Hey! It’s my birthday! Every year I go around attempting to hide it but that’s seems to fail spectacularly pretty often. Technology. Anyway, so this year I’m taking the totally opposite approach and going public. What’s the worst that could happen? Ha! Insert laughing face emoji. So here’s a letter to you all on what’s been going on around here lately.
First — What The Heck Has Been Going On Around Here?
This Substack has been quiet for months until the last week or so. Months. I know it. You might know it. We’ve lost some followers, and a few financial supporters. We may have lost some volunteers.
These things happen when you’re trying to create something out of nothing. I got stuck, this nonprofit did not have enough resources, I hit some trauma stuff… and I’ve been working on finding a way forward through all of that since last summer. So here we are. No sense putting lipstick on a pig. Sometimes life is hard and it doesn’t work out the way you’d hoped.
But then sometimes it does.
^^ That meme is true.
Second — News!
This nonprofit has now this year gotten very baseline funding through the 2024 election!! Woohoo!!!!!!
It’s a good foundation to grow from. Seeds planted in fertile soil and all that. Maybe also planted with a lot of compost and - you know - fertilizer. Plenty of both around from so much falling away (metaphorical compost) and also from so much BS around us (metaphorical fertilizer). Now we keep planting and watering… and grow this nascent seedling of an organization into something sustainable and amazing.
Even with this exciting funding we’ll totally need to raise more money to grow this work, but while we’re doing that we’ll be able to keep the lights on and the tech running and the main person behind the scenes fed (which I am personally very grateful for). More money will help us to grow more, to have a wider reach, to help us all host events, and to amplify all the ruckus we’ll create together. And plus it’s like a birthday fundraiser! Woohoo! Again!!
So this news is super cool. We can actually for real grow the things we’ve been talking about for years!
If you’ve helped us get this far on this journey since 2019, THANK YOU. If you’re planning to help as we grow, THANK YOU TOO.
Every bit of it has helped this nonprofit get to this big election year well-positioned to do the very real work we’ve been hoping to do once we could get enough resources. IT’S TIME. Which is so very neat. More on all that in a minute.
Third — A Few Personal Things Behind The Scenes
In other super positive news (for me, anyway), I got one of those life partner people or something like that and that’s been absolutely lovely. Did not see that coming. That’s led to a lot of change, of growth, of processing, of healing, and of evolving. I’m a better person for it, and I’m also oddly (or not) better positioned to hold space for this work and for this moment.
We’re going to need all of our wits about us this year and over the next many years. As such, I’m happy to have been able to do some healing and to find some more solid grounding to help me be better able to navigate all of this.
I’m grateful. Absolutely fundamentally deeply grateful. I was running on empty. It’s hard to grow anything when the garden is eroded down to mineral soil and you’re missing all the good stuff that brings life and flourishing.
In the midst of all this change the past few months, my family is going through big changes too. It’s not my story to tell, but life is complicated and I love my people. We’re all having more opportunities for evolution and character building and honestly — just for loving each other. I’m grateful for the people I’m walking with in my personal life. I am very lucky. Related, some of my closest friends are also dealing with some really rough stuff. We all just keep moving forward. Everyone I know well is dealing with something tough or some major change. It’s that kind of an era.
My guess is you’ve got some of all that going on, too — the beautiful, and the challenging. This planet is nothing if not consistent in its complexity. I wish you and yours the grounding, healing, strength, connection, and resilience you need to navigate this world we find before us.
All of that is essential, and we can help each when we don’t have enough. That’s part of the community we can grow here through this nonprofit once we get going for real and pull out of this holding pattern we’ve been in. There’s so much potential.
Saying Hard Things — Post Coming
With all of these updates, I thought it would make sense to speak honestly and authentically and even in vulnerable ways (vulnerability builds connection after all) about some of the stuff I often hesitate to say about getting to this point with this nonprofit. Maybe some explanation for why it’s been taking so long to get this nonprofit going; some back story. The truth is that whenever I talk about that sort of thing I end up down rabbit holes and this post is long enough. So… I’ll write about it sometime between now and next Friday when we start volunteer calls — especially if there’s interest. For now, this post is long enough. And — it’s still not finished.
Finally —
Finally, here is this bit from the heart. I don’t know how it will convey, because I’m going to write it super fast as I’ve got to get to a birthday dinner.
Look, everything around us is scary and also sucks quite a bit. The news people are hyper focused on acting like Donald Trump will be in the White House come 2025, and/or are spending their time evaluating what he might need to do to overcome all the total chaos going on for him. They’re not hyper focused on the fascism, the racism, the bigotry, and the hate. While I listened to breathless caucus and primary coverage about which other fascistic non-Trump Republican candidate might win, one news anchor actually acknowledged that Nikki Haley is racist, but said, “That aside, what does she need to do to get better numbers?” Yeah let’s stop putting the racism aside.
I digress.
My point is that it’s pretty scary and dark out there, and so far we’re fighting it mostly with all the same tools and approaches we’ve fought fights with for the last decade or two. There’s no movement taking off like wildfire, exactly.
I’m saying we need to imagine bigger. Brene Brown who is the woman behind the vulnerability video cited above has a book called “Daring Greatly,” but I’ve always thought we need to imagine greatly. To imagine more bigger. To imagine hugely.
I heard a political interview this weekend talking about how Republican politicians who could take on Trump are failing to imagine what could be possible for them.
But aren’t the rest of us, too? Shouldn’t — or couldn’t — we all be imagine bigger, too? Going all out? Bringing all the things to bear?
The hard reality is that we’ve got some cold (or hot) hard brutal realities bearing down on us LIKE NOW and we’re sooooooooooo not organizing for it as a society — and that’s just the stuff that goes with climate change. We’re also really not organizing to fight the authoritarian, fascist movement that could undo even our fairly weak attempts to deal with climate change even now. And so on. Plus you know hate is running rampant, schools are getting unfunded, we have an active culture war, we’ve disable public health, we’re possibly not funding fights for democracies worldwide anymore, and so on and so on.
This work here — we’re fixing to imagine greatly. We’d sure like company. It’s taken a freaking long damn time to get this far, and now we’re finally ready to get this shift going. So, join us.
MUCH MORE TO COME.
See you soon!
Happy birthday! I usually ignore them too but I'll make an exception for you.
Not easy to keep up with the madness, let alone fix it.
Someone still has a voodoo doll of me and keeps jabbing it with an ice pick, but hoping I can reverse the spell and become at least a little bit functional.
"Just keep walkin' "