Hi Friend,

The other day, my partner and I were about to sit down to plan out the course that we are offering this September (so soon!) - when I could not find one of the papers that had the notes from our last conversation.

As I had recently been sorting the papers on my desk, I figured it had gotten misplaced in that process - why is that cleaning so often leads to me not being able to find something that, previously, I knew where it was? Which led me to sort through another set of papers. After about an hour of this, I gave up finding it. Almost immediately after I stopped looking, I found it... (in between two other notebooks that were on my pile of art supplies!)

Oh, paper.

When Krissy and I finally did sit down to go through some of the themes and ideas that we want to share, I found myself chuckling at the irony of it. Afterall, paper - and paperwork - is one of the impetuses that led us to want to teach this new course.

First I should say that I (mostly) love paper itself. As a kid I loved opportunities to make paper - pulp and water and other bits of paper - coming together to form something new, from which you could then create, well, anything: images and words (another kind of image); and from words, stories, and with stories the possibilities of new worlds. Drawing, painting, writing, calligraphy - I loved all of it, and in many ways I still do. I still delight in going to art stores and running my fingers along different kinds of paper.

When I first got business cards for Sequoia Samanvaya, I decided to pay extra for the heavier paper and the rounded edges because it just felt so cool. That extra amount felt like an extravagance at the time, and I felt proud to give them to people: look at how pretty this is!

So I am not anti-paper per se.

But wow, the way that paper - what is written on a piece of paper, who has signed/marked a piece of paper, where that paper is held - has become such a big part of our society, and, in particular, such a big part of liminal spaces like birth and death and citizenship and belonging and property systems and insurance companies and certifications and taxes.... well its pretty intense. It can be very confusing. And very challenging. And if you don't get it 'right', or you don’t have the right paperwork, things can be really, really hard.

The 'digital age' only somewhat shifts what we are talking about here - now there are digital copies of paper (aka records) and, often, paper versions of the digital copies. Just in case you need it. For something. Or someone. Indeed, I know several folks who, after spending over a decade uploading all sorts of records online to make them accessible to anyone in the age of the interconnected internet and in the imagined future age where future generations would get everything online, in the last two years (read, under the current adminstration) they have subsequently been downloading, printing, and keeping hard-copy files of a lot of information before/in the midst of it being deleted/erased from digital spaces that were previously seen to be part of the common good.

So at any rate, navigating paperwork and the institutional apparatuses that are built on this 'technology' is part of what led Krissy and I to have that, 'omg, people need help dealing with this stuff.'

Let me back up a little bit. Just a bit. To 2025. About 16 months ago.

Some of you may recall that in April of 2025, Krissy's eldest son and her mother passed within a few weeks of one another.

Our whole family entered a period of deep mourning.

As Krissy's family is part of an Indigenous community, we were immediately brought into a powerful ceremony.

In those first few weeks of making a lot of difficult phone calls, people would ask me how Krissy was doing. I tried to articulate some combination of, 'well this is pretty f*ing awful', and, 'she is part of this amazing community and tradition and they can and are holding her in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before.'

Rituals for liminal spaces, especially rituals around death, are designed for these kinds of moments: when the thing that you never want to have ever happen.... happens. And then the community/ritual/way of doing things carries you through,

Within the context of her lineage/heritage/community, she was well held. And so, given the extent to which I am very much an outsider, was I.

And then came the other stuff, stuff that is not about traditional ceremony. Including the paper and paperwork and complex Western institutional dynamics that, so far as I can tell, pretty much every person is born into, in some way or another. Whether or not you have papers (and what those papers say) becomes a lifelong dynamic... one that extends after an individual's life is over.

This dynamic was not, really, coming from within her community, which traditionally is an oral society.

Instead, it was coming from the larger dominant society/American/Western/modern society, or colonization, or industrialized society, or a record-based society... there are lots of versions of how we can articulate this....

Which entailed dealing with the 'estates' of those who had died.

Which is to say, with banks and lawyers and a variety of inter-twined institutions and the people who work for them such as insurance companies.

Krissy used to be an auditor for a school district, so navigating bureaucracies and paperwork is something she's actually pretty good at, although she has consciously chosen to step away from positions that require the level of paperwork that she used to have. Engaging with paperwork and institutional stuff in the midst of intense grief was a distinctly unpleasant experience in which both of us learned a lot of things we didn't even know we 'should have' known. About life in this society… which includes death and preparing to die. Our own death, and the people in our family/life/community for whom we are caring/responsible.

As all this was happening, I was teaching my first courses on how to officiate weddings and memorial services. In my research, I was intrigued by the extent to which institutional dynamics - and paperwork - play such a significant role in what people need, what officiants need, and the very nature of how our society navigates such liminal spaces as birth, marriage, death, housing transitions, divorce, etc.

For example: an officiant can legally sign a marriage certificate ... but not a death certificate. A death certificate - which is an absolutely critical piece of paper - can only be signed by an authorized medical professional or a licensed funeral director. The process of signing a death certificate echoes, in many ways, the process of signing a birth certificate, which can also only be signed by the medical professional who helped with the delivery or who examined the newborn. After those signatures (and some related information), each of those three certificates is, to use the official language, finalized, signed, and sealed by the local or state registrar.

In the vast diversity of human culture, there are many ways to signify and mark liminal spaces and the transitions in and out of this world. Western culture leans substantially upon paperwork, officials, and registrars.

I'm going to be sharing more about the ideas within this new course in the next few weeks - there are a lot of important and fascinating pieces for eco-spiritual practitioners and those who are actively engaging in the larger work of connecting the disconnected, such as yourselves. Oh, and the course is about a lot more than dealing with paperwork... but we are creating a container to engage with these kinds of Hard Things that can be so much easier to avoid.

Avoidance, as Krissy and I have learned (and keep learning), only gets you so far.

Which sometimes is not very far at all.

Meanwhile, I find it helpful to keep engaging with the paper that I love - the paper that I paint on, draw mind-maps and doodles and poetry on - as well as other kinds of paperwork (including digital). As well as with living trees and mushrooms (which are everywhere in our woods after some substantial rain) and fire - the multitude of expressions of Tree and Wood that is so much more than paper.

And may you experience blessings on your papers - both fun and frustrating - as well as those activities which have little to no paper at all. Which I hope you get lots of time with!

- Sara Jolena

ps - Thanks to everyone who appreciated my last missive about play, work, attention, and categories! I will write more about attention as forms of categories, as requested. Feel free to send me your thoughts on these themes!