Equal Parts Sardonic, Absurdist, & Fuzzy Teddy Bear

The world knew nothing at first. Then it gave birth to plants, who noticed what sunlight tasted like, and worms, who reveled in the luxuriant touch of soil. Soon the world's bright birds were perceiving the color of sound, its playful quigutl discerned the shapes of smells, and myriad eyes of every kind discovered sight and saw differently.

Behind these senses were minds--so many! The world was too vast to fit into just one mind; it needed millions of them to consider itself from every possible angle.

The difficulty with minds is that each perceives itself as a separate thing, alone. And so the minds spin stories to bridge the gaps between them, like a spider's web. There are a million stories, and yet they are all one.

― Rachel Hartman, In the Serpent's Wake

We're each just part of a refraction.

I absolutely love this observation from someone at work (on our group chat):

You're probably already aware that [Degolar]'s sense of humor is distinctly [Degolaresque] -- one part sardonic, one part absurdist, one part fuzzy teddy bear.

I don't know if it was meant as a compliment or simply descriptive, but I find it accurate and pleasing.

Though I responded:

I'm usually going for 3 parts absurdist and 1 part sardonic, but . . . https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/210909-i-blame-my-parents-it-s-their-fault-for-raising-me

“I blame my parents. It's their fault for raising me with a little guilt-demon living in my stomach. I can't ever just do something without having to worry about whether it's right. Now, don't worry, I can usually overcome it.”

― Kevin Emerson, Carlos Is Gonna Get It

But, yeah, his is more accurate. I am equal parts sardonic, absurdist, and fuzzy teddy bear.

A timely example, also from our group chat at work. Here's a partial transcript. My contributions in bold.

Any idea what "KC BJD" in the meeting room would be?

Ball Jointed Doll!

Make sure to walk by slowly to take a good gander

I will have to sneak away to come see them :D

https://youtu.be/oGWabpugYVU

https://villainsong.fandom.com/wiki/Creepy_Doll

Guys, I want a ball jointed doll now

They look really cool.

suddenly a craze for ball jointed dolls sweeps the library staff...

You can make the doll look just like yourself!

XD

Or like a cool Dr. Who character

god, why would i do that

They're just so... lifelike.... shudder.....

They are one culture away from being voodoo dolls

Oooh, I should get some that look just like my children. Gift them to myself on Christmas morning. Unwrap them, look at the kids, and say, "I guess I don't need you any more . . . "

w

o

w

I love that!!

She would do that...

buy some red contact lenses before you do it and slip them in covertly when you're unwrapping the gifts

LOL

Nightmare ON Christmas

LOL

But the guilt-demon-induced teddy bear part would never let me actually do something like that, only joke about it.

Another example of my humor; I love this meme that came across my feed:

I need to figure out how to get more wolves inside me.

And I posted this as a status on Facebook:

Sometimes I'll be out on a walk or similar listening to an audiobook, and then I go back around people, and I want to keep listening but I can't because it will disturb the other people, so I think, "If only this app had a way to transcribe what was being read, then I could quietly continue my reading without it making noise." Don't you think that's a good idea? If only someone could invent a way to take the words from audiobooks and write them down so people could read them. I would read something like that. It wouldn't even have to be in the app; they could even write it on paper. Just take those words and snatch them out of the sound waves and turn them into something for the eye, collected on pages of paper. Yeah.

(See, the thing is, I actually started having that thought and got a step or two down the track before I got to, "Oh, yeah. Duh!")

Speaking of my children, a recent observation. For the past few weeks we've been giving a classmate rides to school to help out his mom. Second grade, with our younger. I was surprised to find he needs help buckling and unbuckling the safety belts on the car seat. Surprised, because our kids took the initiative to figure that our for themselves years ago. They must have been around three. Reflecting on that, it seems to say something about them, that they did so. They like to solve things for themselves and don't like waiting around feeling helpless.

We recently reached the point in our parenting where we dispensed the "getting older" wisdom that "sometimes the hardest thing you do all day is leave the house to get the day started."

(To the third-grader, who'd been home from school half the week with nagging allergy-induced cough and asthma issues.)

He's also the one who recently told his just-built Lego bot, "I'm so proud of you, my son "

A longer anecdote about [Younger] that I shared on Facebook last week:

Sometimes your children amaze you.

We've raised them on the idea that the differences between males and females are minimal, and are nothing that that makes one better or worse than the other. When they wanted to try wearing dresses when little because "dresses are pretty," we let them. We coached them with advice like, "If someone says that makes you a girl, say, 'So what? because girls are awesome and that's not an insult.' You get to be you and wear what you want."

A month or so ago, [Spouse] received a phone call from the mom of one of [Younger]'s good friends. She said they'd just had a conversation with our school principal, sharing that the boy wanted to start wearing make-up and some more feminine styles. When she asked her son what friend he felt most supported and accepted by to tell first, he chose [Younger]. They've spent a good bit of time together since.

Things however, have not gone well at school. Peers have mocked and harassed him, and have done it where no adults can witness. About a week ago they decided to take him out of the school and find somewhere to transfer him. [Younger]'s been really sad about losing that daily contact with one of his best friends.

The school is currently having a spirit week, with different themed clothing each day. When he asked me Monday's theme yesterday morning, I told him it was pajama day. "Isn't it 'pajamas or something comfortable?'" he clarified. I said it was. He went to get clothes and came back wearing a dress.

Both boys have worn dresses a few times a year at places they felt safe. [Older] tried one time his first year at elementary school and never has again. He came to [Spouse] and me each separately and told us [Younger] should change clothes because he'd get made fun of. But [Younger] said he wanted to express himself and show support for his friend. We let him and minimized our reactions so he wouldn't feel any more self-conscious than necessary.

When [Spouse] picked [Younger] up for an appointment at 10:00, he said he wanted to change clothes before going back to school. He didn't like how mean some of the other kids were being. She asked if it was merely curiosity and attention about something different or true meanness, and he said it was some of both, but that some kids were really being unkind.

We had a long talk last night--including explaining some of the names he was called and cuss words that peers have used, and why we don't use them. We talked about bullying and cruelty and gender stereotypes. He said he'd thought his friends wouldn't make fun of him because they were his friends, so he'd been surprised. We told him we were proud he wanted to be himself and support his friend. It was a good talk and he went to bed feeling happy.

This morning, [Younger]--without talking to anyone about it and to my (our?) surprise--chose to wear another dress to school, ready to shrug off any bullying that comes his way. I'm anxious to hear his report at the end of the day.

My wife added the very important addition in the comments:

I'm very proud of [Younger], but I also think it's important to remember that for him it's a choice. Imagine enduring the kind of bullying he could handle for only two hours EVERY DAY.

Yes. This is definitely happening from a place of privilege and choice right now. Based on what he's said, it seems to be a style choice at this point in time, an effort to deconstruct society's categories of "male" and "female," and not an identity issue. He wore dresses Tuesday and Wednesday last week, but hasn't continued the practice since--though I'm sure his values have not changed.

Our school recently held their annual read-a-thon to raise money for the PTA. The students are supposed to find adults to "sponsor their reading" by making donations in their names.

It all happens through a website. The first thing you see when you arrive to donate is a list of the names of the students who have raised the most:

Further down the page, you find the prizes. The more money a student raises, the better prizes they get:

It's a fairly typical structure. We support the effort because the PTA does good things with the money. However, we not only donate to our kids, we use the website to find other kids we know, those whose parents can't afford to donate, and make anonymous donations for them so they get at least the minimum prizes. We don't like knowing they're getting left out based purely on circumstances they can't control.

Our kids have figured out why. When they saw [Spouse] donating for other kids this time, [Older] said, "So if you're good, you get the special food and if you're a bad kid you don't?  But in order to be a good kid, you have to have money?  So if you don't have money, you must be bad and don't deserve food?".

Yeah, they get it. In this country, your income determines your social worth and quality of character. (Which, of course, is absolutely wrong.)

Some of the comments in response to [Spouse] sharing this on Facebook:

Why is school rewarding individual kids, rather than whole class? If it were while class working as a team, this problem would not arise.

-----

As someone trying to reprogram my brain about this very thing: one thing that needs to happen is completely dissociating food from rewards.

-----

The whole idea of the kids seeing lack of money as making you "bad".... I mean, [Older] knows that's not true, which is exactly why he said that to me. But, it really is how so much of our society feels. Damn those Calvinist colonials instilling their puritanical belief symptoms!

And my contribution:

Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

Children get this message in all kinds of ways from the earliest ages.

The Dead Person Rule: If a dead person can do it, then it is not a behavior.

From a behavior modification training. To modify behavior, we must first define and understand behavior.

It's also a very good guide when enforcing rules, say as a parent or teacher or checking adherence to a library code of conduct. Only a behavior can break a rule (not an attitude or appearance). If a dead person can do it, it is not breaking a rule.

I like this poem:

Poem Beginning With A Retweet

by Maggie Smith

If you drive past horses and don’t say horses

you’re a psychopath. If you see an airplane

but don’t point it out. A rainbow,

a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don’t

whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer!

Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker

and don’t shush everyone around you

into silence. If you find an unbroken

sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see

a dorsal fin breaking the water.

If you see the moon and don’t say

oh my god look at the moon. If you smell

smoke and don’t search for fire.

If you feel yourself receding, receding,

and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone.

It popped up on my feed.

I just finished listening to the audiobook The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. Here's what I wrote for my review:

John Green has interesting thoughts and is very good at writing about them.

When I reviewed books, "I" was never in the review. I imagined myself as a disinterested observer writing from outside. My early reviews of Diet Dr Pepper and Canada geese were similarly written in the nonfictional version of third-person omniscient narration. After Sarah read them, she pointed out that in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants. She explained that when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir--here's what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop. I'd written 1,500 words about Diet Dr Pepper without once mentioning my abiding and deeply personal love of Diet Dr Pepper.

That's what this is. A collection of somewhat random essays that function as mini-memoirs of aspects of Green's life.

I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.

I love his approach so much. It's the approach I've always taken in writing my own book reviews. I'm not trying to provide some impartial, "objective" judgement on the book, I'm trying to convey my experience of it. Because that's all we can ever do, so the best approach is to be honest about it. Reviews say as much about the reviewer as they do the book. Each one is a story, shaped by the teller.

It's also why my posts, like this one, are so long, rambling, random, and eclectic, because each one is a mini-memoir of my recent life and thoughts.

I just really like this quote.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid impact caused a dust cloud so huge that darkness may have pervaded Earth for two years, virtually stopping photosynthesis and leading to the extinction of 75 percent of land animals. Measured against these disasters, we're just not that important. When Earth is done with us, it'll be like, "Well, that Human Pox wasn't great, but at least I didn't get Large Asteroid Syndrome."

And this one.

It's been my experience that almost everything easy to mock turns out to be interesting if you pay closer attention.

And I absolutely get this. I'm the same. I'm happier when I can be a little bit self-destructive. There's something satisfying about it.

For whatever reason, I've always felt like I need a vice. I don't know whether this feeling is universal, but I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit.

And, one more time, in brief: "When people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir--here's what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop."

Scientists Can No Longer Ignore Ancient Flooding Tales

In their work, the pair describe colorful legends from northern Europe and Australia that depict rising waters, peninsulas becoming islands, and receding coastlines during that period of deglaciation thousands of years ago. Some of these stories, the researchers say, capture historical sea-level rise that actually happened—often several thousand years ago. For scholars of oral history, that makes them geomyths. . . . 

For Jo Brendryen, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Bergen in Norway who has studied the effects of deglaciation in Europe following the end of the last ice age, the idea that traditional oral histories preserve real accounts of sea-level rise is perfectly plausible.

During the last ice age, he says, the sudden melting of ice sheets induced catastrophic events known as meltwater pulses, which caused sudden and extreme sea-level rise. Along some coastlines in Europe, the ocean may have risen as much as 10 meters in just 200 years. At such a pace, it would have been noticeable to people across just a few human generations.

“These stories are anecdotes, but enough anecdotes makes for data,” Brendryen explains. “By systematically collecting these kinds of memories or stories, I think you can learn something.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I've been doing storytimes at the library for 20 years now. Because of my experience and lead position, I always have a hand in training those new to the task. The latest addition to our team just had her first storytime. Her previous experience with children had been with older kids, and she approached the storytime with trepidation. We knew she was capable, but were worried she wouldn't have a great first experience. When I asked her after how it went, she happily said it went well. And, "That was fun."

"That was fun." It is. Storytime is fun. There's a bit of anxiety, worrying about potential problems, but for the most part interacting with little ones and bringing them delight is fun. And, since your mood sets the tone for the room, it forces you to find a good mood. You can't fake it with kids. It's a situation where the joy is contagious, and in the best storytimes spirals up throughout. I've found the best cure for a bad mood is doing a storytime.

The most common way to start a storytime is with a song. There are many explicit starting songs, from ones meant to help kids settle ("Shake My Sillies Out"; "Open, Shut Them") to "hello" songs. For a number of years now, I've started all my storytimes by singing "The More We Get Together." (Along with a recording by local favorite Dino O'Dell; he has the feeling and emotion I'm going for--calm, soothing, and happy--and his voice matches mine nicely.) There's nothing about it that says "it's time to start" or "hello" or "settle down," but I tried it one time because it does say "let's get together to do something" and it worked so well I've used it ever since.

When it's time to begin, I walk to the front of the room, start the music, sit down, and start singing. It gets everyone's attention, and after the first time through I invite everyone to sing with me a few more times. I sway with the music a bit, just naturally, and before we're done most of the room is swaying with me. Something about the singing and swaying together gets us all on the same frequency. Everyone is calm, settled, and ready to listen to the first book.

I was thinking recently about how much I enjoy that opening and the feeling I share with the room, and it reminded me of some reading I've done the past couple of years. Two powerful books have focused on the vagus nerve. And that singing a soothing song and swaying together taps right into the vagus nerve. That's why it sets the tone for a good storytime. And that's why it improves the mood, because it's a healthy practice.

In You Are a Group Project, I wrote about SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient; Powered by the Science of Games by Jane McGonigal. One of her main concepts is "power-ups," and "anything that makes you feel happier, stronger, healthier, or better connected counts as a power-up." The core information in the chapter about power-ups is the vagus nerve and how to improve your vagal tone. I shared a chunk of that information in You Are a Group Project, including:

The vagus nerve touches your heart, lungs, voicebox, ears, and stomach, helping to regulate virtually every important function in your mind and body, from your emotions to your heart rate to your breathing rate to your muscle movement to your digestion. Because the vagus nerve is so essential to so many biological and psychological functions, its health is an excellent measure of your mind-and-body resilience. Nearly twenty-five years of research, in fact, has consistently shown that the tone, or strength, of the vagus nerve is the single best measure of how effectively a person's heart, lungs, and brain respond to stress.

She writes that an easy way to get a handle on the strength of your vagal tone is to determine the ratio of positive emotions you feel to negative emotions over the course of a typical day. Wherever you are, your goal is to see an . . . 

'Upward spiral dynamic' between positive emotions and physical resilience. Improving your vagal tone makes it easier for you to have positive emotional reactions to everyday life events, and with every positive emotion you feel, your vagus nerve gets stronger.

Power-ups are her method for strengthening your vagal tone. The chapter describes a number of favorite power-ups. These are the ones most popular and highest rated by the community of people playing the SuperBetter game online. The three in bold are the "all-time favorite power-ups." I'm keeping things brief, but the book explains the science behind why each of these is effective.

Physical Resilience:

• Drink a glass of water! - There's almost nothing it doesn't help, from improving mood to building muscles to controlling appetite to increasing energy to boosting the immune system.
• Sunshine on your shoulders - Go outside and let the sun touch your skin for at least five minutes.
• Dance break - Stop whatever you're doing and dance to a favorite song.
• Make new bacteria friends - Eat yogurt or pop a probiotic pill to strengthen the ecosystem in your gut.

Mental Resilience:

• Brand-new day - If you're having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, get back into bed, pull the covers up, and close your eyes for one minute--then roll out of bed as if you've just woken up for the first time.
• Stop, challenge, choose - This is a willpower booster. Stop before eating, and challenge your choice--is there any one thing you could do to make this meal or snack a tiny bit healthier? Now choose to make one small positive difference based on your health or weight-loss goals.
• Digital detox - Power down and walk away from anything with a screen--your phone, a tablet, a computer, the TV. Don't turn it back on or pick it up for ten whole minutes. See who or what captures your attention in the physical world.

Emotional Resilience:

• Sing your lungs out! - Just pick a favorite song you know most of the lyrics to, and sing it at the top of your lungs.
• Hug yourself - Give yourself a hug or a pat on the arm or back, while telling your body what a great job it's doing--just the way it is.
• Find your voice - Read one of your favorite poems or quotations out loud.
• A mighty act of self-care - Attend to one simple and easy task that helps you take care of yourself. Brush your teeth or hair, put away one piece of laundry, stretch for one minute, or get dressed in something you love.

Social Resilience:

• Love spree! - Give yourself three minutes to like, favorite, or leave a positive comment on as many social media posts from friends and family as you can (or emails or text messages or similar).
• Cheer 'em on - Pick one person and send them words of encouragement or support about something they're doing or going through today.
• Matching socks - Any time you activate compassion and express care for another human by noticing a commonality between the two of you--you power up! It could be as simple as noticing you're both wearing the same color socks!
• Listen to a friends-and-family playlist - Send an email, or write a social media post, asking all your friends and family to pick one song for you to add to a music playlist.

Storytime--whether leading or attending--would seem to be a half-hour mega-power-up experience.

My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts by Resmaa Menakem is in many ways a less typical book, as I wrote in Nobody's Ever Clean. The vagus nerve is the core concept of the book, and Menakem calls it the "soul nerve." It's where racial trauma lives, he writes. Here's a long section where he explains:

Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous. The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies.

New advances in psychobiology reveal that our deepest emotions--love, fear, anger, dread, grief, sorrow, disgust, and hope--involve the activation of our bodily structures. These structures--a complex system of nerves--connect the brainstem, pharynx, heart, lungs, stomach, gut, and spine. Neuroscientists call this system the wandering nerve or our vagus nerve; a more apt name might be our soul nerve. The soul nerve is connected directly to a part of our brain that doesn't use cognition or reasoning as its primary tool for navigating the world. Our soul nerve also helps mediate between our bodies' activating energy and resting energy.

This part of our brain is similar to the brains of lizards, birds, and lower mammals. Our lizard brain only understands survival and protection. At any given moment, it can issue one of a handful of survival commands: rest, fight, flee, or freeze. These are the only commands it knows and the only choices it is able to make. . . . 

All our sensory input has to pass through the reptilian part of our brain before it even reaches the cortex, where we think and reason. Our lizard brain scans all of this input and responds, in a fraction of a second, by either letting something enter into the cortex or rejecting it and inciting a fight, flee, or freeze response. This mechanism allows our lizard brain to override our thinking brain whenever it senses real or imagined danger. It blocks any information from reaching our thinking brain until after it has sent a message to fight, flee, or freeze.

-----

We know that the soul nerve is where we experience a felt sense of love, compassion, fear, grief, dread, sadness, loneliness, hope, empathy, anxiety, caring, disgust, despair, and many other things that make us human. When your body has an emotional response, such as when your stomach clenches, your voice catches, your pulse races, your shoulders tighten, your breathing quickens, your body braces for impact, or you have a sense that danger is lurking, that's your soul nerve at work. When you feel your heart opening or closing down; when you feel anxious in the pit of your stomach; when you sense that something wonderful or terrible is about to happen; when something feels right or wrong in your gut; when your heart sinks; when your spirit soars; or when your stomach turns in nausea--all of these involve your soul nerve.

When your body feels relaxed, open, settled, and in sync with other bodies, that's your soul nerve functioning. When it feels energized, vibrant, and full of life, that's also your soul nerve. When it feels tight, constricted, and self-protective, that's your soul nerve, too. And whenever you have a fight, flee, or freeze response, that involves your soul nerve as well. In fact, one of the main purposes of your soul nerve is to receive fight, flee, or freeze messages from your lizard brain and spread them to the rest of your body. Another purpose is precisely the opposite: to receive and spread the message of it's okay; you're safe right now; you can relax.

Your soul nerve is vital to your health and well being. It regulates your breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. It helps prevent inflammation. And it can reduce pain, improve your mood, and help you manage fear. We also know that your soul nerve is intimately involved with how your body interacts with other bodies, and with how your body makes memories. Without your soul nerve, you literally would not be human. But your soul nerve, like your lizard brain, has zero capacity to think.

Your soul nerve tells most of the muscles in your body when to constrict, when to release, when to move, and when to relax and settle. Much of this is outside of your deliberate, conscious control. However, as you will discover, with some attention and patience, you can learn to work with your soul nerve. With practice, you can begin to consciously and deliberately relax your muscles, settle your body, and soothe yourself during difficult or high-stress situations. This will help you avoid reflexively sliding into a fight, flee, or freeze response in situations where such a response is unnecessary.

Most of Menakem's book describes ways to strengthen the health of the vagus nerve to help it heal from racial trauma.

Here are some of his basic "Body and Breath Practices":

• Humming
• Belly Breathing
• Buzzing
• Slow Rocking
• Rubbing Your Belly
• 20s - Rotate ankles, knees, hips, and other joints 20 times in each direction
• Om-ing
• Singing Aloud to Yourself
• Chanting

There are chapters on practices that combine thoughts, emotions, and body in various other, similar ways. Visualizations connected to movements and positions. Daily practices for health, including:

• Simple pleasures - Each and every day, do at least one small, simple, soft thing that feels good to your body: do yoga, watch the sun rise, dig in the garden, play your guitar, take a walk with a friend, or do anything else that brings you joy. To ensure these simple pleasures become a regular part of your life, build them into your schedule.
• Some form of meditation, prayer, or chanting - This can be secular (for instance, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), religious, or somewhere in between (such as insight meditation or Zen meditation). I recommend doing this for twenty to forty minutes a day--if possible, in the morning.

And there are chapters on practices to do together. Social practices, to build connection and harmony. For instance, the list of "things to do with friends, family members, and others you know and trust":

• Hum or keen together
• Hum and touch
• Om together
• Sing a lullaby (or any other song) together
• Rock back and forth, without touching
• Rub your bellies, breastbones, or solar plexuses at the same time
• Take a silent walk together; after a few steps, deliberately keep your footsteps in sync
• Take someone's hand an gently massage it for one to two minutes
• Wash or massage someone's feet
• Simply stand and breathe quietly together
• When someone is in emotional distress, simply be settled and present with the person

And:

Many of the practices may seem absurdly simple--and many of them are. But each one can have a profoundly positive effect on your body, and on other bodies that are nearby.

Keep in mind that these are everyday activities--things to be done briefly, in the moment, with one or more other bodies. For example: "Before we begin our meeting, let's all hum together for about ten seconds to help harmonize our bodies." Or, "Can we try something? For the next few minutes, let's try walking silently, side by side, keeping our footsteps in sync." Or, "Wow, you look really beat. Want me to massage your feet for a couple of minutes?" Or, "Before I begin my sermon, let's all settle our bodies. Everyone please rise. Now, if you would, for about fifteen seconds I'd like each of you to just rub your belly, slowly, like I'm doing now.

Versions of these happen constantly throughout storytimes, the content aside from reading books.

I've always known storytime was good for kids, but I've only thought so in terms of developing language and literacy skills. Adding an awareness of the vagus nerve adds a whole new dimension. I find the ideas fascinating, and I realize now I've been experiencing the benefits for 20 years.

One more thing about the storytime trainee. A couple of months ago, in Solving Hard Problems with People You Admire, I included part of a message I sent to her as a mentoring thing. Before that though, the first thing I ever told her about doing storytimes was:

The only thing you can really do wrong is be boring. As long as you can connect with the kids and find a way to engage them, you will have succeeded. And there are myriad ways to do that. One way to get it wrong, a multitude of ways to get it right.

The last piece of advice I gave her, 15 minutes before the start of her first storytime, was a printed copy of this favorite quote I share often:

I am one of those people with a reputation for being a "natural" with children. Because I produced none of my own, my friends often make the observation with an air of puzzlement, after I've beguiled their offspring out of a sulk or into a game quieter than hurling pot lids.

The honest explanation has seemed too impolite to share: Of course I'm fluent in child. I've spent my whole life around wild animals. . . .

This is why I don’t find children baffling. They are young animals, unrefined in their instincts and impulses. If an animal is shy, I don’t gaze or grab at it, because those gestures are predatory. Instead, I avert my eyes and display something enticing. To avoid frightening the young human who has approached, it’s essential to project positive feelings. When a horse detects the stiffening of a fearful rider, the horse tenses because it has evolved to respect any indication of danger. Inversely, a fearful horse can be soothed by a rider who is at ease. And so it is with the young human: He monitors other humans for hesitations, signs of doubt, signs of danger. I try not to embody any. Thus, by exploiting an animal’s instincts, it’s possible to manipulate its behavior to suit yourself.

― Hannah Holmes, The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself

You set the tone for the room. Be chill, tell yourself that it's all good, and it will be.

The world knew nothing at first. Then it gave birth to plants, who noticed what sunlight tasted like, and worms, who reveled in the luxuriant touch of soil. Soon the world's bright birds were perceiving the color of sound, its playful quigutl discerned the shapes of smells, and myriad eyes of every kind discovered sight and saw differently.

Behind these senses were minds--so many! The world was too vast to fit into just one mind; it needed millions of them to consider itself from every possible angle.

The difficulty with minds is that each perceives itself as a separate thing, alone. And so the minds spin stories to bridge the gaps between them, like a spider's web. There are a million stories, and yet they are all one.

― Rachel Hartman, In the Serpent's Wake