To be drenched in life

Five things

A song I’ve been loving:

When beauty is blurry, 35mm film

1 — It poured rain for three days straight here, leaving a record amount of rainfall. My backyard is soggy with memory of it now. I kept saying to myself, “how does it just keep going?” The seemingly endless pouring made me think about how long it sometimes takes to fully let go of what needs letting go — to fully release what is asking to be released. It often doesn’t happen in the midst of a yoga class or in one single breakthrough or in one particular cry. It happens over months, years, a lifetime. The heft so many of us carry might not be disappeared with one psychedelic journey or one good conversation or one big change. It might instead require daily tending, ongoing care, forever nurturance. The grief of this; the relief of this.

Some of the heaviness I carry will be with me for the entirety of my life, yet I keep noticing it doesn’t feel as hard to carry lately. Not because it has gone away, but because my capacity for care and compassion toward it has expanded. Not because it has ceased to hurt, but because my willingness to turn toward it when it’s asking for my attention has increased, because my understanding has deepened, because my shame has lessened. Not because I’ve figured it all out, but because I have sought out more ways to let it pour, more ways to let it get unstuck, more in-roads to letting it be fully felt. I’ve stopped hiding from it. I am asking myself, how can I keep widening my own container for all of me to be met? How can I allow this to widen what I can hold with others, what I can bear witness to, what I can stay with? How can I keep caring deeply for myself not as a way of furthering my own individual wellness, but as a way of being better able to build the kind of world I say I want, even in one tiny corner? How can I keep staying with what hurts not to be stuck in it, but to let it become unstuck? I want to be drenched in life. I want to keep learning how to get closer to that. I’m learning.

Quiet, 35mm film

2 — I recently got a deep, heartfelt apology from a lifelong friend who I hadn’t heard from since my daughter was born. It was entirely unexpected, both her disappearance and the apology. It came shortly after the election, in a time I truly needed a reminder that forgiveness, grace, understanding, and true humanity were possible.

Yesterday, this friend came over and met my daughter (J) for the first time. She brought a present and spent hours in our home playing, getting to know J, wide-eyed with wonder at her quirks and sweetness and very serious thinking face. My friend told J stories about when I was a teenager, told her things about myself most people in my current life wouldn’t have (“did you know your mama is an amazing piano player?”), helped her with a puzzle, asked her about her dreams.

I watched with tears as my daughter emerged in front of my eyes, sharing her fullest self in place of the more reserved or timid parts of her that often come forward when getting to know someone new. It was as if she felt the wordless love translating in the room; it was as if she felt the act of generosity and faith in welcoming my friend into our home, making her dinner; it was as if she knew how special it was to rekindle a relationship with someone who always should have been there but couldn’t be, for reasons that do not remove her deservedness of our care, our warmth, our family. My daughter was reminding me what choosing to love can do.

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make, exactly. Maybe it’s the gift of being willing to feel an automatic opening in the heart after choosing to forgive. Maybe it’s witnessing the ways forgiveness stretches my ability to see people beyond my ego’s desire to stay attached to how they’ve hurt me. Maybe it’s the relief of getting an apology I never anticipated. Maybe it’s the grief of all the apologies I may never get, and the self-assuredness of trusting my own heart regardless. Maybe it’s the remembrance that sometimes, the way people show up toward or with us often have nothing to do with us and so much to do with what’s happening within them. Maybe it’s the joy of making someone a meal. Maybe it’s the softening that happens when seeing other people love your kid. Maybe it’s feeling, in a micro way, what is possible when we choose generosity, when we choose compassion, when we choose seeing the good in people, when we choose to allow repair to make right what doesn’t need to remain stuck in anger or resentment. Maybe it’s being willing to look beyond the strategies people get entrapped within in order to see who they are behind those strategies, even if that doesn’t always mean letting them back into our lives. Maybe it’s something about feeling proud of my own heart. Maybe it’s something about becoming the kind of person I want to be.

Along the road, 35mm film

3 — Every time I log off even though my ADHD brain tells me I need the dopamine, I’m reminded why it matters to do so. Every time I move my body in ways that make my muscles uncomfortable, I’m reminded why it matters to do so. Every time I choose to meet a new person for coffee even though putting myself out there scares me, I’m reminded why it matters to do so. Every time I go for a drive to the coast even though my sink is full of dishes and my laundry isn’t yet done, I’m reminded why it matters to do so. Mostly, I’m reminded that many of the things I desire and care about and love require some level of leaning into discomfort. Most of the things I want to do require moving past a layer of dread first. Most of the things I long for require getting beyond fear. And the only thing that seems to soothe any of this is just the act of choosing to do the thing anyway, not after the remembrance of why it matters comes but before. The only thing that seems to lead to this remembering is making the uncomfortable choice to lean into what scares me, even when I don’t yet have proof it’s worth it. Doing things with wobbly knees. Doing things with a trembling heart. Not letting the wobble or the tremble be barriers, but instead be markers of what matters. This might not be profound for some of you but it has been for me.

4 — “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know how much control I individually have over how anything goes. What I do know is that staying close to hope feels important in a climate that wants me to feel no power, no possibility. Staying close to hope feels like a middle finger to the men who want me to feel small. Staying close to hope feels like a way of not betraying those with less than me. Staying close to hope feels like a practice, a prayer, a flame lit. Staying close to hope feels like building a muscle, surrendering to feeling, following those who know how to imagine. Staying close to hope feels like an act of care when not hoping at times feels easier. Staying close to hope feels like an ode to the world my child, our children, all of us, deserve. And when I need to bow out of hope for a while, I remember someone else carries it somewhere; I remember hope needn’t be felt or held by any of us alone for it to sustain.

What’s ahead, 35mm film

5 — Some of what gives me hope lately: Organizers hosting learning circles. The vigil for children lost in Gaza my family and I went to a few weekends ago in our little town. Geese flying overhead. Reading. Walking in the forest. Choosing to love, even when it feels unbearably vulnerable. My cis husband sharing about anti-trans violence. Sitting down to write. Making new friends as an adult. Art that carries possibility simply by way of it existing. Returning to my psychotherapy practice next year. Forgiveness. The group of older men who meet weekly at my local café. Good thrift store finds. Leaves the size of my head. Learning to imagine from those who have been doing it already. Staying close to the earth. Remembering. Permission to start over. Asking questions. Listening to the heart.

Thank you, as always, for being here.

Lastly, if you would be open to offering feedback/ideas on what 2025 will look like for my offerings, please share here; your input is incredibly helpful in shaping my work, and it would be so deeply appreciated.

△ The remarkable beauty of this new album celebrating the gifts of trans people

△ The most heartful words I’ve read post-election

△ Gift Thinking, from Jenny Odell + Robin Wall Kimmerer

△ A recording of Love, Power, and Liberation (talk starts at 50min)

△ Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kiese Laymon in conversation

△ 12 ways to cultivate abundance and security

△ A stunning piece on surviving Hurricane Helene, from Asia Suler

△ Local inspiration from 89-year-old Lloyd Kahn

△ Speaking of local inspiration: this vision, from the incredible Sophie Wood Brinker at her show Whalesong Revolution, up now at at Gospel Flat Show Space in Bolinas

May it be so. by Sophie Wood Brinker

With care,
Lisa