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Noticings

Noticings, This is my new substack newsletter. While I’ve loved my little Ramblings blog here, I haven’t visited often enough. It has felt, well, neglect-full at best. My website is still running all the things: upcoming events, new projects, and freshly published art and programs.

Noticings will hold a theme: the little things I notice that contribute to my creative life.

I guess what I need and, maybe you might enjoy too, is a weekly glee-full rant. Think, avant-garde poetry salon mixed with analog methods, like vinyl records, long-hand writing, to-do lists, and home-baked bread. Think, gathering around a campfire and sharing stories, experiences, noticings. Think, postcards, hand-written Thank You’s, and a proper cup of tea.

Within weekly Noticings, I’ll share my thoughts, along with a creative call or prompt or tool. Something that you might find useful. Something to keep you inspired and your heart filled.

If you’d like to check out Noticings, subscribe, share, enjoy.

Check Out Noticings, by Rebecca Evans on Substack

Much love,

Rebecca

Where We Can Meet

Not belonging.

What is this feeling, really?

Social houselessness.

Rejection.

Invisibility.

Masking in order to function.

Chronic isolation.

When I feel this way—unbelonging—I want inclusion. When I want inclusion, I often say something, a sort of signal to others, with hopes that they’ll add me in:

I wish I would’ve known, I would’ve joined you…

I can help with that…

That’s my superpower, if you need anything…

They don’t get my signal. My emotional response, all internal, kicks into overdrive.

I’m an outsider

Continue Reading at Write2Heal

Tending the Flame

My sacred fire. I thought this depleted. The last months feel a test, a reckoning, a renewal. My body rupturing—one infected stone turned an intricate system upside down. How delicate every cell. How reliant one upon the other.

I’ve thought my body depleted before. Other illness, self-destruction, a war, a death. Even the beauty of birth can feel like depletion of self. The sacred fire ever trying to hold herself. The reminder that when all else falls away—the body, the breath, the inner noise—the flicker, surprisingly, keeps her cadence.

The fire only survives because someone brings fuel. Someone outside of you creates a stir. A line from Oliver or Lee or Hirsch. A deep dive into Rumi. A twilit moment on the back porch, alone. Not alone. Never alone.

Someone helps care for the sanctuary. The GAIA instructor leading me through Kundalini. The writer guiding me through somatic healing. Hynde or Young or O’Connor howling my body into movement.

The noticing begins with the weakening flame.

The noticing is not sudden.

…continue reading on Write2Heal (my free Substack)

Finish Reading on Write2Heal (for free)

In the Business of Softness and Truth

Journal Entry from 16 Sep 2026

It softly rains as I softly write. My pen, often pushed across the page with holy rage. My pen, my exit wound for body stories. Can you pour away all that burned you, all that nearly buried you through art?

I’m in the business because I believe you can.

Nearly a year ago, I dined with an almost-date. A man exactly half my age plus seven years, which is some equation of dating-age-allowance. He—also an artist—was funny, smart and soft in body. Me—draped in a long, flowy dress, my hair following her natural cascades of curls. In the middle of our dinner, an old friend who knew me at the height of my athletic success paused at our table. We hugged. She whispered, Soft looks good on you. I was unsure if she meant the man or my body. It felt like judgment, her body still rocky and square. She leaned into the almost-date man, full-frontal hugged him like a long-lost friend. She may or may not have kissed his cheek. The almost-date turned to me: You should hang out with her more.

I’m in the business believing people usually mean at least two things when they say only one…

Continue reading at Write2Heal on Substack…

Continue reading at Write2Heal on Substack

I Come from Soil, Grit, and River

NOTE: I originally journaled this longhand on Sept. 2, 2026, a week out of ICU and a day after my second kidney surgery.

Yesterday, part of the infected kidney stone was removed and a new stent placed. I am placed in charge of removing the stent on my own on Sunday. I already feel better with my kidney now flowing, much like steam released in a tea kettle. Still, my kidney inflamed, throbs, telling me she suffers. I’ve new annoyances with the stent jabbing when I cough, sneeze, or shift positions.

Yesterday, after surgery, the man told me he might still be in love with his ex. When a man tells you he loves another. Believe him. Here, my heart empties along with my kidney.

Yesterday, I wanted only to cry, thinking of the potential system-wide organ damage that my sepsis suffering has caused. I do not. Cry, that is. Perhaps I can’t choose an organ to mourn right now. Perhaps the organ I choose will turn out fine. I want to cry over heart damage, over one more man unable to offer me a safe place in which to land. Still, no tears.

Perhaps I hold too much gratitude for tears. Yesterday, my pain management surgeon, Dr. L., the man who has repeatedly repaired nerve endings twisting around my damaged and arthritic spine, arrived at the OR as my anesthesiologist…

…(continued at Write2Heal on Substack)

Continue Reading on Substack at Write2Heal

She is Bamboo

Content Warning: This post discusses suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and sexual abuse and trauma

My body, this body, how many times she’s nearly not made it. 2006, a bizarre ear infection. The bacteria traveled to my mastoid, a honeycombed bone in the back of my head. The air pockets in the bone filled with strep. They—the surgeons—couldn’t simply slice me open and remove the bone, replacing it with a plate. There’s but a thin membrane between the bone and the brain. Instead, they admitted me, placed me on my side, allowed the poison to drip from the myringotomy tube, saturating my pillow.

As my body released toxic waste, I told myself, These are the lies others have told me about me. Told myself, These are the lies I believed.

It took a full year on antibiotics to recover, regain lost tissue and weight, as my body fought her way back to center ground.

Later, 2021, a sinus infection that wouldn’t quit. Staph flourished, entering my cheek bone. My body endured surgeries, debridements, scraping bones. My body absorbed heavy doses of antibiotics for another year. Again. Bone. Bone near brain. Bone and bloodstream.

Bacteria is natural to the body, but here, in mine, it often rampages. Still she—my body—fought, with and without outside assistance…

continuing reading this article over at Write2Heal on Substack…

Continuing Reading at Write2Heal

Sometimes, Deprivation is a Choice

NOTE: My entries are published non-linearly, offered to the world based only on courage. Today’s entry was originally penned on September 8^th. Here, I’m ready to share.

Let me tell you, I’m amazed with my body. I can’t tell you if I’ve ever, across my sixty years, simply witnessed her miraculousness.

After each baby pushed through, I tortured her back—however I defined back—each time. Wore girdles, dieted, dehydrated, crunched her into size four. Sometimes size two. I liked her better smaller, flatter, leaner.

I knew she knew this.

I’m sad about this now.

I can’t imagine liking anyone for anything external.

Here, today, I’m letting her.

Letting her be her in all her glory.

Letting her heal.

I left the ICU twelve pounds heavier and thirty percent less muscle mass than when I’d arrived. I can press anywhere on her—my body—all the way through to the other side, to another galaxy. After my neck collapsed, twice, I spent two years struggling to re-gain control and use of both hands and my lower right leg. (You can read my essay, “Braced and Bedazzled” about this chapter in my life in The Rumpus).

Here, an image of me around 2014, braced and navigating university, single-motherhood, and not healing.

I pushed and pushed her—my body—telling her, You’ll heal stronger. I honed ambidextrous ways. I quit wearing my lower leg brace, telling myself, This hurts, and It gouges my ankle.

I’m a liar.

The brace is ugly. It makes me feel vulnerable and broken.

I never wanted my body to need support like that…

(continue reading this Write2Heal article over at Substack)

In Gathering Grapes and Grief

I fell apart yesterday. Along with the body, this body, my body, pulling herself together, my heart cracked and crumpled. A break-up. My choice. My clarity for life moving forward. Clarity to know who and what I will allow access to me based on love, kindness, compassion. My choice—not rash nor emotional—but a series of linked behaviors, especially during and directly following my ICU stay.

The grapes ready themselves. They fascinate me with their way. The bunch of them living in different stages on shared stem. Some ripe. Others raisened. A few maintain their hard green selves. It takes me two hours to gather twenty pounds. I’ve still a second grapevine to tend.

When I fell apart yesterday, I cried my long drive home from the Saturday market. I met friends at the market, bought sourdough bagels and tomatoes and lobster mushrooms. I’m usually satiated by the vibe of concessions—all this community sharing common values of preservation and organic living. And I was. Satiated. Until I was not. The grief over potential future and current loss began its process.

After washing my grapes, I pluck and pack the ripest to freeze for smoothies. The raisins find their way to a mason jar and the green beads move to compost. Matt Berninger plays in the background while my seventeen-year-old fries home-made battered onion rings. The heavy aroma of oil and pepper lingers in light smoke. Or perhaps my vision clouds. I’m not sure.

Continue Reading this Article on my Substack, Write2Heal

With Deep Gratitude for Toast and Stents

Yesterday I pulled my stent out. The surgeon instructed this post-op, though I barely remember her guidance. Blood. Warm bath. Meds. Pain.

The day before, I bled-peed all day. This too, expected. Still, when you witness your body pouring blood through an orifice that should not bleed.

Yesterday I prepped stent-pulling with a strong dose of Tylenol. I don’t ingest pain meds. More accurately, my body doesn’t cope with prescriptions. She—my body—cramps, vomits, shudders. Post-op pain management looks like an endurance test with heating pads, ice packs, and Tylenol. I also believe that pain is a symptom and masking a symptom often brings more complex challenges.

The day before, I joined friends at The Sandbar for live music. The band played 80’s tunes and a third of the crowd dressed the part—Cyndi Lauper-ish, neon jogging suits, hair poofed to sky. I knew the lyrics. I danced in a non-bouncing gentle way and realized that this was my first outing, my first witnessing of clouds outside my backyard. My body warmed with movement. I still peed blood.

(continue reading on my substack blog, Write2Heal)

Continue Reading at Write2Heal

When Black Coffee Sits Sweetly

(Substack Post Dated Sept 1st, 2026)

Tomorrow brings surgery. My 17^th or 19^th while in this bag of skin. When I leave this world, I’ll leave lighter, fewer organs and rage than the state in which I arrived.

Today. I make a list of nourishing things: cool morning breeze, cricket choruses, fire pits and poetry, slow reading and even slower writing, pausing to push mundane tasks—dishwashing, dusting, laundering—into meditative moments of restoration.

Tomorrow they remove the infected kidney stone, too large to pass even with a stent. Perhaps tomorrow they will send the said-stone for analysis and determine what, within my body, helped build this beast. In a week, they will re-culture my blood and hopefully find the bacteria has flushed away. I won’t ask, Where did it go?

Today. I read pages of Tao Te Ching. I read this same book while serving in the military. A few pages every morning. Once I finished the book, I began again. I did this for four years and now, 40 years later, I see the way life shifts. I note the way we re-absorb story, language, another’s wisdom based on our ever-shifting lived experiences.

Finish Reading this Article at Write2Heal on My Substack

When a Rogue Stone Wakes You

Wednesday, August 19^th, my body fetaled, severe cramps spasming my lower abs and left flank. Probably a kidney stone, I thought. Maybe food poisoning. I dry heaved every ten minutes and thought, Manageable. Part of me feels like I could CLEP out of Med School after nurturing and nursing my son through 42 procedures, post-op home care, and over 60 hospitalizations. Then I add in my own disabilities and medical challenges.

This continued until four in the morning. I couldn’t keep a swallow of water or Ginger Ale throughout these six hours. I couldn’t pee.

Most likely a kidney stone blocking passage.

Still, I wasn’t worried until I stood up and couldn’t see, my legs boneless, my body numb.

Oh no, I thought.

I’m probably dying.

This is less than good.

Still, I waited. I mean, sometimes these little things work themselves out. Right?

…continued on my Substack Blog, Write2Heal...

…I’ll meet you over there.