“Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

- David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art + Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

We have a lot of fear around failing.

Especially in public.

This is related to many things, and all that goes deep, so I don’t want to disregard that, but that’s not my focus today.

But the point today is: what could you do if you simply allowed yourself to be bad at something?

And to allow yourself to get better by putting in the reps?

What would become possible for you?

I feel I have done that over the last six years, and for the last year, for sure, and in this last month in particular.

Letting go of this idea that not every single thing has to be a work of art
feels freeing to me.

It has opened my heart and my spirit in the doing of it.

All of this feels particularly sharp to me because Friday was the sixth year anniversary of when I left my job.

Back when I threw up after writing a single post on social media to my 64 Facebook friends, or however many there were back then.

Who would have thought, I would be able to write, on the daily, in public (sometimes badly).

And to be able to show up on camera or video, without freaking out about it?

And who would have thought that from that, I would hear from people all over the world that what I had to say made a difference for them?

My point here is- your voice has an impact.

And when you share your voice, and shine your light.

When you stop worrying about the typo, or the perfect line.

When you simply commit to saying the true thing,

instead of saying it impeccably.

What becomes possible for your soul?

And what becomes possible for others around you?

I would argue the answer is goodness.

Goodness in a world that surely needs it.

New here? Welcome. I’m Rhonda Linn. I help mission-driven authors and founders say the true thing and build the systems and structure to keep on saying it.

Six years ago I threw up after one Facebook post. Now I write to over a hundred thousand people across my communities.

Subscribe now

Soap Box Derby

Main Street is closed.

Children in fiberglass bullets
alongside plywood jalopies.

The purple car covered
in stickers
a red one held together
by duct tape and rope.

Tiny children at the wheel.

People line up for blocks.

Top of the ramp
with helmets strapped tight.

The children are not smiling.
Absolute focus.

They fly off the ramp.

Wheels fly as they go
down the hill.

They stop at the bottom
right on the edge of town
not far from the new McDonald’s.

Dads on garden tractors
hook up chains
and pull them back to the top
so the winners can go again.

At some point
somebody’s grandmother
takes the wheel.

Bubbles fly out of a tailpipe.

Between heats, it gets almost quiet.
The heat softens
as the sun goes down.

A parade of fire trucks.

The Star-Spangled Banner.

(I mean, sure, there are a lot of problems.)

But there’s one I want to speak to in particular today.

And that’s this:

Municipalities have built subdivisions and supermarkets on land that was formerly lowlands, and then….

well. 🙃

We see it all the time now.

Water on the news.

Flooding cars on the streets.
Water washing into houses.

And we treat it like a surprise, and I suppose it is to those going through it.

But the water is doing what it does.

Finding a place to go.

*

I think about lowlands a lot.

I mean, my walk on a daily basis takes me through them.

(This is dry ground for much of the year)


They are part of my life here and here’s what I have come to learn:

Lowlands are a buffer.

When rain comes hard, or snow melts fast, the low ground takes it in.

And holds it.

But we’ve spent a long time getting rid of the places that do this.

Wetlands drained for farmland.

Lowlands paved into parking lots and cul-de-sacs.

The fields, especially now with all of them tiled, shed water quickly.

Which is hard on everything else.

Because, the thing is, water still has to go somewhere.

Everything floods.

And then, after it dries: verdant green.

Ferns and nettles.

But the thing is, the land is designed for it.


The flood will happen. You can count on that.

We could learn something here.

About the hard parts of our own lives.

I’m not talking about the land anymore.

I’m talking about ourselves.

Love,
Rhonda

What does flooding look like where you live? In your own neighborhood, or in yourself?



Grounding Meditation is below for our private community members:

Read more

Love,
Rhonda

P.S. Have you ever gone down in a parking lot?

I was walking out to the garden yesterday.

Dandelions in with the dew of late day under my feet. Soles of my feet damp.

By this time, mid- July, most of the yellow flowers have gone.
Very last of the grey seed spheres too.

So what is mostly left is leaves, and white fibrous roots, stretching out underground.

Last time I shared that dandelions are considered medicine by some people.

That they feed the bees, and can support the liver.

And that people poison it to protect this idea of a lawn that was somebody else’s idea to begin with.

But here’s what I want to speak to today:

Dandelions give us a couple of gifts…though not all season long.

The greens come first, tender with the spring.

You can eat them and toss them into a salad with balsamic vinegar, and it’s tasty.

I remember picking and eating them with my dad at our cottage when I was a very young child.

Like many first-of-the-year plants, herbalists say spring dandelion leaves are good for the kidneys.

Full of minerals: potassium, calcium, and iron. They have more vitamin A than a carrot, in fact! 💖

All of it pulled upward from its deep, deep taproot.

The leaf is a gentle diuretic, which means it moves extra water out of the body. But then it gives you the potassium back again, which I think is pretty neat.

But the thing is, in the heat, as the leaves get bigger, they become too bitter to eat.

On the other hand, the root is used…

but not in the spring.

The roots are a bitter tonic, that is known to support the liver, but you dig them in the fall.

So it has to spend this whole, hot season, in the cool, damp soil.

Roots fattening in the earth until it’s time.

*

We are like that too, though we don’t often let ourselves be.

Our culture asks us to be “on” in every way, in every. single. month. of the year.

To be spring and summer, always on, in bloom and in fruit.

Maybe we could learn something from that dandelion, if we have the eyes to see it.

Love,
Rhonda

P.S. There’s a short personal-seasons practice below for our paid community. A few minutes to see, through the eye of the observer, which season you’re actually in. If you feel called, come sit with us.

Read more

So in any case, that’s my baggage, and getting new photos felt sticky.

And what I realized is that I had all these “rules” in my mind around how photos could, or should, be.

And none of them actually had to be true.

It was just a story I had told myself.

A story chock-full of rules.

A few sneak peeks of the new photos are here:

I share all this to make a point.

Which is this:

If you feel like you’re breaking a rule
ask yourself who gave it to you.

And that’s important here.

Because so many rules govern our lives.

Take a lawn for example.

Lawns started as a way for wealthy landowners to flex.

They had so much land that didn’t need to be cultivated so it made other people’s eyes go gaga with envy.

And at some point between now and the 1600s, lawns as we know them, became the gold standard.

Now a lot of people pour money (and chemicals) into keeping lawns free of dandelions.

But let’s break this down:
So we have this flower.
This cheerful. bright. thing.
that comes up willing
every spring
and people call a weed
and poison it.

because that’s the rule for how someone (big Agra?) decided it “should” be.

Even though dandelions can be medicine.
They can be food.
They can support the liver.
Even though they feed the bees early in spring when little else is up.
Even though they are good for the earth. (More on dandelious next time.)

But my point today is that we learned to hate the dandelion
to protect a lawn that was somebody else’s rule to begin with.

Isn’t it something how these things go?

*
*
*

Now, a lot of what we treat as normal came to us the way lawns did.
And dandelions.
And this idea in my mind about how professional photographs “should” be.

I think it might have come from some ancestor’s status play, or sense of control perhaps, or a culture’s desire to make money,

all of it handed down so many times we stopped seeing the choice in it.

The worst part is we do it to ourselves.

We treat our own gifts exactly the way we treat the dandelion.

We, all of us, have these bright, willing parts of ourselves that want to grow.

And our culture teaches us to pull them up, or keep them hidden so no one can possibly see.

But what we are hiding is usually the very thing worth showing.

Because each of us is carrying something that’s ours alone. (Call it a gift, or our unique energetics, or whatever resonates with you.)

Something that, I think most of us can agree, was given to us divinely.

That thing sets you apart.

So when you begin to tip-toe away from fear, and unbasket your light, it becomes your unique contribution to yourself, and to others around you as well.

We come into this by softening the layers of convention

and by letting ourselves stretch into the new thing (which yes, can feel uncomfortable)

and in so doing, we start writing our own rules.

And we have the freedom to live out
what we are really here to do.

Love,
Rhonda

P.S. What is a rule you are carrying?

And what might come up, bright and willing, IF you stopped pulling it out by the root?

Hit reply and let me know, I’d love to hear. -r

Related From The Archives:

What I Learned From Not Swatting: The Patio, the Bee and a Truth About Attention
What If the Problem Is Not You: It’s a Math Problem (A Reflection on Capacity)
My Permed Bangs Had to Go: On People who Inspire you to Follow your Bliss
Burning the Permission Slip: A Voice Reclamation

I just dried mullein last week. (Up this week: motherwort, and maybe I’ll write about that a different time.)

But today though, we are focused on mullein.

The main thing I want to convey to you is that mullein isn’t too finicky to harvest, prepare, and use.

Two Things Though

1) Make sure you have properly identified it. The lookalike is foxglove which is poisonous, but it’s honestly really easy to tell the two apart. This 1 minute video from Adiantum School of Plant Medicine breaks it down concisely.

2) The other thing to know is mullein is really good at pulling up metals out of the ground.

That’s a good thing for the earth.

Though it means you want to harvest it from a clean location.

So I wouldn’t recommend picking mullein from the side of a parking lot or side of the road as I see people on Instagram doing. 🤦‍♀️

How to Harvest

In terms of what leaves to gather, I usually take them the first year.

Or the second year before the plant shoots up its stalk.

You harvest the flowers in late summer during the second year.

I will say the flowers don’t all bloom all at once, so you have to get a few flowers at a time.

It’s a bit of an experience.

Then…you just dry it.

You can do that in a food dehydrator, the oven, or you can put them in the sun.

It’s “done” when the leaves crackle.

In terms of the oil, which is used for sore ears, what you do is wilt the flowers for a day or two. (You don’t want them to have too much water or it makes the oil go bad.)

Pack them into a small jar and cover them with your mild oil of choice- I use olive oil.

I have never done it but some folks will put a little crushed garlic in there too.

And then you leave it for about a month, and strain.

A few people should leave mullein alone though.

It’s not recommended for those pregnant, nursing and some people say not to use for children.

Same same if you’ve got liver or kidney concerns, or use blood thinners.

Do your own reading up on it.

We’re talking about folk use.

But don’t get too scared- at some point, using plants is pretty simple.

You find it in a field, dry it, and then it’s in a jar in your cabinet waiting for a day when you are a bit under the weather.

Nobody sold it to you.

The earth tucked it in.

All you had to do was pay attention.💖

What’s growing near you that you already know how to use? Or what do you want to learn?

Hit reply and let me know.

Love,
Rhonda Linn

My favorite commercial version, recipes, as well my own use of mullein + something straight out of the Old Testament for grief, are below (for paid community members.)

Read more

And I guess you could say the same goes for plants.

Mullein is one of those.

Once you learn it’s out there, growing in a field, or the side of a forest, you might start finding uses for it.

Mullien has an old reputation for the lungs.

Someone brought it up just last week…said she’d be…

Read more

The second year, though…

it changes its mind. 💖

And sends up a stalk, sometimes taller than I am, lined with small yellow flowers.

It grows in gravel and ditches and the beaten-up edges of pastures.

I don’t think people plant mullein.

It just. shows. up.

It’s common. People mow over it.

But the leaves are soft.

And so it’s known by old timers as cowboy toilet paper.

I know, I know.

Mullein leaves feel like the ear of a dog.

Quaker women didn’t wear makeup so they rubbed the leaves on their cheeks…

and called it Quaker rouge.

The color was from the fuzz, mildly irritating the skin.

A low-grade allergic reaction for vanity.

In its first year, mullein looks a little like foxglove, which is poisonous when ingested.

How to tell: mullein is soft on both sides, smooth-edged.
Foxglove has little teeth along the leaf.

Once you know mullein, though, you’ll see it around.

Watch on the edge of the road, or the gravel, or wherever the soil’s been roughed up.

More mullien next time, but for now, see if you can spot it:

It’s pretty neat.

Love,
Rhonda Linn

What other plant are you curious about? Hit reply and let me know.

We have this sense, moving through the world, that it’s all about dollars.

That what we put out, and what comes back, can be tallied.

I think that’s a limited way to see it.

There’s some…

Read more

Sometimes the easiest path is noticing what’s already happening.

Our culture tells us we need to break our backs tilling up soil, but that’s not the case… unless you want it to be.

Our job is to cha-cha with reality as it is.

I thought about this today as I planted perennial vegetables in this new plot where the leaves killed the grass.

I planted skirret, a perennial root vegetable related to carrots and parsnips. It gets sweeter after the first frost.

And perennial onions- which grow and grow.

I like them because they come out, even in the snow…when little else is green.

The ones I planted are from a 150-year-old farmstead and something I’m glad to grow, share, and sell.

Half of life of rolling with the punches.

Lemonade from lemons.

New garden beds from what is undone.

Rhonda

P.S. Video on how to replicate this same process with cardboard is below for paid members.

Read more

*

Most of my trees were off last year, so I have a lot of apple blossoms this year.

White and fragrant

But a few trees, right next to them, have only leaves.

And one tree, by the chicken coop, has blooms on only a single branch.

That’s called biennial bearing, or alternate bearing.

Why it happens is this: in a heavy fruiting year, the developing seeds release hormones called gibberellins.

Those hormones can suppress next year’s flower buds.

Branches that didn’t carry much fruit don’t get that signal.

So they bloom.

A single tree in two seasons
at the same time.

Our minds want things to be clean.

It’s on or off. We’re producing or failing.

This business of feeling like we are showing up or falling behind.

Nature isn’t like that.

And we, my friends, are part of nature.

*
*
*

I read Amanda Goetz’s book Toxic Grit this winter.

She describes toxic grit as the kind of ambition that says: handle it all, hold it together, smile while you do it. Be consistent.

Goetz proposes an alternative: a life that is “beautifully imbalanced.”

I thought about it again as I walked by my tree with one branch in bloom.

I’m trying to let that one branch teach me.


Love,

Rhonda Linn


P.S. What season(s) are you in right now? Is it somehow two things at once?

Homespun Joy- A Wellness Collaborative

Subscribe now

*
*
*

The road we often biked runs parallel to Bliss Road.

I liked the name even then.

Bliss.

As though a road could hold a promise.

Or a person could arrive somewhere just by being on it.

It has the same hills and lowlands as the road I biked on a kid.

But more elderberries.

I drove down it today, in fact.

And I found myself thinking about how even a road called Bliss

still has low places where you might be eaten alive.

*
*
*

Grief is a theme of my work, though I don’t always name it that.

It feels layered to me.

People you loved, and who shaped you and places that held you.

Whole chapters of your life, gone before you were ready.

The dead.

The changed.

The no-longer-here.

Life keeps going.

I guess this is what happens.

Though seasonal living has taught me that grief lives on every road worth driving.

Even Bliss Road.

Maybe especially Bliss Road.

Because bliss is not the absence of sorrow.

Or some shining, perfect place.

It is the elderberries peeking up from the ditch.

The cool air under the trees.

Maybe it becomes a place you no longer have to race through.

*
*
*

Today, I pulled over.

The bugs aren’t out yet so I rolled down the window

and reached my hand into the cool lowlands air and stayed there for a moment.

Peek of green and blue sky overhead.

Elderberries, verdant green, in the ditch up ahead.

How to grief and bliss exist in your own life…maybe inside the same hour?

Love,
Rhonda

Woodblock print by my friend Jean Allen

James Pennebaker was interested in this too.

He was a psychologist at UT Austin who has studied expressive writing for decades.

In one of his early studies, he asked people to write about their hardest experiences for fifteen minutes a day, for four days.

No one else read what they wrote.

What they wrote was only for them.

In the months that followed, the people who wrote had fewer doctor visits and they also reported less anxiety and better overall well-being too.

The page can hold what the body has been carrying.

There is a difference between naming and spinning.

Spinning is the old hurt looping and looping until it wears a groove in your life like an old record.

Naming something is like a hand on a door.

A gateway to light.

A bridge.

If you try this, understand that the words do not need to be polished
wise, or ready for anyone’s eyes.

They just need to be true.

And your only job is just is to write them.

I think about the trees in autumn.

They release their leaves to the ground.

Where they become gold that feeds the next season.

Maybe we aren’t so different.

Maybe the words we write, even the ones no one else reads, are a leaf-fall.

A way of letting something move from the clenched places in the body.

A way of saying:

This was real and it lived in me.

So if something is sitting heavy in you, consider giving it words.

Four days, fifteen minutes.

A page and a pen.

Some sentences.

Try it and see what happens.

Love,
Rhonda “Words as a Trust Fall” Linn

P.S. If you’d like to explore this alongside others, I’m hosting a conversation about it inside Homespun Joy- A Wellness Collaborative on Facebook this week. You’re welcome to join us. ✨💖

All of that, on Tuesday night just after my dad died.

And the next day:

calm and warm.

Read more

One Van der Kolk found is that when people try to shut off difficult emotions, they don’t just numb the hard stuff.

They numb their capacity to feel fully alive.

We don’t get to choose which feelings we shut off.

His point is this: the body stores what we don’t process.

It shows up in our nervous systems, health, relationships, and our overall quality of life.

So if suppression doesn’t work, what does?

His research points to a few things:

1) Felt safety and connection.

2) Becoming aware of what’s happening inside us.

3) And learning to befriend what we find there (rather than numbing it out.)

But how do we actually do that in practical terms?

We talked about a 5-15 second breath-based practice previously.

More to come…

including research on the power of naming what’s true.

For now, though, what is coming up for you?

Love,
Rhonda

“Before I could catch it.”

I’ve said that a few times this week: at the gas station and again after a hard conversation.

Mid-loop, when I noticed I was saying something on autopilot.

We’ve spent this week noticing, watching patterns, asking questions,

and- yup- trying to create a little distance.

But sometimes noticing isn’t fast enough.

Sometimes the words fall out.

The loop is already spinning or we’re just not in our bodies anymore.

We’re in our heads, and replaying the same story.

When we’re in that state, it isn’t always easy to “think” our way out.

The nervous system is driving.

So today I want to share something for the body.

It’s called the physiological sigh.

There is research about it out of Stanford though I’m sure it has been around a very long time.

We do this naturally.

And it’s a very short practice that we can use anytime we need a quick reset.

A 3-minute video about it is here.

Here’s how it works:

1️⃣ Two short inhales through the nose. The first one fills your lungs and then the second, smaller, one tops them off.

2️⃣ Then one long, slow exhale through the mouth.

One cycle takes maybe five seconds.

You can do one to three cycles (or as many as feels good to you.)


Why does it work?

When we’re stressed, breathing gets shallow. The tiny air sacs in our lungs collapse a little, which increases CO2 in the blood, which makes us feel more anxious.

The double inhale pops those air sacs back open.

The long exhale tells the nervous system the threat is over.


When to use it?

You can use it when you notice yourself spinning: before a hard conversation, in the middle of a loop you want to interrupt, or when you need to come back to yourself.

One round for a quick reset

Three to five rounds for an extra moment of calm.


Think of it like a little pattern interupt…

a little space between trigger and response.

Sometimes that little pocket of space is all we need to choose differently.

If it feels good to you, try it today.

Let us know what you notice.

Love,
Rhonda

Questions You Might Consider:

What’s underneath this complaint?

At different times, the complaint is just the surface. Under it lives something like fear, grief, loneliness, or maybe that we get something from playing the martyr because it secretly makes us feel great in a guilty pleasure way? You can go deep with these, but the piont is- can we begin to identify that first?

Is this wayfinding or spinning?

Am I trying to make sense of something? Is there movement here? Or am I circling the same drain I was circling last week (or last year…or maybe even last decade)?

Is your vent just cathartic? Or is there the potential for a pathway forward?

I think this is a critical one, because sometimes release is enough, and other times release without direction just keeps us where we are. In other words, is there a potential for a exhale, or is this just a habit?

Is this connection or a collapse of autonomy?

Am I reaching toward someone? Wanting them to know I see them, or that I’ve been there too? Am I reaching toward someone because I want them to feel less alone? Or am I pulling them into my spiral because we all know that misery loves company?

What do I actually need right now?

Sometimes I complain when what I really need is rest, or a decision, or a helping hand. Sometimes we need a thought-partner. Or the power of imagination. The real question is: Am I complaining about the dishes when what I really need is to ask for a concrete division of household labor? Is this about the thing I’m saying, or is it about the boundary I haven’t set, or the conversation I’m actively avoiding?

As I’ve been watching myself, what I noticed is a lot of times I’m processing, reaching for connection, or trying to find my way through something.

Next, I’ll share a short grounding practice you can use when you notice yourself spinning.

But for today, I’d say, pick one question.

Give it some thought, or journal it out, or let me know by hitting reply to this email.

Point is- step into the eye of the observer

and just see what comes up. 💖

Love,
Rhonda

But I think that when staying positive becomes the only acceptable mode, people stop naming hard things out loud.

And when nobody names the hard things, everyone starts to feel like they’re the only one struggling.

That creates isolation… which breeds shame.

Both of those things ultimately make people better consumers.

Isolated people scroll more and they keep seeking (and spending).

Because they are trying to fill a hole that connection would actually fill.

There’s a lot of money to be made from people who feel like they’re the only one.

So what’s the alternative?

I’ve been asking myself that, specifically in the context of this No Complaining Awareness Experiment.

I don’t think the answer is endless venting because it is easy to get stuck in loops that keep us stuck.

We spin out in the hard stuff without any movement.

But I also don’t think the answer is bypassing and pretending everything is fine when it isn’t.

I think it’s toxic to skip over what’s actually true. (We’ll come back to the research on this later.)

For now, let’s just leave it here:

There’s a line we walk between wayfinding and wallowing.

And I think it has to do with intention.

What are you noticing? I’d love to hear.

Love,
Rhonda Linn

The other night I was paying for my gas.

Fluorescent hum and worn linoleum.

Rows of shiny wrappers and energy drinks under overhead lights.

The clerk barely looked up when I walked in, but I could tell from her face she was having a day.

I chatted with her for a minute as she checked me out and then I said, “man, times are sure tough, huh? Hang in there.”

If you were scoring me on the no-complaining scale, that probably would have counted against me.

It fell out of my mouth before I could catch it.

In thinking about it more, I think I was reaching for connection.
I wanted her to know she wasn’t alone.
I wanted her to know that someone saw her.

And it made me wonder, how many times am I “complaining” as an act of solidarity for others?

And, indeed, my own life has not been all sunshine and roses these last couple of months. (Is that a complaint?)

There have been some events in my personal life going on, which I will share much later.

The point is, perhaps there was some truth to my statement.

But the foundational intention was empathy.

When I started watching my own patterns more and more, I noticed this over and over again.

When helping someone work through something hard, I very frequently add something like, “this is not easy.”

Is that complaining? Probably?

The intention is me saying you’re not alone in this planet.

Is there another way to achieve this? Perhaps.

But again, we are not here to “fix” first and foremost.

For now, we are noticing.

What are you seeing as you observe your own autopilot responses?

Love,
Rhonda Linn

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