A friend of mine who was newly and unexpectedly pregnant called me the other day. The pregnancy was deeply surprising—so she was shocked, and weighing her options, but also warmly excited.

We talked about my experience of being a mother for a while—what I’ve learned, what I expected, and what I never could have anticipated.

Then, near the close of our conversation, she asked me in a soft and slightly dreamy tone—“Do you love being a mother?”

My first instinct was to protect her. Or maybe it was to protect myself.

I wanted to be gentle, but I also wanted to be honest.

I wanted to give her hope…and I didn’t want to hide the full reality of motherhood.

I ended up talking about how, as a highly sensitive neurodivergent mother with a highly sensitive colicky kid, we had a particularly rough go of it at the beginning.

How everyone’s experience is different. How it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done—but also the most fulfilling.

How it’s extraordinary and beautiful and mundane.

I think I did an okay enough job of answering her. But after we hung up the phone, I kept thinking about it…

About how, when she asked me that question, I was almost at a loss for words.

As if my brain couldn’t quite process the question itself.

Like it was asked in another language—or simply required me to answer in a language I didn’t speak, one we didn’t yet share together.

But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized why I gulped down air as if I was a sea creature on land. The more I understood why this question seemed almost unanswerable.

Do I love motherhood?

There is no tidy answer to this question, because to ask someone if they love motherhood is the same as asking:

Do you love life?

Because this what children are—they are life incarnate.

Unfiltered, present, vivid, entire. Overwhelming and underwhelming. Precious.

So…do I love life?

Well, that answer changes every day.

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Sometimes I catch the sunset off the back porch, and the air has that just-warm spring feeling and the song I’m playing from inside drifts out. My daughter rests her head against me as she points out the tulip poplar flowers budding above us—and oh my stars, I love life. I love this life. I love being alive.

And then there are days when my chronic pain is at an ear-splitting pitch. When I can barely taste my food for the overwhelm in my stomach and my daughter is screaming at the top of her lungs that her shoes aren’t pink enough while she bares her nails towards my eyes like actual claws and I think—dear god, life is altogether too much. I do not love this—whatever this is—and, in fact, every fiber of my being wants it to be over in this moment.

Ask someone if they love life. I’d like to hear their response.

Sometimes we’re in love with being alive, and sometimes it feels like the most painful reality to inhabit. And sometimes it’s somewhere in-between—unsettled, uncertain, sustaining, monotonous.

Life is all the things. And because children are life, they are all the things as well.

So, at the close of the day, maybe the question never was—do we love being mothers?

Nor is it—do we love life?

Perhaps it’s always just been—can we love life for what it is?

Can we reverence the force that is life—building, birthing, breaking down. Flood and fire and furnace. The red-glass heirloom lamp in our living room, finally broken into pieces. The scarlet tanager eating whole seeds at the feeder.

And can we love our children for what they are too? A flicker, a flame, a force.

Can we let them live out this spark of life within them, undimmed?

Can we love them for the light they carry in a world where so many of us had to trade our own lights so often, so early?

Can we allow them to simply be what they are—life, pushing its way into existence? Orange flame azaleas in a dark wood and spring lightning cracking over our house at midnight.

So...do I love being a mother?

The honest answer is—I love being a mother like I love life.

With tenacity and tenderness, devotion and deep doubt, with complete commitment and the flickering desire to escape, and an acknowledgement that everything—the despondency and the ecstasy both—is temporary.

I love being a mother because I am devoted to the ongoing practice of choosing, even when it feels impossible, to still love life.

To recognizing that this is love—not continual transcendent bliss—but the ability to accept something in its wholeness, in its paradoxes and depths. In its entirely.

It’s answering, when life asks you—as our children sometimes do—“Do you love me?”

Yes.

I will always love you.

Yes.

I am here to love you.

Yes.

I love you for the life that you are.

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Happy Mother’s Day, to all those who are choosing—day in, day out—this life.

This past winter was as dense and hard as the bucket of water my daughter left out on the porch, frozen solid overnight. I tried to prepare myself mentally before it began—after all, winter is hard every year. But knowing what to expect doesn’t always mean I can handle it.

Between weather and illness my daughter only had nine school days in seven weeks. We had days on end of sweating through blankets, all of us hot with fever. Sore throats, burst eardrums, bronchitis. My daughter falling asleep like she’s a baby again in my arms.

Then there was the weather. The steep gravel road that winds around the gully to our house became an ice luge more than once and, nearly every week, snow fell in drifts, turning up the brightness of the world to a euphoric, soul-bleaching austerity. One day I spent twenty minutes getting my daughter dressed in head-to-toe gear to go sledding. We waddled out, lay down to swirl angels on our driveway, and made it down our small backyard hill two whole times. I considered it a resounding win.

Seemingly every day we had to cancel, reschedule, and let go of plans. And in the mist of it all, we still somehow had to do the impossible. We still had to work, to make sure there was enough to eat if we got snowed in, to haul wood up to keep the house warm. We still had to digest the news, the world, evolving, changing, breaking open. We still had to live.

We still had to let life transform us. And it did.

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As I look back now on this warm February day—a moment of reprieve with sunshine and the snowdrops blooming and the earth carrying us closer to spring—I find myself with the space again to think. The space to reflect. The space to see just how soul-forging this past winter was, and to revisit an idea that kept coming back to me again and again over these last months.

Parenthood is a kind of winter.

Just like winter, parenting is a season that is revealing, rigorous, interior— beautiful in its uniqueness and overwhelming in its uncertainty. It’s a time when everything is stripped down to the layer of the soul, and the kind of visionary states that can only arise from survival.

We’re told parenting will be a spring in our lives, but more often, it’s a winter.

To parent is to enter a season in which you need to acknowledge that you have no control. A time in which you will be asked to surrender all your plans, your expectations, your schedules. A season in which you will need to let go of every preconceived notion of how your day, or your life, will go— and just meet the unpredictable weather of what is. A time in which nature itself will show you your limits, and you’ll learn how to bow to that which is bigger than you.

In parenting we have no choice but to go indoors for a time, to learn how to warm ourselves by simple things, like soup made over a hearth to fill your family’s bellies on an early-dark night.

Before I had my daughter, I loved winter. I loved how you could see the shape of the land through the bare canopy. Loved the way the cold sharpened my aliveness. Loved the way color stood out like the answer to a prayer on top of fresh fallen snow. Loved when I had to cancel plans and sit, dreaming, by the woodstove.

Then I birthed a child in the aftermath of a snowstorm. Then I learned what happens when you’re snowed in and childcare can’t get up to you. Then I experienced the fear of the power going out in your house when it’s 10 degrees and you have a small child. Then, simply, I matured.

Part of me still loves winter…but now I love winter because I respect winter. Because I am in awe of the power of life, even when it surges up like frost heave.

The power that is life, making you get on your knees in prayer, and surrender.

I recently heard someone refer to winter as the menstrual stage of the wheel of the year. A powerful time in which we are shedding, renewing, letting go of what no longer works for us, and softening into the demands of our bodies.

I resonated with this description—but it makes me wonder. If winter is a kind of menses… what happens next?

In Chinese medicine, menopause is sometimes called “second spring.” It’s a time in a cycling person’s existence when we get a new lease on life. Our energy, which has been pouring outwards into other people, now gets directed inwards—like sap running through our own branches so our flowers can bloom. I’m enchanted by this description of menopause, especially since, in our own culture, it’s mostly seen as some type of dreaded ending.

But if menopause is our second spring, then nearly everyone I know is parenting in winter.

Most of my friends are nearing, or directly amid, perimenopause. Many of us are waiting to have children now in the last years of our fertility. In the settlendness of our mid-thirties and beyond. It’s a wise choice in a world where we are handed very little real-life tools for maturation, initiation and thrival. It’s a compelling choice in a world where deepened spiritual skills are essential for our children, and what’s ahead.

But it also means having children in a period of life when our energy wants to drive inwards, tending and cleansing.

It means birthing during a menstrual phase of our existence, when our focus is naturally burrowing down like a soft animal, seeking resource and hibernation.

It means learning how to parent in winter.

Our species was designed to primarily have children in the summer of our lives— which makes sense. In our late teens and early twenties we are built by vitality. We can run on fumes like it’s a full tank, naturally stay up all hours of the night, and never worry about whether we’ll have energy to meet the next day.

And yet—I don’t think having children in winter is wrong (because clearly, our cycling bodies were also built to bear children during these years as well)—I just think it’s a different set of lessons, and potentials, we are instilling into our children’s lives.

What do we learn, as a species, when we parent through winter?

What soul forging is available to us, and to our children, when we learn how to raise children in the cold?

A friend was telling me, that in one model of Chinese medicine, if we’re lucky, we get two of every season in our lives. Two springs, two summers, two falls— and in our second winter, we die.

So really, to parent in winter is to teach ourselves, and our children, what it means to walk through an ending. How to meet the beauty and rigor of a world that is shedding, becoming something new.

It’s to show them how to let go of all the systems, programs, and creations that no longer work for us.

We are raising children in winter so they know how to look inwards, how to be smart with their own energy.

We are raising children in the winter so they can get comfortable with the letting go, the bare beauty of their own souls.

We are raising children in the winter of our lives, and in the winter of this world, so they are prepared for what comes next.

So they know how to thrive amid endings.

We are raising children in winter because it will be those same children—those who have encountered the distilled bounty of life at its close—who will be ready to meet spring.

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P.S. It’s been almost a year since I last posted on here. To everyone who has stayed here during that time, thank you 🤍 There’s been so much I wanted to write and share (and the beginnings of probably five other essays) I’ve just…been in winter. And now here I am again, on the tip of spring. 🌷

I still remember the moment it hit me, like a knee in my solar plexus.

My daughter was only a couple weeks old. I was sitting on the pink-winged armchair in the living room staring out the windows at the winter landscape. My daughter, tiny and fragile and newborn, had just fallen asleep in my arms when I realized something that instantaneously fractured my brain into a thousand shards.

My child would suffer in her life… and I could not prevent it.

I knew this, of course, in theory, long before she was born. Being alive is hard. Even in the most idyllic life there will be unexpected ruptures, fractures, losses and accidents. No matter who you are there will be times when you break, it’s unavoidable, part of the contract of being alive.

But it’s one thing to understand this as a general fact of existence, it’s quite another to hold the most precious being you could ever imagine in your arms and realize that you cannot control the unfolding of their lives.

I struggled, profoundly at first, with this. Postpartum is a powerful cocktail of hormones, emotions, and psychic openings. It is, to this day, the most potent and prolonged psychedelic I’ve ever experienced.

And so even though I tried to rationalize the sheer normalness of suffering in my logical mind, the deeper recesses of my brain were spinning to comprehend—not only would my child suffer in this life, she would probably suffer in ways I can’t imagine, ways that aren’t familiar to me.

Or, perhaps even worse, ways that are.

After she as born, I was haunted by intrusive thoughts for a whole year. Reoccurring scenes of my worst nightmares flashing across my mind many times a day. I have a lot to say about postpartum OCD, and will share more in a future essay, but looking back now I see one of the biggest factors of these cut-glass thoughts was this— I could not imagine how to survive my child’s suffering.

And so that’s what my brain tried to do, imagine it, again and again and again.

I used to hate the word “suffering.” It recalled monks in horse hair robes, self-flagellating through the streets.

I scented a glorification inside the word that made me grimace.

Don’t we have enough pain in existence without martyring ourself to its presence?

But I feel differently about suffering now. Parenting, in part, made me feel differently about it.

Suffering is just another word for the specific intensity of being human, of being alive. And it’s only through being alive that we can touch that thing we’re always reaching for, the thing some call “the sublime.”

Being with suffering is a skill. Perhaps one of the greatest skills we’ll learn in a lifetime. One our children come, in part, to teach us.

And one that it is the greatest task of our lifetime to learn, so we can teach it to our children in turn.

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Last week was Easter. While I didn’t grow up in much of a religious family, I did attend Quaker meeting on occasion, cracked open the bible once or twice, and was familiar with the Christian story of Easter, of Jesus dying on the cross and being resurrected from the tomb. Growing up, I preferred to shunt the obvious violence of this story to the back of my brain, along with all the visceral iconography of this suffering in some of my friend’s churches.

It’s only as an adult, and as a mother, that I’m able to embrace the fullness of this story. Not just the pain of a man choosing to suffer for the healing of humanity. But the unseen pain of the mother, enduring the immense suffering of a child who came to take on the hurt of the world.

I remember learning, as an adult, about the moment where the angel visits Mary and asks her if she would carry the son of God. She is shown what that means, and she says yes.

What bravery, what profound bravery, I thought, in saying yes to this. To say yes, knowing your child is coming in help heal the world, but will have to experience profound pain to do so.

And yet, is this not what each one of us does as a mother?

We know what life is.

We know what life can do to you.

We know the beauty and the pain, and still, we say yes.

We say yes to bringing a child into the world even though we know we will have to endure their pain. Even though we know, for them to fulfill their soul’s assignment in this world, they will necessarily have to experience pain. It’s part the deal of embodiment, a texture as unavoidable as the dark obsidian of nightfall.

And still, we say yes.

Is there anything more powerful in the world?

As soon as I found out I was pregnant a chronic pelvic pain condition I had had in my early twenties came back. I knew why it did, it was obvious. I had lost a baby six months prior, and I was terrified I would lose one again.

But even knowing why it was manifesting didn’t prevent it from happening.

It has been almost four years now since I started this new cycle with chronic pain. I’ve had ups and down, stretches of days, sometimes even weeks, when I have no pain at all. And I’ve also had deep, dark weeks of flares ups, months of wondering if I’ll ever know what it’s like to not be in pain again.

I find chronic pain intensely interesting.

Not just because it’s been such a big part of my life experience, but because research now shows that most chronic pain is neuroplastic, meaning that it’s presence is the byproduct of—not tissue injury—but your brain and nervous system.

Pain is how our brain signals danger. A broken bone hurts because our body is saying “be careful with this arm, don’t move it too much.”

So, when we have pain in the absence of injury? It’s an indicator that our brain and nervous system are perceiving danger when, in fact, there may be none.

I’ve learned so much about chronic pain in my life, but the thing that most stuns me is the increasingly compounding evidence of how to heal it.

To stop creating this kind of pain, we need to stop being afraid of the pain itself.

Instead of pulling away from it, or trying hard to change it, we just need to be with it. This is what resets the way our brain and our nervous system reacts to our own body. It’s a kind of real-life neural magic trick that works to rewire our brain and our experience of pain itself.

Or another way of putting it— the antidote to suffering is to feel it.

It’s a powerful, wild, potent brew. To feel our own suffering, and by feeling it, transform it. And yet, it’s one of the most impactful things we could ever do—for ourselves, for our children, and for the world they are growing up into.

A lot of the cultures we grew up in were formed—like a grape vine trained to a trellis—to avoid feeling pain. To manufacture a life in which we prevent suffering at any costs (“be careful!”) or to export the suffering in any way we can (“it’s this persons fault”).

And yet, the skill that will see our children through the deep journey of being in this world is not how to avoid suffering—because, the truth is, it’s unavoidable—but how to be with the pain.

Be with it so completely, that it begins to transform into something else.

Things shifted, dramatically, in my body and psyche when I started practicing this. It also changed my relationship with my daughter. She was colicky as a baby, and has been “high spirited” her entire life. We all endured a lot of suffering in the beginning. But I’ve noticed as she’s gotten older, and I’ve gotten better at simply being with her, and my own self, when it hurts, that she calms down much quicker, reaching peace, regulation and confidence inside herself faster than I could have ever imagined before.

Some days it has me wondering…how much could I have been different, in the beginning, if I had simply known how to be with her suffering?

What changes in the world when we teach children not to be afraid of pain? But to know how to meet it? How to companion themselves on the journey of being human?

Because when we teach our children how to meet pain, we teach them how to meet life. How to love life. Not because it’s always what they want it to be, but because it is a thing of many colors and textures, a thing of rough waters and ecstatic understandings, a thing we get to experience.

I think of the trickster astrologer Caroline Casey, and how she writes of trauma as our “beautiful, dangerous assignment”.

There is danger in encountering pain, in being exposed to the hardship of life, but there is also the assignment. Our assignment. The reason why we came.

If I could pray that my child would reach adulthood knowing one thing, it would be this—to not be afraid of life. To not be afraid of her depths. To not to be afraid of change, endings or loss.

Because on the other side is her destiny. On the other side is becoming.

On the other side of breaking is resurrection.

A week after Easter, and our daughter still wants to hunt for Easter eggs in the garden. I fill them up with simple little sweets and set them out for her to find in rock crevices and under trees. She collects them gleefully in a basket, breaking them open while she swings her legs from the porch.

She doesn’t know what all this means, not yet.

But as she cracks each one open to find what’s inside, I think a part of her understands.

Life will break you.

But if you stay with the pieces, unbearable sweetness will meet you on the other side.

I can’t remember the last time I slept in my bedroom. I think it was sometime this past summer. Sometime before the hurricane, when it felt essential to have my body next to hers. Sometime before the preschool transition that crashed and burned. Sometime before I decided it was simply easier to surrender, to get a full night’s sleep in my daughter’s bed. To let her room become our room, and let my bedroom become… a ghost room.

In the fragile weeks after the hurricane, when my parents came to stay with us while power and water was still out everywhere, they slept in my room.

But then they left. A few weeks later I found a dead mouse underneath a pile of forogtten sewing in the corner.

After that, I only ever went in there to throw laundry on the bed.

When the first killing frost arrived, I moved a few plants in that I had rescued from my flooded apothecary. We tried to clean them as best we could, wiping down each leaf and leaving them outside in the rain for weeks, but I still feared that flood dust was lifting off their lengths, so into the room they went.

I started calling it The Ghost Room.

Not because it was empty, but because it had once been full. And that lack of fullness felt eerie, haunting.

For months, peering into that room disturbed me. Not because I wasn’t in there, but because something had been in there. I had been in there, and now I was not.

This, I think, is the definition of a haunting. The fullness of what is left.

It seems there are many ghost rooms in my life these days.

Motherhood, with the intense, unceasing bustle in so many other rooms of your existence, almost requires the creation of them.

For months, writing has been a ghost room. It used to be a sanctuary for me, but recently it’s felt more like a closet, a place where I’ve been consistently sticking things without even bothering to turn on the light.

Slow mornings are a ghost room.

Drinking my tea while sitting down.

My dreams have been a ghost room now for years. I used to remember them every morning, writing them down over breakfast. Now I normally wake up before I complete my last sleep cycle, scrambling to remember what arrived in the night and watching it disappear, like petals in spring winds.

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I used to be fascinated, obsessed even with ghosts when I was younger. In middle school I became a “ghost researcher” for a time, holding séances with the Ouija board (do not recommend) and taking myself to haunted places with cameras to record orbs (only partially recommend). Later, I even slept overnight in haunted hotels (I have some stories…)

Ghosts to me, were the most fascinating and scary things on the planet. Fascinating because: What lingers beyond death? What is the mystery of what remains?

And scary because: How can we stop mystery? How do we curtail what we don’t know?

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized what ghosts—metaphorical and literal— actually wanted.

Ghosts aren’t trying to scare us, they are only want our attention so they can move on.

Ghosts, ghost rooms, the place in our lives that haunt us, are just energies, not yet transistioned into their next potential.

They are waiting, lingering, for their next incarnation.

So, this winter, when I felt the thaw after the hurricane come and everyone in our mountains began moving towards the future again, I decided to give my ghost room a rebirth.

I cleaned from top to bottom, freshened the sheets, piled my bed with cozy blankets. I got creative with what I already had. I tossed rugs in every corner and rearranged the bureau.

I knew it wouldn’t be a bedroom anymore—at least not at this phase in my life. But it could be something else. I made it a cozy den for reading, a theater for late-night Netflix, a meditation room for yoga.

I let go of trying to make it my bedroom, and allowed it to become what it wanted to be instead.

Now, when I look into the room while I’m playing with my daughter, I don’t see ghosts.

I see the creativity of potential, of meeting what is with the willingness to become.

It’s made me look at the other ghost rooms in my life. The ones that have felt abandoned since motherhood, the ones I keep trying to use in the same way, and failing.

I look at them now, and see them differently.

What if these ghost rooms, too, are just wanting to be rearranged, reconsidered, reborn?

What if what I perceive as lack, is just the opportunity to clear out, renegotiate, find a different kind of flow?

What if my own life wants to be used differently? And that’s why I’m being asked to face the fullness in the echo? To let myself be rearranged by letting something go?

Tonight, I finish writing this by the glow of pink salt lamp in the room that I now call my Relaxation Den. It’s warm and cozy and the peepers are sounding like soft rain outside my window.

I don’t have a bedroom anymore, but I don’t need it.

Because once you know how to meet the ghosts in your life, you can point them towards the light of change and say, there is nothing to be afraid of.

The only thing that ever haunts us is the thought that we were supposed to stay the same.

The fear that anything, ever, was lost.

When really, it was just your life, unending, waiting to be transformed.

So what about you? What are your ghost rooms? The rooms you’ve left behind since becoming a mother?

And what are those rooms asking of you in your life right now?

I keep thinking about this…

As we walk into the heart of the holidays and my daughter’s fascination with Santa reaches a peak…

As we sing songs about Rudolph and Frosty and Father Winter…

I keep thinking about all the mythological men who seem to be always at the center of our cultural stories.

But even more so, I keep thinking about the real-life women—me and you— who are the ones making all this holiday magic happen.

I keep thinking about a post I saw on social media sharing the realization that what you remembered as Christmas magic, was likely your mother, working late every night, spinning her wheels, spinning reality into enchantment.

I keep thinking about the tenderness of a holiday that celebrates the birth of a child, and yet, how every story of that birth seems to echo our own culture’s mother blindness.

How a baby is born, and the mother disappears.

I keep thinking about Mary.

I keep thinking about my fellow mamas out there, baking cookies, decorating the tree, wrapping presents, creating magic out of thin air.

Mama’s giving birth and making milk and making miracles happen.

I keep thinking about this piece I wrote last year…

So I decided to repost it again here.

Because I keep thinking about you, mama.

And I want you to know that you are seen.

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The Mother Nights of the Holidays

It never landed with me what we’re actually celebrating on Christmas…until I was nine months pregnant.

Two Christmas eve’s ago I was round as an ornament and just a few weeks away from my due date. It was a tender, emotional time. There was so much that was unknown. When would labor start? How would the birth go? What would my life be like on the other side?

I often woke up in the middle of the long night and couldn’t go back to sleep, wondering about this vulnerable change that was afoot and praying to the stars winking outside in the deep dark night.

Growing up, we celebrated a lot of different holiday mythologies, including the story of Jesus’ birth. And yet it was always the backdrop to the holiday—lost like wallpaper among the flashier excitement of Santa Claus and elves.

Then, I was pregnant on Christmas— and the story took root in me like a tree, like a child nestled beneath my ribs. I understood it in a way I never did before.

Once a year, on one of the longest nights, we celebrate and hold vigil for the tender holiness of a mother giving birth.

A mother, her labor waves already begun, legs turned to water, walking door-to-door until someone gave her refuge.

A mother, surrendering entirely to the animal of her body as she moaned among the warm flanks of horses and ewes.

A mother, awake in the long night bringing a child down like a star into this world.

It touched me profoundly, changing the way I saw this holiday forever.

In a culture and a time when a mother’s body and a mother’s mysteries are often swept into a corner—there is still a night when we remember the holiness of her. Of her swaying, singing, crying, laboring. Of her delivering a new beginning in this world.

Christmas is a celebration of a woman giving birth.

And yet it’s not the first time we’ve associated these holy days of darkness and the rebirth of the light with the mother’s body.

In the ancient Anglo-Saxon calendar December 20^th was celebrated as Mōdraniht, or “Mother’s Night”. The official beginning of Yule, a twelve-day festival, Mother’s Night was a time to honor the female ancestors of your line. The women who gave birth to those who gave birth to you. A whole lineage of women swaying in the long night.

And then there’s Saint Lucia’s day on December 13^th, where across Scandinavia young girls wear crowns of candles and usher back in the light with their maidens and star boys trailing behind.

The Solstice itself, long associated with a literal rebirth of the light, has often been a time of honoring the mother-body, the mother-led delivery of the light. Like the Egyptian Goddess Isis giving birth to Horus. Or the Japanese sun Goddess Amaterasu, emerging again from the cave after healing from trauma (an emergence that is prompted by another Goddess flashing her vulva through a crack in the walls, causing Amaterasu so much mirth she feels safe enough to come back into this world).

Or Beiwe, the ancient Reindeer Goddess of the Sami, who brings the sun back from its southernmost point on the horizon, carrying it in her antlers to rebirth the world.

There’s a truth here, a deep one, one I hold close to my heart.

On the longest nights of the year, when mystery takes root like seeds in the dark, when uncertainty is at high tide, and the depths of what we grapple with seem to flood our life—she is there.

The one who gave birth to us. The one who holds us still. The one who is Earth, who is mother on her knees in a manager, who is sunlight touching our faces, who is Goddess with candles in her hair.

The one who comes to us in the long night to say everything will be alright.

The holidays are many things, but perhaps what we need most out of these days, is for them to be what they’ve always been— mother nights.

Nights when we’re held, when we’re reassured, when no matter what we’re surviving through, we’re shown that there’s light on the other side.

So whatever you’re holding right now, whatever you’re preparing, planning, cleaning or baking—may you take a moment today to honor yourself, to feel yourself being honored. For all that you’ve born into this world. For the body you inhabit. For the love you pour, like sunlight, into your family, into this earth.

For all the nights you’ve lived through, all the mornings you’ve seen dawn.

Because you are as precious as a woman kneeling in manager. As a star on the horizon. As the sun emerging again from tree-dark horizon.

And this mother night is a celebration of you.

Photo by Ryan Karcher

It was dark. Darker than I had ever seen outside our home. Power and cell service had already been out for days and the stars looked like diamonds, clear and cut sharp in the sky.

I didn’t know it yet, but our small holler was part of an outage that stretched across an entire region.

I didn’t know it yet, but we were in the midst of surviving a natural disaster that was literally shaking our mountains down to the ground.

I didn’t know it yet, but our entire town was being buried in a 1,000 year flood.

There was a lot I didn’t know, not yet. But in those days of darkness, somehow, I think, my daughter did, because there was one song she asked for over and over again…

By candlelight, in her rocking chair, while we wondered how her grandparents were, if our friends were safe, what was going on outside our holler— as the rains fell and landslides wiped out communities and tornados tore down entire mountainsides of trees just beyond the safe haven of our ridge—my daughter asked again and again “Can you sing Somewhere over the Rainbow?”

And so, on those dark nights of worry and rain, I sang, and sang and sang.

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It's been a while since I’ve posted here. A long time, it feels, since I’ve been able to string more than just a few words together. In the time between my last post and this one our family, and everyone I know in this region, has lived through a life-altering event. We survived Hurricane Helene.

In late September a hurricane, traveling over 400 miles inland, hit our mountains in a completely unexpected tidal wave, triggering a series of devastating, earth-shattering events. Neighbors, and their houses, swept away. Sacred groves in the mountains torn down like matchsticks. Entire towns, including our own town of Marshall, destroyed.

My beloved apothecary, a sanctuary set on an island in the middle of the river, flooded eight feet up to its windows. The last decade of my life, and work, discarded and left among a foot of toxic mud.

The floodwaters were so unimaginably intense, the ground in many places has been stripped down to bedrock. They are calling this, not just a weather event, but a geological event. One we will literally be able to see in the stones, the bones of our Earth, for millennia to come.

It’s felt, in a way, like witnessing the end of a world. Especially in those days without power or cell service, when every grocery story was empty, all but one highway out of the region was broken, and there was no gas or water. Still, there are communities without power. Still, that are places unreachable except on foot. Still, there are piles of flood debris everywhere. The mud turning to dust that is toxic to breathe in.

On the days when my brain isn’t working right, when I struggle to make breakfast or remember to run my daughter a bath, I remind myself that we all lived through the ending of a world.

And in the midst of it all…I parented.

I’m still trying to figure out how to match these two puzzle pieces together in my mind. That our world was shattered, and while it all broke into pieces, I held my daughter’s world together. Or tried to, at least.

We were lucky. We didn’t have a tree come down on our house. She didn’t witness a landslide take out our road. Or worse— the nightmare—the waters take those she loved. Children here, more than I can currently hold in my fragile mind, have witnessed this all.

I try to shield her and yet, still, she knows.

Me in my studio apothecary

I hike into our destroyed down to see my apothecary for myself and get stuck in hip-high toxic mud. I crawl out of the quicksand on my hands and knees, hyperventilating and wondering if I will be able to make it back home to my daughter. I try to hide this event from her, even as I’m processing the trauma of it for weeks. Spontaneously shaking and crying and unable to touch mud, even the simple garden kind. She asks me one day out of the blue, “Mama, you aren’t going back to your studio again, right? You aren’t going back?”

We have a stack of things we try to save from the apothecary in the driveway. FEMA tells us to wear Tyvek suits and full respirators anytime we’re handling something that’s been in the flood. One day when taking off her shoes after being in the garden, my daughter exclaims, “Mama, we can’t touch the mud. Don’t touch the mud!”

I’ve said the words “gone” and “lost” so many times she’s become sensitized to them. Like when I talk to a friend and acknowledge “yes, that place is gone” or tell the organizer of a local distribution hub “yes, they lost everything.” The words, like an aching tooth, have become so tender we’ve had to start using other ones.

In a moment of needing peace, desperation, space, we put on Bluey and she ends up sobbing. It’s an episode where Bingo let’s go of her stuffed animal in a nebulous. With tears streaming down her face my daughter gasps, “it’s LOST!”

I normally try very hard not to be on my phone around her. But when cell service comes back on after five days, and I can finally find out what happened to our mountains, what happened to our town, our friends, our loved ones, I’m glued to the phone. I cannot put it down. I’m flooded with information and images. Things I can’t unsee, but I absolutely need to know.

She asks me what I’m looking at, and I tell her I’m texting people we love to tell them we love them.

We get into the car to try to find my parents a couple towns over. We pass by tree after tree down on power lines to get to their apartment. When we arrive, they aren’t there, so we sit and wait. When they walk in twenty minutes later and see us there, whole and untouched, we cry.

They come to live with us for several weeks. We still don’t have power, and without power the well pump doesn’t work, but we have a nearby spring and a camp stove to cook on. In the original night of the world falling down, we come to live with one another again. We share childcare duties, making meals together, taking turns crying on the porch. It’s shattering and beautiful and right in a way I cannot name, except to gesture toward the embers in the woodstove and sit beside it.

There’s a deluge of texts from friends. They all say the same thing. “Are you ok? Do you have food? Do you have water?” We’re all making sure those we love are alive.

As the beauty of fall begins, we try to keep some semblance of normalcy. A play date with the neighbor’s kid. Three meals a day. Books at night. Our local playground is gone, its entire structure pulled into the river and carried downstream. But we play in the creek outside our house and I find myself slipping in and out of my body. I’m here with my daughter one moment, splashing in the water, and in the next I’m seeing how things could have been so powerfully different. If the winds had brought the hurricane slightly more to the west, this creek would have turned into a river. How the gardens would be gone, the road likely nonexistent. How I probably wouldn’t be able to touch or look at this beloved water for a long, long time.

I talk to a friend who is living in one of the hardest hit areas of the mountains and ask her if she’s been to visit the river yet. The river that was her refuge, her sanctuary. The same river that washed away her friend’s houses, took away their community center and broke the bridge that leads to town. And she says “no, not yet.” She likens it to how she felt about touching her vagina after birth. “It took me six months,” she recalls “until I was ready to see the way that landscape had changed. It feels the same with the river.” The birth portal has been torn open.

It's been nearly two months and sometimes my two-year old daughter will still say, out of nowhere, “remember the flood?” It’s been two months and yet we are all still deeply in the thick of it. Literally still digging out mud in buildings, finding homes for people who lost theirs, remaking entire roads.

After the storm, I’m so ecstatically grateful just to be alive, to have my child be alive, all my normal overwhelm with parenting evaporates for a time. I’m both more present and more fractured. Less present and more whole. None of it makes sense. I hold her close and she asks me to sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow again.

We have sung that tune so many times since she was born, and yet it wasn’t until those dark nights that I remembered the actual context of this song…

Dorothy singing as the sky over her home darkens. Singing, as the storm draws closer. Singing, as the tornado comes to tear apart the world she has known. Singing, in the moments before she’s transported into another world.

Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.

Photo of our town, Marshall NC

A friend tells me over the phone, “hearing about how things are in Appalachia right now, it feels like you’re reporting back from a possible future.” I get goosebumps when she speaks, the kind of goosebumps that mean truth.

The towns where we live in the mountains were once listed as a “climate haven,” and now many of those same towns are gone. It feels very much like we got a glimpse of how the ending will be. When the catarophe comes, when the cell towers finally go down, when the only water is what runs down the hillsides.

We got a glimpse of how this birth we all know is coming will be, and have lived to report back. Here is what I know:

At the end of the world we will be holding our children tight.

At the end of the world we will be creating stories to help our children understand the ending of the world.

At the end of the world we’ll creating a new world for our children.

At the end of the world a new world will begin.

As so much around us ended these past months, absolutely nothing stopped. My child still grew, she evolved, changing every day. She started talking in her sleep for the first time. Something about apples…

She held my face in her hands and said “Mama, sing the song again.”

Somewhere over the rainbow, we will learn how to fly.

Now that I have lived through the end of the world, I have seen just how much survives.

Somewhere over the rainbow, a new future, a new world exists for our children. A world we can’t conceive of, one that likely scares us if we dwell too long on how exactly it will come into being. But a world that holds healing still. A world that holds hope.

A world that our children, in the deepest parts of themselves, arrived knowing they were meant to midwife into being.

And so, as parents standing at the end, our job isn’t to hold onto what is ready to be swept away, this world we’ve been handed.

Our job is to ferry our children to the bridge. Not over the water—they will have to cross that way on their own— but just far enough so that they can sing as they walk into the new world awaiting them.

Last week, my daughter refused to go to daycare. We had recently organized to have her at a lovely, local Waldorf-inspired school down the road. The idea of it seemed heavenly. She would have a couple mornings a week to play with other kids, sing songs, light candles, make bread. And I’d have an unimaginably peaceful handspan of a morning at the house by myself to work and write.

Once we enrolled her, I began quietly planning the weeks ahead, excited to finally launch into the creative work that’s been rising in me, and put the finishing touches on a brand new course.

Then—my daughter wouldn’t get in the car, wouldn’t even put clothes on, flat out refused to touch the absolutely, earnestly lovely playschool in which she was enrolled.

And so I had no choice but to figure it out.

Somehow, I fit five hours worth of work into one hour.

Somehow, I still moved ahead with the big launch at work I’ve been dreaming into for months.

Somehow I got dinner on the table and the dishes cleaned.

Somehow, I figured it out…but only because there was no other choice.

I’ve been seeing a funny video circulate recently on Instagram where a mom sobs into a dish towel, only to have her kid come in and ask where their favorite snack is. So she stops mid-sob, gets the snack, and then goes back to sobbing once they’re gone. Over the video is the caption: “when you’re mid-breakdown but also a mom.”

I can’t count how many times I’ve been mid-meltdown only to have to stop, reorient, adjust. And as frustrating as it can be, as emotionally taxing and hard, I know the breakdown is ultimately being interrupted so I can have a breakthrough.

It often feels like the demands of mothering takes me away from what needs to be done, but the truth is, parenting doesn’t disrupt our trajectory…it shows us what is ready to be, finally, figured out.

Stepping into motherhood was like pulling every rug out of my house. After years of quick vacuuming and polishing the floor beside it, I finally saw what was underneath…

Some of it was delightful—like being reunited with a beloved piece of lost jewelry.

And some of it was shocking, ugly, messy.

But all of it gave me an opportunity to see it, and in seeing it, to know myself.

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Parenthood continually asks me to figure out the things I thought would remain koans for the rest of my life— work/life balance, self-doubt, ancestral patterns of anxiety, my needs and desires. But of all the things parenthood has demanded I finally figure out, the biggest has been my own sensitive nervous system.

Before having a child I was aware that I was sensitive—it was a defining factor of my existence. And yet, part of me also believed I could somehow bypass it, overcome it, change it, when need be. That I could pull all the honey out of the hive when it was necessary, and it would always be replenished. I believed this, even as chronic illness and pain took up residence in my life in rhythmic waves. Even as I was constantly, always, on the verge of burnout, break down, sickness.

At the time, I thought these symptoms arose because I was sensitive in an overwhelming world, that there was an inevitability to it.

But now I see that I was sick so often, not just because I was sensitive, but because I was sensitive and didn’t know how to take care of my own sensitivity.

Then, motherhood happened and I had no choice but to finally figure it out.

Suddenly, there was no way I could drain myself until I was laid out flat in bed…because then who would rock my baby as she cried?

There was no way I could rob all the honey from the hive… because what, then, would the children eat?

There was no way I could pretend I wasn’t overwhelmed, anxious, on the edge of burn out…because my child felt it, and reflected it back to me.

My therapist once described parenting as akin to equine therapy.  Just like horses help us heal by showing us our own inner selves, your nervous system is immediately, instantaneously, reflected back to you by your children. The moment you step out of regulation, out of capacity, out of alignment, they show you.

Children come through our bodies and teach us how to be embodied. How to be inside the bodies that we were born into. The only bodies we will have in this lifetime.

And so, as intense as parenting is. As little resources as I have at the end of some days. As weary as my face looks to me in the mirror, I’ve noticed something interesting…

Somehow I’m sick less. I’m in pain less. I’m steadier. I’m more grounded.

Somehow, I’m more in harmony with my energy resources than ever before, because I’ve been forced to learn, finally, how to be inside this body. How to embrace my sensitivity, instead of be at odds with it. How to breathe gently in and out of my nose, to chuff, to run when I want to run, to stand still and watch the light ripple over the hills, to ask to have my flanks be rubbed down with hay, when I need it.

In spiritual circles I sometimes hear the term—choiceless awareness. This state of being in which we are present without effort or judgement.

Most people talk about choiceless awareness as something you reach only when you’re on day ten of your vipassana retreat, or months into your ashram experience.

And yet, on my best days of parenting, this is what it feels like.

There’s no choice, and so I step into a deep awareness of what is.

There’s no choice, so I allow myself to trust that, everything, ultimately is already being figured out for me.

There no choice, so I let go of having to choose and just come into the moment.

There’s no choice, so I surrender to playing make-believe in the sandbox, to eating the other half of a discarded apple, to coming into a state of pure, radiant awareness on a sunny Thursday morning when my child is not in daycare and we are simply together.

There’s no choice, and so I allow myself to be in the process of befriending my body, my self, my life.

There’s no choice, so I figure out, slowly, slowly, how to be alive.

….

P.S. I’ve been thinking about all of this so much as I prepare to teach a new upcoming program: THE SENSITIVE SERIES (aka. the class I was hoping I’d have a glorious stretch of a daycare week to work on, ha). I’ve wanted to teach this course for my fellow sensitives for so long, but it wasn’t until I became a mother—and walked through the green therapy fields of that initiation—that I felt ready. Motherhood prepared me, delivered me, to teach this. And I’m stepping into it with a deep sense of gratitude for the experience of parenting as a sensitive person. Wish me luck.

I’m curious…what has motherhood finally forced you to figure out or step into it in your life?

We got back from our yearly beach trip with my family this past week, and I feel a spaciousness in me I haven’t touched in a long time.

It was a week of sharing meals, taking turns with my daughter in the water, and cleaning dishes in shifts. A week of all of us working together, laughing together, making sure each other were fed, happy, and well rested.

By the third night of our trip my insomnia—forged by the terrible inconsistency of my daughter sleep recently—evaporated.

Suddenly I was falling asleep with ease every night and stayed that way, curled next to the warm curve of my daughter’s body, until the morning.

I felt happy, free, at peace.

And it didn’t take long to realize why…this is the village so few of us ever get.

This is what our nervous systems were designed for. When we have it, when we glimpse it, we can feel it with every fiber of our body.

And when we don’t have it…we feel that too.

Sometimes I’m shocked by how hard my days feel. As someone who used to be proud of her capacity, starting her own business at 24 while juggling several jobs and dealing with chronic pain and illness, I thought I’d be at least a little bit prepared for the nonstop rigors of being a parent in our modern world.

I wasn’t.

Most days my brain spins like a samara leaving a tree limb when I try to understand why this all feels so hard. Why I struggle when it seems other people are handling this, and even more, just fine. Why it feels like there’s a fire rippling under my skin when I’m laying in bed at night.

I’ve gone so far as to wonder if I’m honestly just not cut out for this. If there’s something big I’m missing. Some profound fault within me. Something I’m doing innately wrong.

Then I have a week of living in a village, and it all makes sense again.

It’s not that I wasn’t built to be a mother. It’s not that I’m doing anything wrong. It’s not even that parenting a toddler is as hard as it feels most days.

It’s that being a parent and having to do everything else is impossible.

It’s impossible to both parent and work full time. To parent and have all the dishes be clean. To parent, even when you have a partner, and have food on the table every single day. And then to clean it all up again.

And yet most of us are doing it, every day.

Every day we request our bodies and psyches to keep holding the impossible, and it’s slowly grinding away our ability to see possibility.

For weeks leading up to this trip I was struggling. My daughter wasn’t sleeping, each of us fell sick one after another, and everything but the making and eating of soup fell completely by the wayside.

I felt my life shrink as small and dark as a pinhole.

But living among a group of trusted people for a week, all of us moving like planets around the sun of my daughter’s radiance and needs…suddenly it all seemed do-able. All the things that felt impossible before—getting enough sleep, having time to decompress, accessing the space to dream—was possible once more.

I laughed more, felt lighter, and yet was as solid as a standing stone during the upsets and tantrums.

When she woke up in the middle of the night one night and was up for four hours, her grandmother came in to take over so I could go back to bed at 3 am. Then, her aunt and grandpa watched over her in the morning as I caught up on sleep.

It felt like a miracle. And yet everything in my body said—yes, this is how it’s meant to be.

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Anthropologists hypothesize that our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely only needed four hours a day to take care of their basic needs for food and shelter. The rest was likely spent in leisure, in art, in expression, in connection, fun, and rest. I feel like I got a glimpse of that on this vacation. A glimpse of the life my nervous system was actually designed for.

And even though I can’t linger here forever. Even though I must go back to life as it’s lived (though I try in the ways that I can to bring the village with me), it’s still a comfort.

We may have to go back to the dishes. To the endless meal prep. To the insomnia and stress and overwork. But we don’t have to go back to thinking that there is something wrong with us….

Because there isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with me.

And there’s nothing wrong with you.

We are simply parents, people who are over and over again doing the impossible.

Parents making a home out of an uninhabitable culture.

Parents creating and sustaining life in a world that has forgotten how to cherish life.

Parents who are learning how to put down the impossible expectations, so we can find the possibility of our own joy once more. Seen in glimpses, like the bright glint of happy fish in moving waters.

Because every time you do the impossible task of forgiving yourself, you experience the Caribbean blue of peace that is remembering that you are enough.

You can see, if only briefly, that embracing your wholeness is ultimately so much more healing for your child and their childhood than trying to do the impossible over and over again.

That you are making a new way possible for the entire world by letting go of all those impossible standards you hold for yourself.

These glimpses don’t last forever. Even the most spectacular sunsets end eventually. But as I move back into the warm, tropical night of my life, the never-ending summer that is parenting, I can remember…another shore is possible.

This week COVID has moved through our family like a wrecking ball, knocking each of us down, one-by-one, like bowling pins. We’re officially at the beach now, somehow moving ahead with our family vacation even though we all feel like we’ve survived a shipwreck.

Since I’m still operating at half capacity, I thought it would be a good time to share this piece I wrote when I was postpartum for a mothering magazine that (I think) no longer exists.

It felt apt, as I spent this whole week asking the parent of the Earth to hold me as I struggled to hold everything else 🤍

(psst..This piece includes an excerpt from my book Mirrors in the Earth)

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My daughter was born in winter, on the edge of a departing snowstorm. Though the tumble of white soon melted, that whirlwind of energy followed us into postpartum, where for months afterwards we stayed swaddled in our home, learning about the words colic and cradle and cry.

The only mirror she saw then was the glass of the bathwater as we lowered her into my waiting arms. The scent of lavender and rose petals soothing her wails when nothing else would.

Just as the fourth trimester ended, spring arrived. At first, she would fidget and fuss every time I brought her outside— until I turned her outward to look at the world. Then, eyes wide with awe, she’d hold onto my fingers, grasping them as if they were guardrails while she peered over the precipice of wonder.

That first spring we walked in slow circles around the garden, ducking underneath drooping boughs of cedar and the flutter of falling petals. We sat by the creek while the water lulled her into a soft melt of sleep. When the lilacs bloomed, we’d stand under the arms of the branches and I’d sweep my hands over the blossoms, loosening a shower of small purple flowers, falling like rain onto our arms.

In the garden, among the trees, with the mirrors of the Earth, I could feel her finally arrive with peace into her body, and into this world.   

Before mirrored glass was invented, the only way we could catch a glimpse of our own image was through the natural world—calm waters, mica flakes, the onyx in someone else’s eyes.

Though today we have cameras and selfies, we still lack the ability to see who we truly are. With nature, however, there remains a place where it’s possible to come into direct, caring contact with our soul. We need only look into the benevolent mirror of the Earth.

In healthy parenting, part of a caregiver’s role is to mirror their child.

When children first begin to have an emotional experience of themselves as individuals, a parent’s job is to reflect these feelings, along with the child’s innate goodness, back to them so they can build self-worth. Many of us didn’t experience enough of this early phase of healthy reflection.

But no matter what our family of origin was like, we all continue to have access to this essential source of nurturance, because nature is the parent-mirror that will never forsake us.

Nature is our lifelong caregiver. It is the source from which our lives are made possible, a mirror here to help us when we have lost sight of ourselves.

Whenever we peek out from our hard places and hiding spaces, nature will reflect back to us the depth of our goodness and belonging—not because the denizens of nature are objects onto which we project ourselves, or because the more-than-human world lacks its own personalities and sentience, but because the beings of the natural world are our kin, our elders, and our teachers.

As Potawatomi author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts, “In some Native languages, the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’” We are the youngest children of creation. When we see ourselves in the wider world, we remember who we are.

When my daughter found her way into the garden to meet the trees and the creek, she met a caregiver who will be with her forever. The mother who is mother to us all. The one who, no matter how much we thrash or cry, will be there to hold us and remind us of who we are— natural beings who innately belong.  Those who are made of the same stuff as cedar bough and creek body, branch and lilac flower.

Today, when I walk around the garden with my daughter, I watch as she mimics the trees, waving her arms against the sky. Birds call and she calls back to them. She arches her back to gaze up at the clouds and I swear a cloud arcs softly over the horizon in response.

With the clear eyes of someone newly arrived on this planet, she sees what I have only just recently remembered.

I am a part of this swirling whole of beauty, of sunsets and sentience and petal. I belong here.

And when I can see myself with the same measure of compassion that the Earth sees me— I remember the spark I carry within me. The small flame that has survived through every snow of my life and that now, as an adult, I can blow into coals. The bonfire that signals high summer, the deep remembrance of all the gifts I was meant to give to this world— and the boldness to give them.

I hold my daughter in my arms and we gaze into the mirror of the Earth together, and the beauty of everything, within and without, enchants us both into silence, into joy.

We’re officially in another sleep regression. This time my daughter is refusing to sleep anywhere else but in bed with me. No matter when I get her down, she’s back at my bedside after a couple hours.

I’ve never been a great sleeper. My mom likes to joke that between my sister and I, she didn’t sleep through the night for ten years.

I used to laugh at this, now I’m horrified.

I’ve struggled on and off with insomnia my whole life. When my daughter was younger and we were officially co-sleeping, I could never drop my hyper-vigilance. I was endlessly waking up to make sure she was breathing. It got better when she got older, but I still woke up with every toss, turn or arm flail. And so it was a relief when she transitioned, happily, into her own bed.

That seems to have come to an abrupt end.

We’ve had times since the transition, of course, when she’d creep back in. Like anytime she was under the weather. But for the last three weeks she hasn’t spent a single full night in her own bed. With trying, and failing, to resettle her I was averaging four hours of sleep a night, and was ready to unravel.

So I’ve done the only thing I can do…accept it.

There’s an old Daoist saying: acceptance leads to gratitude, and gratitude leads to grace.

We’re all trained to struggle against what is—the isness of our bodies, our lives, the state of our homes, the intensity of the seasons we move through. But this wisdom reminds me that, when I can just surrender, accepting what’s ultimately out of my control, I find a way in my heart to be grateful.

Maybe grateful that, despite operating on four hours of sleep, I have the flexibility in my life to take it easier that day, like ordering takeout for dinner. Or grateful for the fact that we have beds at all. That they are warm and cozy and my child is safe inside them. Or grateful that I have other mama friends to talk to about it. Friends who’ll say, “I feel you,” “this is so hard,” or “it’ll get better.”

And when we can find this gratitude, for even the smallest things in our existence, it naturally leads us to the place we’ve been striving to get to all along—grace.

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As the mom of a toddler, I feel graceless a lot of the time. My hair is pretty much always sticking out at odd angles. I have random outbursts of stress crying and frustration at any hour of the day. My clothes are pretty much always unwashed, rumpled, or in a heap on the floor.

If I let it, it can feel like my entire life these days is just one long graceless stretch of lines under my eyes, dust bunnies beneath the furniture, and a half-deflated kiddie pool on the porch that I haven’t had the time or inclination to replace.

But I’ve noticed… the moment I stop trying to making everything different than it is, the moment I simply accept that I’m exhausted, that this phase of life is hard, that I too overwhelmed to make a good decision right now… things get easier.

When I see the dust bunny on the floor and can laugh at its tumble-weed resemblance in the true Wild Wild West of raising a toddler…

When I look in the mirror at the aura of unkempt hair and can re-envision it as a saintly halo…

When I simply accept that I won’t be buying a new kiddie pool this summer, that it feels unnecessary and depleting…

Then I can find the gratitude that’s always there beneath the surface.

And when I can touch that, grace streams in.

It’s unexpected, grace. It never feels warranted.

But I guess that’s the definition of grace. Grace isn’t something you work for. It’s something that’s given to you, a gift that rocks you with it’s specific, life-deepening kindness.

I’m always yearning for more grace in my life. To have things flow more easily, for my days to be infused with the goodwill of the unseen, to move more elegantly through the waters of existence.

And in those moments when things feel distinctly graceless—when I’m so exhausted I’m floating outside of my body or the panic pinches at my heart after I’m woken up again in the night and can’t go back to sleep—I try to come back to this:

Instead of fighting…how can I accept it?

Because acceptance is how gratitude takes root. And out of gratitude, grace—that force that can change life in an instant, bestowing pardon, restoring order, showing us the higher design behind it all—can stream in.

Last night, lying in bed awake at 2 am, with the silk of my daughter’s head nestled against my cheek, moving slightly with every breath, I felt it.

I felt the full surrender of life. The unexpected gratitude of this fleeting, tender moment. The sense that even in my most graceless states, the goodwill of the universe is endless.

And that grace—this force that brings light, brings morning, brings hope—is here, even in the middle of a long, long night.

P.S. I write all this, and I also want to make it known (just in case some unseen power is listening) that, even among the acceptance, I’d still love to sleep through the night again. Ok, noted? Thanks!

But there were also so many possibilities, the endless fractals of what could be, that seemed to end overnight.

It’s no accident that a mother’s sense of her own vitality and creativity ebbs the moment she stops believing in the possibilities of her own life.

This past week’s class Relighting the Creative Fire was so potent and intimate and powerfully special, I thought it would be fun to share a short clip here with you about this very topic…

Watch to drop into:

• The link between creativity, possibility, and your life-force.

• How mothers function as the weather systems of their families

• What studies say about the importance of our own personal joy

• Why the pursuit of your creative spark is a form of intergenerational healing

Also, folks have been reaching out to ask if they could still get access to the replay, so I’m leaving the page up for now! If gifting yourself an experience of reconnecting with your fire is lighting up possibility within you, come on in.

Till next week ❤️‍🔥

A few nights ago my daughter was up from midnight until 6 am. I’m still not entirely sure why, it was just one of those nights when the moon crept under our door like a lamp, haunting us all until sunrise.

Normally, after a night like this, I’d feel depressed the next day. The combination of no sleep and the worry that I must be doing something deeply, deeply wrong, would have sent me into a spiral.

But it didn’t happen this time….and I knew why.

After a full night awake in the cold blue dark—a kind of spiritual vigil that always tests the limits of my psyche—I had a fire to go warm myself by in the morning.

I had the creative projects I’m currently ignited by.

(Like this class, happening tomorrow).

I had the passion and purpose that have re-entered my life like sparklers.

I had my creative fire back, finally, after what has felt like years of a long cold night. And just for having this—this fire that is my own, this taper that highlights what is still glowing in me, what is alive and will never die—somehow I feel like I can survive any hardship (including a night awake in the cold hard moonlight)

Tomorrow I’m teaching a live class just for mamas called Relighting the Fire: An Experience in Creative Resurrection for Mothers

After thirteen years of teaching, this is the first time I’ll be offering a class just for mothers, and it has felt nourishing beyond measure.

I honestly can’t wait to sit around this virtual fire with other mamas. To share, to be seen, to embrace the comfort of being with others who know exactly what you’re moving through, and to collectively reignite our own sparks.

So if you want to take your shoes off and let your feet grow warm, to allow the flicker of flames to soothe your nervous system and bring you back home to your own light…come join me.

I’d love to gather with you tomorrow (or send you the replay so you can come sit beside the fire whenever the timing is right).

Because, I still feel the same bone-deep awe for mothers now as I did the day after I gave birth, thinking to myself in those fragile, joyful afterhours…

All this time, mothers have been this creative? This generative? This magnificently powerful?

Yes, they have.

And yes, you are.

P.S. I’m truly curious, especially among my fellow mothers and creatives here: What does your creativity look like in this particular season of your life? The creative journey always takes us to such unexpectedly deep places. And if I’ve learned anything, it’s that, even if its caved in darkness, no path is the wrong path.

P.P.S. I filmed a quick video note to mothers everywhere the other day, and wanted to share it here with you here…

Moonlight image source

I was camping once with a group of friends outside a waterfall in Morocco. It was dusk and we decided to get a fire started. Even though several of the women in our group had grown up camping, girl scout badges and all, a few of the men insisted they be the ones to start the fire.

“It’s a guy thing,” I remember them saying.

We all watched, bemused, as they proceeded to throw sticks in a random pancake assortment on the ground and try to light them.

Needless to say, the fire didn’t last long. We all inhaled a few buckets of smoke before our kindling was gone and we decided to just call it a night.

Reflecting on all the messaging I received growing up, I notice how often firekeeping gets typecast as a “guy thing,” and it honestly amuses me. Because all we have to do is gaze back to see that mothers are the original firekeepers.

Up until very recently, it was our mothers, the maternal heart of the household, who would have been keeping the hearth alive.

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It would have been our mothers who started the cookfire first thing in the morning from last night’s carefully banked coals. Our mothers who went to gather kindling with the baby on their back. Our mothers who set the stewpot over the embers to make sure we all had warmth in our bellies.

And it was our mothers, then, who would have taught us how to do all these things. How to become firekeepers ourselves.

Now we can just open the lid of a lighter and flame dances to life. But before butane and matches, there was women with flints and fire boards. Women carefully carrying coals over nomadic miles, in clay, or horns or the curve of a skull. Women preserving forest fires in tinder mushrooms, making sure this spark that was life, that was survival, that was food, protection and warmth, stayed alight.

For millennia women carried the creative fire that defined our species, that spark of ingenuity and possibility that literally kept us alive.

To this day, mothers, are still the firekeepers of our culture. Except now it looks a little different.

Me nine months pregnant on Christmas 2021

Now mothers are on the ones planning schedules, picking out clothes, organizing trips, opening the doors on warm days to air the house, wiping noses and bringing roses in from the garden. We are the ones making sure the creative heart of our home stays alive.

I think about all of this as I prepare to teach my new class Relighting the Fire: A Class on Creative Resurrection For Mothers this upcoming Thursday.

I think about just how much creativity it takes to raise a child, maintain a household, make sure all the tiny tendrils of life keep going.

About how, even if we no longer cook over fire or tend a hearth, we still use our fire making ability to warm others, feed their bellies, make sure they are safe at night.

How we give so much that sometimes it feels as if there isn’t a single spark left for our own creative nourishment.

How we work so hard, burnout becomes a perpetual state of being.

And yet, there’s a reason why there are votives to Mother Mary in alcoves around the world that never go out. There’s a pilot light within us all, an eternal flame that will not, cannot, ever be extinguished.

I remember worrying before I became a mother that I’d lose my creative spark, my sexual vitality, my fire for life.

Now, I look back at that fear and laugh. Because creativity, sexuality, vitality ARE life force itself. And as people who make something out of nothing daily—including the creation of a literal flesh and blood human from nothing but the spark of two tiny bits of tinder coming together— the idea of any of these die when you became a mother is now absolutely laughable to me.

Becoming a mother isn’t the end of your fire. It’s just the beginning of you understanding your capacity as a firekeeper.

I’m getting so excited for this upcoming live class this Thursday. If something inside of you is burning to reconnect with the passion and possibility of your own creative flame—come gather with this amazing group of mamas.

Can’t join live? Aka. It’s just after the baby’s nap-time, or you have to wait in the carpool line, or wonder-of-all-wonders, you actually have an appointment to get a haircut that day? No worries, I’ll send you the replay and it’ll be yours to keep and revisit forever.

Because as a mother, you are a natural firekeeper.

You know how to relight the spark when it goes out. And there’s a bonfire blaze of new possibility, creativity and hope waiting for you in this life.

In shamanic communities there is the concept of “dismemberment.”

The idea that we must first be torn apart, pieces of ourselves scattered to the four winds, before we can reach a new form.

Dismemberment is painful. It can feel as if you’ve been ripped apart. But when we’re put back together again on the other side, we reach an entirely new level of wholeness—and access to our own life-force—than we could conceive of before.

Motherhood dismembered me in a lot of ways. It brought back a chronic pain condition I thought I had healed a decade prior. It dissolved some the most major relationships in my life. It shattered so many of my expectations, views of the world, and ways of seeing my own self.

But the hardest dismemberment of all was what happened to my creativity.

At some point in the first year of my daughter’s life I realized… my creative spark was gone. That fire that had always warmed me, held me, protected me, kept me believing in the future—had disappeared.

And it terrified me.

No matter what I’ve been through in my life, I always had my creativity. When I was trapped in a severely abusive relationship. When I was first diagnosed with chronic pain. When I caught Lyme disease and struggled with chronic illness.

No matter how shattering an event was, I could envision a future, see new possibilities, remember why I was here, because I still had the ember burning inside of me that said—I will create.

Then motherhood happened and it felt as if the fire had gone out.

I know a lot of mothers feel this way. We pour so much into the creation of our children, our families, our homes, that it often feels as if there is nothing left for us. We use every piece of kindling we can carry to build a fire that can feed others, warm others, protect others, so when everyone is in bed, and all the bowls have been emptied, it can feel as if there is not a single ember left.

We go to sleep in darkness, and wonder when the light—that spark that is meant to light up own selves—will return.

Creativity isn’t just writing, or painting or cooking. Creativity is the life-force itself. It’s the impulse towards life. And when you cannot access your creativity, it is as if the light of life itself has gone out.

In the deep of it, I wondered if the creativity would ever come back. If I’d ever be well-slept enough, resourced enough, regulated enough, to see the spark again.

Of all the initiations into motherhood, this one was the most profoundly distressing for me. It was a reorganization of my identity I never saw coming, but one that changed me irrevocably.

And eventually delivered me to a new level of wholeness, self-trust and, yes, creativity.

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I recently saw a video of someone emerging from a three-day darkness retreat. Living without light inside a cave, she lost track of all time and space. She went into the deepest, darkest parts of herself…and then she emerged.

Watching her blink her eyes open to the light after so many days of darkness, witnessing her cry in pure wonder, touched me beyond measure.

And I thought—this is motherhood.

Motherhood is a darkness retreat that takes everything from us, and then gives us back more than we could imagine.

Most days lately I feel like that person emerging from the cave. The creative spark is back, the light has returned and I find myself blinking back tears of gratitude.

I know there will be times when it dims again. When my daughter is sick or life just gets too intense to hold it all. But having the fire die in me, and then having it be resurrected, is an experience I wouldn’t change for the world, because it’s given me a map—torchlit and inextinguishable— of how to always come back.

A few months ago I started to feel a deep pull to teach a live class just for mothers…

I’m excited to announce that this class is finally here— Relighting the Fire: A Class on Creative Resurrection for Mothers.

Together we’ll gather on August 1^st (on Lammas, the Celtic holiday of harvest and bounty), to reconnect with the fire of our own creativity again, and find a map that can guide us back.

In this two-hour experience you’ll:

• Understand how to keep your fire alive (even in the darkest moments) 

• Get clear on what creative project is calling your name (and how to get there)

• Meet the creative muse who never leaves your side

• Identify what is smothering you and tap back into the possibilities of life  

• Heal ancestral patterns of self-sacrifice so you can be fed by your own hearth

• Gather with a group of like-hearted mothers and be warmed by our collective fire

Because fire is just another word for force of nature…and you, as a mother, are a force of nature beyond measure.

So if you’re feeling drawn to relight, or more deeply ignite, your creative fire—I’d love to gather around the bonfire with you.

I never thought I’d be the kind of person who’d want a “Baby on Board” sticker for my car, but as I neared the due date for my daughter, suddenly “Baby on Board” seemed like a brilliant idea. I imagined myself out with my newborn, the sticker waving like a flag, letting all my fellow humans know that I was ferrying something precious.

When we drove home from the hospital, I remember feeling like the sticker gave us some sort of immunity, a forcefield of acknowledgement and care that would encourage everyone in our immediate vicinity on the highway to drive 40 mph.

It didn’t take me long, however, to realize that the “Baby on Board” sticker wasn’t there to warn other people to drive safely around us, but a giant “Beware” sign asking people to be gentle with me.

My daughter hated the car. So for a while my partner drove every trip while I sat in the backseat with a battery of toys (crinkle paper was her favorite, second only to a hand puppet we named Mr.Bee).

It wasn’t until I finally drove by myself that I realized the real reason behind Baby on Board signs.

We were headed to the doctor and she was howling in the backseat, her face slowly turning red. I was trying desperately to assuage her by handing back one of the toys she had dropped, when I swerved suddenly into the other lane. I righted myself quickly but I saw the car behind me flashing their brakes. Holy crap. I can’t believe I almost let that happen!

Little did I know, this was just the beginning.

I’m handing my daughter back a book and almost miss that traffic in front of me has slowed to a crawl.

I’m scurrying to get “The Happy Song” to play on the stereo and nearly sideswipe a mailbox.

I contort my arm like an octopus handing back a snack and almost miss an exit.

My daughter is screaming because she can’t get her shoe off and my nerves are so fried I end up speeding through the end of a yellow light.

The Baby on Board sticker isn’t there to alert everyone to the presence of my passenger…

It’s there to tell people who the driver is, and why she needs four whole lanes of gentleness and understanding.

My daughter is now solidly a toddler, moving towards a full-on child. But part of me doesn’t ever want to remove the Baby on Board sticker.

Honestly, I wish I could just keep the sticker, and simply display it across my entire life.

When I go out into the world with my shirt on inside out, my hair a frizzy halo and a smear of berry juice down my front. Baby on board.

When I don’t return my dear friend’s phone call for a day. Then a week. Then months. And I can’t believe we’ve somehow fell out of touch. Baby on board.

When I’m at the end of my rope and the checkout person says the simplest, kindest thing that suddenly makes me want to cry. Baby on board.

I don’t know who originally made the “Baby on board” stickers, or how much they understood of motherhood, but maybe when they screen-printed that first shield they already knew…this bumper sticker isn’t actually about the passenger.

It’s about the mother, us mothers, who need people to see how much we’re carrying.

How we’ve made ourselves into vehicles, our bodies into places where souls travel.

How our nervous systems are now the highways in which an entire new generation learns to regulate, flow.

We need these signs because we need people to know—we are ferrying, very literally, those who will determine which roads we’ll take next in this world.

So be gentle with us when we can’t stay between the lines. Be kind with us when it seems like we’re veering off course.

Help us if we just can’t seem to get ourselves started in the morning.

Give us a wide berth if we’re swerving mad. We’re probably mad for a reason.

But most of all, recognize us out in the world.

See us pouring everything we have, the compressed millenia of maternal care, into our mothering.

Into these vehicles we are creating for our children as we move with high speed through existence.

As we juggle the million things needed to keep us all alive.

As we fly towards the horizon that is our child’s destiny, and our single sacred task.

As we figure out, day after day, how to keep moving forward.

Image source

Lately it’s not fully dark in our house until close to 10 pm…and our toddler is on a similarly wild schedule. It started the week before the summer solstice. All of a sudden our two year old would not go to sleep until 10:00 pm. Then it was 11:00 pm, then midnight.

It was likely a combination of some sort of developmental leap and the long body of sunlight that simply wouldn’t leave our house until the deep of the evening. But the brutality of not having a single moment to oneself (let alone going to bed at your own bedtime) began to wear on me, culminating in a night-long fever in which I sweat through all the bed clothes and woke up to the power blowing out like a gunshot, all the lights in the vicinity blinking out in darkness.

It felt like the power-surge of too much wakefulness, busyness and sunlight finally blew all the circuits, the high-beam headlights of the last few weeks giving way to the tiny twinkles of fireflies in the dark cove surrounding our home.

Amazingly, that same night, my daughter finally went to bed at a normal hour and, blessedly, slept through the night.

The spell seems to have finally been broken…

but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed. 

It’s hard enough feeling the pressure of no sleep, no sleep, no sleep. But then there’s the other pressure…

The pressure of—“a two year old should be going to bed by 8 pm” or “at her age she still needs a nap” (even when naps lead to exorbitantly late bedtimes) or “if a child can’t put themselves to sleep, there’s a problem.”

We’ve been down this road before. Sleep was so harrowing the first six months of my daughter’s life we worked with several different sleep consultants. She screamed for what felt like hours every time she fell asleep. Even if she was being bounced, even if she was nursing, even when it was pitch dark with the sound machine on and mama humming a song. The last sleep consultant we talked to reassured us that this was just her way. We weren’t doing anything wrong, and it wasn’t going to change. It was just time to help her get to sleep without the circus that was draining us all.

So we sleep trained in two minute increments. It ripped my soul in half sometimes, and I never could leave her for long, but she got to the point where she could sleep without being bounced on the ball (a feat that had literally started to tear my body apart).

She’d do well for a while, and then she’d backslide. So we’d called the consultant again. But the advice was always the same. Kids needs consistency. They need routines. They need structure.

So we’d try and try and try again.  We’d nail it for a few weeks, then something would shift. She’d get sick or family would be visiting, or the seasons themselves would simply change. We’d force ourselves into consistency, but life would refuse to meet us.

And so, at some point, we gave up.

Not that we don’t still try for a routine. We do. But we gave up trying to be perfect.

Experts say that there is an unalienable rhythm to things. Children should go to bed by themselves by 8 pm and wake up at 7 am. Eat, nap, eat, repeat.

But then there’s the reality that some times of the year we have sunlight clear until 10 pm. Sometimes naps just don’t make sense. Sometimes children need to be held.

We try keep to some prescribed rhythm, but meanwhile the world has an entirely other cadence.

There’s the fireflies that rise from the forest floor starting at dusk. And afternoon showers that bring refreshment just when you thought you might drift off. And blue moonlight pouring like milk through the skylight.

And if we linger long enough in this unchartable twilight, we’ll see the gap between this idea of an outer “expert” that we so enshrine in our culture— and the simple, complicated, exquisite system of simply trusting the inner tides.

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I often think about how we were designed.

Not how we’re living now, but how we, as human beings, were designed to live.

When I needed to bounce my daughter to sleep three times a day it felt arduous, excessive— especially when I saw other mamas have their babies just fall asleep next to them on blankets.

But then I thought about it… wouldn’t all babies have evolved to feel safest in motion? Strapped to their caretakers back as they harvested seaweed from the shore or acorns from the forest floor? Wouldn’t this just have been how we were designed to fall into slumber? Not necessarily at a certain time or hour, but in the moment when we were tired and our mother was moving and we felt safe enough to drift off?

So maybe—the thought would always bring me back to— my child wasn’t such an outlier. Maybe there wasn’t actually a problem. Maybe there isn’t anything to “fix” at all.

Similarly, when we were in the middle of sleep training with our daughter, I often asked myself—did our ancestors keep their children to strict sleeping schedules? Did they watch the sun move religiously through the sky and stop everything they were doing to make sure their child napped at the prescribed time? Did they forfeit their entire evening to try and try and try again to get their children to go to sleep by themselves?

Somehow, I highly doubt it.

Living close to the earth and the rhythms of our bodies, we likely just trusted our children to sleep when they needed to—strapped to our backs, out harvesting roots, sidled next to us by the fire while we mended a hole in our shirt.

We trusted our children. We trusted the world. We trusted that the peak of sunlight on the longest days means the rhythm changes. We trust that times of storms lead to new plateaus of calm. We trusted that balance returns.

As our family finally gets to the other side of this particular sleep “progression,” and as the light officially beings to wane on the other side of the solstice, but still gathers in heat on the western side of our house till late in the evening, I ask myself—

When did we stop trusting the earth?

When did we stop trusting ourselves?

When did we stop trusting our children?

I don’t know the answer, but I struggle with it often.

I have trouble trusting the process. Knowing that everything is a phase. That the hardship will end. That change is the only constant.

I have trouble trusting that I’m doing enough.

That I’m giving my daughter what she needs to thrive, even when I know, on most days, that there is nothing more I can give.

I have trouble trusting that the earth of the life we’re creating for her is sustainable enough, attuned enough, nourishing enough.

I have trouble trusting what I know inside, what rhythm is arising from this organic moment, versus what I fear some projected, externalized expert might say.

But then, there’s the handful of blackberries we gather on our evening walks.

There’s the sound of her breathing next to me as she finally, finally falls asleep.

There’s my body, laying in the last rays of the sunset, the world in balance for just a single moment.

There’s nighttime and there’s fireflies. Sensitive, glittering, bright.

And I think, I can trust this.

I can trust this.

The other day my daughter was up for three hours in the middle of the night. I tried, and failed, to get her back to sleep with me, and so then we were up. I made her a snack in the kitchen, helped her go to the bathroom, cleaned up the remnants of dinner I was too exhausted to tackle before bed, set her up with paints, read her books. Finally, sometime around 5 am I was able to coax her back into bed, and back to sleep. Her dad slept on, unawares, only a few hours away from waking up for his workday.

As I felt my daughter’s body grow peaceful and still beside me, the adrenaline of the last few hours finally ebbing from my limbs, I found myself wondering… why didn’t I tap out anytime during those three hours? Her dad and I both work and share childcare duties…so why didn’t I ask for help?

I was one of those days (and those days are every day) when I needed to remind myself… I am not an orangutan.

I hugged my animal body in the lonely night as I drifted off to sleep.

Humans are unique in the world of primates. Not only do we invite other members of our community to hold and care for our infants, our survival absolutely depends on it. Without the sharing of childcare and resourcing of food, the raising of a young human simply wouldn’t be possible.

As human mothers we were built to be supported, from absolutely every angle, by our human communities as we do the hard work of bearing, breastfeeding and caring for a child.

My genetics tells me that I am human.

But sometimes it feels like the world is asking me to be an orangutan. 

Orangutans mother completely alone. Solitary, elusive, and intensively connected to their children, Orangutan mothers raise their offspring entirely by themselves.

For the first two years of their life an orangutan baby literally does not leave their mother’s body. They are carried through the trees on her back and belly. With the orangutan father long gone, orangutan mother and baby pairs move together the forest, climbing in and out of the elusive mists.

Orangutans nurse for up to eight years. For eight years an orangutan mother will make milk for her singular child, teaching them the ways of the world, carrying their weight, and the weight of the world, as she moves through the forest.

Orangutan mothering is stunningly beautiful. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to see pictures or videos of mother/child parings, there is something about it that is profoundly, strikingly tender. Outside of humans, orangutans have the longest developmental period of any primate. And, as you can imagine, the bond between mother and child is deep.

The vision of an orangutan mother, carrying her child as she moves in and out of the veils of the deep rainforest, is a compelling one.

I remember the first time I learned about orangutan mothering, a part of me sighed, “Yes, this feels deeply familiar. And wouldn’t it be easier? If we were simply designed for this, this life that so many of us already lead?”

And yet, I have to remind myself that I am not an orangutan

Over and over as mothers we’re telegraphed that we are meant to take on the brunt of childcare ourselves. To the point where we consciously or unconsciously stop even asking for help (see me at 3 am cleaning the kitchen with my daughter while her dad sleeps).

We think we’re supposed to be that matriarch who can carry her children for as long as they need, providing for them with our bare arms.

And when we can’t, we feel like we’ve failed.

But we’re not orangutans. We were never meant to be orangutans.

We’re human, with all our tenderness and sensitivity and needs.

We’re human.

We need community.

We need alloparents

And we need help.

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I think about this as I acknowledge all the mothers out there who have been forced to become orangutan mothers.

Maybe it’s because the father or co-parent is out of the picture.

Or maybe the co-parent is there, but the mother is still carrying the whole invisible load.

Or maybe it was your community who failed you. The network of family, aunties, uncles, grandparents, and friends that said “I’ll be here for you” and yet never showed up.

Or maybe it’s because everything inside of our culture, and the systems that we live in, tells us… you are meant to do this entirely by yourself. And if you can’t carry it, you aren’t a good mother.

I think about this as I’m up with my daughter today at 5 am. As I make her yogurt, then a smoothie, then toast, then eggs. As I order her a new pair of shoes, get her name on the list for a school this fall, coordinate dates with the grandparents.

As I go about the million every-day things, like swinging from tree-to-tree-to-tree in a forest that is both beautiful and endless.

I remind myself that it’s okay to ask for help.

That I need to ask for help.

That asking for help is what makes me human.

Because I’m not an orangutan.

And you aren’t either.

We are human. And we are mothers. And we weren’t designed to it alone.

(Photo Credit: Jim Schulz/Chicago Zoological Society via AP)

I once had an astrologer look at my chart and tell me I was a paradox. “There’s a part of you that wants to walk onto a stage in front of an audience and throw your arms wide” he said to me knowingly. Then he paused, “But once you get up there it’s like you find yourself announcing ‘Hello everyone! I’m a very private person!’”

I laughed. It felt like the perfect description of a creative who is also a highly sensitive person.

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of waltzing onto the stage that is Substack and saying “Hello everyone! I’m a very sensitive person who deeply needs to talk about this profoundly sensitive aspect of my life!”

As a teacher, earth mentor, and guide I’ve been writing and sharing in the public eye for over a decade. But something about Substack. Something about motherhood. Something about sharing from one of the absolute most private corners of my life, has made me feel like I’m doing this, all of this, for the first time.

When I started this Substack a year ago I gave myself a very specific task—to let go of all my roles. I wanted to know what it would be like to not show up as a teacher or a guide. I didn’t even want to put pressure on myself to show up as a mother. I just had to show up. To write about the ocean of movement behind my life as a parent to a young child. To let my own self-expression, my tenderness and unknowingness, be enough.

It's been one of the most confusing, exciting, brave and uncertain things I’ve ever done in my adult life. I’ve learned a lot. More, maybe, than I can put into words. But here are the things that stand out most…

1.        It takes so much to show up to the page every week, but it’s worth it.

Posting every week here feels like a miracle. In a time when even necessities like showers are negotiable, the reality that I’ve shown up here every week for a whole year floors me. I’ve written a fair share of these posts sitting in my car, pulled over in the CVS parking lot for 45 minutes while my daughter naps in the backseat. I’ve had to give up a lot of my perfectionism to make it every Sunday. There have been plenty of times when I didn’t have the space to edit what I wrote in the way I wanted to, making it more lyrical, poignant or clear. Time simply ran out. And so it had to just be what it was: Raw, honest, here. Nearly every time I post, a part of me still wonders—“is this good enough to share?” and then I post it anyways. Because that was the goal. To just keep showing up. In the last year I’ve chosen writing over napping. Writing over meals. Writing over the million other things that need to be done every day…and it’s always been worth it. Because writing shows me what’s here. It shows me what’s going on beneath the surface of my being. It connects me to my self in a time of life when the dissolution of your identity is all but guaranteed. Writing brings me back to my life, and shows me that the miracle of your life continuing is possible. So it’s worth it, every time.

2.        The community is always here, even if you can’t be.

There was a part of me that thought I could be more involved in the community aspects here on Substack (notes, cross-posting, commenting etc.) but parenthood has forced me to accept the one thing I’ve always had trouble embracing—my limitations. What I can handle in a day, and what I can’t. How much bandwidth I have to be on the computer before it all starts to falls apart like a badly put-together cake. What’s been most piercingly beautiful though, is the realization that even if I can’t respond to a message, even if I miss reading a post, even if I loved someone’s essay and never end up saying anything because the moment I tried to type my daughter woke up from her nap and started to cry in the other room, the community is still here. The grove of mothers who understand. The circle of those of us who are writing, parenting, sharing, becoming, are here, always here. Those of us who know that you can step in and out, in and out, and that this movement can be a kind of dance. A pattern of nourishment that is important, sanctioned, needed.

3.        I’ve felt the need to be less private than I thought I’d be.

When I first began this Substack I figured I’d paywall at least half my posts. It felt so vulnerable to step out and share from this un-figured-out place in my life. Paywalling felt like a way to create a safer, interior garden-within-the-garden. I still feel that way about the things that are just too tender to share with any person with a passing google interest. And yet, I’ve been surprised by how little I feel the need to paywall most things. It’s felt refreshing, honestly, to be so open. To have anyone who needs it, be able to read what I wrote. I’ll still likely paywall the things I know I’m still fragile around. But so far opening the gates to this garden, without much reservations, has only meant more creativity, connection and abundance.

4.        The support will surprise you

Making money from writing isn’t easy. After I wrote my first book, I was intensely grateful for all the support it received. But it also made me feel for all my writer friends whose only stream of income is their words. Making money, any kind of money, from writing is hard won. And so it’s felt like such a blessing to witness people decide to pay for this Substack. To have someone say “I believe in you,” in this way, has lifted me more than I can express. When I was younger I wanted to be a writer, a writer of lyricism, of poetry. But as I grew up, I internalized the belief that making it as a writer was too hard. I didn’t think I was good enough. So writing just became something I did on the side. The subscriptions I’ve received for this Substack has been a kind of soul retrieval for me. A force of kindness reaching back to speak to the young part that still believed “I can’t, it won’t work out, I don’t deserve it.” Your support has changed me. It’s shown me that it’s actually possible to be in the stream of your own deepest naturalness, your flow, your creative pool of creative nourishment, the thing you need to do to be yourself, and someone will say “I see this, and it’s valuable.” It’s shown me that is truly enough, for all of us, just to be ourselves. And that when we do, we will be supported in ways that touch us beyond words. So thank you, thank you.

5.        I want to keep going

When I started this, I set a goal for myself to write once a week for a whole year. I can be bull-headed about goals, so I didn’t take this one on lightly. When I began my daughter was just a year old. We didn’t have any formal childcare and I was still supporting the entire family while running my own business. How would I also do this? But time has done a miraculous thing. Because writing about motherhood has given me life, my life has somehow expanded. I wrote my last post sitting at Ingles (our local chain supermarket). The small pocket of time before grocery shopping was all I had. So I sat at a table next to an older couple eating General Tso’s chicken from the take-out section and typed for forty minutes straight. I felt like a different person afterwards. I wasn’t sure if I’d want to keep going after a year. I set myself this goal with the permission, in advance, to let go once I reached it. But now having hit the one-year-mark I find myself more passionate than ever about this writing, this sharing. There are things, big things, I’ve yet to write. And this is the space where I want to do it. I’ve hit the one year mark, and I want to keep going.

And for that, for you, for this space, I’m so grateful.

What about you? What is one unexpected thing you’ve discovered about being here on Substack?

Motherhood reveals the sine wave beneath all of existence.

It’s always there, this wave.

The oscillation between joy and sorrow, aliveness and terror, gratitude and despair.

We just don’t always recognize it. Or we do, but would prefer not to.

This wave is the structure of our day, the curved backbone beneath all of life.

The tide goes in and comes out.

You are in awe of your child, you are desperate to be alone.

You feel so positive about the world you’re creating for your little one, you wish you could put them back into your body forever.

You are in love with existence, you are having a panic attack in the parking lot of the grocery store.

Art—writing, music, dance— helps us appreciate these waves. To relish the swoop of the dips. And yet most of us are still taught that the ideal is to ascend the scale of joy and stay there.

So even though art can help us appreciate the wave… nothing brings you into the realness of its undulating existence like motherhood.

Nothing breaks you down, bringing you back into your own wave form, like becoming a parent.

And so on the days when I watch myself swing wildly. On the weeks when I’m lost in grief or disappeared into a joy so deep it makes me feel guilty, I remember that this wave, this movement back and forth is why we came into existence.

That this wave is the hum that creates music, pulls the tides, makes matter.

This wave moves through the tops of the trees, ripples through the earth like the muscles in a snake.

It snakes through us. It reorients, transmutes, changes us.

And if we let it, if we just let the wave be what it is, it will transform us.

I was reflecting on all of this after finding a poem this week I had scratched into my journal my first couple months post-partum.

Words often failed me then, as they still do now. But even when the words aren’t there, the wave still was.

Let the wave come
the love, the 
lostness

let the wave come the
presence, 
the pain

let the 
wave come
the worry, the 
wonder

I zoom out and immediately
snap back in again.

Everything is fragile
I worry about breaking her 
I’m fragile
You’re allowed to 
protect yourself
from breaking.

Some days I feel 
more myself 
than ever
other days I 
don’t know
who I ever was.

Every step I take 
out into the world
is too much

I come back, chapped
and in 
need of respite

I hide under the cover
of this moment
and let the waves
come.

Art from the Robin Wood Tarot deck

Lately I keep getting The Fool card. No matter which tarot deck I work with, or how I shuffle, it’s the same…

There’s a jovial figure laughing, joking, dreaming with abandon… as they dance themselves over the edge of a cliff.

The Fool is the very first card of the tarot. At number “0” it’s not even technically a part of the sequence of the journey. The Fool is the one who is about to go on the journey. Which means that when you get The Fool card, it’s signaling the beginning of a whole new cycle.

Whenever I pick The Fool card, I’m ok with it.

Because when it comes to parenting, I’m a Fool.

I never had much experience with taking care of children before my daughter came. I eschewed babysitting as a young woman, wasn’t present at any of my friend’s births, and am the first person in my family to have a child.

I remember the last trimester of being pregnant, when I tried to read up on all the things—birth, infancy, post-partum, taking care of a newborn—and I realized just how much I didn’t know. It was slightly terrifying. But I also knew there was no other way. This is how a new cycle begins, with us being willing to not know the outcome…and to do it anyways.

The Fool is the part of you that is naïve, unexperienced, a beginner. The one that’s willing to make a muck of things. The one who walks with innocence off the edge of a cliff, and tumbles head-first into the abyss.

It seems painfully ignorant and yet, it’s that same innocence that ultimately allows The Fool’s journey to begin. Because without The Fool’s enthusiastic naiveté, they would never take the leap in the first place. And without the leap, we cannot hope to reach the other side— that place where the new journey begins.

Stepping into parenthood is exactly like dancing off that cliff.

It takes a Fool to want to do it.

Blessedly, there are many fools among us.

Art by Lisa Sterle From The Modern Witch Tarot

Still, there’s times when I seriously wonder what I doing, if I’m doing it right, or what this is all supposed to look like.

On those days when I feel woefully out of my depths I have a mantra I often repeat to myself.

“I have no idea what I’m doing”

I repeat it to myself when my daughter has a meltdown and all the gentle parenting tools fail.

I repeat it as I reach out for a date with a new mama friend, unsure if they feel the same about wanting to connect with me.

I repeat it when I post here again on Substack, not entirely sure what I’m doing with these weekly writings except that I need this, this space, this community.

I stop and tell myself—“I have no idea what I’m doing.”

And somehow, just for acknowledging this, the sense of being unbearably foolish is miraculously transformed into the light-footed step of The Fool.

The Fool has no idea what they’re doing.

And, bless them, that unknowing is the best possible thing.

Art by Walter Crane and Earnest Fitzpatrick in the Harmonious Tarot

I used to be a big time planner.

If there was a cliff I was jumping off of, I’d already mapped it. I knew the quickest path to the top and the best place to launch myself for landing cleanly on the other side.

But there’s something about the leap into parenthood—a free-fall that has, a least for me, not yet ended—that has broken every strategic bone in my body, making me more comfortable with being The Fool than ever.

The archtetype of The Fool is a sacred one.

Closely aligned with the trickster, The Fool is the one who can lead us back to the truth through an obscuring of what’s right in front of you.

The one who reveals a deeper order through creating disorder, who can help us find trust in the mystery by taking away what we thought we knew.

In some descriptions of The Fool’s journey the figure is described as a newborn. Spontaneous, trusting, innocent.

In this way, children are the ultimate Fools.

Kids know nothing about how the world works, and because of that they show you over and over again what really matters in this world.

They venture with undimmed enthusiasm to the edge of the porch steps, to the band playing on the street, to the beautiful stranger with a limb difference, and ask only to know, to connect, to experience.

Through parenting them, children teach us how to embrace the Fools that we are. And if we can only accept it, this can be a life-resurrecting experience.

The more I parent, the less I know.

The more I parent, the more of a Fool I become

And this, I realize, is the medicine that this world so deeply needs.

To recognize that we don’t know, that there’s so much we are here to learn, that we’re just beginning.

To be willing—with trust, enthusiasm, innocence— to walk right up to the edge of what’s to come. To embrace the journey that is bigger than can be named.

To say “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

And then to jump.

Because that’s how the other side will rush up to greet us, sure as a hug.