Change of Heart: Spring Life Update Edition
The flowers have been blooming, and I have been... sitting
This week, in lieu of an essay… a bit of a life update (which should explain why I don’t have an essay for you). Happy spring!
Hello, patient readers! It is April! It is officially springtime! It is a week in which I do not have a change-of-heart essay for you!
Many of you know already know one of the primary reasons for this lapse, which is that I recently returned from an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica—a trip for which I left my laptop, blessedly, at home, and an experience that reorganized the filing cabinet of my brain thoroughly enough that my creative writing has been even slower-going than usual. (Kind of. I did just spit out a 3,000-word rough rough draft about the experience, which will likely eventually show up in this newsletter. But when I say rough rough, I mean it, so don’t expect to see it anytime soon.)
Since I got home, I’ve been focusing on getting my life back in order, picking up the pace on work (there’s no such thing as paid time off when you're freelance, so I’m playing catch-up), and reconnecting with loved ones, all while trying to inhabit more of the space and stillness I discovered for myself while I was down there. I spent so much time on retreat just sitting—not meditating, not reading, and not even doing what is sometimes called “sitting with” ayahuasca itself. I mean literally, physically sitting and looking at the jungle and thinking nothing. It was heavenly. And it’s a way of being that feels totally out of reach for me here in the confines of my “real life” in the States. (Our culture hasn’t really caught onto the human beings, not human doings thing. See also: America’s century-long struggle to enact a four-day workweek.)
Anyway, TL;DR: I don’t have an essay for you this week. But I do have a lot of love for everyone who’s subscribed to this newsletter and who believes in the power and importance of changes of heart! And also, as a consolation prize, some photos from Costa Rica.
In the meantime, I’ve been lucky enough to have a few long-awaited creative publications cluster all at once, along with a few pieces of journalism I’m proud of:
Fourth Genre published “Dessert,” the leading essay from my memoir-in-essays’ manuscript (as it stands—it, too, is likely to see substantial evolution before it’s ready for public consumption).
The Spectacle published “Stone Fruit,” another of my favorite pieces of the in-progress book.
I had a couple of deep pandemic-era poems about death and stuff (🙃) come out in 9VT\5’s anthology, Still Dripping. The edition is limited to 100 copies, so if you’d like one, best snatch it up soon!
For ValuePenguin, I’ve been writing in the (depressing but important) medical news space, covering crowdfunded organ transplants and the very stupid Alabama Supreme Court ruling’s potential ramifications for IVF.
On a far lighter note, I had the pleasure of covering the Greyhound Walking Club (it is what it sounds like) for Willamette Week.
I was also promoted in January to Assistant Editor over at The Rumpus, where I’ve been a reader for almost a decade. It’s such a joy to find diamonds in the rough and help essayists shine up their already-sparkling words—and I’ve just begun the editing process with a writer whose work I absolutely cannot wait to share with you; it’s gorgeous.
Also, at the risk of being repetitive: I’d love (love!) to feature your work here, too. If you’ve got an essay, story, poem, comic, song, audio clip, or interpretive dance about a time you’ve changed your mind, please send it (complete drafts only) to changeofheart@substack.com. Contributors are paid, though it’s not much (since it comes directly out of my pocket for now). Psst—if you’d like to support the effort, consider upgrading your subscription to paid or just sharing the newsletter with a friend.
I hope spring is bringing big renewals (and plenty of just-sitting opportunities) to all of you.
<3
Jamie
Love all of this. Congratulations on the publications! Brava!