Here’s a little space to exhale.
A little candle in a little lantern, being lit with a wooden match.
You can listen to this newsletter instead of reading it. Click the long black rectangle above these words.
Do you need to exhale?
We are all holding so much right now.
There’s the war in Gaza, and the traumas of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism that it has evoked. There are all the other global conflicts this has shone a new public light on — in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Sudan, all over. The economy is squeezing us. COVID numbers are somehow still high, limiting choices for immunocompromised folks.
That paragraph right there could be a mile long, and it wouldn’t list all the places where pain is hiding.
I don’t know where you are in all this, but I know writing can be a way of breathing out, so we can breathe back in.
So. Mari and Sophia made a gift for you.
There are two new “Messy Beautiful Pages” videos, both aiming to help us exhale. If you’re new to these, they’re write-along videos, which will walk you through a 5-minute writing experience. They are uncomplicated, free, and available anytime.
Sophia’s video explores anger, inviting you to get some of of your fire onto the page.
Mari’s video explores tenderness, inviting you to find what’s soft in you right now, and write from there.
Fire and softness. Strength and tenderness.
I’m wishing you both these things, in the balance you need most, as we travel forward into the winter.
The word “inspiration” is closely tied to the word “inhalation.”
They come from the same Latin root, inhalantem.
We can’t breathe in without also breathing out. We can’t act without also pausing. We can’t create without also being nourished. We can’t tend without also being tended to.
Let’s lean on each other — and the big invitation of the blank page — as we keep walking this road together.
In it with you,
