As Steve Miller Band rightly noted, time keeps on slipping into the future. It’s been one whole year since I launched Birdseed! In the last year we have…
Seen Mara and touched earth; realized we were delicious as soft-shell crabs; remembered time + again that someday we’ll be just bones; double-checked our (airline) status; and snooped through garbage to find life’s meaning.
It’s been a delightful, emergent endeavor as I have continued to emerge as a human, a writer, a creative, a Buddhist, and a teacher. This week, I’m launching paid subscriptions and I hope you’ll consider coming with me!
Birdseed is a space for humorous, esoteric, + thought-provoking dharma seeds (dharma meaning an aspect of truth or reality) offered for your nourishment.
Each piece is meant to be a meditation of sorts, a vehicle for mindfulness comprised of parts lightness, nostalgia, depth, mundanity, and important questions which steer us all a little closer toward presence and awareness with ourselves. From this place of grounding, we become glowing nodes in a more free and just whole.
My aim is to remind you of the preciousness of a human birth and that you have what you need to start from where you are (you’re perfect!).
My hope is to inspire you to see magic in the mundane and to feel energized to lean a bit further into more growth, exploration, empathy, or engagement with yourself and the world.
My vision is that we take ourselves seriously enough but not too seriously.
Why am I doing this?
Birdseed is a byproduct of my honest, imperfect, but ongoing intellectual, spiritual, and engaged practice in the world. I’m figuring this shit out just like you are, and I’m metabolizing and sharing it through the lens of my own study and experience. Your subscription graciously supports these endeavors.
Second, I believe in supporting creatives in the making of creative work on principle, but especially if it’s ever moved me or meant something to me.
Finally your subscription inspires me to create and share even more (I have a ridiculous number of ideas in the pipeline) and makes this work accessible for a wider audience. Starting this week I’ll be writing and sharing more content more regularly, whether written, audio, and maybe even hologram (!?). I’ve also got a book in the hopper that I’ll start to divulge and dive into here.
Deep thanks to those of you who’ve already pledged subscriptions— that really gave me wind beneath my wings to envision a bigger future for Birdseed.
What now?
You can update your subscription to $6/month or $60/year, or as a founding member for any amount more than that. Your support means so much!
Free subscribers (you, currently) will receive:
2-3 posts a month + Curious Seeds interview series monthly
Announcements about online and IRL mindfulness offerings
Paid subscribers will receive all this plus:
Additional subscriber-only weekly content in the form of longer personal essays and dharma talks.
Weekly recorded meditations themed around nature, space, etc.
Multi-media interviews, deep dives into childhood journals to parse out existential concepts, interactive reader community engagement, and more as I dream it up.
Most important to me, if you want full access to Birdseed as a subscriber but can’t pay, for whatever reason, you got it! No questions asked just email me at jessmack [at] gmail.com.
You can donate subscriptions on behalf of folks who can’t cover it, or gift them specifically to special birds in your life.
A Final Reflection on Birdseed’s 1st Birthday
Birdseed began as a way for me to reconnect with my own voice in my own words, in exactly my own way. It was a revelation. It was no accident that Birdseed began at momentous time in my life, in a seismic shift during which I turned away from all-consuming hustle and toward vast but nourishing spaciousness. I returned to contemplative and personal practices that had gotten buried deep beneath lots of shit, and in doing so unearthed a fountain of… what I would call dharma (truth, teachings, threads…) that wanted to gush forth.
I’m also so grateful for a number of couple people who independently, unprompted cheered me on, encouraging me to consider writing from a new space. And everyone who’s expressed their support in the past year, too! One thing I’ve learned in the past two years is that you need to allow others to see you in order to reflect back to you the truths about who you are - hard and wonderful. You might know them deep down, but seeing them in the mirror of another unlocks the truth on a new level.
Over the past 15 years, I’d written hundreds of speeches, talking points, and presentations for other people. Truly, that’s been an honor. I’ve also written hundreds of blog posts and op-eds under my own name about issues that, while personal, like reproductive rights, were almost solely explored from a political or intellectual angle.
But I’d never really written publicly, honestly, about my own hopes, fears, and experiences, in the particular style that my voice really wants to be expressed. Because of course it’s terrifying to do that! I’m pretty sure I don’t have a solid handle on grammar, TBH, and yes, you’ll notice many typos (if they’re truly offend, dear journalist friends, LMK and I will fix!).
As a communications expert, I’m formula-trained to create from the outside in, meaning what’s the outcome I want? How do I want the audience to feel, or what do I want policymakers to do? Then I’ll find the right words, in the right way, on the right platform toward that outcome. My aptitude to do that helped me get very far in my career.
But as a human creative trying to make sense of this world, I longed to feel free enough — rooted and in touch with myself enough — to create from the inside out. What is true for me right now? What feels scary and confusing? What am I noticing? It’s a mindfulness practice, really.
In January 2021, I had a miscarriage. It really fucking sucked. If it’s something you’ve experienced, I’m so sorry. To cope through the excruciating first days I began writing, somehow knowing deep down that this loss would spawn a creative rebirth for me. I published my first really personal piece from it. This was almost verbatim what I wrote to myself in my journal. A study in vulnerability, as a dear friend put it. It was a piece so deeply rooted in what was true for me exactly in that moment. That changed everything.
The writing on Birdseed is true for me, and I hope is true for you in an entirely different way I won’t have predicted. You can receive it as makes sense to you at the time — peck at it now or squirrel it away for later. Birdseed is an ongoing love letter between me to each of you and our shared humanity, which is a precious gift with lots of hard things embedded in it.
Thank you so much to each one of you for your support so far, and for reading all of this if you have.
With love,
Jess
Feeling inspired by you.
I appreciate you honest sharing and vulnerability. It's a sweet reminder for me that we are more connected than we think. In you I see myself. In me you see yourself.!!! I feel grateful for your seeing and you allowing me/us to see you! i so happy to have jumped on this journey with you!
"you need to allow others to see you in order to reflect back to you the truths about who you are - hard and wonderful. You might know them deep down, but seeing them in the mirror of another unlocks the truth on a new level." this <3 <3 <3
Gifts upon gifts. I am so moved to be reminded of the journey I’ve been on with Birdseed. - While I have looked forward to and savored the present moment of delight that each birdseed has given me, I have a whole new perspective on reflecting on where I was in my own personal journey when receiving each to consider-what did it spark or illuminate for me and what can that tell me that I may not have been aware of?
After a year, I have a sweet storehouse of seed to come back and nibble on in sparer times. But mostly I am so so full of nourishment.
❤️✨