Where I've Been

and what I've been up to...

It has been a while.

I’ve been here, in our sweet old house in the “Great North,” as I call it.

I’ve been occupied with a variety of things: taking care of stuff for my mom; building out my coaching business; putting in an ambitious (for us) rage (I mean, vegetable) garden; and healing. A lot of healing.

Fall 2024 took a huge toll on me. The chaos of the last six months has been a different kind of toll.

Probably like you, I have a lot to say about that, but this is my messy memoir, so I’m going to write (mostly) about me.

Putting a parent in memory care is a kind thing to do. It means understanding you cannot give them the care they need and deserve. There is not one way you need to show up, not one way you are “supposed” to move through this, not one way to Do the Things That Need Doing. Now that the biggest parts are behind us, like dealing with her house, car, and all that, this means a lot of hours on the phone with a lot of people. I make sure the things get paid, the physical therapist is lined up, the taxes are signed, and all the other things a person of a certain age needs done when they are no longer able to administrate their own life.

It takes time. It takes a toll. No matter what kind of relationship you have with your parent, and there are as many kinds of relationships as there are parents, when you step into the role of caregiver, no matter what that means for your situation, you can rely on meeting demons you didn’t know you had, grieving things you didn’t know you had to grieve, and figuring out how to do things you never even had on your radar.

You talk to the tax folks, the finance folks, the facility folks, the medical folks, the insurance folks, the credit card folks, the friends, the other family, the list goes on. You sign the things, you send the papers, and you remind your parent, whose world is getting ever smaller, that they are safe, that you care, that you haven’t forgotten them, that you know where they are, that you talked to them yesterday…you get the idea.

Or you don’t. And that is actually ok. Not everyone gets it. It is a privilege to not have an understanding of this load.

Or, to quote a good friend of my mom’s in an email where she encouraged me to seek support: “It is a very private Hell.”

I don’t do it alone. All the folks I mentioned above, and my belovèd, and my good friends, and my family, have all been amazing. A-MAZ-ING. They are why I am typing about this with clarity today. I could not do it without them.

But what goes on inside of me while I manage this landscape is still mine and mine alone.

I try to turn that energy into creating other things.

With the help of my belovèd, we put in a big vegetable garden. Folks always ask what we are growing, so here goes: peas, beets, spinach, radishes, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, peppers, chard, lettuce, arugula, garlic, and herbs (cue music: parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, as well as basil, lemon balm, oregano and an attempt at cilantro). I talk to my plant babies almost every day. We have marigolds planted all around as guardians against garden pests. They are tiny but mighty. We have an enormous citronella plant on the porch on mosquito duty.

The other day, in my eagerness to make a first batch of pesto to freeze, I cut my finger on the food processor blade. In the moment, this was pretty dramatic. There was a lot of blood. The good news is that not only is my finger all wrapped up and doing ok, we also have a batch of pesto in the freezer! That’s not been the only cooking project. Until the temperature in our non-air-conditioned house became too unpredictable for our starter, I’d been making bread weekly. We both love trying new recipes and with the summer, we welcomed regular grilling, experimenting with new iced coffee recipes, and regular trips to the local farm and plant stand for Amish donuts and more plant babies.

Spending the late spring in the garden, upping my sourdough game, and just generally trying to cultivate a more meaningful relationship to activities like growing food and cooking has meant I’ve been, as my mother said to me recently, “in my Earth Mother phase.” She’s not wrong and it’s been deliberate on my part. I have spent a lot of time elbows-high in dirt. It has felt crucial for my wellbeing, for bringing deep and hurting parts of me back into balance.

Sometimes I still practice singing. I sang for a bit on Sunday, Handel mostly. Early music was always my go-to after I’d taken time off. It feels good to “Let the Bright Seraphim in burning row” roll around. I remember performing this with a spectacular trumpeter in South Africa many years back. Memories like that used to make me sad; now they make me grateful. I am patient with myself. I am pretty deconditioned at this stage in “retirement” from professional singing. But that offers a new experience: singing what I want when I want for no one but myself.

I work with my coaching clients to envision and re-envision their lives, make plans, reframe their relationships with themselves, and create positive change. It brings me a lot of joy. I’d like to be doing more of it, so please send your friends my way! They can find me at Aligned Insight Coaching.

I am writing more than my infrequent posts here suggest. I publish on my business blog, Aligned Insights, about weekly. I’d love to have a few more followers over there, so please make your way if that feels aligned for you. Just yesterday, I published my first long-form self-coaching guide. I wrote about toxic workplaces and shared a bit about what it means to recognize that I was complicit in the dysfunctional workplace I quit in December.

Do I mean I was a workplace bully? Gosh, I hope not and I hope no one here thinks that. What I do mean is that sometimes workplaces make you feel small. Bullies want you to feel small because it makes you easier to control. And sometimes you go along with it. And then, if you’re like me, at some point you realize “It’s me, Hi! I’m the problem, it’s me” – I was complicit in my own smallness and that contributed to a workplace environment that wasn’t good for anyone, especially not me. I’m not making excuses for someone else’s bad behavior; I’m stating an objective fact about an unsustainable situation. Healing from that has been a big part of this year for me. There are so many posts about unhealthy workplace environments on LinkedIn that I have to assume everyone has been in one. So, as they say: IYKYK and, statistically, you probably know.

What else?

I meditate regularly. For me, it’s crucial for my healing, for prioritizing rest, and for maintaining the mind-body connection I constantly fed when I was a professional singer.

I read a lot, mostly creepy Gothic novels with some psychology, neuroscience, and consciousness studies thrown in. I recently wrote about reading and stories on my other blog, in case you want to check that out.

I painted a dinosaur painting for my belovèd, at his request. It’s magnetized so we can play with our little dino friends on the canvas. It makes me indescribably happy.

I’m learning about entrepreneurship from Cornell University and I’m diving into my Akashic Records. So I’m working on expanding myself in both concrete and not-so-concrete ways.

I think a lot about my poetry practice. I don’t have the time or the bandwidth this summer to get back to it at the pace I’d like, but the other day, I read through some of my work from the past few years, I thought about what it means to tinker with words, some of the earlier blog posts where I was more creative, more expansive, more playful in my use of language. I want to get back to that, words like toys, like blocks where a sentence doesn’t have to have them in the “correct order” but where I can mess around with that, find some new way to say something, say something that needs to be read aloud or turned around or just that jostles your neurons gently until some kind of meaning falls into place.

We need more art, more gardens, more community, more healing, more connections, more reading, more sharing…we need all of that more than ever.

More than ever.

So even though I didn’t feel I had too much that was creative or deep to say, I felt compelled to publish here again. I have to hold myself accountable to actually writing if I’m still in some way a “writer.” One who writes.

And I love this community here, you who are reading this, the Substack world and vibe, my writer friends who, when they tell me about their projects, it lights me up like heat lightning above our birch trees.

And then, of course, there is the bigger picture of everything going on in the world. Find a way to do something. It can be small. Learn something new. Make some art. Tap into a community. Volunteer or give money or just check in on someone. And do what you need to so you don’t lose track of yourself. We all need you. You are loved.

Here’s a poem I wrote a while back. I tried to make the line breaks look like the ocean from the side. It was read aloud at an event hosted by the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science a couple years ago. I think about this poem more than the others, for some reason. It’s a love poem to my sweetheart, to the ocean, to poetry that looks like an image if you turn it sideways, to the whole wide world of water and the sky and all of that inside all of us.

Memories of an Ocean
Erin Heisel

Sprawling, endless
		waves
	white-crested and bubbly
return 
		and return to their shore.

I taste salt
	welcome the burn
			in my throat.

	A buoyant wave,
		lifts me lifts us– 
the rush carries us to shore.
	Sand sifts through my toes
			I land clumsily 
					falling against you, 
				belovèd.

Droplets splatter on our faces. 
	I squeeze my eyes shut, 
force joyful saltwater tears 
		to roll over my eyelashes, 
	down my scrunched-up smiling cheeks.

We dance, laugh
	you on your own 
part of the same wave
	we each on our own parts 
	of the same life
		floating 
			jumping 
		splashing
			in perfect time. 

Everything sparkles in the sunshine of high summer

as you and I and 
	the whole wide world of water
	sing our hearts out
		for an audience of sky.

Dear Readers:

I did not set out to write a post that could be part of my series loosely (very loosely, some might argue!) following the Major Arcana in Tarot. But as I review this, I realize there are some underlying themes, namely, creativity, nurturing and caring for self and others, and connecting to the natural world.

Welp, golly, that’s the next card in the series, The Empress. The Empress is often depicted as a pregnant woman surrounded by nature in green, glorious abundance. In the Tarot, however, these are archetypes and messages are often metaphoric. The figure does not need to be a woman and the figure does not need to be pregnant with a baby. Any person can be making something new, bringing a new project or idea into the world, or inspired and connected to the beauty and bounty of the natural world. That is all to say: there is strong “Earth Mother” energy in this card, but that can apply to anyone and is not limited to actual, literal pregnancy.

My previous disclaimer applies, unchanged. You can find it at the bottom of this post.

The Empress creates, nurtures, and protects life, in all its various forms. While the card encompasses things like motherhood or parenthood, it also includes stewardship of the natural world, creative processes that bring forth new ideas, and caring for ourselves, each other, the world around us, and our unique contributions to it. And for me, for the last few months, this has meant deep healing, reconnecting with myself, and cultivating life experiences that allow me to find my way as a person navigating not just my own struggles from the past year, but everything we are grappling with as a collective.

This is the time to create, to bring something new into the world, and to find new ways to protect the most vulnerable among us and the most precious things we have, our home, this planet, and each other. New communities, new structures, new art, a new relationship with the Earth. Everyone can participate. No one should be left out. Now is the time.

Love,

Erin