Flowers in Winter
Torpor, Interbeing, And Tension
Dear Ones,
Hi soul friends. Crestfallen ones. Sunflowers and birdsongs are reliable even in the dead of winter. Even when winter calls for torpor- a state of physical and mental inactivity.
These feel like unsuitable times. It’s a circus jungle out in the human kingdom. I don’t know about you, but I like to go to the theatre, not live in one.
Have you heard of Anam Cara? Soul friendship is an act of belonging and recognition. We can have many soul friends across time, space, and species. Intimacy and love are not limited to physical proximity, human partnerships, or groupthink.
I can feel collective tension of revolution in my body. Can you feel it? My left upper back/neck is in rigor mortis. Torticollis. Tensions of the world manifest inside our cells. Body tissues take the brunt again and again.
I have faith that we can navigate these mapless times.
Body detoxification habits have become as innate as breathing now. Hot epsom salt baths and black sage sun tea for the win. I prescribe drinking sage and whole body/foot soaks in hot salt water. Refills: indefinite.
Locals, feel free to swing by the garden to harvest black sage. Thank me later.
SHIFTING FOUNDATIONS
There is no shortage of tyrants and fools in the world.
When publicized religion is fused with unchecked power, it eventually poisons itself. Faith imposed is not faith at all. It’s just another brand of hijack. Don’t believe me? Follow the Benjamin.
Authoritarians act as if they preserve faith. They replace devotion with fear. Destroy trust in the invisible. Create generations allergic to the sacred. Cultivate a world of spiritual vacancy. A society of souls departed.
Imagine a new world of crisis coping and spirit building.
Can we gracefully move from “what is happening in the violent external world?” to “how should we live today in this moment (and this moment and this moment…)?
Less command and control. Less theatrics. Less violence.
More adaptation. More repair after rupture. More embodied presence.
INTERBEING
Most modern/Western “communities” are organized around identities, shared narratives, legibility, participation, and emotional/narrative synchronization. They leave little room for difference in experiences, paradigms, beliefs, and values.
Interbeing is a lifeline. An edge dissolver. Interbeing doesn’t require alignment. It doesn’t need a strict container or doctrine. It is relational, not communal.
Interbeing really can’t be worded because it is more of a felt sense among living beings. Iyfyf (if you feel you feel). We interare. Simple as that. Just being with flowers, sea, and redwoods is interbeing. Withness. Witness.
How I practice interbeing:
maintain relationships without labels
practice ordinary acts of care
keep small, uncategorized relations
reorganize how I relate to the inner/outer world
pay attention to direct lived experiences as opposed to fiction stories
let community be undocumented/unbranded
Over time, I may or may not:
feel connection without proximity (ex. feel the redwoods despite distance)
turn to simplicity and quietude over participation or visibility
pause rather than patch
no longer need mainstream ideas of community to confirm belonging
notice when togetherness is performative or grasping
SCIENCE STILL SCIENCES
Despite viral devaluation of advanced expertise, science is still sciencing. Laws of nature hold. Birds chirp. Sunflowers bloom. Sun sets. Moon rises. Microbes reign and circulate.
So it still goes.
I get it. It is hard to know what/who/why/how to trust. That’s because of the weaponry of info/cyber word wars. So much is bastardized and co-opted now. If someone could sell the air we breathe, they probably would. Or how about ocean therapy certificate programs. Umm, ok. Or just go to the ocean to directly experience the blue medicine? No certificate needed.
I get it. A large for-profit ecosystem has grown around licensures, degrees, and certificates. Licensure is supposed to protect clinicians and patients. However, it also weakens clinician autonomy by embedding us deeper inside the tar pits of “health” bureaucracy.
Dearest critical thinkers, we are innovators by nature. We can practice/live/work with integrity inside and outside of bloated systems. We don’t need external permission, validation, or certification. May we choose what we love. Focus attention there. Restore. Recycle. Regenerate.
OPACITY
My worth doesn’t depend on my level of societal visibility.
My worth doesn’t change because I choose to serve something other than what others expect/desire/demand.
Gen X (a small and incredible generation) is about rejection of visibility or opacity. Privacy > surveillance. Being unreadable has been protective for us. We figure, if they can’t easily categorize us, they can’t control us as much. We value independence, skepticism, and self-reliance. We avoid full capture by algorithms, institutions, or fixed narratives.
Doors close. We build our own doors. We sit with the peaceful solitude of non-grasping. Surrendered state. We have a lot of societal antibodies. Decoy identities. We are part chameleon. Legible when it helps us. Opaque when visibility costs too much.
***NESSA TIP*** Take a page from Gen X
Be unreadable. Stop explaining yourself. You are not required to explain every change, reconcile every contradiction, or update everyone on your life. You are not hiding. You are choosing safe witnesses. Control your visibility to conserve energy, reduce misinterpretation, and maintain interior freedom. Turn inward.
SINK AND SWIM
Hospitals in the U.S. (and world) are on life support. Many are experiencing chronic understaffing, leadership churn, hollowed-out management, loss of institutional memory, regulatory overload with zero slack, and erosion of trust between clinicians and administrators.
There is systemic fragility. Rapid shifts are disorienting. It is time to compost and begin again.
Right livelihood may not mean staying or leaving systems per se. It may mean reshaping how, where, and under what conditions one “serves”, exists, lives, and works.
What if it’s not sink or swim? What if it’s sink and swim? Who wants a vapid surface life without depth, anyway?
EDUCATION OF MICROBES
There are so many things we do not know. Some things are mysterious. Some things have just not been studied.
Who decides what institutions and academics study? That is the million-dollar question and a whole other can of worms. Can you imagine if men menopaused or menstruated?
Manufactured doubt is a strategy where companies emphasize the absence of proof while actively benefiting from underfunded research topics. Ignorance is maintained strategically. Engineered over time.
A classic example: tobacco companies claimed there was no proof that smoking caused cancer. PFAS or forever chemicals, fit well in this pattern. This is often called the absence of evidence fallacy. Or the burden of proof trap.
What if public trust in science eroded not because science failed but because scientific uncertainty is repeatedly used to protect power, delay action, and normalize harm?
The future human will come back from this one way or another.
Check out how science = ignorance = humility = exploration = observation.
Rest assured, the microbes will teach us all.
LANGUAGE AS DISCIPLINE
Words can be weapons and salves. In inner or outer fields. They shape realities. Speech carries moral weight. Can be violent or poetic.
I think of word re-languaging as a discipline. Pausing before speaking helps me find grace. Like flowers growing in cement cracks. We all do the best we can (and that capacity is wildly variable). Doing the best we can is the definition of practice.
**NESSA TIP** Nonviolent Communication Practice
Someone says a hurtful comment to you.
Take a deep breath. Do not react instantly. Instead, ask clarifying questions:
Ask them to repeat the comment.
Ask them if they meant to say something unsupportive in that moment.
Take notes of what you learned for future reference.
Try it and let’s compare notes.
MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
How “information” is delivered shapes thought. That is why information wars have taken shape. Attention is the new currency. What we pay attention to grows.
The medium of information imposes its logic on the content. It filters and molds the viewer. It becomes an architect of thought.
I wonder how this plays out in print/physical book culture (slow, imagination) vs electronic culture (immediacy, curation). Medium/tech literacy is the adaptation skill of the century.
Find the elders. Be the elders.
May we be strong enough to be gentle now. Send me word on how you are doing, Sapiens.
May All Beings Find Peace.
May the people of Iran (motherland) and the U.S. (stepmotherland) be free of tyranny.
Nessa (born at 333 ppm)
SCARS OF MY HAPPINESS:
MISCELLANEOUS:
Check out this great offering by Dr. Bita Nezamdoust on her article Contested and neglected: Social and medical marginalization in severe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
I love to go back and reread your posts!!
Reading your posts helps me remember to love humanity. Thank you