A Parting Letter From Nourishing Kin Co-Founder, Channing Parker
Nourishing Kin’s Co-Founder, Channing Parker, recently announced that she would be resigning from the facilitator team for personal reasons. In the letter below, Channing shares those reasons as well as a beautiful recollection of her time with Nourishing Kin.
We are incredibly grateful for the vision and dedication that Channing poured into the creation of Nourishing Kin. Their creativity, wisdom, attention to detail, and passion will be greatly missed on the facilitator team.
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Hello friends, dear ones, and kinfolk,
I look on my time as a facilitator of Nourishing Kin with a mixture of reverence and awe. I remember approaching Bergen about co-teaching a small series of classes in April 2022 with me about cultural appropriation and Northwestern European folk traditions. Sonja joined us for a long lunch at Beaumont Bakery brainstorming names for this offering. Bergen insisted it include something about "caretaking" and that it must include the word "kin." Nourishing Kin was born in the spirit of a nature-crafted bread basket: a place where people could come and be fed by the land and by each other.
Our first gathering was held on Beltane morning in the chilly shadow of Storm Mountain in Sandy. I gave a lengthy lecture on animism and the process of translation. Bergen wove us in and out of the trees and waters with dance. We both brought enough food by ourselves to feed the entire group - about 50 people - out of sheer anxiety of not having enough. Imagine our surprise and deep satisfaction at seeing every participant bring something to share, and that we would've had enough between us all even if Bergen and I brought nothing. The community understood the foundation of abundance Nourishing Kin was founded on without us ever explicating it. Communal meals have been held at nearly every gathering since.
Bergen and I quickly invited Alisa to the facilitator team because of her generously-offered experience with British Isles folk traditions at our gatherings and online. The Nourishing Kin community has benefited greatly from her knowledge, and I gained a valuable friendship based on mutual interests and compassion. Alisa is my favorite enneagram 4 (myself excluded, of course), and we have held many passionate exchanges about folk traditions, books, movies and shows, and neurodivergence during our carpools to-and-from gatherings.
Nourishing Kin grew from its planned "small class series" to an ongoing project quietly and seamlessly. I had not anticipated the sustained interest in Northwestern European folk traditions you all have shown. I am honestly sometimes shocked by the enthusiasm each of you has about our gatherings, topics of discussion, and activities. It is difficult to express the depth of my appreciation and amazement I feel toward this community for the ways that you have shown up for yourselves, this land, your ancestors, and each other.
It wasn't long before Madee began working with Nourishing Kin as an assistant, but it quickly became clear that her expertise in finance and business management was a massive boon for our administrative needs. Madee has, at many times, single-handedly navigated the many weighty organizational and legal transitions Nourishing Kin has made over the years with her usual grace and humble acumen. My friendship with Madee was forged over smutty romance novels. She is my favorite Aquarius, and certainly the best person to make butter candles for Imbolc with.
Nourishing Kin would have ended at Samhain 2022 if it wasn't for the incredible women who agreed to host our not-so-little coven for the autumn and winter months. If you have held us in your home, backyard, or family cabin over the last four years, please know that your offering to this community is in no way small. All the cleaning, communication, and patience you've offered to the facilitator team and the people who have attended gatherings in your home have benefitted from your unseen work and love. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Bergen transitioned away from the facilitator team last summer. Her exit was gentle and entirely void of conflict. We felt the loss of her experienced hand in guiding gatherings, her clear and soothing voice at songs, and the subtle ways in which she nurtured those in her presence. We were especially sad to lose her dance-playlist-making talent, and her excellent emcee skills. Bergen's exit was necessitated by major life changes, and we were glad to support her next steps with an easeful goodbye and a blessing for her way.
Our gatherings continued into late summer, autumn, winter, and spring. Samhain brought your beautiful costumes and land shrines; Winter Solstice, the Yule Lads and Mari Lwyd; Imbolc, Michelle's blackberry arch and comforting home; Spring Equinox, the birds. Each gathering, each person brought what they had - a voice, an ear, a story, a perspective, an effort - and it was always enough. More than enough.
During this time, I began to notice a progressive deterioration of both my mental health as well as in my executive functioning and skills. I began to lose threads of thoughts, unable to complete sentences and activities fully, then requiring equal or more amounts of rest to compensate. My work contained an unusual amount of mistakes, and my offerings began to consistently lack the quality of care and compassion it has held in the past. I watched with internal alarm as my resentment, cynicism, patience, and capacity for anything other than sleeping and wrestling with my mind decreased to the point where I ceased to function at a socially-acceptable level.
I worked with my long-time therapist to execute an emergency plan of care, which included stepping back on as many responsibilities and commitments as possible. When I communicated to Alisa and Madee in September about my need to step back from some facilitator duties, they responded, "Of course. What else do you need?" Madee and Alisa took over the majority of my responsibilities through the end of that year to allow me the time I needed to focus on my healing. When I shared with you all what was happening, you also stepped up. You sent me gift cards so I could feed myself post-therapy lunch. You sent me journals, pens, weighted dino plushies, bath bombs, eye pillows, puzzles, word searches, memes, messages, and gifts of all kinds. You showed up to my house to assemble freezer meals and cut carrots into stars for stews. This community showed up for me in the same way you have always shown up for each other: bringing what you have to offer, nothing more and nothing less. It was enough.
At the beginning of the year, I noticed a marginal improvement in my health and executive functioning as my intensive therapies continued. After stepping back on every other project and commitment I'd invested in (including Instagram, my personal blog and writing, my runes course, my Etsy shop - Jesus Crisis, what was I thinking?!), I was prepared to re-invest all my newfound time and energy into Nourishing Kin. I successfully spearheaded our rebrand on a timeline that was borderline manic and experienced an explosion of new ideas and directions for Nourishing Kin. Then, as quickly as this boom began, it ended. My executive functioning, depression, and anxiety returned to levels of concern. What was going on?
In April I began to sense that I had no reliable timeline for my recovery. Horror and shame accompanied the deep knowing that I could no longer participate in Nourishing Kin as a facilitator. For the months following, I second-guessed and re-committed and second-guessed this "knowing" again and again (making this process much harder for Alisa and Madee). I did not want to give up on Nourishing Kin. I did not want to give up on myself.
As recently as two weeks ago, I made the life-changing discovery (under the guidance of my therapist and using several reliable methods) that I am an undiagnosed autistic. It feels impossible to measure the impact this discovery has had. It offers the appropriate perspective and explanation for all of the symptoms I experience that are not related to trauma. This explains why, when Bergen asked us to describe our sensory experience at last year's retreat, I nearly cried when I explained that the world felt like a sensory onslaught and that sometimes people frustrate me because "their emotions are loud." The "inexplicable" loss of executive function? Autistic burnout. The deep, passionate (and inflexible) moral standard I hold my work and Nourishing Kin to? Autism. The fact that I almost always disappear to some corner of the room or volunteer for independent tasks away from the group at gatherings? It's the 'tism. Understanding myself as a neurodivergent person needing specific lifestyle adjustments and accommodation has solidified, rather than brought into doubt, my "deep knowing" of needing to leave the facilitator team.
I am leaving Nourishing Kin as a facilitator, having gifted this organization and community all that I am capable of giving. I understand myself as someone whom David Abram describes as a "porous one." My favorite place is not, never has been, at the center. Even so, under my four years as a facilitator, then CEO, Nourishing Kin has seen:
31 successful day/evening gatherings, attended by anywhere between 13-45 people at a time (My favorite gathering? Summer Solstice 2022, when we learned kulning and galdr with the Nordic runes)
2 treasured retreats (My favorite retreat was hands-down the one at Michelle's cabin. I don't care that we got stuck in the mud. It holds in my mind as literally perfect.)
5 online classes
the inauguration of the Book Club
establishment as a 501(c)3 nonprofit
None of these undertakings were accomplished alone. The credit belongs entirely to the group, both facilitator team and community. My name was stamped at the top out of organizational necessity, but I have always seen Nourishing Kin as a community effort. Because of the collaborative nature of Nourishing Kin, I have every confidence in Alisa and Madee as they move forward in their leadership of the organization. They have consistently expressed commitment to this community; and tangibly show, with remarkable professionalism, their passion and enthusiasm for the success of Nourishing Kin's mission. My trust in them is explicit and unwavering. I can think of no better hands to leave this project with. I can think of no better friends.
As an additional note to those considering participating in the formal structure of Nourishing Kin: I can say with confidence that the facilitator team is incredible to work with. Anyone considering offering their skills, time, money or capacity to the organization can expect transparency, communication, and respect from real people who really care. I deeply desire to explicitly communicate the following: My burnout is exceptional in that it is deeply rooted in my embodied, neurological experience of my everyday life. As such, managing Nourishing Kin has been neither a primary, secondary, nor even tertiary contributor to my current physical and mental health. Instead, this community has felt a haven in a world where light, color, sound, and emotion are exquisitely painful and exhausting.
My time now is at a close, and I feel both relieved and deeply sad. But while I am saying goodbye to the facilitator team, I will not be gone from this community. All my friends are here! I will still come with my inconveniently-timed anecdotes, my passionate soapbox speeches, and my inappropriate innuendo that always goes one step too far. I have given heart, breath, body, spirit, voice, and soul to birth Nourishing Kin into the world. It is time now for it to move about separate from me, and for me to return to the edges so my work and healing can continue in its strange, winding ways. It is enough.
With love, in kinship,
Channing Parker
