Everything at Once

Sometimes it can feel like everything is happening at once. Devastating loss and deepening love, humbling failures and goals achieved, worry for someone's safety and profound belief in their ability to shine.

This is life, isn't it? It is always more than one thing. It can feel overwhelming to hold all of it, but it can also be exactly what is needed in order to keep us from slipping into despair, to keep us coming back to what is, to here, and to now, to the simple beauty, the deep heartache of this gift of life.

Holding our children tightly and letting them also walk away from us; claiming our personal rights and also tending the health and wellbeing of the larger community; grieving our losses while opening our hearts to new love.

It is not easy, it is not binary, black and white, in or out, right or wrong. When we feel the pull to tighten, to use the tool of rigidity, to allow one meme to summarize our beliefs, we are contributing to our disconnection, but we are also protecting ourselves from the pain of living.

So how can you find safety and support in order to allow the difficult feelings to have room to be felt?

Turn towards people and environments you trust, take time to rest, nourish, and connect in order to let the grief metabolize, to move through you, and thereby grow your capacity for staying present in the face of challenge, which will help you to ACT! To advocate, to love, to vote, to protect, to participate more fully.

Just allowing the feelings to come is an act of bravery and trust!

It's not easy and it takes time, literally, it takes time to allow the body to slowly open, to let the waves start rolling again.

It's scary, so go slowly.

Listen when your body says “no!”

Listen by pausing, turning off the news, shifting your expectations of yourself today, tending yourself as if you are taking care of a hurt animal. We cannot force the emotions to go away or to process quickly. We have to honor our body’s pace, not override it.

I am reminded of so many poems inviting this slower pace, or professionals writing books about it, there are a thousand ways to say it, to invite it,

but the permission to honor your own wisdom must first come from you.

Sending love in these tender times.