Birthday Musings

Earlier this week (before the snow and the storms), I took a birthday visit to the lake yesterday to celebrate and do some reflecting about the transition into a new decade.

One of the things I thought about was how, in my twenties, I felt a lot of pressure to be good and feel good – to manage and maximize my life through positivity, productivity, and perfectionism.

But I began to see somewhere along the way that this focus was off – and that it was a better investment to pour my time and energy into the project of becoming a person big enough to hold the hard stuff – the complexity, imperfection, failures, hard emotions, and bad days – rather than pushing them away.

Ultimately, the focus on goodness, positivity, and perfection made me smaller because, in my efforts to maintain them, I often shrunk away from the real and hard stuff that was asking something of me.

And now, in all my 30 year-old wisdom, I feel pretty confident saying that living a good and deep life is far more than a collection of good feelings, positive thoughts, and productive days strung together.

It’s about our capacity to be with their opposites; it’s about becoming a person who can do a hard thing and feel a painful emotion rather than let them stop us.

Which is probably why being in the presence of the lake was so comforting - a perfect metaphor for becoming a vast container to carry whatever flows within it.

Here’s to a decade of bigness, flow, and power.

Amping Up Your Beautiful Weirdness

As a 6’0” American woman, I fall in the 99.38th percentile of height. (Info courtesy of this calculator).

People see my tallness first. It’s the thing about me that’s most noticeable and conspicuous.

People often look at me with wide eyes and say the obvious, “you’re tall.” (or random dude on the street one day: “your daddy must be biiiiig!”).

People ask me if I play basketball. Or used to model. Or if my (male) partner is shorter than me (he is) and how he feels about that (totally emasculated, obviously).

All of this is only sometimes and sort of annoying (and there’s actually a lot of social privilege in being tall), but my height is definitely a thing. It leads the way and defines how I show up and occupy space in the world.

After the awkward teen years, I got better at standing up straight, not shrinking away, and enjoying the benefits of getting things off the top shelf and being able to see and breathe fresh air in crowds.

But I pretty much always wore flat shoes. Because I thought I couldn’t wear heels (isn’t it awkward and rude to tower over people like that?) or because I thought I wouldn’t be able to walk gracefully (higher center of gravity and all).

But I recently got a couple of pairs that make me about 6’2”, and the experience of wearing them has rocked my world.

These shoes make me feel like I have superpowers, which makes sense – because they do amp something about me (my tallness) that actually is a sort of weird, mutant superpower (statistically speaking).

It makes me wonder: why don’t more of us amp up rather than tone down what makes us weird, different, and special?

The places we don’t fit (maybe literally) are portals into so much beauty, power, and realness.

I’m finding that for me, wearing shoes that make me taller is an act of embracing my bigness – not only my actual physical size, but also the fullness of who I really am.

And there’s something catalyzing and life-affirming about stepping into that simple truth.

It feels good to feel like more of myself.

I’m tall. So I might as well own that shit.

Is there anything about you you've been toning down that wants to be amped up? Where is your invitation to step into your bigness?

Whatever weirdness, uniqueness, or realness is waiting to find deeper expression in and through you, I encourage you to embrace it, own it, and let it take you to truer depths of your vast and beautiful being.

The Honest, Gritty Truth about Change

Our capacity as human creatures to change, shift, and transform – to upend a life, identity, or trajectory to create a new one – is one of the most awe-inspiring marvels of life, in my experience.

We all possess this power, and that’s a beautiful truth.

But I don’t often see a lot of honest conversations about what change actually is and what it requires.

Change is wonderful – it’s also often hard and weird. It’s dangerous alchemy and volatile combustion. This is true whether the changes are good or bad, chosen or not, external or internal.

Because when we undergo a change that cracks or shatters our sense of reality or asks parts of us to die to be reborn, there are moments of empty (and perhaps terrifying) uncertainty, moments when we are confronted with the questions: who am I, and what is real? – and don’t know the answers.

And this unknowingness is destabilizing and catalytic – and certainly not as safe as the status quo.

I was reminded of this recently. I was having a hard mental health day and feeling confused about it, until I remembered I was in my own process of transformation. And since those changes were internal (and invisible) rather than obvious in my external world, I had overlooked the care I needed to navigate the process.

Because often, the actual, lived experience of transforming is one of our whole system being wobbly, out of alignment, and in an uneven, jumbled mess as parts of us deepen, grow, and expand, while others are left behind and trying to catch up.

I try to remember to expect all of this so that I can be intentional in creating space for my body and spirit to integrate, rest, and heal. Because there will probably be hard days, and things will probably get broken along the way. And when I can expect this and (sort of) prepare for it, I can more easily let the current carry me along and invite care and grace into the process.

Knowing vs. Certainty

When I feel like I don’t know what to do next, there’s a good chance I’m confusing certainty with knowing.

Here’s the difference as I understand it:

Certainty wants a guaranteed outcome, promise of safety, clear view of the whole path, and list of step-by-step instruction, whereas knowing is the truth available now that takes me to the next right thing.

Knowing unfolds as we go.

This is often super frustrating to me. Because I even though I know (or can find a way to know) what’s true for me now and what the next right thing is, this often doesn’t feel like enough – at least to my anxious, small self who prefers certainty and would choose the guarantee every time.

But the path is unfolding and so are we, so the truth of our knowing is never a once-and-for-all conclusion we can hold ahead of time.

Instead, knowing comes with engaging life, walking the road, making wrong turns, and deepening into our embodied, intuitive wisdom.

This way of knowing reminds me that life is an adventure of trusting what I know in the moment and remembering that for now, this is enough – the rest will unfold when it’s time, and I can trust my own capacity to be with the uncertainty in the meantime.

The Vastness of You + a Tool for Discernment

Who am I? is one of my favorite questions.  And it's an important one - because what we know and believe and understand about ourselves shapes how we live, dream, and engage others and the world around us.

However, I find the answer people give to this question is often a role - a set of expectations and ideas defined by others - when who we are at the core is so much deeper than that.  I think this is because we are asked and conditioned to extract the truth of our identity (in all its wondrous, paradoxical vastness) and shove it into too-small containers.

Roles (like student, teacher, parent, partner, employee, etc.) can be useful and even accurate, but they never tell the whole story and can never contain or hold us in our bigness, depth, and wholeness. 

I was working with a client recently who was in the midst of a significant ending and life transition.  As the roles that used to define this person’s life and self broke apart, one-by-one, they felt like they were dissolving into nothing, when really, they were being invited into a deeper conversation with identity.  Underneath all of those roles and external expectations, who were they really?

What they found was that this transition was an invitation into depth, vastness, and mystery – an opening into looking at self, identity, and possibility in a new way.

If you too are being invited into explorations of self and identity, here is a simple exercise I recommend for getting in touch with the wisdom of your identity.

1) Get grounded and settled in your body and take a few deep breaths.
2) Come into connection with the vastest, deepest, wisest part of you – the part of you that is fully alive and dangerously powerful.
3) Ask this self: what do I know?

What is the profound, resonant, dangerous, deep-in-your-bones truth of the moment?

Maybe it’s that you need something you’re afraid to ask for or claim; maybe it’s an insight into a relationship or life situation; maybe it’s a knowing about who you really are at your core.

Maybe this knowing is lighthearted and simple; maybe it’s alchemical and potent; maybe it’s terrifying and electrifying; maybe it’s hilarious and beautiful. Whatever it is, you’ll know it’s right by how it lands in your body: clear, resonant, powerful, expanded, enlivened, relaxed.

When I did this exercise earlier this week, mine was: my freedom is worth any price.

This knowing asks something of me and isn’t super easy in terms of its implications, but it’s also a truth that when it landed, immediately clarified my next steps and intentions around a tricky life situation I have been trying to sort out for the past couple of months.

The trick is to be willing and brave enough to be with the answers that arise within us, to confront our truth with power, authority, and self-possession, and to trust our ability to hold complexity and stay with ourselves when it gets hard.

Not always easy, but worth it (in my experience). Because when our introspection, courage, and truth-telling collide, shit gets magical.

Cultivating Loving Feeling + Tools for Deepening Self-Love

I grew up with the maxim that love isn’t a feeling; it’s an action. Which I appreciate. Because love is gritty and hard and takes us to depths in ourselves and reveals truths about our human condition that can rock our worlds and shake us to the core. And when it comes to love, sometimes we just have to put our heads down and power through.

But somewhere in this pragmatic, sensible approach, I lost the truth that love is not only practical action and no-nonsense work, but also a feeling we cultivate with intention. And this feeling bit is just as important.

My relationships – with my partner, with my people, with myself, with the earth, with my creativity – all require my investment in creating feelings of connection, appreciation, and awe, as much as they require concrete action and commitment.

I felt this most recently in my relationship with myself, which had become all action, no feeling.  Even though I was loving myself with action – acting and advocating on my behalf, taking care of my body, mind, and spirit, setting boundaries, and going after my dreams and honoring my desires – there was a gap in feeling that left me with a missing piece and asked me to consciously nurture positive feelings toward myself to love myself better.

Because feelings aren’t just fleeting hits of emotional sensation – they are deep energetic compass points, transporting currents of power, and spiritual fuel. And my own tendency to dismiss feelings when it came to love was leaving my love relationships unbalanced and deprived of this essential ingredient.

So I’m welcoming feeling back into the mix and attempting to bring more warmth, appreciation, and wonder to love so that I can create energies that connect me with the world, feed and inspire my relational commitments, and ultimately make love an act of devotion, joy, and transcendence.

Here are some ideas for deepening your experience of self-love:

1) Let yourself feel all your feelings, even (especially) if they seem silly, contradictory, or nonsensical.  Give yourself safe space to feel, and let yourself laugh, cry, and rage.  Speak to yourself like you would to a toddler who is overwhelmed or tantruming.  

2) Answer the following questions: what do I appreciate about myself?  How can I cultivate feelings of warmth and connection with myself?  How might I deepen into delight in my own aliveness and being?

3)Give yourself experiences of wonder.  What takes your breath away?  What inspires and awes you?  Give yourself space to feel, experience, and allow those feelings, experiences, and memories.

4) Ask: What do I most need to deepen self-trust?  Maybe it's prioritizing your basic needs, fortifying your boundaries, cultivating positive feelings for yourself, or deepening your routines of care.

5) Honor your desire, and let yourself want what you want.  Too often, we push down what we yearn for, believing it's too big, too shallow, too frivolous, etc.  What might it mean to let yourself have it, and to allow that energy to pull you forward into mystery?

Wishing you all so much beautiful love and deep relationship.

Working with Fear to Create Goodness

Life has been reminding me recently that deepening my capacity to feel fear, discomfort, and uncertainty is a nonnegotiable part of living a big life.

Going after what I want, being real and vulnerable about who I am, stepping into newness, and seeking out unpredictable, raw experiences in the world often scares (and sometimes terrifies) me.

But more often than not, good stuff is waiting for me on the other side of that fear.

When I think of my first date with my spouse, getting on that plane to travel alone, starting my coaching business, or preparing for all of those high-stakes swim meets, job interviews, or exams, I can still feel the nervous butterflies and/or heavy pit of terror in my stomach, but I also remember that those feelings were all that stood between me and the beauty, goodness, and accomplishment waiting on the other side.

Deepening my capacity to feel fear helps me not run from life. And being with uncertainty and discomfort helps me stay in the moment I’m in (and not opt out by turning to escapism or avoidance).

And when I can do that, fear becomes an essential compass point – an indication I’m at the edge of my comfort and on the verge of the next new thing calling me forward.

Also: feeling fear and getting clear about what it’s communicating is a core component of discernment – because sometimes, fear is telling us it’s time to take our next step (or leap) towards a coherent desire, goal, or possibility, and sometimes, our fear is telling us we got off track and are on a path that is not right, safe, or good for us.

So how do we discern the difference? By getting clear on how each feels in our body.

I love the metaphor Martha Beck uses to talk about these two types of fear: does it feel more like you’re standing on a high dive about to jump into cool, clear water on a hot day, or more like you’re about to jump from the high dive into toxic sludge? Either way, the jump is high and frightening, but are you leaping toward something glorious, right, and clear, or not so much?

A helpful way to calibrate this compass is to return to times you felt fear. What did you feel in your body when the fear was leading you toward goodness, and what did you feel when the fear was warning you to stay away from something unhelpful or harmful? What do you notice about the differences between the two in how they show up as a feeling in your body?

Either way, fear is an important thing to feel and allow (unless we have traumas, addictions, or mental health issues that make it problematic for us to feel anxiety and fear, which is another conversation), because those feelings – as they show up in our bodies – are what give us the data we need to respond clearly and coherently to what life offers. And when we listen to our emotions and our bodies, we not only have more clarity for the path ahead, but also a deepened sense of inner knowing and self-trust.

Creating When You Don't Feel Good

I had a life-changing realization recently that I don’t have to feel good to create.

Much to my surprise, I’ve found that I can sit down to write, paint, or make something when I’m not feeling amazing.

And perhaps this is obvious, but it was sure a revelation to me.

Here’s a nuanced distinction I wasn’t quite getting:

Being connected and in flow with good energy matters in creativity. It definitely helps to have access to my vision and imagination. It’s good to have a solid energetic grounding in what gives my creativity life.

But this isn’t the same thing as feeling emotionally good.

The work I do to cultivate and plug into my deep creative energies is something I do on an ongoing, regular basis and not something I have to capture in a moment in order to do a thing in the material world. I can trust the inner work I’ve done already and also trust myself to access it when it matters, even if I don’t feel it emotionally.

(Plus, it is often the act of creating – actually doing the work – that connects me with good energy and gets me feeling good and in flow).

So sharing in case it’s helpful. As someone who personally benefits from so much of y’all’s creativity, I never want to pass up an opportunity to encourage folks to keep going. The world needs your art.

Returning to the Basics

This year, I’m reminding myself to return to the basics.

Because in the journey of deepening into who I am (sharpening my devotion and commitment to what matters, becoming a more effective life coach, growing spiritually and emotionally, etc.), I’ve noticed a temptation to bypass the basics (the work at its most fundamental level) in search of the next practice, insight, method, framework, or idea that will (magically) take me to new heights and depths of connectedness, joy, and wisdom.

And while seeking out new opportunities is part of the journey, it’s usually not what I most need.

Usually, if I’m craving connection or seeking transformation, I find I need to deepen into the basics of what I already know (and know to do).

For me, it’s the trifecta of awareness (body, emotion, and mind):

1) Getting grounded and checking in with my body, experiencing and settling into my embodied energy, listening and responding to what my body has to say.

2) Letting myself feel and have embodied experiences of my emotions (without needing to make them mean anything).

3) Managing my mind and working with the thoughts I think and beliefs I carry that keep me small, suffering, and stunted. Basically, identifying those thoughts/beliefs and doing to the work of choosing better ones.

All of this is infuriating simple (which, just to be clear, is not the same as being easy).

No matter how much I grow, transform, or deepen into this experience of life, I still have to be with myself, feel what’s happening inside, and question what I think.

No matter how much progress I make, the starting point is still more or less the same: breathe, sit, feel, connect, question. (It's pretty much always unhelpful to skip these steps.)

All of this reminds me that there is infinite depth in what is already here and available – and infinite possibility in the simple, foundational, unsexy work I know is mine to do and know will take me where I most want to go next.

Making Grounded, Clear Decisions

Being a human being with freedom and agency means that life gives us moments when we’re asked to decide – to go this way instead of that when it comes to what we’re doing, what we’re creating, and who we want to be in the world.

These crossroads moments are exciting and beautiful but also often frightening and anxiety-producing, as we confront the unknowns, eliminate options, and take a hard look at what really matters to us.

Important decisions – the weighty, life-trajectory-shifting kind – ask something of us, and it isn’t always easy.

So here are some of the key steps and practices I’ve found especially important in the (not always linear) process of discerning and deciding:

1. Imagine and Dream

Since decision-making is a process of narrowing and eliminating, it’s helpful to start big.

Imagination stirs up good energy, challenges our assumptions about what is true or possible for us, and opens up space.

The more we dream, envision, and connect with the frequency of our desires, the more compass points we have to guide our way forward.

2. Collect Data

This is especially important for those of us who prefer to dream in big, intuitive visions rather than deal with practical details and concrete realities.

I know I’ve had the tendency to avoid raw data when I’m facing a big decision because I want to hold on to my idealistic vision of what could be. The inconvenient details and bothersome realities force me to take my intuitive dreams back to earth.

But that’s where they have to go if I’m going to make anything with them.

So gather the data and information and stir it into the pot. Let it touch you and engage with what you find without necessarily jumping to immediate conclusions. Let it begin to speak to some of the questions: What’s available? What’s within the realm of possibility here? What are the boundaries and limits?

3. Filter Data and Set Parameters

What matters and what doesn’t? What factors are you centering vs. merely considering? And what data doesn’t really matter at all? Treating all factors and pieces of information as equally important in a decision-making process is mostly unhelpful and can quickly take us to the edge of overwhelm.

4. Be in Your Body

In my experience, good decisions are only ever made when I am grounded and centered in my body and listening to what it has to say.

Our body compass is our best discernment tool.

So in the process, ask and notice: what opens, expands, relaxes, and enlivens me? And what closes, tenses, or constricts me?

Remembering to climb back into our bodies also deepens our capacity to be with uncertainty and ambiguity. It can be easy to spin in the manic energy of I-have-to-figure-this-out, but in our bodies, we can just sit in this tension of not knowing, return to the awareness that we can bear the uncertainty, and be with ourselves through the process, no matter what happens.

5. Question the Scary Thoughts

Our decisions matter, but often, we give our decisions more power over our lives than they actually have and make all sorts of assumptions about how unequivocally wonderful our lives will be if we make the “right” decision and how horrifically bad they will be if we make the “wrong” decision.

When I was deciding something important recently, a turning point came when I realized: I have the ability to be happy no matter what I decide. I still have power and agency to create the life I want, whichever way I go.

Here are some questions for finding (and then challenging) your scary thoughts: What are you making it mean if you choose “wrongly”? Where have you set up strong either/or’s or absolute binaries in your thinking? Are you believing there’s one right (perfect, mythical) outcome? Are you asking for perfection?

Taking some time to identify and question these thoughts can release the pressure valve and open up space for flow and possibility.

6. Return to the Body

Before I make my final decision, I always check in to make sure it’s a “yes” in my body. This has never steered me wrong and has led to so much goodness I could never have predicted at the time.

So wherever you’re discerning and whatever you’re deciding, it really comes down to this: trust yourself and trust the processes you’ve entrusted to hold through the journey. The answers are inside.

Reclaiming Grief

I really wish our modern, western culture was more accommodating and literate around grief. As it stands, grief seems to be allowed only under certain circumstances and only for predefined periods of time.

I think because of our cultural bias against “negative” thinking and feeling, grief gets cast as a less-than-ideal feeling state we’re supposed to move through as quickly as possible in order to get “back to normal.”

But as anyone who has experienced loss knows, grief takes its time and there is no “back to normal.”

And in my experience, allowing grief is the way to not end up haunted, thwarted, or derailed after a loss. Because it’s the catalyst through which we compost and alchemize whatever was lost so that we can keep going, growing, and deepening.

So I wish grief was woven into the fabric of our culture as a unifying thread.

I wish we understood grief as an essential process and inevitable journey into the fullness, realness, and depth of what it means to be a human being who lives, loves, and dreams.

I wish we were all taught from the beginning that living a big life means allowing grief and joy, success and failure, disappointment and celebration to coexist in our lives and selves.

I wish we knew that grief is both allowed and necessary, whether the loss was small or big, clear or ambiguous, chosen or not.

I wish we understood grief as evidence we said yes to love – and that love is far from finished.

Devotion and the New Year

One of my favorite New Year’s rituals is choosing a word of the year.

There’s more to my New Year’s reflections, imaginings, and schemings than this, but I love the practice of trying to distill the energy of the 12 months ahead into a guiding word I can return to when I’ve lost the thread.

And each year, my word becomes almost eerily prophetic and finds expression and realization in ways I didn’t expect.

In 2018, my word was expansion. This year, my word is deepening.

Last year, I threw myself into life, tried new things, chased opportunities, and changed in ways and directions I couldn’t have imagined a year ago. And there was so much goodness that came of it.

This year, I feel the pull to tend to the roots – to deepen into devotion and intention, to be really clear about what matters most, remain realistic about my capacity, and live accordingly.

It’s reminding me that sometimes, life asks us to say no to some of the goodness present or available to us in order to invest in another possibility.

And sometimes devotion means stepping away from what is perfectly okay (and maybe even wonderful) because it is incongruent with the commitments we’ve chosen or the frequencies we’re committed to cultivating and amplifying in our lives now.

This has already been hard. I don’t like to pass up opportunity or let go of goodness.

But it’s been helpful to remember that I’m limiting the width in my life to amplify the depth. I’m stepping back from growing outward so I can lean into processes of growing inward.

Paradoxically, limits can set us free, and boundaries can open up spaces of infinite possibility. 
(Or at least that’s my working hypothesis for the year).

So whatever 2019 is asking of you, I hope it opens, deepens, and catalyzes you into whatever goodness awaits.

The Invitation of Creative Urgency

Creativity is urgent and insistent. Our art, our vocations, our activism, our work in the world – it all matters. It all carries weight and significance.

But I’ve often resisted this urgency, conflating it with the demands of a hyperactive dominant culture that pushes us to be productive at all costs.

What I’ve come to realize is that our creative urgency is a different thing than the urgency of panicked striving that disregards the organic cycles and processes that support our creative energies.

Creative urgency is real – and an important thing to feel, I think. It speaks to the necessity of vision, imagination, ideas, and art in our world. And we can listen and respond to this urgency without interpreting it through the lenses of oppressive systems that will always and forever tell us we’re not enough, and that we’d better push ourselves to the edge of destruction in an attempt to prove otherwise.

The urgency of my creativity is not the urgency of capitalism (which always demands I do more, produce more, and be more), and when I feel urgency, I’ve found it super important to take a moment to discern which sort I’m experiencing. The former pulls me forward, invites me into bigness, connects me with power, and inspires vision and possibility. The latter has me preoccupied with measurement, comparison, panicked striving, and external expectation. It’s an urgency that kills the best parts of my creativity.

And so while I do ask my creativity to produce for me (as some of my work in the world asks for that), I also take intentional breaks to separate creativity and production – to set aside space free from judgment and expectation: space for process, flow, and experimentation. And perhaps most importantly, I do not ask my creativity to “prove” anything about me – my enoughness, worthiness, giftedness, etc.

Our creativity is urgent because it’s a portal through which we step into and open spaces of power, aliveness, hope, and possibility. And these are all things we need, things the world needs. So when that urgency rises up in you, pay attention and follow its lead. It’s calling for something big and important.

Creativity and the Deeper Thing

On the creative path, there are all sorts of ways to get tangled up and pulled off course by fear, perfectionism, and beliefs we hold around productivity, enoughness, and visibility. It’s a simple enough (though not always easy) process to dive into these pieces and do the work to get somewhere good, but in my experience, there is another essential step in uncorking creative flow.

And it’s basically finding a way to remember that creativity is always bigger and deeper than the thing we’re creating.

I’ve found it helpful to have regular conversations with my creativity, and here’s one way to do this: remember a time you felt connection, exhilaration, flow, resonance, freedom, love, etc. in your creative process; get anchored in how that feels or shows up in your body; and then step into that feeling to “take on” its consciousness and channel its energy. From there you can journal from its perspective, ask it questions, or allow it to guide your creative process.

This is what I consistently find when I do some variation of this exercise with clients: there is always a depth of wisdom, spirit, or vastness present. Which doesn't surprise me because our creativity is a holy and alive thing.

And when we can connect to the depth and vastness of our creativity, we step into a whole other frequency of energy, one that can't really support or sustain our fear.

And while it may not be possible to live here all the time, even a glimpse of it can start to change things.

And this is why it matters to me that more folks find a way to unleash their creative power: because it’s more than what we make with it – it’s the energy inside and beyond us – the light, connection, and resonance we share with the world and pour into the collective.

So if you feel creatively stuck, see if you can find your way into the deeper thing, the underlying energy of power that wants to pull you into all manner of creative goodness and possibility. I'd love to hear how it goes : )

Paths of Failure

One of the life goals I set for myself (when I was about 14 years old) was to learn Spanish. Committing to that process is one of the most important things I’ve done in my life.

Not because of the awesome new skill it gave me but because it broke something in me that needed to break.

I took a Spanish class my first semester of college that felt like an absolute disaster: an endless series of humiliating failures (obvious evidence of my complete ineptitude), that agonizingly specific feeling of embarrassment and despair in those frozen moments when I couldn’t find the words, the C (gasp!) I got on my midterm.

But as anyone who has learned a new language (or done any hard thing ever) knows, reaching a goal is simply a matter of failing well, productively, and consistently.

So there was a choice to make: I could choose a different major and return to what came easy for me, or I could commit to that path of failure.

To get what I wanted, my identity had to change – from smart person to determined person, from person who gets straight A’s to person who commits to processes of learning, from person who succeeds a lot to person who fails a lot.

I am thankful I had Spanish to remind me that I am not here (that I did not come all this way into this dimension of time and space!) to hold my breath so as not to disrupt some frozen stasis of perfection I’m clinging to for dear life. I am not here to serve or uphold models of smartness, goodness, or success that other people made up. I am here to get gritty and dirty – to come into fierce contact with the world and my own self.

And here’s the thing: I speak Spanish almost every day, and it’s often still a colossal failure. I still lose words or say them poorly. I still have to ask people to repeat themselves. But I have also traveled alone in other countries with Spanish. I have assisted clients in accessing services, navigating the legal system, and creating safety plans with Spanish. And I have had conversations with hundreds of people I would not have been able to speak with had I not chosen this path of failure.

And what I know now that I did not know then is that there is no ultimate arrival or success – only beautiful milestones along a path of infinite failures.

I believe that part of what it means to be human is to take ourselves to our edges, to have our identities shattered and recreated, to surrender to what it means to be a beginner, to let go of where and who we are to embrace an ongoing process of becoming. This is what I came here for. And I like it a lot.

Art as Hope

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that art reemerged in my life at this particular moment – that my impulse to begin tinkering with watercolors happened in the midst of deep grief, hard uncertainty, and painful despair.

There have been some really hard things happening in our country and world, and I realized at some point along the way that denying, minimizing, or bypassing any of it would never work. I had to accept its realness. My task is not to make the horror other than it is. My task is to find a depth of beauty that matches the depth of despair – to find a goodness that can stand its ground and hold its truth in the presence of swirling grief.

When we have been pulled into new depths of despair, it simply means we have to go deeper to find a love that can meet it.

Art helps.

When I’m tempted to believe I’m powerless, creativity reminds me that no, actually I am still in possession of immense power. Because when I’m creating, I’m using the power of my aliveness to dream up visions, put energy into form, and recognize beauty. Art – my own and others – reminds me that aliveness is thriving, as is our collective power.

In other words, art is an answer to despair and creativity is an act of hope. Because it’s hard to keep believing there is no possibility when I am literally creating it inside of me.

So please keep creating, friends. Your art matters.

The World Needs Your Art

Six months ago, I was not painting. In fact, I had not picked up a paintbrush in more than a decade.

Five months ago, I brought home some watercolor supplies and started dabbling.

Three months ago, I started painting a lot and sharing my work.

Art has been the lightning-bolt epiphany of my 2018.

I am so happy to be making art, and although I can appreciate and understand the timing of it all, I am also sad there was a decade of my life that I wasn’t.

I had two primary objections to creating art of my own: I believed it didn’t really matter (or at the least the kind of art I would make wouldn’t really matter), and I believed I was not artistically gifted enough.

The shift started when I heard Fabeku Fatunmise talk about art and how/why it matters - that art is a transmission of energy and talisman of magic. I began to see for myself how art is a portal into a language, experience, and world beyond words, how art creates a bridge into what we can access no other way.

I began to notice how art was transforming me. And then I began to imagine how I might take the energy inside of me and make it into shapes, forms, and images on paper too.

Suddenly, it didn’t really matter how much talent I had. I wasn’t trying to paint a picture that could be mistaken for a photograph; I was trying to take an energy inside of me and make a thing that transmitted that same power and frequency.

Art has created so much magic and connection in my life this year – as I’ve taken in others’ art and shared my own.

If you have your own objections to making whatever art calls to you, I hope you recognize those as the lies they are - and see that the world needs your art and will be a more magical and alive place if you create it.

Creativity, Aliveness, and Hope

This is what I’ve come to believe about creativity:

1) We do not create creativity. Our creative power just is. We support it, free it, nourish it, and channel it, but we do not make it because it already and always exists.

2) Creativity and aliveness are the same thing. Creativity is simply the energy of our life-force reaching beyond the boundaries of our selves to find expression in some tangible form – words, images, colors, objects, ideas, connections, etc.

3) Our aliveness is always pulling us forward into vision and creation. Creativity then is simply a matter of uncorking what is already alive within us.

I find this perspective incredibly hopeful. Because it means that all our visions and dreams, all we hope to create in and for the world, begins with what we already have within us. It also means that we actualize the changes and visions we want for the world with the same energy and power that animates our existence and being. And to get started, we don’t have to look any further than our own heartbeat.

Winter and Aliveness

Where I live, pretty much everything dies, hibernates, goes dormant, or flies away for the winter. Water stops flowing and becomes hard and heavy as a rock. There are days when the slightest breeze against skin is physically painful. The sun sets at 4:30.

And every year, there is that inevitable moment, usually around late January, when we hit the bottom of winter – when things feel so impossibly frozen and lifeless that our bodies temporarily forget that summer ever existed.

But there’s a rightness to winter. Because it’s just the truth – deep and abiding realness.

Winter reminds me of so many things. That stasis cannot support life. That death is essential. That as much as I think I want eternal, unchanging summer, I know in my bones there is something not right about that.

I sometimes think I want forever summer in my own life too – that energy must always be moving, ideas always flowing, activity always happening. But unchanging levels of energy and constant activity is its own type of stasis. And stasis is not organic. Stasis is not alive.

But we are alive, so winter happens inside of us too. And these times of dormant inactivity and motionless stagnation are required happenings in our own life-cycles and inner seasons. To live, create, and claim our own aliveness, we must make our own descents into winter.

And rather than fighting it, how might we embrace its gifts of quiet, stillness, rest, and death, knowing we are held inside of larger natural forces of life, death, and rebirth that carry us forward and around into a new moment, season, or possibility?

Setting Boundaries and Investing in Possibility

I think about boundaries a lot.  It’s a topic that often comes up in my workplace and with coaching clients.  And it’s something I track closely in my own life and experience: am I protecting my space and energy?  Do I have what I most need?  Am I starting to feel overwhelmed or resentful and need to readjust?

Saying no not only helps me eliminate what I do not want in life; it also fortifies the energy, experiences, and relationships I do want.  In other words, boundaries are not only a no; they are also a yes.

Boundaries not only build walls of protection around our safety and wellbeing; they can also push us into spaces of unknown, open possibility in which we’re asked to imagine, create, and seek out what we want.

In this sense, boundaries are a leap of faith.  Saying no to what is familiar and just good-enough so that we have the space to say yes to what truly dazzles and enlivens can feel like a risk.  It often is a risk.

But boundaries are investments in possibility.

And in cases like these, I try to remember that it’s okay, and actually essential, to use boundaries as tools to create empty spaces of uncertainty because those are also fertile spaces in which our dreams and desires get nourished, take root, and find ways to grow and expand into our lives.