance is sometimes necessary for survival.

What follows from this is simple: I have a right to remain opaque. I have a right to tell only as much as I choose. My vulnerability, my pain, my story — my chaos — are not available for consumption. When I live inside chaos, I maintain the right not to speak, to stop, to leave, and to resist being turned into documentation, pathology, or performance.

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1

Le*ah writes from a practice of attentive, non-extractive listening. Their work explores chaos, embodiment, and neurodivergent experience beyond capture, clarity, or completion.

3

Marta is a writer, artist, teacher, community organizer, and editor of The Spiral Lab Magazine.

5

Leif is the queer Chicago-based AuDHD artist and zine maker behind It’s Weird Now Press. Their creative practice is rooted in survival, self-compassion, and finding humor in the mess of being human. Through zines and mixed media work, Leif explores the beauty and chaos of the in-between. They view art-making as an act of resistance, healing, and re-imagination.

6

Mylo K. Oliver (they/them) is an eclectic artist and vocational human being. They are a tender-hearted and tender-bodied white fatty, and a strong-willed gender non-compliant trans queer. They’re autistic, chronically ill, and an all-round disabled cringy weirdo. They love a crisp caesar salad, watching drama mystery shows, and being overwhelmed with cuteness aggression at the little furry creature that lives in their home.

12

Nico is a multidisciplinary artist working in oil paint, fiber, silversmithing, and more. Like most of the pieces scattered around her studio, she is a work in progress. She believes strongly in lifelong learning, tenderness, and the joy of the process. Her work explores “the dream of a common language,” complex and layered emotions, and meditations of balance.

13

Nada is a neuroqueer multi-disciplinary artist on a spirally journey of unmasking and redefining her relationship to art, whose work evolves and shape-shifts as she does.

A fluid force with too many passions, Nada has a background in visual arts and film, a current focus in ceramics, and a life-long infatuation with photography, documentation, and storytelling.

Going by “Planet Nada,” she has a profound love for being alive and its infinite glimmers, a witchy kinship with the Earth and its creatures, and a rich inner world that translates outwardly in expressions of maximalism, whimsy, silliness, softness, and loads of colour.

One of the many things I used to be deeply ashamed of, but now really like about myself, is how ALL IN I can be, on a moment’s notice. An idea will come to me, and I am THERE, ready to run with it. These ideas appear like a vision, or a gestalt, complete and obviously viable. The getting there is just a matter of details others will need to catch up. But I am already there, living in the vision, with complete clarity and confidence that this plan will work. And sometimes the plan does work. And sometimes it does not. But to me, those unfulfilled visions don’t feel so much like failures or absurd dreams, but rather simply as alternate realities that I didn’t get to experience. A path not taken.

But I’ve always known that most others don’t view it that way. Especially in my previous life (b.d.: before divorce), I know that others came to see my visions as just pie-in-the-sky dreams, Marta being Marta (cue: roll eyes). As one former friend once said, “a flag flapping in the wind.” And so I learned to be ashamed of my visions, and my unbridled enthusiasm for them.

Of course, what did come to fruition eemed to others as seamless and natural choices, not the fulfillment of a vision, much less the fulfillment of a vision that by definition required all those other alternative realities to “fail.” We all have to dip our toes in waters we decide not to swim, but most of us don’t dip with such relish or with quite as much splashing as I do.

I no longer think of this as shameful—that moment when the vision seems obvious and entirely real and achievable, and I am IN IT, living it. I now let myself splash around with abandon. Though I have learned not to be quite so vocal about my visions when they are new. But sometimes they slip out anyway.

One of those visions has been to live for some significant period of time on the road in a van. “Van Life” as the kids call it, though I’ve since come to understand that more and more people, including often senior citizens (like me? that feels so funny to say, but I guess it’s becoming more and more accurate..), are living in their cars and vans, not just out of a sense of adventure (though I do think there is often that too), but also out of necessity, as the cost of traditional housing skyrockets out of the reach of so many. This car/van life reality, and the stories and cultures that are emerging from it, is endlessly interesting to me, as are the many ways so many of us want/must find new ways and places to live: cars and vans, cohousing communities, tiny homes—this too is Divergent Design.

Joel and I are now in the middle of our latest and longest van adventure—a month on the road driving to and hanging out in the Southwest of the United States. We drove to Nashville, where Joel grew up, and then down the Natchez Trace Parkway, which is unbelievably beautiful and full of magic. In Natchez, Mississippi, we turned west and drove across Louisiana and Texas, and are now parked on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land in New Mexico. Fun fact: there are so many places to park a van and spend the night, for FREE. Our first few trips we paid for camping at HipCamp sites or state parks, but no more. There are so many free places to stay, and we have slowly figured out how to manage two grown humans and two large dogs and all our stuff in the van, so that we can be entirely self-contained when we stop for the night.

Our last trip—through Canada and to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, was so glorious, I was ready to ditch everything: sell the house, buy a bigger, more comfortable van, and make a life of this. The vision has been clear for a long time—I really really want to live a life on the road for a significant period of time—but the process of getting here has been incredibly iterative. I guess what I’m coming to understand is that having a vision and acting on it often looks impulsive—hence the eye rolling, there-she-goes-again skepticism—but it needn’t be impulsive, especially if one understands iteration.

Iteration is two steps forward, one step back—if you draw that in three dimensions, it’s a spiral. Built in, however, is what is often viewed as failure—that one step back—but which can be recast as growth, learning, experimentation. When I first dared to imagine that maybe we could have some semblance, at least, of a life on the road in a van, we decided to test it out and see if we liked it. We rented a mini van and took a trip to the finger lakes area of New York. It rained a lot. Ithaca wasn’t quite what we expected. And yet we were hooked. We LOVED it. Next, we sold our car and bought a used van, then spent a very long time—leaning heavily on the kindness and expertise (and tools) of our dear friend Gray—starting to build it out. Compared to many van lifers, our build started out very rudimentary—a platform for sleeping with storage underneath. We took some weekend trips and made some adjustments. A year ago we took a two week trip with the dogs and loved every minute.

Then we had to take a break for Joel be laid off, and then promptly to be diagnosed not once but twice with cancer, and to endure and recover from two major cancer surgeries.

By the time we went to Michigan earlier this fall, we were having a very YOLO moment. I really was ready to sell the house and hit the road full time. We didn’t have the dogs that trip, and it seemed to me there was no way we could do this full time with them in this little van we have now christened Gertrude. Gertie for short. Selling the house and getting a bigger, better van seemed like the only way. But the house is our only asset, and we are approaching old age. Selling the house would be irresponsibly impulsive, and also we have kids and dear friends in Philadelphia who we don’t want to leave forever. Maybe even a grandkid sometime down the road!

Now, though, two weeks into our first month-long van trip in Gertie, and with the dogs, we are realizing we absolutely could live full time for a few years in this van. Even with dogs. People live full time in cars, for crying out loud. We have continued to make mistakes, and learn from them, but nothing has come close to dampening our enthusiasm.

I don’t really want to be a landlord, but one of my lifelong dreams has been to live more communally, in some sort of co-housing situation, and we are now dreaming up options for beginning that while we hit the road for a year or two, maybe beginning next summer.

Of course, none of this is set in stone. We are now in a liminal time between significant health scares and actual old age, and we are iterating. But adventure is in the air, and I have never felt so full of unbridled enthusiasm for this vision!

Stay tuned for a big announcement about the future of The Spiral Lab, coming soon! There is no place like in the desert of New Mexico to gather stardust, and I feel myself finally stepping through the portal. It’s a delicious feeling.

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Hello friends!

I’m so grateful to all of you who have sent me thoughtful and encouraging messages while I am out “gathering stardust.” Some of that stardust is beginning to coalesce around an exciting, big idea now in its early stages among a group of really cool writers and artists in Divergent Design Studios. In fact, I would say we’re in “getting shit done” mode, just behind the scenes. More on that soon, or come join DDS if you’d like to be part of it!

Also, if you join DDS, I am running my workshops in the coming months, for free (of course) for all DDS members. You’ve missed the one on shame already, but a recording will be up soon.

In the meantime, I’m so excited to be part of a group of really cool people who are offering sessions in a new course call Art for Activism! I encourage you to take a look at the sessions and presenters below and book tickets now!!

Art for Activism

for more info and to book tix

We live in a time when social oppression and economic injustices are at the forefront of our lives and minds, and our time, energy and focus is being constantly co-opted by the need to survive under capitalism. So how can we engage ourselves and our communities in effecting change and creating more equitable futures? By weaving artistic practices into our activism, we demonstrate how these techniques can be used as tools for taking back control, changing the narrative and speaking truth to power. This is because humanity is innately creative and imaginative, and the forces which oppress and restrict us are not.

Over six weekly sessions, we will introduce a variety of creative arts techniques that can be applied to our activist practices, as well as broaden our understanding of where art and creativity already show up in our daily lives. This course is delivered by a group of facilitators with a wide range of life, art, and activist experience, allowing us to bring you a multiplicity of perspectives and practices. We will cover topics such as the role of art in activism; the body, self, and individual; creativity in community building; writing for revolution; craftivism, and art as public action. Sessions will include examples of where art, together with activism, has effected change, and the artist activists who have paved the way, as well as creative invitations and opportunities for discussion and community building.

This course is for everyone and anyone. No creative or artistic skill or experience is necessary.

Saturdays, Nov 8th - Dec 13th, 6-8 pm GMT via Zoom

(10 am-12 pm PST; 1-3 pm EST)
*Sessions will be recorded and shared with ticket holders.

book now!

Session One: The Role of Art in Activism: Drawing from Creative Practices to Build Activist Practices

Saturday, Nov 8th

Facilitated by Erika Phoenix with intros from other facilitators

This workshop is an introduction to our facilitators and the ideas we will explore throughout this course regarding the relationship between art and activism. This workshop will expand on the concepts of art as well as moving art away from a consumerist lens. We will also introduce a communal creative care invitation for a collective zine that participants can engage with.

Erika Phoenix (she/they) is a non-binary, neurodivergent artist, writer, performer & activist based in Wales, who has worked for many years as a theatre arts educator. They believe everyone should have access to the arts as a means of self-exploration, and through their advising, facilitating, and project planning, they support creatives in making the things that they want to make.

Session 2: Starting from Centre: The Self, the Body, the Mind and Awareness

Saturday, Nov 15th

Facilitated by Erika Phoenix, Jordan DuPont & Ashleigh Gray

Our second session invites participants to ground themselves and meet us where they are that day. We will examine ways artistic practices can inspire us to make space for our own self-awareness practices. As artists and activists, we are always in process, and this workshop provides creative care invitations and tools to remind us how to return to centre.

Ashleigh Gray (they/she) is a writer, performer, workshop facilitator, and qualified yoga Nidra teacher, with a particular interest in aftercare for artists. They wrote and performed Tumours to a sold-out run as part of the Maiden Speech Festival 2018, before taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019 and the Soho Theatre. They are currently writing a memoir, and have received an Arts Council Lottery Grant to develop a series of workshops for artists and survivors of sexual assault.

Jordan DuPont is a student of transformation, experiential and embodied living, and liberatory politics. She teaches high school English and is certifying to be a Focusing professional. She has facilitated a variety of containers ranging from People’s Assemblies and Tenant 101 trainings, to literary salons and grief circles. Jordan spends her time writing synthesis and research essays, theorizing about fanfiction and smut, and being with her significant others.

Session 3: The Role of Art in Community Building: Creative Approaches to Nurturing our Neighbourhoods

Saturday, Nov 22nd

Facilitated by Jordan DuPont & Erika Phoenix

During this session, we will discover both the art of community building and the role that artistic practices can play in its creation. We will exercise our radical imagination to create art that depicts and represents the communities and worlds we long for.

Session 4: Writing as Resistance

Saturday, Nov 29th

Facilitated by Selina Nwulu & Jordan DuPont

During the session, we will read a selection of poems, drawing from the techniques and approaches of others as inspiration to create our own poems. We will explore what makes a political poem and how we can find resistance and revolution in our everyday behaviours.

Selina Nwulu is a poet and essayist. Her work has been widely featured in a variety of journals, installations, short films and anthologies, including the critically acclaimed New Daughters of Africa, and more recently Nature Matters, an environmental anthology written by the global majority. She was Young Poet Laureate for London 2015-16, before her full-length collection, A Little Resurrection, was published with Bloomsbury in 2022. Her debut essay collection, Black Climates, an exploration of Blackness and climate justice, was published by Chatto & Windus in August 2025.

Session 5: Craftivism & Zine-Making

Saturday, Dec 6th

Facilitated by Leif & Marta Rose

This session will include an overview of how craftivism shows up in the world and how you can incorporate it into your own creative practice, with a focus on the history of activism via zines and a creative invitation to create your own zine as well as contribute to a collective zine about the course itself.

Leif is the queer Chicago-based AuDHD artist and zine maker behind It’s Weird Now Press. Their creative practice is rooted in survival, self-compassion, and finding humor in the mess of being human. Through zines and mixed media work, Leif explores the beauty and chaos of the in-between. They view art-making as an act of resistance, healing, and re-imagination. Leif believes everyone is inherently creative and through the simple act of making - holds the power to transform not only themselves but also the world.

Marta Rose is a queer AuDHD writer and artist. Her work offers critical insights and healing metaphors for reframing the ways we understand neurodivergence. She founded and directs Divergent Design Studios, an online community for neurodivergent creatives. She writes The Spiral Lab Substack, and has published several ebooks. Her work has been cited by Dr. Devon Price, Rebecca Schiller and Jesse Meadows, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. She has two grown neurodivergent children and lives in Philadelphia, on the land of the Lenni Lenape people, with her partner.

Tickets:

To ensure financial accessibility, we offer three pricing tiers with 2-month payment plan options. There are limited free places available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please select a free ticket only if you are unable to afford the subsidised ticket tier or payment plan.

Accomplice Tier: £150 or two monthly payments of £75

*For those with a bit more expendable income. Helps fund subsidised tickets.

General Admission Tier: £120 or two monthly payments of £60

*Represents the true cost of the course.

Subsidised Tier: £90 or two monthly payments of £45

*For those with limited income who cannot afford the GA tier.

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Some of you may be familiar with my Instagram post, and subsequent workshop, about what I have come to call Spiral Time.

With this metaphor for understanding time—which is a metaphor that came to me and is related to how I have always synesthetically “seen” time, but which is also related to many ancient and indigenous ways of understanding time—I talk about two phases of being in time as it relates to a creative project or even a creative era in our lives. Sometimes you are in the “getting shit done” phase, and sometimes you are in the “spinning out in space gathering stardust” phase.

The thing is, for those of us who are multi-passionate, who have very busy minds and multiple special interests, our creative energy in time doesn’t look like a single orbit in space, but rather more like this:

It can be a lot. At any given moment, we may be getting shit done in relation to some creative projects and eras of our lives, and we may be spinning out in space gathering stardust in relation to others.

When our creative lives and our source of income are intertwined, as they are for so many of us who are trying to survive in capitalism and also be artists, the fluctuating nature of our various relationship(s) with time can be overwhelming and scary.

I recently sent out an email asking subscribers to suggest topics for me to write about, because lately my well has felt dry. I received a bunch of great ideas, but even that hasn’t seemed to prime the pump. But I was struck by two very kind responses, one of which simply asked “how are you?” and the other asked “do you even want to be writing?”

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So here’s the truth: I’m doing great—like really great—except for feeling guilty about the fact that I don’t really want to be writing right now—certainly not at the pace of once-a-week, which is sort of the expected standard for substack newsletters. And that makes me feel anxious, because some of you are actually paying me to write this newsletter, and those subscriptions amount to about one month’s income each year for my family. Not a lot, but not nothing.

When it comes to sewing, crocheting, craftivism—actually *making* with my hands, things I can wear on my body or cover myself with or hang on my walls, I am very much in the getting shit done phase of my creative spiral. I feel on fire and more excited creatively than I have in such a long time.

But when it comes to how to write about all that, I am very much out there gathering stardust.

In fact, in my life in general, I feel like I am in a liminal space floating between eras—I just turned 60, it’s been 10 years since my divorce, Joel has retired … I feel like I am moving slowly through a portal, and I know that on the other side is something exciting and wonderful, and I feel confident that it will give me so much to write about.

But I also know, there is no rushing the gathering of stardust. There is no racing through liminal spaces. When portals open up, you have to respect the slowness.

I do think collaboration is the key to everything good in the world, and I have some collaborative projects in the works behind the scenes that hopefully will have The Spiral Lab active and vibrant again, even as I float around in liminality, crocheting and sewing with the zeal of the convert.

For those of you still sticking around—especially those of you paid subscribers—I appreciate you. Your ongoing support means a lot.

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I am crocheting next to the fire in the free spot we have found far into the Hiawatha National Forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We are camped in our micro camper van next to Mosquito Pond, but it’s too cold for any mosquitos. It’s also been raining pretty much non stop since we arrived, with just a few hours of sunshine here and there.

I’ve never been happier. I want to do this forever.

Two vehicles pull up and park about a hundred yards away. A man and a woman get out and start walking down the lane to our site. I scramble to hide in the van.

We are doing nothing wrong. Nothing illegal. We’re allowed to be here. But unplanned and unexpected interactions with total strangers is just not my jam.

In a few minutes Joel comes around and opens the door of the van. “They just wanted to let us know they are duck hunting. They actually asked if it was ok! They’re gone now.”

“I’m sorry I’m so weird,” I say as I step down from the van.

Joel doesn’t miss a beat as he lays a fire. “All part of the package, babe.”

***

We drove to Michigan through Canada, crossing over the Peace bridge in Buffalo. Three things we learned about Canada:

1. Tim Horton’s > Dunkin Donuts. Hands down. For starters, their coffee actually tastes like coffee.

2. There are wind turbines *everywhere*. Not just a little windfarm here and there, but a standard part of the rural landscape for miles and miles and miles. I mean kilometers and kilometers and kilometers. I find them strangely beautiful

3. You can camp in Crown Land for free for up to 21 days. And there is tons of it all over. We ended up staying in the small gravel parking lot of a Wildlife Management Project, which, as it turns out, is Crown Land.

***

A rainbow greeted us as we crossed over the bridge into the UP.

***

This north forest landscape, surrounded by the cold waters of the Great Lakes—it all feels oddly familiar. Comfortable somewhere in my bones. This is in part because I am originally from Michigan, and my father’s family has lived here for generations. My mother’s family were immigrants to Flint Michigan after the war, and my parents met at Flint Junior College. When my family moved to Indiana when I was in first grade, I resented the hell out of it and insisted throughout my childhood and teen years that I was not a Hoosier, I was from Michigan, damnit. My parents had both done graduate work at the University of Michigan, and I had a t-shirt that said, “My blood runs blue,” and a bumper sticker tacked to the bulletin board in my bedroom that said “Oh how I hate Ohio State.” We vacationed every summer in Michigan, camping at the Warren Dunes State Park, and we made regular trips to visit my grandfather in Flint. One summer we came up here to the UP.

But it’s not just my childhood ties. I have this mystical belief that we carry landscapes with us through time and great divides of space. I feel the call of the landscapes of my ancestors, some of which I have visited, and many of which I have not, but all circling around the North Sea (the Netherlands, Sweden, Scotland). In fact, I feel like these landscapes *are* my ancestors, even more than the actual humans and the cultures who inhabited them. This may all seem very woo-woo, but I feel it deep in my viscera. A longing for landscapes I will never live in. And these forests of northern Michigan, these cold waters of the Great Lakes, I think they remind my soul of those landscapes.

In any event, I can’t remember feeling this happy and content and free of anxiety.

***

“You look so happy!” texts Meg when I send her the photo of me in front of Tim Horton’s to let her know we are in Canada.

“I’m so so happy,” I text back.

“I don’t know why this is making me tear up,” she says.

But I think I do—I have been on the verge of tears of joy this whole trip. “It’s so beautiful,” I say to Joel, “I think I might cry.”

***

Back in Southwest Germantown, a home awaits us. A home that has been a sanctuary for me and my family, and for which I will always be grateful. But it is too big, and I can’t keep it clean on the inside, much less keep the tiny postage stamp of a garden tidy. It’s all just too much. I have imagined so many schemes in my mind for how to create a community to live with us in this too-big house—and tried, wildly unsuccessfully, to actually live a few of them—but the truth is, I’m miserable living in the same close space with anyone but Joel.

This home is also in a neighborhood that I love, but I am coming to accept that I don’t love living in. My neighbors are lovely, and we are friendly with so many people—and gardens and lilac bushes and maple and fig trees … but it is also loud, and gritty, and I live on a main corridor frequented by emergency vehicles. I have become a hermit there, rarely leaving the house. This, despite frequent resolutions and self-exhortations to get out, to walk to the coffee shop or the bookstore or the fabric store. I know I should, but I don’t. Instead, I work all day inside a home I have made lovely, and then watch TV shows in the evening set in beautiful places near water and long for those landscapes, and try to convince myself that it’s enough to love them from afar and enjoy them on a screen.

***

But I’m pretty sure that’s not how I want to live the next chapter of my life.

***

to be continued…..

Discounted Early Bird tickets for NQYCP are still on sale until this Wednesday (scroll to the bottom of the page at the link).

This is a roundup (in reverse chronological order) of some of my own thoughts, from IG posts to interviews, on the topic of the executive functioning paradigm:

Compulsory Executive Functioning:

from an interview by Jesse Meadows of me and KR Moorhead (lightly edited)

Marta: I've started using the phrase Compulsory Executive Functioning, and it totally borrows from Adrienne Rich's compulsory heterosexuality. She was such an important influence on me when I was a young feminist and coming out as queer. And I do think that there are a lot of parallels with the set of skills that gets termed executive functioning.

I've been thinking a lot about it lately, and I I'm not sure if my thinking is changing or just deepening, but I do think that there is discrete set of skills that we could identify as executive functioning, like working memory and a particular orientation to time, and various organizational skills. I concede that there is a set of skills that we can identify as executive functioning. I'm a little bit more skeptical about the idea that they are intrinsic to some people and intrinsically disordered in others, because in my own experience, a lot of those skills are very much correlated with my levels of shame and anxiety. When there's a lot of shame and anxiety in my life, those skills tank. And when my life feels fairly calm and I feel supported, and I have spaciousness in time and space, those skills actually become much less dysfunctional in my own life. So it's definitely true that those are skills that as a neurodivergent person that I struggle with in a lot of contexts, but even there, it's on a spectrum, right, of how much I struggle or don't struggle with those things, based especially on shame and anxiety and stress in my life.

And I even think so called neurotypical people, who are really good at those things, when under enormous amounts of stress will also become bad at those things, so that's one part of it.

But another part of it is that they are a really small and, in my mind, fairly uninteresting set of skills. You know? And that we have sort of elevated them—some people describe them as “higher level thinking skills” and “the skills that make it possible for us to be human” kinds of skills.

And it seems to me that almost all of them are the kinds of skills hat most people with enormous privilege outsource to other people, and they don't pay them very much to do it…. They're skills that wives do and that housekeepers do and that secretaries do.

So I don't actually think that they are particularly interesting or important skills in and of themselves, especially when it relates to creativity and innovation and design and those kinds of things. And I think that the reason that we focus on them so much is that they are the skills that are necessary for students to be able to perform well in our educational system as it exists right now, and then to be able to go on and be productive cogs in the wheels of capitalism.

To be a good worker bee, you have to have this set of skills, so that's why it becomes compulsory, and I think there is an alternative set of skills—the skills that are required to be creative, to be innovative. I talk about them often in the context of design thinking.

Um, but I think that you could just call them the skills of creativity and innovation. And we do honor those skills in a small number of people. And the people who are successful in those realms are usually able to outsource the executive functioning skills. We don't treat those executive functioning skills as compulsory for that small group of privileged people who are allowed to be wacky and creative.

But if everybody were allowed to be designers and artists and creatives—and I do think those are, for most human beings, natural impulses, to be creative, to be innovative, to design things. But if we let the vast majority of human beings do that, capitalism would just fall apart.It just doesn't work if most people are performing in the world according to a different set of skills.

When you look at small children, they can't keep track of time in their bodies, and they are disorganized often, but they're very curious and creative and artistic. In order for us to turn those little children into workers who are going to keep the economy going for capital, we have to sort of drum that out of them. And I really believe that that's a lot of what our educational system does now. And I think it's becoming increasingly intolerable for most human beings because it's becoming more and more and more compulsory to conform to a specific set of skills and a specific way of working in the world. But I think that it's especially detrimental for neurodivergent people because we just really, really, really aren't good at that set of skills that, that we call executive functioning. And I also want to say that I think it's a set of skills, but when you read the sort of theorists of executive functioning, like Russell Barkley … he's not just talking about a discrete set of skills, like having good working memory and being organized and being able to understand time. He's talking much more about a kind of process: Identifying a goal and moving in a linear and focused and methodical and fast way towards achieving that goal.

Jesse: He also defines executive functioning as self control, the ability to put off rewards in the moment for future gains. Which is just a very capitalist concept.

Marta:  And the “future gain” is always, like, being able to work in the world and earn a living and not be dependent on other people…. he's very concerned with people not being a burden on society, not being a burden on their families. He's very, very concerned about that. And by “burden,” what he means is needing other people to support you financially, or needing other people to support you in the tasks of daily living. In his mind, the worst thing that can befall a human being or a family or a community, is that there are individuals in it who need other people, basically. He argues, “there is no such thing as the common good.” That's sort of a foundational principle of his entire theory of executive functioning, that there is no such thing as the common good. And that to me is a value … not a fact, right? If you reject that set of values, if you believe there is a such thing as the common good, if you believe that depending on one another in our families, in our relationships, in our communities is not the worst thing that can befall a human being, then the whole idea that executive functioning is the most important thing kind of crumbles.

What is so terrible about needing somebody to help you eat? … How is it that these executives who are doing so well aren't relying on other people to help them eat when they order DoorDash or have a cook? We all depend on each other, and there very much is such a thing as the common good.

Jesse: There's this paper that I read recently by Robert Chapman about ecological functioning as a model for neurodivergent people, which is a level of group functioning? And I think that's a really good contrast to executive functioning, which is very individualistic.

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A Wife of One’s Own: Executive Function as a Feminist Issue

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction, she needed "a room of her own and £500." In other words, Woolf argued, the reason there were so few successful women fiction writers was because most women didn't have the space and the financial support to commit sufficient time and bandwidth to writing.

I adore Virginia Woolf. She is one of my patron saints. She was almost certainly autistic. Her fiction makes my heart sing. She was a prolific writer & critic. She also had a housekeeper, no children, & a husband who prioritized her work over even his own. I don't begrudge her any of this.

I do note, however, that in addition to having a room of their own and (the equivalent of) £500, most successful male writers and artists and creators (many of whom, let's face it, were neurodivergent) also had a WIFE, or at least a housekeeper.

So much of what we call "executive function" is also what is culturally regarded as "women's work": maintaining a household, keeping track of a schedule, managing paperwork, housework, laundry, feeding the kids.

The "executive function" experts love to talk about EF as "higher order thinking," such invaluable skills that we are tragically hobbled if we lack them.

This is a lie. The tell is the simple fact that almost all so-called "executive function" skills can be outsourced at very low wages to a secretary, housekeeper, nanny, or, entirely for free, to a . . . (you guessed it) WIFE.

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EF is the New IQ

It’s like the new “little black dress” of capitalism

It's like the new Bell Curve of white supremacy.

And Russel Barkley is the new Charles Murphy

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray is a book published in 1994 that argues "intelligence," not socioeconomic status, is the most salient predictor of personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, out of wedlock birth, and involvement in crime.

In a nutshell, the book argues that poor people are poor because they are not smart enough, and that rich people are rich because they belong to the "cognitive elite." Moreover, they argue that Black people on average have lower IQ that white people, and that such a statistic is not only "scientific" and legitimate, but that it is also, by implication, explanatory: according to this theory, Black people are more poor because they are less smart [sic].

While a little more subtle, Russell Barkley makes essentially the same arguments about the poorly-defined concept of Executive Function.

Astonishingly, Barkley's claims are theoretical (and, I would argue, political): he doesn't even engage in statistical hocus-pocus like Hornstein and Murray.

He just looks at "bad" outcomes in society: people failing in school, people who can't support themselves financially, people who still depend on their families for support, people incarcerated by the criminal justice system—and from these "bad" outcomes he theorizes the existence of something he calls "Executive Function" to explain it all.

His entire theory of EF is tautological: these "bad" outcomes are both the definition of and the evidence for the existence of executive function.

This, btw, is not science.

This is just white supremacist industrial capitalism justifying itself.

Before you can object—"But I actually suffer from executive dysfunction!" and offer as evidence that you are unable to do X, Y, and Z very important thing—hear me out.

I am not arguing that many of us are not actually disabled. I am arguing that "Executive Dysfunction" has become a catch-all explanation for basically every ill that plagues us.

The neurodivergent community throws around the term "executive function" to explain practically everything that is hard for us. But we don't really know what it means (because no one actually does!)

First of all, there are many other explanations for why we have a hard time with some things—trauma, abuse, neglect, racism, poverty, shame, the demands of capitalism and industrial school/employment, the Western fetishization of individualism, independence and self-reliance. Just to name a few.

But even putting all of that aside, if you begin to actually read about what the so-called experts mean by the term "executive function," it is much narrower than we in the neurodivergent community have come to understand it means.

Without a hint of critical awareness or investigation, we have latched on to this concept of executive function—much like we latched on eagerly to RSD, the pathology de jour—and we don't actually have any idea what it even means.

Because even the so-called "experts" can't agree what it means, how to measure it, or if it even exists!

I fear we've been sold a bill of goods.

And we've paid dearly for it.

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Executive Function is a set of late capitalist values masquerading as skills.

"Executive Dysfunction" is the hallmark of ADHD; acquiring these "skills" is the main commodity sold by the ADHD Industry.

Planning and prioritizing: ADHD people are not bad at planning and prioritizing; we are just bad at conforming to other people's (i.e. teachers and other middle managers) plans and priorities.

Focusing attention: Anyone who has ever observed an ADHD person in creative flow (i.e. "hyper-focus") knows this is a lie; we are terrific at focusing; we are just really bad at obedience when it comes to focusing on the "right" things.

Remembering details: ADHD people may forget our keys, but we are more likely to understand the keys to the universe than those living small, conventional lives obsessed with trivial details.

Switching focus: It's true that ADHD kids are bad at putting away the Lego's and focusing on the math worksheet when the teacher says it's time . . . because math worksheets are meaningless exercises in futility and ADHD kids are bad at compliance just for the sake of it.

Managing time: ADHD time is spiraling and elliptical—the way we exist in time requires patience and a long view; our time may lack efficiency because it doesn't value factory standards of production.

It turns out the main Executive Function VALUES are conformity, obedience, conventionality, compliance, efficiency, & production.

If you have any questions about Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below or reply to this email. Discounted Early Bird tickets are on sale until this Wednesday, 27 August (just scroll to the bottom of the page in the link)!

Often I don’t realize that I’m going through a particularly rough period until after the fact. In the midst of it, I just keep asking myself, Why am I so scattered? Why is the house such a mess? Why am I so forgetful? Why do I feel like I’m not getting anything done? Why am I so inordinately, debilitatingly anxious about seemingly nothing I can put my finger on?

That’s the kind of summer I’ve had. In general I actually hate summer. I hate heat, I hate humidity, I hate air conditioning (but can’t live without it), I hate so many hours of daylight, I hate how noisy and gritty the city gets. But none of this is new. What has been new is not really coping with any of it very well … and being confused about why.

Even though it’s only the middle of August, the heat has finally broken here in Philadelphia, for at least the next week. And having lived almost my life on some sort of academic calendar, the end of August very much feels like the end of summer, even though the heat can often continue well into September. This is the time when for most of my life, summer—for better or worse—is over, and it is time to settle back into some rituals and a sense of my own sort of normalcy.

It’s also a time when I now have enough of a remove to look back and say, Ohhhhh. Right. Joel had TWO cancer surgeries in the last six months. That is by any measure profoundly disruptive. He’s also just been sick a lot this summer, completely unrelated to his surgeries. The very good news is that based on scans and bloodwork, we have every reason to believe that Joel is now cancer free!

We very much hope that this is a period at the end of a sentence … a paragraph … a whole chapter (!) that began almost three years ago with my heart failure diagnosis. Of course, there are parts of this story that we will always carry with us …. the medications that keep me alive but also sap my energy and slow me down, the every-present fear of recurrence that probably every cancer patient lives with…. As Octavia Butler wrote, The only lasting truth is change…. But at least now I can look back and be more gentle with myself about what a mess everything has been for quite some time—my house, my sleep, my memory, my rituals, my ability to self-regulate. And maybe direct the change a bit now in the direction of calm and pleasure again.

But where to even begin? At least I now seem to have enough capacity and insight to know that where I begin is with slowness, and very low expectations.

It’s never a straight line, it’s always fits and starts. In fact, as I was writing the sentence above about very low expectations, I realized I was 20 minutes late for a meeting! Slowly slowly.

For me, the most important ritual has always been my morning toast and coffee and a silly novel. It has always set me up for a better, calmer day. I have fallen off of this ritual this summer—not the toast and coffee … never the toast and coffee! I have eaten toast and coffee for breakfast for a decade, and never intend to stop. But I have stopped reading. I either watch YouTube videos with my breakfast, or jump right into some sort of work because I feel behind and anxious.

So, I’m going to start that small, that simple. A book with my breakfast. No more ambition that that. But I need your book recommendations! I especially love British murder mysteries, political thrillers, smart queer romance, novels that are page turners but not brutal or about trauma, and not too experimental in the writing. Fiction lite1 is what I’m looking for, but smart fiction lite that is well-written. I realize this is a tall order, which may be why I feel like I’ve run out of ideas! I would very much appreciate any recommendations!

What do you do to restart your comforting rituals and regulating routines when things have gotten thrown off? What regrounds you into pleasure, slowness, and a bit of ease?

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I’ve been talking about Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice now for a year, ever since KR, Meg, and I launched this course for the first time last autumn—it is the course offering I am most deeply proud of, and a collaboration that has literally changed my life. But in true neuroqueer fashion, this course is ever-evolving—we’ve even had a number people take it twice!

In this post I’m collaborating with some past neuroqueerdos to let you know a bit about what you can expect in this autumn’s session!

Neuroqueering and Being Neuroqueer

But first, just a bit of information about the course, which was inspired by this concept from Dr. Nick Walker:

Neuroqueer (v): the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously

• Walker, Nick Dr., ‘Neuroqueer: An Introduction’ (2021)

Sometimes people wonder if they can join the course if they don’t identify as queer, or even if they don’t identify as neurodivergent, and the answer is another quote from Nick Walker: “In you neuroqueer [verb], you are neuroqueer [adjective].”

Which is to say: we welcome anyone who is interested in defying, distrupting, and liberating themselves from the oppressive constraints of neuronormativity and heteronormativity!

The Sessions (always a work in progress!)

We are always iterating, and we’re still in the process of finalizing this autumn’s course, but this is a rough breakdown of the sessions as of right now:

🌀 Introduction to Neuroqueering & Creative Practice (KR, Meg & Marta)

🌀 Connection, Collaboration & Community (KR, Marta, Meg)

🌀 Introducing your Field Guide to Neuroqueering (Meg)

🌀 Mise en Place (Marta)

🌀 Do it on Purpose: Neuroqueering Language & Style (KR)

🌀 Neuroqueering Shame in Our Creative Lives (Marta)

🌀 Monsters, Magic and Machines: When truth is stranger than fiction (KR)

🌀 Unmasking Your Monster (Meg)

🌀 “Meander, Spiral, Explode”: Neuroqueering Narrative Structure (KR)

🌀 Creating in Spiral Time (Marta)

🌀 Returning to our Field Guides to Neuroqueering (Meg)

🌀 Show & Share (KR, Marta, Meg)

Creative Care Invitations

One of the biggest evolutions in this course over the past year is the inclusion of creative care invitations, a concept Meg has been exploring and developing in her own work and especially in this course. Creative care invitations really bring to life in hands-on, creative ways the ideas each of us shares in our sessions. They create praxis. Before I experienced creative care myself in the context of neuroqueer community, I couldn’t have imagined how transformative it would be, but I am now an evangelist. Meg’s creative care invitations have sparked a renaissance in my own creative practice, reminding me of the deeply satisfying and healing nature of *making* for its own sake.

For many of the neuroqueerdos as well, the praxis offered by NQYCP sparked “more joy in creating again, and doing it on my terms…”

…the combination of inputs from all three of you was the magic mix for me. reconnected with creating for the sake of creating and the joy in it, allowing myself to "abandon" stuff if i don’t have fun with, picking it up later again if i feel like it, trusting myself more that whatever i create is art and doesn’t have to be a masterpiece every single time (thinking about Meg's "make it as ugly as you can" or something like that).”

~Anon

Neuroqueering Space and Access

NQYCP is unlike most other courses you might have participated in. We are not only interested in helping you neuroqueer your creative practice, but we are also actively trying to neuroqueer the course itself by making it more and more accessible in every way possible.

Neuroqueering Beyond Your Creative Practice

Once you begin “unmasking your monster” in your creative life, it’s pretty hard to contain! Separating our creative lives from our “real” lives is such a false dichotomy, of course; we are whole people, and neuroqueering our creative practices necessarily entails neuroqueering our whole lives.

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If you have any questions at all about the Neuroqueering course, please either put them in the comments below or hit reply to this email. There will be a number of free and reduced price tickets available, which will be announced first to the interest list. We would also love to see you at our FREE taster session on 18 August (recording to follow if you can’t be there live).

Having a new special interest is a lot like a love affair.

I don’t mean a casual, oh-this-is-kind-of-interesting-I-might-watch-a-few-YouTube-videos-in-my-spare time sort of special interest. That’s perhaps more like making a new acquaintance who seems really interesting and you hope might become a friend.

I’m talking about an obsessive, the-rest-of-my-life-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket-and-I’m-being-completely-irresponsible-but-I-just-don’t-care sort of special interest. All I want is to be with my beloved, and the real world be damned.

This is how it has been for me this spring and summer with sewing and crochet. And while the acquaintance-who-might-become-a-friend sort of special interest may be a dime a dozen, I feel like this sort of epic love affair of a special interest doesn’t come along every day. How often in a lifetime do we get to feel like that? Often in the past I would have resisted the temptation, feeling virtuous and responsible, or I would have let myself succumb to shame and broken up with my beloved before things got too deep.

But in this phase of my life, at least, I’m throwing caution to the wind. None of us knows how much longer we have, but I’m a lot older than most of you (I turn 60 next month!) and so I mostly likely have less time left. To me, this doesn’t feel like a morbid thought at all. It’s actually really comforting—the constraints of age, like so many constraints in art, can be very freeing.

This doesn’t mean that my new love affair has been without its doubts and anxieties. As with any love affair, it’s impossible (for me at least) to become completely unaware of the routines and responsibilities I am chucking out the window in favor of my new beloved. My house is a pig stye, and while I generally don’t aspire to a high level of tidiness and cleanliness, when it gets this bad it does start to overstimulate my nervous system, and even send me into shame spirals. And just in general, the feeling that I’m not doing what I’m “supposed” to be doing, and that I’m being irresponsible, has felt sort of like an irritating swarm of gnats I can’t swat away fast enough. The miserable heat we’ve been experiencing this summer in Philadelphia hasn’t helped.

Another casualty, as anyone who is paying attention to my recent publication schedule will have notice is writing. Until just the past few days, the well had run completely dry, and as a consequence, I’ve been away from The Spiral Lab for far too long. Because this newsletter is a significant part of my bread and butter, my inability to write anything for many weeks now has caused me considerable anxiety. I have pondered how I can fit my new passion into what I write about here, but I have worried that people who have come to expect a certain sort of content from me will be at best uninterested, and at worse, will actively dislike my new beloved.

Of course, everything is connected. One of the beauties of fiber arts is that the doing of them affords long stretches of time and meditative silence to ponder and dream and begin to see broader webs of interconnections. I have begun to see some clear connections to neuroqueerness, and, doubts and anxieties aside, I would now like to suggest that perhaps you might want to consider learning to sew!

Why?

Learning to Sew is Sensory Freedom.

I first started sewing with one specific goal in mind: I wanted to upcycle some of my old clothes to fit me better as my body size and shape has been changing. I didn’t want to, nor could I afford, to buy a bunch of new clothes that might not fit as my body continues to fluctuate (as it always does). I had some stretch pants that were a bit too tight around the waistband, and some t-shirts and dresses that were just a bit snug. So I set about learning how to make them work.

One t-shirt in particular, a reproduction of the cover of the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, had always been a bit small. I have a LOT of very specific sensory needs when it comes to clothes, and t-shirts specifically can be really tricky. If they are too tight, and especially if they are too short and ride up my belly, I Can. Not. Stand. It. But also, if they are too large and floppy, that is also intolerable. So I determined to learn how to size up a t-shirt, and along the way, I decided to combine it with a dress that I thought was really beautiful but that had several sensory problems of its own: the band around the middle was too tight (I can’t stand anything tight around my middle, more on that later), and the fabric was very synthetic, which felt ok on the skirt part but I really didn’t like against the skin of my torso. So I used part of the decorative trim from the dress to enlarge the t-shirt, and then added the skirt to the bottom so the t-shirt never rides up. This was my very first project, and it has combined two garments I loved but never wore, into one that I love and wear all the time.

I was hooked, and wanted to make more. I had started following two sewists on YouTube, Carly from Australia and Scarlett from Liverpool, and just loved their colorful, maximalist patchworked clothing. But Carly and Scarlett are both cool, sparkly young women, whereas I often feel dowdy and middle-aged. When I confessed to my friends on DDS my anxiety that the sort of garments Carly and Scarlett make would be ridiculous and age-inappropriate, they gave me exactly the sort of advice I would normally have given myself, if I weren’t, you know, my Self. The sort of advice I would give anyone else: WHO CARES?? They not only encouraged me to make myself something whimsical and girly (more on that later too), but basically demanded it.

In the spirit of both Carly and Scarlett, who use almost exclusively scrap and second-hand fabric, I sorted through Joel’s closet and absconded (with his permission of course) with all of the button down shirts he never wears. I didn’t feel up to making a bodice on my own yet, but I altered one of his shirts to fit me better, and then used the other shirts, plus some old sheets and pillow cases, to make a flowy twirly dress that I absolutely LOVE. It is a sensory dream and I think it is so pretty. And it cost $0.

Learning to Sew Can Also Offer Freedom of Gender Expression.

Recently, I made one of my rare appearances on Instagram and saw this story from my friend Price:

My first thought, probably not entirely accurate but increasingly so, was “I could make that.” Certainly the flowy pants wouldn’t be too hard, especially if they don’t have a zipper fly (I think they might have, but I can’t tell for sure). This photo and Devon’s comments about clothing and gender dysphoria set me down an entirely new rabbit hole of contemplation.

For many of us, gender, style, and sensory needs are all very much connected. Sometimes our preferred gender expression in clothing seems not possible on account of our extreme sensory sensitivities. For example, I have long thought that if I didn’t have any sensory issues with clothing (can you imagine??), I would actually prefer a far more masc/androgynous style: fitted button down shirts, cropped blazers, narrow pants, big clunky boots. Alas, these sorts of clothes are simply not possible for me to wear for more than a few miserable hours. Instead I have always worn—long before I really understood why—a uniform of low-waisted stretch pants with really wide loose elastic, empire-waisted dresses, cardigan sweaters, and Birkenstocks or Dansco clogs that can easily be slipped on and off.

It’s not exactly that I dislike this uniform, even aesthetically—I very much enjoy flowy pretty dresses. But this has literally been all I wear, for decades, and it has always felt like it traps me in a very specific, and not entirely correct, gender expression. I don’t feel that femmy all the time, and I have long wished there were a way for me to mix up my wardrobe’s gender-expression without creating a sensory nightmare.

To be clear, this is more of a wish, not a need. I don’t experience gender dysphoria about my clothes or my body. But I definitely would feel more deeply like myself if I had a broader range of gender expression in my clothing.

Enter my sewing passion: one of the main things that learning to sew my own clothes has done is to teach me so much more about the actual shape of my body, and why certain cuts of clothing feel good and others feel intolerable.

For example, I have never been able to tolerate clothing that in any way cynches around my waist. High waisted pants, tights, skirts, dresses with a waist band or belt—all out. Or so I thought. But what I have come to understand is that these sorts of off-the-rack, waist-cynching garments aren’t actually coming to my natural waist, because my natural waist is exceptionally high. It is literally just under my rib cage, not across my belly-button as I had always thought (I literally shudder when I think of something wrapping around my torso at my belly-button). Off-the-rack clothing of these types is never going to work on my body, given my sensory sensitivities.

But now I understand where my natural waist is and where I can tolerate things being a bit more fitted. I also have come to understand that self-drafting patterns, or manipulating commercial patterns, is not the impossibly complicated realm of advanced sewists. This isn’t my first foray into sewing and other fabric arts—decades ago I made halloween costumes for my kids, and a few knitted sweaters—but it is my first effort with the assistance of a wealth of YouTube sewing channels and tutorials. As is true with almost any niche, I think, there are so many sewists on YouTube, making amazing and accessible content. In the course of just a few months, I now have the understanding and confidence to self-draft and alter patterns and clothing myself. It’s a lot of trial and error, but part of the fun is that mistakes no longer feel like a frustrating set-back, but rather an aha! moment and learning opportunity. My seam ripper is one of my favorite tools, and I actually find unpicking seams very meditative.

More and more I am coming to understand that the gender expression I would like to convey through my clothes is not either-or, or even androgynous, but rather a whimsical combination of traditionally gendered clothing. I am dreaming up mens-wear shaped bodices with big flowy skirts underneath. I have found indie pattern-makers coming up with ingenious solutions to the discomfort for many of us of traditional trousers—such as these clever Magic Pants created by the pattern-maker and sewist Ann Tilley, which have a very clever construction that looks fitted around the waist, but is really mostly fitted around the hips (heaven!) I haven’t made them yet, but I am excited to.

Learning to Sew Can Create More Size Inclusivity.

As I mentioned earlier, the reason I began sewing again this spring is because I had gained weight but couldn’t—and didn’t want to—buy all new clothing. My original idea was that I would just upcycle the clothing I have to make it fit better. But as I have been diving deeper and deeper into the community of sewists and indie pattern makers on YouTube, I have discovered that many of them are committed to size inclusivity. Unlike many mainstream pattern makers (if any remain after private equity has driven them out of business, another story entirely), many indie pattern makers have a much wider range of sizes, and they truly size them up, rather than just making a size 2 exponentially bigger in all directions, which is not how human bodies get bigger. Other patterns, such as Anne Tilly’s magic pants, very cleverly build size-adjustability into one garment. Another example of this is the split-side skirt (such as the Coquelicot Skirt pattern from Wildflower Design) which can be adjusted as the size of your body changes, looks so comfy and promising, The sewist Charlie Nebe, who has a YouTube channel called The Stitchery (and who happens to be autistic) has a whole video about “The Quiet History of Adjustable Clothing [from a non-historian].” I haven’t made a split-side skirt either yet, but hope to soon.

But Isn’t This All Really Expensive?

Sewing can definitely be very expensive, certainly far more expensive than fast fashion. The start-up costs, especially, are not insubstantial. While I am becoming more and more intrigued with hand-stitching, if you actually want to make your own clothing, you probably do need a sewing machine. I already had one, which made it possible for me to get back to sewing on an extreme budget. But I think it’s not too difficult to find cheap or even free used sewing machines on places like Facebook Marketplace and Freecycle. Other than that, you absolutely need a decent steam iron, a good pair of fabric scissors, and some straight pins. You can definitely get started with just that.

And yes, fabric can be *very* expensive, but as I mentioned earlier, most of my favorite sewists primarily get their fabric from thrift stores, and by repurposing fabric from used clothing, sheets, table cloths, duvet covers, tea towels, and the like. There are also several online thrift fabric stores. Patchwork fabrications, such as those used often by Carly in Australia and Scarlett in the UK, mean that literally no scrap ever need go to waste, and creating your own fabric can become part of the artistic expression of making your own clothing.

And I Haven’t Even Mentioned Crochet Yet!

and I decided to teach ourselves to crochet, at the same time but independently of one another. Our text messages have gone from Very Intellectual Discourse About Neurodivergence and Disability to photos of our latest crochet creations and links to good explainer videos. Jesse is making all sorts of gorgeous plants and flowers and is crocheting their way into hyperbolic space … as for me, having gained the confidence to self-draft patterns (but still lacking the artistic genius that is Jesse Meadows), I am crocheting a sweater for myself out of scrap and stash yarn, some of which I have been carrying around, head hung in shame, for years.

Next week, I will show you more of my crochet creations, including watermelon slice key chains that I intend to offer for free in my Little Free Library, along with zines and books, as part of the slow, soft, squishy launch of DDS Press!

In the meantime I would LOVE if you left me some comments!

For most of my life I dreamed of Virginia Woolf’s proverbial room of my own. As a homemaker and mom raising a family in a small Philadelphia rowhouse, having a whole room to myself, where I was only responsible to myself, and where I could close the door on the world... that felt like both an unattainable dream and also *necessary.*

It took me a very convoluted, roundabout journey (including my kids growing up, a divorce/remarriage, and unmasking as neuroqueer), but I I now have way more space for myself than I could ever have imagined. It is a blessing I do not take lightly.

At the same time, the curious truth is that despite all my space in which to create, you can find me 90% of my waking hours in two places: a day bed in my studio and on the couch in my living room.

This is because for a whole variety of reasons, I spend most of my time reclining.

I would set up my creative spaces aspirationally—the way I thought I *should* use all this room now that I’m an empty-nester. This has meant lots of desks for working at, and upright chairs for sitting in. I spent lots of time setting up these spaces, but then ... the surfaces became dumping grounds, the chairs covered in clothes and laundry .... and I would feel ashamed.

Ashamed that I wasn’t using all this space I had always dreamed of, ashamed that there were whole rooms I never worked in because there was nowhere to lie down.

Finally, I took my own Divergent Design advice and stopped designing aspirationally for how I think I *should* use my space. Instead I started designing for how I actually *do* use my space. Right here, right now.

In my studio, I moved out a huge shelf and installed a daybed. I painted that end of my bright green room a lighter blue with leftover paint from another project, so that I wouldn’t feel like I was in front of a green screen when I zoomed from my daybed (as I frequently do). Then I rearranged things some more and moved out my desk entirely (it’s now my sewing table, though I have to admit, I am gravitating toward hand sewing because …. yup, I can do it lying down!).

I pulled together a little creative corner where most of the things I need to make stuff are all within arm’s reach of where I lay on my daybed.

And suddenly, I use my studio again!

Next up is doing something similar in the living room, where I often spend a lot of time on the couch. My couch backs up onto a bookshelf, and that bookshelf is now mostly a dumping ground of random “maker stuff” littering the shelves in front of the books.

It works ok, but I think I could make it a bit more organized, so that the materials I use most down here on the couch—knitting, hand sewing, and doodling supplies (for keeping my hands busy while watching TV—are more accessible.

Do you have space and organizational barriers keeping you from doing the things you love?

Do you love to bake but your baking supplies are so disorganized it’s overwhelming to get started? (Ask me how I know....)

Do you love expressing yourself through fashion, but your closet is such an overwhelming mess that you end up just wearing the same things over and over?

Does shame about these messes and overwhelm make you feel defeated before you even begin to figure out a design that might actually work for you?

I have two upcoming offerings that I think will really help.

The first is my workshop on Neuroqueering Shame in our Creative Lives.

Saturday, July 5th, 12-2 pm EDT; £15 GBP (about $20 USD)

This is not specifically about designing creative spaces, but it is a deep dive into the political aspects of shame in neurodivergent lives, and how that shame creates all sorts of dysfunction. Shame is a powerful political tool used in almost every area of our lives—our families, our schools, our workplaces, even our identities—to wrench us into conformity with the values of industrial-colonial time and compulsory executive functioning. In this workshop, we will look at the ways shame disables us for deviating from neurotypical expectations and norms, and the ways it creates dysfunction in our creative practices. Through creative care invitations, we will examine some of the ways shame shows up and explore how we can disrupt and even transform it, so that it becomes less and less debilitating.The second is a course called

The other is called One Small Space.

Mondays class July 21st & 28th, Aug 11th & 18th, 1-3pm EDt, Sundays body doubling August 3rd & 24th, 11-3pm EDT; £75 GBP (about $100 USD), payment plans and limited free tickets available.

Monday classes including recordings so you can work at your own pace even if you are not able to attend live.

In this four week course, we will explore what space you really need to have a satisfying creative life—or even just a functional home life—and then design and execute the smallest space possible to make that happen. Something you can actually ideate, design, and complete in our time together.

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BJ (he/they) is an independent journalist and neuroqueer novelist exploring the tangled hedges of disability and desire through anarchist animism at Revel*ution RIP. Their monthly astromagic card reading is free, and all subscription revenue goes to their local queer community kitchen.

He is also the founder of Well Beings News, a queer trans health and wellness newsletter for practitioners, providers and professionals who care. BJ reports on the latest research, interviews experts, and offers deep dives into the health news and politics facing LGBTQ+ people, delivered three times a week for premium subscribers, and six times a month for everyone.

I hope you’ll show BJ some love in the comments!

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Why I Don't Say "Neurotypical"

I'm not refusing to ever say the word again. I've used it plenty in the past. But if you hear me say it, know for certain that I am doing so with air quotes. Because…

Neurotypical Doesn't Exist

Coined by Kassiane Asasumasu, the term "neurodivergent" originated as a self-descriptor, one the Hapa and Asian-American autistic activist uses to describe people "whose neurocognitive functioning diverges from dominant societal norms in multiple ways" or in other words, people who cannot, for one reason or another, comfortably perform neurotypicality.

In an essay posted to Instagram titled, "Not Your Neurodivergent," Swazi and Zulu Indigenous ancestral and traditional healer Thokoza Ndondlo writes:

I resent anyone placing a Global North label (created to oppose the colonial pathology paradigm white people created) on me. I am an initiated healer. I am not your neurodivergent. I do not diverge from your norms — from any norms set by the white colonial world.

For months now, since I started reading Dr. Devon Price's book Unmasking Autism, I have been on a bit of a tear about the word "neurotypical" and have been shouting from the proverbial rooftops that, "there is no such thing as a neurotypical person."

As Dr. Price describes it, Australian sociologist Judy Singer — who originally coined the term neurodiversity — was adamant in her belief that neurotypicality should be regarded similarly to heteronormativity: as a form of violent oppression applied via a set of ideals and norms to which no one can fully conform all of the time.

As Singer saw it, every human person alive experiences neurodivergent states of being at some point during their time here on earth. These include diagnostic labels like autism and ADHD, medical conditions like traumatic brain injury, and life experiences like grief that change how we interact with the world around us.

Some of us experience these states more frequently than others. Some of us embrace these states, and others avoid them. Some of us are better at avoiding them than others. But are any of us ever fully the people that empire tells us we must be?

For Arié Moyal, a disabled, Jewish Amazigh and Arab activist, acceptance of the social order represented by the concept of "a neurotypical person" is capitulation to the settler colonial project that severs us from the land and from each other.

In the US, there is no federal standard for bereavement leave. The average — for a close family death, such as the death of a child — is 3 to 5 days. One week or less.

If your child is shot and killed at school, you will be lucky to be allowed one week off from work before your job is in jeopardy. And if you grieve a lost loved one for longer than a year, you have a mental illness. These are the standards we are allowing to define typicality, and what constitutes divergence from the normal.

A good friend and past lover of mine died by suicide in May of 2024. I watch as his widow struggles every day to make a life that’s worth living for herself and for her child. I could not imagine telling her that there is something chemically wrong with her brain because she still mourns out loud and in public, or at least out loud and on social media.

What does it say about the “healing” professions that so many prioritize you being a productive laborer over anything else?

Neuroqueering the Neuronormative

I have been taking a class these last several weeks called Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice with KR Moorehead, Marta Rose, and Meg Max, rooted in an understanding of neurodiversity as presented by Dr. Nick Walker in her work on neuroqueerness. It was through Dr. Walker's work that I have been able to give voice to the ways that words like "neurodivergent" and "nonbinary" have made me feel uncomfortable.

Dr. Walker defines neuroqueer through an active verb: "neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously."

Both the concepts of "neurodivergence" and "nonbinary" as they are commonly used today begin from an implicit acceptance of settler colonial standards. Do we "diverge" from the utterly unattainable ideal of neuroconformity, and from the sex-gender binary? Or do neuronormativity and cisnormativity diverge from actual, embodied physical reality?

Tyson Yunkaporta writes about this particular problem, the struggle of having to use words that invoke the very thing from which they are trying to differentiate, about the way that the word “nonlinear” prompts us to imagine the line. In Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Yunkaporta writes:

We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name.

Multiplicity and diversity, in gender and neurology, is just how the world is. If there is no true neurotypicality, if there is no true gender binary, if we can acknowledge that these things are lies constructed through and for settler colonial violence, what value do their names have? What does a word like "nonbinary" illuminate and what does it obfuscate?

Genderqueer as an identity is so important to me, because like neuroqueer, it reminds me that having an identity which opposes settler colonial norms is a constant act of rebellion, and one that doesn't just happen. It’s one that I need to live out loud on purpose every day.

Neuroqueer as a Vision for the Future

In a recent session of Neuroqueering class with Marta, on the subject of mise en place, we contemplated momentarily the concept of vision. In A Native American Perspective on Liberation, Vine Deloria Jr. wrote:

An old Indian saying captures the radical difference between Indians and Western peoples quite adequately. The white man, Indians maintain, has ideas; Indians have visions. Ideas have a single dimension and require a chain of connected ideas to make sense.... The vision, on the other hand, presents a whole picture of experience and has central meaning that stands on its own feet as an independent revelation.

The class has discussed several characteristics commonly associated with the kinds of people who are labeled or self-identify as "neurodivergent" and the ones that have stood out the most for me are this propensity for vision, our social motivation, and a spiral, orbital experience of our own movement through time.

I find these pathologized traits fascinating, because from my perspective, they are all perfectly natural, evolutionarily-beneficial ways that most humans have historically understood the world we live in.

In his article, "Being Socially Motivated is Not a Disorder," Dr. Price writes:

People with ADHD are highly socially motivated, but they live in a world where independence is prioritized.

It’s odd that having a strong social motivation is considered a pathology at all, when we consider that nearly all of us are social animals. The majority of humans throughout history have lived, worked, cooked, cleaned, gathered resources, and played together, feeding off of one another’s energy and encouragement, the natural movements of their lives lending structure to each other’s days.

Being observed makes all human beings more productive, and collaborating on a task improves focus, motivation, and performance for nearly everyone. When people feel that they are a valued member of a team, they do more and actually enjoy their efforts, plus they’re just happier in general, because of the company; when we toil alone, we often feel work is meaningless. And since our lives as humans center around our relationships, a life of nothing but isolated work is a meaningless one in a very real way.

And yet a life of nothing but isolated, meaningless work is exactly the world that powerful people want us living.

Who does it benefit to convince us that being motivated by social connection is some kind of pathology? Who wins when we punish vision and enforce a strictly linear understanding of time? (Hint: it's not you.)

And this brings me to a question I have been asking myself since fully embracing descriptors like neuroqueer instead of neurodivergent, or genderqueer instead of nonbinary: who am I being me for?

Visibility, Legibility, Inclusion: who belongs?

It's tempting to say that I am living my truth just for me, that being genderqueer and neuroqueer and loud and proud about it is an act of individual identity politics. I'm no more immune to the propaganda of the rugged individualist than you are. On the other hand, I'm sure many bigots would accuse me of "attention seeking" because I choose these words.

If we are social animals, motivated by the meaning-making that exists between us... who isn't attention seeking? And if you aren't... why not? Yeah, actually. I am seeking attention.

But whose attention? Where am I choosing to be more visible to systems of oppression and where am I seeking to be seen by people who are also living their lives as an act of queering the world?

I want colonialism to choke on my queerness.

Lately I've been contemplating my visibility as a queer trans person, as I have been coming to terms with the fact that I will maybe never be able to legally change my name and gender marker on my ID. I've been thinking about X gender markers and "diversity, equity, and inclusion" projects and the ways that we collectively keep seeking to be seen by systems made explicitly to exclude people like us.

There is a sense of safety that I think could come from having a legal name and gender that doesn't immediately “out” me as nonconforming to anyone who sees it.

Similarly, there is a sense of support that I think could come from having an official autism diagnosis to go along with my official ADHD stamp. (My therapist tells me, "I spoke with a diagnostic specialist, and they don't think they will be able to tell the difference between you being autistic and you being a gringo." And I laugh, and laugh, and laugh.)

I am quite confident that there are areas of my life that would be easier if I had the limited acceptance and legitimacy the state could provide. And, also, I don't want my gender (or my neurotype) to be legible to white supremacist settler colonialism. I have a vision for my queer existence in a queer world and it is not one where I somehow manage to keep surviving under the boot.

"Please do not perceive me" memes get a laugh out of me. There are absolutely days when I just want to disappear. But ultimately, I don't want my queerness to be unperceived. I want colonialism to fucking choke on just how incomprehensibly queer I am.

Can You See the Future?

Visions are fucking dangerous to settler colonialism. Ideas? I don't know. There is a reason that people call Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower "visionary" and claim for her the gift of prophecy. She didn't just have ideas about the world and what was happening in it. She had vision. Sometimes, the identities I embody in opposition to white supremacy feel like a vision of a world that could be.

I often think and journal about how much I love the visioning part of a project. I absolutely adore that moment where a big picture reveals itself all at once and all sorts of smaller parts click into place. Visioning has always come to me with quite a bit of ease. Making vision reality, communicating vision is my hardest work.

And I think it has been so hard because vision requires somatic embodiment to be made real. To bring vision to life requires a grounded, supported body that exists in relationship with the land it lives on. Without this, I have experienced vision as incredibly destabilizing.

You can't lay a vision out in a straight line of clearly connected ideas. Vision spirals like the trunks and branches of trees, like the striation of bones, growing through time, gravity pushing and pulling us as the earth rotates on its axis and orbits the sun. How can we make sense of the connected planets and constellations of vision if they have nowhere to rest inside a felt presence?

They say that autistic people are especially good at pattern recognition. They say we were shamans once. I'm not sure there's a point in quibbling over the difference. The word you're looking for here is vision. Vision is where prophecy and pattern recognition meet inside a living, breathing, eating, shitting, fucking animal body.

The revolution needs visionaries. Not just people who can experience the vision, but those who have the ability — or at least the will — to bring vision alive in the manifest world.

So I will not be working to make myself more legible to cishet whiteness, more understandable to settler colonialism. I will be reveling and keening in the vastness that is queer, and doing everything I can to bring visions of that embodied queerness to life.

I hope you’ll join me.

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Joel is home from the hospital, just one day post surgery, and we are so relieved. We’ve had some terrible bad luck with post-surgical complications in the past, so we had geared ourselves up for more of the same, but it seems third time’s the charm. The surgery went well and Joel is resting comfortably.

Because I was expecting the worst, I had lined up some guest posts for the next few weeks, and while I probably could keep up my regular schedule of posting now that we are looking at a complication-free (knock wood) recovery, I’m not going to cancel the guest posts because they are so good! I’m very excited to expand the voices you hear on The Spiral Lab, and to offer some of my brilliant DDS colleagues an opportunity to share their writing with you. So stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, I wanted to share about the courses and workshops I’m facilitating and co-facilitating in the rest of 2025. I hope you will consider joining us for some or all of them—I’m very excited about these offerings and I’d love to hang out and explore with you! We have tried to keep the prices very accessible (while also paying me a living wage), but if they are still too steep, contact my colleague (and producer) KR Moorhead, krmoorhead.lit@gmail.com, about the waitlist for pay-what-you-can tickets.

Spiral Time, Composting Slime, Starting… (on a dime?)

By popular request, I am re-running my Creating in Spiral Time and Neuroqueering Shame (i.e. composting slime) workshops, plus I’m offering a third one called Mise en Place: When Getting Started is the Hardest Part (starting on a dime?).1

Each course consists of one 2-hour session, plus a recording if you can’t attend live.

Tickets are on sale now! Tickets for one course are £15 GBP (about $20 USD); or book all three together for £40 GBP (a £5 discount). You can also pay two monthly instalments of £20.

There are a limited number of free places available for those on low or no income. Please only select this option if you are unable to afford the General Admission cost.

Neuroqueering Shame in our Creative Lives

Saturday, July 5th, 12-2 pm EDT (5-7 pm BST) via Zoom

Shame is a powerful political tool used in almost every area of our lives—our families, our schools, our workplaces, even our identities—to wrench us into conformity with the values of industrial-colonial time and compulsory executive functioning. In this workshop, we will look at the ways shame disables us for deviating from neurotypical expectations and norms, and the ways it creates dysfunction in our creative practices. Through creative care invitations, we will examine some of the ways shame shows up and explore how we can disrupt and even transform it, so that it becomes less and less debilitating.

Creating in Spiral Time

Saturday, July 19th, 12-2 pm EDT (5-7 pm BST) via Zoom

Neurodivergent people are often plagued by a sense that we have “wasted time” and “fallen behind” our peers in terms of productivity and creative accomplishment. If there is any hope for finding a more enjoyable and generative relationship with time, we need new metaphors that defy the contemporary Western ones that have colonized the world. We will explore alternative metaphors and values of slowness, cyclicality, ritual and rest. Through creative care invitations, we will explore the different shapes time might exist for us, and how we might inhabit time differently.

Mise en Place: When Getting Started is the Hardest Part

Saturday, July 26th, 12-2 pm EDT (5-7 pm BST) via Zoom

​Many of us struggle with getting started, maintaining momentum, and following through with our creative projects and lives, as well as caring for our spaces and supplies. We are often shamed for these struggles, and offered many hacks and systems that seldom last very long, but we seldom are invited to examine the reasons these issues plague us in the first place. Mise en Place, a concept from the culinary world, offers a practice of slowness, and of pleasure in the materiality of our creative projects, and in our creative lives. We will spend time in the session doing the mise en place for a project we are having difficulty starting, or that has stalled out in the middle.

Divergent Design

One Small Space

Designing our homes to accommodate and celebrate our unmasked neurodivergent selves is life changing—but also incredibly daunting. We are often bogged down by shame, limited bandwidth, and financial constraints. It can also be so difficult to know where to get started, to come up with a design that really works, and then actually follow through. In this course, we will tackle so many of those issues by focusing on one small space. Not even, necessarily, a whole room. You might choose the desk where you work or make art, or the bed where you spend most of your days wishing you could do creative work if chronic illness didn’t sap your strength and spoons. You might choose one kitchen cabinet that would make food prep easier if you could just find what you need, or a closet that would make your clothes actually accessible to you. You will be urged—strongly—not to take on too much, so that you can identify some small subset of your needs and get really creative about designing a space you can sustainably maintain. We will examine the ways shame and the “shoulds” of convention interfere with how we imagine and design our spaces; we will share and workshop our design ideas; and we will spend long body doubling sessions actually working together on our spaces.

This course consists of four Monday sessions presented by Marta: Mondays July 21st & 28th, Aug 11th & 18th, 1-3pm EDT via Zoom (10am PDT; 6pm BST); and two longer body-doubling and support sessions on Sundays: Sundays Aug 3rd & 24th, 11-3pm EDT via Zoom (8am PDT; 4pm BST)

Can't attend live? The Monday sessions will be recorded and shared with all ticket holders.

Tickets on sale from June 27! To get updates and reminders make sure you Register Your Interest.​

All Tickets are £75 GBP (about $100) (or three monthly instalments of £25).

There are a limited number of free places available for those on low or no income. Please only select this option if you are unable to afford the General Admission cost.

Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice

After two wildly successful offerings of this life-changing2 course, we are running it again this fall! If you would like a taste of the vibe and the content, we are offering two FREE Taster Sessions take place on July 7th & Aug 19th @ 10 am PDT/ 1 pm EDT/ 6 pm BST via Zoom.

To be the first to hear when discounted Early Bird Tickets go on sale, and to get updates on session descriptions, make sure you Register Your Interest. ​​

This course consists of 12 Weekly Sessions (+ 2 weekly optional drop-in hours), and is co-facilitated by KR Moorhead, Marta Rose (me!) and Meg Max

Neuroqueer (v): the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously Walker, Nick Dr., ‘Neuroqueer: An Introduction’ (2021)

​This course is an introduction to a variety of ‘neuroqueering’ practices, geared towards artists and creatives. As a community, we will deconstruct capitalist/colonialist concepts of time, work, productivity, shame, ‘executive function’, language, grammar and more, while simultaneously constructing new systems, languages, narratives, and ways of being/creating that subvert, defy, disrupt, and liberate us from oppressive social structures.

Session topics are drawn from the facilitators' (evershifting) personal and professional interests and will vary from intake to intake. Sessions we have run in the past cover topics such as: composting shame, executive function vs design thinking, decolonising time & productivity, neuroqueer stylistics, creative lineages, radical memoir, unmasking in creative practice, community building & collaboration.

Discounted Early Bird Tickets will be available for one week for anyone who has registered interest. ​​Four & six-month payment are available for both Early Bird and General Admission Tickets.

Early Bird Tickets: £159

General Admission Tickets: £199

FAQs

Who is this course for?

• Anyone who writes or makes art (or would like to). No previous knowledge or experience required.

Do I need to identify as Neurodivergent or Queer in order to join?

• Nope! “One can neuroqueer, and one can be neuroqueer. A neuroqueer individual is any individual whose identity, selfhood, gender performance, and/or neurocognitive style have in some way been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering, regardless of what gender, sexual orientation, or style of neurocognitive functioning they may have been born with.” (Walker, N.)

How big is the group?​

• We offer a maximum of 100 places - but are aware this is a large group. Each weekly session will be presented to the full group, but attendees will be placed in much breakout groups for discussions, with the option to stay in the main room and quietly reflect/body-double. Additionally, there will be 2 extra one hour drop-in sessions per week, one for discussion, one for body-doubling.​ Attendees are also encouraged to join the NQ Discord for connecting, communicating and creating in community.

Will I be expected to 'produce' anything?

• Although creative, reflective, and generative invitations will be shared, nothing is mandatory or expected and no one will ever be 'called on' or shamed for not engaging with a particular element of the session.

Will I be expected to share my creative work?

• Although there will be opportunities to share work, this is not expected or required, or even necessarily encouraged except in specific spaces.

Will I be expected to be on camera or speak on the mic?

• Members are free to engage on camera/mic or 'lurk' off camera as they feel, in any given session. No one will ever be put on the spot or asked to speak or engage unless they have volunteered.

What is included in the ticket price?

• Access to twelve live, structured sessions via Zoom, which will consist of discussions, presentations, guided reflection, writing invitations, and art-making.

• Access to two, weekly, optional drop-in hours: one hosted by a facilitator which serves as a small group space in which to discuss, reflect, and question that week's topic, and one unhosted session for quiet body-doubling.

• Access to all session recordings, invitations, & slides, as well as relevant further reading materials.

• Access to a private online group where all materials will be hosted and group members are able to interact with each other and the facilitators throughout the course and in perpetuity.

• Access to the Neuroqueerdos Discord server - an active community space made up of attendees of previous NQYCP intakes.

• Free and continuous access to all of KR Moorhead's Writing Sprint sessions (Mondays 5-6pm & Thursdays 10-11am GMT) from the start of the course.

Adina Docter, a neuroqueer somatic practitioner & trauma therapist, is one of the founding members of Divergent Design Studios and has been integral to building the neuroqueer culture that holds our community. She hosts Peer Support once each week and offers an Authentic Movement workshop once each month. She also offers individual and group sessions in a variety of flexible modalities interpreted for each client, including The MELT Method, Authentic Movement, Continuum-based inquiry, Brainspotting, and more. All the deets on her website, Adina Docter Somatics.

Adina is organizing an upcoming free online event featuring Dr. Nick Walker1 entitled Neuroqueering Somatics: A conversation at the intersection of neurodivergence and somatic practice. This 90-minute conversation and Q&A are FREE and open to the public. Register here.

Katy Higgins Lee2 will interview Dr. Nick Walker, a leading thinker on the neurodiversity paradigm, to discuss the creative possibilities that emerge when we practice neuroqueering somatics. The concept of neuroqueering was coined by Dr. Walker and refers to a practice of intentionally subverting normativity and embracing neurocognitive diversity. This conversation aims to explore the creative possibilities that emerge when we can subvert normative paradigms and neuroqueer our practices—not just as an afterthought but as a central, generative framework.

Adina Docter: Neuroqueer Somanaut

I recently had a delightful conversation with Adina. In DDS Peer Support, one of our guiding values is that "there is a weekly topic that serves as a starting point for shares. From there, we spiral out, and the conversation evolves naturally. Tangents and sidetracks are welcome and encouraged."

This conversation is very much in that spirit! It is also quite heavily edited, with Adina's permission.

I began by asking Adina about her work and what somatics means to her.

ADINA: Somatics is the study of the bodymind. In somatic practice, we create generative spaces where we explore perception, human embodiment, and consciousness. Healing and liberation can ensue!

It’s important to neuroqueer all of this. For example, human embodiment must be queered so that people don't think they have to be "in their bodies" in any particular way.

I really see myself as an explorer, and for me, somatics is about asking questions. I kind of live by Richard Feynman's quote, "I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."

I have transformed my body, psyche, and mind through various practices over the course of several decades. But the essence of it has been asking questions and not needing fixity or rigid rules. I do sometimes use [various somatic] methods [and modalities]. Still, it's always a portal to exploration and listening to myself.

And that's what I aim to deliver in my work with others: to give them the tools to begin listening to their own bodies and psyches so that they can create their own ways of working with and being with themselves. I spent a lifetime unlocking myself. I want to help others do the same.

MARTA: When you said bodymind, I've started using that term as well because I think it's such a false dichotomy, the body, and the mind—not just in sort of philosophical or theoretical terms, but literally: our minds are our body.

ADINA: Exactly! There is no separation. And so much of somatic practice is about helping people to come out of that trance [of separation] and into an understanding that everything is connected. For example, you can't separate the brain from the nervous system that innervates the entire body; it's all one thing. And, energetically, we are connected to everything—to the earth, to the sky, to all living things … we're connected to each other; we're connected to nature. It's just that we're in a kind of cultural trance that makes us think we're separate and disconnected.

ADINA: Do you have something else? 'Cause I'm about to spiral.

MARTA: No, no, please spiral!

ADINA: Okay. So, Divergent Design Studios is also a generative space. Being in DDS has been a process of unlearning and being with myself as I actually am, without shame. Being in DDS & other neurodivergent spaces has also allowed me to iterate, making up processes and practices that work for me and my community.

In a way, the generative container of DDS becomes a witness, allowing us to see ourselves outside the neurotypical gaze. We begin to take ourselves seriously on our own terms. We can start to figure out what works for us and what doesn't.

For example, I say I'm dyslexic because it is a close metaphor to describe how my brain works. And, as Autistic educator and advocate Kristy Forbes often says, if you spend your whole life wondering if you're autistic, you're probably autistic.

MARTA & ADINA: [knowing laughter]

ADINA: Well, I spent my whole fucking life wondering if I was dyslexic. I reversed letters. I still struggle with spelling. As a child, it took me a long time to learn basic tasks like tying my shoes and distinguishing left from right. The list goes on.

Later, my husband, Lawrence, noticed how this affected my writing because he was always my first editor. He would say, Your ideas are powerful, but your grammar is inverted.

Basically, the way I write is a reflection of how my brain recognizes language. That has caused me a lot of pain and trauma as I tried to navigate the education system because I could not portray my thoughts in writing in the typical way. I also did not know at the time that I had learning disabilities.

There were two times in high school when I was asked to do something creative, and those were the times I completely blossomed.

In English class, I was asked to write a short story, and the teacher didn't give any specific directions; yay! The typical way of learning to write did not work for me. For example, trying to teach me to write, by telling me to: write a topic sentence, and then three more sentences explaining the topic sentence, and then write a concluding sentence. Please don't give me that kind of direction! It's going to give me conniptions and make me think I'm stupid.

So, when I was asked to write a short story with no rules to follow, I did, and it was easy for me to do, except that my teacher didn't believe I had written it! She made me sign an affidavit, swearing that I wrote the story. Once I signed the affidavit, she turned around and asked me to submit my short story to a writing contest!

MARTA: I wanna ask you about that short story. Before you even told me about the story that your teacher didn't believe you wrote—when you were telling me about what Lawrence was saying about your grammar being inverted—it sounds like what some of the most interesting, experimental, avant garde, modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were doing. Like what they were doing is playing around with English syntax. And poets—like that's what poetry is: you play around with the syntax of things.

And the reason that those writers are brilliant is because they were just translating what is in their brain. And you were trying to do the same thing too, but nobody recognized it as avant garde literature. They were recognizing it as broken or a problem. Not following the rules of English grammar. Yeah. So that's just a perfect example of how creativity gets pathologized.

ADINA: So imagine an education system that didn't try to force norms on people, but instead tried to understand their bodyminds and followed the blossoming of those bodyminds.

I'm going on a ramble, but I also gotta show you this. The other creative assignment was in ceramics class. Generally, in that class, I didn't do so well either, lol. I could not learn to make a bowl on a spinning pottery wheel to save my life. (laughs)

But then we got an assignment to interpret a dream. That I could do.

Actually, I queered the assignment. I described a dreamlike feeling I was having instead of a literal dream. The feeling was that there was never enough time.

I just found the ceramic sculpture I made in storage. Your whole thing is Spiral Time and we talked so much about time in DDS, and when I found this, I was like, oh my God, I gotta show it to Marta!

So this is from having to wake up at 6:30 in the morning to catch the bus to get to school, to go from class to class where I was struggling, you know? Even though nobody knew it. So this is my piece.

MARTA: Oh my goodness. I love it. I can't believe that you made that when you were in high school.

ADINA: I made this in fucking high school.

MARTA: You're already anticipating everything!

ADINA: Yeah, like I was so stressed out. I was highly verbal and I quote unquote, did okay. But did my intelligence, did my gifts ever get to blossom? No, they did not.

Dr. Nick Walker has this beautiful way of explaining autism that is backed up now by research, which is that there's a kind of blooming, a neural plenum, a cacophony of sensory experience in the neurodivergent brain. The pruning that might happen in a so-called "neurotypical" brain doesn't happen, or happens differently. But there's just, there is a kind of blooming and buzzing that Dr. Walker describes. A buzzing of neural input. Of sensory informing. And, if that experience is not met with attunement, a great deal of harm can be done to a person who is experiencing such intensity. So I kind of consider it a fascinating inquiry: how to sit with that blooming to be with it so that it can find its own coherence in its own way. This type of embodied, compassionate attunement is particularly essential for neurodivergent individuals.

MARTA: So Lizzy [another dear friend in DDS] suggested I ask you about silence. Just that: ask Adina about silence.

ADINA: I love that Lizzie asked about silence. Dear Liminal Lizzie.

Spending time in silence has been among the most powerful experiences in my life. And it started in Continuum Movement [a somatic modality]. They totally queer the idea of spending time in silence. It's not like a structured Zen Buddhist kind of experience. Instead, in that [Continuum] kind of silence, all you're doing is dropping out of words, and into a wordless, somatic inquiry.

The space is set up with various altars of meaning that set a stage for the experience.

And what happened for me was this whole blooming, like this sensory blooming of all the other realities that had been submerged by only staying within the confines of spoken language. Suddenly, everything felt mysterious in the best way, and so much more coherent. Emilie Contrad, the founder of Continuum used to say spending time in silence was "essential for our sanity." For me, it is a time for getting sane in the deepest, most coherent sense.

The world through silence becomes palpable in a sensory way that feels like home to me. Silence is home for me.

It's the place where everything feels connected, and the spaces in between emerge and blossom. There's a quote by Isak Denison aka Karen Blixen that says, "Who has a tale finer than all of your stories? Silence does."

Our stories are really valuable, but the stories that emerge in silence are dimensional in a way that words can not always reach.

And it's not a rule, like the space that I'm talking about is not a coercive silence—it's a very deeply liberating silence that is about emergence and blossoming and connection.

This brings it back to the somatics of introducing people—ways that work with and for them — to their felt sense, where an unspoken intelligence emerges. If you can get to know it, it becomes a container for your experience. It can hold and support you. You know what you know because you can sense it. It validates you. IYKYK.

The felt sense can become a tableau for our emergence.

Of course, for some people, the felt sense is gonna be something they want to run 5,000 miles away from. And for those people, it's not the way in. So there are other ways. For some, it's going to be entirely energetic… or something else. It's about listening for what works.

For example, sometimes I think we pathologize dissociation. Or, rather, sometimes we misunderstand what is happening and call it dissociation. Everyone processes differently, especially those who are neurodivergent. So it can look like dissociation, when it is something else entirely. For example, some people are more tuned in to the energetic space around them, instead of what is happening "inside" their corporeal bodies. If you thought of us as an energy body, as a larger body, maybe our conscious presence or awareness is located somewhere else.

MARTA: That's so interesting, because I've often described this experience I've had that has been a very "aha" and healing experience, but when I describe it, it sounds a lot like dissociation. It is this sort of becoming a meta version of myself, becoming the omniscient narrator of my life. Where I can look down at myself with kindness and compassion and wisdom. But when I say it out loud, it sounds an awful lot like dissociation.

ADINA: Absolutely. The metaphor I would use, and this comes from my teacher, Susan Harper, is that you're learning to live in a larger body, your perception of your body is larger. Yes. You are just with a more expanded sense of yourself, which is actually more accurate.

Of course, actual dissociation is a trauma response where we leave the corporal sense because we've been thrown out of our bodies. That is a different experience that requires care and tending.

Marta: You've talked a lot about blossoming, but also about containers and witnessing, and I know you do a lot of work with the fascia, which, if I understand it correctly, can be a way into all of that.

ADINA: Yes! I really love to work with the fascia. Fascia is the matrix that holds us together; it is both the space in-between and the container. Most people are unaware of what goes on in the fascial matrix.

I love Joan Avison's description: She describes fascia as a continuous, intelligent, and responsive web of connective tissue that shapes us, senses us, and connects every part of us — from the cellular level to our whole-body movement.

The fascia is a sensory organ; it's threaded through with 250 million sensory nerves. The beautiful thing is that you can work directly with your nervous system through your connective tissue. And, I find that to be incredibly liberating and transformative. And for neurodivergent people who maybe don't like to be told what to do or certainly don't want people's hands on them all the time, they control the pressure and learn to work with themselves. And it's just a very easy, powerful way to self-soothe and to heal.

You can use these soft tools – like the soft balls and rollers we use in the MELT Method—that help you slowly come into yourself in a new way. Using soft tools like we do in MELT has been the single most important practice for me in terms of helping me to be calmer and heal. It's also great for chronic pain. You learn to do bodywork, on yourself.

So why not try to follow bodymind as best as you can by tuning to it and seeing what it needs to do in order to restore and regain homeostasis, which is just coherence.

And to bring it back to Divergent Design Studios, I feel like you've created a space where people can come in and out of, where they can be transparent with where they are. They can be vulnerable and real about exactly where they are. Nobody's gonna shame them. We're gonna actually celebrate them just as they are.

They just come forward as they are, rather than through cultural contrivances. So what we're doing in spaces like DDS is we're finding our own somatic homeostasis.

You can find Adina and her various offerings on her website Adina Docter Somatics, and also on Instagram, @adinadocter. You can also sign up for Adina's newsletter, Somanotes for Somanauts.

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This time I am thinking about it the context of housework specifically, and interior design more broadly. These are not fully fleshed out thoughts, but once they are, I will likely incorporate them into my book project for paid subscribers. Until then, this is free to all!

First, a quick update from me and mine. We are in a sort of holding pattern while we wait for Joel’s next cancer surgery, which is scheduled for 20 June. The last one, at the end of January, was so much more difficult than we anticipated that we are both pretty anxious and on-edge these days, and I am trying very much to tie up some loose ends and create as much spaciousness around that time as I can. Then if things go exceedingly well—bonus!

What this means is that I may be publishing The Spiral Lab a bit more sporadically than I normally would, and I hope you all, and especially my paid subscribers, will think of it as paid family medical leave ;-). I’ll be back at the Divergent Design book project soon, and with renewed enthusiasm, later in the summer!

But in the midst of my more sporadic publishing schedule, I am excited to announce that several incredible writers and artists from DDS are going to be publishing guest posts over the summer, and I think you are going to love them!

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What this also means is that a course I am developing and was planning to offer early this summer will have to be delayed—this is a brand new course called One Small Space, which is all about, well, redesigning—and executing said design—of one small space in your home. The idea came to me when I was teaching the Coming Home to Ourselves course where we were focusing on our studio/creative spaces. For many of us, it turned out that simply redesigning the side table of our bed, or the bookshelf near the couch, was actually what we needed to make our space work for us in our creative lives. For you, your one small space might be a cupboard in the kitchen, or a closet, or a front porch: any small, achievable space that could make a big difference in your life if designed with your real needs and aesthetics in mind.

So, that course is now rescheduled for later in the summer,1 but if you would like to know when tickets go on sale, and any potential discounts etc, please do sign up for the interest list so we don’t lose track of each other!

And now, on to our main event:

Mess is morally neutral… your creative life is not.

I used to ascribe real virtue to having a clean and tidy house, and I felt a lot of shame about not being able to maintain such a house most of the time. I hated when anyone would stop by unannounced, and when I knew someone was coming over, I would spend a LOT of time (and most of my bandwidth) cleaning in anticipation of their visit.

It’s not that I don’t love a neat and tidy home. I do, actually. Very very much, in fact. An aesthetically pleasing home is very soothing to me, and it fills my eyes with beauty.

The only thing is, I like making art better.

When I first moved to this house and went on an exhilarating creative bender, my teenage son was living in the basement, and his space became the social gathering place for his wide network of friends. This meant there were lots of young people in my home day and night. I could tell how many kids were asleep in the basement by the number of bicycles in my living room when I got up in the morning.

Normally I would have put enormous time and bandwidth into keeping up appearances, knowing these kids would always be coming and going (and also knowing that my son is a bit of a neat freak). Initially I felt a LOT of shame about the state of things. But this was the same time that my ideas about shame and its relationship to neurodivergence (as discussed in my Shame and Spiral Time workshops, now available as recordings for $10!), and I was determined to disrupt that shame. I knew it was toxic, and I believed it was possible to overcome it. I basically subjected myself to exposure therapy—I forced myself NOT to clean just for the kids in the basement. Instead I paid attention to how my nervous system was responding to mess, and I determined when I needed to clean based solely on how much the mess was interfering with my ability to keep creating.

I think of this as the tipping point approach to housecleaning.

When mess reaches a tipping point where it is causing me enough anxiety that I can no longer create joyfully, then I pause and clean up.

Not because having messes is shameful. Not because of what someone else might think about my messes. Not because I think any longer that there is something intrinsically virtuous in keeping an “instagram ready” house.

I just clean as an accommodation to the needs of my creative life. I believe that my creativity, and yours too, is a moral good in the world. When we create joyfully, we are contributing to the overall good of the world.

That tipping point will be different for everyone. The degree of mess that you can tolerate is different to mine, and it will change for each of us day-to-day and over time.

This is a photo of my current mess (not counting the dirty dishes I have left all over the house and the huge pile of dirty laundry in the corner). It shows half of what was Joel’s study, which I have now turned into a sewing studio. A very messy sewing studio.

Lately I have become obsessed with sewing. Right now, it’s that sort of all-consuming creative passion that has me diving down rabbit holes and stealing every spare moment. It’s what I think about when I go to sleep and when I wake up. I’m sure my ardore will settle down in a while, but in the meantime, this is a sort of high that doesn’t come along every day. It is a wave I am joyfully riding. I am certainly not going to slow down in order to do laundry!

After all, I’m making myself new clothes—I’ll wear those when everything else is dirty!

This is the dress I am currently working on, made from Joel’s old button down shirts and old sheets and pillow cases:

I kind of doubt that anyone is signed up to The Spiral Lab for sewing content, but in addition to sewing, I am also on a bit of a tear with zines and other DIY “craftivism” stuff, which I will write more about if folks are interested?

In the meantime: Don’t sweat the mess. Dive down rabbit holes and make nice stuff instead!

Let me know what you’re making these days:

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Yesterday I taught the latest iteration of my Spiral Time workshop to the Neuroqueerdos (members of Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice), and in the process of putting it together, I stumbled upon a new metaphor, which is really resonating for me.

In this workshop we look at several metaphors for time that I refer to collectively as “Spiral Time”—there’s an elliptical orbit in space, and several tree metaphors. All are meant to help neurodivergent creatives disrupt shame around their creative practices—why does it take me so long to finish anything? Why do I abandon projects so often? Why am I so easily distracted? Why do I get lost down rabbit holes? Why have I wasted so much of my life? Oh how I wish I could get back all of that lost time.

The creative care practice in this workshop invited people to use various media to make connections across time among a lifetime of creative endeavors, special interests, and hobbies—whether long abandoned, or their latest passion. Looking for patterns and connections—as neurodivergent people are so good at!—it’s possible to pull strings through, seeing the ways that everything you’ve ever done is part and parcel of everything you are doing now, and everything you will ever do.

When I did the exercise myself ahead, as preparation, what emerged was an elaborate web, which helped me to see that so much of my creative life that now feels abandoned and shameful is actually still alive today in everything I do, even if I don’t have a book, or an exhibition, or a respectable professional career to show for it.

As I literally stitched this web with embroidery floss in multimedia paper, it came to me that maybe the web itself is the point. Not the book, or the piece of great art, or the career. The making, not the made. That the shape of my creative life is much like a spider’s web, a creation I have always found beautiful and miraculous. Maybe that web is what will remain, when everything else is inevitably forgotten or destroyed.

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If you would like to dig a bit deeper into these themes of shame and time in your creative life, I am offering my two most popular workshops over the next two Sundays, 18 May (shame) and 25 May (spiral time) both at noon EDT. These workshops are about examining Western constructs of time, what I call “compulsory executive function,” the ways shame disables us (especially in our creative lives), and alternative metaphors and paradigms that might serve us better as neurodivergent creatives. Both workshops will include a presentation, a creative care invitation, and possibly time for discussion.