Widening

and some things I want to tell you

Oct 26, 2025

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A song I’m loving:

I want to tell you my daughter turns four today, and as I decorated our living room last night with balloons and streamers and put party hats on her stuffies, I cried tears filled with the layers of life; the impossibly large love, grief, pure delight and deep overwhelm from what it means to cherish someone so very much in this lifetime — the preciousness of it, the intensity of it, the learning and unlearning required to truly let it change the parts of me that weren’t ever entirely sure how to let it all in and out.

I want to tell you we are so much more capable of loving than we might know in any given moment, and us forgetting it never makes it less available.

I want to tell you the grief is a mirror of the love is a mirror of the grief is a mirror of the love is a mirror of the grief is a mirror of the love is a mirror of the grief is a mirror of the love; when one is near, the other is close by, too.

I want to tell you that so often when we think we’re grasping to get somewhere else, what we’re really longing for is to feel like we can be fully here, right now, in the pulse of aliveness only found in the tenderness of presence.

I want to tell you everything changes, even when we cling with all our might to what we know, to what’s comfortable, to what’s familiar… it will all eventually shift into something else, whether we like or not, expectedly or unexpectedly, and it might be the practice of a lifetime to let the inevitability of change widen the heart instead of shrinking it. Facing change with a widened heart feels like turning onto an open road with an expanse of sky on all sides, where anything is possible and the unknown doesn’t feel so scary but is instead the very place possibility is born.

I want to tell you how hard it is to unplug in a world that seems so deeply and at times pathologically tethered to plugging in, logging on, and using screens as a means of connection… and I want to tell you there is a vast amount of embodied connection that is available in the flesh of life all around us, and the struggle to orient toward it more and more is not a personal failure but an externally-planted seed most of us started watering before we knew what it would grow into. A contemplation: How can I stop watering the seeds I don’t want to keep growing?

I want to tell you it’s okay to do things imperfectly, and it is in fact the only option, and there are people who will love you in your imperfections.

I want to tell you how much I love laughing, how loud and awkward my laugh is when it’s just my little family around, how fascinating it is to me that I tend to keep my humorous, silly, absurd side reserved for very few people, the risks I’ve been taking in letting that side of me out more and more, and the freedom found in remembering our multidimensionality.

I want to tell you so many parts of our current world are so serious, which might be why laughter and lightness and ridiculousness feels more important than ever.

I want to tell you I’m devoted to judging less and loving more, and that devotion doesn’t mean I get it right all the time, and not getting it right can become wisdom when we stop shaming our humanness.

I want to tell you it is never too late to change your mind, even when others might never know how to see you any differently than they’re used to seeing you.

I want to tell you having a job that allows me to sit up close with humanity every day is the widest reminder that most of us are longing for the same things, and all of us were once little humans searching for safety and love, and we are so deeply wired to move closer and closer to the essence of who we are, and doing so allows us to move farther and farther out into the world, into connection, into our inherent belonging.

I want to tell you I’ve been reading this poem from David Whyte lately and letting it permeate the parts of me that forget:

“Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving.
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving.”

I want to tell you there is room for your gifts, your offerings, your invitations, your extensions into community, your ideas, your care, your softness, your wobbliness, your assertiveness, your curiosity, your zest, your sorrow, your questions, your timidness, your morphing, your buoyancy, your rage, your forgiveness, your wholeness.

I want to tell you of all the ways beauty persists despite the horrors, and of course it does, and what a gift to be willing to trust, look for, and remember that.

I want to tell you you can stay tender with all the ways you have no idea what to do, and you can stay tethered to all the ways you know just what to do.

I want to tell you the sunrises are extra magical this time of year, peach and crisp and splattered with life.

I want to tell you how relieving it feels to allow space for all of it — that we must — and going to celebrate my child’s birthday in the midst of so much devastation feels like a perfect mirror of why all of it is asking for our attention, our willingness, our staying. I want to tell you others will tap in when you need to tap out. I want to tell you your offerings don’t need to solve it all… that was never the task. I want to tell you I see all the micro ways so many of us are bringing more of what we want into the world, and the relief I feel when I let that truth permeate my heart is profound.

Thank you, as always, for being here.