the format of these monthly updates are directly inspired by how my family and I stay connected with each other. you can expect some main points, some tangential stories, some vulnerable reflections on things that feel uncertain, and an invitation to share what’s up with you too.

here’s some snapshots of what march looked like:

🍝 had a lovely, communally-cooked spaghetti dinner and visit with friends.

🎶 felt utterly cracked open by the song Alma Florecida by Gaby Moreno and cried to it for hours on the morning of the eclipse.

⭕ held my first CC Resilience Toolkit practice group.

🌳 had a nourishing, restorative group day trip to Veluwe for the first time—filled with beauty, activeness, fun, and wonder.

👩‍👧‍👧 my mama and siblings got to visit me for the first time since moving to the Netherlands—and it was their first time in Europe as well!

🥣 had grits for the first time in over a year — thanks to my mama for stocking me up 😭.

👵🏽 shortly after their arrival, my grandmother (mama’s mama) stopped by in a dream — driving no less (my grandmother never drove in her time on earth, so I found this amusing).

🐌 got to take my family to a fantastic masked queer art party + fundraiser in Amsterdam hosted by Fertile Ruins — give them a follow!

🙋🏽 got to introduce my family to some dear friends and show them around Utrecht.

❤️‍🩹 had a hard conversation with family around what supporting each other looks like, and what our collective survival needs are around transparency and communication.

💊 took my final iron pill for recovering from major blood loss back in December.

🌸 spent the day before the equinox walking in parks with my sibling and finding fallen flowers for them to press.

👂🏽 I reopened my left ear piercing, inspired by earrings of mine that I’d left back home, and that my family brought back to me on their visit.

👷🏽 helped some friends with renovations while also getting an introduction to snacks from their home country.

💩 My insurance refuses to honor the the coverage start date they originally quoted me, confirming that the life-saving surgery I received to remove an ectopic pregnancy that was originally diagnosed as kidney stones will not be covered at all. I will still be fighting this.

🎲 got to take my sibling to one of our regular game nights with more dear friends — and the baked goods they brought were a hit!

🤬 Me, my sibling, and my partner are harassed about wearing facemasks by a pasty tantrum-throwing thrift shop owner before being asked to leave, claiming that he “can’t take it anymore” and that “people who look like you all normally come in to rob the place.” If you’ve got excess spit or dog-shit to fling at Karma Karma, it’ll be worth it.

🌧️ the rain arrived once more to support me in tender times on the day my sibling flew back home.

🐝 On our return from dropping off my sibling at the airport, we also escort an errant bumblebee out of our apartment stairwell.

🍪 On my grandmother’s birthday, I finish the last of a batch of lemon rosemary kalamata shortbread cookies that my sibling baked for me.

😌 I receive some relieving news that putting the medical bill on a payment plan will not disrupt the minimum equity of my business required to maintain my visa.

📊 I receive further relieving news that the hospital can waive a significant part of the bill — over 75% — and that I can pay the remainder in (still expensive, but more affordable) installments.

🐺 Another fun D&D session filled with sleep spells, glitter shenanigans, and many window-centric crit fails.

card pulls and personal reflections

🌾 38 - Field of Plenty - Ideas/Needs manifested

“Don’t worry, help is on the way. Prepare to receive. Find peace in the help that is to come. There is plenty and you will be provided for”

I am both ready to release worry, but to also share my gifts, to be part of the ways abundance makes its way through the world. To step into the flow within it. The cornucopia is participatory. Be in it. Show up.

🐦‍⬛ 21 - Rites of Passage - Change

“Momentous change; growth that shapes your future. may need change to regain the spark of life and magic. NOTE THE GROWTH”

Keep noticing how you’re growing. I will have to be things I’ve never been before. Where did your spark go? How will you need to change to meet this moment? What rites can you do to mark this change? Acknowledge who you are now, grieve/celebrate who you no longer are. You are growing. Maybe even consider this a birth of sorts.

🌰 26 - Squirrel - Gathering

“Reserve for future use. Prepare. Ready yourself for change. Lighten the load of any gathered things that no longer serve — tangible and intangible. Prepare a safe space to put your gatherings — an unroubled heart and mind. Put into it wisdom and caring. This will set you free. Know you are taken care of.”

Hopefully I can replenish my stores. But it seems more likely I’m moving on from hoarding whatever I thought my life would like like ease-wise. It’s time to dig up and eat your talents. My skills and what I put out can sustain me if I prepare a place to receive the resources.

conversations with community

My family visited for a good chunk of March. I missed this kind of nourishment. My mama cooked me some grits and a spinach frittata for breakfast on one of the mornings she was here. I got to have this communal breakfast with her, both of my siblings, and my partner. How lucky I am to receive such powerful medicine.

I often told people that it felt like they brought me back a part of myself in this first visit. Not all of this visit was easy, but it was an infusion of rootedness that is as close to the earth as I could fathom.

The rest of these month’s reflections are piecemeal, unedited, unpolished. This is what I had time to do while being with my family. The parts left “undone” were fertile places to be present with my mama, sister, and sibling.

—

Eclipse reflections: realizing I was never incapable of being soft. I was already soft and when others weren’t, I stopped, but it’s not gone. I am taking a new shape to hold the daily routines and responsibilities associated with new life, and within a new life.

Reflections from conversations with friends on pleasure, ritual, and connecting to ancestors:

Little pleasures as offerings to self and to ancestors; little pleasures as watering myself, the seed that ancestors planted knowing they wouldn't be around to meet me, that we would never sit in each others' shade; little pleasures as opening the channels to receive messages from the ancestors that are rooting in us and believe in us; weaving pleasure in with nourishment, and nourishing self as an offering to ancestors. pleasure as a connection to resistance and the resistance of our ancestors. pleasure as not leaving my body behind. time spent in pleasure as a building material, stacking moments on your practices and on your altars as a way of building a spiritual foundation from which blessings grow; blessings being not just the things that you can see and feel, but the ways in which ancestors diverted you misfortune, stank energies, and undue despair.

Enjoying a sunbeam as offering.
Making your coffee exactly how you like as offering.
Crying to a song you like as offering.
Taking moment to rest your eyes as offering.
Taking your time as offering.
Doing it scared as offering.
FAFO as offering.
Honoring your own process as offering.
Experimenting with your own process as offering.
Changing your mind as offering.
Changing it back as offering.
Doing the thing while my mama/supportive living ancestors are alive as offering.
'No' as offering
'I see you' as offering

We are the leaves of the branches that came before us, we are that connected. Who are we to be overpruning ourselves when so many will gladly do it for us, often against our will? When the seasons will show me when to prune and when to blossom if I can sit with them present enough to hear them? My job is to be, and occasionally, grow.

Resilience toolkit practice reflections:
Each time we take a moment for ourselves and don't die, we build trust in ourselves that we can safely take a moment for ourselves. In that trust, there's a little extra space to seed experimenting with noticing what's present--and what isn't.
Each time we take a moment with ourselves to notice what's actually present, we build trust with ourselves that we are capable of noticing what's present. In that trust, there's a little extra space to seed experimenting tending to ourselves with pleasure, anchoring, settling, etc. whatever we need based on what we noticed was present.
Each time we take a moment to tend to ourselves and our needs with pleasure or anchoring or settling, we build trust in ourselves that we can experience pleasure, anchoring, or settling without the world ending. In that trust, we can seed experimenting with meeting the unknown; the unknown doesn't get any less scary, we just feel more prepared to meet it based on the trust we've built with ourselves. The fear may never go away, but with our practices of pausing, noticing, and tending to the needs we've discerned for ourselves based on the environment we've observed, we retain some agency to move with it, to bring the fear with us, to know that we got ourselves--or to stay in a pause and honor the limits of our capacity.

Each time we don't steamroll past our capacity and the world doesn't end, we build trust in the fact that we can say no.
Each time we meet the unknown and survive (maybe even thrive), all the layers of trust we've built so far are strengthened.
This anchoring foundation of trust expands our capacity for meaningful connection.
This is how we build capacity. And this capacity, built en masse, is how we heal.

"I don't know" is sacred. "Let me try" is an offering to give yourself and ancestors a tour of 'what if'? To indulge the curiosities they may have never had time to ponder and dream for themselves--or that they did dream and never got to try. This, and also 'no' as a powerful spell and celebration of enacting agency that was denied to so many of our ancestors--with the larger ritual being the agency you exercise choice between the two.

Thanks for reading 💜

misha | ritual as:

p.s. you can now read about April here!