#36: becoming a sort of person
Plus formerly and currently unexplained sounds, and befriending my bioregion
You’re reading This Might Resonate, an occasional newsletter from me, Emily.
I help people to collaborate regeneratively and cultivate graceful endings through facilitation, coaching and grief tending.
Hello there. For longtime readers, it’s been a six months since I last wrote this newsletter. If you’re new, it’s nice to meet you.
Reasons for disappearing
I moved to South Devon a year ago and have been building community there, which has been nourishing and challenging in equal measure (I talked about this with my pal Deepa Mirchandani on her excellent ADDA podcast). My main realisation: community does not mean that you need to be besties with everyone, it just means that you have each others backs, which takes time to cultivate. Side note: it’s such a joy living in a small place and bumping into people on the high street or at events, rather than squeezing in updates over endless one-to-one coffees and dinners. As my friend C put it to me recently: “it sounds like you’re living life alongside one another”.
I have always wanted to be the sort of person who is in a band and does crafts and joins in. It turns out, you do these things and then you become that sort of person (I always believed these things weren’t for the likes of me, ie tired and impractical people). I am in a nascent folk band where I play guitar badly and sing adequately, a choir, a food co-op and a group for seaside sauna enthusiasts. I am co-holding seasonal ceremonies on Dartmoor. I have started learning how to weave, for god’s sake.
I am befriending my bioregion, attempting to become a “person of place”. Reading obscure pamplets by dedicated local historians (blessed are the local historians!). Learning the proto-Celtic and Cornish names for trees and greeting them as I walk. Oak/ Daru / Derowen. Yew / Iwos / Ewin. Birch / Betwiyos / Besewen. Getting to know the rivers Exe and Dart. Mapping the local holy wells.
I am consumed by decorating my rented 1830s workers cottage and finding out that if you spend many hours per week on Facebook Marketplace, you will witness significant crimes against upcycling. I don’t anticipate a huge reader desire for interior decor musings, but if you are interested, my aesthetic is Witch’s lair x French farmhouse x Maximalist romance x Late 70s suburban sex party. I am devoted to this house, it’s complete magic. Sometimes, in the dark of night, I pad through it top to bottom, feeling the summer warmed oak floorboards underfoot, resting my forehand on the cool white walls.
I am dreaming into and slowly building practices and offerings that I hope will become chunkier elements of my portfolio:
, hosting ceremonies and grief tending (see below). I am hopeful that I can be of service. I am listening to what my facilitation and coaching work desires and following those threads of interest (updated website here, feedback welcome!). I am challenging old stories, introducing tangents, becoming unbrandable.Finally, like all of us, I Have A Lot Going On, not least attempting to operate amid genocides, rising facism and ecological and societal collapse.
Facilitating + Coaching
I help people to collaborate regeneratively and cultivate graceful endings through facilitation, coaching and grief tending.
I have facilitation and coaching capacity from September, get in touch if you’re interested.
Enjoyable things I’ve been up to:
Continuing to co-facilitate a strategy and organisational design process with a regenerative economy NGO
Prototyping a low-cost, outdoor coaching offer for changemakers in South Devon
Seeing several Advisory clients
I co-faciliated a grief tending workshop with Grief tending in Community. What a privilege it is to be part of these spaces.
I designed and held a ceremony for a colleague facing the end of her life, to support her and close colleagues to celebrate and say goodbye to her career. Sacred work.
Working with
and on the next iteration of . More soon!
Upcoming
I am co-facilitating a grief workshop in July with the Centre for Climate Psychology, supporting my grief tending teacher Sophy Banks. Maybe you’ll join us? More info here.
Writing/ creating
This audio piece about what Disability Justice can teach us about liberatory ways of organising, in conversation with some brilliant guests, commissioned by the excellent Transformational Governance crew:
Speaking
On The Adda podcast, Deepa Mirchandani and I reflected on our longing for ritual, the strange aliveness of grief, why community can feel so challenging, and why disabled and chronically ill people may be the wisest guides for navigating uncertainty and collapse. Listen here or watch on YouTube.
I was part of the
podcast, which brings the listener “into the room” as a small group explores being ecological together: interbeing and complex relationality, the more-than-human and worldviews and cosmologies.
Reading
Zero novels, I’m afraid, my mind feels too scattered to follow plot. This list of formerly and currently unexplained sounds is more my speed. What is going on under the sea?? Truly none of our business.
Facilitation and coaching as healing:
The Aligned Organisation: A Brown Paper from the brilliant
and Align team.
Women, myth and land:
Watching
Andor, a stunning exploration of colonialism and good companion thematically, if not stylistically, to Kneecap
Hacks Season 4, I cannot get enough of this toxic team
Dying for Sex, just gorgeous.
The Bear Season 4, which has recovered from its Season 3 dip in quality.
Listening
Do you know someone who loves unusual ideas and great reading recommendations? Perhaps they’d like This Might Resonate; please consider sharing this newsletter with them.
You might enjoy my other newsletters: GriefSick (about chronic illness grief) and Foregather (about connecting with creative energy). Yes, I agree that three newsletters is too many newsletters.