Loam Loves: April

tayla shanaye on cultivating endurance and tending attention

Apr 01, 2024

PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN

Loam Love is a series within our Substack. Each month, we share a curated missive from one of our contributors on some of the perspectives and projects that are shaping their current praxis.

In celebration of the launch of “Nourishing the Nervous System” this Spring (you can find the PDF here), we are sharing a missive from integral somatic decolonial counselor and relational educator tayla shanaye. As the author of “Nourishing the Nervous System” and “Locate Your Liberate,” tayla has been conjuring healing lifeways with us for many years.

WHAT I’M GRAPPLING WITH

Since completing the new introduction to Nourishing the Nervous System (2024), I’ve been thinking a lot about patterns of endurance - or this idea I’m gestating about how our bodies and nervous systems are patterned and therefore shaped by historical, intergenerational, and personal efforts toward endurance. I’m thinking about the shapes I’ve taken when endurance has only been linked to suffering, heartache, burden and wondering what it feels like to endure from a new place. What it’s like to choose to endure, to say a full ‘yes’ to each moment. What endurance is like when it’s a re-claiming of the atrophied muscles of connection instead of the hyper-individualized exercise of martyrdom.

Patterns of endurance can be created both by experiences of trauma and traditions of resiliency. Perhaps the difference goes something like this - the pattern of burden-laden endurance breaks our backs in our knuckling down, whereas the pattern of choice-buoyed endurance curves our attention in reverential prostration. The latter gives us something to drape ourselves over, the former makes us the table upon which struggle is placed.

I don’t know if that makes sense, but my body, my spine, feels the logic.

WHAT I’M READING

Thank you Cole Arthur Riley for the medicine that is Black Liturgies. I’m not someone raised inside any organized religion. My battle scars with religious indoctrination come from the periphery of Christianity. The ways these ideals have seeped into the water table and my efforts to parse out the value of spirituality from the poisons of rigid dogma has brought me fatigue and freedom. I have never prayed in a church. I’ve never read the gospels as guidance. And so, I pick up this book everyday as an oracle, an opportunity to reflect and give my attention over to spirit in ways that feel both emergently familiar and foreign. Prayers for liberation, justice, the body, and awe sweep me clear. It feels a bit clunky - my relationship with a liturgical text— but it seems sometimes like Riley knows that, and welcomes me nonetheless. Holy books for our times…may we all find something that soothes.

WHAT I’M TENDING

You ever have a dream deferred, just to have it re-emerge when you’re better equipped to care for the life you’ve been praying for? I’m in that moment right now, and it’s requiring me to learn how to honor my yes. Life does its thing in glorious and mysterious ways and I’m here tending my attention to such mystery. As if to remind myself over and over again that I can dream big and get big enough to house the dream.

I keep returning to the idea of creating pockets of freedom. Spaces in which we can reckon, rest, and return to the all of it all…can I tend a place, space, and pace for these pockets to exist? Can I grant myself perpetual permission to exist, and allow it to be contagious? Can I give up my “knowing” to dream again? In the chaos of this moment…in the devastation and pain and suffering…can I keep dreaming? Can I dream enough to care for the life I’ve been praying for?

WHAT I’M MAKING

Bread. Since the start of the pandemic, I became one of those sourdough people…and now I’m fully in love with the process of making bread. The loving and visceral art of caring for sourdough starters and making decadent tear-and-share monkey breads. I keep thinking about my great-grandmother who was a phenomenal baker. I see her hands in mine every time I break a sweat kneading dough by hand. I feel these parts of me come alive when I pop something warm and beautiful out of a baking dish. Whether I make it for my family or to give away, something of a love language gets activated in me. The craft of homemade bread connects me to so many people on this planet. To the mothers and grandmothers that speak care with warm bread and welcome connection over the music of cracking crust. It becomes a place to surrender. A moment of remembrance. A treat to both my body and my spirit. A prayer for those without. A link I refuse to let become forgotten. A nourishment I no longer seek to outsource. An act of beauty. Delicious.

WHAT I’M CARING FOR

Mothering has become such a blessed dance (sweaty, relentless, damn cute and awkward). These little humans are just something to behold. Keeping them alive is a full-time job that tickles and challenges me in equal measure. Almost 5 and almost 1 has me caring for the adult they will become and the child I once was. They make me time travel. Watching them make friends, develop trust, melt down over uncut toast and try to recover from a fall is just bizarre and humbling. I am noticing my awareness stretch so I can feel and taste the way time is not linear. I see the children in all the adults I encounter, and the adult in the children I steward. I’m both tethered and unmoored by the act of parenting. The surrender into a mutual becoming. The uncertainty and clarity in a breath. Both/and. Caring for small people is a prayer. It’s an act of devotion, not just to the children, but to ourselves. It takes a tenacity and grit that I didn’t know I had…Sometimes I don’t think I can do it. Sometimes, I don’t want to. I wake up some days saying “I don’t want to be a mother today” and then, you know, I do it but with permission to be a bit more me, not just mom.

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