Two thoughts for you:
Think back to that rushed morning where you didn’t quite pack the bag or lunch and you are standing with your hand on the the door, scrolling through your mental checklist of all the things that you needed to bring along or tend to before you walk off into your car.
You know that feeling?
How often do we check in with ourselves? Not our keys, although that is often the thing I have to run back in and grab ever since we moved over to push-button start-up cars I seem to forget them more often. Anyway, how often do we check-in? I don’t do you?
This weekend we are in the midst of an eclipse energy and if you want to learn a lot more listen here. I’ll give you the gist: it’s time to tend to the things that you thought you would tend to later. It’s time to include yourself and that may mean an odd evaluation of personal habits, or relationships, or face cream.
See if we are a bit alike when it comes down to some genres of change we think the answers lie in really big tweaks, but sometimes it is in the smallest pivot. Sometimes it is in a 1,000 small pivots. Like, when I picked up some Ayurvedic face cream.
The best endorsement I can give, is when I bought it for a good friend, and she left me a voicemail exclaiming, “KATE, what is this? This is magic in a bottle disguised as face cream.”
I smiled. It is.
Why? Because the intention in which it is made. You can click on and read the link that alludes to the ingredients of herbs that come from a lineage of belief in human understanding and healing. A holistic and comprehensive understanding, not reductionist. There are still arts and places alive that understand the human body is not just slab of meat that bumps into infection or disease, but rather a divinely orchestrated universe, braided by past and future, unlocked in the present with superhighways of information both physical and spiritual. There are emotions that create discomfort, as well as physical discomfort that can prod us to unlock a new freedom through feeling and transmutation.
The faster pace of the world suggested numbing this information, but that tide is ebbing and we are remembering that there is peace and chaos embedded within to help us learn to live. We can’t separate ourselves from ourselves. It’s not in the design. We are complex and we are simple. As Walt says: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes.”
This is the thread that I am plucking this eclipse: reductionism.
Somewhere I began to weave that not enough was good enough because who was I to want more, and honestly it was a little more subtle than that. It was…[takes sip of coffee, while the house still sleeps and that feels like sheer luxury]…it was that I had been given so much good that I didn’t know it was fair to ask for more, while simultaneously not having my needs met.
I guarantee every service provider, artist, teacher, herbalist and healer understands that sentence. So does every mother. And many other shoes I have not walked in felt that exhale somewhere in their body. That is the thread I plucked out this eclipse season, and left on the crafting floor. I am telling you as my witness. I have said that you cannot pull one thread — but that is the one I am pulling.
Do you have a thread you want to pull? This is a really good time to do it. What time you ask? Now, when you reading. If there was something that tapped you on the inside, something that slipped out of your subconscious, or something that scuttled further out of view thinking that this bag of shame cannot be what I am alluding to …that is exactly the one. That is the one.
This is also my second thought for you: the power of intention. Ever since social media some of these words have been so overused (or is that only my algorithm?) that they have begun to lose their meaning.
Let me tell you! (types with enthusiasm) — Start your day with an intention. It is not woo-woo. It works.™️ I recently spent the day with kids who were doing project-based learning. At the beginning of the day they decided what they wanted to focus on for their projects. At the end of the day, when we circled up, and I asked them if they had built a lego catapult or learned all the terms of baseball they were surprised I had remembered. (Yes, I was sitting with their folders, but that is the joy of kids and their presence. Life just delights them). They had forgotten what they had said in the morning, like we all do.
When I asked them about their intentions at the end of the day, they were surprised and proud that they had attended to their intentions in some way. They were also contemplative (if only for a nanosecond) of that which had not been met. It was a great end cap to the day. It brought their attention to their goals and steps they had taken toward them. It is a powerful practice.
Intention effects everything. It can kinda put some weight into our feet and help us stand for the lives we want to be living rather than reacting and running after each outside need or expression of the other. Because something (or someone) calls your name does not mean you have to respond. Just as there is benevolence in this world that wants to uplift you, there are forces that want to confuse you and keep you overwhelmed as it serves their needs. It can be conscious or subconscious, either way we all need to develop the tools to wade through the life if we want to look back on our days with a sense of pride. The good and the bad. The light in the dark, it’s the tension that holds us together. Like Anne Lamott writes about her son and life:
“I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.”
It’s always a both and. Whenever I want to end a substack with a sweeping gesture, I am reminded that it is always a both and, which is why you buy the face cream, and the good strawberries, and you pluck the threads that are cutting out the gold.
So that one day, further along in our days. We’ll look at each other and the sunset, “Ah yes,” we’ll recall fondly, on the front porch to each other, feet gently pushing against the wooden floor, rocking the chair of our lives: It was not perfect, but I lived it best I could.
Pluck the thread, my friend.
With love,
Kate
This podcast is about the face cream and baseball and simply reevaluating how necessary you are and deserved to allow life to lusciously love you.
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Ok, I am getting that cream.
Also, much to unpack in what you say here " It's a fine line these days of knowing were we actually are loving ourselves into wellness and where we are running from what we need to face (pun intended)."
Let's do a podcast episode, just on that concept. especially the "running from what we need to face."
Two questions, Kate, if you feel like sharing… one: what are the effects of that delicious face cream you write about and two, would you feel comfortable describing the thread YOU pulled? Is it a thread of something you want to do or the thread of something you don’t want to do?