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Upcoming events:
— Copperfields Books in Petaluma with Kaitlin Soule, 6/12, 7pm
— Womb House Books in Oakland with Carissa Potter, 6/23, 6:30pm

[ A song I’m loving ]

This Sunday is my birthday/Mother’s Day. They fall on the same day every seven years. I happened to be born on Mother’s Day, found under the widening blue sky that Sunday morning 39 years ago. This portal of time always feels like some strange swirl of both grief and miracle, like each year it pulls me into deeper connection with it all, reaching previously untapped layers and revealing the truth that none of it will ever be “finished.” Not because I’m doing it wrong, but because I’m doing it right. And in this portal, there are some things inching toward the surface that long to be felt, known, practiced, and shared. Here are 39 notes to self in honor of 39 years/thresholds, perhaps some we all share:

My god, the gift of being alive at all. Your younger self would be amazed you got to a place of life feeling like a gift instead of a burden.
Within the gift of being here at all are endless heartbreaks, and those heartbreaks can bring you more alive when you turn toward them with love.
If others are a mirror, how do you want to practice seeing them? What kind of grace do you want to practice offering them?
Being a companion to your grief will widen your heart in the exact ways you assumed getting over your grief would. More, and more, and more.
Your body’s marks of aging can become landing places for your own reverence.
Things that are always a good idea: dancing. a fuller belly breath. curiosity. croissants. music. poetry. going for a walk. touching the bark of a tree. telling someone you love them. forgiving the part of you still waiting for your embrace. looking at the sky. learning more about yourself via risk. learning more about yourself via ease. going for a drive. assuming you don’t know the full story.
Some of the places you are propulsive are actually asking for your slowness. Similarly, some of the places you are moving like a snail are asking for your gallop.
There are things you will never have an answer to, and no amount of circling in your mind will bring clarity — but embracing not knowing might bring peace.

There is always time to take one single breath, to let that spaciousness in.
Let humor be medicine. Let laughter uproot your assumption that seriousness is always the answer. Notice the sensation of allowing your laugh to erupt out of your mouth a little wider, a little wilder.
Unconditionally loving a child will teach you something about your own unconditional lovability. Let it pour.
You might never feel ready, and that cannot keep you from Doing The Thing.
No amount of their acceptance will replace your own. No amount of pleasing them will bring the closeness you can only find by being who you really are. Real love will never demand your performance.
Real Love requires a softening of the heart, which means it starts within, which means you can turn toward it at any time, in any moment.
To create is to stay close to possibility. To stay close to possibility is to remember reality can be as emergent as you allow it to be. To remember reality is emergent it to embrace your inherent fluidity, your multifacedness, the utterly vast landscape of you.
Your weirdness, your strangeness, your absolutely bizarre self is actually begging to be let out a little bit more. Let it out.
You might not need the certainty of safety as much as you need to trust yourself to move through whatever arises in what can never be certain.
Profundity can be found in the ordinary; it’s okay to stop seeking Big, Explosive, Transformative, and Deep — to lean into small, subtle, the blip of a moment, the quietest, tiniest revelation of a second.

What you assume is In The Way IS The Way.
Lostness isn’t a detour but is part of the territory of being here, something to drop fully into instead of avoid.
There is a children’s book called Have You Ever Seen A Flower? Letting yourself really see the miracle of flowers might change you more than reading another Instagram post will.
Your fierceness is not an opponent to your gentleness but is the very thing that makes your gentleness trustworthy.
Turning toward the wisdom of others might feel more nourishing than trying to figure it all out on your own.
You are the loving adult you’ve been waiting for.
Notice how you become more and more yourself the wider your heart opens. Notice how some of the fear of living with an open heart dissipates as you practice it. Notice how you feel the most you when you keep your heart available.
You can be a door to unending second chances, to recognition of all you’ve overcome, to being an attuned witness to your own ever-flowing humanity.
You can close the door on what no longer fits the being you are becoming.
Seeing the truth requires such an intense process of unwinding from what we thought we knew, which requires so much humility, which requires so much grace.

The only place is here. The only time is now. What will you make of that?

Let yourself be surprised.
Right within the wobbliness of not knowing is the birthplace of everything.
Portals and doorways are everywhere when you start looking for them.
There is an unbreakable place in you, always. You can return to that place, always.
Uproot your identities to discover the very essence that lives underneath.
Your heart breaking when you peer out at the world is just as real as your heart widening when you look out at the world. The breaking and the widening get to co-exist, inform one another, nurture the other.
Soften. Soften more. Notice how your softening only strengthens your backbone.
To age is to ripen is to become infused with richness, with aliveness.
Take a moment to savor it all, to linger in it all, to stay with What Is Here.
One day, you will write this poem and it will mirror to you the very miracle it is that you are here at all, able to meet all that comes from presence:

I was born on Mother’s Day.
That was the day she left.
I sometimes close my eyes and imagine it:
my newly-opened eyes looking for hers
and instead watching the dark morning morph
into blue sky, no clue that blue was mirroring
the color of my eyes.

The Great Mother was my interim mother,
the one between she who left and she who came.
The soft, damp dirt of earth, my first cradle.
The whoosh of wind, my first soothing.
The sun and trees, first mirrors to me.
Companioned by the elements, carried by her resiliency,
imbued with something I still don’t always know how to see.

When I first looked into my daughter’s eyes the morning she was born,
I saw my reflection in them, the blue a perfect mirror of my own.
I saw my face in her face, my essence in her essence,
myself in the curve of her eyebrows,
my heart in the depth she came here with.

They say a woman is born with all the eggs she’ll ever carry.
In some mystical way, my daughter was with me as a newborn,
with me in the waiting,
with me as Mother Earth took care of us,
with me as I searched for a mirror,
with me when I learned to find mirrors everywhere.

“Look at the beautiful sky, mama!” she often says.
We are mirrors of each other.
We find mirrors everywhere.

Thank you, as always, for being here.

△ Honored to have had this profoundly meaningful and tender conversation on Adoptees On, a podcast that has truly changed my life. This might be one of the most vulnerable podcast conversations I’ve done thus far. A gift.

△ Another beautiful conversation I got to have with Tracee Stanley

△ Really looking forward to reading this newly released book

△ This incredible essay from Haley Nahman

△ Practicing imagination

△ Trees

△ Hearing Rebecca Solnit speak about her new book and, upon arriving at the bookstore, seeing a familiar face on the poster next to hers (tears)