Feral Soul Podcast: Recent Episodes
Louis Osborn
I think steadily saying something of value can drain a person. Unfortunately, the algorithm demands routine posting and the pressure that comes with it. I’ve learned that pouring from an empty cup can do violence to our souls. So I’ve been away for a bit.
The late Blaze Foley sang a song called Clay Pigeons and in it, he sings of being at an intersection, a crisis, a time of searching. A part of the song talking about what he’s going to be up to goes:
Feed the pigeons some clay, turn the night into dayAnd start talkin’ again when I know what to say
The line about feeding pigeons clay has to do with the fact that they eat clay to help with their digestion. That pause for digesting and processing is a luxury and liberty. I have taken the luxury and liberty this summer. Autumn brings me back to this space with some things to say. I’m happy to find you still here.
This is a Substack about living our inherent worth. It will persist in these topics as the pieces I hope to write will orbit around the ideas of flourishing in life from the truth of our God given inherent worth.
You were never a wretch
Here’s what I’d like to add to the conversation at this time: you were never a wretch.
You may not know the reference, but many of you immediately connect with a deep memory. A treasured and fabled hymn of the American church, Amazing Grace, contains the line
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, That saved a wretch, like me!
Taking John Newton’s treasured words to task is not something I do lightly, but I feel it’s more than just a trace line in a song; it’s become a mindset that’s thrived and developed beyond its momentary intent.
New versions exist
You can find adaptations to this line, but you’ll find a pile of pushback to any change of the stone tablets on which hymns have come down from the mountain of our memories. I’m in no way contesting that grace is amazing and a sweet sound, but I have an issue with name-calling apart from the context of John Newton’s abhorrent past. Moreover, projecting that same name-calling forward for all time.
Newton, for his part, we assume was meeting his past as a slave trader humbled and transformed by grace. But it can be misleading when applied universally, especially if it leads believers to see themselves as inherently vile rather than deeply loved.
The word “wretch” suggests someone utterly despicable, worthless, or beyond hope. But Scripture never describes human beings in such terms from God’s perspective. Even in our sin, we are not worthless—we are wayward children whom God longs to restore. From Genesis to Revelation, the biblical narrative affirms the inherent dignity of humanity, made in the imago Dei—the image of God. Sin distorts that image, but it does not destroy it. God’s gaze toward humanity, even in our rebellion, is not disgust but compassion: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
Having sung this for years isn’t the crime; the crime is believing it to be true. That God’s image in man was so tarnished that it became unpursuable by the Creator of it. That we are an unworthy wretch in all respects, and not someone for whom God would chase after to save.
For some, this has created a way of viewing our need for grace. But that need is present no matter our track record. Read that again. No amount of “unwretched” actions before accepting His grace negates our need for His grace. So, seeing oneself as a wretch to create an indispensability of grace is thoroughly unnecessary. Poetic, maybe, but bad theological scaffolding.
I can only guess the reason John Newton wrote the line or why it resonates with our experience. The shame from our past can be powerful, visceral, and defining. However, just because a line of a song lands doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a helpful characterization. Maybe the line has created a higher level of humility for some, but at what cost? I’m afraid it speaks of a way of thinking about ourselves that has terrible downstream consequences.
There are more than a few people who believe and live like they are their actions. They try to stack enough good ones to earn respect, honor, esteem, and, sadly, even their salvation.
Yes, we need Christ. He achieves for us what our souls could not. But conjuring a flawed definition of man in a lost condition can stay with us for long after we’ve been saved. I’m afraid I know far too many people who aren’t out sinning without a sense of their wrongdoing, but far more who deeply feel God could never forgive them.
You were never more than a lost sheep. If that doesn’t satisfy some desire for deep humility, I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to find a God-inspired word to say it more strongly than you were separated from your Creator. God never calls you a wretch. Ever. No matter what state you are in.
We were lost sheep for whom God comes, pursues, and reclaims. This should satisfy our need for humility. That God would even think of us is amazing, but He’s never thought of us as a wretch. That has less to do with us and more to do with Him.
Be well, friends.
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I’m going to offer my most controversial take in the three years of doing this Substack: We have to schedule noticing joy and put it on the calendar.
I don’t mean create joy, it’s there, I mean merely notice it.
In our over-scheduled lives, usually only two things happen: Things we schedule and have to get done, or the things we do to avoid the tasks we have scheduled and need to complete.
So we’re either working on tasks or avoiding tasks. It’s working for the man or doom scrolling.
Even harder for us
In America, noticing joy isn’t encouraged; there’s no money in it.
Our economy runs on you and me being dissatisfied with what we presently have. That’s consumer capitalism 101.
All advertising is built around one main task: to create desire, meaning you and I are meant to be dissatisfied with our lives. Nothing in our society is designed for you to notice joy; you’re meant to crave endlessly.
Another significant point is that we can’t show joy in our quarterly earnings. We all work for organizations or companies that are obsessed with upward growth; joy seems superfluous, unneeded, and reserved only for those who have suffered enough to be rewarded.
And this is where joy and worth intersect. If we lack worth, we will struggle to notice joy. Or feel like it’s undeserved. We will take up less space for enjoyment altogether.
1) Noticing Joy counters stress and burnout
Modern Life often defaults to being busy. When joy isn't planned, it's easily forgotten or postponed. Or, worse yet, seen as only for the deserving. Intentionally scheduling joy, making it part of your rhythm, not just a reward after exhaustion. You are allowed, you are welcome to it.
If you don’t schedule noticing joy, feeling stress will schedule itself.”
Scheduled times for noticing joy affirm that joy is essential, not optional.
2) It trains our hearts to notice goodness.
Nothing invites this except the last story on the evening news. You know the story about the kid selling lemonade to donate the money to a cause. It’s like news producers think it erases the last 28 minutes of horror porn from around the world.
When you plan for joy, you begin to look for it and anticipate it. This rewires your brain to expect beauty, goodness, and grace, even in hard seasons—a practice deeply aligned with Christian hope and gratitude.
- It honors your limits and humanity
You might be saying the work you’re doing is so critical. Jesus came to save the world and had three years to do it. Yet, Jesus took time to eat with friends, attend weddings, rest, and retreat—He modeled a rhythm of joy noticing. When you schedule joy noticing, you're saying, "I'm not a machine; I'm a beloved human."
- It helps shape a sustainable life of service
Without noticing joy, sacrifice turns into resentment. But with joy regularly woven into your Life, you're more energized, generous, and emotionally available for others.
Life can become an unending slog in service to the powers that be, who want us to remain restless and dissatisfied with our lives. To exert some control, we have to be intentional.
Famously, Christians will proclaim they have joy no matter the circumstances. It’s true that where we can do better is in seeing joy and noticing it as critically important.
I’ll quote the sage advice of Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Be well, friends.
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When my wife and I told our friends we were moving to Southern California, the list of things I should be concerned about was long. I should worry about wildfires, earthquakes, the homeless crisis, the liberal direction of government, and the immigration crisis. We just passed the one-year mark here, and I realized I wasn’t warned about what’s been the most persistent concern.
It’s been said that we humans have a negativity bias. Maybe you know this phrase.
Negativity bias is “the human tendency to pay more attention to and give greater weight to negative information and experiences than positive or neutral ones.”
Whether you know this term or not, it can explain the lion's share of our conversation topics.
I’ve noticed that a lull in conversation will often instinctively produce a story about some awful situation or garden-variety annoyance. Ears perk up, and the spotlight shines bright on the annoyed person talking. The aggravating topic being shared can garner immediate attention. (Psst, the news figured this out a while ago.)
There are at least a couple of reasons for a negativity bias:
Stronger Emotional Response: Negative experiences elicit a stronger emotional response and can be stored more vividly in memory. In our distracted culture, negativity can be a shortcut to the front of the line for attention.
Evolutionary Roots: This bias likely developed as a survival mechanism. Quickly recognizing and responding to threats was crucial for survival, so the brain prioritized processing negative information.
However, I’m afraid our bent towards negativity is more ingrained than the phrase negativety-bias can even communicate. We have a negativity obsession.
I’ll leave the reasons to others to decide, but having dedicated the early part of my career to news broadcasting, I know that “if it bleeds, it leads.” Media companies fighting for clicks and eyeballs have become dumpster fire specialists, ensuring the all-mighty click-throughs to earn ad revenue.
Even if you don’t watch the news, the trauma-bonded public of which we are a part can dictate the conversations we all have. It’s like trying to swim in toxic waters; it gets messy even if you’re not drinking the toxicity before you swim.
Why didn’t someone warn me?
So, the real thing I never was warned of or could have anticipated was becoming interested in flowers. These massive blooms with arrestingly beautiful, vivid colors will force me to stop what I’m doing, or where I will take a picture. Why didn’t anyone warn me I’d be gobsmacked by such color and beauty? That I’d become a victim of their displays. Don’t they care about my well-being? My lost work time and slower commute are among the concerns they didn’t alert me to. Please think of the literal minutes I’ve lost to looking at a screen.
What you look for shows up, or often doesn’t
I’m having a little fun here, but the phrase “where focus goes, energy flows.”
The phrase means: “the direction of your attention dictates how your energy is channeled and utilized. Concentrating on something specific will direct your mental and physical energy towards that focus.”
But Rob, you should probably be concerned about those things. You mean the things that might happen? But the concerns aren’t actual flowers. Flowers are happening.
Not another “be present” piece
The number of messages today that tell us to be present is staggering, but the idea isn’t to be ignored. Are we looking for the beauty? If we’re not, we may not even see it when it shows up. Below are a few of my favorite explosions of reckless blooms. There’s beauty where you are, I hope you look for it as much as what there is to fear.
Be well, friends.
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The fact that the bible says God watches the sparrows should surprise me more than it does. Folks who call themselves birders often don’t care much about sparrows.
When someone sees me carrying my camera, the first assumption is that I’m bird watching. (Second, that I’m paparazzi lol) I will often get stories about them seeing a bald eagle. It’s fine, but can I tell you I’ve never gotten a sparrow story? Not once. Lol
Here are a few sparrows I’ve seen. There might be as many as 13 near where you live. Take notice, and when you do, join the God of the universe who prizes sparrows as much as eagles.
What does that mean to you in your life?
I think we all would prefer to have the consideration, attention, or reputation of eagles. Reaching to be an eagle is fine, but even if you make it, God’s care for you doesn’t increase. It’s set for all time in the sparrows as much as the eagles.
I think that with our careers, there are private moments of plotting and hoping for greatness, notice, or esteem. In all of these moments, there can lie an unspoken desire to separate ourselves from the garden variety of the world—a harmless ambition to make a mark and do something special. The challenge for us is to delineate that desire from our value. Whether we succeed or not, our worth is set. We are considered. More than that, we are valued, looked after, and loved by the God of the universe. Much of our life, and the voices within it, try to convince us otherwise. A steady drumbeat reminder that we, in our most common and ignorable, overlooked ordinariness, are intrinsically loved and watched should buoy our hearts as we reach for heights.
A magazine we hadn’t ordered, subscribed to, or requested arrived in our mailbox a few weeks ago. It sat on our kitchen table a few days with an array of other discardable pieces of advertising disguised as personal mail. The main article featured on the front was titled In Pursuit of Awe. I both recognized the sentiment and judged it to be deeply flawed.
I have pursued awe. I’ve tried to instigate awe in others by something in myself. What I’ve learned is that if I sit still, awe tends to show up. God’s interest in sparrows is encouraging and a point of correction in all our pursuits. Awe is uncovered in the everyday as much as the faraway. This can be encouraging for the adventure seekers and the aspirational. The highest judge of beauty has rapt attention on what we ignore. I want to sit with that and let it guide my pursuits for moments of eagle soaring.
There’s nothing wrong with maximizing our efforts for greatness, but let this be a helpful reminder that at the end of all those efforts, as we stand in our often normal, unremarkable outcomes, the attention of the Creator is still cheering for us, noting His handiwork in what is overlooked, even by us.
Be well, friends.
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I started riding a bike for my commute. Please don’t be impressed. It’s a pedal-assist cargo e-bike, so I’m not exerting myself too much. It’s a grocery getter, short-haul carrier bike that might be the most middle-aged purchase I’ve ever made. But the wind in my face, safely navigating around my neighborhood, town, and beyond has been a nice experience. Mostly.
I live where the weather favors biking or what I’ll call “exposed to the weather” travel. As a result, many other forms of transportation and hauling are used. It’s nothing to see electric scooters, skateboards, or pushcarts that sell elote, ice cream, and fruit. There are Latina grandmothers with repurposed baby strollers that hold their groceries. I once saw a guy pushing a shopping cart with materials he used for a remodeling project.
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There are lots of people out of the cocoon of a car. They’re walking, single-wheel zooming, and generally making their way to wherever, with whomever is doing the same. As one of them, I’ve noticed a funny thing that happens as I ride along: shared reverence.
As we pass one another, there’s a nod, wave, or smile. It happens in boating on lakes, among Jeep drivers, and in the motorcycle community. The subtext feels like this: Another person is trying to get somewhere just like me. I’ve found myself thinking of these everyday people differently. I’m softer towards them. The shared struggle is out in the open, so a kind of microdose of care seems to go out to them as we travel together.
Moreover, passing vehicles honor our efforts to navigate the world in this exposed way. They often give us the right of way and provide a wide berth as they pass. There are exceptions, moments when a car aggressively accelerates to get around me as if to say, “Get a horse pal!” but in general we all kind of feel gently considered.
Since I landed in this community of exposed travel later in life, I feel this subtle sense of respect for humanity a bit more acutely. I don’t usually see and honor others in my car unless I know them. Conversely, in the insulated kingdom of my car, I find opposition, competition, and a lack of regard for others. There are remarkable exceptions, but I find it interesting that all it takes is one layer of distance between us and others dissolving to make the shared reverence easier to feel.
The insulated travel I do supports an illusion. The illusion that we’re separate. You’re over there, I’m over here, we are not the same. Even further, the brand or age of our car can add to the imagined separation. Don’t get me started on a license plate from another state or heaven forbid a bumper sticker with a hot take. In our moving boundaries we slowly become less willing to acknowledge we’re “in this together” and instead can invest in “othering” people. This is further supported when we tap a button inside our cars, drive into our garages, enter our homes. There is a screen that delivers a pale substitute for human interaction for the evening. Maybe we live lives of quiet designed desperation. I don’t have a fix for this, suggesting one is so profoundly out of touch with the massive current of progress and modernity. I merely want to encourage myself to be aware of all the insulating layers that keep me one step removed from the people of the world around me. These are sometimes unavoidable, so the move may be to be intentional about peeling back the layers when the opportunity presents itself.
Even as the more wealthy and advanced among us find chartered flights and security fences to be a god-like insulating move, I can do well to remember often that the real God came to live among us and to save the worst of us. So identified was he with those he traveled with that it took a kiss to single him out from among them.
Be well friends.
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We work to make a living—bills to pay, you know? But as we spend the bulk of our time working, something happens. Our sense of self and worth begins to be fueled by our work. We no longer work to support ourselves but to make sense of our place in the world.
This can also affect our recreation and hobbies. Whatever we do can be co-opted to give us an identity. Even good things that benefit our family and society can become a source of our sense of self. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it can set us up for a great deal of suffering.
More through less
Now that we have settled into our new place after moving across the country, I’ve committed to reading much more fiction, as I did when things were less chaotic. Early in Rick Powers's book The Echo Maker, a character experiencing a family crisis is introduced. Her brother is lying in the ICU and clinging to life. She feels her moorings slip as she’s taken from her job and routine. But then she goes to work on the phone, trying to attend to some paperwork.
For the hour it took to transact the forms, she felt the release of being useful. The pleasure of it burned.
While I related to the sense of purpose during spiraling circumstances, the sentences caught me deeply. In the throes of changes we don’t initiate, I’m afraid our sense of self, identity, and pleasure of purpose can all take a hit. And that’s a canary in the proverbial coal mine of a poorly constructed identity. There are both ongoing and eventual consequences that harm us and others.
While what we see in this quote is something to acknowledge and celebrate, after all, work has redemptive and helpful aspects; it’s something to build better.
When it all fades
Who are we when we can’t do much? Or our routine accomplishments are out of reach? When we feel inert and incapable? We may be many things, but we are never without worth. Our worth is unassailable and not created by our accomplishments.
Our worth is unassailable and not created by our accomplishments.
“Unassailable”. There’s a word I don’t use enough, partly because it doesn’t apply to much, but it does apply here. It means “unable to be attacked, questioned or defeated.”
As you read that, I’m not looking for a charity head nod; I’m hoping for a deep knowing that will serve you and me as the days of our need for meaning when we can’t function loom on the horizon.
We’ll all come to days, periods, and seasons in which we cannot do the things that gave us a sense of purpose. But more than that, between here and there, deriving our worth from our doing could lead to a cascade of interpersonal challenges. It can make us pretty miserable to be around.
There is an inevitable competitiveness to our existence. We get more oxygen when what we do is better than the next person who does it. When we can diminish and denigrate through judgment what others do as less meaningful or label it a frivolous, vain pursuit compared to our work, we shore up our fragile worth.
You’ve heard and maybe said this: Oh, that? Yeah, I guess some people are into that (eye roll). That dismissiveness is a reflex to keep a fragile sense of worth — safe.
Letting someone have the spotlight, or even steering it in their direction, suffocates us. While we might not attack them directly, we must name their deficiencies, if only in our minds.
Sabbath as protest
Getting this deep into our spirits will take practice, routine, and habituation. In our meritocracy, we are only what we accomplish and how well we accomplish it—every day, all the time. So, having a day every week when you are a human being instead of a “human doing” is more than a command of God; it is a skilled way to assert the truth about yourself.
On a day you don’t accomplish anything, you aren’t obligated to apologize or feel a sense of failure. This will disappoint your instinct and a world that doesn’t know or agree with the truth of your unassailable worth. Raging against the machine is less violent than it sounds. It’s sometimes merely disconnecting from the myth that we are only a person when functioning for the machine. Be well friends.
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On a recent windy day, I was at the coast, and as I walked along the surf, I was reminded of the phrase “the sea has no memory.”
Unlike humans, the phrase means that the ocean does not retain past experiences or hold onto memories; it constantly changes and is not affected by past events, signifying a sense of timelessness and the ability to exist in the present moment without the burden of the past.
This idea came to mind and stayed as both a challenge and a comfort. It is a challenge to see that I will suffer less if I accept the impermanence of this life. And a comfort that I needn’t let conditions present today define tomorrow.
It was vastly different the last time I was near this same shoreline. As I walked, each tide changed the conditions of the previous tide. In this dramatic cycle of nature, the speed of impermanence can be powerfully observed.
I picked up three things laid bare on the beach by the waves. A stone tumbled smooth for many years, a shell cracked open by the tide, and a US quarter. These things caught my eye. As I sat to reflect, each served as a revelation of what time and impermanence do.
New year, a new tide
A new year approaches, and I’ve been thinking about impermanence—how all things are passing away. Please don’t take back my invitations to your New Year’s Eve parties. I promise I can read a room and won’t bring my melancholy thoughts to the punch table.
The idea of everything passing away might seem like a dark and unwelcome thought, but it applies to the good and the bad. No matter how things are, they will someday not be that way. Good or bad.
While this is a hard truth to remember, it’s more challenging for those struggling with worth. If our worth is built on the condition of anything in this world, we are putting ourselves in a precarious situation. People who struggle with their worth are inclined to stake their well-being on accomplishments, health, appearance, accumulations, or relationship status. All these things are passing away.
The three things I picked up revealed truths about impermanence.
Smooth stone.
A stone’s corners are polished smooth by tumbling forward in time on the tides. What it was 30 years ago no longer is, but what it is now reveals beauty only available today—a smoothness that is a joy to hold. Can I release my attachment to the shape of things today?
Cracked open
The shell was created layer by layer and tightly formed over time. The inside was in complete darkness and lay on the ocean floor. The tide has cracked it open. What was once in complete darkness is now met by the sun's rays from miles away. The conditions in which things are formed are transformed to become the near opposite, revealing a beauty wholly different from what it was once.
The quarter
The once well-defined words and art on the coin were worn nearly smooth. Empires' precise and careful designs dissolve, and all the earthly kingdoms fade into a semblance of what they once were.
Am I okay with all the carefully laid plans I trouble my mind over being lost to time? What I was once precise and careful about may only be similar to what is seen now.
Relish, but don’t cling
Enjoying the present moment but not clinging to the state of things is the move. We can all get attached to the present moment, which will add to our suffering. We will inevitably experience loss as the tide of time takes from us, but we can minimize our suffering by not clinging to the present conditions.
Be well friends.
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Lately, we’ve been through it. There’s been a lot to think about and process. There seems to be a steady stream of things to concern our minds. Even if you’re among those who say they don’t watch the news, it’s hard not to pick up the static of panic in the environment by simply moving through your day. It’s like knowing all the words to the song Sweet Caroline but never having bought a Neil Diamond album. Some ideas just sort of leak into your mind from unchosen sources.
It’s got me thinking about more enjoyable ways to exist amid the dire predictions and wild swings in fortune that seem to loom each day. I suppose I’ve not found the place where the wood drake rests in beauty on the water, as Wendell Berry writes. I certainly know the prospect of living “in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be.”
If we want certainty in this life, a trouble-free experience, I’m afraid it’s not on offer. So when the reasons for fear cycle through our minds, our freedom to choose our focus becomes more critical.
Fly a kite
A couple of weeks ago, we had our first (to my knowledge) “red flag warning” since moving to San Diego County in May. Before I heard about the reasons to be worried, and it’s a legitimate list, I noticed the sustained winds in the palm fronds high over our place. I was thinking about how, later in the day, I’d be responsible for recreation activities for an after-school program for a group of young elementary-aged kiddos. I immediately thought of bringing my large beach kite. On vacation, I used to fly the beauty of a kite off the Carolina and Florida coasts. This would be its maiden flight on western winds, and I knew it would do well in the wind on this day.
I arrived early and sent the kite aloft, paying out line on the thousand-foot spool for a few hundred feet. The kite came alive with the strength to climb higher, but I stopped about a hundred and fifty feet up. The children started to arrive and immediately were interested. They all got in a cooperative line for their chance to fly. Several of these sheltered iPad-generation young’uns had never flown a kite, so they were super excited.
But then there was Christopher.
Christopher patiently waited for his turn and took over the spool. The kite tugged hard, and feeling the aliveness and connection with something approaching uncontrollable, his joy surpassed the others. The kite swayed and dipped, animated by a force nearly overpowering Christopher’s grip. All the kids were joyful, but compared with everyone else, Christopher was something nearer overjoyed.
Overjoyed
The experience of being overjoyed appears in scripture. It’s an experience that is nearly foreign to me. Heck, joy can be elusive for me. I can be the weatherman of any moment: "It’s sunny now, but I can see some clouds coming.” I am not naturally joyful, and staying on the ride to the next stop of being overjoyed seems like a bridge too far.
This factory preset is made a bit worse by being a Christian. As spiritual people (of any flavor), I think we are easy targets for this way of interacting with joy. We’re invested in the world's wellness in a way that can make joy feel undeserved in the face of so much concern and pain. We may have convinced ourselves that in the face of Red Flag warnings and the long list of worries (legitimate and accurate), we are best to reign in our joy. We might think being tamped down in the joy department has more utility.
Here are some questions to consider:
Does suppressing God-given joy help anyone’s struggle? Does curbing my experience of pleasure alleviate suffering?
Does my joy and praise mean all is right in the world? Or am I okay with it all?
We face a fundamental task in working to see the world heal. Do we think our being absorbed in some worry and struggle is the first step to healing the world?
Or what if the first step the world could use in healing looks different than our furrowed brow? What if the world saw us exhibit our joy amid whatever struggle there is in this moment? That would speak to a victory that’s yet to be fully seen but of which we profess to have now.
Joy is an act of worship.
When I noticed how taken Christopher was, I realized I was smiling at him smiling. I found joy in him having joy.
Who smiles at you smiling? There are people in your life, I suspect. But could you allow God to smile at your joy?
I’m not Christopher’s father, but I could imagine nothing would give his father more joy than seeing this joy on Christopher’s face. Not for the act of kite flying but because joy on his face says more about how he is in the moment. It says he’s relaxed, unafraid, and has the time and energy to enjoy a moment. He is at rest in all those truths.
Father Gregory Boyle shared that our worship can sometimes be as simple as this:
“Behold the One beholding you and smiling.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
The Red Alerts are real, but so too is our joy.
To be precise, I can tell you that the political winds have brought some real concerns for Christopher and his community. There is a plan blowing in hard to deport his neighbors, perhaps even some of his family. Many of them have been here working and raising families for decades. It is easy to be consumed by the threats and all that could mean.
I can’t control the winds, but I can decide what to do with them. I can ruminate on the list of potential things to fear and become absorbed by what may happen. Or I can hand out kites and see the reason for joy in the moment we do have.
Be well friends.
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What lets you know you’re breathing? As you’re reading this, take a slightly deeper breath. Where do you feel the earliest sensations of your inhale? Get detailed and granular with the data. Sometimes, it takes some time to find the start. At first, it may be easier to find your inhalation's overall more extensive experience. Is it in your chest expanding? Is your belly swelling? From the larger experience back up, pick up the first move. That first clue you’re breathing is evidence you’re alive in the world. You’re here, present to what is, the only place we can be. (James 4:13-15)
Where the inhale starts
My first hint of inhale is cooler air in my nostrils. That’s the first hint I’m inhaling. Maybe I run hot or am usually cold, but the air always feels cooler. That cooler temperature is my first hint. It took some time to find that earliest and subtle beginning. From there, I can surf the sensation of inhalation into my chest expanding and belly expanding.
When I first began mindfulness and noticed my breathing, I realized I didn’t like my belly swelling to accept the inhalation. I didn’t want a swollen abdomen or a more noticeably snug waist in my pants. It made me think, “I should cut out sweets or get more steps.” So, I’d instinctively lessen my inhale. Talk about shallow breathing.
The mid-point pause
After the top and middle of my inhalation, there’s a second where I turn around. A noticeable place where things shift from inhale to exhale. It’s not inhaling, not exhaling; it’s a pause. A kind of midpoint or fulcrum. It’s easier to notice if I get curious about finding it. The solitary second, or maybe two at the most, where the gears shift and move from inhale to exhale. It’s there. For most of my life, it went unnoticed. Imagine carrying something with you and never realizing it. It went unnoticed until I was encouraged to notice it; how many of those seconds have occurred over 54 years?
Interconnected
The long series of sensations began at one starting point—the first time and now this time as I type this. These sensations are connected to my beginning.
We support the idea that each day is a new start. Each day, we awaken to this thing, a stream that began many years ago. Its origin connects us to the origin of man—the breath in our lungs—the creation itself—and the God of it.
Unnoticed and hard to find
We spend the bulk of our time lost in rumination about yesterday or today. All we have is right now. Time machine owners are the exception, but for everyone else, this moment, this inhalation, is all we have. Now, this pause — and the exhalation.
I spent a very long and confusing search for the beginning of my exhalation. I realized last week that it was “settling.” I feel more ‘seated’, more settled in my seating. This may be odd to you, and it probably should be because yours will differ. The weight of myself seated slightly (very slightly) seems to grow through my exhalation, and my chest eases downward, but that’s it. The exhalation ‘show’ is subtle, more whispered, and more noticeable about what isn’t there.
Who cares?
Ok, Osborn, who cares? Getting immersed in observing my breath isn’t going to change the world. No, but you are. I can view changing the world as separate from being home in myself, attentive and supportive of my needs. This is an erroneous compartmentalization. This is where self-care becomes marketed as something over there to sell. But self-care is intrinsic to our doing. We put our oxygen mask on first; it’s not selfish to breathe.To see breathing and being mindful of it as separate from being a human might be the most unintentionally hilarious misunderstanding of mindfulness. There are other misunderstandings, like beginning to think about what *Casper was before he was a friendly ghost while you’re trying to focus on your breath is a fail. Getting distracted is part of the whole deal. Noticing we’re distracted and returning home is like a bicep curl for our attention. Do it enough, and you begin to see you’re on a train of thought earlier. You start to hear the train whistle before you’re in the next town.
Noticing our breath unites our thoughts with this present moment. A thing that is harder to do than we might imagine and more challenging to practice. By the way, the term “practice” implies you’ll be skillful some days, and other days, you’ll realize why it’s called practice.
Practicing the miracle of enough
Every breath is a miracle, connecting us to our first moment of life and creation. Becoming aware of this present breath brings us home to what’s here. It’s an occasion of wonder. And it’s far more available than a perfect sunset, mood music, or a sound bowl. Breath is autonomic, necessary, portable, and non-denominational.
In this way, I hope breath is enough—just like you. Before all our doing, thinking, theorizing, theologizing, politicizing, regretting, planning, and wishing things were different or otherwise, there’s our accepted self receiving without judgment and some notice of what is present—what our first present was as created wholly loved beings.
You’re joining seven billion people and tens of billions of animals all trying to get somewhere but often unaware of the sufficient here they’re in. *credit Dan Harris for this joke and observation
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A continuous stream of crows flows south across the sky in the intense yellows and oranges of the sun’s fading daylight each dusk. For thirty minutes, intermittent waves of one of San Diego County’s largest crow flock head to what I’m told is a nightly roost at Lake Hodges. Fascinated by the flock's regularity and scale, I did some research. Not so much online but with elder residents (living Google, as I like to call them respectfully). Living Google told me the flock has been observed for decades. The crows adjust their daily southward salmon run as the equinox brings an earlier dusk.
Observing this ritual is a kind of natural metronome each day. I wondered why they fly toward roosting grounds. Why do they enter the stream southward like clockwork? They fly out each day to live, eat, and pester other birds but, for some reason, reassemble nightly at shared roosting grounds. The bird geeks (said with endearment) who track avian behavior surmise the evening rally is to check in and exchange information. But I contend that deep within ourselves, we know why.
Our migration
This reliable stream of crows came to mind as I rode the Sprinter train to Oceanside, where I’m writing this. The Sprinter is part of the North County Transit System that runs commuter trains around southern California. Like before, I entered this communal trip with whoever was on the same schedule as me. From our individual lives, we shared cars and space as we migrated together—some for work, some for play, but all going somewhere westward.
I had deja vu watching people stepping into this migration. Everyone in this disparate band of train travelers has an inner journey to a type of roost we humans need and want. We are all headed somewhere in life, and I contend it’s more similar than a separate destination. Our individual lives feel separate, and technology, politics, and what passes for upward mobility sell isolation as a better, more desired way to travel. But we all want the same things: to flourish, to love and be loved, and to feel we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves. That feels like a shared roost.
Migrating together has its upside
I get why public transit is less desirable. If you could never, I get it. This flock, I count myself as a member, can make enjoying it difficult. The train is slower, which isn’t the same as inefficient. A rider surrenders their freedom and has to share space with unchosen others. But something happens as we join the stream of shared travel, probably a few things.
On the train, I’m physically reminded that I’m no better than any other rider. Over the intercom, I’m asked to respect riders who need a seat, and taking up only the required space becomes unspoken respect for one another. Thank yous and nods are exchanged as bikes are situated or seats are requested with a quizzical look and pointer finger.
A successful life in most American cities means never traveling on public transit. Therefore, cars jam interstates going the same way the trains are going. Success means living insulated from every interaction with unchosen others. The desired life is living in a gated community or far enough away that a gate isn’t needed. If not that, we want a life isolated from undesired human contact through layers of technology. Most of us are successful enough to arrive at these conditions—or something that passes for them.
But the glaring issue for me is the results. It turns out that part of the cost of our independence and insulated experience might be paid with our souls.
The results
In an article titled: New Surgeon General Advisory Raises Alarm about the Devastating Impact of the Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation in the United States we’re told
“…calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in our country. Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness. Disconnection fundamentally affects our mental, physical, and societal health. In fact, loneliness and isolation increase the risk for individuals to develop mental health challenges in their lives, and lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking daily.”
From Kasley Killam’s book The Art and Science of Connection:
Today, many people show signs of social health in decline. Over the past thirty years, the percentage of Americans with ten or more close friends dropped by 20 percent.? Over the past twenty years, the amount of time people spent alone increased by an average of twenty-four hours per month. Over the past ten years, participation in communities, such as book clubs, sports leagues, and neighborhood associations, fell by nearly 20 percent. And according to a national survey in 2019, around half of adults in the US felt as if no one knew them well.
I can’t help but wonder if it might help us to see that all our inner pursuits are shared—our goals, our roosting grounds, so to speak. Our migration and our roosting are tangible and something to experience in public transit. What if that led us to an overriding desire to see others get where they’re going with relative comfort and their space in the migration honored?
When we look out over a public space filled with people, do we see them as birds of a feather traveling to a shared roost? Things that rob us of that view might not be as desirable as we imagine. A public space can be an access point for empathy and connection. Or a reminder of our need for it.
There is an unacknowledged, often avoided, but very real shared destination for us as humans. We’re all heading where time takes us. Age, loss, and death are on all our horizons. But we all generally want the same things. How can we see our shared travel to these things more clearly? As wealth and success draw us into isolation, we might be paying more of a price than we realize.
What can give you a glimpse of our shared migration with all beings everywhere? Consider how we might shed isolated and tribal pursuits for more shared migrations to our hopeful roosting.
Be well friends.
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Robert covers some miles on his bike. He has 21 bikes in all and rotates in and out of the fleet daily in his travels outside and around Escondido, California. For some reason, his sleek bikes seem European to me and have narrow tires about as wide as a piece of rigatoni. He often uses a bike instead of his car and averages over five to six thousand miles a year on a bike. I wonder if he realizes there’s an irony to his last name being Carr.
I’ll bump into him a few times a month, and we’ll sit outside a small but bustling coffee shop on Grand Ave and trade stories about life. I’m a newly minted e-bike rider, and although I’m nowhere in the same hemisphere as his bike riding, I do roll forward on two wheels and have questions.
Recently, I shared my concerns about road safety, and he steered me toward more legitimate concerns. Like anything, bike riding has things we fear and things should be fearing. He told me to delay my travel until after 9:30. He explained that by then, the volume of cars was down, and most everyone was where they needed to get to at a specific time.
Robert added that traffic is edgier when school is in—not merely at drop-off times but all day. The pace of life squeezes the space between vehicles in traffic on all sides. That’s the space bikes inhabit. Cars leave less room, close in on lanes faster, and are generally more impatient. He closed by saying that traffic sounds and feels different.
Awareness in the world
This awareness struck me as only something a person with five thousand miles moving next to traffic could make. He inhabited the world more immersively than nearly anyone I know or may ever know. I want to get nearer that. I think it’s still available.
Truly inhabiting the world in which we live in a fully felt way doesn’t come naturally. It does, but we’ve insulated ourselves from feeling much. We walk on thick pads of shoe soles, afraid to feel the surface we touch lest our feet be asked to work like feet were made. We spend endless hours on manufactured surfaces, breathing air through an air system.
A layer falls between us and many of our human experiences. Screens now deliver our loved ones we once touched and knew. We order at a kiosk so as not to enter a clumsy human interaction at a counter.
Next to the 15 near our house, I drive by a giant vending machine-looking thing with cars in it. I’m not sure why reducing the feel of a car buying experience to the act of buying a bag of chips is a move in the right direction, but it’s a choice in line with much of what technology has brought us in a box labeled as better than the last thing they gave us. Do you even get the new car smell anymore?
Where we are now
Our lived experience is sterile. We live in neighborhoods with investment overlords called HOAs that tell us what can and can not be done, all in preparation for the next wave of buyers of our houses. We dare not paint the walls in our homes a color the next potential buyer might not prefer. Whose house is this again? We don’t really live somewhere if we’re planning for the following people who might. Are we ever really anywhere?
The result is less connectivity to our world and each other. Ironically, we’re sold endless apps that claim to be a means of getting or staying connected.
Makeshift tables
Robert introduced me to Brian. The three of us shared stories about bees and birds (different from the birds and the bees stories). Brian also pointed out that the makeshift table where my books and coffee were sat was his addition to the coffee shop. It’s not Brian’s shop; he’s never worked there. He simply showed up one day with the materials and installed it. He added it’s great to put your things on. As if I wasn’t sure of the general function of tables, he offered why this particular one was good. A fact I loved hearing from its inventor.
Connectivity gives us the ability to “see the need—meet the need for the good of all.” However, it’s part of what we lose in the zero-sum game of disconnection and isolation for self-fulfillment and perfection.
Where we started
We know isolation is bad deep in our humanity. The entire creation of the universe was called good by its Creator. Only one thing was labeled not good: man’s aloneness, isolation, and disconnection—disconnection from humans and from all of the created world. The Creator invited us to enter the world and be a part of it. We’ve retreated from that only to recover what the Creator tried to end: isolation.
So, spread a makeshift public service project table of shared community value and pull up a chair to discuss the safety tips you can give for the flourishing and good of all. And a few bee stories over coffee. Be well friends.
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Often, artists are not in control of what their art reveals about themselves. At times, artists can make statements they didn’t intend to make. It’s humbling to make public what happens privately in our minds. Left on the page, the canvas, or in music, what was once in our control no longer only shows what an artist wants it to.
There’s a painting I have come to love for its relaxing, clean lines. Its hues are cool, and I feel drawn to it. Any general sampling of American art will feature Nighthawks by Edward Hopper has nearly been covered too much. Shown and re-shown, spoofed, and used in marketing. It’s like the Green Onions by Booker T. and the MGs. Great, but overplayed.
It depicts four people in a spare evening diner on the corner of a mid-century city street. These characters are a male and female seated together, a solo male with his back to the viewer, and a single busboy behind the counter, hunched over and appearing to engage with the male at the counter.
They are suspended in time, forever in a late evening moment, perhaps before going home. At first glance, it’s just that, a diner at night. But laid over the man that Hopper was, a complex understory emerges.
Much like the diners, he was visible, seen in the public eye, and his work forever. And yet, what does the painting reveal about that experience?
In her book, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing shares a passing observation made while visiting the Hopper painting in Chicago.
A tour guide came in then, her dark hair piled on her head, a group of visitors trailing in her wake. She pointed to the painting, saying do you see, there isn’t a door? and they crowded round, making small noises of exclamation. She was right. The diner was a place of refuge, absolutely, but there was no visible entrance, no way to get in or out. There was a cartoonish, ochre-coloured door at the back of the painting, leading perhaps into a grimy kitchen. But from the street, the room was sealed: an urban aquarium, a glass cell.
The interior door will take someone deeper, more interior, hiding, but there’s no way out. Or in. Without realizing Hopper may well be showing the experience of being a known figure. A person on display (at least a part of themselves) and yet inaccessible. And unable to escape, leave, or withdraw except for aloneness. The tragic aspect of many of our lives is we, too, are like these diners. Seen but not accessible. If accessed only by way of someone who’s part of our own operation, our own inner working.
A closer look shows that while those in the dinner are in the same space, no one is directly facing or intimate in any real way.
Loneliness can be experienced by the most known and visible in society and can take this shape.
Laing further describes the experience of loneliness.
The sensation arises because of a felt absence or insufficiency of closeness, and its feeling tone ranges from discomfort to chronic, unbearable pain. In 1953, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan came up with what still stands as a working definition: ‘the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy’.
Healed but worse off
After the long nightmare of the pandemic, I expected life to recover. However, my expectation of our society's necessary relational connecting acts to at least return to its pre-pandemic state—which was already on the ropes by any metric—has been let down.
Just the opposite has taken place. The retreat from relational connection, arguably necessary at the time, has continued and, worse yet, been glorified and celebrated in memes and, sadly, the habits of everyday life for people.
Intentional corrective
As I wrote last week, we’ve moved. The social table has reset, and the vibe in our new locale is very different for many reasons. I’ve set a goal to have three to five conversations with complete strangers each week. It’s a real challenge across the board. But the gamble of public engagement has proven to be worth making. This week I met a guy name Tom from Iowa who loves to still work on his car, even though the electronics of the modern automobile makes it difficult. I met a lady named Karen who helps with the library book sale and went to a community college in Ohio. I met Carrie, McKayla, and their dog, Marvel. They are all San Diego Padre fans (I suspect Marvel doesn’t have a choice in this matter).
Are all my interactions spectacular? Homeruns? Not in their content. But in their benefit to a warm-blooded mammal who needs more people in their diner? Yes. Human relationships can’t be maximized, optimized and always a win. But as Marvel, the Padres fan, will tell you, a hitter can go 3 for 10 over their career and be in the Hall of Fame. Be well friends.
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We moved. It was a move that took us from central Pennsylvania to San Diego County, California. At the time, I thought I’d be here on Formerly Feral sharing poetic observations. I’d be trying to weave spiritual insights through the sweeping experience of a cross-country move. But here’s the thing: Moving is time-consuming. I’ll say more someday, but for now, I’ll say this: we made it. As is my routine, I beat myself up for not being better at something I hadn’t done in over a decade.
The apartment we are renting is on a steep incline that looks across some mountains to the west, where further on lies the Pacific Ocean. I’m in no need to travel to go birding; the birds have come to us, from the pair of Great Horned Owls low-calling in the palm trees nearby to the pair of red-tailed hawks that rip overhead as dusk moves in. This is the first time I’ve had as many Northern mockingbirds nearby. They are very active and extraordinary songsters.
A mockingbird can mimic dozens of songs and calls. It’s a catalog of all it has heard, even from other mockingbirds. Being a flying cover band takes impressive vocal range. It’s only a quick mimic of the other songs and calls, but it’s still an impressive impersonation.
But I have to wonder, do they have any originals?
They do have a few of their calls and songs. A few bird notes that are unique to mockingbirds. But in a somewhat tragic twist, instead of using all they can do, they’ve reduced their mockingbird calls to a few plain and mostly functional vocalizations. As for a song, they squeeze and stretch vocals to offer the world remixes of things.
And therein lies a tragedy. Here, a bird is capable of singing across many ranges and pitches, and it uses very little of that skill for original expression.
Same mockingbird. Same.
If we aren’t mindful, our lives can be reduced to mostly mimicry. It feels better to be quickly noticed and appreciated. So, we take what’s been done, which is safe, known, and celebrated by others, and imitate it. Our imitation will vie for the approval of folks merely interested in us doing an excellent rendition of what they did first or already know. What adds to the issue is that we can do it with excellence. We can almost pass for them or what they have done. This can feel like we’re great at something. To be fair, we are great, but it’s mostly mimicry with a few tweaks.
We can continue traditions and acts from those who have gone before, but is that what the world needs?
While doing what has been done is a serviceable endeavor, and there is the truth that nothing is thoroughly new under the sun, the diminished life of replicating the known things in the world is cheating the world out of our full breadth of abilities and, frankly, God-given talent.
New Songs are risky
So, why don’t we sing more new songs and originals? The danger is that we expect folks to embrace a new song or see what we’re doing as valuable and needed right away. If not, we might safely run back to the safety of the accepted, known, already-heard song. Some might say we humans are afraid of death—perhaps not in an actual sense, but an artistic one—either death of career or death by embarrassment. But to limit ourselves to the accepted songs of others is more about being afraid to live. Living comes with a lack of acceptance, a lack of appreciation, and, frankly, failure—none of which are actually dying as much as they are part of living. So, sing your God-given song, even if no one knows they need it yet. Be well friends.
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A strong sense of your inherent worth will welcome questions. When we’re centered in our worth and are asked questions, it won’t be a threat, and when we ask them, the hint of not knowing something won’t chip away at our sense of self. The converse is true, too; if our sense of worth is low or fragile, we’ll feel we’re supposed to know already. What a shameful thing to not already know, right? And the terror of being asked to explain something we believe without much support beyond habitual patterns can be terrifying.
There’s something about questions that makes us vulnerable. When we’re asked them, we have to explain our assumptions or our less than well-constructed reasoning. We might reveal our narrow biases or weaknesses we’re protecting.
While we might have been led to believe that displaying our knowledge holds power and strength, it often reduces the size of our world. The ability to be curious and ask questions of ourselves and others expands life’s possibilities.
Krista Tippett, of the show and now podcast On Being, has been asking questions for over 30 years. In her book Becoming Wise, An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, she discusses the countercultural act of what she calls generous listening, which is activated by questions.
Listening is an everyday social art, but it's an art we have neglected and must learn anew. Listening is more than being quiet while the other person speaks until you can say what you have to say… Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions.
In American life, we trade mostly in competing answers—and in questions that corner, incite, or entertain.
My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits.
If I've learned nothing else, I've learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness.
Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet. So while a simple question can be precisely what's needed to drive to the heart of the matter, it's hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. It's hard to transcend a combative question. But it's hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.
Here's another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and civic tools: they may not want answers, or not immediately. They might be raised in order to be pondered, dwelt on, instead. The intimate and civilizational questions we are living with in our time are not going to be answered with answers we can all make peace with any time soon.
How’s that going?
Yes, but Rob, you must correct, rebuke, convince, and persuade. Let me ask a question I know the answer to: How's that going? I realize our instinct is to impress, speak down to until folks know they're lower, and flex our resume, degree, or acumen until someone accepts our rightness. However, the outcomes of this are predictable, well-worn ruts.
Tippet offers the idea of strength in apparent weakness. Our questions can display the biblical idea. She asks if we have
"the courage to be vulnerable in front of those we passionately disagree with”
What questions would Jesus ask?
Jesus, knowledgeable in all ways, employed questions far more than his followers today. In the Gospels, Jesus asked more questions than he answered, asking 307 questions and only answering 3 of the 183 questions asked of him.
We see when Jesus sat near a well and talked to a Samaritan woman. He asked her for water. Picture Christ, present at water's creation, being willing to ask for a cup of H2O from a woman he culturally was allowed to view himself above talking to. A vulnerability that softened her heart.
If we shore up our worth, realize and live it, questions become less scary. They become the open terrain of possibility upon which to meet others with whom we might disagree and share a meal of conversation that leads to new paths.
Be well, friend.
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How’s your audition going? Didn’t know you were auditioning? We often are these days.
Let me pick on social media that great punching bag that we both hate and are simultaneously tethered to. I should warn you that the following thoughts are not unique to social media. So, if you’re not on or are only a lurker, please know the ills of social auditioning are not exclusive to Facebook; it’s just easier to make a point with it.
Our desire for social acceptance can lead us to obsessively send out social radar pings to see if we’re okay and if we still matter, at least as much as we did yesterday, but hopefully a little more. We do this with posts, sometimes funny, sometimes ironic, often snarky and dismissive of others, but almost always hopeful of affirmation in some way. What are we lacking that compels us to these time-sucking post-and-check-result cycles of endorphin addiction?
Michael Gervais recently spoke about the phenomenon he has labeled FOPO (Fear of people’s opinion). In our social media friend groups, we’ve likely slowly curated echo chambers for an ‘audience’ that leaves our takes unchallenged, but we are still vying for approval. It might be the weirdest and most undiscussed aspect of social media. We are trying to gain the approval of supposed ‘friends.’ Or check that approval, reaffirm it, and feel established at a deep fundamental level.
Gervais is gracious to us humans. He says we came by this trait honestly. In our early stages as a species, rejection from the group was a death sentence. Survival on the savanna meant we had to be accepted. But today, that instinct still thrives and metastases into unhealthy appetites for approval.
I’ll add to his grace by saying we are skilled in scanning the world and looking for threats of rejection, never more so than if we grew up in a place of scarcity. A scarcity of resources could mean a slip would become an unrecoverable loss. This can be in the form of scarcity of emotional support, where a misstep means rejection. That will plant a seed of relying on approval even deeper than our instinctual wiring.
Having unresolved worth issues will drive us to live off the unreliable fuel (mostly fumes) of distracted social media associations. Even if we ‘win,’ it’s perhaps the most fragile sense of worth one can acquire, maybe second only to basing our worth on our looks. It’s pure folly—diminishing returns on a lousy stock.
Moreover, Dan Harris says:
if we are in the grip of FOPO we play it safe, we resist standing up for ourselves, we value approval over authenticity and often pursue other people’s dreams instead of our own.
So we audition, and when we do, we compete and compare. Even the voices of support in our lives can be informed by this instinct. You or I receive encouragement because we’re better than others doing the same. Why not offer something apart from how we stack up with others? This is nearly unavailable to those who build worth through comparison or competition.
For anyone concerned (or hopeful) that I’m advocating for an extreme, punk rock-like disregard for the thoughts of others, I’m not. To do good work and be a good fellow human, we must care what others think. However, caring about what others think is different from worrying. Our care can’t tip over into rumination or fear. We can note it and check our need to redress things.
We all have seen and likely made posts featuring us on vacation. We circle back (sometimes within the hour) to see how pictures of our smiling family in front of enviable vacation backdrops are performing. Often, folks in the comments will proclaim their love for our locale and even go on about how frequently they go there. Whose audition is this, pal?
What if we had a resolute, unshakable sense of our worth and value? How much would we fall prey to FOPO? How much new energy would we possess by not expending it for the obligatory thumbs up from people we knew in middle school?
That most powerfully comes to us in the tender mercy of God’s grace and love. Neither of these can be learned or increased by our behavior. There is an is-ness to the worth God has placed in us. So, whether the audition we undertake is at the gym or job or under the control of billion-dollar companies who are pitching us products as we seek acceptance, we can step back from the zero-sum game if we remember God sings over us (Zephaniah 3:17) whether we got more likes today than yesterday. Be well friend.
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An old Folgers coffee ad includes a jingle: “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” The practices around waking up have been on my mind lately, and this little earworm roars to life when I think of waking up’s best parts.
Birdsong is big for me. In its absence, something deep in my mammalian psyche is off. A morning can feel bleak and somehow darker without the song sparrow on our neighbor’s roof. Even if you’re not a birder, notice what sense the songs and calls of a dawn chorus give you.
Just as I think of waking up’s best parts, I have a habit I’ve tried to break for a few years. I’ll call it “Waking the Wolves.” Stay with me.
Our day’s wolves
Anxiety can be a familiar companion to a lot of people. When we first wake up, it’s usually not awake yet. But, we anxious types can weirdly feel a need to give anxiety a wake-up call.
If our default mode throughout the day is a combination of baseline anxiety, worry, or turmoil, when we first wake up, we can seek to create these familiar mental states. We do it by imagining someone stewing about an email we owe them, disappointing a boss or client, or thinking of unfinished daily obligations. All this instigates concern, heightens our awareness, and jangles our nerves. Once we have a churning sense of doom in our stomachs, we feel more at home in a perverse sense.
There are varying degrees of this. Some may go off the deep end and struggle to function, cancel plans, and recede into a lesser life, while others simply underperform.
Part of the problem in breaking the cycle is we think it’s helping us. For instance, you may think, well, of course, we add stress; it’s helpful motivation, and to an extent, some stress serves us to bring focus and can mean we care about outcomes. But I’m talking about stress that has nothing to do with outcomes or, in some ways, even reality.
Stress addiction
Our bodies can become addicted to stress. We think it’s a helpful, motivating influence, but it can create reactions or reactivity that’s outsized with what’s happening in front of us. Evidence for this abounds. Why do people explode over slight hiccups in their commute? Why do they fire off cringe emails steeped in displaced anger that they must apologize for later? All this supposedly helpful motivating stress that can gin up our motivation may be partly to blame for our being a jerk.
Even with no outsized reactions or relational casualties, the emotional cost of creating stress is far too high. Yes, you can navigate tricky circumstances because your attention is razor-sharp. Still, the crash and emotional escape that awaits are often harmful in ways the feared and imagined scenarios never would’ve been. After a day of created stress, we can eat our emotions, binge-watch trash television, or think that only a vacation can fix us when we need to reduce our need for escape altogether. The experience of waking the wolves to feel normal is the subject of the forgoing poem I wrote. It’s a poem; it’s dramatic, but let me know if you have felt the same. WAKING THE WOLVESThe wolves of unrest emerge —from the gentle woods of sleep.Slink in lithe trotsinto the clearing of a new day.
The wolf of guilt, the wolf ofdisappointing others, the wolf ofremembered unskillful actions.
Doubt wolf, Imposter wolf. Failure wolf.
I was free in sleep — but nowwaking feels complete by enticing, teasing them to dig real and imaginary teeth into me.
The bites hold equal pain and comfort.
The unsettled uncertainty of dawn’s clearingfeels right now,
as I’m crowded and
devoured. The help I’ve found is to practice differently than this habit. It’s practice, good one day, difficult the next. Like life.
Be well, friend.
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We all have a friend like this. They are the center of the conversational universe. Even if they are listening, it’s from a crouched position waiting to pounce into the conversation to make it about them. They upstage, dismiss, and hold court as all topics obit their preferences. They have a trove of hero stories in which they expertly handed the struggle you’re sharing. Their stance is certainty; they need you or me to stop talking, and we’ll get their formed take on the topic at hand.
Occasionally, we realize we’ve become this person. Age will do it. Life experience. Compassion fatigue. Hopefully, when we see we have become the center of the universe, it’s just a stinging realization during a quiet drive home from dinner with friends and not how we’ve lived our adult lives.
I was with a person for a thirty-minute car ride to meet shared acquaintances at a minor league baseball game. I think he confused me with his biographer because I got a solid half-hour of details about his life, diet, and recent vacation. I have all those things, too, but like a lesser-known talk show guest who got bumped, there wasn’t time for me on the show tonight.
We arrived earlier than our friends and worked towards our seats. His commentary on preferred ballpark snacks might make it into the footnotes, but I don’t think it’s enough material for an entire chapter in the biography.
As we settled into our seats, I hoped anything would derail his tales of Little League prowess. As luck would have it, a stranger approached us both and told my friend he liked the major league team on the jersey he was wearing. The stranger added that, like the team, he was from out west and liked them from a young age. Undeterred by this potentially interesting opening salvo, my friend quickly broke in with his own reason for liking the team. The stranger followed up with the fact that he was near the ballpark for work and had a free night that evening and decided to stop over. He casually added he’s a rodeo clown, and his company’s rodeo didn’t have a show tonight.
Without missing a beat, my friend explained what he and I do for a living and why we’re there, but I simply couldn’t let him. I jumped in and asked the stranger “Wait, you’re a rodeo clown?, I have a million questions”.
He wasn’t a rodeo participant, a pretty straightforward role; he was this unusual side-act within the oldest action sport on earth. A character in a get-up that charges into the chaos and danger to help protect a rodeo participant.
I was slightly offended that my friend wasn’t interested in me, but when a rodeo clown sidled up to us, even that wasn’t enough to interest my friend. I felt weirdly less offended. I realized I could’ve been Neil Armstrong and wouldn’t have been asked a question.
This experience led me to an axiom, a bumper sticker-length truism for the rest of my life: If you ever meet a rodeo clown, stop talking and listen unless you are a rodeo clown.
Now, of course, I’m attempting to be funny. Conversations aren’t contests to win and shut down people who live more quiet lives. But this illustrates exaggeratedly that sometimes nothing can derail a person fighting for their worth.
Any mention of my friend’s self-absorption must be followed up with: I’ve been him. When I’m talking to people, I’ve felt a sudden contest emerge in me to gain worth, status, and consideration. I can need it like oxygen. I endlessly am trying to be interesting. I’m sure it’s exhausted people in my orbit. They don’t have a Substack to write about it (yet).
Let me encourage you to make a minor pivot if this feels relatable. You needn’t reorder all your input and interactions. Start small with this: Instead of trying to be interesting, be interested.
If someone says they just returned from vacation, don’t hijack their story if you’ve been there a bazillion times. Maybe even save the details that you’ve ever been there. Please give them the full spotlight. I’ve seen well-traveled people do this, and it’s actually lovely.
Feeling heard, seen, and honored will give people much more than being wowed by you or me. Giving attention is one of the highest forms of love. Be well, Feral Souls.
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What does low self-worth look like? A shy, backward, self-doubting, feckless, and underachieving mess of a person? The traits we assume a person who lacks self-worth can be cartoonishly simple. And to be fair, these can be correct. But I want to warn you that there are some perfect disguises at the masquerade ball of daily performances.
Chelsea
Growing up, a friend’s mom had a bull-mastiff named Chelsea. If you’re unfamiliar with them, these are very large, visually intimidating dogs. Now, temperamentally, they’re often big babies. But if you’ve never seen one, your instinct is to protect yourself.
I don’t remember Chelsea ever barking. Ever. She didn’t have to. She was unthreatened by anything or anyone. At home in herself.
Compare her to my nearby neighbor’s dogs. Three tiny dogs on leads in the front yard to do their business a few times a day. For those fifteen minutes, they never shut up. It’s instant kennel sound effects from the moment they go out until they’re gathered in.
Why? I’m no dog psychologist, but I observe that they assert themselves because their hold on their territory feels fragile. They are in protection mode. They don’t want to be overlooked. Ever. Everything is a threat to their whole selves.
Now do people.
How many Chelsea’s do you know? Quiet, self-assured, and comfortable in themselves. Dogs not barking…er posting on social media for approval. Not territory marking. Not ensuring they’re never overlooked, even for a single instance. Not forever ensuring their opinion is heard and their preferences are known.
Now, how many little dogs do you know? Their and their kid's accomplishments are on show in carefully curated detail online; after all, you must see them; their worth depends on it. Whether in person or online, so much rides on every experience.
They lower everyone with criticism and judgment merely to get the room for their worth to get some air.
To see these yappy types we might decide: extrovert, big confidence, achievers, they know and announce who they are all the time. What swagger they possess! Self-worth isn’t their problem, over self-worth maybe.
Hold up. If they had self-worth, they wouldn’t be trying to prove it. Read that again.
The disguise
Many people with low self-worth show up trying to look like the exact opposite. They’re not comfortable within themselves, so they bark and show out. We read their disguise as who they are for real. We will go further and call that kind of thing disgusting over consideration of themselves. But if they had the worth they’re flaunting, would they be doing public relations every time you bump into them anywhere?
Everything is an exhausting game of “whatever you can do, I can do better” or “you’re good at that? I would never be interested in it.” They have to win contests they’re not even in by rolling their eyes at the others. Is that self-worth, or is that the sound of barking?
Look, we’re allowed to share details of our lives but check your motivation. If we have to win, even being more humble than others, it might be a symptom of work to be done. Do we have a sense of enoughness? Ever? Our bark may be trying to secure it.
I want to be gracious if you see some of this small dog instinct in your walk in the world. We’re trained our whole lives to bark.
Toddlers usually start very loving and caring. We hit school, and it’s a twelve-year slog through trying to win, place, or show — in literally everything. If we fail a bit, we attempt to win, place, or show in acting like we don’t care.
It’s what we do
So if you’re a barker or know one, this is more our discipling in everything because it’s what society rewards. It might be the only thing our parents ever rewarded. In a lot of cases, your success is your parent’s worth. A lot can be on the line for a whole family system. Better bark more.
Our discovery of these broken ways can be humbling. We might be out in the world in a particular way and not realize it. Sometimes, we think we have a personality, but it’s more a list of symptoms.
Little dog, big dog, feral soul, begin with your enoughness, your worth apart from being considered or achieving anything. And as we unpack that, we can see the exhausting charade we’ve been living in. We can become authentic people at ease in the unconditional love of our Creator.
Snore
One thing I did hear Chelsea do is snore. So wholly at rest, the world knew it. Not by her barking but by her resting. Be like Chelsea and Be Well, Feral Souls.
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Mike Vrabel was fired from his head coaching job with the Tennessee Titans. Apparently, in the sports world, this was unexpected. A headline filled my feeds for a news cycle or two. Seen as one of the best present coaches, Vrabel’s ouster was criticized by many. It’s how it goes; in fact, six vacancies have been created lately. I have no idea what type of coach Vrabel was, but it got me thinking.
Our inner coach
What interested me is the way I continue with my coach and the way we all do. Didn’t know you had one? You do, and he may need to be let go.
We all have an inner coach. A sort of motivating narrator that’s evaluating, criticizing, and trying to perfect our efforts. He or she is often severely lambasting us for missteps and trying to get us on — or keep us on track.
Folks who struggle with worth can be particularly susceptible to keeping an inner coach on, even if it’s not helpful. We tend to motivate ourselves from the harshest and least humane point of view. It’s a voice that forgets that you and I are human and mistakes in performance are our M.O. This voice seems to say there’s success at the other end of beating ourselves up.
For example, this time of year goes like this: Look in the mirror, hate yourself, and then flog yourself in the gym with a joyless exercise plan. Rinse and repeat each January.
Who knows how this happens, but I suspect film depictions of drill sergeants or coaches partially inspire us. Maybe we had task-master parents. The uniform way of these cattle prod voices is that if you need improvement, you should criticize yourself for betterment. This is made worse if we have zero models for motivation other than this. It’s a reliable trope in film and movies, so I don’t expect it to go away.
We sometimes make a deal with the devil in making room for this type of inner drill sergeant. It goes like this: Angry outbursts and unhinged tantrums are allowed if the end goal is excellence. These taskmasters we have known have yelled because they care. And we can close the story with a kid whose life was turned around because he was yelled at playing a game. That coach believed in him; it only took a lifetime for him to see it.
We take this template and map it to all our efforts. We say (without saying) “I care about excellence therefore my inner dialog must do its best impression of a drill sergeant cliche”. And just like in the movies, we’ll someday look back on all those traumatic anxiety-creating screaming sessions and see them as the real source of our terrific work ethic. Never mind the immobilizing anxiety we’ve created; the ends justify the means. Sadly, we rarely make it to the end. There’s always a new reason to instigate change angrily.
Here’s the thing, the way of a football coach can get you and I through a quarter of a football game but life is longer. All that matters for a coach is the next 15 minutes or less. You and I will have about 80 years on earth; we are not doing the same kind of motivating. Yet we’re motivating the same way. I’m afraid tough love is more a short term story gimmick. Who doesn’t love a tender-hearted brow-beater who only wants the best for you?
Not to say there aren’t critical moments where a stern evaluation is needed. But it’s more an exception than a whole way of operating.
Back to our surprising coaching vacancy created in Tennessee. If a multi-million dollar organization that’s a part of a city’s identity (if not a state’s) can release a decent coach in a surprise move, I wonder why we’re so unwilling to let ours go? Maybe it’s time our upper management went in “a different direction.”
Why? Because science.
Would you believe data?
Dr. Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion for over 15 years has shown that being self-compassionate is actually a stronger motivator.
The number-one reason people give for why they aren’t more self-compassionate is the fear that they will be too easy on themselves. Without constant self-criticism to spur myself on, people worry, won’t I just skip work, eat three tubs of ice cream and watch Oprah reruns all day? In others words, isn’t self-compassion really the same thing as self-indulgence?
When we are ruthless with ourselves, Neff says our imagined field of options narrows. We only see putting our head down and driving through a linebacker (so to speak). Again this works for the last play of a drive, but 30 years of it can be crippling. It creates behavioral ruts that cause us to become defensive because, well, they work.
And that might be the most damning thing about all this. The tactic works but doesn’t help. We only care about short-term goals, so if something works in the moment, it must be the best thing.
Look into Neff’s work. She’s done TedTalks, has been on podcasts, and written helpful books.
I’m a tough whatever
I know this butts up against your Gen X instincts, we did things the right way, none of this weak self-love stuff. Here’s the thing. When I think back to the 8-9 boys who met regularly to play backyard football, baseball, and kickball in the ’80s, three are dead, two are morbidly obese, and one is a recovering alcoholic. There are a million possible reasons for some of these things, but if we want to point to how we’ve done things as being better, the inconvenient results aren’t helping me see it as accurate.
So, the next time your inner coach rants and throws a clipboard, tell him, thank you for your service, but we’re going a different direction. Be well, Feral Souls.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction, was interviewed by Oprah and was unexpectedly asked, “Jon, what do you think about life after death?”.
Jon replied, “Oprah, I have virtually no interest in the question of life after death; I’m interested in the question of whether there’s life before death.”
He went on to say in a recent interview.
“What often passes for life is… a driven automaticity that disregards your own beauty, never mind the beauty of others and nature.
This took my breath away, and not in a good way.
The next life.
Much of my early spiritual formation had me focused on the next life. I got “saved” to avoid punishment in the next life. My foundation of what was meant to be the greatest love relationship with Love personified was based on my avoiding eternal conscious torment and never making a false move to continue to avoid it. It became a spiritual life lived on defense.
When I think of this spiritually, I’m encouraged to view this life as essentially horrible compared to the next one. Anyone who passes from this life is in “a far better place” (we say that all the time at funerals). As a result, I envisioned this life as merely a disappointing waiting room for the next life when real goodness kicks in.
An aspect of my spiritual upbringing was to warn me that I shouldn’t put too much stock in this life as it would tempt me to overvalue it and draw me away from complete investment in the next one.
But wait. Christians believe eternal life begins now. Once we become “saved,” a seamless timeline stretches into eternity from here. Our soul never dies. And yet much of my early understanding encouraged me to separate or bifurcate the experience of life into a first part of around 80 years that’s dirty, foul, and has nothing to celebrate, and a second eternal part that is the good stuff. Until that great day of my dying, I simply circle the airport and await the someday reality of going to the good times. Sure, there are glimpses and even blessed trials that are where all the good development of my faith really happens, but I mostly just want out of here. Can we just study Revelation, pastor?
One major hurdle to this view is Christ’s own words. Christ said he came to give us life and life to the full. Shouldn’t it be that we live as one who inhabits that fullness now? And embrace discussion and experience of it? Without competition or shame?
So many forces try to suppress our lived experience. Whether it’s life’s challenges or systems within the world that make demands of performance to arrive at our worth, this is made worse because some of them are interwoven with spiritual inspiration that is mostly helpful. These voices of my formation did do loads of good. So it’s complicated.
Whether it was intended or not, I’ve gotten the sense that it’s reckless and selfish to enjoy this life. You may think this is an overstatement, and to make my point, perhaps it is, but it’s merely the exaggerated expression of what we quietly feel or have been taught. If you enjoy this life, you’ll struggle to forsake it for the next. But aren’t there compatible elements in this life that we actually won’t release going into the next?
The way we’ve been taught
We must admit that much of our understanding of living life is informed by being a good worker. Dithering about for the systems we serve. Even though life to the full is what we’re promised, we’ll only enjoy a break after we’re sufficiently exhausted. We won’t indulge in the joys of this life because hardship exists for others. I mean, how dare we smile when sadness exists?
Informed by what it means to be a good, productive citizen our aim is to move through our day as expeditiously, conservatively, and productively as possible. These goals sometimes crush our lived experience at the moment, but never mind that we’re after the approving gaze of an inner Pharaoh calling us to make more and more bricks. We will someday cross that river Jordan and get to the promised land — but for now, earn your keep. We’re still slaves of our own making, for some reason.
We need convincing to live life before death. We actually always have. It shouldn’t be any wonder that the most verbose of the commandments is regarding a day of rest. To stop rest and delight. Our reluctance to rest is an effort to create our worth that we already have, gain approval that grace gifted us, and earn our right to breathe the air we we were gifted in the garden.
A trip for coffee
We were on vacation, and I was tasked with going for coffee. I happily do this as I rather like being engaged with other warm-blooded mammals. IF that makes me an extrovert, we may need to work on definitions. But I digress.
I entered an Italian-owned, themed, and fully vibed coffee place. It smelled magnificent and was serene and washed in hushed conversations of relaxed couples and lone customers sitting at hopelessly quaint tables.
I ordered our drinks and slid to the waiting area of the counter. The drinks arrived, and to my horror, they were made for what the cafe was expecting: someone who would sit, sip, chat, and live life. What I needed was coffee prepared for a person who was going to bolt, drive away, get on the road, and get things done. I sheepishly asked for them to be made to go. They dutifully adapted my order, but the contrast of the two offerings is telling. (Picture below)
The initially prepared drinks are gorgeous. A big, frothy, inviting, and flavor-filled offering teeming with an invitation to a slowed-down experience. The remade-to-go drinks are a sterile paper cylinder, plastic-capped cliche. The flavor pressed through a joyless sip slot. It gets the job done. It imparts caffeine and flavor in the strictest means of delivery. We went from a flavor banquet inside an Italian bistro to an IV caffeine drip on wheels. We saved around 15 minutes, probably.
Not every coffee order puts me at a crossroads in evaluating what we’ve become, but this one did. I drove back to our hotel and handed the coffees off to the awaiting hands of my family. Only I knew what we’d sacrificed to get on the road quicker. Life before death. Be well, Feral Souls.
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Five years ago, I walked onto the Appalachian Trail (AT) for the first time. The AT is a 2,190+ mile long public footpath from Georgia to Maine. I planned to travel 30 miles in the Michaux State Forest in Pennsylvania. I would spend four days on the trail, camping in the backwoods.
I had done exhaustive research on the backpacking tent I should get, the cooking system, the water filtration kit, and the backpack. I had also exhaustively spent money to accumulate this gear. I’d watched endless reviews, read blogs, and lived on backpacker YouTube channels for a few months.
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However, when it was time to go, I ducked into our garage and grabbed my well-worn, trusty Wolverine boots that I wore when mowing our lawn. They were rugged yet comfortably adapted to my feet. They had life in them, and I knew they could still handle the terrain. Never mind that the conditions, my pack weight, and the length of time in my boots were all different from mowing, my footwear was a footnote in my preparation.
I’ll cut to the chase to say that while I slept warmly, drank clean water, and ate well, the blisters on my feet took close to three months to heal.
I had obsessed about the wrong things. While I would be camping, filtering water, and eating, off and on, I would be walking nearly the whole time. I wasn’t going to get anywhere without walking. My footwear should have been priority one. Instead, it was somewhere way down the list.
In my defense, I felt like I knew all there was to know about walking. While I’d never done a hike like this, I had been walking for nearly 50 years.
We might think we have the basics down and can now move on to more intricate things, but we realize later that not reviewing the basics eventually gives us problems in many other areas.
Breathwork
Enter the world of breathwork. Maybe you’ve noticed over the last decade that breathwork has become an area of study and focus for mental and general health. There are breath coaches, breathwork practitioners, and classes one can take. A landmark book by James Nestor entitled Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art came out in 2020, just as the importance of breathing soared to the forefront of our minds during Covid.
And yet, I can understand why we’ve made it the last thing we grab out of the garage on the way out the door. What is there to learn?
But I contend we have plenty to learn and even more, we need to relearn.
I think I can hear you. You’re talking about breathing? Inhaling and exhaling? The thing that is, among other things, autonomic in humans. We do it without thinking. Are people studying that? Talking about it? Ok, but I think I know how to breathe. Yeah, I did, too.
We’ve gone backward
Nestor's book explores the importance of breathing and its impact on our health. The book's main argument is that many modern health problems can be attributed to improper breathing habits and that rediscovering and practicing proper breathing techniques can lead to numerous health benefits.
So, even if we’ve done it well, Nestor argues, we have experienced a devolution in our breathing. In the modern era, we share something called “email apnea or screen apnea,” a temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing while working (or playing) in front of screens. This, among other issues, makes going back to the basics necessary.
Next time you’re immersed in an email, try to notice how you’re breathing. You may not be doing as well as you know how. Seated with our eyes trained on pixelated details, we can stop breathing in short bursts of time. And given our hours hunched over screens, this possibly becomes a dominant breathing pattern for our day. Imagine routinely making breathing, a massively important thing, less effective for six to ten hours a day. It becomes our new habit whether we realize it.
More than optimal functioning is affected; withholding our breath throws the nervous system into fight-or-flight mode. Since most of our waking days are in front of screens, is it any wonder that anxiety and stress trends have skyrocketed? It may not be anything more than our breathing that’s put us in exhausted cycles of worry.
This hardly scratches the surface of breathing devolution. Trauma and high levels of dysfunction in ourselves and others have led to a decline in our ability to get out of fight or flight.
The great news is we’re rescued from fight or flight simply by a few minutes of deep belly breathing. While shallow breathing automatically triggers anxiety cycles. Our bodies are amazing, but when we go into fight or flight, our body doesn’t know if we’re attending to an annoying text or being chased by a bear; it simply sends us into rescue mode.
Your invite to breathe
So, I’m inviting Feral Souls to breathe.
The worth challenged may think that’s not enough. You may think in your downtime, in rare moments of self-care, you need to think on scripture, confront injustice, contemplate your Creator, create art, heal the world, and become a better person. Our path to those things (to steal from the airline boarding spiel) comes from putting our oxygen mask on first and then attending to the broader world and our function in it. Self-care isn’t selfish if it’s the first step to helping the world.
We only consider our breathing when it’s not happening or if it’s labored. “Let me catch my breath” is an expression when something has gone wrong. But to turn our attention to enhancing our breathing, even if it’s satisfactory, could be just the move to help your life. Being less exhausted and more emotionally regulated has enormous upside.
The spiritual side of breath
Breath is the first thing checked by doctors when we enter the world. We’re swatted on the rear if it’s not happening. It’s one of the final things we stop before we pass into the next life. It’s a gift that ties us to the first man and back to our Creator. The moment-by-moment reliance on it can be a natural reminder of our fragile existence. Simply put, breathing is our first spiritual practice.
Regulated breathing is a way of living that ensures the world hasn’t squeezed us into a harried scramble for the worth that takes our breath away. It’s a way to defend against the cruel encroachment on our Creator’s value of us. If we breathlessly chase our worth, it’s no wonder we’ve forgotten how to breathe with our God-given ease.
Below is a cleaning house of resources around breathing. One thing I use is a Calm Strip with a boxed breathing prompt. I received a few of these and have put them in places to practice wherever I am.
As my index finger traces the soft sand-textured path, I do each action for four seconds, activating a relaxed state by design.
Check out the resources below and be well, Feral Souls.
Left to right: Black Girls Breathing, Oxygen Advantage, Breathwork Alchemy
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What if you’re not actually an introvert?
In this post, I will suggest your self-diagnosis may be a bit off. Suppose you cling to the giant and often hilarious introversion community with a thriving online meme industrial complex. You may be unwilling to shed the introversion label but hear me out.
Introverts can be a welcoming community, even if from a distance. The growing online spaces of the 2000s have meant introverts have found their voice. It has become a treasured label that folks are eager to share online. Who knows why it’s become attractive? Maybe it’s to tell people we introverts won’t be showing up to things, or if we do, we don’t want to be there and will find the first excuse to leave. If the head cheerleader and class president got all the attention years ago, it’s attractive to be socially unattracted today.
I read reposted and shared memes by the boatload that are infused with lots of snark about how the person sharing them doesn’t want to go out, be in public, talk to people, or be in situations that are too “peopley.” The new introverts are too happy to tell you they like tacos and maybe three people. I read one today that said: Neighbor said hi again. I’m just gonna move. Below, you’ll see Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, who’s too smart for the unwashed masses, saying he’s not a fan of social settings.
Watching people own the label can feel like walking by a 90’s era herd of goth kids at the mall food court. They all seem to be rolling their eyes at essential human interaction. We get it; humans aren’t your thing. The bad news, though, is you’re still a warm-blooded mammal that needs others.
Admittedly, these memes border more on anti-social than identifying anything about the nuanced spectrum of personalities and character uniqueness. Wanting to be around fewer people and needing downtime to process is real, but it’s made trite by these pointy barbs of humor. Somehow, all these jokes get rolled up into the introversion burrito. Today, introverts seem to be a majority of people rather than the interesting niche people group many have as a reputation goal.
Why introversion might not be you
Feral Souls, those who struggle with inhabiting their worth, can default to the label of an introvert because they are exhausted by groups.
What is a social gathering to you? Is it an intense joust to convince people you’re on par, passable, or perhaps deserve respect as being in the social lead? Are they a space to earn consideration, a subconscious competition to take the lead? In short, do you feel you need to win the dinner party, or at least medal?
When our interactions with others are an audition for approval, the emotional spend can be high, and we will want to limit those interactions or avoid them altogether. The emotional exertion we expend can be exhaustingly high if, when we talk to others, we need to either impress them or ensure we are maintaining a similar life status.
Being human means we need social support. However, having an inner void that can only be filled by impressing others into states of envy or awe sets us on an unsustainable pace. Exhausted from trying to earn our worth will become the familiar end point of gatherings, so saving oneself from the exertion is natural. We have no pressure to win if we don’t show. But what says you need to win? Perhaps it’s the void where your unshakable worth should be.
Your family gatherings aren’t boring.
It can seem lacking when a setting doesn’t afford us a stage to impress or a theater of competitive intensity.
Here’s what I mean.
When a social gathering doesn’t offer intense jockeying for either significance or supremacy, the gathering itself can seem lacking. Talking to our uncle at Thanksgiving, who loves us no matter what, usually holds no socially electric buzz to promote oneself or compete. What if our Thanksgiving gatherings aren’t boring, but instead, they’re not demanding unhealthy things from us? And the absence of tension makes them FEEL boring. We might reach for our phones to see where the action is and miss the acceptance we have at the moment. At Thanksgiving, why do teenagers seem to want to be anywhere else? The raw power of the endorphins of competing isn’t on offer in the stark light of complete acceptance and the smell of warm turkey.
While in these low-risk gatherings, do our minds hum with the desire for more intense worth-creating moments among social ladder climbers or peers? That’s less about our uncle’s reliable stories and warm predictability being boring and more about the familiar routine of contesting for value in social settings.
Shedding your feral status and coming home
A significant upside to healing our inner worth is social settings become more relaxing. Just know that people aren’t considering your every shirt choice. Many people have no opinion of you, and if they think of you at all, they likely are working from a bare minimum awareness of who you are. Fully inhabit your worth and put down the jousting spear you’ve carried into group settings; they’ll be less draining, and who knows, you may even find they’re not so bad. Be well, Feral Souls.
Could someone you know use a weekly-ish dose of mindful worth? Share Feral Soul with them.
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We are over the pumpkin-sized hump of Halloween and into the season of thanks we go. We are between two worlds. Perhaps more than we realize.
In our era in America, Halloween is an incredible celebration of fantasy that’s escalated in every imagined direction, from twelve-foot plastic skeletons and inflatables of every variety in people’s yards to a costume store that’s a retail zombie called Spirit Halloween. Think a retail space is gone for good? Nope, that kitschy ghost will haunt it as if it is lurking nearby to rear its zombie offerings the whole time.
In short, Halloween is a big deal. We get dressed in who we’d like to project ourselves to be. The choosing is an event complete with planning and dramatic unveiling. We can be scary, funny, timely, meme-related or nostalgic. The costume is an attractive moment of escape in an adult life that rarely offers more than two weeks a year.
We only go to the gatherings of our choosing. I don’t know of anyone who goes to obligatory Halloween dinners, except maybe for vampires.
Then comes Thanksgiving. In the stark light of a dining room filled with memories of who we were, we’ll be our unveiled selves in front of people who see us in the version they prefer. Or perhaps they’ll guilt us in spoken or unspoken ways for not yet being the version they prefer. Our presence at these and most gatherings is expected, even if they’re enjoyable.
If you think about it, having Halloween give way to Thanksgiving is a wildly bi-polar juxtaposition. And it’s not hard to see why Halloween is second only to Christmas while Thanksgiving has become merely the day to begin Christmas shopping.
But let me welcome your feral soul that assumes it’s on its own; everything is up to it, even its survival, to give thanks for where you are now.
Maybe after all the aspiration, projection, hiding, and effort to become something else, your soul can come home and be thankful for who you are. Sure, it’s imperfect and often humbling, but that’s okay. Feel all the feelings; you’ll be fine.
What Sally Brown can teach us
Sally Brown is the hero of The Great Pumpkin. Next time you watch it, bear witness to her realness. She gets invited to Trick or Treat. She shares her anxiety about it. “Are you sure it’s legal”. In her love, she ardently defends the passionate but delusional Linus, even to her friends. When the Great Pumpkin doesn’t show, she demands accountability. She tells Linus, “You owe me restitution!.” And finally, she mourns missing Trick or Treats when all she sees is a beagle. She felt the whole alphabet of emotion, commitment, and disappointment, and that’s all fine.
Feel all your feelings
Feel all your feelings, give thanks, and in the stark light of where you are, the misunderstandings and disappointment with people you love, know you’ve made progress, but it’s also perfectly fine not to make progress every single moment. Come to the obligatory tables of brightly lit reckoning and feel all your feelings with thankfulness. And be thankful that those feelings, like every celebration, are passing.
Be well, Feral Souls.
Thank you for reading Feral Soul. This post is public so feel free to share it.
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*contains spoilers about The Birds
I went to two movies in two weeks. That’s some kind of recent record. The first was a 60th anniversary showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The film holds up if one can put aside the crude special effects that are silly by today’s standards. I mean, it still works because it seems like it could happen. The slow retreat from Bodega Bay with perched blackbirds in the final scene dismisses the viewer into an alert unease of every flock of birds they see for the rest of their lives.
The second was Rosemary’s Baby, a film I had never seen and hope never to see again. It’s meant to be profoundly unsettling, and it achieved that goal like few things I’d ever seen, at least on purpose.
I saw The Birds in a modern cinema. The kind of place you’ve been to if you’ve been to the movies in the last, I don’t know, twenty years. When the door swung open, and the overly familiar look of the lobby and the smell of popcorn hit me, my mind went on autopilot. I knew I’d show the ticket I bought online to someone who would tear and return it, likely without saying anything more than what number screen to amble towards. The number being the only different thing about the room I’d walk into. I’d get into the overly comfortable seat, and the well-worn experience would feel very expected. It did.
Rosemary’s baby was being shown in a theater space that was being renovated. It was in a part of an early 20th-century hospital building. Work will be done to turn into something, but it’s barely discernible what it is even in its present state. The work was so unfinished I wondered if it had been started. A polished artist's drawing of what will be there someday was beside the makeshift concession area. A single employee raced around selling popcorn and chilled soda while peppering his every interaction with apologies no one needed for all he was doing.
As I looked around at the decayed ceiling and disarray of the lobby, the drawing seemed to show something that would take place elsewhere. I couldn’t imagine the space I was in would ever look like the drawing.
My friend Danny had been before and knew the route to the theater. Which was good because as I followed him around curved staircases, blind corners, weirdly slanted floors, and completely unexpected turns, I worried I would never find my way there or out.
Eventually, we stood at a centered landing, looking down into the cavernous theater space. It was like seeing the inside of a sunken ship that hadn’t been used until recently. Behind the patina from age and neglect, it was likely impressive when the ribbon was cut in the early 1900’s. Renovators say “good bones,” but you’d have to say “good dinosaur bones.”
The seat was too small and hard, but all of it brought back memories of the Murphy Theater from my youth in southern Ohio. A place I saw movies like E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
As we waited for the film to start, from an Amazon Prime account being signed into before us on the screen, I thought of many reasons that would have been reason enough to wait to show movies here. Nothing felt ready.
We need to wait
Having been on the planning end of many things in my life, I know the voices that come from within and without that say, “Well, we need to wait.”
Wait for what? The expected experience. What feels familiar to a mind-numbing degree? The well-rehearsed experience that puts us on auto-pilot that we sleepwalk through? Is it any wonder we feel half-dead inside? We create sterile environments and experiences the same as our last ones. Our minds aren’t asked to do much, and I’m afraid they don’t.
Sometimes, we need to go before we feel ready. Because our readiness is defined by what we’ve done before and not what we hope to do. This is where worth-challenged folks struggle. Our worth is creating things that can go unnoticed. That’s not our goal; we want to be brave and fresh and share art, but often, it’s safe. It’s ready.
We can’t hazard the judgment of not being ready or familiar. We will wilt in the judgment of seeming un-similar.
Start before you’re ready
Here’s your encouragement to go precisely before you feel ready. This Substack isn’t ready yet. It meanders, it goes off-topic, it repeats itself. It’s also a failure by algorithmic standards. Heck, even by Substack standards, it would seem.
But I happen to know there are people who nurse their way around the faded corners of things I hope to improve with a desire and belief in what’s next. Even if weekly, I have to remind myself of where I’m going.
So, start before you’re ready.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Schiller.
Live with your century, but do not be its creature; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise.
Be well, Feral Souls.
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What more could she say? That was my reaction to Katherine May’s recent post entitled How to light the dark months: A Manifesto for winter light. May was the breakout author of 2020’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. She helped recast my vision and expectations of winter. I’m still not sold on needing winter, but I’m warming up to the idea.
The autumnal equinox recalibrates the daylight. Not only does it lead to shorter days, but the quality of light also seems to change. It’s like someone down-clicked the brightness on the photo editor. The sky gets gauzy, and I feel the lack of vitamin D, with all its requisite mood benefits, to the core of my being.
I’ll spend the next few months starting my day in front of a Verilux Happy Light. Does it help? Like most things, it helps a percentage. Given this change in my schedule, May’s emphasis on winter light piqued my interest.
I have been a Seasonal affected disorder (SAD) sufferer most of my life. I live in the Northeast, and the cold, lethargic winter days with less sunlight can bring mental health challenges. So, when May rolled out yet another tidbit about winter, I was all ears but also surprised.
Her adding to what she’s already said shows me there’s always more to learn, and there’s help in repeated reminders. We needn’t be original at all times. And in that spirit, I want to offer some hard-won pointers here.
It is less a guide about deeper spiritual practices, which I assume you are engaged in; this will be more a guide to mental and emotional help or tips for the SAD sufferer.
A few recommendations and an epiphany.
A stable
Have a stable of voices that give you a steady stream of regular reading, thought notes, and encouragement. These will become guides who can help navigate the wintering months. Thankfully, the era in which we live has many access points, apps, and means for connecting.
There are a few requirements to be in the stable.
Routine
These voices are routine. You want someone who is in rotation pretty regularly. They’re doing daily, weekly, biweekly, or even multiple daily offerings of their input. Winter's darkness, gloom, and sinking dampness are unrelenting; it all coalesces into a steady, insidious visitor. It warrants at least an equal routine of counter-programming. If a person posts once in a blue moon, they aren’t exactly to be counted as a voice in your stable.
One voice in my stable is Dawn Mauricio, who has leveraged apps like Mighty and WhatsApp to offer a steady beat of encouragement around mindfulness. She’s created a growing community that orients towards introspection and self-compassion. There are moments of encouragement and a regular reorienting that are helpful. Find your Dawn. It may be Dawn or someone similar.
Joy
The voices in your stable are joy-oriented. There’s enough bleak, dire, and fear-based news; it’s steady and unavoidable. Your stable of voices is oriented towards ‘things above. They are pointing us to better versions of ourselves and our world. They are creative and open to evolving into what represents goodness. Not Pollyanna or avoidant of the dark but naming the good even though darkness exists.
Real
They’re real. Even if we are self-assured and know we are graciously loved people with worth separate from our accomplishments, the filtered perfection of social media can instigate feelings of inferiority and comparison with real life. The online persona of some will give a routine spark of jealousy. It’s meant to. And these accounts are sometimes obvious, other times subtle, and what gives me a feeling of inferiority might be benign for you. Most of us know ‘try hards’ when we see them. Ask yourself what you feel when you visit the work being done. If it seems too slick or doesn’t acknowledge a need to learn, hit that subscribe button again — to unsubscribe.
How now do you live?
The online self-help industrial complex breeds a kind of mental agreement without much change. If we’re stuck in a doom scroll, we aren’t open to doing anything with even what we find true. So, we need actionable steps and progress. This is where your own journaling or progress tracking is helpful. However, there is a wintering caveat.
Wintering caveat
This is not the time to remake yourself necessarily. Yes, it would be best if you moved forward, but this is not a season for bursting forth. (Credit goes to May for helping me here.) Of course, there will be exceptions, but generally, things are slowed by steady rounds of colds and flu, weather-cancelled plans, and a generally sluggish everything with compressed daylight hours. You can think you will become an entirely different version of yourself on January 1st, but the meeting to announce it will likely be canceled and rescheduled for March.
We must accept the season as one of slower progress. This is where snowmelt seeps into our roots, and our growth all but stops. This makes working on reasonable action steps and connecting with people you are accountable to all the more necessary. In winter, our community usually goes the way of maple leaves and tulips, so it will take some tenacity to remain connected to others who are invested in your forward progress and you in theirs.
It won’t last
Regularly remind yourself of the impermanence of everything, even winter. Like clouds coming into the sky and passing, our thoughts, emotions, and present conditions are not forever. They only have the power we give them.
An epiphany
None of this is revolutionary; it’s more a well-timed word. But I did have a small epiphany. In her book, Joyful, Ingred Fetell Lee made a side note about eating, which struck a cord. Winter can be a time of carb loading for marathons I’m not running. I struggle with cravings and snacking on things that aren’t good for me. (The holidays don’t help). But Lee pointed out that some of our cravings may be our minds seeking sensory stimulation. And it was an Aha! The drab, brown, soggy, overcast days of winter don’t make me hungry; they make me sense starved. What’s more appealing than a pantry full of brightly colored packages with salt and sugar highs at the ready? Here’s Lee:
When I do have a snack craving, I try to pause and ask myself if what I'm feeling is a food hunger or a sense hunger and, if the latter, if there's anything else I can do about it. I try to make my office a haven of abundance, with a string of bright pom-poms, some colorful nautical flags, and a collection of postcards from favorite art exhibits.
Dashes of colors, textures, and even a fresh soundscape of bird song work against the foggy void and blah days of winter. Sense your way through cravings! Love it.
Get outside
There’s a Nordic expression: There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes. Nature heals, even if it’s cold. Touch grass with your feet, and a host of sensations to survive a week or two can race through your body.
Finally, May’s post from a few weeks ago here on Substack had this to say in closing.
Take SAD seriously
For some, the lack of winter light will cause serious mental and physical difficulties, and if that’s you, don’t dismiss or diminish it. Winter doesn’t have to be a season of suffering. Some of the ideas above might help, but there are also a range of other therapies available - talk to your doctor. There’s an excellent guide here from UK mental-health charity Mind. Even if you don’t feel that your suffering is severe, consider taking steps to stay happy and well during winter - for example, because I live in a northern climate, I take a daily Vitamin D supplement in autumn and winter as recommended by the NHS.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t conclude by saying it’s really important to stay physically active. We can all do a little better there. So, I’m curious: what are your winter light hacks? Who is in your stable? Let me know in the comments.
Be well, Feral Souls.
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Sir Ken Robinson is a British writer; he would go into nursery schools and ask the children, “Who in here is an artist?”. At the age of four or so, every hand goes up. He’d go to rooms of 3rd or 4th graders and ask, “Who in here is an artist,” nearly no hands went up. Why?
Robinson thinks that kids were told, either overtly or in more subtle ways, that they simply weren’t good at art. As I think about it, at that age, the test of whether an artist is good or not is often whether they can draw something that looks like something in real life. While that’s a form of art, it is a ridiculously small genre of art. Art comes in many mediums and can be real or abstract. Imagine the talent and art lost forever because, at the age of eight, a child didn’t excel in a merit-based system with a bafflingly small definition of art.
Can you not be good and still ok?
As we age, the disqualification becomes more self-induced. At a certain age, we only do what we’re good at or suspect we will be good at. I’m 53, I don’t try much of anything that I don’t already know or at least suspect I’ll be good at. Talk about a slowly shrinking world, right? My worth, tied to having skill through a lifetime of schooling and a culture that narrowly defines excellence, is too fragile to risk the embarrassment of doing something that doesn’t measure up.
When was the last time you did something you weren’t good at? Something you weren’t told either through merit, status, pay, or winning you have the skill for doing in life.
In a pickle
Over the last year or more, I’ve tried my hand at pickleball. You might be sick of hearing about it, or if you live close enough to a court, sick of hearing it being played. The game has a steady plink, plunk sound of a plastic ball being hit by hard graphite paddles. It’s actually generated noise complaints.
People describe it as a mash-up of tennis, ping pong, and badminton, but easier than any of the three individually. I’ve played maybe 40-50 games, and I’d say that description fits. I’ve played the other games and have no reason to believe I can play pickleball.
Pickleball has had a meteoric rise in popularity over the last five years. It’s what a physical trainer friend of mine calls a “lifetime sport”: something you can play late into life, like golf or shuffleboard. I think this was his polite way of implying my old body can still do it, but whatever.
Find your version of pickleball
The landslide of risks around not trying new things starts with something a bit nuanced. If we are immediately good at everything we do, we are not exposed to the potential of seeing ourselves improve, or the arc of our improvement is minimal. We can take the potential for improvement completely out of our field of experience. Improvement gets limited to things we have extremely limited ability to affect. We only know improvement if our day happens to go well, the markets are up, or our tasks run smoothly. But so much of that is beyond our control. Whereas, if we come to something we can or need to improve in, something different is on offer. We can feel a sense of growth, address the need for adaptation, and move towards a goal with a bit more liberty than we usually enjoy.
If we’re not careful, the experience of failure, learning, and improvement can drift from our lives as we age. Studies indicate the risk to our brain health and longevity is pretty dire.
Worth related?
If our worth is tied to only being the best in the room or at least on the medal podium in everything we do, we might pass as superhuman but fail at being human. Our brains need striving, learning, and play. What’s more, our entire bodies need movement.
If pickleball instigates an eye roll, I get it. Like anything in our culture it can be cringe and overhyped. My encouragement today is to find your version of something you’d have to say: “I’m not good at this, but I can learn.” Take the hit to your ego, your worth will be given a new durability. If you have to move your body, that’s a great addition. I’m told I need to get around eight thousand steps in a day. Three or four games of pickleball give me at least half that.
Maybe your thing will be musical, art, writing, or cooking. Fortunately for me, the vast array of things I’m not good at gives me a seemingly endless list of opportunities. This entire Substack thing is an exercise in what I need to improve. But I have friends who’ve tried ballroom dancing, glass-blowing, and learning a new language. Worth-challenged people have a tendency to need a steady pipeline of affirmation, but that shouldn’t be limited to only doing what we always have done. If so, our good feelings around affirmation can seem to fade, too. Getting affirmed in what we already have skill in has less of a boost in it. So get out there, dance, pickle, cook, and fail your way into new tiers of your value.
Be well, Feral Souls.
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Ross is on the delights again (eye roll). A few years ago, poet Ross Gay did a break-out book called Book of Delights. Feral Souls will remember me going on about it here. It was nifty. The premise was an essay a day for a year on a delight he noticed. It was simple and refreshing, and for the era it reached the bestseller lists (into and during Covid), it was even necessary.
But recently, Amazon, seeing I liked Book of Delights and algorithmically deciding I’m only one thing in this life, suggested Gay’s newest More Delights. I cringed a bit for Gay. My GenX mind winced at a person seemingly commodifying something originally beautiful and organic. I thought, “Oh, here we go, chicken soup for the soul but edgier. No thanks”.
Shame on me. I doubt anyone came to Monet and said, “Again with the waterlilies, Claude.” Or to Rothko and said, “Color play? Seen it”.
There are worse things to be seen as than the delight guy. And for me to pass on someone giving delight a voice is a worse statement about me than any writing, predictable, commodified, or otherwise.
So I purchased it. And by the second short essay, I felt like someone who had protested going into a room that was a surprise party for me. Shame for my initial reaction faded quickly as the writing did precisely what the first book did for me. It invited me to consider delightful experiences. It’s getting granular with how I’m blessed and how we all are blessed.
Inclining the mind
I again came to realize the act of inclining our minds toward delight is a Herculean chore. It works against every impulse in a mind that finds the broken, the disappointing, the room for improvement. We’re pre-wired to find problems. This is the muscle memory of folks who hope to help the world, and it doesn’t start badly. It can define the launch pad for our soaring efforts. But unbalanced with at least an equal counterweight of naming beauty, it can also send us into deeper darkness than we can imagine.
The writing is excellent, but the win is watching someone unencumbered by looking correct or defending their view, enjoying life, and leading me to copy the effort in my way. The success is when the reader can’t resist becoming a soul, a mind inclined toward goodness; toward the good that is a shadow, a foretaste, a pre-echo of what’s redeeming us.
Who we become
It’s not the ones who can find and name the dark, but the ones who can see a speck of the coming light and, undeterred by this present darkness, name the light — first to themselves and next to the dark world. Does it make us less novel, less compelling? To a world in love with the dark? Probably. I don’t care. Again. Thanks, Ross.
From a review of Gay’s newest:
Gay proves that he’s able to endlessly expand on any minute detail of life in a way that’s not only interesting but that’s often profound, open-ended, and sometimes even revelatory. Whether it’s about a lost cat, an adult wearing braces, or a simple sunflower, Gay’s writing feels at home in this space. It’s clear that these “delights” are a gift not only for the author himself but also for every one of the readers he touches.
His rules are easy enough for anyone to follow. In a recent interview, he said many have. Write daily, write by hand, and write quickly. The by-hand thing takes us out of our tendency to perfect or polish the writing. Computers invite a mechanical perfection that Ross says made his writing worse. Handwriting also means we can be untethered to all of the deceptively helpful benefits of tech. Here’s a journal I love to use. And a few of the implements that make it feel like a luxury.
Find some delights and share them if you’d like. I’ll start.
I love trying to catch a falling leaf. Living here in the northeast, a few trillion colorful sails will descend on their ride to become life-giving nutrients to the tree that gave them life. Just before they make their landing, try to catch one. Think it’s easy? It’s not. They can change trajectory in a fraction of a second in stiff autumn winds. I try not to blow out a knee to get an ESPN-level highlight, and when I succeed, I hold the leaf that lived a few seasons suspended in the sun and rain. I enjoy its texture and it’s surrendered color. And I know again the impermanence of what I thought would always be there. Friends fade, our abilities, our treasures. Hold lightly, don’t cling, but try to catch them, if but briefly.
Be well, Feral Soul.
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Next time you’re in Walmart’s parking lot (for me, likely later today), look out over the vehicles parked there. There are about three colors: gray, black, and white. Don’t focus on the few exceptions (red or maroon make an appearance); see that most cars today are a slightly different shade of those three colors. Here’s a graph to prove over the last 50 years, green has been all but squeezed from the vehicle color wheel, and red is the next victim in line:
I feel like I say this too much, but stay with me.
I can only guess the reason. There are deep philosophical guesses, one being something called “chromaphobia.” It sounds made up, but chromaphobia is where humans tend to fear color as evidence of being unserious or frivolous. As a result, we’ve slowly taken any hint of the fun of color and relegated it to the corners of society that are trying to sell us something or lead us to make bad decisions (think casinos and fast food choices).
There are also economic excuses from the automobile industry. After all, they can sell cars with zero personality to way more people. But I’d guess it costs no more money to paint something a beautiful, eye-dazzling color than it does East German Gray. Will they still charge more? Of course.
Don’t settle
Why are we settling? Even our homes are painted in resale-friendly hues while we’re still living in them. And yet, this life has so much available to us in beauty and joy, and we are opting for what serves the automobile industry or allows us to blend in. We are reducing ourselves to more expeditious versions of us for what reason? To keep auto-exec fat cats in silk pajamas? Or maybe make sure our neighbors approve of us? “Man, what do my neighbors think of our canary yellow hatchback?” was my thought at 2 a.m. last night. No, it wasn’t. But here’s a picture of our Honda so you can laugh at me over lunch with friends.
Get over it, Osborn, get your boring Alcatraz-drab car, and move on. Who do you think you are? Andy Warhol?
Well, I’ve been making this observation about cars for some time. Given what I do and the size of the town I live in, the expectation to wave at people I know is high. But these days I unfortunately can’t tell one car from another. So, I end up waving at more people who likely wonder who I am because they’re in cars I think I know.
All this spills over to more of our lives. Vivid color is seen as less educated, less serious, and frankly for people who make poor choices. Think I’m wrong? What do you think of when you think of business icon Steve Jobs or his many copycats? Plain black tee?
Most people outside Hollywood are expected to mirror the joyless look business execs appear in. Why? Cause we’re rich? Or does being dull, neutral, pale, and lusterless directly add to our bottom line?
Dress for the JOY you want
All this came crashing in when I considered what Ingrid Fetell Lee said in her book Joyful: The Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. She rhapsodized about the joys of color. For humans, vivid color has been an evolutionary cue to show us where we can find plentiful ripe food. But in modern times, it can keep our minds active and adventurous. Besides, color is just more fun.
Color choice can be a routine invitation to retreat for the worth challenged. To stay small. To be ignored and shrink. But Lee changed a saying with one letter, which was a nice challenge for me. She said, “Dress for the joy you want”. The more familiar saying, “Dress for the job you want,” invites us to get in line, get grayed out, and acquiesce to expectations through monochrome mimicry.
So, in a way, that Hawaiian shirt or that jacket with a bit of flair can be a modest protest against the machinery of Western culture or our inner impulse to be less of a person than our worth allows.
So yes, Dress for the joy you want! I promise to politely notice but not make too much of it. After all, I’m from the Midwest, where a dazzling flannel can be seen as reckless. We only dress in bright colors if we’re trying to shoot a deer.
Be well, Feral Souls.
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This is an end-of-summer clearance sale. When we’re coming out of seasons into new ones, it’s good to survey what we’ve learned, gained, or lost as we move on. So this will be part collection, part list, and all annoying for someone who might be here for a concise, single-topic entry into our journey on the subject of self-worth.
A daily practice for “never enoughers”
First haikus. There will be no wild praise for these literary nuggets; they’re an odd and very niche art form, and traditionally, they’re not even meant to be shared. However, the daily practice of writing haiku has tremendously helped this maximizer.
A haiku is a three-lined poem restricted to a specific number of syllables per line. The opening line: five syllables, second line seven, last line five. So, 5-7-5. And those constraints are maddening at first but give way to a liberation. Let me explain.
As someone who tries to squeeze every last drop of production from a moment and severely judges themselves for falling short when a day ends, I realize the deep personal cost I’m voluntarily paying for the unchanging limits of reality.
Every day has limits; things won’t be as good as possible. We live in limits. As humans, constraints are us. Every moment, we make choices to convey ideas, accomplish things, and move life along, and when the sun sets, we look over it all and might think, “That could’ve been better.” The resulting churn of dissatisfaction has served us to try again, but it’s put us out in brutal emotional weather. The toll mounts, and our once-motivating dissatisfaction spills into a pervasive mood about everything. Everything could be better! Grrrr. Here comes Mr. Fun.
So, each day, I sit before a blank piece of paper and jumpstart my creativity, trying to put a coherent idea down. Over the next three to five minutes, I make choices and edits, grieve over words I can’t include (too long or eating up too many syllables), and wince at words I do include. Finally, I usually find a moment of satisfaction and rest in what has come to be in the world. What my mind, unmoored to a creativity-destroying screen, has birthed. I’m then hopeful the practice will map across the remainder of my limit-filled day. I’ll be okay with what has become, even with limits.
Haiku might sound like a nightmare to you. My broader encouragement is for you to find a daily practice, whatever it is, to bring you to terms with limits (different from term limits which may never happen).
This brings me to a quote that bowled me over:
"And God said, Love your enemy, and I obeyed Him and loved myself."
Kahlil Gibran
Our self-sabotage is pretty well crafted, and excavating the pillars of it can take time and deep digging.
IRL (in real life)
I met a reader/listener in the real world. A friend I’ve known for many years introduced me to her husband, and he was very encouraging. Hello Bob and Linda! Thanks for being along for this thing.
This newsletter, podcast, blog, Substack thingie is part experimental and mostly my weekly commitment to bring forward something that might someday be material for in-person spiritual retreats. But engaging with folks who’ve found some resource with it in its present form — is fun.
Joy next
It was in this past season that I committed to investigate joy. I wrote about it here. Knowing the human raincloud I can be and the humor I use to mask it, it has to be God’s sense of humor that I would be inspired to pursue this topic. While the inspiration has had multiple sources, the quote that brings it all together is “God made us because He thought we’d enjoy it.”
Clearance bin music and a quote
The song below features a quote (in what the kids call a drop) from Twin Peak’s character Agent Dale Cooper. It shows his approach to joy in life. It reminds me of morning coffee in my ‘travel’ mug. Some mugs allow us to take them places, but this hefty pottery from East Fork Pottery takes me places. It’s truly a travel mug. The coffee brewed with beans from far-flung places like Ethiopia and Columbia, roasted in places like Boston and Nashville, comes to me from Trade Coffee.
I leave with it a link to the song and a few links in the clearance bin. Don’t assume that because something is affordable, it’s not valuable. I hope you find something helpful.
Here’s what Agent Cooper says:
I’m going to let you on a little secret. Everyday, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt in a men’s store, a cat nap in your office chair, or two cups of good hot black coffee, like this. Man that hits the spot. Nothing like a good hot cup of black coffee.
Be well, Feral Souls.
Clearance bin:
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
It’s no surprise that this particular Substack is about changing your experience with life. And maybe Nordic novelty will be the thing that leads you to a different experience with life. I’m hoping so with this post.
A few years ago, Linda Akeson McGurk wrote a trendy book about rearing children with a more integrated experience with the natural world. The book is called There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids. The title is from the Noridc expression, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.” The book helped introduce the Swedish word friluftsliv to a new audience. Her latest work is more solely about friluftsliv.
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What does this wildly exotic and fun-to-say word mean? McGurk writes that
The Norwegian government defines friluftsliv as embracing nature and enjoying the outdoors as a way of life, a "possibility of recreation, rejuvenation and restoring balance among living things”.
She further helps non-Swedes like me fall in love with the idea by adding two caveats: friluftsliv is non-motorized and non-competitive enjoyment of nature. She adds physical exertion is often involved but can be as stripped down as a walk around the neighborhood. She further suggests the deeper into wilderness one gets, the more benefits one derives from friluftsliv.
You’re no longer just taking a short walk in the woods or around a park; you’re engaging in friluftsliv! Feel fancy and Nordic? You should. She advocates “walk and talk” meetings around a trail. She advocates a voice recorder and a follow-up email if we fear losing focus on the topics discussed. Meetings would be shorter and more enjoyable, and we’d get our steps each day.
The inhospitable winters of the Northeast led me to listen to the voices of people who trek around the Swiss Alps in cold, damp, limited sunlight and yet somehow manage to keep sane and mostly pleasant demeanors.
Watch this video from Swedish clothing maker Fjallraven and pay particular attention to the lady on the left—a delightful disposition while describing clothes to survive the most unenjoyable weather on earth. The company’s educational videos changed my understanding of how to thrive in cold, damp conditions. They gave me a deeper understanding that we mainly chose our reaction to even the worst of nature.
Rather than making friluftsliv some twice-a-year experience or even the more frequent camping jaunt, McGurk invites a more down-to-earth and integrated experience. Calling it “The Open-Air Life” in a book by the same title, she suggests making nature's nearest and most available version your daily habit. Rather than yet another thing to do, allow the experience to be where you do life—drawing away from to-do lists but not fully seeing the space as a place for no accomplishments.
A recent experience
On a recent morning, I entered the woods off our deck and allowed its conditions and sights to overtake me. It brought the sound of a spotted sandpiper at the edge of a small lake. A bird that would have jetted away if I hadn’t slowly entered its foraging space, acting like an unthreatening witness.
Soon, the din of the annual cicadas raised and lowered in a trill.
It’s fun to find the early surrenderers to fall in late August. Those leaves that jump the staring gun and descend the forest flow with hints of what their kindred leaves will show in mere weeks.
A catbird pair called back and forth from within heavy cover. Maybe they are talking about their plans to pack for the coming migration. All their more colorful neighbors have either fallen silent or started to depart.
Finally, I stood in my sandals in the leak from a spring that came off the hillside and cut the trail. The cool water had journeyed long and emerged into the dappled sunlight of the forest floor. Now it descends into the lake and one day seaward. For now, it passes my bare feet with a rushing chill.
I nibbled wild allegheny blackberries and watched a deer take its share of a farmer’s harvest. We stared at one another for a moment, suspended in shared enjoyment of our friluftsliv
I invite you to surrender into a union with who you are. We avoid the truth that from this we emerged, to this we’ll return. And we do so with a touch of hubris. It’s as though we’ve defined success by entering nature with as many layers between us and it as we can afford. It’s both a refutation and a denial of a beautiful truth. Be well, Feral Souls.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
The ‘ew, people’ attitude has had its day hasn’t it? The internet’s meme factories endlessly churn out snark that seems to say real, deeply enjoyable life happens under a comforter in front of Netflix while your Doordash delivered food is sat at your door without speaking to another person. Even for an introvert like myself, it doesn’t exactly sound like enriching bliss for a warm-blooded mammal whose species has survived because of community. But ubiquitous lies work on us best in isolation, and I’m afraid the ills related to “chosen loneliness” are devilishly crafty.
And this isn’t some extroverted persuasion piece trying to get people out of their shells. The loneliness epidemic has been here for a few years; this is non-partisan. Earlier this year, America’s surgeon general launched an effort to combat the obvious epidemic of loneliness in the country. The fact of our loneliness is indisputable; correcting it has options.
The bottom line is we need people, and a big part of the soil of our interaction is conversation, and we can all get better at it.
Yeah, but ‘ew, people.’
Look, no matter our appetite for interacting with others communicating with people can be a source of enrichment and joyful flourishing. No really. But for the worth-challenged, it sounds impossible.
If we feel a lack of self-worth or have unhealthy ways of developing it, it likely informs our engagement with others. We may avoid it more than our personality prefers because it feels threatening or demanding. We may not notice it, but our conversation can be guarded, subtly (or not so subtly) competitive. It’s exhausting always to have to win a conversation to feel like your worth remains intact. That has nothing to do with introversion; it’s about worth.
It’s exhausting always to have to win a conversation to feel like your worth remains intact. That has nothing to do with introversion; it’s about worth.
In order to not feel threatened, we can prefer uniformity of opinion. While the social media echo chambers that algorithms create have set this up, the truth is, if we fear a difference of opinion, we must have little confidence in our own.
Sometimes our avoidance of communication comes from not wanting to appear unknowing. Ironically in the age where authenticity is esteemed, the axiom, fake it till you make it, is still nearly gospel. So, we may feel like we must be error-free. Everything we say, and don’t say, is intended to protect any knowledge blindspots or awareness deficiencies. To avoid being the person who hasn’t heard the latest, we might stay under the comforter saying “ew” to people out of fear as much as anything.
No safe topics
Put all this in the present era, and much of the potential joy and life-enriching aspects of interaction with our fellow humans can be hard to access. Even the outgoing with a good sense of their worth can be affected by the times we’re in. For a few years now, there’ve been fewer and fewer ‘safe’ topics. Covid masking, January 6th, racial unrest, it’s been a season that’s created safety in silence or avoidance.
Remaking our approach to conversation is a deep work of rebuilding things we’ve assumed are instinctual. You might be thinking: “I’m middle-aged; how could I possibly need to recreate how I communicate?” Ask yourself, “Am I moving toward where I want to be with my present communication?” If not, then reinvent. If we don’t like the results we’re getting, we must lift the hood on what’s creating them.
Dan Harris recently admitted to trying to be less dismissive. With our limited resources, we’ve been convinced we’re effective when quickly dismissing things and people. After all, our over-functioning selves feel more proficient if we never have a meandering conversation. But I contend I’ve felt most alive in them. At the end of each day, I relish the unfinished thought, the sketchy summation, the musing I can return to with someone.
Joyful conversation starters
Ingrid Fetell Lee laid out a handful of joyful conversation starters, and they can inspire us to have some adventure around our interaction. Our self-worth will become more robust.
Here’s one I love and am instantly adding to my repertoire of convo starters: If you could have a mediocre superpower, what would you choose?
I’d love to hear your answer in the comments, but my mediocre superpower would be never choking while taking a quick sip of water. Or always picking the right side of the blind cord to pull to raise the blinds. Or choosing the right lane of stalled traffic that will start moving first. When I think I have this one, my experience driving down I-95 south to the east coast shows me I don’t.
Check out her list here. And start climbing out from under the covers.
Be well, Feral Souls.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
What’s one simple pleasure that you never get tired of?
I lofted this question to friends at dinner a few days ago. The yearbook answers come first: Spending time with my family. My kids laughing. Great replies, no question, but our conversation opened the door to a more interesting truth as dinner wore on. Someone commented on the heated floor in the bathroom of the home we were in. Then, a person living in the house said, “I love putting my toes under the bathmat and feeling the warmth when I get out of the shower.”
There it is. To me, that was the better answer. Her earlier answer wasn’t wrong, just less detailed and unique than this one. This answer spoke of a reliable moment of joy that seemed personal and well thought out.
And then I thought, why don’t we talk about these things? Why are we shy or reticent about them? Why do they seem frivolous? Hearing about toes under bathmats beats 99.9% of everything people have been talking about over the last three years, anyway.
Is joy allowed?
“Adults who exhibit genuine joy are often dismissed as childish, or too feminine, or unserious, or self-indulgent”.
So says Ingrid Fetell Lee.
What would she know? She did ten years of research on the topic of joy and later did a wildly popular TedTalk and a critically acclaimed book around the topic of joy.
The book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness is an immersive exploration of how to find joy and create it. I’m just starting it because I’ve recently tasked myself with getting serious about joy.
Ingrid presents a dozen or so hurdles to experiencing joy. But, because her take isn’t from a faith or spiritual perspective per se, she misses a few things that can compound the challenge of accessing joy for spiritual seekers.
As spiritual seekers, we value seriousness. If we are joyful, we might feel like we’re neglecting those suffering around us. Or we’re abandoning a good work ethic and not being practical — or are unoptimized in our efforts (e.g., lazy).
We also see joy as something to be earned or should only be a reward for right behavior, a job well done, or if we’ve maintained our diet for the day. All these can get bundled into self-worth adjacent issues, meaning joy becomes less accessible or off-limits at a fundamental level.
What would Jesus do?
Do we see how out of step this might be for spiritual seekers? Jesus wasn’t avoidant of his day's severe and challenging issues of the day, yet he told weary and troubled people when their problems seemed overwhelming to look at flowers. He told people with little going for them to take heart.
I know we think the most intelligent and spiritual people in the world are serious and maybe angry; after all, look at all that’s wrong! But to look out on the issues and maintain joy is a big clue that a person can live in the tension of life’s struggles and yet, know joy. To me, this comports to “spiritually advanced.”
People might dismiss joy as not substantial, for a world obsessed with happiness, that weirdly may mean we might bypass joy altogether. But I argue joy is substance; if our faith has evidence, it might be in the area of works first and joy as a close second.
Given all that is in play and all that’s at stake, I’m committing to reading Ingrid’s book and adding some spiritually connected observations over the coming weeks. If you’d like to join me, that’d be great! If you’d rather observe, that’s ok too! But I hope we will arrive at personal and enriching moments of joy. And we’ll learn how to spot them and not feel ashamed or even shy about toes under the warm bathmats of life.
Be well, Feral Souls.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
I met a man named Paul who owns an impossibly adorable little British car called a Riley Elf. His was built in 1964, and he had it shipped from England to his home near Pittsburgh a few years ago.
Seeing one of the less than ten Rileys in the US was a special moment for me, and it was fun to imagine whizzing down a backroad or zipping around in a city in his tiny gem of a car.
As I talked with Paul, he said that nearly the first thing many people say to him at car shows is, “Boy, I wouldn’t want to be in a crash in that car!”. To which he usually replies, “I didn’t really buy it to crash it” He smoothly delivered the quip with a wry smile that told me it was a well-practiced line that drew laughs, mine included.
As you hear that line, I will assume you might defend the tired observation of fearing crashes. Let go of your protective reflex that says, “Well, you have to be ready for crashes!” Or “Still, you have to think about those crashes!” Let me ask you, have you ever heard someone list the reasons they got their car and they say, “We really loved the look of it and the gas mileage, oh and boy, we can’t wait to crash it!”
It got me thinking about many of the people I talk to today. We’re good at finding problems and zeroing in on what must be avoided. Rehearsing the fears that might happen. Pointing out where a flaw might someday emerge. Until we have entirely forgotten the point of moving forward.
Finding problems as a life
The origin of a problem-finding mindset hijacking our lives is hard to uncover, but many of us slide into it naturally with age. Maybe it’s a scarcity mindset, a negativity bias, or preferring to be a contrarian in conversations because it feels like many people have outrun us or might. I mean, look at them with their relaxed enjoyment of life. They should hear about crashes; I’m just the person to tell them.
The origin isn’t that interesting, but living differently might be. If we live life looking for its problems, we might find them all — but completely miss life. Like a person missing the point of a car not being to crash it or protect ourselves from any potential crashes, but to enjoy our trips, we can sacrifice a great deal of life fearing its potential harm.
If we live life looking for its problems, we might find them all — but completely miss life.
Hearing people dissect the potential issues with something has a whithering effect on us and is usually built on the false premise that there aren’t issues with everything.
Are we in this life merely to avoid its pitfalls or potential problems, or are we in it to live it with its problems and pitfalls? Above in this article, the advertising tagline for the Riley says, “Magnificent motoring in miniature!” At the intersection with anything, we have a choice to find the joy that moves us forward or find the thing to avoid.
“Magnificent motoring in miniature!” To me, it sounds fun. Imperfect and slightly risky fun. Which is life in miniature. Be well, Feral Souls.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
Our youngest son (24), Isaac, and I went to a park near his home for a photography walk. He’s an analog guy, getting great evocative pictures with loads of nuance and feeling. I only want birds with my digital.
As we exited his car, I heard a cacophony of bluejays behind a wall of large trees separating us from a slow-moving, wide creek. Four or five jays were doing loud calls and in a complete dither. That many jays that worked up usually means a threat looms. Because of Jon Young’s book and my subsequent personal experience, I decided there’s a hawk about. Sure enough, the hawk called a few minutes later.
The alarm call is deeply purposefully for birds. It alerts all who know it (even nonbirds) that a threat is within reach. The loudest of these calls is complete silence. That means a threat isn’t just in reach but is imminent. If the forest falls silent at certain times of the year, you’re right to raise your awareness. Not so much for your safety, but you might be about to see a fox or some other larger creature of interest.
We all have a system of warning within us. Our bodies tell us a great many things. Signals come on a nearly second-by-second basis. However, the busyness and noise of life have a way of making us deaf to these alarm calls. When these ignored signals go on for a while, the things they were alerting us to can have significant health effects. Unfortunately, we learn of the impact through a health professional after we’ve ignored our inner signals for weeks or even years.
To notice, attend to or even hear the alarm calls of our minds will take physical awareness many of us have demonized. Paul’s unfortunate use of the word “flesh” to describe what mostly likely was ego has created at least a few generations of deeply disconnected Christians. “Flesh” is universally bad, a conduit for all forms of evil, and therefore should be bypassed or so filtered that hearing what our bodies are saying becomes nearly impossible.
Couple this with the overwhelmingly hectic and noisy lives we are conditioned (if not addicted) to lead, and our body’s alarm calls have long ago become unavailable to us.
We reap a terrible consequence for this disconnection, surrendering a vast amount of information that could help us heal. Or perhaps sidestep situations, patterns, and modes of activity that harm us.
On a recent Zoom I was on, Dr. Judson Brewer shared:
“Our feeling body is stronger than our thinking mind.”
As we’ve labeled “flesh” evil and made our minds our supreme guide, imagine the handicap with which we’ve saddled ourselves.
From an article about emotions in the body:
Connecting your mind and body is integral to your overall well-being… ignoring, burying, or blocking your emotions may contribute to more illnesses. For example, when your mind-body connection is weak, you may neglect your emotional and physical health.
PES (pronounced: “PEZ”)
In counseling people (especially men) for many years, I’ve given the acronym PES (like pez dispenser but with an S) as a routine checklist for a check-in. It starts in our bodies; here’s how it works:
P
Doing a check-in on your physical status, at least daily and multiple times daily, is a good first step. I’d argue that dropping into your physical awareness throughout a meeting is deeply helpful. Am I carrying tension in my shoulders right now? Is my forehead strained? We all carry stress in our bodies we’re unaware of most times.
E
Your emotions come next. Next time you’re thumbing through your social media timeline, are you feeling jealous? Displeasure? Ill-regard? A lack of empathy? You’ll be surprised how susceptible we are to a flood of negativity in our down moments (usually when we thumb through social media). Unnoticed emotions can run in the background of our minds and wreak havoc on many of our intentions and, eventually, our actions.
S
And finally, are you connected spiritually? If you were able to sense the Spirit’s presence right now, would you feel connected? If not, why? Is it addressable? Do you need to confess something? Reconcile with someone who you’ve been at odds with of late.
Notice patterns to step out of them
Check-ins are ways to sidestep our patterns and routines. We get off auto-pilot. Life sneaks up on us; our alarm calls will give us the first sign of trouble. Turn them up through habits of awareness.
Be well, Feral Souls.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
Our feet have over 7,000 nerve endings in each foot. They are highly sensitive radars informing our minds of endless experiences every second. I sometimes take my daily walk in minimal sandals, and over my routine mile-and-a-half trek, I may have one modest jolt of an unpleasant feeling, a rock, or a gnarled root that catches my foot a bit, but the fuller experience of the ground beneath me is life. We aren’t as separate from this big beautiful world as we’ve convinced ourselves. Separateness is a myth; we are united with the pulsing world and all that lives and dies here. This is something worth recovering, even if it comes with a pang of a sharp rock or two.
A mile in today’s shoes
Looking at modern footwear, it seems the goal has been to shut our foot radar down completely. Giant foam soles mean we insulate our feet from every sensation they might encounter. Shoes are praised for being comfortable and keeping us from all feelings (good or bad) while limiting the effort our feet are asked to make.
Feet, by the way, are beautifully designed to strongly adapt to every angle and undulation of a walking surface while delivering second-by-second signals to our brains. All that lovely design for sensory experience be damned. We let it all go to sleep while wearing pillowy casts.
To be fair, we walk on manufactured surfaces now more than ever in human history. My little path is an exception to my walking surfaces the rest of the day. I contend some of that can be changed if we exert little effort. For instance, maybe put this down right now, free your feet, and let your toes spread out over the grass. That will stir up some memories. It’s an experience that calls us back to carefree days long ago. I’ll be here when you get back.
Hey, I know my limits
I won’t try to talk you out of your Hokas; I know my limits.
The multi-billion dollar shoe industry has sold us on shoes that narrow at the toe (the exact opposite shape of a human foot) and that we still need raised heels in shoes (entirely cosmetic and a holdover from the era of riding horses). It’s impressive salesmanship. They tend to fix the problems they create. I won’t undo the conditioned expectation of footwear; I merely want you to see how this same approach to unnatural protection from our experience is how we navigate our emotional lives. And it has spiritual implications.
The insulation we use from our emotions takes many shapes. Recently I heard someone say, “Emotions can’t hit a moving target.” One way to not feel our feelings is to over-schedule our lives. Stay on the move. Or if heaven forbid, we ever find ourselves stuck in the traffic of our calendar, we reach for our phones, doom scroll a bit to distract ourselves.
There’s a blessing to be found in fully feeling what we’re feeling. The beatitude is “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Those who go the full route of their feeling find they’re caught in the faithful arms of the Comforter. Fall short of that by avoiding that, and the experience of comfort doesn’t come either.
Running to escape takes many forms
Look, I won’t talk you out of your emotional Hokas, either. Many economic forces stand ready to deliver you and me from all pain or temporary discomfort. I believe the rise of marijuana usage is partly due to our instinct to escape or insulate ourselves from our feelings. Long-time marijuana user Woody Harrelson famously backed away from regular use for this exact reason. He said:
"I wanted to be emotionally available to my family, to my friends. It was a good experiment," said Harrelson, who lives in Hawaii with his family.
The risk is worth it
Being open to the richness in our experience may mean surrendering to the occasional jolt of displeasure, but it will expand our lives to know the comfort we can enjoy. Ridding ourselves of things like anxiety or sadness isn’t in the offering, but can you be with the experience knowing you’re held? It may be the only way to know.
Be well, Feral Souls.
Bookclub:
If you’re reading our book club book or would like to start, here’s discussion questions for chapter two. Post any thoughts in the commnets:
Place chapter two
Please don’t see this as a comprehensive list of all possible questions or thoughts, it never could be. Add, edit and discuss something entirely outside these observations!
She begins with an interesting myth of how birds were formed and the way ground helps them recall/remember their origin. In what ways can you relate to being on ‘solid ground’ as a comfort?
Richard Rohr describes good religion as given us roots AND wings, what do you think of that?
Cole writes “Place has always been the thing that made us. We cannot escape being formed by it.” (p. 18).
Have you thought much about the way a particular place has formed you? Have you ever tried to escape it?
In what ways has the place you’re from helped you, or hurt you?
Have you considered travel to be a requisite to ‘finding myself’?
She quotes Simon Weil who wrote “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul”. Do you agree or disagree? Why?
Cole describes her grandmother in NYC as people moved past her like she was the wall, and that New York City allowed her to get lost. If we are born and raised in a particular place is it harder to have a “place to exhale” as she states it.
Cole traces the story of God’s people out of Egyptian bondage and towards a place of their own. We too live as ones spiritually released from bondage and destined for elsewhere (aliens and strangers in our present home). What ways do you see God’s promise always being a place; “a liberation born of location.”
Cole delivers some sharp critique on the effect of losing place, and what might have inspired the action of those who took it. What are your thoughts on the following quote? Can it expand our capacity to hear her wounds more fully?
“I do not know from where my ancestors were abducted. I cannot tell you what the air smells like there. I don’t know what sound the waves and soil speak. These things were stolen from me as they were from them. I think it is one of the deepest evils to become a thief of place, to make someone a stranger to their home, and then mark their relationship to the land by bondage instead of love. To steal place has less to do with power than with hatred. How much must one hate oneself and one’s life and one’s own land to run around chasing everyone else’s? I used to think colonization was about ego, and maybe it is. But maybe it’s not that the oppressors think they’re worthy of more but that they believe their present self is, in fact, worthless. It’s the work of people incapable of perceiving their dignity without attempting to diminish someone else’s. It is no surprise to me then that these same powers, in the end, care so little for the land they are desperate to conquer. It was never about love or curiosity or care but a violent act of self-soothing.”
(p. 22)
Ultimately the story of her life is part of a larger redemption as she sees it: “To know that, at a time when the transatlantic abduction, enslavement, and purchase of Black bodies was occurring, God was preparing a place. A place for this little Black girl from Pittsburgh.” (p. 25) How important is it to believe in the greater goodness of God in the face of evil in the world?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
If you want a laugh or two, google “skip challenge.” The search will show adults trying to remember how to skip. Grown humans are lunging forward like some defective robot that’s misfiring. It’s hilarious, and they’re laughing, making their attempts harder. Some look so bizarre that I wonder if the person ever knew how to skip.
To be fair, skipping is pretty useless. What’s more, it’s hard to skip and not look ridiculous. Especially the older we are; what person skips if they’re not headed to see The Wizard of Oz?
If only momentarily a skipper has abandoned how they look or are perceived, or if what they’re doing is valuable or has a return on investment. It might be the only human motion we can associate with being completely carefree. A skipper is unencumbered with how they appear, and they’re not accomplishing anything; they are literally free of care.
Is it gone for good?
As I watched adult after adult unable to do something they could likely once do without thinking, something near sadness crept over me. It was as though they could no longer speak a language they once were fluent in. The sun had set on that knowledge; how to be carefree had gone dark. But was it gone for good?
We are consumed with a great many fears. We have a negativity bias that ceaselessly scans our life and the lives of those we love for threats. A host of real and imagined worries, fears, concerns, and to-do lists all flood the inbox of our mental email. Over time the muscles to be carefree start to atrophy and might eventually vanish.
Even the space to skip starts to disappear. We need open space to skip, with energetic hops and swinging arms free to move. But, unfortunately, our once spacious mental landscape that allows for skipping has likely become overgrown with vines and clutter from fears to the point that even on our best days, we warily inch along.
Carefree
I suppose I’m not talking about skipping but about the ability to be carefree. I’m not telling you to skip (maybe try for the humor of it), but I’m wondering if we’ve forgotten our calling to enter the kingdom of heaven. Part of this involves a carefree child-like trust that might allow us the mental freedom and space to skip.
The instructions to enter the kingdom of heaven are surprisingly brief. Jesus said:
“Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
This analogy can go in a few directions: faith, wonder, being open to not knowing, but the image of a child, free to skip, not struggling to remember how, is where my imagination takes me. But, of course, nearly any child can skip without even thinking.
If what I’m suggesting seems preposterous, maybe you need to hear the most. Today there are a great many forces that influence our access to a child-like demeanor.
On a recent Ten Percent Happier podcast episode, Dan Harris said it well:
There’s a lot of fear about being real, especially since we’re in this era of the panopticon of social media, and people are curating their lives and this persona, this false persona, we’re encouraged to have it, we’re encouraged to build a brand. Everybody’s got to have a brand.
Dan is talking about being consumed by appearances and productivity — and I’m afraid it hit home. It’s easy to see skipping isn’t on our agenda.
Flow state
I know skipping might never be your thing, and I don’t want anyone to break a hip, but I hear and read a lot about the benefit of a flow state. Being carefree allows for it. When we lose ourselves, and we’re in flow. Do you have an activity you do that you’re not self-conscious or self-editing? Dancing before the Lord, so to speak.
Play, skipping if you will, has researched benefits showing it helps slow dementia and generally aids our mental health.
My skipping/flow state
I love the Seek app. You hold your phone’s camera over a flower, plant, or bug, and it tells you what it is. I take loads of readings of what plants, bugs, or whatever are around me. A few days ago, I left my office and saw a tiny moth on my window screen. I zoomed in, and the app told me this little overlookable creature was a striped chocolate-tip moth. I was momentarily lost in experiencing this now-named, beautifully designed visitor. Seeing his drab blend of fuzzy khaki layers was a joy; I could have skipped away. I didn’t.
Let me know your flow-state-inducing skip-like activity in the comments!
Be well, Feral Souls.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
God is love; his people are called to share that love and be known for it. When they don’t, as leaders, our move may be to guilt, shame, or challenge them, but what if the issue runs deeper than what those actions lead to? Shame is demotivating, so it’s hardly the right tool to lead people into the enormous challenge of loving an unloving world. Imagine trying to climb Everest in Crocs. It’s that.
What if when Christians aren’t showing and growing in love, they are actually struggling, unwell, and not fully living the truth of their inherent worth? What if we start by embracing our worth and loved nature and, from there, find we can love the world with all its hard-to-love edges?
Cole Arthur Riley begins her book This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us with a chapter entitled Dignity. In it, she seems to say that evil (or life) tricks us into believing we are anything other than glorious. And that our glory is achieved in our usefulness and ability. This has effects that reach into much of our life. For example, she writes, “when we believe love is a scarcity, we are less prone to give it away freely.” As a result, loving the unlovely feels less like we’re freely giving and more like we’re being stolen from. So, you can imagine how undoable Christian love becomes if we don’t begin with a deep reservoir of goodness in ourselves.
She makes the point that Adam and Eve bore the image of God before they did anything. This correlates well with Jesus hearing God’s love and approval of Him before his ministry started.
Life and life in an “earn it” culture like America can press inherent worth out of our minds. The cycle of being only as good as your last performance and having a bigger quarter than the last can reframe our worth as a thing we achieve anew every day instead of a possession with which we begin each day.
Cole writes:
From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive, I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.
Self-worth isn’t self-centered
We won’t begin here because we’re afraid we’ll become self-centered. Self-centered people are telling us they don’t believe the truth of their worth and are forever on the hunt for what’s already theirs.
When we fail, what we find with God is a readiness to resolve the failure, to make us right. Cole writes:
On the day the world began to die, God became a seamstress. This is the moment in the Bible that I wish we talked about more often. When Eve and Adam eat from the tree, and decay and despair begin to creep in, when they learn to hide from their bodies, when they learn to hide from each other—no one ever told me the story of a God who kneels and makes clothes out of animal skin for them. I remember many conversations about the doom and consequence imparted by God after humans ate from that tree. I learned of the curses, too, and could maybe even recite them. But no one ever told me of the tenderness of this moment. It makes me question the tone of everything that surrounds it.
Cole covers some beautiful ground outside the garden, and while there are some challenging ideas I don’t always agree with, I’m leading an in-person book club, but you can participate here. Below you’ll find some discussion questions for the first chapter. Feel free to reply here.
Be well, Feral Souls.
Discussion Questions
What things made inherent dignity hard for Cole to accept freely?
What things have make inherent dignity hard for you to accept freely?
She refers to God as' she’ and' they’ and makes a case for rending whiteness from God. What are your feelings? How might a more expansive view of God help everyone?
When she struggled with her dignity, rather than trying to convince or argue Cole into her dignity, her father did something else. How does his act mirror God’s approach?
She writes: “We cannot help but entwine our concept of dignity with how much a person can do.” Society’s markers for significance and dignity (production, earning) can become our own. How important is it that they were made in God's image before Adam and Eve did anything? What does that mean for you and me?
She calls people who live outside society’s markers of value “sacred guides” that can lead us out of the bondage of productivity. Does the sabbath call us to a similar path? If so, how?
Cole writes, “glory can’t be unborn”. How important is this reminder as we age, falter, or fail? What was to remind yourself of this? In what ways might it help?
(Chapter 1 Dignity) The rub:
She seems to say that evil (or life) tricks us into believing we are anything other than glorious. This has effects that reach into much of our life. For example, she writes, “when we believe love is a scarcity, we are less prone to give it away freely.” What’s the implication of that for us?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
We like a fell swoop. Something done in one fell swoop. It means doing something with a single, quick action or effort. It’s tidy, and to our overburdened, overscheduled minds, it’s insanely attractive. Who doesn’t love a home run? A slam dunk? That thing where one action completes everything. In my lifetime, ordering a combo meal with a burger, fries, and drink changed the experience of going through a drive-thru. Now, we give a number and a preference for cheese or not and a drink selection. What a time to be alive.
However, when fell swoops and quick ordering are applied to our spiritual lives, more than being attractive, it’s deceptive and can add to our frustration.
We’re complex and nuanced; we contain multitudes—mind, body, and spirit. If we approach ourselves with the hope of fell swoops, we’ll realize we, as people, are annoyingly extra. The task of growing and healing will get saddled with disappointment and self-disapproval because we aren’t a quick, easy one-step fixable thing. Instead, our paths are slow, plodding, and we take turns that we aren’t expecting.
A day ago, I watched Max Muncy of the Los Angeles Dodgers come up to bat in the ninth, bases loaded and hit a screaming grand slam to win the game. It tied a bow on the whole affair and sent everyone home happy. In the clip, you can hear the announcers giggling with delight. If only our healing were as epically simple.
The desire for a fell swoop, grand slam kind of spirituality gets marketed to. During the pandemic, a friend handed me a devotional he’d collaborated on entitled “Just Jesus.” The devotions were good, but the title gave me pause. Who could argue with the sufficiency of Jesus? Oh, I’m certainly not; I’m afraid the title suggests that there is a single way that Jesus comes to us. Just Jesus? Yes, and in a thousand ways.
Christ comes to us in a long list of ways. For example, Psalms is a tapestry of creative poetry, giving a cornucopia of descriptions and access points to the Divine. Although we like it as a collection of warm comfort, we might be annoyed when it is our path. It takes concentration, time, imagination, and sitting with imagery that we unfold.
When people want to fell swoop their spiritual lives, it speaks more to our shared impatience with the complexity and variety of the human condition and a God of mystery than how spirituality works.
I’ve listened as someone will express the many challenges they’re facing, and the well-intended advice sounds like this:
“Hey, get in your bible.” Or, “Hey, just focus on Jesus.” I am thankful His word and, more importantly, who He is, are not confined to the printed page or our limited descriptions and concepts.
Yes, and.
What I’ve found to help is a sort of horse stable of voices, a committee of practices, and a meal with courses.
In investing, the successful investor will have a diverse portfolio. Lots of different companies, so when one stock stumbles, the others (from entirely different sectors of the economy) will be unlikely to suffer simultaneously. In a way, this gives protection to the goal of growth.
So, yes to silence and solitude, yes to community and gathering, yes to scripture, yes to prayer, yes to journaling, yes to hearing truth proclaimed. Yes, to music. Yes, to a meditative walk in nature. As Austin Kleon says, “Demons hate fresh air.”
And finally, a listening ear of expectancy to what has been described as the ‘unlikely other.’ The entertained angel, so to speak, serving us coffee, holding a door for us, or giving the random word with a surprising depth we would never expect.
I was once driving down a deserted highway, and one of those Department of Transporation LED signs beamed in the half-light of dusk with the phrase “Be Alert.” At that moment in my life, it was a well-timed word.
So, throw the door open to the many ways we can hear. At the death of Jesus, the temple curtain tore in two; what seemed contained was no longer limited. And so, as Gerard Manely Hopkins penned so long ago: The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
Practically speaking
How do we bring this into every day? First, have what’s called a Rule of Life, a sort of list of non-negotiables that you practice daily. They’ll become streams that feed your soul. No need to overcomplicate it; simply say; these three things, or these four, I will show up for each day. Or, practice grace and say you’ll show up daily-ish. No judgment; life is hectic. While one practice may shrink or deliver less presently obvious truth, they all won’t simultaneously. The topic of a morning routine is hot, and how famous people practice theirs is a whole cottage industry of discussion. Yours is probably more interesting than you give it credit for, so feel free to share something you do or plan to add below.
If this helped you, even remotely, consider sharing it! Thanks, pal!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
As we near the first full year of Feral Soul (next week’s post will be our shared birthday!), we pause for some help to meet ourselves in change. The change of living our worth isn’t easy — so bring some ease to it. (psst, it’s unlikely anyone else will)
Who knows how social media algorithms get us in slots for particular goods or services? But a clothing maker named Western Aloha landed in my corral, and I landed in theirs. They make some cool things, but their tagline drew my admiration. I’m terrible at setting an intention (which is all the rage), but this one rang true: “Take it easy, but take it.”
The notion that living our worth, doing life mindfully, or being self-compassionate is taking an easy way out might be an assumption we make. But becoming aware of our emotional weather and the effects of our long-standing habits will unleash some truths we’ve perhaps been avoiding. Their weight and the patterned routine of their practice will show us that change is a lifetime's work. Entering our healing process and becoming aware of the work to be done will mean things often get worse before they get better.
James Baldwin said it best “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
So, why bother? I mean, if our being stuck is so challenging to overcome, why not resign ourselves to our factory presets or live out the destiny of our ancestral conditioning? Because hope says, we don’t have to. The resurrecting newness of grace invites a new life, which means new living. Like all things, we will change anyway, so why not give our change some godly direction? And godly direction is based on love and compassion. Exercising it in ourselves will help us have a foundation to share it.
If we commit to healing, the journey will undoubtedly be rocky. Healing isn’t linear nor experienced on a constant upward slope. This is where self-compassion and patience become the essential fuels for our travel forward. But, unfortunately, our minds, conditioned to be hard on ourselves, judge at every turn and will meet these fuels with suspicion.
Unfortunately, we have an inner food critic writing a food review while the meal is still being brought to our table. As we’re in the process of change, our problem-solving minds tend to judge, compare and grade our efforts while they’re in faltering baby steps forward. Although helpful in some things, this will undoubtedly saddle us with an even more significant challenge than the effort of change already represents.
In Lighter, Yung Pueblo writes:
A common challenge is trying to measure your progress while you are in the midst of the process. You don’t want to judge yourself when you are feeling particularly stormy, as your perspective is clouded.
Mindfulness will allow you and me to note when we’re in a low moment physically, mentally, or spiritually. Seeing that the present moment is a more significant uphill climb for reasons we didn’t expect or can’t put a fine point on is a moment to be self-compassionate. The first act of noting is a subtle but indispensable help. You’re not low because you’re failing; you’re just down now.
Pueblo shares:
Recognizing the down moment and using it as a signal to embody patience toward yourself and others is a sign of your growing wisdom. It will also help you refrain from doing things you will later regret or getting into any illogical arguments because your inner tension was pushing you to fight. Focusing on moving gently through your day while your mind goes through its storm is not a matter of being fake or suppressing your emotions. It is a matter of honoring a greater range of your reality. Yes, you don’t feel great, but you also understand that fueling this fire by adding tension on top of your existing tension won’t make anything better. Your only beneficial option is to feel the heaviness of your truth and not add any more weight to what your mind is already working on releasing.
Stay in it
Stirring up the still waters of our habits will unavoidably make the water murky. It’s not a cue to give up or backtrack. It’s a cue to honor the work you’re invested in as a legitimate struggle. No one is saying this is easy or the effort is a cakewalk. Bow to the opponent of your past and admit it’s got some fight in it. After all, that’s the classy warrior you are.
Pueblo concludes:
So stay committed to your healing, but be gentle with yourself. When we take up the inner journey, we are accepting the challenge to evolve and flourish.
Said more succinctly: Take it easy, but take it.
Be well, Feral Souls. And plan on cake next week!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
Our worth rests in us, not the present version of us. Get this wrong, and we can stall or, even worse, live far beneath our potential.
We get attached to who we are right now. Emotional attachment to who we are now isn’t something to negatively judge ourselves or others for; it’s something that has guarded us against rash, dishonorable, or inauthentic change. It has partly protected us against change, guided by momentarily favorable winds or opportunity. These are real risks to be avoided. But the emotional attachment can be shed after it has served its limited role in our diligent searching for the next step toward Godly character. Once we see, yes, this is what’s next for me, the attachment has done a service.
As we accept and perhaps even invite change, a lack of worth can create a hurdle to the better version that awaits. Our worth can be wholly founded upon the acceptance our present version has enjoyed, which can hijack our journey to what awaits. But worth isn’t conditional; it’s always with us, portable into what’s next. Even if we’re not clear on what that looks like. Or even if we can’t sell previous ‘buyers’ on what we’re becoming. Once someone or many someones like what we are, protection of our acceptance can keep us there. Our built-in desire for admiration and delivering on expectations becomes a limiting feature. Differentiating between a healthy acceptance of our traveling self and our present self can be valuable to develop. Our ever-evolving selves can sometimes mean leaving what’s been successful. We are exiting the comfort of known acceptance. It’s the crisis bands face in sophomore albums. What’s the axiom? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But that notion is founded on remaining, retaining, and staying the same. An impossibility to be sure. Not changing isn’t ours to enjoy.
A once and continual story
The story of Christ willingly dying, being in the tomb, and leaving it behind holds truth on several levels. First, while it is the supreme story of the Christian faith and the ultimate one-time sacrifice for the soul, it also mirrors a repeatable pattern for our growth. It represents an experience arc in our development and our becoming. Our dying and resurrection to newness, ‘nextness,’ what awaits us, is shown in Christ’s descent into darkness, waiting, and then stepping into a new dawn.
The story is a pattern as much as a single moment on our soul’s ultimate behalf. Even the tiny detail of grave clothes being shed, like an exoskeleton from an earlier shape, is a symbol of our journey. Christ’s death and resurrection is the perennial example of our shedding of old layers. Nature itself joins this shedding and becoming. Spring is our soul’s next step after the darkness we endure.
Immutable and portable worth
Worth is portable; we carry it through our evolution. We must believe this to become who we are becoming. If we think our worth is tied to our present self, if we feel acceptance only as we are right now, we will almost certainly be less willing to release the current version of ourselves for the next better version of our growth.
Jesus tells his dear friend, Mary, "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended. to the Father”. Our message to those we love can honor their attachment to who we have been while being firm about the unhelpful delay their attachment represents. It’s a message we can give ourselves as much as others. So don’t cling to your ego, vocation, possessions, or all you’ve come to be known as; return to the Father, and the new way will be revealed. Exit the former and leave behind the thoughtfully chosen clothes other’s dressed your previous self in.
The service of an unknown tomb
We have tombs for unknown people, but there are only a few unknown tombs. The location of the most famous tombs are precisely known: Pharaoh, Ulysses S. Grant, and Elvis. But, the tomb of Christ is only guessed at. And that’s a gift to our need to release what we’ve come from. A tomb is a place of release and relinquishing, notable but not ultimate. It is both a finish line and starting point. Helpful to recall but not a place to continue to mourn beside. Happy resurrection, Feral Souls.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
We are led to find our purpose in what we do. Meet someone, and the exchange of this detail will most likely happen within a minute. Even if the word ‘retired’ is wedged in the description, the room feels arranged once everyone has said what they do or what they did. A palpable calmness and rhythm of conversation flows once everyone knows their place in the pecking order.
Because sharing our occupation is an instinctual part of human connection, it’s a short distance from there to people building their identity around their daily functioning. It seems like a mostly harmless conversation starter, but it can become a faulty foundation upon which much of our worth is built.
It starts early and innocently.
How’d we get here? Other, more intelligent people have written about it, but whether a career or who we are to others (mom, caregiver), we likely all started life through the lens of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Getting kids thinking about this seems benign and helpful, but the premise might be setting children up for failure—or at least the unskillful construction of their identity.
When things don’t go as planned
This week I was doom-scrolling Twitter and ran across a tweet from a New York Times bestselling author. Suzanne Young posted this message: If you ever want to see a career low point, this is it. Crying my entire way home. The message was above a picture of a few rows of folding chairs at a bookstore. Unfortunately, the chairs, ready for an audience to her author talk, sat empty.
What followed were replies of encouragement, and a few other authors shared similar pictures of empty seats that were ostensibly waiting for an audience that never showed.
If we struggle with accepting and living our inherent worth apart from our work or success, we are very susceptible to defining our lives by our functioning. When things are going well, so are we; when they’re not, neither are we.
Having a work-defined identity or worth seems like a good Protestant work ethic. This is how things work, after all. But how far do we have to go before we say: You’re only a person if you work? And you’re only valuable as a person if your work is comparatively prosperous when measured against others. So compete to have identity and worth. Are you sure this is it? If you’re winning, it feels right.
The storm of feelings and reactivity this dynamic creates can be a source of negativity. Ever known someone who only feels secure when they privately degrade someone else in their field for cheap success or some other flaw they think they’ve spotted? “Their work is shallow or ignorable”; once they tell you that, they feel better about their own work.
There might have been a time when this type of commentary gave me pause to see the person as unloving or caustic. Now, I feel empathy. They’re the product of surviving an unwinnable dynamic of finding worth through their work that’s been our societal training for ages.
The way out: Self-worth
One of the founding principles of Feral Soul is in Jesus being spoken over before his work even began: “This is my son, whom I love in him I am well pleased.” He’d done nothing yet. At least nothing worth writing down. Living in obscurity with a vaguely assumed carpenter apprenticeship under his belt, he heard this affirmation over him after merely receiving the grace of water baptism. He was enough already. And his Father, whose thoughts he shared, spoke his worth out loud. It must have mattered to the humanity of the incarnate Christ to hear that. Will we?
We must begin with our sense of worth; what happens next is not defining. It’s interesting, but the outcome of our work is not up to us. It never will be. We’ll all look out on empty seats eventually. The work we’ve given ourselves to will not be celebrated, valued, or noticed. Who are we, then? Dripping with the acceptance of God that has never left us. Or are we doubting our worth?
The concept of self-love has been labeled no-fly territory for Christians. They raise the specter of the sacrifice of Christ as evidence. But Christ’s sacrifice was founded on a sense of worth that was made clear to him.
Yung Pueblo is a poet and writer whose book Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future has been helpful of late. He writes this:
Self-love is the first step that all inner and outer success is based on. Self-love gives your journey the energy and stability to stay on a clear trajectory…
Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of. Real self-love is a tricky concept that requires a sense of balance to be able to use its transformative power—it is nourishing yourself deeply without becoming self-centered or egotistical. It is no longer seeing yourself as less than others, but at the same time maintaining the humility not to see yourself as better than others.
As I near the one-year mark of this work, I’m hopeful that the ongoing work of correcting foundational flaws will be the help this newsletter provides.
Be well, Feral Souls.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
Hey, there fellow peacocks! Today’s extra info is content, but sending it is a message too. You can be extra. If that’s all you get from this, cool. Other details follow, but you are unfolding, and as you spill over the boundaries you or others have set for you, own the new space! (see peacock above)
Many of our upbringings didn’t allow for difference. We were enmeshed with family scripts, and branching out was considered disloyal, dangerous, and even prideful. So yeah, that’s over because it was never authentic living anyway. It was controlling, diminishing, and if we struggled with worth, we were easy targets. As Ms. Lauryn Hill sings, “My emancipation don’t fit your equation.”
Here’s a fantastic podcast featuring Sonja Renee Taylor of The Body is Not an Apology. Her book is excellent, and I’ve heard her in other interviews, but something about this episode frames her ideas nicely, and there are some amazing zingers:
A quick takeaway: Radical self-love is not conditional but about our inherent state of enoughness. Later she points out that not feeling like enough makes each of us profitable to many people and systems. Therefore there aren’t any voices communicating the idea of enoughness. So, be in confrontation with stories of not enough or too much.
From Father Gregory Boyle’s Homeboy Industries, an outreach to LA gang members. “We don’t aim to ready folks to survive as the fittest, but to thrive as the nurtured.”
A reminder to resist above. Your humanity is an annoyance to the ways of the world of profits. It’s something to exploit, not welcome and respect. Your peace of mind, wellness, enoughness, and uniqueness will stick out. Stay well, Feral Souls. See you next Thursday.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
a barred owl peeking to see me in the woods behind our house this past fall. 2022
Catching ourselves in the slow-moving habits of winter can bring more than a few incriminating voices to our minds. “I should’ve done more,” “I wanted to get that done,” and “my closet would horrify Marie Kondo.”
Winter is like walking in sludge; the evidence we’ve been doing it isn’t mud but clutter. Some people are clutter blind while others feel disorganization dents their sense of self. If you’re the latter, we are alike. Between the rounds of colds and cases of flu passing through our families and the guesswork of dressing for weather conditions, winter life can be illustrated by that pile of clothing many of us have thrown over a piece of home exercise equipment. Life becomes a series of “we’ll get to it” aspirations.
Be gentle with yourself.
Fellow clutter haters, let me say we often set our goals in the vitality of our highest moments. It’s dangerous to plan how we’ll live in winter while we’re in the zenith of summer’s brilliance. Summer speed rarely maps onto the slow moments of winter. July plans can’t be the standard for cloud-covered February days. They simply can’t. Embrace this truth, and you’ll suffer less.
Gretchen Rubin advises us to have a to-do list and a ta-da list. A ta-da list lists things we did on a given day. For example, the pace of winter might mean our Ta-Da list includes “Got out of bed and made breakfast.” Celebrating the simplest of life’s acts can create the momentum we’ve been waiting for.
Donate a few things that no longer serve you or organize a drawer in the fridge, and these small, simple acts can make you feel like you can change careers now.
None of this is why I’ve called you here today. I have a nature parable for you.
This is not an owl story.
Camping in the backcountry just off a trail has given me some of my most memorable experiences in nature. Being away from campsites and people invites a unity with nature that’s unavailable any other way. A woodpecker’s sawdust from looking for food fell onto my tent’s roof. I awoke in the night without a rainfly on the tent to an array of stars unobscured by the lights of any town. Who knew there were that many stars? I’ve heard a bear rumble past me in the early dawn hours. Thankful she kept moving. I’ve heard a coyote yip and cry in frustration at three in the morning when she found the food she’d come for in my bag tied too high in a tree to get to.
My first night on the Appalachian trail was memorable for the lack of sleep I got. After an intense day of lumbering with an overstuffed and poorly edited pack (newbies tend to bring too much), I was tired. But unfortunately, instead of getting the sleep my body desperately needed, I would be harassed by some varmint trying to chew its way into my tent. It was relentless. The first sound I heard the following day a few feet from camp was the unmistakable clear cry of a redtail hawk. So powerful this call is often wrongly the sound effect given to soaring bald eagles in film and television. It couldn’t have been a hundred feet from my setup. My first thought was, “where were you last night, pal!?” I needed air support, and this guy was a no-show.
Fast forward to ten miles of hiking and a new site the following night. I slept undisturbed and felt like I had melted into the stillness of the woods. I could’ve been a felled oak passing its well-lived life into the lush, damp mossy forest floor. I'd be shocked if a five-star resort offered better sleep.
A barred owl was the first sound that rose above the distant dawn chorus of songbirds. The “who cooks for you?” call was very close, fifty feet from my setup. The difference in mornings was an incredible contrast. I was profoundly well-rested and awakened by a voice that flies at night. It offers the air support I lacked with the hawk. There were no varmints in the night because they likely knew better. If anything moved, it became an owl dinner.
As I walked from camp, I thought we need owl friends. Those who can see what we can’t when we can’t. Those alert to what we aren’t. Those awake to the truth we are sleeping through or from our present rhythms and schedule find ourselves asleep. Their perspective protects us. Friends whose awakeness and aliveness allow us to enter the rest we need fully. Their clear-eyed vision in the darkness and brilliant hearing of all that moves to invade our peace becomes soul protection.
The owls likely won’t be people.
I’m not necessarily talking about people. I don’t want to set you up for disappointment. Modern friendship is unfulfilling in nearly every way. I once thought it could be redeemed, but I’m entirely convinced otherwise. Surviving the loneliness of wilderness has helped me survive modern-day friendships. The withdrawals of people are the most routine and reliable part of them. This might’ve crushed me if not for being miles in the wilderness and realizing I’m ok, even thriving.
Owls may take the shape of writing from sage advisors whose voices and wisdom we remember. An owl can even be our routine practice. Thich Nhat Hahn has said anything that protects our practice is our community.
Look for voices that can become your solid stable of owls. The varmints of the world are persistent, but your rest is needed. Be well, Feral Souls.
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A listicle of daily good wolf food!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit feralsoul.substack.com