Health
Returning to Source: Surrender into Certainty
Photo by Sebastian Engler on Unsplash
“Returning to the source is stillness,
which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.”
~~ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Greetings to all my precious people,
The geese are gone now. What’s left behind is quieter work, and it happens where no one can see it.
Above ground, the trees look like they’re dying. Leaves gold, then rust, then gone. But below ground, something else entirely is happening — the sap that spent all summer reaching upward toward light is pulling back down now, into the roots, into the deep dark storage the tree has been quietly maintaining the whole time it looked like it was only reaching up. Nothing about this is loss. It’s consolidation. The tree isn’t disappearing. It’s remembering where its life actually lives. continue reading
Migration & Knowing When to Leave: Surrender into Certainty
Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash
“It is always important to know when something has reached its end.
Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters…
what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”
~~ Paulo Coelho
Greetings to all my precious people, my fellow travelers,
You’ve been standing at doorways for three weeks now. This week, we walk through one.
Overhead, the geese aren’t practicing formation anymore. They’re gone — or going. Nobody called a meeting. No committee reviewed the data on when, exactly, to leave. Something in them simply knew, the way it has known for longer than any of our calendars have existed, and they went.
I want to be honest about something most migration stories skip past: knowing when to leave and knowing where to go are not the same knowing. Geese have both, wired in together. We rarely get both at once. Usually we get the first — a restlessness, a door that’s suddenly, undeniably closed, a chapter that has plainly ended even if we can’t yet see the next one’s title. Coelho’s line isn’t really about destinations. It’s about having the courage to close the circle before you know what the next one looks like. continue reading
The Equinox and Liminal Spaces: Surrender to Certainty
Photo by Paul Pastourmatzis on Unsplash
“You’re afraid of surrender
because you don’t want to lose control.
But you never had control;
all you had was anxiety.”
~~ Elizabeth Gilbert
Greetings to all my precious people!!
Right now, we are standing in a doorway.
Tuesday brought us the Autumn Equinox — the exact moment day and night stood equal, the cosmos balanced for one instant on a knife’s edge before tipping toward the dark half of the year. The Celts called places like this “thin places” — shorelines, riverbanks, the hush of dusk — locations and moments where the veil between worlds goes porous. What most of us haven’t considered is that a day can be a thin place too. This one was.
But a threshold isn’t a place you stand still in. It’s a place you either walk through, or resist. continue reading
The Harvest and The Hinge: Surrender into Certainty
“Most experiences are unsayable;
they come to fullness
in a realm that words do not inhabit.”
~~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Greetings to all my precious people,
There are some things I’ve been sitting with lately that don’t really fit into words, which is, I think, exactly what Rilke meant. But I’m going to try anyway, because it’s been coming up again and again in conversations with my patients, and I don’t want to keep it to myself.
Before you were you, there was an errant sperm and egg, colliding. And then — with no coach yelling instructions, no manual, no one standing over the process telling it what to do — that collision replicated itself, over and over, in the most intricate and masterful sequence imaginable, until nearly ten months later, an entirely unique being took form and opened its eyes. That is happening right now, in bodies all over the world, and it has been happening since the beginning of everything. We almost never talk about it. We need to talk about it more. continue reading
The Healing Gift of Self-Compassion
Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
— Joseph Campbell
Greetings to all my precious people!!
There’s a quality of softness I keep trying to carry home with me — the kind I always find in slower places, where time is measured in togetherness and not in hours. You can feel it when people gather just to sit and talk, when mornings are unhurried and the birdsong gets a chance to be heard. That softness is available to us anywhere, but most of us have to consciously choose it, because the pace of modern life conspires against it. continue reading
