Surviving Summer
2026 is half over sweet beetle babes of my readership. Now who has the audacity to bring up the panic inducing facts about passing time being observed in quicker and quicker bursts by our brains as we age? Oh me that is. Yes and basically fyi we are hurtling ourselves towards some endpoint-the year, the decade, life or even hey the epoch?-and sometimes I sit and stare in horror at the beautiful canopy of tree greenery in my (new, overly priced rental) house and think my god I am an adult human with two children, can’t I just be a bird?
I suppose we can always look to things outside of ourselves to quell our existential cave diving into doom thinking. That’s what I’m doing here folks, bringing you some nice things to pad our time with when we just need a break.
Tally-ho….?
Reads
This may rock the boat for many but every time I read a brilliant dissection of the problem with pathologising identity in our current global culture I smack my hand on the table at every line shouting “YES GODDAMN THIS IS IT”. I urge you, to open your mind to this staggering, astute observation of the world we live in now:
Nobody Has a Personality Anymore by Freya India, GIRLS.
I always say when I read something reeheeheeeally good that someone got inside my brain and took what I was thinking and made something comprehensible, creative and brilliant out of it. I applaud them and it drives me to write more.
I would be remiss if I didn’t share this excellent substack that celebrates writers who create in time and spaces where they are squeezed tight by responsibility but feel compelled to respond to the spirit of creativity that flows through them: Part Time Poets.
I recently was honoured to have one of my personal poems published by them. It is the poem titled Undeserving and is a very personal treatise on my own wrestling with mental health and motherhood. It is part of a larger book of poems I am working on just as a personal project to help me keep writing and excavating my own experience. Find it in at this link: Issue 34.
Lastly, I love this substack Platonic Love. Too delightful friends sharing delightful things in life, stories, products, ideas, mothering moments. It’s the kind of creative enterprise I enjoy losing myself in because it doesn’t MAKE ME HATE HUMANITY. Read this interview below for a celebration of a unique, brilliant publishing house that is doing the whole counter-cultural thing but in a way that feels inexhaustibly feminine i.e. brilliant, tinged with joy and lifting each other up.
Issue 159: The best friend behind an incredibly cool publishing house.
Bants
Listening to Podcasts is a balm to my soul when I feel all caught up in the whirlwind of my exhausting train of thought (CHOO CHOO). Sometimes I just want someone else’s voice in there helping me refine, define and see better with clarity what I am stuck on or even just give me some good food for thought to monch on that looks elsewhere than the problems of my own day to day living. This podcast interview from the On Being podcast was one I managed to squeeze in over the course of a few, bone-tired “I got two kids to bedtime” days and it haunts me in the sense of a haunting being a shifting of the spirit in response to something deeper, liminal perhaps even infinite in a cosmic way. This is what poetry sets out to do and brushing the coattails of the prophetic word working of poets is an honour whether their gifts are experienced in an auditory manner, literary or even interpersonal. I hope you enjoy this conversation with two profound seers-of-things.
Here is a link to the show page where you can listen.
On Being with Krista Tippett: Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."
Eats
I birthed another human, or rather he was released from my body in a very invasive and essential surgical procedure that transformed me into a human purse. Naturally, cooking as an enjoyable pursuit and consistent activity has fallen by the wayside in this newborn stage. Sadly I have no eats of particular note to share as I have barely even showered the last seven weeks with any sort of consistency and my toddler refuses to eat anything other than Mac and cheese and chocolate chips. All this is to say sometimes it’s ok to let sokme things fall to the side for the sake of survival and relying on easy, maybe not 100% nourishing, quick fix meals to get through it all is part of the process.
Alrighty this is where I leave ya till next month. Here’s hoping I can collect a few more lovely tidbits to share and keep us buoyed up to reach the end of the summer and sail on into autumn. Thank you for giving me a reason to keep writing.
“Throughout my reading life, poems have greeted me with what feels like urgent compassion.”