In a raindrop? In a rivulet that cuts through the muddy slope? In the tiny stream that ribbons, shining, through a grove of ferns? In the underground spring that burbles to the surface and feeds the stream? In the ocean, where all rivers end only to evaporate into the sky again? In a cumulus cloud? A droplet of mist floating over the mountain? A lightning bolt?

Underground or in the sky? On a mountaintop or in the ocean?

A river begins in all places, everywhere.

Whatever its source, that is the source of our words.

I believe that stories flow through the earth and carve channels through us. Our job is to let them flow. To visit the river and listen.

❊

Last month, I gave a reading at River Arts & Books in Roscoe, Montana, on the banks of East Rosebud “Creek”—which really is a river! I marvel that I was invited to read words from my forthcoming book about listening on a river’s banks, my voice finding its frequencies alongside the river’s sibilant rush. (With the help of a mic.)

So much of this book has been written on the banks of Big Creek, the little creek in the woods where I’m living in the Georgia Piedmont. On so many days and through so many seasons, it has helped my words to flow. Its gentle shushes quieting me enough to hear the world through the din of the world—the world within this noisy world; the world I came here to hear. The more-than-human, that world that enlivens and enlarges us, ensouls and enminds and embodies us, makes us who we are.

And I am still listening, as these words find their way through me.

This week, I read “Listen to the Quiet: A Conversation with Rebecca Gayle Howell about Erase Genesis” with Tiffany Troy at Tupelo Quarterly. In it, Howell says that:

I’ve always been interested in the balance between silence and sound in poetry. My students and I often have that conversation—I’ve found that a poet can substantially deepen their relationship to the art when they let go of the idea that manufacturing more sound, saying stuff, is the ultimate goal. The world is plenty noisy enough.

But I am increasingly interested in the idea that the soundwork in poetry is actually only there to point us toward the silence, to lure us into a silence that is shared among the generations and the natural world, one I think knows a lot more than I do.

All my writing on listening these past years resonates deeply with this.

I believe that what many people don’t understand about writing is not only the time that the words take, but the time the silence takes.

The silence the river asks of us.

The time we have to spend shushed so it can speak.

Spells for the Earth,

Holly

Nine data centers planned for the state of West Virginia, for a total of 10,458 megawatts. Heat waves rolling across the Northern Hemisphere. The uprooting of more and more and more people from their homes. Continued loss of grasslands, prairies, and wetlands. Eleven million acres of farmland lost to urban development between 2001 and 2021, according to American Farmland Trust, much of it prime soils.

Driving down the road, I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday,

yesterday.

Too many roads, though, for that matter, fragmenting the remaining country, the Roadless Rule that keeps habitats intact across 58.5 million acres of national forest lands rescinded by the US Secretary of Ag last summer.

It was hard not to hear our longing and our complacency wrapped in that ballad, to feel our collective love for our rural places and our lack of care for them.

Still, I heard in the voices and saw in the faces that we were united, for a few minutes at least, no matter where we are from or grew up, by a longing as pure and crystalline as a mountain stream: to go home to a place we belong; to be at home on almost-heaven Earth.

Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze

Country roads,

Holly

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And my big-sky heart can’t wait to be in Montana for the first time, where I’ll be giving a reading this weekend at River Arts & Books in Roscoe. Then I’ll head down to Yellowstone to commune with the geothermal mysteries of the earth and find some cold streams and starry peaks.

I’ll talk to you again when I return.

se hace camino al andar

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Traveler, there is no path

the path is made by walking

— Antonio Machado

There are perhaps no two lines that better encapsulate the creative process. Here is the thrill and the dread of creating. The excitement and the fear lie here.

It’s what Keats called “negative capability,” the ability to pursue a beautiful form, a meaningful story, in the face of not knowing yet.

… several things dove tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

— Keats, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, 1817

We walk into the darkness, onto the rocky path we stumble forth. Everything we write is a process of falling forward and finding our footing with each step, as walking is. There’s no guide, no map, only your own walking—listening for your rhythms, finding your pace, looking for the next foothold.

The terrain is different every day. We’ll get bogged down in yet-unforeseen quagmires. We’ll reach the heights of yet-unknown overlooks: new perspectives on what we’re wrestling, crystallizations of our thinking; the peaks of writing. We’ll stand at a fork in the trail, confused about which way to go. We’ll take a path only to realize it’s an impassable rhododendron thicket, what Southern Appalachians called a “hell-thicket,” a “laurel hell,” or simply a “hell.” We’ll get tripped up by a root or vine, what my ancestors called a “devil’s shoestring.” We’ll have to sit and take a rest on an uphill, for longer than we thought we would. We’ll reach a waterfall where the words tumble down and rush toward us. It’s all in a day’s walking through the wilderness of language and story.

It’s the only way you’ll get where you’re going when you don’t know where you’re going. There are moments of despair, of heaviness, of exhaustion, and exhilaration and joy, too. Moments when you’ll lie on the ground and just think how good it feels to be out in the wilderness, lost to time and logic.

If you can’t stand the green chaos, then stay inside, use ChatGPT. If you’re up for the adventure, though, lace up your boots and get going.

Spells for the earth,

Holly

Traveler, your footprints

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship’s wake on the sea.

—[Traveler, your footprints], by Antonio Machado

Translated By Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney

Friends, I’m in need of following the path toward new forms for this newsletter. As you may have noticed, I’ve been sending weekly spells for the earth for the month of June. I’m feeling pulled toward these love letters to all subscribers and want to express my continued gratitude to paid subscribers as I land on new exclusive offerings for you. Your support enables me to stay fluid and listen for the way I wish to grow this medium of connection. Thank you. 🌿

After a Sunday night of fast-moving storms full of lightning, I went for a walk in the woods yesterday morning. The sun had come out, but the woods were rain-soaked and cool, the leaves dripping.

Walking, thinking, feeling, my eyes landed on the brilliant orange clusters of chanterelles fruiting on the forest floor. It was the largest bloom I’ve seen in seven years of living in these woods. I went to fetch my harvest basket.

As I plucked each fleshy mushroom from the soft soil, smelled the subtle fragrance as they landed softly in the basket, I knew I was scattering 1.3 trillion spores as I went—at least. This is why mushroom foragers always use porous baskets, so the spores can release and drift when the fruits are up-mycelialed; you propagate even as you take, an offering and exchange.

Mushrooms produce an unbelievable amount of spores, a percentage of them making their way, along with the spores of ferns, into the troposphere. Right now, there are chanterelle spores catching a ride on the jet stream, eager to land down again in good soil.

1.3 trillion thank-yous to the earth that evolved such brilliant lifeforms and bounteous sustenance.

I did a language-dig along with my forage, as I like to do, to understand the mycelial threads of the names and what I am really eating.

And, get this: the genus name of chanterelles, Cantharellus, is the diminutive form (-ellus) of cantharus, a drinking vessel with two handles consecrated to the personification of Bacchus.

God of wine and dancing, music and festivities, Bacchus gets a rap as a bit of hedonist. But he’s one of the earth gods. He embodies the harvest of grapes, fruit, and vegetation; the fertility of the soil. His is a very serious kind of fun, infused with religious devotion.

He’s known for ecstatic trance, yes. Because he helps us remember what a really good time we can have right here on fertile Earth. He gets us earth-drunk, in love with the lush-rich overflowing of gifts to be found all around us—reminds us of the playful freedom to be found within the limit of being gravity-bound. His parties were subversive due to their free mingling of social classes and genders; he taught his followers to undermine the oppressions of the powerful.

For devotees of Bacchus—and you may’ve guessed by now that I am one—the party is right here on Earth, looking up at lifeless glinting Mars in the dark of a starlit night, up at the big round moon, belly full of chanterelles and fermented fruits, and the crickets trilling, bare feet on the dewy grass.

This is to say happy high summer on Earth in the Northern hemisphere, friends. 1.3 trillion spores of awe and joy and gratitude to be right here with you. +

And oh, by the way, p.s., Bacchus’s fennel-stem sceptre, wrapped round with ivy & dripping with honey, is a magic device, wielded by the followers of the god. It both disperses good & destroys those who work against Bacchus. In Euripides’ 407 BCE play Bacchae, a warning is issued: “You will all be routed, shamefully defeated, when their wands of ivy turn back your shields of bronze.”

Spells for the earth,

Holly

Patter on the sweetgum and poplar leaves.

Occasional plunk from the eave

onto an upturned bucket. The regular tick

like a metronome of one drip

from something to something, unseen.

The soft plish of slow streams falling

from the corrugation-grooves of the roof

onto patio concrete.

Rain, rain! This refuge, this music.

Scientists have learned that seeds, hearing falling rain, begin to sprout. Tucked into the soil, they sense the sound vibrations and accelerate germination.

And I think of how the whole world is listening. How we are sensing, always, for the conditions that will help us thrive.

What brings the voice alive? “When creeks are full / the poems flow,” writes Gary Snyder in his collection Regarding Wave. A perfect statement on the ecologies of writing.

Rain is not a thing but an animacy—“vibrant matter,” as the political ecologist Jane Bennett would call it. Vital materiality. Rain is life. Is inward. Is growing. Is a sated thirst.

The whole parched earth around me seemed to be listening for the relief of drops and patters these past drought months in the Southeast. As if the plants and soil were holding their breath, the rocks still and pensive, waiting. The grass turned brown and the woods seemed tired when I walked in them, the birds quiet. My footsteps too heavy.

When the rain began last week, I heard a big green sigh. The mosses grew softer; the creek, swollen back to life, sent up a ribbon of fog. Snakes came out from their burrows. The passionflower climbed its trellis, threw out a new tendril.

Roots, too, listen underground for flowing water, and move toward it. They can distinguish a recording from the real sound, and prefer the real.

And noise—from an endlessly roaring highway, say, or a leaf blower or lawnmower—impedes their ability to perceive and respond to water’s acoustic cues.

We sense so much more than we think we do—so much more than modern society has allowed us to. But we are waking up. The world is vibrant, down to every atom and particle. Everything matters.

This is to ask: how can you listen, deep down, for what waters the stories inside you? What helps your words germinate? Resting in quiet, away from the noise, can you hear the direction in which you want to feel and sense and learn—and allow yourself to grow that way?

Vibrant matter,

Holly

✢

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What makes you the authority? that mean little demon asks when we sit down to write about a subject. (I can also say that those who aren’t white, cis, hetero men hear this demon far more often and more loudly.)

Authority has many meanings. Here are a few from the Oxford English Dictionary:

The power to enforce compliance or obedience.

Power derived from or conferred by another.

The right to act in a specified way, delegated from one person or organization to another.

Official permission, authorization.

This official permission and authorization has most often been bestowed by patriarchal systems of power run by white, cis, hetero men who tend to give authorization to those like them while the silencing Who am I to speak? knifes the powerful spirited voice inside the rest of us.

But, I will add that white, cis, hetero men can also struggle with this demon. Within patriarchy, not all men have authority. In fact, outside of their households and romantic relationships, most of them don’t; that’s how the patriarchal system is built, on domination. That’s what led the Black feminist scholar bell hooks to write, in her essay “Understanding Patriarchy,” that, “Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.”

All of this is to say, the demon finds most of us in this system whose very structure is about oppressing the power of the majority of human spirits, which is to say voices. (The growing prevalence of Large Language Model-generated writing speaks in part to the fact that most voices have already been crushed and diminished, made to tremble and be tiny and timid and ask themselves constantly Who am I to write this?? LLMs enter to give sudden confidence and authority; who doesn’t want to take it?) (There is much more here to say about LLMs based on my experience teaching first-year writing to undergraduates for the past 7 years, as I’ve been a witness to many spirits, listener of many young voices, and have heard their struggles—and am seeing how eagerly they grasp at the power of the LLMs.)

I do digress, a little. The voice is a wild thing, a spirited thing.

The root of authority is author. (I’ve also written about this link between authoritarian and author, in regards to who controls the narrative.)

As the written word has been tied to systems of patriarchal power since the beginning, it’s no wonder that so many of our wounds of silencing and powerlessness live in that gaping vast howling gap between our pen and the page.

Like many of us in this historical moment, I’m thinking a lot about power and what it is.

And as I’ve also written, I want to suggest that we always have more than we think. I’ve known this intimately, from my earliest years, as I was raised by an authoritarian—and look at me, an author. His usual m.o. was yelling in my face and dismissing everything I said, everything I reported about my experience in the world, my innermost truths, my view of reality. My voice trembled. I took to my bedroom as often as possible and wrote furiously in my journal.

There are many kinds of power but one kind, the wiliest, most magic, wildest, most fluid and skillful and powerful kind, stirs, fledges, and takes to the wing out of fierce love.

What I’ve been trying to say is that if you love a subject enough, you have the authority to write about it. (Including yourself, as in memoir.)

I was struck recently, reading Laura Poppick’s Strata: Stories from Deep Time1, when she told the reader in the intro that she was indeed a geology major in college, and became a field assistant and lab technician, but decided to leave the field. That is: she didn’t earn a PhD, didn’t go on to become one of the world’s leading geological researchers (about whom she writes in her book). She became a writer instead.

So who is she to write this heftily scientific and significant book about deep time?? I can certainly see those who earned their PhDs asking.

I read this sentence:

Even after I left geology for journalism, though, my appreciation for strata only grew.

Who is she? Someone who honed her appreciation—her love.

And love is action, devotion, attention. It is unwavering commitment. It is study, thinking, reading. It is asking questions. It is trying to understand. It is time. It is focus. This is the love that gives you the authority to write about something.

All of that is deeply visible in Poppick’s book. And I would venture that she is the utmost authority on strata. Her book is utterly beautifully wrought, precise and thoughtful, evocative and deeply researched.

What do you want to write about? Go earn your authority. Commit, study, devote yourself to it. Sit at the page with it and hold it. Love it deeply—and, as I said in a similar way here, the subject you “love” can also be the grain of sand that gets in your shell, the subject that vexes you, hexes you, a story that won’t quit haunting you. Turn to it and love it, try to understand. Give it your time and focus.

Your authority will come from that.

As the spirit moves,

Holly

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As ever, I want to hear your thoughts and reactions. I invite you to join the community and the conversation below.

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A newsletter series devoted to the writing life.

In each Writing Desk post, you’ll find a small collection of thoughts from my desk about the writing life and practice, plus what I’m reading/listening to/snacking on/etc.

First, We’re thrilled to be in conversation this evening with Laura Poppick about rocks, stones, fossils, mud, ice, air, plants, minerals, & water—all the forces that got us here, the elements we are wrapped up in now. Poppick’s book Strata: Stories from Deep Time, shortlisted for the 2026 LA Times Book Prize, is a monumental achievement of deep research; lovingly detailed reportage; and graceful, personal, reflective prose. We can’t wait to be in conversation with Laura about this beautiful book (with stunning illustrations by Sarah Gilman, a couple of which you see here).

The EarthSpells Institute is an online habitat for ecological writers. A refuge for magic & mystery. A place where we are growing together as the world falls apart. If you’re interested in joining us later this year when our doors open again, stay tuned. We would love to welcome you in. ✺

In this month’s Writing Desk:

❈ getting softer with your writing practice as we enter summer

❈ using blocks of writing time to get past writing blocks

❈ what I’m reading

❈ what I’m drinking

❈ what I’m listening to

❈ Getting softer with your writing practice as we enter summer

The poet William Stafford wrote that:

The stance to take, reading or writing, is neutral, ready, susceptible to the now; such a stance is contrary to anything tense or determined or ‘well-trained.’ Only the golden thread knows where it is going, and the role for a writer or reader is one of following, not imposing.

As I’ve written elsewhere (& I’m sorry that I link this piece so often, but it conveys so much of what I wish to say about writing), “This is a state of receptivity, a stance that looks relaxed.”

Relaxed!—imagine that!

⁀➷

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Love the grains of sand. The world is full of them. Invite them in. Feel them grate against your flesh. Notice.

Why do they scrape and irritate?

Because they touch a part of you that has something to say. A part of you that thinks otherwise, that cares about something. They get inside you because they are in some way yours to work with. Imagine that! That they are yours. Yes, they’ve found their way to you.

Use them to inspire your own words. To “express” means not only “to make known the opinions or feelings of (oneself)” but “to force out (as the juice of a fruit) by pressure.” (The poetry of my Merriam Webster’s collegiate dictionary.)

Fresh juice. Lustrous pearl.

When you push ideas away, you are saying, “I reject this.”

What do you embrace, then? What do you wish to invoke instead? Can you use the energy of your rejection to articulate, to express, your vision, your experience, your beliefs?

We spend a lot of energy pushing away, resisting. I often notice that my undergraduate students want to throw their energy into rebelling against texts. In today’s culture, what this means is that they throw out the text entirely. They cancel it.

But it’s not just undergraduates. It’s readers in general. If a text contains racism/sexism/able-ism/genderism, or any identifiable isms that are distasteful and disagreeable, the zeitgeist encourages us to make a (public, or virtue-signaling) blanket rejection of the text and move on.

I think this is a deeply wasteful use of our energy and intellects. There are so many missed opportunities for thoughtful engagement. For fiery and alive expressions of the heart. For softenings or nuance, for gentle and compassionate invitations to dialogue, when we move deeper into the ideas we resist.

It makes me think of Rumi’s great poem “The Guest House,” translated by my spirit friend and elder Coleman Barks, who recently passed.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

So much of good, compelling writing happens as flesh meets grain and begins to work with it. Begins to turn it over and massage it toward something the writer wishes to say.

When my students put a big label on a piece of writing—ableist, classist, or whatever it is—I ask them to take that grain and use it as fuel and spark. To take the grain and run with it. And that’s when they begin to tell about their own stories and experiences in meaningful ways.

Regarding reading itself, most often, there are so many dimensions and aspects to a text that, if we can learn to notice the grains and to engage with the rest, we find that a wealth of compelling ideas/sentences/passages remain for us to hold and sit with.

Finally, there’s another layer here I wish to speak to. When we read this way as writers, we begin to open into more gentleness with our own writing. Maybe we’ll get a few things wrong in our books or essays. Maybe we won’t hit every nail right on the head. We are always trying our best, though—to be sensitive, to listen, to be engaged in conversations about all the -isms, absolutely, working for justice and liberation, humble enough to learn—and we hope that our work sparks and invites compassionate dialogue and conversation.

There’s an abundance of writing out there right now that constricts itself terribly, for fear of cancellation. The writer protects themself with every move, fears and imagines every potential criticism and girds their sentences with weighty defenses. Things go stale and lose their spark. And whatever may have been expressed, meanwhile, cannot seem to find its way out.

We are all deprived by this.

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Yours,

Holly

Oikos, the Greek word at the root of ecology, means the home or dwelling of a common person.

This month’s letter is not from home but from the Caribbean, where I traveled this month for the first true vacation—not for writing/research/reporting—in years, since I can’t remember when. Do writers take vacations, though? …

✼ Oh, real quick, before we get to the letter!—I’d like to invite you to become a paying subscriber. Though I don’t have a huge readership, I nonetheless have a high ratio of paid subscribers to free, and I am on my way to becoming a Substack bestseller (💫🙏), which can help me find a much wider audience here on this platform. Every paying subscriber helps me give more time and energy to this newsletter. I am pouring more of my heart into my writing here, and I look forward to hearing from readers. I’m grateful for your presence as I move toward the publication of my first book, This Resounding World: A Field Guide to Listening. (I promise you’ll be the first to know when I have a release date.)

When you join the EarthSPELLS community as a paid subscriber, you’ll get:

🪶 My monthly Writing Desk posts that cover what I’m working on, thinking about, reading, and anything else from the desk that I’d like to share

🪶 Either a Letter from Home, a monthly letter about my personal ecologies of writing, or an essay in the Mycelial series, which explores the golden threads of the everyday

🪶 Access to the full archive & the ability to join the conversation by posting comments & being part of the group chat

Deep thanks to my readers and all those supporting artists at this harrowing time.

Now onto this month’s letter.

⁀➷

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A seminal text is “a foundational work that introduces groundbreaking ideas, significantly influencing future research, thought, or developments in its field.”

The root of seminal is semen.

The idea that semen was active with Vital Heat that emanated from God the Father was put forth by Albertus Magnus in the 1400s while thousands of women were being burnt at the stake and Western science and philosophy were being formulated and institutionally constructed.

The ovum is passive, the sperm active, Science collectively agreed. More than 500 years later, we all sat dutifully at our desks and saw an image of sperm racing to penetrate the egg. The fastest and strongest one would fertilize it, we were told.

The Western science that came into being during an intensely concentrated genocide of women that is still continuing today claimed that scientists (nearly all male, until quite recently) occupied an objective position and were able to observe reality “rationally"—what Donna Haraway has called “the god trick.” Philosophy with its rational arguments also assumed the God position; what Science and Philosophy observed was objectively true.

To what end was rational and objective thinking put to use?

By “knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all other bodies that surround us,” wrote René Descartes (I think, therefore I am, 1637, Discourse on the Method), “men can be the masters and possessors of nature.”

Science and Philosophy observed that women’s brain mass is smaller; that when women think too much, they divert blood from their reproductive organs; that women have “inordinate affections and passions” and are not rational; that women are hysterical, the root of which is hyster, meaning womb; that the womb is where emotions are generated, and therefore that women’s observations cannot be trusted (Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc., etc.).

Studying popular biology textbooks in the 1980s, the anthropologist Emily Martin pointed out in her article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Sterotypical Male-Female Roles” that cultural gender stereotypes infused “scientific” language:

Take the egg and the sperm. It is remarkable how “femininely” the egg behaves and how “masculinely” the sperm. The egg is seen as large and passive. It does not move or journey, but passively “is transported,” “is swept,”’ or even “drifts”’ along the fallopian tube. In utter contrast, sperm are small, “streamlined,” and invariably active. They “deliver” their genes to the egg, “activate the developmental program of the egg,” and have a “velocity” that is often remarked upon. Their tails are “strong” and efficiently powered. Together with the forces of ejaculation, they can “propel the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina.” For this they need “energy,” “fuel,” so that with a “whiplashlike motion and strong lurches” they can “burrow through the egg coat” and “penetrate” it.

[Sperm are on a] “mission,” which is to “move through the female genital tract in quest of the ovum.” One popular account has it that the sperm carry out a “perilous journey” into the “warm darkness,” where some fall away “exhausted.” “Survivors” “assault” the egg, the successful candidates “surrounding the prize.” Part of the urgency of this journey, in more scientific terms, is that “once released from the supportive environment of the ovary, an egg will die within hours unless rescued by a sperm.” The wording stresses the fragility and dependency of the egg, even though the same text acknowledges elsewhere that sperm also live for only a few hours.

Broadly, in all the scientific language, Martin discovers, the sperm are the leading actors and take center stage. They are “made to loom in importance over the egg.”

In a collection of scientific papers, an electron micrograph of an enormous egg and tiny sperm is titled “A Portrait of the Sperm.”

All of this was misleading because in 1984, in a biophysics lab at John Hopkins University, writes Martin, it had been discovered that the egg in fact plays a very active role in the process of fertilization.

[Scientists] discovered, to their great surprise, that the forward thrust of sperm is extremely weak, which contradicts the assumption that sperm are forceful penetrators. Rather than thrusting forward, the sperm’s head was now seen to move mostly back and forth. The sideways motion of the sperm’s tail makes the head move sideways with a force that is ten times stronger than its forward movement. So even if the overall force of the sperm were strong enough to mechanically break the zona, most of its force would be directed sideways rather than forward. In fact, its strongest tendency, by tenfold, is to escape by attempting to pry itself off the egg. Sperm, then, must be exceptionally efficient at escaping from any cell surface they contact. And the surface of the egg must be designed to trap the sperm and prevent their escape. Otherwise, few if any sperm would reach the egg. The egg traps the sperm and adheres to it so tightly that the sperm’s head is forced to lie flat against the surface of the zona, a little bit, they told me, “like Br’er Rabbit getting more and more stuck to tar baby the more he wriggles.”

[emphasis mine]

For hundreds of years, “rational,” “objective” scientists had failed to make this basic discovery. They had failed to reëxamine the oldest law of genetics.

Once the science was there, though, the language of scientists continued to cast the sperm in an active and aggressive role, even in studies that found that the egg was at least equally active in the process of fertilization. Even when the science itself changes, the language of the scientists “cannot seem to escape the hierarchical imagery of older accounts.”

Further, writes Martin:

Even though each new account gives the egg a larger and more active role, taken together they bring into play another cultural stereotype: woman as a dangerous and aggressive threat.

Such descriptions “grant the egg an active role but at the cost of appearing disturbingly aggressive.”

A woman with agency is dangerous. A woman with autonomy is conniving. A woman who does not lie passively in waiting is an aggressor.

And even though the script was flipped scientifically beginning around the year I was born, I didn’t come across any information about the active role of the egg in fertilization until my mid-30s. The research at that time was presented as new.

As science journalist Starre Vartan, author of The Stronger Sex, writes in an article in Live Science:

In 2017, Quanta magazine published an article^⁠ about a researcher whose work was "challenging this dogma" that "the egg is not the submissive, docile cell that scientists long thought it was" and in 2019, a University of Virginia magazine article stated: "The old notion of the egg as a passive partner for sperm entry is out. Instead, the researchers found, there are molecular players on the surface of the egg that bind with a corresponding substance on the sperm to facilitate the fusion of the two." The writer called this an "unexpected discovery."

That discovery was then 35 years old.

Science now shows that the egg is fully responsible for choosing which sperm to pull in, using chemosensory communication.

*

Today we still speak of seminal texts as those that have been particularly powerful, active in shaping our intellectual culture.

I set out to write about some of the seminal texts that have shaped my thinking as a writer, and to poll my readers about which texts have been seminal to their creative work. But I soon found myself diverted by what my language contained. The text as fertilizing semen that introduces the groundbreaking ideas. Where is the egg that influences future thought? Where are our ovulatory texts?

It’s crucial to ask this now as the Epstein Files continue to go ignored by the US Justice System; as the male leaders around the world whose crimes are implicated or explicated in those files continue to collude with fossil fuel industries and AI companies and weapons manufacturers to bomb women and children and destroy our world; as every single winner of the “Green Nobel Prize” (the Goldman Environmental Prize) is a woman who is leading climate solutions.

I am called to dig into the soil of our language, what Gary Snyder called the “word-hoarde,” to search for the roots under the surface. And to ask what seeds are germinating there, and how we might cultivate the garden of our minds differently.

What lies dormant, in need of water?

Language is at the foundation of the world we are always bringing into being. It is alive, responsive to our attention, our tending.

That’s why I write, and read, and speak, and listen.

This is my way of getting my boots dirty. Of touching the earth. Of actively tending our collective growth.

To turn our language over is to turn the compost pile. To enrich our understandings.

This language is the place I am called to toil in the work of cultivating whole and fertile ecosystems in which we can live. “Ecosystems” here is not a metaphor, for all of our cultural ecosystems shape the soil beneath us, the ground we walk on. The root word of “culture” is the same as in “cultivate,” as in to tend and grow within the earth. Sustainable culture is informed by deep, rich ecological and biological knowledge. These traditional knowledges created thousands of thriving cultures around the world long before they called it “science.”

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In my next post, I will share some of my ovulatory texts, and will look forward to hearing what yours are, too. (And we can have seminal texts too, but at least 51% of our groundbreaking and foundational texts must be ovulatory, right?)

I want to know what’s fertilizing your minds and germinating in your hearts, what’s growing in your souls.

Spells for the earth,

Holly

Every dream sleeps in the dark earth.

Every tomorrow stirs there.

Every pigment ripens in its belly.

The stones are awake with a vision.

Water is the first word.

The roots are murmuring.

I’m alive with tomorrows and rivers and lilies again.

Open your hands.

I never died.

Happy Equinox, friends—
Holly

Oikos, the Greek word at the root of ecology, means the home or dwelling of a common person.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

—Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks

From February, the shortest month, already flown, these fragments & photos ⤁

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April 23, 1937 Chattanooga, Tennessee – February 23, 2026 Athens, Georgia

Two nights ago, I received word from a friend, the photographer and artist Benjamin Rouse (whose photos grace this missive), that the poet Coleman Barks had died. I had the great privilege of spending time with Coleman in his home in Athens a few times over the past year or two. The rooms breathed with the life of the meaningful objects he’d collected, including his many books, some of which he’d sometimes chuck into the fire, the ones he didn’t care to read again, just to watch them flare and flame—words passing back into the unspeakable, back into the burning heart of mystery; they were better off there, surely.

I was intending to write about his life, his work, his spirit. But more than writing, I stood in witness. His mind was fraying, interviews did not move from question to answer. I surrendered, realized they were a way of entering the stream. I abandoned my idea of an end-of-life profile and simply allowed myself to float in that current and be moved.

Not enough. But I am grateful nonetheless that I followed the call to the doorway of his great dreaming flashing mind and caught sight of the glimmers.

I expect that I will write more as time goes.

He was a fellow Tennessean, and, now, a fellow Athenian. He was a kindred. He was a guide, an inspiration.

I’ve been reading his poems aloud at night these past two nights. Allowing them to come to life in me.

Here I’ve included my reading of his poem “The Center,” published in Winter Sky, his new and collected poems. It was a new one, written sometime between 2003-2008. In his poems, I see that Coleman was preparing for his death for a long time. He was courting the dark whirling afterlife—where Rumi still dances, where his Sufi teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen still teaches—with a kind of ecstasy that sharpened his joy for being alive.

Mr. Barks lived & breathed the spirit of poetry—that is, poetry was a vessel for the spirit to move through him, a vessel to carry the waters of life, to bring those waters into his body, to share them with those in thirst around him.

With this vessel, he freely poured the great flowing spirit of Rumi, invited him to speak again in the modern day, alongside him.

Barks’ was a heart that bowed ever toward the Muses.

He was a kindred, someone who graced my life, though too briefly. As he crosses over the wild river into the land of endless dreams, I am lifting my prayers to him, holding his words and his silence in my heart.

With love,

Holly

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Coleman’s full obituary:

Coleman Bryan Barks of Athens, GA passed peacefully at home on February 23, 2026 surrounded by loved ones. He was born on April 23, 1937 to Elizabeth Bryan and Herbert Bernard Barks. He grew up on the campus of Baylor School along the Tennessee River in Chattanooga, where his father was headmaster. He attended Baylor School and was a stellar athlete who excelled at soccer and tennis. He earned his BA at UNC Chapel Hill as the first out-of-state Morehead Scholar, and his MA at the University of California, Berkeley, returning to UNC for his doctorate. Barks joined the faculty of the University of Georgia English Department in 1967, where he taught literature and creative writing to thousands of students until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1997.

In 1976, Barks’ close friend, the poet Robert Bly, showed him some academic translations of Jalal al-Din Rumi, the thirteenth-century mystic Persian poet. Bly urged Barks to “release the poems from their cages.” Later, Barks became a student of the Sri Lankan Sufi mystic Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. Thus began his long and illustrious career translating Rumi, and producing dozens of volumes including The Essential Rumi, A Year with Rumi, and ultimately, the comprehensive Big Red Book. His translations have sold millions of copies and have been translated into many languages spanning 41 countries, inspiring readers worldwide.

For decades, Barks traveled the world, performing for audiences large and small, often with music and dance ensembles including the Paul Winter Consort and Zuleikha, the Storydancer. His translation of Rumi’s “The Guest House” can be enjoyed on Coldplay’s album “A Head Full of Dreams.”

In 2004, Barks received the Juliet Hollister Award for his work supporting interfaith understanding, and in 2006, the University of Tehran awarded Barks an honorary doctorate in recognition of his translations. In March 2005, the US State Department sent him to Afghanistan as the first visiting speaker there in 25 years. Rumi was the most-read poet in both countries at the time.

In 2010, Barks was interviewed by Bill Moyers as part of two Public Broadcasting Service series on poetry, propelling him to an ever-widening audience.

In addition to his Rumi translations, Barks was an acclaimed poet in his own right. Notable titles include The Juice, Tentmaking, and Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems. Much of his finest work – including notes on his process – is archived with the Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library (https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/catalog/ms4164) at the University of Georgia.

Barks was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. His many literary friends and heroes included Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Annie Dillard, James Dickey, Naomi Shihab Nye, James Hillman, and Mary Oliver.

Barks lived in Athens, Georgia for most of his adult life. Although internationally acclaimed, he was always approachable at his favorite corner seat at The Manhattan Cafe, Jittery Joe’s, or the Five Points Waffle House, ready and willing to talk about poetry, politics, or the Georgia Bulldogs. Generous with friends and strangers alike, he enjoyed laughing, dinners, conversation, buck dancing and singing, with some partiality to shape-note hymns. He found particular inspiration and peace near rivers and creeks. Outside of the written word, he expressed himself creatively through stonework and painting. He was a devoted and playful grandfather, always instilling an appreciation for whimsy and art in his children and grandchildren. His work and life were infused with humor and joy.

Coleman Barks is survived by his brother, Herb Barks; sister, Elizabeth Barks Cox; his former wife Kittsu Greenwood, and their two sons, Benjamin and Cole (m. Kelley); his grandchildren Bryan (m. Chris Miller) Tucker, Keller, Woody, Henry, and Luna; and his longtime companion, Lisa Starr. Additionally, he leaves thousands of friends and fans around the world.

A newsletter series devoted to the writing life.

Each month, you’ll find a small collection of thoughts from my desk about the writing life and practice, plus what I’m reading/listening to/snacking on/etc.

This month:

✍️ On revision

✍️ (Yet another) pep talk to get away from your phone, with actionable strategies

✍️ A new song I love

✍️ A February soup recipe

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I’ve been mulling and meditating on love this month, and I wanted to send you this little collection of handwritten notes I’ve made: the quotes of others, and one of my own—as a Valentine, a way to say without embarrassment I love you, a way to say let’s keep loving the earth and one another. They can’t stop us.

Looking for some writing inspiration? Read my love letter to life and to creating in these extreme times.

If every detail can by careful handling, through association, sound, tone, language, lead us in, then we live in a sacred universe. — Robert Bly

I’m switching things up with this newsletter as the year grows into a new one, allowing things to evolve in the direction I’m being pulled. Each month, in addition to a Writing Desk post, my supporting subscribers will receive *either* a Letter from Home *or* an essay in a new series called Mycelial. Just for this first in the series, though, I want to offer it for free, so you’ll have an idea of what these essays might be like. If you feel called to support this newsletter to keep it going, I encourage you to do so. Deep thanks to my supporters.

In these essays, I will be following what William Stafford (after William Blake) called golden threads, infused with the spirit of what Mary Ruefle calls “dailiness.”

“I remember that I did not always know authors were ordinary people living ordinary lives,” writes Ruefle, “and that an ordinary life was an obscure life, if we can extend the meaning of obscure to mean covered up by dailiness, glorious dailiness, shameful dailiness, dailiness that is difficult to figure out, that is not always clear until a long time afterward. Obscure: not readily noticed, easily understood, or clearly expressed. Which is a pretty good definition of life.”

“I feel ready to follow even the most trivial hunch,” Stafford wrote of golden threads.

This series will lean more heavily memoiristic (a pull I’ve been feeling) and will explore the golden threads of the everyday, following both memory and immediate impression. A way of staying awake, paying attention: my rough prayers and jagged devotion.

REVERSALS

“The literature of the city—nearly, but not all, modern literature—is panoramic, sometimes celebratory, often horror-struck: the hubbub of voices speaking different languages or dialects, the conglomeration of apprehended fragments. Its medium is the collage; its science that opposites attract; its logic that every proposition and its converse are equally true.”

— Eliot Weinberger

On the bank of the East River: rip-rap against a concrete wall, a vivid moss covering the rocks above the waterline. Where the little waves slap and slosh, a dark seaweed with purple undertones clings to the rocks. We lean against the cold railing. In some places the water’s surface holds a blue that does not appear to be of the sky above (a thick gray this late-January afternoon) nor of the water itself. The color pulls my attention into the distance toward—toward what? Where a word might be, there is a silence. I feel the air in my lungs, the size of the world and its wildness, my small life within it. The city is surging in me, flowing around me.

J points out into the center of the river, where the rapids look like they are running backward—the incoming tide, he says. I have my arm through the loop that his arm becomes with his hand stuffed into his coat pocket, as I will for most of these two days. He tells me, too, that humpback whales returned and swam up the river again a few years ago, after disappearing for years when sewage and pollution choked the water, and menhaden, the whales’ crucial forage fish, declined. Now, after decades of their absence—of people tending the waters in their absence—the whales are coming back, their blueblack bodies sudden forty-ton arcs of surprise when they breach, full of salted glittering breath. They aren’t here just now but somewhere, who knows where, out in the ocean, alive on our tongues and in our imagination as we scan the water.

I am thinking about empire, and I am thinking about the whales’ return, and about how the tides reverse every day. I am thinking about how humpbacks collectively write their song, evolving the phrases and patterns not just year to year but month to month, week to week. How they sing that song to stay together, to find one another in the dim deeps.

We make our way to the dock. For a full minute before we see the ferry, we see the water swell up the concrete wall, roil and churn around the rocks, feel the dock rock and sway. Then the boat is pulling in and the dock is lifted on the swell beneath us. When they unlatch the entrance rope, we are the only passengers who climb the stairs to the top deck. A biting wind against our faces, we watch the city slide by, a slow-mo panorama. Buildings and buildings and buildings full of people and people and people. Cars bumper to bumper on the road, a stream of red brake lights. J directs my eye to the skyscraper where his office is, on the 54th floor. The United Nations now on our right: a rectangular building with rows and rows of square windows. In the river below us they are monitoring for possible spying submarines, J says. The things empire must do to fortify itself. But I remember that it was the US Navy that, accidentally, first recorded and discovered the songs of humpbacks as it listened with hydrophones for Soviet submarines during the Cold War. Unexpected songs are always slipping through the cracks and fortifications of empire, into the wires of our technologies.

Our hotel room is a glass cube perched twenty-four floors high, a bed with a white comforter and pillows on it in the middle—we hang there suspended. It is only our 5th date. I am thinking, yes, about how things can return to places where they had disappeared, when no one expected them. How the whales were gone for so long. How I have found a way to be alone. I am thinking about the river running backward like time in reverse, but these reversals, backward motions, are time moving forward, too. Thinking time is more forgiving, maybe, than it at first appears. We gaze at the jumble of buildings around us, the plate glass windows across the street with big screens flashing behind them, offices with Christmas lights still up, people in front of desktop computers at 8:30 p.m. It is 15 degrees beyond the glass. Inside our box the heat is blasting dry air, the thermostat on the wall set on 75. We are in bed looking at the city, talking. Somehow we get on the topic of rocks.

He tells me that when he lived in New York, before he went remote and moved to the Blue Ridge, he and a client went to lunch and somehow ended up on a tour of the Manhattan building the restaurant was in. A guide took them to the exposed bedrock in the basement. The skyscrapers are here because of the bedrock beneath them, he says.

When I get home I look it up. Manhattan schist is former ocean sediment and river-delta mud and clay that was pushed ten or twenty miles below ground when the continental plates collided to form Pangaea… and then drifted apart and collided again… and then again—“triple-metamorphosed.” Over hundreds of millions of years, the sediment and mud became mica, quartz, feldspar, garnet. At 932 to 1292 degrees F, under immense pressure, rocks aren’t solid. Crystals keep breaking their bonds, dissolving, and consolidating into larger ones. Hence schist. Birthed in the hot dark belly of the earth, gestated over unimaginable years. Later, erosion stripped other rock away, and then glaciers, during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, scraped and scoured the soil to expose the rock. It is dense and strong, with a high load-bearing capacity that resists compression and shifting. We don’t feel so much as a tremor those twenty-four floors up.

“A culture, I think now, is above all a spiritual creation,” Paul Kingsnorth writes in Against the Machine, the book I’ve been reading. Where we have fooled ourselves that we are secular, a culture that makes room for religious freedom, where we have blotted a sense of the sacred, money has become our god. And, he writes, “You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses, and global corporations.”

The city’s skyscrapers are temples, then, in Kingsnorth’s view, where money is worshipped. But after that night, I won’t be able to quit thinking about the bedrock beneath them—the only reason they could be built so high. Schist, that child of the earth’s own belly, the earth’s flesh and bones, exposed in basements in Manhattan. I heard recently that the mythologist Joseph Campbell had the following posted above the front door of his house: “Bidden or unbidden, the goddess comes.”

In the morning, a distant building, through a gap in the skyline, lights up first. Then a corner of the building across from us; is the sun coming from the opposite direction, then? Then the building to the right of us is glowing, soft and bright. Is the sun, in fact, rising from the other direction, reflecting off our building? Finally J points to the far periphery of our window view, in the one direction we hadn’t thought it was rising: there it is, blazing. Every window is a mirror beaming it back from another surface—it is bouncing between ten thousand pieces of glass, volleying from one to another to another. I lean my forehead against the cold window and let my breath fog it as I stare out. My sunrise at home only comes from one direction. I had worried I wouldn’t be able to see it here, that it would stay hidden, blocked by concrete. Now the city is a labyrinth of sunrise, a maze of light, and we are inside it.

I’ve come to meet with my editor, after my previous one retired, about my book that’s now years in the writing. We have a meeting today at noon. It was my book, too, that brought me to the city the first time in my life, four years ago, at 38. That was the year I was stuck—briefly but stupidly, dangerously, ridiculously, embarrassingly—in a bad relationship. The person didn’t matter, really, he was just a reflection of the trauma pattern I learned before the age of 1—try to get the attention of the one who won’t look at you, the one who disappears, the one is not capable of taking care even of themself. Try like hell to make them see you. It was the same pattern as my previous 5.5-year entanglement, the one I uprooted my life and moved two states away and 340 miles to end, lacking willpower in his proximity. But I also uprooted because I was pulled toward—toward what?

It would all crumble, that next one, just months after my first trip to New York, the pattern shattering suddenly as if a 38-year curse had been broken, and I finally understood. It was as if the earth was quaking, continental plates had collided. And the pattern would ripple, like aftershocks, three more times through my life, through three more relationships, very fast, but I could see what was happening, and I was learning to hold myself through it. Triple-metamorphosed.

No one really sees it from the outside when you are re-born, when the universe by some strange grace gives birth to you again. I had done the work, sure, for years. But then there was, finally, the shock of a convulsive mercy, a recrystallization under pressure, the violence of contraction then dilation. Then emergence into a new life. It has been four years or so now since. And I have known something like happiness, even bliss, amid the regular struggles of life. Watching the sun rise every morning alone, the sedges in the field turning golden and dancing.

And then this past fall I got curious. About love, the possibility of it in another person, not just in “the universe.” The possibility of something like bedrock in a human heart. And that is in part why I am here, too. Out of curiosity.

After my meeting—and his, with a client—it’s nice out, and he takes me to a favorite spot, a woodsy path through Central Park. We marvel at all the boulders protruding from out of the ground. Schist sparkles, if you look closely: little bits of garnet red as blood and gleaming, flakes of mica. Skyscrapers might have been anchored here. Instead, we stop and listen to sparrows twittering brightly in a tangle of briars. We spot four messy nests, spun with straw and plant stems and little pieces of trash, and we laugh at the way the sparrows ruffle and puff their breast feathers.

In another part of the park, we gawk up at a stone obelisk from Egypt that was carved and inscribed with heiroglyphs around 1450 BCE. Cut by skilled craftsmen who were commissioned by the pharaoh, the obelisk was a symbol meant to sustain the king’s divine power. On the railing around it, someone has painted NO KINGS NO GODS and I wonder if kings have always claimed the favor of the gods, used their gods to rule and dominate others.

Residents of Minnesota will gather in Minneapolis the next day for Ice Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom, a massive protest and economic blackout in response to the recent murder of Renee Nicole Good. They will march and sing songs in the freezing cold, songs to keep them together in the deep darkness. And the next morning, when J and I are flying home, holding hands, a Border Patrol agent will murder 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti. That night at a park near Pretti’s home more than 100 people will hold vigil, candles flickering as they sing “This Little Light of Mine.”

Egyptian kingship theology made the king responsible for serving Ma’at: an animate force of cosmic order, truth, justice, and social harmony. If Ma’at was failing, the king was failing. The tip of the obelisk we now stood in front of would have, 3,500 years ago at a temple in the Egyptian desert, been gilded, to catch the sun’s light each morning, when Ma’at was reborn. As if to renew daily the king’s devotion to Ma’at—who, it is said in the Book of the Dead, weighs each heart, in the end, against her white feather. Truth has a certain weight.

The obelisk is a symbol of empire, perhaps. Yet, I am entranced by the heiroglyphs, as I know that writing in Egypt was performative, ritual magic; to inscribe was to call into being, to preserve the cycles of time, keep the ledger of truth. An owl, a feather, a loaf of bread, a seated goddess: Ma’at’s name carved in the billion-year-old granite. And I can’t help imagining the gilded tip catching the golden sun each morning for thousands of years, though the gilding has disappeared now. That Border Patrol agents are patrolling in the middle of the country, far from the border, tells me that our aspiring king knows that the border of empire is everywhere.

There are cracks, passages, songs that seep through. Whales swimming up the East River. The tides reverse. Rocks recrystallize. Trauma patterns shatter. The heart of the empire is a labyrinth of light. Bedrock underneath every skyscraper, holding it up.

The city feeds the machinery of empire, but it is also the place where it is starved. I saw it, riding on the B train with J at rush hour, my arm looped through his, looking at the faces all in secret love with each other, the bodies quietly in celebration of their jostling together, bumping against and brushing past, leaning in to catch strangers’ snippets of conversation, outbursts of laughter. In the elevators, the warm and shy exchanges, shuffling in close to one another to go up or down. Walking back to our hotel, a white gull feather on the sidewalk picked up by a biker’s tailwind, sent spinning and floating around a child’s face: a cry of delight, a smile from an onlooker.

A newsletter series devoted to the writing life.

As the year begins to unfold—already too fast, already barrelling onward, already asking too much of our attention—I want to provide a robust handbook for channeling your precious energy toward your writing this year. I want to be firm with you. Wasted gifts turn against you, as Joy Harjo writes in her memoir Crazy Brave. “It’s possible to mess up, but it’s far worse not to try,” as Kim Stafford told us in a recent Hellbender Gathering of Poets generative writing session. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard writes in The Writing Life—you need to direct yourself page-ward, word-ward every day that you’re able to this year, if you are to be a writer in this lifetime. You need to be crazy brave, and you need to try and try and try.

Soon enough, you will feel the energy accumulating and gathering force. This is how it happens.

I’m going to help you get a little hard on yourself. And I’m going to tell you how to be gentle and tender, too. Are you ready, then?

Oh, pssst, before we get to it, I’m now admitting more participants into the EarthSpells Institute. Right now, we’re reading Laura Poppick’s Strata. We’ll discuss the book together in March, and in April we’ll host Laura for an in-depth conversation and Q&A. All our conversations with authors are being archived in our library. (So far, we’ve had Nicholas Triolo, author of The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere, and Lauren Markham, author of Immemorial.) Every month we begin with a writing prompt, and we end the month with an open mic where participants can share works in progress—or simply find witness for their process, space for their questions. The EarthSpells Institute is featured now on Circle Discover—you can learn more and check out our offerings there. I’m excited to keep growing with you all this year.

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The name of the god Iānus means “arched passage” or “doorway” in Latin.

As David Lukas shared in his newsletter recently, January 1 as the year’s beginning is an arbitrary date chosen by Julius Ceasar in 45 BCE, because two Roman consuls took office on that day.

Time on Earth is a circle, and different cultures in different biomes and ecosystems have chosen to ritually begin the year again at different points in the 365 days it takes us to orbit the sun. Throughout history, they have chosen ecological events and phenomena by which to mark the new year.

If it were my choice, I might honor the New Year the day after the Winter Solstice, when the days begin to lengthen. But we are under Ceasar’s decree, and so January 1 it is.

I do love the depiction of Janus: looking behind and ahead at once. In the etymology of this god we have the notion of passing through a threshold. At the doorway we pause to look backward—to reflect on what we learned and what happened—before going forward.

In that spirit, here are some things in 2025 that moved me.

1. The sunrise. Melatonin is my favorite drug, and we produce an abundance of it—if we don’t interrupt our natural hormonal cycles, which are governed by the sun. Synching my rhythms with the sun has been the single best thing I’ve done for my physical, spiritual, and mental health these past few years. I’ve only missed a handful of sunrises this year, and I’m sleeping like a babe, having rich dreams, and feeling so healthy. (Melatonin is also the most powerful antioxidant.)

   

   I also greet the sun in other ways, with prayers and thanks and the joy of being alive and welcoming beauty back into my eyes. (E.g. the broom sedges thru the winter.) I spend my sun time each morning breathing and being with the land and in my body before I head into the day.

2. My cat Thistle

Since my hound dog Banjo died in 2020 and then my cat Merlin in 2021, I have not sought out new pets to own; I’ve waited. This cat appeared one morning in the field a year ago, and I just knew he was asking me for a home. I could see that he was curious to figure out if I would take care of him (although he was quite bristly!). And I did. Several months later, his owner who had abandoned him surrendered him legally to me. He’s mine! And his name is Thistle!

3. Books. Putting the phone on silent and sinking in. There’s nothing like it. Here were some of my favorites I read this year, although I am constantly dipping into & enriched by the hundreds of books on my shelves.

   

4. Hellbender Gathering of Poets generative writing sessions. Writing is often lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. I attended a session last month with Oregon’s former poet laureate Kim Stafford, and it was medicine. For the record, Stafford does not believe that poetry makes nothing happen, as Auden wrote in his elegy to Yeats. “It’s possible to mess up, but it’s far worse not to try,” Stafford told us of writing poetry. If you’re interested, the next session is March 31 with David George Haskell.

5. Quietly quitting the digital hustle. Books last, Instagram posts don’t. I’m not making an on-hiatus post or proclaiming that I’m deleting the app, and I’m not making a post about how I haven’t been spending time on Instagram. I’ve just quietly begun to pour more of my energy into the work that will last as I pull my energy away from digital hustle culture and the labor of maintaining a digital avatar.

   

6. Listening. Along the way of writing a book about listening, I stumbled on the listening practice. My book (forthcoming!) is about listening to the more-than-human, but I’ve had my life changed in the practice of listening to other humans. This year I facilitated this practice in my community, and it was one of the most enriching things in my year.

   

7. Protesting. It reminds us that we’re in this together, that we have a voice, that we aren’t alone. That there’s joy in resisting—and that joy itself is resistance.

   

8. Writing Rhizomatically. I taught my 6-week Writing Rhizomatically course again this year for Orion magazine, and here’s what a few of my students had to say:

A generative writing workshop is a gift. For me, a regenerative gift, as I am often a writer in remission. Beginning with the beautiful words of Dillard and Solnit, our group of twelve collectively drew on mother threads and pulled and threaded offshoots into vines growing into a maze of rhizomatic ideas. Learning in a community of writers is also a gift. In our six-session three-hour workshop with Holly, we contemplated generative writing and collectively gifted responses anchored in curiosity and the loveliness of our growing words. Some of us wove whole tapestries, others spun single threads. All were guided by Holly’s writing teacher expertise and her blessings—if that is the right word and I think it is.

— Susan

Holly’s class is space for wondering. She encourages approaching your own and others’ writing with curiosity and openness, for what truth it might discover, for where it might lead us, for the possibilities it might reveal. It’s no surprise that her class naturally creates a sense of trust and community.

— Jaime

I came to Holly’s workshop a seasoned workshopper and writer, and yet I was still so surprised by the space Holly cultivated in workshop: community-oriented while also introspective and reflective; joyous risk-taking on the page while also grounded in the material here and now of being a writer, living through this moment in time. I loved the readings she brought into the workshop for us to spend time with and her presentations to frame and inspire writing; but I also loved how she gathered a group of fellow writers together to learn from each other’s questions, processes, and discoveries. Her workshop was not only a class in the best sense--challenge, read, write, time, reward; it was a heartfelt journey that cultivated community, care, and growth.

— Molly

I’ve realized that teaching engaged adults is where I thrive in my teaching. And I couldn’t be more grateful for the community of writers, readers, and thinkers that Orion magazine cultivates.

9. Paddleboarding. It gets me on the water, fluid and in motion. It clears my head. It gets me in the mind of water, and water has one of the wildest minds. It’s one of my greatest teachers. Here in the Georgia Piedmont this year, I’ve been on the water almost every month of the year, and it’s been a beautiful way to feel the seasons turn.

10. Culhowee Native Plant Conference. This summer I had the great honor of being the opening-night keynote speaker at the Culhowee Native Plant Conference. The crowd was 500 strong, I spoke for an hour, and I have never felt a warmer room in front of me. I won’t forget it. The bonus was that I got to spend time in some of my favorite Southern Appalachian plant communities and that I got super super jazzed about ecological restoration via native plant gardening.

Now we turn to face the doorway. And I will write more soon about what I am looking forward to in 2026.

I’m so glad to have you all here with me.

Spells for the earth,

Holly

Dear friends,

I’m writing to share the news that my essay “Woman in the Woods,” published at The Bitter Southerner, has been listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2025, edited by the wonderful Jia Tolentino.

If you haven’t yet read the essay, I invite you to take some time for it this season.

I’m grateful for this honor and so thankful for my readership far and wide. It is my deepest fulfillment to be connected through the stories that I write.

Sending all my best, until soon,

Holly

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Phenology is the study of biological life cycles and changes in weather as the seasons progress throughout the year. Phenology is a practice of paying attention to our habitats.

On occasional Fridays, I share a little glimpse of my passing seasons from here in the Georgia Piedmont, where I currently live. At the end of each post, I invite you to share in the comments from your own corner of the earth. You can join the EarthSpells community in this grounding practice throughout the year, an experiment in a collective phenology. Even as our seasons shift with a changing climate, through phenology we can practice staying rooted and cultivating a more intimate relationship with the places we live.

Dear friends,

When I began to share a little about my practice of phenology here, I realized that I wanted to articulate this practice in its richer ecological and spiritual context, as I see it. I wanted to find a way to express a more pointed meaning to something that can look, well, quaint, at first glance. The long essay that came from that exploration, “A Circling Story,” is out now at Emergence Magazine.

In it, I write about how rooting our attention into the circling seasons is a radical act in a culture that tells a straight-line story of endless growth. How the seasonal narrative of death and rebirth has been at the foundation of so many of the world’s spiritual and mythological systems, serving to keep them rooted in the earth. To keep them humble to the more-than-human shape of the story. And how that circling story has been pushed into the background as the lie of the straight line of “progress” has ascended. How that story has fractured the circles of the seasons themselves. How stories can break time or mend it. How insisting upon the circles is an act of resistance. How death feeds us and the leaves must always fall. The story of the straight line must fall too. The story of the straight line is dying. The circle is always underfoot, always encircling our sky. It’s the primary story of our being here on this planet. And it is my scripture.

No story could be more worth telling.

This photo is from my sunrise walk yesterday. The lifting sun was blazing at my back, the lowering moon glowing in front of me, my long shadow falling on the field. I felt myself so bodily wrapped in the circles, so rooted. My spirit so rapt.

I hope you will read the essay—or you can hear me reading it in full at the site.

Thank you for circling with me,

Holly

Our next EarthSpells community circle is this coming Tuesday, November 11, at 7:00 EST on Zoom. All paid subscribers are invited to our monthly gatherings and will receive the link beforehand. Come talk ecologies of writing with us, bring your journal, bring your questions, bring a topic for us to discuss. I look forward to seeing you.