One Step, One Breath at a Time

From a walk through Pollok Country Park in Glasgow, Scotland. June 28, 2022.

This is a letter written to those in my Love Letter email group on June 29, 2022, a few days after the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Hi Dear Ones,

We are living in a time of immediacy.

This sense of immediacy rushes us to constantly have the words. To be everywhere at once. In texts and emails back, in Instagram stories and posts, on Zoom calls, and somehow also in person.

We're in a pressure cooker of knowing what to say right away so that we can prove something to the world. To prove that we care.

Take heart, dear ones. You don't owe anyone your words, your thoughts or your energy.

As a person in a female body, from America, my body has governed expectations and legislations placed upon it.
That feels heavy.
That feels ancestral.

Emotions have been flowing in and out of me and I have been inviting them to do so, without putting up any kind of dam.

Anger.
Fear.
Despair.
Hope.

Move it through
and move it through
and move it through...

The trees have been holding the weight with me as I've been leaning into them with extra *umph* these past few days.

My body is saying, "lean in."

Lean in.
To the trees.
To the sea.
To prayer.
To people.

The thing is, we don't have to do this life alone. In fact, it's unnatural to try to do it alone. It is a primal instinct to gather and to care for the village.

When we go out into the forest, we realize how not alone we are. There are living, breathing Beings standing tall and rooted all around us.

Sometimes we don't have the bandwidth to stand tall and rooted, and that's okay.

What the world is needing right now is our attention.

We're being called in endless ways to
wake up!

My call to my angels and ancestors lately has been, "Please guide me."

"Please guide my steps, so that I may be of service to the world."

Through words, through presence, through movement, through music.

If you are feeling helpless, tired, uncertain...
sink,
melt,
dissolve
into all of it.
Ask for your next breaths and steps to be guided.
To the places and Beings that need your unique tincture of heart medicine.

"You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

~~~~~
Martha Beck so beautifully talks about the process caterpillars go through in their cocooning stage. They actually completely dissolve in their cocoon before forming into the butterfly they're becoming. Then, when it's time, they emerge.
She did this talk in her "Gathering Room" the other day and I found it incredibly helpful.
Here's the talk - Fresh Morning in This Broken World (on Facebook) or Fresh Morning in This Broken World (on Instagram)