REFLECTIONS FROM A YEAR OF GROWTH

 January 5, 2022 // From a tethered god newsletter

+ folklore is regional + embodied

I’m remembering the beginning of these newsletters and other internet interactions, feverishly trying to keep convey the flowing of times through various holy days, folk traditions, and seasonal celebrations of old. Many of these were within the scope of my own lineages and felt personal to me, but not necessarily intimate - not things I always practiced myself and not even necessarily how the flow of my own brain works to map time. Since then, I’ve noticed myself leaning away from the habit of conveying folk culture with clarity & precision, even in my own life and personal practice. This feels like a fitting journey for someone who engaged with this type of academia for years before leaving — I love precision, but what actually feeds me is the feeling, so I find myself practicing more yet talking/thinking/writing less.

As I continue to take on my own endeavors built on foundations of reverence for these ways of the people (and a discernment for what they can and cannot teach us) I am getting curious about what happens when we convey folklore & folk culture as such structured, precise, and monolithic ideas. Or even monolithic ideas of cultures themselves. One of my own desire for engaging with my lineages (and the desire of many other folks I know) is to disrupt the myth of homogeneous whiteness, which also channels into the destructive myth of white supremacy. Folk traditions, regions, and origins within the many cultures of what we could consider whiteness are actually incredibly diverse — and something about the conveying of large ideas about folk culture over the small texts of social media has been falling short in this diversity for me lately. Some questions I’m working with recently are: how can I practice my lineages in a way that is as nuanced, complex, and regional as they are? How can I move from conveying clarity to living embodiment in the practices of my life & my business? How do I work with integrity at the intersection of folk culture and capitalism? How do I continue to divest from & betray whiteness at every turn? How can I hold myself accountable to the slowness of deep, ancestral time as resistance against extractive capitalism?

+ the deep wholisticness of health

This past year - aside from being growthful and beautiful - was also incredibly difficult, some months more than others. There were some deep health challenges that came up for me in both new and old ways, asking me to truly rework and then embody my understanding of what words like health and wellness and wholistic actually mean. Herbal medicine at it’s core strives to be a wholistic modality - meaning it focuses on the whole body & it’s many interlocking pathways in order to support health, rather than merely working from a symptom-management lens. As herbalism moves more and more into the limelight and gets more and more co-opted by capitalism, I see this insistence on wholistic modalities slipping more and more (looking at you, $12 chaga latte consumed with occasionality and fervor and probably made by someone not paid a living wage). I have so much more to write on these ideas soon, but for now I want to center how deeply intertwined our systems of emotional and physical health truly are - and how tied into all of these are our systems of spiritual health, community health, ancestral health, and so on. 

+ neurodivergence & expectations

Along the journey of growing health issues came the realization of just how deeply ableist our culture truly is, and more specifically here, how much small business rhetoric is engrossed in messages of neurotypicality. It’s no secret that I can be a perfectionist (a recovering one I hope!), and watching the interactions of these attitudes with my tendencies around performance, expectations, and timelines illuminated my own internalized ableism in so many new ways. So many of these perfectionist & ableist ideals ask us to sidestep our own authenticity and ignore our own patterns of ebb and flow. It is a myth that we need always be articulate, coherent, or even productive at all (a myth that seems particularity present in the hustle-till-you-make-it small business world). This year I am trying to embrace more imperfection and more authenticity — which probably means less productivity, less consistency. A good business move? Probably not. A move that will deeply enrich my life and health? Most definitely.

SOME MILESTONES FROM THE PAST YEAR

+ Teaching in-person classes & building a medicinal garden space as tender-in-residence at LICHEN Center, a place close to my heart that is growing and flourishing.

+ Working with the incredibly folks over at Folklore for Resistance to be apart of the first issue of their zine — which I will forever recommend. 

+ In addition to teaching some of my first online classes this year (both on my own & with the amazing Megan McGuire), there were some truuuuuuly incredible opportunities to further my own education. It feels like there are too many to name here, but some highlights for me were courses with Sophie Macklin, olivia ephraim pepper, Ancestral Apothecary, wildbody, and Jillian Hyllantree Twisla. This year was truly a year of feeling blessed with the sharing capacity of the internet (and some Zoom fatigue). 

+ A grand total of $399 given in mutual aid over the past year to organizations that are run by or centered by BIPOC, LGBTQIA, or two-spirit folks. 

+ Beyond the confines of “growing an audience”, this little endeavor grew in its connection. It has been nothing short of a blessing to interact with more and more folks over the topics that I center here, and the encouragement from my own community has truly helped me sink into a physical place I am relatively new to. So all the wordiness of this newsletter really boils down to one thing - thank YOU for being here. It makes it all so, so worth the while. It makes me believe in things bigger and broader beyond us all, even in these times of immense pain.

Catelynn (she/her) is first and foremost a compassionate and ever-evolving human & threshold tender -- beyond that, she is an herbalist with a framework rooted in experience, emergence, reciprocity, and nuance. Her approach to mental health & grief-positivity came through years of formal training in direct care mental health and end-of-life work, filtered through the lens of her own experiences with mental illness and the lack of holistic & critical spaces provided for these experiences. This all led to an underlying philosophy of interdependent listening, growing, and healing.

Her herbal practice thrives through a structure of support from ancestral reverence, death tending, folk practice, ceremonial research & resistance, wonder, and disruptive queerness. Her toolkit is deeply indebted to the labor of activists & educators of abolition, radical mental health, and body-based healing modalities such as somatics.

Catelynn’s approach to education aims to be non-hierarchical and responsive to indescrepencies in power, presented in a way that is trauma-informed and steeped in reciprocity. Her offerings are life & death honoring both. You can find the hub of her work at atetheredgod.com, or on Instagram as @atetheredgod. She lives, tends, and bakes lots of treats on both Penobscot & Southern Sámi lands, although her heart is forever scaffolded by the saltmarsh magic of Timucua territory.