The Social Studyz newsletter is a mix of question starters for building community, how I’m practicing it myself, and the occasional update on how I'm building this all in real time.
Hi in-betweener,
This week: we’re slowing down. Learning the names of the plants we encounter every day, staying for the whole out breath, and looking at birds on purpose.
Rare bird sightings abound:
🌀 what we’re spiraling out about this week
Spiraling thoughts are the ones we think on repeat, or that send us straight down a rabbit hole at 3am. Each week, one of us shares, so we can all normalize the spiral instead of pretending we're not having one. Have a spiraling thought you’d like to share? We’d love to feature it.
🚨🚨In-betweener share 🚨🚨
People of the modern world are not aware of nature at all. They don’t notice the plants around them, don’t know them by name, or how to tend them. Over the last hundred years we have left the earthly world for a technological one, and we have lost the vital connection to that which sustains us. The greatest fallacy of modernity is that man was made to rule the earth, when in reality we belong to a fragile, killable ecosystem.
How did the Fertile Crescent become a desert? What turned a jungle into the Sahara? What was the final blow in the fall of Rome? What happened to the vast pre-Colonial cities of the Americas? Why does the Gobi Desert continue to expand? Degradation of natural resources is often linked with civilization collapse. This is the history of mankind as it has been documented for several millenium. Conquering nature is not our destiny, it is our demise. To sustain our lives, and the lives of all living beings, we must preserve and proliferate biodiversity, or perish in a wasteland of our making.
asking for a friend
Can you name a plant or tree you pass every day?
Don’t know her? Take a picture and look it up.
Then, introduce yourself and give her a nickname.
We won’t tell anyone it’s Winifred.
🧮 the connection equation
A tip or practice we’ve tried in our quest to build community — broken down for you to steal.
Every Sunday at 2:00pm, I take Kimberlee’s yoga class. She knows everyone’s name, and her sequencing is slow: longer holds, a long warm-up, no rushing. One cue she gives often is “stay for the out breath.” Use your whole breath to arrive in the pose, and only once the exhale is complete, move into the next one.
What if we stayed for the out breath with the people we love?
In yoga, there are two ways to miss the out breath: leave the pose early (before the breath is complete), or rush through it (force the breath too quickly). I think we do both with each other. We leave each other — moving, muting, unfollowing, going “no contact”. Or rush each other – rushing someone to reply to the text, rushing them to the end of their sentence, rushing ourselves to an opinion, to a decision, to the next thing.
I catch myself doing both. A loved one has an opinion about AI I don’t agree with. Someone makes a decision I wouldn’t have made. Someone else plays their music too loud, which feels inconsiderate of everyone around them. And once I’ve decided what I think, leaving feels reasonable. But the reality is that at some point, we all feel this way about each other. I’m almost certainly someone’s too-loud music.
To be clear, I’m not saying we should stay in relationships that harm us, or in conflict that only goes in circles. That takes discernment. But for the everyday friction, what does it look like to stay?
For me, it’s slowing down. It’s taking a full breath, in and out. It’s asking about an opinion before arguing with it. It’s asking a question about a behavior instead of making an assumption. It’s choosing patience. It’s leaving a little more space before I decide what someone means. When someone isn’t responding as quickly, or in the way I’d like, I stay anyway. And that is the practice: we stay all the way to the end of the out breath with each other, and then transition into the next move together.
Who is a loved one you’ve been quick to move on from, and what would it look like to stay for the out breath with them?
🌟 come sit with us
Grab a tray, we'll catch you up. Sharing what's new, what's coming, and what you get for being at the table. All the good gossip lives here.
Last call for this Saturday’s bird walk, and the pumpkin tasting is two weeks out. Pick your soupy middle activity.
Winging It: A Bird Walk — a guided morning bird walk in the Sepulveda Basin. Beginners welcome, and binoculars provided.
The Great (TJ's) Pumpkin Tasting — a wine and pumpkin-food tasting with an official ballot, because pumpkin bisque vs. pumpkin tamales deserves your competitive streak more than your family group chat does.
Grab a spot
🗓️ Saturday, October 10, 9:00am - Winging It: A Bird Walk
🗓️ Saturday, October 24, 4:00pm - The Great (TJ’s) Pumpkin Tasting
Looking forward to meeting you in the soupy middle,
Lauren