Mary Oliver, One or Two Things from Dream Work

This is Buster.

Buster has heart disease that is steadily becoming congestive heart failure. Every breath and every heartbeat are gifts I hope he doesn’t open too quickly.

I count his breaths per minute—each one a prayer I am desperately praying: “More time. More time. More time.”

But I know this is the wrong prayer. I know this—right here—is already more time. His medications have already comfortably extended his life for probably more than a year. The fact that he continues to joyfully eat, walk, sniff, and snuggle is a gift beyond measure.

I know that “more time” is a futile bargain and that the more I pray for more, the less I’m here for the more I have already received.

And so I watch his chest rise and fall (one…two…three) and I pray also that I’m here.

I pray also that I remember he’s temporary, I’m temporary, we’re all temporary.

I pray for gratitude.

I pray like each prayer could plant a gentle kiss on each second, each exhale—so precious is every single one of them.

I know the veterinarian calls it heart failure, but when I ask Buster about it, he says he doesn’t think his heart is failing at all—it’s just getting larger.

He says, “my heart is expanding, overflowing with love—a love for this world so vast and so profound and so unmitigated, it will carry me out of this body and into whatever’s next. That does not sound like failure to me.”

Our walks have gotten slower—he savors each sniff and often wants to double back to revisit the nuances of a smell. Sometimes he’ll sniff one singular leaf for many seconds, as if patiently modeling for me how to slow down and love this world with your whole body, how to humbly savor something fleeting.

He sniffs as if to say, “This is the world. And this. And this. And this.”

He sniffs a leaf he sniffed yesterday and the day before and the day before that as if to say, “Isn’t it wonderful that the world is made new everyday?”

When the walk is over, I carry him up the stairs to the apartment and when we get to the top, I kiss his head, and turn around to show him the view. Faces to the breeze, we sniff the wind together and, like a dedicated student, I whisper, “This is the world.”

Our days are punctuated by 5 alarms for his pills. The harsh music that cuts through distraction and says “Stop what you’re doing! Don’t forget! Everything’s fragile! Everything’s temporary!”

Meanwhile, Buster delights in the the routine—he cannot believe his luck! 5 times a day, he savors his life-sustaining medication dunked in Gerber chicken baby food.

Subscribe now

When we take walks and Buster sees a stranger, he often fully stops, looks up at them with his glistening blueberry eyes, and starts wagging his tail, absolutely certain they are there for him. Many rush past without even noticing—into their houses, into their cars, onto their next tasks. But I still think Buster is right: each crossed path can be cosmic if you’re willing to believe it is for you.

Buster’s love for me is a wild and jealous love. If someone hugs me, hands me something, talks to me from the other room, or stands above me while I am sitting, he wails his heart’s song.

Buster lets every feeling tear through him. He lets everyone know what doesn’t feel good. He has no shame in how preciously he holds and expresses his preferences.

He’s a “soft animal”, and he loves what he loves.

When I first adopted Buster, he did not trust me to cut his toenails or cut his hair or pick him up or pull burrs out of his furry paws.

Now, every walk, at least once, he pauses for me to scoop him up and pull little seeds and sticks and out his paws.

Now, on the warmer days, when he gets tired and lays down in the middle of his walk, he lets me scoop him into my arms and carry him home. He wags his tail as I bend over to pick him up, he yields his full weight into my arms, leans back, closes his eyes, and sniffs the whole way home.

There’s something about a trust you cannot build with words, a trust you demonstrate over time, a trust that’s lived-in. It’s tender and slow and sturdy in a way a promise wishes it could be.

When I ask Buster about things to come, he just shakes his head and brings me back to right now and right now and right now.

He says:

Right now, I am tired so I find a soft place and lay my body down to rest.

Right now, I want to be laying in the sunshine and sniffing the wind so I herd you towards the yard.

Right now, I can breathe, so I take a breath gratefully.

Right now, I can eat, so I devour my breakfast.

Right now, I can walk, so I walk slowly and sniff often.

I do not have to know the future to trust right now.

I do not need to be promised more time to savor the time I am receiving right now.

Buster doesn’t speak to me in words, but his whole life is a suggestion, a suggestion of how I might really and truly live.

When he is laying in a sunbeam and I am trying to convince him to come back inside because I have a meeting in two minutes, I know between the two of us, he is the wiser one.

It has taken years upon years of animal stewardship for me to get humble enough to really take that lesson in. To stop trying to shape an animal’s behavior to fit in the polite and stuffy bounds of human society, but to take their suggestions towards wildness, towards attending to the “right now.” To allow myself to go feral with them.

So many of us believe we can’t communicate with our animals, but I think the truth is we have just been conditioned not to listen. We’ve been conditioned to believe the world of screens and bureaucracy and pavement is the real world. We’ve been conditioned to rush our dogs through their walks instead of slowing to try to imagine the unfathomable wisdom that they glean from each sniff.

We’ve decided for some reason that because they are food-motivated, because they are frightened of the vet, because they want to lay agendalessly in a sunbeam outside on a weekday during work hours that they are irrational, that they are foolish, that they are not understanding the way the world works.

But the more I sit with how humans have decided the world works, the more I believe that they are living with deep and profound presence, with an understanding of both life and death deep in their bones and that we are—more often than not—the foolish ones.

We humans forget how to love this world when we are too busy trying to save it, trying to keep it as it is, trying to get it back to what it was. We turn towards control. We miss the invitation to love the world not for what it was or what it might be, but for what it is right here and right now. We miss the invitation to tend to what’s right in front of us.

Buster is teaching me how to love him and by extension how to love the world.

He says, “you cannot save me.”

And, like a dedicated student, I say, “I cannot save you. I cannot keep you as you are forever, and I cannot take you back to the way it was before. I will love you through every phase of you. I will love you through whatever is coming. This is the world. And this. And this. And this.”

I learned disability shame in the human world. Society taught me there were rules for acceptance in the human community, and that if your body could not follow those rules, acceptance would be withheld.

I am learning disability pride in the beyond human world. Plants and animals teach me that there are millions of different kinds of bodies with millions of different ways to live a good life. The sun and wind touch my face; the water yields to receive my body; the dirt holds the full weight of me; and gravity hugs me to this wild and wonderful planet. They have no regard for whether I am sick or well. The sun, the wind, water, dirt, and gravity teach me that there are zero preconditions to being accepted as part of this wild world, that my body can be rebellious and in relationship at the same time, that there is nothing I could ever do or be that could kick me out of earthling community.

Society taught me that I had to control my body, and that if I was suffering it was my fault. Illness, pain, and disability meant that my body was a problem I needed to fix (and that I wasn’t trying hard enough).

The beyond human world teaches me that we actually have control over very little no matter how hard we try. It teaches me that suffering is not a punishment. It teaches me that illness, pain, and disability are part of life—sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent. It teaches me that no body is a problem to be fixed.

Society taught me that bodies need to be productive, be useful, be exploitable.

The beyond human world teaches me that bodies are alive and sovereign and full of unruly wants and needs.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I do not want to diminish the impact of the many humans that have shown me that there is profound pride to be had in disabled and chronically ill lived experience. But I so rarely hear about how the beyond human world is always inviting us into an interspecies kind of pride and community, and I want to slip out of disability pride as just a human story.

Many of my most profound moments of feeling seen and held in my experience of illness were not offered to me by other human beings, but by animals. A cat curling up to purr on my chest, a dog looking at me like there is nothing and no one more wonderful in the whole universe, a bird landing on the wire outside my window at just the right moment. Even the sun’s warmth pressing on my back or the wind playfully nuzzling my face have been invitations into not-aloneness.

Beyond human love has been life-saving for me. And I don’t think that I am alone in this experience.

This Disability Pride Month, I find myself thinking about the wisdom of my youngest selves. I had my first surgery when I was 4 years old, and when I think about that version of me, I lovingly and reverently think of the words “absolutely feral.” I kept the company of animals more often than people; I pretended I was a horse; I walked on all fours next to the dog; I never wore shoes; I sank my fingers into the mud; I chewed the sour grass; I sang. I had this inherent knowing whenever I was in the company of the beyond human world that my body was precious and that I belonged to the earth.

I have spent so much of my adult life trying to domesticate my body so that it will stop rattling the bars on the windows of the house of capitalism. I have spent so much of my adult life responding to dehumanization by trying to make myself useful, by trying to show how human I can be. But I guess I find myself skeptical about this project. I find myself suspicious of my white-knuckled grasp on humanity when what I really want is dignity, self-sovereignty, and pride.

When we say someone “dehumanized” us, we’re saying someone did not treat us with dignity; someone did not treat us as if we have sovereignty over our bodies; someone shamed us. We act like dignity, sovereignty, and pride belong to humans alone. But as I watch the human world becoming more and more steeped in capitalism and ableism, productivity and optimization, exploitation and profit, alienation and superiority, it feels more and more urgent (and more and more true) to find dignity, sovereignty, and pride beyond just the human experience, and certainly beyond what society defines as human.

So, this disability pride month, I find myself celebrating the ways that my chronic illnesses have fulfilled my childhood dreams of being a shapeshifter. I find myself curious about what I might see if I looked at my disabilities through beyond human eyes. What if my endometriosis is an expression of my body’s longing to molt and take new shapes like a dragonfly? What if my migraines are a tribute to hibernation, an ursine call towards deep stillness? What if my joints that swell with storms are paying homage to the way the moon swells the tides?

If being human on society’s terms means submitting to shame, exploitation, and constant usefulness: May I go feral. May I become less human. May I embrace my animal body—rebellious and full of need. May I exchange the illusion of control for the responsibility of self-sovereignty. May I find dignity in my shapeshifting body and the relationships (human and beyond) that are adaptable enough to shapeshift with me.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I am writing from the perspective of chronic illness because that has been my lived experience since I was a child, but it is my sincere belief that if you have a body of any kind, you are receiving chronic invitations to your aliveness and creativity.

I am not the first person to give voice to many of the ideas in this piece—I am indebted to Mary Oliver, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Sophie Strand, and Andrea Gibson; to the wisdom of chronically ill bodies; and to the many animals and plants who have shown me that there are countless ways to live creatively within constraint.

Cormorants (pictured here) have the highest “flight cost” of any bird, and I find them to be very wise teachers in the realm of creativity and constraint.

Subscribe now

Bird Church—the Substack and the in-person gathering—is first and foremost about the practice of loving the world with our whole bodies. I believe that slowing down and fully experiencing our love for the world in our bodies allows us to include our bodies more and more as part of the world and include the world more and more as part of our bodies. It invites us to recognize ourselves as part of the ecosystem.

Chronic illness belongs here because it is a reminder that our bodies themselves are ecosystems; it is a chronic invitation into our inherent (internal and external) connectedness. We are not a unified, congruent whole but an interweaving of relationships between the bacterial communities that regulate our digestion and immune system and the mites that live in our eyelashes and the fungi that coat our skin and our blood cells that make and re-make themselves daily. When these internal communities act harmoniously (or as we prefer), they become unnoticed and forgotten, subsumed by the singular “I.” But when there is rebellion, we are invited to remember that the “I” is plural and relational, that “self” is composed of a community of “others,” that the the body is not under our control, and it never has been.

So, here I am, placing chronic illness on the Bird Church altar, to be loved with our whole bodies.

All my life my chronic illnesses have invited me into a wild and mutable relationship with the world. I had to start from inside myself and work my way back out. After years of swimming against the current of myself, I had to trust that somehow my body was giving me care instructions for relating to the world not trying to keep me from it. Every time I stray, my body—in all it’s chronic illness and complexity—brings me back to loving the world.

This is such a pattern that I have come to believe that chronic illness is by nature an invitation and initiation; that chronic illness is an inherently creative state; and that our chronically ill bodies desperately want to be our creative collaborators.

Let me be clear. I believe a life with chronic illness can be a good life, a creative life, a beautiful life, a relational and ecosystemic life. I do not believe it is an easy life. I do not believe it is a gentle life. When you’re chronically ill:

You’re often forced to have a much more complex relationship to goals, plans, and time. You have to stop living in the fiction that you can promise yourself or anyone else some specific future. Right now becomes exceedingly precious.

You’re often forced to maneuver through labyrinthine, dehumanizing bureaucracies to get basic needs met. Staying in contact with your personhood is a survival need. Feeling your agency even at the smallest scale can be life-saving—breathe the air, drink the water, blink your eyes.

You’re often forced to listen to a lot of bad hold music. The phone tree for Walgreens pharmacy is psychological warfare.

You’re often forced to try new medications, solutions, and fixes only to find that they create a whole new series of symptoms.

You’re often forced to be in a very intimate relationship with your body, constantly living in the mystery of yourself, experimenting with what eases and what activates symptoms.

You’re often forced into a very precarious relationship with resources. When productivity is unpredictable, income tends to be as well.

These experiences are undeniably difficult. These experiences require so much grief tending. There is a way of seeing chronic illness that is all constraints, all loss. But that way of seeing is cropping a lot of creativity and aliveness out of the picture.

Living in an ongoing relationship with grief is living in an ongoing relationship with aliveness. Living in an ongoing relationship with constraint is living in an ongoing relationship with creativity.

Grief is not the opposite of aliveness, and constraint is not the opposite of creativity—these experiences are in relationship with one another; they beckon to one another; they enact change on one another; and they enact change on you.

We don’t talk enough about the clarifying nature of grief; the potency of loss to show you what you most love; to remind you that you and everyone and everything that you love is temporary; to invite you to completely reorganize your life around what is most essential to you.

We don’t talk enough about how creativity is actually how humans have been responding to difficulty for millennia. We don’t talk enough about how creativity is neither frivolous or fancy, but an everyday practice we’re already participating in.

We don’t talk enough about the beauty of inhabiting our body as an ecosystem, as a plurality, as a wild (and sometimes dangerous) place. Chronic illness invites us to put down stories of discipline and control and enter into the mystery of ourselves, enter into relationship with all the “others” that constitute our body.

The experiences of grief and constraint are not unique to chronic illness. They are thresholds everyone will have to cross. No one is exempt from constraint and creativity. No one is exempt from grief and aliveness. However, with chronic illness, the call is coming from inside the house. Your physical, visceral, internal experience is the site of the grief and the constraint—it is also the site of the call to aliveness and creativity.

We’ve been sold this lie that illness (and aging and dying) makes us less alive, less creative, less connected.

But every grief I have suffered, everything I have lost at the hands of my illnesses has served to expand my aliveness. It has deepened my love for this world and my awareness that everything I am and everything I love is temporary. Love is the only thing in my life that I strive to approach with urgency. That’s a grief lesson.

And every constraint I have encountered in my body has invited me into my own creativity. Illness calls for greater attention, sensitivity, and responsiveness to the worlds inside and outside of me. Through my illnesses, I have felt the unique relief of a shower sit more times than I can count, I have spent hours deciphering the shapes and symbols inside my eyelids, I have traveled farther in the confines of the ever-changing topography of my body than a plane could ever take me. And I have found—over and over again to my surprise—that I have all the materials for a beautiful, creative life right here, right now within the constraints.

As for connection, there is nothing in this universe that can separate my body from its interrelatedness—I am an interspecies sanctuary. My chronic illnesses are proof of that. I am home to bacteria, fungi, mites, and shapeshifting cells. They do not obey me, they are not under my command. We are in relationship. We co-create one another. We constrain one another. I am home to memory, to my beloved dead, to every being and every place and everything I have ever loved. My body does not keep the score; it sets the table, it tends the altars, it keeps the fire lit.

Mary Oliver wrote, “maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” And maybe we have been encouraged to forget that our chronically ill bodies are sacred bearers of that desire. Maybe we have been encouraged to limit our definition of “beautiful,” “creative,” and “art” so much that we’ve excluded ourselves from it, excluded the endometrial cell that strayed, excluded the mitochondria that rebelled, excluded the brain that is foggy, excluded the joints that are achy.

What if every part of your body that has gone “off script” is inviting you into your creativity?

What if every part of your body that has gone “off script” is inviting you into your inherent collectivity and connectedness?

What if every part of your body that has gone “off script” is a piece of God?

Chronically ill folks are walking around with these beefy, honed creative capacities, and the societal story (which I often hear us tell ourselves) is that our brain fog, our pain, our time spent at appointments, our fatigue, our anger, our grief is antithetical to aliveness, to the creative process.

But I know there are creations, stories, and connections that can only be seen through brain fog, can only be dreamed up in a fatigue daze, can only be birthed into this world through an intimacy with pain. I am not here to romanticize our suffering, to say we must turn our pain into inspiration. But I am here to slip out of the familiar story that chronic illness separates us from our aliveness, our creativity, and our capacity for connection.

There is something that wants to happen here—that can only happen right here—under these specific conditions.

I don’t care if it is painting or scatting over that godforsaken hold music or writing or adjusting your pillows so you’re in 15% less pain or sewing or watching the light filter through your eyelids in colors and shapes or dancing or sitting down in the shower. We’ve got to stop acting like creativity is a luxury and a novelty and not the ancient inner wellspring chronically ill folks are drawing from everyday to to navigate our symptoms, to self-advocate within systems, to keep surviving, and to keep loving.

We’ve got to stop pretending we’re singular and start collaborating with the collective of our body, start sending vibrations down the web that extends the “I” into a larger ecosystem of rebellious bodies and wild cells, start claiming chronic illness as chronic invitations to our innate creativity.

Maybe it’s time to steer into the improv of chronic illness and start “yes, and-ing” our bodies, our ecosystems, our pieces of God. Maybe it’s time to step out of the societal binary that chronic illness is either a comedy (you get better!) or a tragedy (you suddenly die!). Maybe it’s time to claim aliveness and illness not as foils, but as one interwoven and unfolding story. Maybe it’s time to take our plural and shapeshifting bodies up on their offers of creative collaboration.

I just really wonder what would happen if we bet on our creativity, if we stopped believing the good life was anywhere but here, if we stopped believing the good body was any body but this body, if we started living like we believed Andrea Gibson when they said, “a difficult life is not less worth living than a gentle one.”

If you’re chronically ill (and living in CA & over 18 y/o), and you’re interested in exploring your creativity in community, I’d love to have you at Chronic Illness & Creativity, a virtual somatic group therapy space.

Get on the waitlist here.

Hi, y’all, and welcome to Bird Church (the Substack)!

I took a couple years away from being consistently online to follow an impulse to gather in person, outside at the marsh where you can hear the Black-Bellied Plovers’ cries and feel the wind irreverently tousle your hair; to read my favorite poems out loud from a book whose cover is lovingly adorned with rings from the countless cups of tea it has held; and to make things that I could hold in my hands and give to other people (zines about critters, lumpy mugs, hand-sewn little artifacts).

This is to say, Bird Church is, first and foremost, something physical and immediate and neighborly. A place where blankets get laid out on the grass, where we sit and sip tea together, where we gasp and gesture, where we show & tell.

Bird Church is a free, monthly gathering at Crab Cove in Alameda, CA—on Huichin, the unceded, ancestral land of the Ohlone peoples—inspired by Mary Oliver’s “instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

You may have noticed, that this Bird Church—what you are currently reading—bears little resemblance to an in-person gathering at the marsh.

Bird Church—the Substack—is an extension of Mary’s final instruction to “tell about it.” It is a place for me to write my own altar to this world—a place to leave offerings, wonderings, practices, praise, and grief.

To open this virtual space, this internet altar, I want to start with a gratitude practice.

I have spent much of my life savoring the simple pleasures and simultaneously rolling my eyes at gratitude practices, gratitude journals, etc. I think I’ve always just had a pretty sensitive bullshit detector for when a gratitude practice feels more like it’s bargaining for something: “Look, universe, I’m being grateful for what I have. Can I have that other thing now?” So, if you’ve been somewhat skeptical of keeping a gratitude journal, please know you’re in good company (or at least my company!).

I have more recently come into an understanding of gratitude practice that feels more vast and less conditional. It’s a gratitude rooted in the improbability of each life and each encounter. It’s approaching every human, every creature, every plant I meet with the almost somber understanding that they or I could have just as easily never been born, never made it to this moment right here. From this perspective, every path that crosses mine invites me into a welling up of wonder at my own aliveness, at the aliveness of every being. It’s not about what I prefer, what I want or don’t want—it’s just about being here.

It should be said, too, that sometimes this is an involuntary welling up of wonder. Sometimes it arrives all on its own, without being asked. But sometimes, maybe even more often than not, it is an active practice. It is a choice to accept the world’s invitation to gratitude. It is the everlasting and holy work of remembering you’re here, of paying attention, of coming back to your own improbable and temporary life, of coming back to your own improbable and temporary body.

Right now, as I write this, the wind is coming in through the window, gently rustling the pages of a precariously placed book, and outside, the sun is turning the leaves of the trees into streamers of raw, glittering light, and next to me, my dog is occasionally turning the pinks of his ears towards the rhythmic tips and taps of my keyboard.

Right now, as I write this, I am somewhere between the physical altar and internet altar of Bird Church, my hands brimming with words, one thousand “little alleluias.”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I’m Shallyn—an ardent nature noticer, a somatic therapist, an eco-somatic facilitator, and a body living with the wild and humbling ebbs and flows of chronic pain and illness.

Little Heron Somatics came about as a way to do the work I most deeply long to do, as a way to follow in the lineage of my greatest teachers in this life: birds and bugs, trees and flowers, dogs and cats, and the humans who have taught me that the counsel of critters is worth seeking.

I like to work and write in collaboration with what’s here—letting the container take shape around what’s longing to be held rather than forcing what’s longing to be held into a one-size-fits-all container.

I am always coming back to a deep trust that healing, relating, unfolding, living (whatever you want to call it) is always already happening—that we can’t miss it; that it’s not always easy, but it is organic; that our bodies are our living blueprints for that process; and that our beyond human neighbors are our teachers in that process.

I have an M.A. in Somatic Psychology and am trained in Relational Somatic Healing. I live and work as a somatic therapist and eco-somatic practitioner in Alameda, CA on Huichin, the unceded, ancestral land of the Ohlone peoples.