Autumn Offerings :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
On Being SICK
Altadena Healing Village & Fall Festival
I'm on Yelp (hooray?)
How to Do Nothing
Poems by Kenneth Rexroth
On Being SICK
As we transition into shorter days and longer nights, I'm wishing you all a sense of peace, embodiment, and connection to the people, places, and activities that make you feel more whole.
When I was in my early teens, I met a therapist who assured me that, while there was nothing wrong with me, I may in fact be SICK. And he help up four fingers to count off what he meant by that: Sensitive, Intelligent, Creative, and Kind. It's a bit hokey, but I think back on it sometimes, and I'm glad someone told me that at some point.
I feel fortunate that I live in a place so full of SICK people—people who care for each other, who care about learning, unlearning, and reflecting, who are sensitive to the natural world and to others around them, and who show up in creative, often unexpected ways in my life. If you are reading this newsletter, chances are I count you among them.
Altadena Healing Village & Fall Festival
I met some good people recently volunteering with an effort called the Altadena Healing Village, a collection of healing arts practitioners who offer free services to neighbors affected by the Eaton Fire. They have been at it for several months now, meeting in a lovely backyard garden off of Lincoln Ave. I will join them once again to offer our labor at the Altadena Fall Festival on Saturday, November 22. To learn more about the Healing Village, you can follow their Instagram, or check their scheduling site for upcoming offerings.
I'm On Yelp (hooray?)
I learned recently that, after over a decade running my own business on word-of-mouth alone, I have landed on Yelp. I consider this a mixed blessing, and not one that I was seeking, but if you are someone who likes to leave Yelp reviews, feel free to do so here. I also love to hear feedback directly, and maintain a running list of nice things people have said about my practice here.
Schedule your next session here.
Learn about my sliding scale work here.
This photo was taken during one of many neighborhood walks while living in Oakland. Shot with a Pentax LX on Kodak Tri-X 400 film.
How to Do Nothing
Over the summer, I came down with a fresh affliction: a distorted, darkened blob in the middle of my right eye's field of vision. I learned that this is called a central serous retinopathy, that it is common in high-stress individuals of a certain age, and that it will tend to go away on its own—if you let it. I have tried to de-escalate some of my more stressful habits, and pepper in moments of self-care and low-stakes enjoyment, but it's no small task in such tumultuous times. Meanwhile, the blob is still with me, a visible reminder that for better or worse has gotten easier to ignore.
So it came to pass that, while running around on a typically chaotic day, I popped in to check the shelves at Goodwill, and found myself walking out with a dog-eared copy of Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I was vaguely aware of the book when it made a splash in 2019, but my tendency is always to walk past the popular displays and into the more obscure bowels of any bookstore. If I thought about it at all, I likely presumed Odell's audience to be some other kind of workaholic, not the cool, artistic, socially engaged workaholic I've worked so hard to become. In any case, I'll slow down if and when I can afford to. Turns out, I do fit the mold after all.
How to Do Nothing is embarrassingly well-suited to my inclinations. Odell's points of reference include public space, conceptual and performance art, experimental music, gardens, communes, minimalism, labor organizing, autonomist critical theory, dam removal, decolonization, urban wildlife. In other words, the good stuff. For someone with a view of social media, the hustle economy, and pop culture perhaps more critical than most, I still struggle with authentic connection, with slowness, with reasonable goals and expectations. I hold in high regard the principle of attunement to self, others, and the world around, but believing is a pale substitute for doing, and doing takes practice.
In How to Do Nothing, Odell advocates for a practice of purposeful and intransigent divestment from systems that "keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction;" instead investing our energies into activities—and inactivities—that genuinely nourish ourselves and our relationships to family, community, neighborhood, city, bioregion, world. These nested, overlapping zones of attention and care are central to her argument. Doing nothing is not (only) retreat, but also reinvention or rediscovery of complex webs of affection and trust that are suppressed under capitalism or whatever we're calling it in 2025. They are suppressed not because they are unproductive, but because their productivity is inevitably distributed and not easily captured and concentrated in the hands of a few. To the extent that we choose how to pass the hours, we can use our attention as a divining rod to find the wellsprings of inspiration and thereby widen the cracks in the concrete of mandatory reality. In widening these cracks and nourishing what nourishes us, we are already on our way to a world that revels in diversity, complexity, and nuance, and that sees individual, communal, and ecological wellness as ends in themselves.
Odell's book pursues many rich threads, and I won't attempt to do them justice here. Suffice to say I've found it to be a thoughtful, exciting, and satisfying read that spurred a wide range of reflections and connection, evidence of which can be found in the rambling pile of notes and the steadily growing tabernacle of other books I've been carrying around for the past few weeks as I think through this work and what I'd like to say about it. While I think this messy sprawl of allusion and complexity begetting complicity is very much in the spirit of How to Do Nothing, it's unfortunately not in the spirit of wrapping up this newsletter in a concise and timely way, so I'll leave the footnotes for another time.
Poems by Kenneth Rexroth
One writer who came to mind early in my reading is the poet, translator, and scholar Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth was a generous thinker and a politically engaged writer of deep ecological and ethical sensibility, a writer whose sense of solidarity was manifest in word and deed. As prolific as he was, his writing embodies the spirit of doing nothing as an ethico-political and aesthetic act.
When I think of Rexroth, I think of someone who breathes in surroundings and breathes out verse, a photosynthetic process as necessary as that of trees. Rexroth's poetry exists in "an ongoing state of encounter," to borrow Jenny Odell's words. Even his most romantic or meditative works exhibit a liveliness that depends upon a sense of embedded relationality, however fleeting; a stillness as at the top of a breath or an hour before the candle burns too low to see the page. A moment whose bounded attentiveness must necessarily derive from a reciprocal intimacy with the innumerable strands of time and consequence that lead to now, and that fall away only to the degree that the writer puts them to rest. Watchfulness as an expression of care. I attend to my piece so that you might dream, so that the world might turn, so that in stillness I might perceive my place in the dance of life and death. That in dancing I might know stillness. That in dreaming you might attend to me.
The following selections are presented chronologically, published between 1940 and 1965. I've stayed away from what might be considered prototypical Rexroth works (though I mean no shade upon them). The Bestiary selections are probably best known of these, from a series of shorter poems written to his young daughters, alternately hilarious and terrifying, that exhibit a level of honesty and respect in dealing with youth that I find admirable.
Hiking on the Coast Range
On the Anniversary of the Killing of
Sperry and Conderakias in the
San Francisco General Strike
Their Blood Spilled on the Pavement
Of the Embarcadero
The skirl of the kingfisher was never
More clear than now, nor the scream of the jay,
As the deer shifts her covert at a footfall;
Nor the butterfly tulip ever brighter
in the white spent wheat; nor the pain
Of a wasp stab ever an omen more sure;
The blood alternately dark and brilliant
On the blue and white bandana pattern.
This is the source of evaluation,
This minimal prince rupert's drop of blood;
The patellae suspended within it,
Leucocytes swimming freely between them,
The strands of fibrin, the mysterious
Chemistry of the serum; is alone
The measure of time, the measure of space,
The measure of achievement.
There is no
Other source than this.
from A Bestiary
for my daughters, Mary and Katharine
Aardvark
The man who found the aardvark
Was laughed out of the meeting
Of the Dutch Academy.
Nobody would believe him.
The aardvark had its revenge —
It returned in dreams, in smoke,
In anonymous letters.
One day somebody found out
It was in Hieronymus
Bosch all the time. From there it
Had sneaked off to Africa.
Cat
There are too many poems
About cats. Beware of cat
Lovers, they have a hidden
Frustration somewhere and will
Stick you with it if they can.
Scarecrow
A hex was put on you at birth.
Society certified your
Existence and claimed you as
A citizen. Don't let it
Scare you. Learn to cope with a world
Which is built entirely of fake,
And in which, if you find a truth
Instead of a lie, it is due
To somebody's oversight.
These stuffed old rags are harmless,
Unless you show them the fear
Which they can never warrant,
Or reveal the contempt which
Of course is all they deserve.
If you do, they'll come to life,
And do their best to kill you.
Wolf
Never believe all you hear.
Wolves are not as bad as lambs.
I've been a wolf all my life,
And have two lovely daughters
To show for it, while I could
Tell you sickening tales of
Lambs who got their just deserts.
Camargue
Green moon blaze
Over violet dancers
Shadow heads catch fire
Forget forget
Forget awake aware dropping in the well
Where the nightingale sings
In the blooming pomegranate
You beside me
Like a colt swimming slowly in kelp
In the nude sea
Where ten thousand birds
Move like a waved scarf
On the long surge of sleep
With care,
Wilson