My battery is low and it's getting dark.

Will I dream?

Friday, March 17, 2023—Waning crescent moon in Capricorn/Aquarius

My tiny phone camera and I don’t often manage to capture the moon so clearly. It was a cold, blustery, cloud-strewn night a few months ago, but recording this moody image was worth the frozen face and fingers.

Hello loves,

I have a brief, gentle letter for you this week.

In February of 2019, my son told me that NASA was declaring the Mars Rover Opportunity mission complete. We’re a family of space-fascinated science nerds, so this was important information. The Rover had stopped transmitting in June 2018, after spending its original mission duration of 90 days plus an additional and unexpected 15 years (60 lifetimes!) roving the surface of Mars.

He told me the ever-inventive internet was quoting Opportunity’s last message to NASA as, "My battery is low and it's getting dark, will I dream?"

¹

My twenty-year-old son then said he thought this story was both sad and strangely beautiful.

I agreed.

The story and my son’s response splashed together and became a slow-acting catalyst. In January 2021 a poem draft nudged itself through my hands onto paper.

It’s such a numinous experience to notice a poem brush the back of my mind.

If I pause and make space for it, I will feel the life of this poem—the words and spaces and music of it—move across my brain, down my throat and heart and out through my hands. The sensation is breathtaking in the best possible way.

This practice of noticing then making poetry feeds me, steadies me, fills my well. My art is a huge part of how I stay resilient. Or, if life has happened with unusual vigor (that never happens, right? Insert eye roll here.) and I’m sideways on the sofa, it’s a big part of how I restore my resilience.

I’m curious. How do you fill your well and/or restore your resilience?

With gentle, restorative thoughts,

Tracie

tracienichols.com

Ways we can write together this spring

Listening With Our Bodies: Writing Toward Resilience

April 19-May 10, 2023

This gentle four-week virtual adventure into listening with our bodies is for people feeling stretched, overwhelmed, scattered—as if they are rice paper thin, or maybe sideways on the sofa.

Facilitators, coaches, counselors, activists, educators, writers, poets, students, word artists of all kinds—this is an invitation to explore the ways you listen with your body and discover how your way of noticing affects the steadiness of your resilience. 

Over the course of our time together, in the online class space and optional Zoom meetings, we will use our love of language coupled with multi-sensory exercises to connect more deeply with our senses and explore our noticing patterns.

Saturday Writing Circles (We next meet tomorrow, March 18th and all March 2023 Saturday Writing Circles are free!)

We meet virtually on the 1st and 3rd Saturday every month from 10 am to 11:30 am New York time. These circles are islands of respite and joyful, kind community.

In this circle, we write to remember—and to celebrate—our Selves in the face of an off-kilter world.

1. This was a poetic, though inaccurate, interpretation of a data stream reporting a sharp, and eventually fatal, decrease in light to the rover’s solar panels from a dust storm.