This is the second in a series of interviews with people I know going through transitions.

This one is my mother. I used the same simple set of questions from the last interview, and plan to continue that for all the pieces in this series. I wondered how the questions would function in a situation where I know a lot of the story that shapes the answers. I learned the questions produce insightful answers regardless. The more difficult part was parsing back through our transcript, because we speak to each other as any talkative family members would, in overlapping sentences and shorthand.

My mother’s name is Anelda. She is 63 years old, born in Antigua. Let’s start with some dreamy pics of her from when she was a teen.

My mother has lived in Baltimore for 26 years. When I asked what she considers her calling in life, she said, “I think I’m a connector. It’s taken me a long time to acknowledge that.”

This is a funny answer if you know her. She knows a lot of people. My mother is one of the most disarmingly warm humans you’ll ever meet. My whole life, I’ve watched her walk into a grocery store or any old place for a five minute errand, and walk out with plans to help someone later that week, information about someone’s aunt who recently went into the hospital, a new best friend. She balances her extroversion with alone time and a tight inner circle. “My immediate family is primary. Then I have a few select friends that I am in touch with daily who I consider my core tribe.”

I asked her to describe a transition that has been significant recently.

“My husband passed. I lost my job. The past two years have been stressful trying to sustain myself financially. But by the grace of God, I managed with the help of family and friends.”

Her deceased husband and my stepfather, Roy Crosse, had been making art his entire life. It was literally the only kind of work he ever had. His pieces had been installed in museums in the United States and abroad. But when they moved to Baltimore in the early 2000s, they turned part of their large row home into his studio and workspace. The rest they used as a gallery. Roy displayed his work on the upper floors and used the lower floors to promote other artists. This meant that he spent the last years of his life hosting more exhibitions for other people than he ever did for himself.

After he passed in 2014, my mother was left with a large body of his work and a set of hard facts.

“My husband left a large body of artwork that I was automatically in charge of.” She later lost her job, and considered the possibility of selling their large house in the list of next steps. She realized “I could accomplish two objectives: get my hubby’s artwork out to the world, and use the proceeds to sustain myself and my home. So after living with these items for so long on my own, I had to prepare to let them go.”

I asked what made the transition easier.

The answer started practical. She looked at what she had.

“Technically having no money, the thing that I have is this house and I have the artwork. Those are the two things. And it’s like, okay, why are you holding on to all this stuff, and where are you going to go with it?”

She started reaching out to several museums around Baltimore. Some museums expressed interest that ultimately didn’t result in exhibitions. Other galleries offered contracts that would have meant signing away her rights. She said no. She finally found a good match with Eubie Blake Cultural Center and started on the long process of preparing his work for a show.

That process has taken almost a year, partly because Roy started making art before the internet existed. There is nothing about him online. No digital archive, no website. So Anelda has been working with an archivist who comes over every couple of weeks. They sit on the floor together reading through yellowed articles and old exhibition records. My mom makes beans and rice. They sit there, piecing together a history that was never digitized.

But beyond the logistics, what made the transition easier was something she appreciates about Roy’s work itself. She remarked on the objective beauty of his art, but also something that she noticed about his art in contrast to what she saw in other exhibits. She has spent a lot of time in recent years going to art shows around Baltimore for her own education.

“Art is very personal. But a lot of the exhibitions I’ve gone to, I thought were too personal. Like, things that were so representative of the artist that it was more representative of the artist than say a piece that I would buy to be in my house. I don’t want your face in my living room.”

I laughed, because that is exactly how she talks.

“That’s the one thing that I really, really love about Roy’s work. I could take one of his paintings and put it in somebody’s house and it would fit in. Even without knowing that it was created by him, it fits into your home and it compliments it in some way.”

She has lived inside his art for the length of their relationship. She knows what it does in a room. And she knew that Roy would have wanted her to do this. What she was holding onto, she realized, wasn’t really about love. It was about habit.

“It’s more habit that I’ve gotten so used to the pieces. It’s here. I’m used to it. And embracing change, because like you say, everything changes! And it does. It comes down to, how are you going to embrace that change? Are you going to embrace it with anger, or with feeling sorry for yourself, or finding something, like, some active way to make it relevant to you and possibly to other people?”

I asked what was hardest.

“Just coming to terms with the fact that things have changed. That was hard. It was really hard.”

Not the logistics of organizing for a gallery exhibit. The acceptance.

“This is a new chapter. And coming back to embracing that things are going to be different regardless. Things have changed. So what are you going to do?”

I was there, years ago, helping her sort through things right after Roy passed. She was processing his death and simultaneously realizing she had to deal with an enormous body of work. I don’t think we could have done what she’s doing now back then. It wasn’t time yet.

She told me about a friend whose husband passed around the same time as Roy. Twelve years later, all of his things are still in the house. His closet is untouched. Anelda has offered help, but her friend declined.

“She’s just not ready. And who knows. It’s a different timeline for all of us.”

About five years after Roy’s passing, Anelda started gathering his things into one room. She calls it the Roy room. It’s set up like a small library and archive now.

Before the show, she went through the works she truly loved and moved them upstairs in her house where no one would see them. When the exhibition finally came together and a crew showed up to pack everything, she told me it felt like she was moving. The walls were suddenly empty. She said the same to the gallery director, who told her: “You’re not moving. You’re moving ahead.”

That loosened something. “It made me feel like I’m making space to be able to deal with all the changes that have happened in my life, and I hadn’t before.”

Now, when the gallery calls to say a piece has sold, she knows exactly which one before they finish the description.

“I’ve been so intimate with these pieces over the years. Like, automatically I know which one. There’s thirty pieces in the show. I said yes, it was hanging at such and such a place in my house. I remember where everything was.”

I asked what gave her strength.

“Honestly, really my family and friends. It was just nice to know that they were being supportive and encouraging. So many people asked if there were things they could do to help, but a lot of it I had to do myself, because I literally had to go through things and find what they wanted to know. I had to sit on the floor and go through things, and I just couldn’t ask anybody to, because they didn’t know what I was looking for either.”

But the support mattered. People called. People brought food. People checked in.

“It just really made me cherish the people I chose to associate with and hang around. It is really important to be connected.”

Her aunt once told her: “Whatever you do, Anelda, it’s very important that you have companionship as you get older.” I think my aunt meant a husband. My mom really loves living on her own. She told me this plainly and without apology. But companionship doesn’t have to mean one person or a partner. It means tending to all the relationships you have.

She told me a friend of hers put it more bluntly: you need friends of all ages, because the ones closer to your age are going to die off, and you need the next group ready.

“She broke it down like that. And she’s sort of right. You just need to foster friendship and community. I passionately love being by myself. But though I like being by myself, I like being with other people. The knowing that I get to be by myself later on, that’s what matters. You have to have some sort of balance.”

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I asked what she would say to other women going through something similar.

“I started to look at my fear and perceived loss as an opportunity to be able to move on. I broke it down into tiny bits.”

She told me she had written something down on a piece of paper, and walked away from the video call to grab it. This is another thing of my mom that I now do. All my life, she’s written little, hopeful, inspirational quotes on post-it notes or scraps of paper, or sometimes taken the time to frame them. She puts them around the house in places where people linger. Like near the kitchen sink, where you might meditate on the words a little bit while you’re standing washing dishes. It’s a habit I picked up in the notes app on my phone, in a journal I take with me everywhere I go.

She calls it the Three-Part Change Process.

This one said: “Number one is purpose. Number two is truth. And the third thing is action.”

Purpose is knowing why. “What’s important to you about this? Why do you want to do it?”

Truth is knowing what you have. “My truth is I know what I have. I know what I can do. I know the importance to me. And just live with that.”

Action is doing the thing.

“It sounds so easy. Purpose, truth, action. But it’s not.”

And when the nostalgia hit, when she found herself caught in the grief of a particular piece leaving the house, she would come back to it.

“When I found myself just getting nostalgic about things, that was what I reverted back to. Okay, how is this going to help you in the long run? And that helped me to get through whatever emotion I was feeling about any specific piece.”

When she first said “break it down into little bits,” I thought she was referring to breaking the task of getting the exhibit together into small tasks. It’s interesting that she was actually referring to the mental steps to make the decision to act.

She is in a paring-down phase now. Not just the art. Everything in the house that doesn’t have a clear reason to be there.

I’ve lost elders recently, and have elders in my family who won’t be around much longer. I’ve been through the devotion of sorting through the physical items loved ones leave behind. I have anxiety about what’s coming in the back of my mind, that I’ve only just begun. Objects hold the shape of a life you shared with someone. Letting the objects leave the house is not the same as letting the person go. But it is not nothing, either.

My mother looked at what she had. She told herself the truth about what she needed. And she made a choice to act. I see it as not turning away from my stepfather, but towards supporting herself and sharing his gifts with the world.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I’m proud of you.

Anelda Peters is a connector, community builder, and the steward of the estate of artist Roy Crosse. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. An exhibition of Roy Crosse’s art is at the Eubie Blake Cultural Center through June 6, 2026. You can view photos of the opening night for the exhibit here.

This interview is part of an ongoing series about women navigating significant transitions. If you know someone whose story should be told here, reach out.

This post is about beautiful, transporting fragrances.

I’m a lady who prefers the most narcotic florals. Star jasmine, tuberose, and lilac. The preference feels ancestral, passed from the generations of my family who lived Caribbean or New Orleans. I hope my foremothers were out there flirting on summer nights in the sweet flowery air.

I have a luxurious stable of jasmine and tuberose dominant perfumes. However, there’s not a great lilac perfume. Believe me, I’m still searching. Most add other notes to round out the fragrance, and it simply doesn’t make its presence known like the others. I want the first application to mimic the rush I feel when my nose is buried in a cone of lilac blooms. I want the dry-down to tiptoe up softly to grab me by the nose the way lilac bushes do as I walk around the neighborhood. Because I can’t get the lilac scent I want other than through nature, late spring, lilac season, is one of the most special times of year. I order my daily walks around sniffing bushes. I will trespass to deeply inhale a good one.

I went to a college that was also an arboretum, and blessedly have a lot of natural fragrance, texture, and visual associations with that time of life. The arboretum clustered varieties of single plants in several areas around campus. There was one garden dedicated specifically to lilacs, arranged in a circle. On unseasonably warm spring nights, my friends and I would drink a little too much cheap wine and hang in the lilac circle, romanced from all sides by the heady blooms. The nights were always giddy, late in the semester, summer break approaching, a frazzle of stress releasing in the soft evening air.

Smells take us back to a time, place, and mood so quickly because the part of our brain that senses odors lives right next to the parts of our brain that governs emotion and memory. My late spring walks are a direct portal to a time of joy and relaxation and limited worry. It’s a bonus when I can engage my senses of taste, sight, touch if I can take a glass of wine on a lilac walk on a balmy night. The effect, whether we’re smelling something associated with good or bad memories, is near instantaneous. This means we can strategically, intentionally employ scent to lift our mood.

My invitation:

Make a poetic menu of your favorite fragrances. List the emotions, memories, and senses each scent evokes as a description for that “dish.” Bust out your menu and find ways to recreate the scents the next time you need to be quickly transported to a different emotional state.

Here are a few of mine:

This is the first in a series of interviews I plan to do with people I know going through transitions. I kept noticing that people going through the hardest transitions were also becoming the most interesting versions of themselves. Something gets stripped away in seasons of change, and what’s left is something more essential and usually more true. I’m honored to use this space to capture that. I hope never to present tidy, retrospective stories where everything worked out. I want readers to see the actual texture of going through change: what cracks, what holds, what’s surprising.

I met Alex through fisheries, which is truly the most unlikely meeting place for two black women. She is the only Black woman I know working in Pacific Northwest salmon management, which means she’s one of the few Black women I know, period, who does the work I do. I share in this post that I’m likely the first Black woman (and possibly the only black person) appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to serve on a federal fisheries management council. That rarity is something we talk about often. While it is lonely and heavy, it is also really beautiful that I found someone who looks like me in a field that wasn’t built with either of us in mind.

Alex is 33. She is a scientist, a policy mind, a professor, and a practicing Death Doula. She is honest about the complicated business of being all of those things at once. We spoke on a Sunday morning in late winter. I also include some answers that Alex wrote about herself before we spoke.

I always ask the people I talk with to just introduce themselves — not their résumé, but themselves. Who are you, what are you here to do, who matters to you most?

“I’ve always wondered how to introduce myself if I were to write an autobiography, and I still haven’t come up with a satisfying answer. Something along the lines of: I was born on the gale-dawn of Sunday, November 3rd, 1991 — a Balsamic moon — a near poetic slight at the power and glory of sunlight. Perhaps that’s why my middle name is Dagmar. Dag-, a Nordic root meaning ‘day’ (probably informed by the association with the rune Dagaz), and -mar (or maer) meaning ‘maiden’ or ‘mother’. Readers who are inclined toward astrology will know I’m a Scorpio sun, could guess I’m a Libra moon, and if I share the anecdotal information that I was born in Seattle, WA, would suspect I’m a Virgo rising.”

Dagaz — the rune that encompasses the in-between of sunset and daylight — is a recurring touchstone for Alex. She describes it as “that very shamanic, thinning-of-the-veil, ushering-in-light kind of space.” It is, she says, a useful metaphor for where she tends to find herself in any room she walks into.

“In all honesty, my calling in life remains an open question. If I lean into my inclination from childhood, my calling in life would have been to become an Olympic swimmer who would eventually retire to Ireland and pursue a second career as a poet. Unfortunately, an abusive swimming coach and lack of funds to consistently access a pool put an end to this. If I lean into my mother’s inclination about my purpose, I’d say I’m meant to be a great academic. I’d swiftly point to you my lack of publications in Nature or Science as an indicator of how well this thread of fate has unfolded.

Today, I’d say my purpose in life is to hold safe, sacred, and supportive space for all forms of dying — literal and metaphorical. In natural resource management, I witness the falling away of capitalistic and colonial practices, which to me is a kind of death. I simultaneously try to hold the grief of those who, literally and metaphorically, bought into these systems, while also building toward a more sustainable future in which we recognize our interdependence on nature and build managerial structures that honor this relationship. Outside of my nine-to-five, I am a practicing Death Doula. I support people, pets, and their communities of care through the dying process.”

And who is significant in your life?

“My ancestors, especially my grandfather. I could write an entire book on the personal significance of my grandfather, so what I type here won’t do him or our relationship justice. I’ll briefly share that my grandfather held space for me to understand myself, build a system of integrity and internalize it at an early age, and taught me how to fish. I remember thinking to myself when he passed that the entirety of my life will only be a shadow of what it could have been. Perhaps that’s my true purpose in life — to learn how to grieve my grandfather’s passing.”

She lost him at eleven.

You mentioned that you ended up in salmon almost sideways — that it wasn’t the plan. Tell me about that path, and about the transition you’ve been through most recently.

Before we got into the hardest part of it, Alex told me something that I think is important context: she is a woman who has, as she puts it, “conflated her career with her spiritual path.” She describes it not as a mistake, exactly, but as a fact about herself — one with real consequences.

“I believe that we bring our whole selves into any room we occupy. I decided a long time ago that I would mindfully bring my whole spiritual self into my career. It felt like I was called to and made for salmon work, even in ways that weren’t at all obvious and were very indirect.”

The mechanics of what happened are worth understanding. A restrictive legislative budget cycle eliminated her position.

“My recent job change has been one of the most significant transitions thus far in my life. I used to work for a state agency in marine natural resource management, but following a particularly restrictive budgetary legislative cycle, my position with this agency was cut. This was incredibly painful on several fronts. When my position was cut from the budget, I felt the Universe had dealt me a failing grade in my spiritual life.”

What followed was a disorienting in-between: a layoff option that landed her in aquatic invasive species work — a field she’d deliberately moved away from, for reasons that are both intellectual and deeply personal. She was also picked up as an adjunct professor at a moment when she felt entirely unequipped to teach.

I want to ask what was easy, because I think we tend to skip that question and go straight to the hard. Was anything easy?

“Nothing was easy about it. However, the blessing that emerged from it was a community of politically visionary, spiritually insightful, and brilliant women coming together to support me through this transition. I can’t thank them enough for their love, support, and guidance.”

What also happened, in that holding place of invasive species work and its retraumatizing familiarity, was something she hadn’t expected: a corrective experience in the form of a supervisor, whose management style was so fundamentally different from what she’d experienced the year before that it rearranged something in her.

He offered to join her through a particularly painful annual review for the position she lost, and supported her while she cried afterwards. “He was so able to receive that and hold it with compassion and love and validation. He would call me by my title (Dr. Safiq!) and would defer to my expertise on technical matters, which rarely happened in my old job. He collaborated with me to expand my skills. He was a very strategic, supportive mentor and coach.”

That a good supervisor should feel like medicine is its own kind of indictment. But it was medicine nonetheless.

And the hardest part?

This is where Alex’s writing is worth quoting at length.

“The most difficult part of the entire situation was witnessing, in real time, the very harms and traumas inflicted on my ancestors being enacted upon me. Whether directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously — and in truth, through a combination of all four — the patriarchal, colonial, bigoted, and capitalistic systems that have long sought our erasure at national, local, impersonal, and personal scales were, however briefly, able and permitted to erase me.”

Her grandfather was an Air Force pilot, the most brilliant human being she’d ever known. Like many Black folks from the rural South, he joined the military to get out of a racist and economically defunct region of the country — rural 1950s Mississippi. He was treated horribly in the service. He never told Alex. She only knows from fragments she overheard, and from one of the two times she ever saw him cry.

“One of two times I ever witnessed my grandfather tearing up was when my mother told him she had joined the Army Reserves. My grandfather didn’t want her to experience misogyny and the same racism he experienced while in the armed services. He was a stoic, quietly powerful, and profoundly wise man. His quiet strength carried with it a deep intention — to prevent the transmission of generational trauma.”

She continues: “Through my own lived experience, the wisdom he embodied, and the memory of his steadfastness, you can understand the depth of my grief when I found myself subjected to the very harms he had spent his life trying to shield his lineage from. In that moment, I felt as though I had failed him — that I had somehow betrayed the legacy he worked so hard to build. Why would I willingly serve a government that had sought not only his erasure, but mine as well? That question haunted me throughout the entire transition.”

There’s something else she said in our conversation, quietly, almost as an aside: “I had to acknowledge that I have no idea how to grieve for myself. And here I am taking on the role of a death doula.”

I told her: You’re so young and you have so many years to learn this. That it’s actually a gift that it hit you at a point where you could begin to reckon with it. She laughed and said it felt like being kicked while you’re down — not only apparently unqualified to keep doing salmon work, but now apparently unqualified to do her second career. She tried to spiritually bypass it, she said, by reframing it as shamanic initiation. “And in some ways I feel that. But in another way I’m like: no, Alex, you need to do the actual work.”

That’s the yes-and of it, I told her. It probably is an initiation — and you still have to do the confronting.

What stayed with me is that grief is a lifelong lesson, and society doesn’t give us space for it. There are communities that still make a public and collective show of grief around death, around things that are universally acknowledged as grievable. But grieving an identity, a job, the things that don’t register on the scale of the whole community must stop and bring me snacks, those are harder things to do. And for someone who holds other people’s dying for a living to discover she had no map for her own? That smacks harder.

What gave you strength? What steadied you?

“My community of colleagues, friends, and spiritual mentors.”

She also found it in nature — specifically in a quarry pool near her home in Tenino, where a natural waterfall became something like a weekly appointment. “The catharsis and release of emotional baggage — all the big feelings just naturally moved through my body when I was sitting under there. I realized that no matter how much I tried to intellectualize what I was going through, my body wasn’t processing it. The only way I found, quite by accident, was sitting under this waterfall.” She mentions that trout would flock to her feet when she stood in the shallows. “It felt like they were witnessing what I was going through. Like they were saying: We still love you. We see you.“

She found it in cooking — specifically in reverse-engineering her grandmother’s gumbo from sense memory. “I would put on In the Heat of the Night in the background, lay out these green cafeteria trays from the ‘90s, and just start smelling different spices. ‘Oh yeah, that smells like the one that was in the kitchen when grandma was cooking.’ It was just an intuitive process.” She got it right. She can make the gumbo now.

When she finished describing all of this — the waterfall, the trout at her feet, the spice-smelling, the green trays, the In the Heat of the Night playing in the background — I told her: you said at the beginning of this that you don’t have your own spell for grief curing. But I think you just wrote one. These are all things that sound like you engaged all of your senses and abilities to get yourself through it. You made your own grief recipe.

She sat with that for a moment. “Part of it is just trusting my body with what feels good and trusting that that’s the medicine,” she said.

She found it in Hozier, specifically the album Unreal Unearth. “The bass that comes from his music really gets my body to move through some really hard things I can’t just sit in a room and journal through.”

And she found it on the other side of the transition, in a form she couldn’t have predicted: she is now a lead salmon scientist for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, which called her and asked her to come work for them.

“To be solicited by the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission to apply for a lead salmon scientist position was so validating and healing. I was told by my leadership (from the job I left) that I didn’t know how to communicate and work with the Tribes in the salmon context — and that felt totally opposite of everything I’ve tried to do in the salmon world.”

What would you say to another woman standing at the beginning of something this hard? Or to yourself, before it started?

From her writing: “A healed place for me looks like no longer putting all of my emotional investment in validation from systems that have consistently showed me again and again that they’re built to invalidate. Through that, I want to be a person whose presence creates and holds creative space for something more sustainable, affirming, and sacred to be built.”

She ended our conversation with hope: “I see a lot of fertile opportunity,” she said. “Like shimmering shards of something. And I am inspired by that today.”

Alexandrea Safiq is the lead Chinook FRAM modeler for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. She is also an adjunct professor at The Evergreen State College and a practicing Death Doula. She lives in Tenino, Washington.

This interview is part of an ongoing series about people navigating significant transitions. If you know someone whose story should be told here, reach out.

I love The Wheel of Fortune—I think of it as a challenge to consider who we want to be in the circumstances presented to us. But The Magician resonates more right now because I need to feel agency in this painful moment when xenophobia and murder have become our norm again.

The Magician stands ready to conjure, reminding us that we have the power to transform our circumstances using tools already in hand. Everything we need is already present. We just have to choose what to create with first.

If you’re like me, you forget your power all the time. This post by reminded me to mine my own history to remember my tools, my power, and my agency.

corinna’s Substack

Planting Seeds is all We Can Do

I keep saying. it over and over again, and I know I’m going to say it some more. It’s a Magician Year, we have to do everything differently this time…

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4 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · corinna rosella

The last Magician/Wheel of Fortune year was 2017.

Think back to 2017. Think about both the twists of fate that got you to where you are today and the agency you brought to those twists. The skills you already possessed. The magic you made out of what was available to you.

Here’s some of what 2017 held for me:

After Donald Trump's inauguration, a federal hiring freeze blocked the career change I was desperate to make. Stuck, I threw myself into the difficult job I already had and nailed it. When the freeze lifted, I applied for a promotion I wouldn't have considered otherwise. I got it. That twist of fate - not getting what I wanted, then stretching for something bigger - propelled me forward. In the coming years, I hit career milestones a full decade earlier than I expected.

It was also the year I edged closer to my divorce. A really big revelation happened in my marriage. We decided that year to move with our young children from a small town in Massachusetts across country to Seattle, in part for the promotion but also so we could get the mental health support our family needed. While my marriage ultimately ended, it was the start toward a very healthy revised relationship that is truer to both of us.

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Looking back, I can see how much agency I actually had in a year that felt like pure chaos and held an immeasurable amount of heartache.

I didn't have ideal circumstances. I had a hiring freeze, a difficult job, a failing marriage, and young children who needed support. I was grieving deeply for the lost opportunity and my crumbling marriage. But I also used what was already on my table: my professional competence, my clarity about my family's needs, my willingness to make a hard choice to uproot my family serve multiple purposes. I made what I could out of what was presented to me. The Wheel of Fortune was turning, but I was also the Magician. I took things that were available and transformed them into something new.

Some reflection prompts for you:

• What did 2017 hold for you? How did the Wheel of Fortune turn?

• What skills did you develop or lean on? What tools did you already have?

• How were you the Magician? How did you use your skills and tools to make magic from your circumstances?

• What tools do you have right now that make you the Magician in 2026?

The Wheel turns whether we want it to or not. But you’re not just along for the ride. You have tools, and I’m certain you’ve done stunningly impressive things in less than ideal circumstances before. You know how to make magic out of what’s in front of you.

What will you choose to create first?

If you’re not already connected to ways to help and it is within your means, here’s a mutual aid guide for Minneapolis.

Stay Angry

Minneapolis Mutual Aid Guide

By now I’m sure you are aware of the second fatal shooting by ICE in Minneapolis. 37 year old Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse, legally observing and filming agents when he was tackled to the ground, beaten, and shot while face down in the street…

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4 months ago · 166 likes · 10 comments · Alex Cascio

In a chapter on reconnecting with sensuality, hooks shares a tool that I can see adapting in so many ways:

Black women are often more passionate in our rage and suffering than we are in our loving. The energy that we bring to situations that arouse hostility or pain can easily be redirected. We can tell ourselves daily to direct our most intense feeling to those areas of our lives that bring pleasure and delight. To achieve this end we need to write ourselves many recipes for tuning into healing erotic power and put them in a box so that when we see our energies going toward anger or suffering we can take a recipe from the box and follow it. When I am in pain or feeling sad, I am often unable to imagine what activities might create a shift in feeling. A box full of ideas can serve as a reminder.

Hell yes, bell. Let’s make our own recipe boxes!

Why it works

When you’re unholy pissed, in a puddle of sadness, [whatever your state of dysregulation], it is not the time to think of a way out of those states. Do your future self a favor and devise a way to get your power back while you’re feeling good.

You try

Make a *physical* recipe box for yourself or as a gift for someone else, as a resource for getting out of a funk. Make cards, each featuring a single activity. List any supplies or attitudes (e.g., bright optimism, heaps of sass) you need. Draw and follow a card to return to yourself.

Here are some recipe box themes to spark your imagination:

1 - Everyday Joys Recipe Box

from the Cozy Clarity Substack offers a mostly free list of simple joys. Her suggestion to rearrange furniture is a favorite. I adore moving a piece of furniture to a different room to give it new life.

Cozy Clarity

20 Small Things I've Done These Last Few Months to Feel Joy

Visited an adult arcade…

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4 months ago · 4 likes · Shelly

2 - Activist Recipe Box

I could have used this since the new year. I swore I’d pace myself, but have been grieving about all that’s playing out in Minneapolis, and enraged after watching people give awards to bullies.

Pick a few important causes. Start local. Write your recipe cards to include practical ways to support for them.

Indivisible’s Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink summarizes “what you, a regular person, can organize locally to do right now.” You can also look to suggestions from your local chapter.

Also, 80 great ideas here:

Stay Human - Shape Tomorrow

Stay Human: 80 Tiny Moves for Everyday Resistance in the Authoritarian Harm Complex

Please Support This Work…

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a year ago · 3569 likes · 74 comments · Paul T Shattuck, MSW, PhD

3 - No screens Recipe Box

’s Analog Toolkit has reminders of all that we’ve been doing without screens for millennia. I’m planning to use ideas from her list to create a recipe box for my tech-hungry tweens.

Fox Hollow

The Analog Project

Hello friends…

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5 months ago · 692 likes · 31 comments · Allyson at Fox Hollow

My ex also gifted our daughter Adam Ferguson’s The Things You Have to Do Before I Buy You a Phone for Christmas. That’s a recipe book on its own. One of the suggestions is to cook an entire meal from scratch for the family and clean up all of the dishes. Read the intro here.

I collaged a few cards for myself last night:

What recipes would your box include?

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I’ll start this gratitude post by thanking you, my small audience, for reading along with me. It’s been so rewarding for me to write down my thoughts and share my coaching approach. I’m touched by the engagement. I can’t wait to see what connections grow in the coming year.

With this post, and because it’s a time of year for deep reflection, I’d like to offer a journaling exercise focused on gratitude.

There are so many gratitude practices out there. You may have a really well established practice, and I’d love to hear what it is in the comments if you’re inclined to share. A collective and accessible practice here on Substack is - an email every weekday listing three good things, and an invitation for you to share your own.

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What I’m offering here is a deeper practice than just noticing the good things. Daily appreciation is vital and can totally change your outlook on your life. However, that approach can neglect the cloudier parts of life. Here, I’m going to ask you to sit with the parts of your life where you struggle to access gratitude.

Grab a pen and your journal, ground yourself in the present in a way that feels right for you, and work through the following prompts.

A journal exercise for accessing gratitude

• What does gratitude mean to you?

Now, look at the Wheel of Life, described further in this post. No need to do a deep dive on the wheel. I just want you to look at the life areas.

Once you’ve considered them:

• What is one area (or a few areas) of your life where you find it easy to access gratitude or give thanks? What makes it easy?

• If you identified a few areas of easy gratitude, what are some observations about what makes that gratitude come easily?

I’ve found working through this exercise with people that the areas where it is easy to access gratitude are effortless in some way – areas that naturally sparkle or areas where there’s already been long investment that’s paying off.

Now take a few deep breaths, shake out your body, and clear your mind.

• What’s one area (or a few areas of life) where you’re finding it challenging to access or express gratitude? What makes it difficult?

• If you identified a few areas of difficulty, what are some observations or themes in the areas of difficulty?

Pause and deeply breathe again.

• Now shift a bit – what opens up in your world if you access or express gratitude in that difficult area of life?

• Imagine effortlessly expressing gratitude in that challenging area. What could that look like for the next week?

This can look a lot of different ways. One example approach is to narrow the three-things-a-day practice just to that hard area for a week. If gratitude is hard, can you intentionally shift to neutrality for a week, rather than negativity?

The goal isn’t to sugar coat hard things, minimize difficulty, or wash things away with toxic positivity. Instead, I hope you can use your imagination to see what is possible if you can bring appreciation to something difficult.

For example, rather than just hating difficult parts of my day job, I can appreciate when I handle tough situations with grace, or appreciate the resourcefulness and practice I gain from encountering difficult situations in the future. When my heart unclenches, I can honor that my job pays the bills and keeps me sharp professionally.

How did this exercise work for you?

I wish you so much warmth this season.

Like many of us, I’ve been trying to get work done and take care of myself and raise my kids and garden amidst all the existential dread. It’s exhausting. It was exhausting before the last election, and has been unimaginably exhausting since.

I’ve been taking solace in the Wheel of Fortune tarot card recently because the world feels too wiggly right now, too full of negative possibility. The Wheel is one of the spirit tarot cards of every thing changes. The card signifies cycles and inevitable turns of fate, both positive and negative change. The card is also a reminder that however things are right now, they can change again. Life is in constant motion. every thing changes.

In the U.S. right now, I feel a bit like I’m sitting at a roulette table betting on black, and that the ball keeps landing on red. I’ll share one way this is playing out in my professional life. The Supreme Court recently reversed a court order that barred the administration from laying off employees en masse. This means that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts our weather and governs fishing in federal waters, and many other important federal agencies will lose more staff. Federal agencies and the people who depend on their services were already reeling from the loss of probationary staff and forced federal separations. Now the administration can proceed with gutting federal agencies even further. For my work in fisheries management, this means that critical federal work that supports fishing communities, protects marine species, and keeps mariners safe at sea will be even more impossible. There are more horrors things since I started writing this, including the Environmental Protection Agency announcing that it will eliminate its scientific research arm, and proposing to repeal the finding that allows the government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. We are entering a much deeper state of scarcity.

When I work with tarot and the Wheel comes up, one set of questions I ask is:

• What do you want to do with your new circumstances?

• Who do you want to be in the face of change?

• What is a past situations where you took lemons and made lemonade, or had lemonade and somehow turned it into more lemonade? What resources helped?

Now to the thing I’ve been saying a lot lately. I know how I want to show up – who I want to be while it feels like I keep getting bad spins, that this administration keeps destroying good, important things.

You first need to know that I’m a big true crime, disaster, and horror junkie. The story of the 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in the Andes has always fascinated me. In short – a chartered plane carrying 45 passengers from Uruguay to Chile crashed in the Andes. Sixteen people ultimately survived for 72 harrowing days in extreme conditions, including alpine exposure, starvation, and an avalanche. I saw the movie Alive when I was young, and have other reenactments, including the recent artistic and haunting depiction in Society of the Snow. Some of my favorite discussions of this tragedy were on two podcasts -- You’re Wrong About and Last Podcast on the Left. Both podcasts highlight that people often focus on the anthropophagy (inappropriately described as cannibalism) in the story, when the true marvel is the incredible care and humanity the survivors displayed to each other throughout their unimaginable ordeal.

At one point in this story, 16 days after the crash, the survivors hear over the radio that rescuers suspended their search for the crash site. One survivor, Carlitos Paez, recounts a pivotal conversation he had following the news:

Gustavo Nicolich - who later died in the avalanche - told me: 'Carlitos, I have good news to give you: I just heard on the Chilean radio that they are not looking for us anymore.' I said 'How good news, son of the great ...?!' and he replied: 'This is good news because now we depend on ourselves and not on outsiders.'

If I think about 47 years later, I realize that that was the moment when we realized where we were standing and that we had to call on our own resources to save ourselves. It was when we stopped waiting and started acting.

That story, that conversation is what I’ve been telling everyone about how I want to be.

As a long-time federal employee, I used to trust way too too much in the missions of our federal institutions. I know the federal government is clunky and has a *very* checkered track record, but I was part of it. I believed that our institutions, our collective decisions as a society, though imperfect, were always sllllooowwwwllly shifting towards a greater good. As I watch it all crumble, that faith isn’t just impossible anymore, it’s dangerous.

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That’s why for me right now, Gustavo Nicholich’s energy is where it’s at. No institution is going to save me, the ocean, my family and those I love, anyone right now. There’s no more government to yell at to right imbalances or to intervene with the services we all need. There’s not an adult in the room.

And so, this is where my Wheel of Fortune questions come in. What do I want to do in these circumstances? Who do I want to be in the face of this change? What kind of lemonade should I make? [Insert pee joke.]

If the government is being wildly, irrationally awful, I can match that energy in the opposite direction. I can try to be wildly creative and solution-oriented in response. I’m older now, and more powerful in my career, and want to stand in my agency to weather this turn of the wheel instead of feeling hopeless. I’m mostly thinking about this in my fisheries management work, but it is equally true in other parts of my life. Fish Forward was one of the ways I started acting. There were hopeful fish and seafood stories to tell, people still fighting the great fight, and no space to gather them, so we made that space. I’m now learning how to use my professional weight in fisheries other ways. One is I’m teaming up with like-minded people to do the work I think needs to be done and that the government can (and maybe should) no longer do.

Fish Forward

Who is Aja and what is Fish School?

In the next few posts, Jamie and I will introduce ourselves and the concepts behind some of the forms Fish Forward will take. I’ll go first…

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a year ago · 9 likes · Aja

I chose to show the Wheel of Fortune card from the Modern Goddess Tarot deck in this post because the imagery matches how my grounding and active response is playing out. Lately, I’ve found inspiration in community – in spaces where people are ready to sit down with some caffeine and a notebook and get to work. The people who have given me life lately are those who are done waiting to be saved, who are done complaining that they are being wronged (because we’ve been wronged for SO LONG) or lamenting that it could be done better, and who are ready to start acting.

In moments when the world keeps bringing you down, what do you center yourself? Who are people that you emulate when shit hits the fan? What qualities do they have that inspire you? What power and skills do you already have to draw on? What resources do you need to shift yourself out of desperation and into action?

And if nothing else, I can hold it in my heart that the wheel will keep turning, and we’re just as likely to get a winning spin next time.

Resources:

• Links to Alive and Society of the Snow above in the article.

• An excellent journal article that analyzes the Flight 571 crash to draw conclusions about how resilience is cultivated, and how to maintain resilience in high-stakes situations. Kijan Vakilzadeh, Sebastian Raetze, Enacting project resilience: Insights from Uruguayan air force flight 571′s crash in the Andes, International Journal of Project Management, Volume 43, Issue 1, 2025, 102677, ISSN 0263-7863, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2025.102677.

• All of the podcasts that I listened to on this story. One part on You’re Wrong About. A long (and less clean) 3-part series from The Last Podcast on the Left.

• If you prefer story format and no cursing, check out this 4-part series from Against the Odds:

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