Wavy impressions, and taking space
Sweet solstice wishes, taking pauses, a free resource for your summer reading, and reality TV delusions
Every other essay, this one included, is a part of the Soft Body Personal section of this newsletter. If you prefer to just read about the worker cooperative and all things adjacent to alternative business, click here to change your preferences to receive only bi-weekly Rest Day Creative missives.
The other night, rain drummed hard on the skylight, which at times reached a near cacophony, but ultimately turned out to be a comforting din as I curled up underneath and lulled to sleep. The leftover droplets blotting the window in the morning made everything through it look impressionist, wavy approximations of trees on the other side. That’s a little how my insides have felt this whole week: wavy impressions.
That same morning after the rain, I was still under the duvet and looking up while a confused crow tried to land on skylight above me, sliding across the wet glass and squawking indignantly about needing to find footing for a new roost elsewhere (and startling the ever-loving shit out of me in the process).
I get it, buddy. Sometimes we think we’re landing on something solid and we’re not actually.
The place I’ve been waking up is my summer respite, a tiny house sublet in Portland through a friend of a friend where I’ll be staying until mid-August. After that, who knows where I’ll be next? I’ve lived in four places in as many months lately, and while that’s by choice, it requires me to completely build new structures of stability each time.
I feel stable in my living situation for now, but something is gestating internally this week and I want to give myself space to form the words for it. My internal ground is shifting. Not seismically — just enough to unsettle my equilibrium for a minute. So I’m letting myself find stability while that happens, taking a pause. I have a lot to say, but not a lot to say right this minute. Spacious time to process is necessary for anyone, but especially so for an autistic person (we have some cool neurological reasons for that, which I can talk about another time).
Handily, I feel very steady from a mental health perspective. Late spring into summer is historically a time when I feel Big Sad, and I feel beyond fortunate that depression is not my predominant reality this year, for once in a long time. That makes me hopeful that I can truly have a summer this summer.
But chronic illness is illness-ing this week, and as a result, all of my mental processing happens through a blurry filter. How cool, and also how inconvenient, that the gut is so connected to the brain.
Things continue to come together behind the scenes for Rest Day, but I want and need space to digest it while my body feels so wobbly and my brain feels so squishy before I talk about it. (Before I take that space, however, I did create a little something for you below.)
Let this be the permission-granting for all of us who need it, a reminder: take the space. A day, a minute, however long. There are truly urgent things happening in the world, but the vast majority, by a long shot, are not.
To give myself the headspace I need, I’m taking next week off from writing to go eat lots of local strawberries and rhubarb, to try to inject my eyeballs with enough PNW sun to try to last me the whole year, and to spend time with my fam visiting from Colorado. Out of the 25+ places I’ve lived as an adult, only my mom has ever visited one out of state, and that was 12 years ago, so I want to make the most of it by dragging my family to my favorite places in Portland and reveling in lots of summer eating with abandon.
So I’ll see you here in two weeks, and leave you with a fun reading resource below, the usual links and thoughts (including insight into my absolute delusion about being a viable contestant on Love Island), and some solstice wishes in the meantime:
May we pause. May we feel spacious and know spaciousness.
May we do good this week, this year, this season, for our hearts, our loves, and our cares. May we create the realities we want to see. May we tend to ourselves, may we tend to the earth. May we love each other gently, and hold each other well, in order to hold all of us accountable. May we lean into sweetness, may we recognize softness, and may we let in joy.
May we lie in the grass. May we eat ripe produce. May we read our new favorite book. May we laugh deeply. May we do nothing at all.
Sending you all of the solstice sweetness, babes.
Love,
Iris
Rest Day Book Library
I’m excited about a community resource we’re planning to incorporate into the resource hub that Rest Day is going to host, our digital book library!
The library is made up of curated lists with books from varying topics, like anti-capitalist business, community care and organizing, building and sustaining alternative relationship structures, polycrisis and eco-solidarity, disability and body liberation, anti-racism and BIPOC futures, and queer joy.
So far the lists only contain recs I’ve added, but I’m excited to get my team members’ favorites on there too, and to add your recommendations over time (tell me about ‘em!). Some day I’ll also want to add a whole bunch of fun fiction on there, especially lots of queer rom coms, because I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.
Here’s to putting things out in the world before they’re “done”!
The intention is that the library can grow so people can come back again and again, and I want it to be truly community-initiated so we can make use of all of our beautiful minds together, not just mine or our team’s.
I built the library on Bookshop to easily allow for growth, and while the platform automatically sets up a small percentage of sales through the library to go to Rest Day, the primary idea is that the library is a free resource based in radical generosity and not a transactional exchange for us. We give it because want to, and that’s it!
You can change the setting once you’re there so proceeds go to a local bookstore of your choice, which we think is a great idea if you’d like to. Or if you use the lists to inspire ideas and pick up your books elsewhere like your local library, we hope they act as a little nudge to pay it forward! That might look like writing a review for the author after you read their book, recommending it to a friend, or doing a small act of kindness, however unrelated, for yourself or someone else, just because.
Want to find your next read?
Thinking, Receiving, Listening, Delighting In
This important read by
Price: When You Live Your Values Every Day, There's No Need for Activist Guilt, deconstructing the decision fatigue and moral imperatives that can come with not feeling like we’re doing “enough” in activist efforts (and, importantly, putting a critical eye on what we consider activism in the first place). A snapshot:“When we get swept up in not being able to ‘do it all’ or freeze up with complete inability to choose any cause to work toward because we can't decide which one is the ‘most worthy,’ we are operating out of a highly individualistic framework that positions the self as the agent of change.”
Speaking of, Devon’s book Unlearning Shame feels like required reading for anyone who has ever experienced shame (aka me, you, basically all humans). Devon unpacks the ways shame is largely connected to larger systemic forces, and instead of saying, “Well, that absolves me from personal responsibility,” offers ways we can engage with expansive recognition, remain accountable to ourselves and each other, and still access much-needed compassion.
This essay by
on what it means to make art, make money, and choose to live toward futures we want to see:“We bear witness, organize, and learn how to resist in our own ways - whether through boycotts or civil disobedience… I know that it is our shared responsibility to not only get through this moment together, liberated and free, but to also simultaneously reimagine futures of survival and beauty, one where we can all exist together.”
In the comments section of Fariha’s piece, I also saw an open call for speculative fiction reimagining futures beyond genocide by Stories to Change the World. Fiction revolutionaries, send in your submission so you can show us all the collective beauty of what is possible!
This piece, “Living Danishly" isn't the solution we think it is by
I’d heard Greta van Fleet before but they would always get mixed in with 70’s rock on playlists so I just realized this week that they’re a young, current band. The sound is reminiscent of Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac, echoing an era of music I am so deeply down for. Greta van Fleet is still its own thing, and while I often want to go to the source, listening to them is a bit like getting new songs from already beloved artists of times past. (Plus I love that the leader singer is a queer bb.)
I love this sweet idea of a professional walk-companion. People showing up for each other in small but potentially impactful ways.
Misbehaving bird + forbidden cupboard = protect at all costs.
Lately I’ve been building a client project that is fun for me to do but requires that I simultaneously occupy 25% of my brain at the same time with external input. Predictably, that has resulted in background watching of the new season of Love Island UK. Is it just me, or is this one even more unhinged than usual?? I’ve watched nearly every season (UK, US, and Australia), to the point that I now harbor a small but deep delusion that I — a queer, autistic, non-binary, non-monogamous, fairly-cute-but-definitely-not-anywhere-near-supermodel, 34-year-old who doesn’t wear makeup and would be mortified to even be perceived by a camera — could compete to win the hetero-monogamous drama fest/beauty pageant. Even without all of the other necessary attributes, I would automatically be disqualified because I am already geriatric by their standards, and because I have actually been to therapy. Still, some corner of my delu little brain is convinced that I could somehow get far enough to make my way through a handful of recoupling ceremonies, only to have to recuse myself due to the competition where they have to baby-bird food and drinks into each other’s mouths (iykyk). Anyone else?
And on THAT note — probably a good place to end.
Posts Lately
To wrap up, here’s a quick roundup of the recent posts on Soft Animal Bodies, in case you missed one. If there’s one that particularly resonates, I wholly appreciate you sharing it with someone you know!
Rest Day Creative
This part of the newsletter is where I explore all things inclusive of and adjacent to co-owning and building an anticapitalist, worker cooperative microagency with a team, with thoughts and experiments in community-oriented business and beyond.
Human wellbeing as a priority — creating a microcosm of reality. An essay on accidentally creating the change you think someone else is going to do, and looking behind the scenes of our worker cooperative.
Values only have value if there's agency. Questioning whose security we treat like it matters (and whose we don't), plus a snapshot of our values as an anticapitalist, community-oriented business.
Soft Body Personal
This section of the newsletter is the spicier, less filtered, more personal writing sibling. Opt in or out depending on how you feel about: gay rom com books and fiction writing, neurodivergence, autism, disability, chronic illness, trashy and deeply problematic reality television as delightful medicine, hiking long or short distances in nature because it makes snacks taste better, and queering gender, relationships, and systems.
Co-creating unconventional partnerships. Finding security through nuance, friends as beloveds, former romantic partners turned FWB minus the friendship, and sex as a hobby. If you like to be nosy about the particulars of other people’s sex lives, this one is for you.
How do you celebrate when grief is here? Reflections on birthdays, death days, and accessing joy amidst sorrow, especially when we’re in a world that can feel so broken. Basically: the very human ways that we find our way through.