#30: go deeper, grow deeply

Plus rock time, infrastructures of care and the worst people alive

You’re reading This Might Resonate, a monthly newsletter from me, Emily. Welcome to all 876 of you! A favour: if you enjoy This Might Resonate, please forward it to a friend - they can subscribe right here.

My Dad brought my grandmother’s late 70s and early 80s gardening books down from the attic, and they’re an absolute treasure trove of stunning photography. This is from The Creative Guide to Dried Flowers.

I have some work capacity coming up for summer. Aside from reading and watching things, I help teams to collaborate and develop in regenerative ways through facilitation, organisational design, coaching and grief work. Read more and get in touch here.

Reading

What’s it like when your therapist is a TikTok star?

A chilling article on the pro-natalist movement. Why is it always the worst people alive who are obsessed with living forever and populating the earth?

This profile of Miranda July. All Fours is next on my reading list.

How did Denmark become the most trusting country in the world?

Weathering by

Ruth Allen

. It took me until the middle of the book to fall into step with the author’s pace and style, and then I was all in. Drawing geology and psychotherapy together, traversing our inner and outer terrains, it’s a beautiful read. It had a lot of resonance for me a chronically ill person who operates in crip time, which bears similarities to rock time:

Rocks invite us to think again about why being held in place might be a good thing in a modern world where so little is certain, and so much variety and choice is a cause for growing anxiety and stress. They reveal that though we might slow down and stay put for a while, there is a bigger picture of movement and dynamism that can still be present in the background if we take a longer view. Rocks that show us that being in place offers an unassailable limitation to what is possible on the horizontal axis of our lives, over shorter timescales, but also offers a boundary within which to be entirely oneself, go deeper, grow deeply and find a niche in which to really land and gradually evolve over time through an endless process of non-arrival that we call becoming. Rock medicine is forever medicine.

What does it mean to grow an organisation as an infrastructure of care? A deep, rich exploration of questions the MAIA team is grappling with. What is your organisation's relationship with care and accountability? What does relational, rather than transactional, care look like? What needs healing in your organisation's relationship with accountability? Featuring the work I did with MAIA back in January, and some beautiful thoughts by

Lana Jelenjev

and Tianna Johnson.

We talked a lot about how care requires an in-the-moment sensing of need — I think accountability requires something similar, the in-the-moment sensing of boundaries — Emily Bazalgette

Some people talk about poverty as being a thousand petty humiliations each day — what if we saw care as offering a thousand tiny dignities every day? — Tianna Johnson

Most read from the last edition:

• The Lifegiving Benefits of Befriending Our Mortality by

  Andrea Gibson

• The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram

• “Take up that space”: A conversation about a ritual to grieve and celebrate a life with chronic illness in GriefSick.

Watching

Challengers, an enjoyably thigh-forward film with a banging soundtrack, which led me to a Josh O’Connor deep dive (rewatching Emma and Gods Own Country — I had forgotten how stunning and tender the latter is).

Dark Matter, a multiverse sci-fi thriller, good fun so far.

Bridgerton Season 3: steamy and unhinged as always, featuring a scene in a carriage that I fear has irrevocably altered my brain chemistry.

Listening

Upcoming

Enchanted

I’m excited to share that

Anna-Marie Swan

and I are co-hosting an enquiry session about Self as Ecology at this year's Enchanted gathering in July. Enchanted is a community-led gathering about all things regenerative, at Selgars Mill in Devon, UK.

Some questions that are guiding our Self as Ecology enquiry:

• What does it mean to be ecological?

• We exist in rich, fertile webs of relationships, deeply rooted in ecosystems and social systems that we (wonderfully) cannot be detangled from. In this session, we will discover ourselves as ecological beings, and explore what this means for being in relationship, including our experience of navigating Enchanted as ecological, and therefore entangled, beings.

• What are we experiencing now, in this season, on this land, with this community? What season are we truly in right now, not just physically, but also spiritually and emotionally? Can we hold these pluralities together?

Anna-Marie and I visited Selgars Mill last week, the land is so peaceful and I can't to see how it informs and shapes our session. I was so taken with the birdsong, the wildflowers, the stream and ponds, the old oak trees and the new kitchen garden... It's pretty special to me to be facilitating so close to my new home in Exeter, too. Anna-Marie and I also spent a lovely few hours together exploring our collaboration, what matters to us in facilitation, and what we hope for the enquiry. I think it will be a gorgeous session and we'd love to see you there.

Apprenticing to grief

I will be support-facilitating at the Apprenticing to grief journey in Norfolk in July. I participated in the journey myself in October last year, it’s a special experience: “An immersive journey for people wanting to deepen their relationship with grief, and strengthen their capacity to hold grief spaces for others. We explore common stages on the journey of grief, different views of grief, and traditions about how to welcome it; exploring facilitation, questions of safety and ethics in holding grief spaces, and the relationship between grief, trauma and the wider systems of harm and times of disruption we are living in and impacted by.”

There’s a few spaces places left. If you feel curious about or called to grief work in any way, do take a look.

Still not accepting…

… that cursive is dead!

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If you’re interested in chronic illness and/or grief, you might like my other newsletter, GriefSick (why have one newsletter when you can have two?).