#1 Welcome to Some Sundays!
A book, a prayer, how to get life advice from Dolly Parton, and why does this newsletter look different now?
⭕️ A new illustrated series from Elena Megalos “In late spring, my family gets lice…Nightmares commence.” Of course, because it’s Elena, this story is also about all the ways parenting is uncomfortable, how it shrinks and expands us. Start here.1
⭕️ Loving Kindness Meditation I’ve been incorporating this into my morning routine most days: May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be free from fear and suffering. May I know peace. May my life be blessed with ease.2
⭕️ Dolly’s Pep Talks Dolly, I’m feeling a lot of things about both of my boys being in high school this fall…3
⭕️ Funny Story Emily Henry changed my mind about the romance genre. This one involves revenge, librarians, a dreamy Michigan summer, and deciding for yourself who and what makes a place home.4
Why is this a different newsletter now?
15 years ago I started a blog called lady i swear by all flowers. It’s been archived for a long time, but for the years I wrote it, it meant a lot to me.
I connected with people across the internet who are still friends today — both online and IRL. Writing that blog helped me feel less lonely during a time when I was living a life that was entirely different from most people I knew. It helped me feel seen for the hard things I was doing, and it helped me to see the beauty in those things, as well.
Visual beauty, attention to detail, texture, aesthetic: these are part of my daily practice of being human. My ability to be at ease, think clearly, and create is, for better or for worse, deeply impacted by my environment.
And I wanted this space to be more reflective of my taste, to look and feel like hanging out in my home.
We’ve been in this house for a decade this summer. Prior to renting here, we’d moved 12 times in five years. Ten of those moves were with babies.
It has been one of the greatest gifts of my adult life to just stay put. To settle in and cultivate this home for 10 years. To change my mind about what I like, add layers, figure out systems that make a small space (715 square feet) work for four people. To make it look and feel really, really good.
Simply put, Some Sundays will have the same content as All Hypnosis is Self Hypnosis, in a different container.
Some of the topics I like to think and write to you about include:
🔹 Parenting
🔹 Family Culture
🔹 Relationships & Connection
🔹 Mental Health & Wellbeing
🔹 Learning & Growth
🔹 Personal Style
🔹 Creative Projects
🔹 Noticing
🔹 Figuring it Out
Some Sundays is a little bit lifestyle (but honest); a little bit personal development (though that phrase is kind of ick; I like this framing); a little bit relational (marriage, parenting, friendship, partnership); a little bit on living a creative life (or trying to).
I’ll share what I’m thinking on, excited about, expanded by, noticing. There will be links, because I love links.
On Sundays.
Some (most) of them.
August was a lucky month for us, because it also gave us this essay from Elena on the ways we track the parallel lives of others and navigate comparison. It’s considered, honest — and a little bit juicy. 💧
I learned it at a silent retreat I went on in May. I signed up impulsively, in a moment I’d been craving quiet and was curious about the experience of pulling out of the day-to-day noise of life and spending time in the space of my own mind. I knew it would be hard to create that at home, so I found a weekend retreat not far from Portland, signed up, put it on the calendar, and mostly forgot about it.
When I arrived at the Monastery, I was looking forward to time without my phone, books, music, TV; time without external inputs. Time without a lot of words.
My living is made of language, messaging, finding the right words. It’s what I studied, both in undergraduate and grad school. And while there were certainly words spoken at the retreat — orientation, chants, a Dharma talk — they were far fewer than I typically take in and put out through the course of a day.
When Pan was a baby, my mom told me it was really important to talk to him all the time, to keep a running monologue so he’d know my voice, hear language, and more quickly come to understand it. It also made me feel less lonely in the long hours we spent alone together those first years.
Before Orion was born, I read books on the Waldorf approach to early childhood that emphasized the importance of limiting noise around the young child: recorded music, daily news, TV. Parents should even limit the number of words used to communicate with the young child because it’s hard for them to hear what’s truly important when it’s delivered surrounded by verbal clutter.
It wasn’t hard to be left alone with my thoughts that first day of the retreat. There’s a lot happening in there and I don’t often give myself the opportunity or time to sit in that space.
Instead, I found myself struggling with my attachment to time.
Always, I’ve felt the lack of it: there’s never enough time to do everything I want in a day, a week, a year, a lifetime. As soon as I settled into my seat in the zen-dō, however — with no phone, no clock, no sense of how time was passing — it crawled.
I tried to use my breath to count moments. I said decades of the rosary, something I haven’t done in actual decades. With my hands stacked in my lap in cosmic mudra, I pressed each Hail Mary into my palm, finger by finger. One more rosary and 20 minutes would be up. My count was off each time.
I was miserable in it. Angry, actually, that I had signed myself up to sit in such itchy discomfort for 2-3 hours at a time, four times throughout the day.
During one of the last sessions of the first day, we were given the Metta Bhavana, or Loving Kindness prayer. The suggestion was that we say it first for ourselves, to direct loving kindness inward before offering it to others: “May I be happy” → “May you be happy” → “May all living beings be happy.”
And despite my desire to empty out and sit free from the clutter of language, it was this practice with these words that shifted the meditation experience for me. I chose just one phrase — “May we be free from fear and suffering” — and said it for myself and then for everyone I know, picturing each person with a long in and out breath before moving on to the next family member, friend, coworker, dear one from my past.
How quickly or slowly time passed no longer mattered.
And, somehow, this detachment from time has carried into my civilian life. I practice this meditation most mornings, in no rush to get through it. But I also feel time differently in small ways: spending 45 minutes watering the garden no longer feels like a waste of it; 15 minutes is plenty of time to take an after-dinner walk.
Perhaps most significantly, I feel it in my approach to writing. I’ve always felt that I needed to be completely immersed in the world of whatever I was working on — for hours, for days — in order for it to come together. And, with a handful of exceptions (before having children, or when I was in residency), those circumstances were almost never available to me. So I didn’t write.
Now, I just feel different about it. I can take 20 minutes before the plane lands, or 30 in a coffee shop before meeting up with friends, and dip quickly into it. Maybe I only get a few sentences down, but that’s a few more than I had before. I’m okay with it being incomplete for a while.
I’m okay with it taking time.
This rad use of AI was created by Katie Marie, who I connected with almost 15 years ago when I first ventured into blogging. And this is why I can’t quit the internet.
Funny story about my copy of this book: I wanted a paperback, which isn’t yet available in the US, but I found one on ebay. I figured I would be getting an international edition, but, friends, the book I received in the mail was bootlegged. The font and design on the cover was jagged, and the copy inside the book was full of spacing errors (like they’d copy/pasted from a PDF). It looked and felt like a real book, but just kind of wrong? 😳
