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I can change the world, with my own two hands
Make it a better place, oh, with my own two hands
Make it a kinder place, with my own two hands
With my own
With my own two hands
I wrote this piece a few months back. And y’all when I say I needed to read it this morning after many months of being pulled from my writing for my paid work. I hope it inspires you as it has me.
This newsletter is a special ritual for me. After I light the candles at my altar and sip my morning coffee, I channel - hands to heart, and then hands to keyboard - all that’s been incubating within me. I conjure up all of the inspiration that’s been nourishing my spirit throughout the week. All of the ways the organic energy of life has touched me and held me and (paradoxically) how life also breaks me, how it transforms me, and moves me. I write to feel. I write to share my humanity. I write it for myself first. And then I offer it to you, dear reader, without any expectations, just joy to share what supports me and guides me and deepens me on this journey of being alive.
It’s interesting that I write these weekly love notes that my Nana calls my “column,” because I come from a newspaper family. My Grandaddy was raised in a newspaper family and he grew up to be the owner and editor of the Gladewater Mirror, the town newspaper where my family resides in East Texas. I grew up seeing my grandfather write. He was a writer of stories and songs and musicals. Perpetually holding a book in his hands or back pocket. This inspired me to be a voracious reader and writer at a young age. It is he who I would gift my stories to as a child, and I suppose I still do that in my writing today, this craft an ode to my special ancestor.
I’ll always cherish the pieces he wrote about family and community, the hand written guitar lessons he sent me in the mail, and the way I can still see his hands in my mother’s.
Writing has been one of the key practices to help me find my way back to my magic. Sounds about right for a Virgo;) I write because it helps me remember that my hands, my body, have the power to create something that’s life affirming. I can gather up all of the love and liberation that I’m witnessing and processing and praising, and bring it into a physical form. This newsletter is simply an offering that I lay out with my two hands. Something that might provide nourishment to my community. Love notes for you and me and the stars. For the sunflowers and babies and hummingbirds. For the clouds and poets and dreamers. For the waters. For remembering our earth’s preciousness. For each of our preciousness.
And we all make this offering in our own way. We all come from deeply creative beings who showed the world what it means to be human with their own hands.
My Nana’s hands, who never tire of tickling my back or loving on her plants with her green thumb. I’ll never forget the way she laid my body on her lap when I was about four years old, soothing me with her touch after the family dog passed away. I can still feel that comfort and love on my skin right now, even though she’s thousands of miles away. I can feel that comfort especially when my heart breaks.
I grew up seeing my mom, who was also shaped within the newspaper household, holding a camera or busying her hands in the dark room. I’ve always seen her as a true artist, with sometimes stained fingers and supplies strewn frantically about, unafraid of and unbothered by the mess of her creations. And I love how she honors what she finds precious through her photography. Like this photo of her son and grandson, my brother and baby nephew. A physical representation of such tenderness between father and child that gets to bless our family beyond this fleeting moment.
I grew up seeing my dad holding tools and crafting homes with his bare hands. I remember being fascinated by the way he would cut stone tile pieces to match each other perfect as a puzzle and then he’d smooth wet grout over the tile like paint on canvas. I’m in awe of how he has the ability to build not just any home, but a beautiful home with his hands and the wood from the land around him, a truly wild and loving way of supporting his family. And I’m also in awe of how these gifts were passed down so effortlessly to both of my brothers just by watching our Daddy work.
I grew up seeing my Mimi sewing stunning quilts and cooking up delicious gumbo. I’ll never forget the way she would tenderly cut my brothers’ hair and wash mine. And the way she would take care of her hands with milky moisturizer and pretty nail polish. I think of her when I care for my own skin and nails. And I can taste her devotion to those she loves when I cook for my friends and family.
I didn’t realize until adulthood that I come from deeply creative people. These creative practices weren’t always their jobs, but they were always their crafts.
I believe that all of us come from creative people. Creating our lives with our hands is deeply human. What I’ve learned over the past few years from being in my own practice of craft is that:
Craft work is soul work. It’s healing work. It’s culture work.
I place my hands on my heart. And then I write. And the whole process brings me closer to myself. Closer to the world. Closer to god.
It is through our hands that we craft our entire lives: how we cook and feed ourselves, the way we touch our beloveds and tuck our babies and our dreams in at night, how we scoop up a newborn fresh out of the womb, how we wash and prepare our dead. We use our hands to sort this from that, to reach for what we desire. Our hands bring our life force up and out of our bodies, our hands, a blossoming garden of the heart space. We even have whole languages with our hands through dance and ASL and all kinds of other gestures.
As you read this email, notice your hands. What have your hands been up to lately?
What miracles have they touched?
What if we remembered that love flows through these hands? That heart magic flows through these hands?
I pray that today your hands meet the skin of those you love. Even if it’s in your imagination.
I pray you plant your hands in the earth.
I pray that together we reach our hands to those who most need it.
I pray that together we craft the world of our hearts.
I love y’all
🌻 Josie
Sunday Soul Nourishment is the free weekly version of the Starlit Soil newsletter.
I am endlessly grateful to each of you for your presence here. Your support and sharing is so appreciated.