Trust and Patreon
Me picking blueberries at In Good Heart Farm, where my partner and I have a farm share, and where I sometimes lead seasonal rituals. If you’re local to central NC, I highly recommend joining their CSA!
It’s taken me a while to figure out what kinds of stuff I want to offer to people in my work, especially online. Do I want to be a Youtuber? Do I want to make online courses that can reach a lot of people? Do I want to keep it really micro and local?
Here are some truths I’ve found in that question-asking process:
I do not want to be a youtuber, or an IG influencer. No shade, it’s just not an energetic match for me. Because . . .
It seems that intimacy is central to how I function, and 1-1 energy threads through all the things I do. Even at a large group ritual, that ritual lives or dies on the conversations I have with people before it starts. I’m still cliarfying this one, but there’s a truth here.
I like this newsletter and my Patreon as my Online Containers, and no matter what other online spaces I create, I always end up paring down again to some version of the two. This tells me they’re a good energetic match.
Recently I sat down and asked myself, “Why do I have a Patreon?”
I already have a newsletter where I post my current offerings and write, blog-style, about how I process what’s happening in the world, with the intention that it will help and connect me with others.
(And it does! I feel a big yay in my heart about this, and I keep a-writing.)
But my Patreon needs to be something different. I wrestled with this.
It’s a big goal of mine to create more reciprocity and sustainability in my work. As a recovering people-pleaser and someone with OCD, I have an old pattern of consistently making and presenting more and more offerings and content as a way of managing my anxiety. This burns me out, isn’t the most helpful to others, and leads me to forget what I most want and need at any given time.
With all of this in mind, I asked, “What if I could get paid more by putting content on Patreon?” But that got me stuck. The the transactional quality of energy that that wording produced felt bad in my body. The motivation was off. So I kept working on it.
“My Patreon could be a place where I get paid in small amounts,” felt better. I added, “It could be for people who want my work, but in small, asynchronous packages.”
This all felt good, but there was still a missing piece I needed to figure out to make it feel like a big old Yes. I sat with it more.
The answer came in the form of a new friend’s Patreon. Sarah Lyona, who I met at Clapping Hands Farm’s Women’s Camp (as mentioned in my last newsletter), is a holistic systems artist. I was immediately drawn to what she does in the world because she brought, to camp, a piece of burned wood art that she’s been working on for four years. She takes the piece of beautiful, raw wood to different places and gatherings, and people write on it a short memorial to an animal they’ve lost. It can just be the animal’s name. Then she burns the words into the wood.
This hit me in the heart. I’ve lost several beloved animals to sudden medical issues, and I’d never seen a way to mourn and love them in a community-made art form before. I immediately wrote my creature’s names on the piece of wood, and read the love notes of other people who feel the same grief and joy.
Check out this sick bunny memorial tattoo I got this spring! If you like this work, it was done by my friend Marie Reverie.
So hell yeah, I signed up for Sarah Lyona’s Patreon, where I saw she had a pay-what-you-can model bursting with open-hearted, reciprocal energy. DAMN, I thought, that’s for me!
Pay what you can has not felt right for all of my offerings, but it feels right for my Patreon, where I want to create a container for people who are excited about accessing ongoing support and connection, and excited about reciprocating me for it.
This is the energy I want to receive give these days: “I am so excited about what you do, and so hopeful about what it means for our world, that paying you makes me part of something I want to be a part of. I am excited to pay you.”
I’ve found that this kind of thinking and feeling can heal a whole lot of capitalist bullshit.
To this end, I’ve made a BUNCH of different amounts of $$$ that Patreon subscribers can pay me, ranging from I think $3 to $44. If you don’t see the number you want to pay, reply to this email and I’ll make it into a “tier.” And if you’re just testing the waters, you can have what I post there by subscribing for free.
(Oh, and paid subscribers get a 10% discount on all rituals and readings.)
What’s there, you ask?
My Patreon is where I’m going to start posting things like
guided meditations and visualizations
journal prompts
rituals and spells for the seasons and other shifts
maybe a book club??? eventually
I plan to post at least once a month offering something that feels relevant and useful to me, and will post more if it feels right.
So, I’m scaling back on offering spells and guidance here in the newsletter. I even plan on putting some of my longtime favorite Isabel meditations and tools I use for coaching up on Patreon, over time! Once you’re a subscriber, you can see the whole library of posts.
Patreon is my place to practice more trust in other people showing up for me. It’s where I’m growing the juicy energy of people who respond to my work with a leaping high-five of Hell yeah!!
You can check it out below :)
Lots of love,
Isabel
Events & Offerings
Lúnasa Ritual at
“The Sun and Her Daughters” Music Festival
Sat. Aug 1 (AKA Lúnasa), coming up soon!!
Renewal
2-session mini life coaching package
Orient in calmness & direction, and jump-start a creative or personal goal
Alchemy
4-month life coaching cycle
A committed investment in seeking the tools and support necessary to transform your doubts into self-love, power, and possibility
Rituals and Readings
Customized readings and rituals to transmute energy during crossroads moments
Author Cauldron
An intentional writer’s workshop for fiction and nonfiction, reply to this email to inquire!
Village Witch’s Corner
If you’re into things I used to post here like “Spell of the Week,” “Questions I’m asking,” “What I’m Reading,” and posts about the wheel of the year, I’m moving that stuff over to my patreon.
