Tag: Personal

I saw the dreams in photo flashes last night. The shutter sound was clear and everything was slower. Every detail didn’t belong to me, but was available to me, prepared and open for peaceful coexistence. 

I watched the blue smoke of your eyes, a color that would make Ray Charles swoon. The color that used to hold the whole mood of the world to me. I was looking too closely at first, you know how the story goes. 

I zoomed out further, further, further until I was seeing the whole landscape, a beautiful and expansive abyss. I stayed here longer – studying closely, fully alive. I waited, listened, breathed through the tears, the waves of panic nausea – the pain of memories that still live in my cells. 

I breathed more deeply again and again and again. 

There it was, finally. The Immovable Truth.

This has been my circle around the sun that has gone the least like what I expected or even had the capacity to imagine. What a thing it is to be thoroughly surprised by a life. 

I’m exactly 16 days late in posting this, but I’m feeling pretty confident that 2020 was the year time was cancelled anyway.

Here’s a random list of things I would have liked to tell myself 381 days ago, if I could hit rewind: 

1. It’s really important that you speak up about the days that are filled with joy, gratitude and bliss – talking it out does not just apply to the things that are hard. Sharing your light is just as raw and vulnerable as sharing your struggle.
2. Your biggest relationships have always held up the mirror for you to see and approach your own work. They’re not around to fix anything, like country music and the entire movie industry desperately cons you into wanting to believe. These souls are your teachers, not your saviors.
3. Sisterhood and chosen family are still the most magnificent pieces of being alive that I’ve known to date.
4. Even people you love and respect tremendously will not understand or agree with all of your choices. Very well then, it’s probably a very good sign that you’re living your own life and not theirs.
5. It’s okay – and necessary – to trust your happiness. Buoying above the things that feel too good to be true is a very direct path to not being present for any of it. Hope in these moments is still the most brave and vulnerable thing we do.
6. Your saying Yes to things that feel like a “yes” inside will allow you to keep living a really interesting story (and well done in this category this year, by the way). Be proud of the yesses that you’ve chosen over the past 365 days solely because your only guide was your own Knowing and apparently insatiable curiosity about the human journey.
7. This is the year of life you will start groaning unexpectedly when bending down to pick things up – it will catch you off guard and it’s probably easiest if you just accept that that’s where we’re at here. (Also, maybe good to note that it wouldn’t hurt to continue increasing the yoga).
8. Make all the plans you want, but don’t get attached to the result or the timeline. It’s important that you’re training to move side to side as quickly as you want to move forward.
9. Very few things were ever made worse by taking two minutes to sit down and focus on your breathing. Exceptions include, but are not limited to: food poisoning emergencies, house fires, operating a motor vehicle.
10. You get to sign your own fcking permission slip.

A few days ago, Jenna took my picture for my Wanderlings bio.

I don’t know the last time I’ve had a picture taken of me, just me, without a prop or an occasion to give context to the photograph.

I’ll be completely honest, it sent me to crazy-town for a moment. It was somehow too intimate – just me, standing alone with my face and my hair and and my acne and my crooked smile. My instant response was to jump back from all of this, to recoil from the show of me-ness in its unapologetic roar. I wanted to be embarrassed, I wanted to criticize. I wanted to call my mother and reprimand her for not putting me in a helmet to correct my asymmetrical infant head, which I would wager to bet was a pretty linear path to my asymmetrical adult head. I wanted to tell her that I know my teeth were straight enough as a pre-teen, but I’m sort of pissed that we didn’t look more closely into braces.

As soon as I looked more closely, though, I started to see and feel something else. That need to jump back from myself, to be embarrassed and critical of the things that will keep me off of magazine covers, was not erased, but joined by a question I couldn’t quite articulate yet.

Going back for another look with an awareness of my ranting internal voice, I noticed first how happy I look. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic and I’m in my sixth week of sheltering-in-place… and I look happy? Then, I noticed how peaceful I look with the trees all around; it looks so normal to have me sitting in the dirt at the base of my dear green friends.

I started to note the peculiarity of this notion that I can celebrate your attributes that make you you and on myself, they’re flaws. I know this isn’t my fault, that we’ve been cultured to seek our imperfections and obsess over them, chastise ourselves for having them, make ourselves small because of them. The hard truth of this is that I don’t get to start helping define a new normal in this realm by exclusively honoring my little sister, my future daughter, or my best friends. Those celebrations are important but the real work starts right here.

I took another look through a new lens with the compassion I’d have for a dear friend. I knew that if I was looking at a picture of a friend, I’d tell her that I like her wild hair, which has never been tidy a single day she’s been alive. I like that it refuses to stay one color that would make it easy to categorize. I’d remind her that, as a person who lives to be outside, why would her wild skin not have imperfections and blemishes from the sun, the change of season, and so much sunscreen? These are her trophies of her wild lifestyle. I’d remind her that her body is wild and strong enough to run up hills and carry a human in some sort of emergency. I’d remind her that her eye color is hard to see because her smile is big and goofy, tending to change the expression of her whole face, and that makes her feel wild too – wildly connected, wildly loved, and wildly lighthearted.

I’d remind her that the wildness of her imperfect physical attributes are just as they’re supposed to be, even if she wouldn’t have chosen them all.

She may as well learn to love them wild.

And finally, I heard the questions loud and clear – Doesn’t the picture look just like me? Isn’t that enough?

I’ve been looking for the right words, but I’m only hearing music – some happy, some sad. Your big, bright, messy world has taught me that maybe that’s okay too.

As our seasons are changing, I hope you know that there isn’t a day I’m walking through without you.  You are an unconventional, inexplicable part of me.

You have made me the most creative, most playful, most patient, most adventurous, most intuitive, and most grateful version of myself I have ever known.

Three years ago, I would never have thought to dream of alternative career options for princesses, where the neighbors are headed at any given time, or what the mailman’s dog’s name is. I would have never named my feet or answered every phrase with a rhyme. I would have never understood why parents occasionally have wine for dinner.

I wasn’t prepared for what you would teach me and how much you were readying me for a world beyond my comprehension.

I didn’t know what I believed in until I found myself humbled by your occasional torrential rage but mostly, by your love.  Unapologetic. Relentless. Unconditional.

I hope someday you’ll grab the hands of my own kids, all of us with watermelon sticky fingers, and teach them to crazy dance at Concerts in the Park, enveloped by the orange glow of the late summer sun.   

“Thank you” feels inadequately small and “I love you” seems laughably obvious.

So, here’s to the small and obvious.