Mindfulness
The Miracle of Molting: Surrender into Certainty
Photo by Greg Daines on Unsplash
“Shedding is an act of involuntary bravery.
We do not choose when our skin grows too tight for us.
We are split open from the inside out
by the pressure of our own growth.”
~~ David Whyte
Greetings to all my precious people,
I want to tell you something true about the caterpillar, because we’ve romanticized it into something gentler than it actually is.
Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar does not gracefully rearrange itself into a butterfly. It dissolves. Nearly its entire body breaks down into a kind of living soup — cell walls collapsing, structure gone, no shape left that anyone would recognize as a creature. And here is the part almost no one tells you: scattered throughout that soup are clusters of cells called imaginal cells, which have carried the blueprint of the butterfly all along, dormant, waiting. At first, the caterpillar’s own immune system attacks them. Treats them as foreign invaders. Fights the very thing that is trying to save it, because it doesn’t yet recognize its own becoming. continue reading
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 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 Sacred Pause: Surrender to Certainty
Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash
This week we pause.
25 years ago, September 11 was a sunny Tuesday with a brilliant blue sky. It seemed a day like many others: a return to school, a return to work after the Labor Day weekend, a certainty to the air, the schedule, the path to the season of Autumn. But on that day certainty broke, publicly and completely — the ground everyone stood on, the buildings people worked in, gone in real time. But what came after is where our theme gets its proof: the certainty that did show up that day wasn’t about answers to the questions, and it surely wasn’t shelter from the storm. It was people. continue reading
