Please Be Properly Scandalized
Alarmingly loose pavillions of women and a note on pausing paid subscriptions
Dear loves,
I’m always worried my posts - personal and whimsical as they are - read as trad-wifey, naive, gaslighty, etc. Don’t look at the collapse of democracy! Look at my children’s play dough!! So much of online life is dominated by alarmist headlines blasted at the volume I started this newsletter to avoid. At the time, I needed to tend what was on my mind and heart in spite of the world’s tyranny, greed, weaponized binaries troubles, and wanted whenever possible to lean into the timeless parts of me. Some of these parts had been covered over in the lumps and bumps of finding my footing in the world and, in a proper middle age passage, I had some subtracting to do.
When I started Under a Spell, I was also in the middle of a series of brain surgeries. I don’t know if you can imagine this, but that scenario threw me into certain existential crises. Luckily, I had been practicing transitions for a while, so when genuine, inescapable pressure visited me in the form of a large (benign) brain tumor, I found that my life-long habits of staring at the light pouring into various rooms, walking in the woods spotting turtles and writing bad poetry, enthusiastically crying through countless yoga poses and studios and playlists, and trying off and on (and off again) meditation at various points had really meant something to me all along. They weren’t just nice background music as I went about the business of real life. I could suddenly see that these pursuits were the backbone of who I was. So much, in fact, that it felt like a moral imperative to turn down the volume on nearly everything else and turn up the volume on those things.
In that adjustment, I found a lot of magic and places inside I could return to whenever my mind felt fractured, my soul and body too heavy to attempt any sort of organized dance. I’m telling you this because I want to provide context for this space. The journey of discovering (and rediscovering, again and again) a self - what makes a person happy, what makes a person wobble - gives me the courage (some might say self-absorption) to be so focused. If my hope is to throw light into the world, I also accept that to some I appear willfully obtuse.
And I do fear I appear that way sometimes. Wow, who gives a shit what that lady’s favorite color is!! (sayeth readers everywhere.) But, in the spirit of a child who lets you into their soft, sunlit afternoon, I offer these glimpses into my days. Not to put myself centrally but to center the human heart, the things that tether me here on the earth. It’s my hope that these missives also connect you to what tethers your sweet bones here.
And/but I have decided to pause paid subscriptions for a bit. First of all, I have been feeling badly for a while that when I first invited paid subscriptions to this newsletter, I was writing much more frequently - at first daily, then bi-weekly, then weekly. Now I’m writing the other kind of bi-weekly - every two weeks (there’s a bisexual joke in here but I’m too lazy to find it right now). I am certain you will be hearing from me, possibly just as frequently as before. But I have been feeling that a paywall doesn’t serve my missions right now, or as much as it did before, and I want to explore what it will feel like to show up when I have something to say, or a picture/joke/thrift store find I simply can’t keep to myself. As I said, perhaps that will be just as frequently as before, and I’m also contemplating some kind of system where part of all of paid subscriptions go towards movements for our collective good: gun safety measures in the U.S., mental health advocacy, or righting imbalances of inequity across our shared histories.
For those of you who have been supporting me faithfully, I am so grateful that you continue to “vote” for me in this way, especially as I have faced hard days after moving from my beloved town while still asking who the hell I am after my first brain surgery. It was a true, though vulnerable, delight to examine my life so closely, to find joy in so many unexpected places, in spite of all the continued invitations to growth. You all played so willingly, humored all my pictures and rapid-fire ideas some days. I know we will keep exploring the full spectrum of growing up and growing old together, how we might all carry the mix of our potential along with our burdens and challenges. This is not goodbye so much as a pause to see where I’d like to take Under a Spell in this next phase of my significantly more stabilized life (thank goddess).
I know this pause also makes a little space for a novel-in-progress that’s been with me a long time, which I’m determined to finish this year. (I hope God’s not laughing as she hears this plan.) I’m also developing off-screen as a life coach and re-watering some of my oldest roots. (I finally found a yoga teacher I respect, hallelujah!) I will try to give you a heads up if and when I consider turning back on paid subscriptions.
A final note about growing old - it has been my experience that many ancestors visit me in story. They want to show me things, and they want me to show you, too. Part of what they illuminate for me is that behind the voices hijacking the earth’s wide narrative (and blowing parts of our lands to smithereens) a love and wholesome power is stitched through everything. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the benevolence I find when I switch certain dials in my mind - not away from suffering but toward opening, learning, and laying down the weapons my nervous system still carries. It’s a solace then, to spend time with these stories, to track the light falling across my carpet like all of us falling across the years. Even and sometimes especially when my life feels hard, writing always helps me see something in a way I hadn’t seen before. My hope will always be that the small snippets of my days invite new visions and pathways of thought for you and your loved ones, too.
With that long preamble, we’ve got a show to put on. Onward! To the legendary (and hopefully vintage) animals that surround us all.
When I look back on the first half of January, I see mostly highlights - sledding, making sugar cookies, a paint by numbers nutcracker this authoress slayed. If you want an ego boost, paint a kit next to children who think you are the second coming of Michelangelo. How did you even incarnate into this town mama omg can I kiss the ring???
I have forgotten essential narrative elements, however: where I fell on my face, what evil things I said to my partner in moments of duress (smiles with a combination of Cindy Lou Who and The Grinch). I do remember that one morning Tim came home from dropping a kid at school and reported: “Someone tried to turn LEFT out of the school driveway. Please be properly scandalized!”
I had just been reading a steady drip of international news. My skin was truly on fire. I needed and deeply appreciated a joke, the detail of someone ignoring a posted sign and a really busy road while a long line of other impatient parents in idling cars grew behind them. My son told me that someone in his life crochets with “alarmingly loose” stitches. I laughed and thought, should Alarmingly Loose be the title of my next post? What can I report on that would qualify - besides my country’s grip on ethics and international law? Point being that when Tim joked about traffic patterns, I was absolutely and properly scandalized by the news.
This Friday night I unceremoniously made pancakes and burned one so badly my son asked for water. “I can smell the char, but I can’t taste it,” he said helpfully. Another night this week, I baked some yam chips. Everyone agreed, “These are much better than the other ones you burned.” As the daughter of someone devoted to burning every roll warming in the oven, my work here is done.
We celebrated Tim’s birthday. I didn’t know what to get him. I gave him two books (Zadie Smith’s newest essays and Kevin Moffet’s first novel Only Son). The kids got him socks. I’m not sure we did great but I think we had a fun weekend. At one point after a miscalculation on my part we went to The Peanut Shop downtown (a Lansing institution) that smells like warm vegetable oil and is confusingly tiny. We were waited on by someone I am confident has met only one person in his young life with hair actually greater hair than his, and that person is/was Tim. While helping us pick out chocolate-covered clusters of various sugars, the excellently coiffed person stared helplessly at Tim as if he were a celebrity.
He is to us!
I do not feel like I’ve put enough into this letter. Have not divulged enough, have not asked enough of your brains. And/but I want to send this out because I like to check in with you. As mentioned above, some things are growing internally and externally (don’t worry, not a baby, thank goodness, lol and PHEW). One thing I like about getting older is that I can hear my internal rhythms much more clearly. It is sometimes easy to obey. Not always, but much more frequently than before. That’s nice. It’s nice to understand your own earth, to know when to dance and when to be quiet. This is a season of small quiets for me. I am enjoying the space for hushes right now.
From my desk where I write and stare out the window, the snow coming and going and coming like all my meditation habits, I am sending you special occasion sparkle and the gentleness to listen well. What is calling to you these days? What (quietly) asks your obeyance?
With lots of love and even more coffee,
Xoxo
Kara
P.S. One of my children castigated me for writing this post for you instead of reading with them on the couch. “You need to be reading! It’s more important than writing.”
This was the title given to me:
Only you can say if my efforts were worth it. The next morning I was asked first thing out of nowehere, “Is War and Peace a real book?”
It looks like the Michigan Chillers series isn’t ruining all literary thoughts in this household. Phew!
We’re pretty much Kara Norman fans for life, so pay, don’t pay, buy your books, require rooster lamp pickups? We’ll be here with you. xoxo
Friend, just want you to know how much these posts of yours help me to breath easier during these times. The way in which you share about adventures big and small gives me access to a kind of joy that increasingly eludes my grasp here as a solo entity. That said, entirely support you writing at your own pace and listening within for how to manage UaS. Just know that you always put in enough of just the right stuffing for this reader. 🦄💖🌈💞🦄