The Carey/Oscar combo has me running to rewatch one of my favorite movies, Drive. They are both in it. <3

Also...the wardrobe. If the aesthetic is right, I can enjoy a show based on that alone. I was really into Carey Mulligan's effortless style. There was one dress in particular that I immediately went hunting for. And Oscar Isaac's silver koi fish pendant or Carey’s Spiral necklace? My Pisces soul is obsessed.

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It def has some wtf crawl in your skin moments, a little campy, a little vile. If you have an uneasy stomach, here is your warning.

Every interaction felt like two histories colliding. Every character was reacting to each other, but they were also reacting to old wounds, expectations, ambition, shame, grief, status & the desperate need to be seen.

Underneath all of the chaos, it was such a human story. Of course, I found myself thinking & nodding throughout because it really is such a good example of something I find endlessly fascinating:

Our mind is an incredible storyteller.

Sometimes it tells stories that set us free. Sometimes it tells stories that imprison us.

All it takes sometimes is a moment, a feeling, a look, a silence & immediately our mind begins building a world around it. How much of our suffering comes from what actually happens to us...& how much comes from the meaning we attach to what happens?

Someone doesn’t respond the way we hoped & the story begins.

This person doesn’t respect me.
I’m failing.
I’m not enough.
I need to prove myself.
I need them to see me.

& before we even realize it, we are no longer responding to the now moment. We are responding to a story written from every hurt, fear, belief & experience we have carried with us.

The mind replays what the heart wants to heal.

We don’t just experience life. We interpret it & we give it meaning. We build narratives & sometimes those narratives help us survive. The story that once protected us becomes the very thing keeping us stuck. Our brains are constantly trying to make meaning. It is one of the most beautiful & complicated parts of being human.

Our brains dislike uncertainty. They would rather invent an explanation than sit in the discomfort of not knowing. It's one of the ways we make sense of life. But sometimes the story that once protected us becomes the cage we live in.

We start building invisible cages…

If I am kind, they will like me.
If I am easy-going, people will like me.
If I can keep everyone happy, I will be lovable.
If I achieve this goal, I will finally be loved.
I may never rest, but I will be loved.
If I don’t take up too much space, I will be safe.
Safe & small right here...

We build these stories so early that we forget they are stories at all.

They just become the lens we look through.

When we start to notice the story, we begin to create space.

This is why movement continues to feel like such a powerful practice to me. The body is where we can interrupt the loop. If we take time to breathe, move differently & slow down enough to actually feel ourselves, we create a tiny opening between stimulus & response.

We start to remember that we are not every thought we think. We are not every feeling we feel. A feeling can move through us. With our awareness, we can experience what is moving through us without becoming it.

We are the awareness witnessing it.

The story, the feeling, the thought.

All moving through us.

xP

For years I lived mostly from the neck up.

My body carried me from one obligation to the next. It was the vehicle that got me where I needed to go, the thing that held everything together while I kept moving forward.

I noticed it when anxiety settled into my chest or when rashes bloomed across my skin. My body was always speaking to me (and still does). But eventually, it has to raise its voice.

Otherwise, I only lived inside it. I wasn’t really in relationship with it.

A lot of my life was spent trying to think my way through living, believing I would feel better when I understood enough. If I could just read the right book, ask the right questions, untangle the right story, find the missing piece.

I thought if I could understand everything, maybe I could finally feel safe.

But bodies don’t speak in thoughts. They speak in sensation.

Recently I finished reading The Body Is a Doorway by Sophie Strand. I found myself taking photos of pages and filling my notes app with quotes, and little thoughts I didn’t want to lose. The book wasn’t telling me things I didn’t know, but it gave language to something I had already been living.

My body remembers.
My body grieves.
My body knows the way home.

Looking back, I can see that I had been drifting away from myself long before my miscarriage.

I had become heavy in ways that had very little to do with weight. I felt dense and inflamed. At times I still do, I am not free of this, but it is dwindling. I had been working and holding too much. I was carrying layers that felt protective, and those same layers were keeping me from fully experiencing my own life.

I was trying so hard to keep it all together.

And then grief arrived.

Grief will not ask for permission. It just arrives. Sometimes when you hear a song, see a friend hurting, or even when you see something beautiful. Grief is not polite. It cracks things open.

I think about how a crab must leave its old shell to grow. For a while, it becomes soft & vulnerable, exposed without the protection it once depended on. The old shell no longer fits, but the new one hasn’t fully formed yet.

That in-between space.

A little bit like becoming someone new while still learning how to hold yourself.

I don’t say that because I believe suffering happens for a reason or because loss is somehow a gift. I would never wish that season on anyone. But somewhere inside that heartbreak, I could no longer keep abandoning my body. I finally had no choice but to come back.

Old tears surfaced. Tears that felt older than me. Ancient tears. Tears that had been waiting years to shed. My body was speaking a language my mind had never learned to translate.

So I stopped trying to fix it and I started listening instead.

I walked. I stretched. I danced while dinner cooked. I stood barefoot in my backyard. I noticed the birds and the bunnies. I talked to trees and the wind. I started to pay attention to the quiet intelligence of the natural world and wondered if it had been speaking to me all along.

I learned that animals don’t think their way through terror. They shake. They rock. They move. They sway. They let an experience travel through them instead of becoming them.

I began wondering what it would feel like to trust my own body that much. To let things move and to stop gripping so tightly. To stop believing everything needed to be figured out before I could begin living.

One image from the book has stayed with me.

The hummingbird. She isn’t greedy for sweetness. She depends on it. And her appetite isn’t excess. It’s life.

Many of us learned to distrust our appetites. Not just for food, rest, beauty, slowness, creativity, or joy. Especially as women, we’ve often been taught that smaller is safer or being quieter is easier. That wanting less somehow makes us more worthy.

What if our appetite is not something to control, but something to listen to?

Saying yes when your body asks for sleep, a pizza or warm soup. Saying yes to dancing, music, an energy drink or a glass of wine. A walk. A scream, A cry.

Creativity works this way too. It can’t be forced. It’s something we feed.

Maybe that’s why I keep returning here. To document what brings me back into relationship with being alive. The small rituals that remind me who I am beneath all the striving. The moments when I stop fixing, over-explaining, performing, and perfecting.

It is about listening, noticing, being & slowing down to make tea or cookies while humming or dancing.

There is no arriving at a finish line. There is only the relationship. A relationship with my body, my grief, my joy, my creativity, the natural world, and this life that keeps asking me to participate in it.

Movement brought me back into my body, but what I’ve been learning is how to listen to it and say “yes” again.

All the Yesses to following what brings me alive and trusting that my body knows the way and has been pointing the way home all along.

xP

The first daffodil.
The first warm(ish) day.
The first butterfly.

Spring arriving.

Spring begins long before things start to bloom. That is why we get impatient waiting for the beauty. We want to see more color, more green, brighter hues.

It takes time and it begins underground. Tree roots begin drawing water upward, and the buds start to form on bare looking branches.

The phoenix, perhaps the oldest symbol of transformation, rises from ashes. Different symbol, same story.

My daughter randomly waking up and telling me she wants to draw a phoenix first thing in the morning one day is not random. These signs feel like little nods from the universe speaking directly to my soul.

I wear an Isis necklace around my neck with a phoenix on it. I am not sure when I started connecting with the Goddess Isis and Egypt, but it feels like an ancient remembering for me. I don't have the answers, just a knowing.

Like the roots of your culture. Something that lives in your blood somehow.

Nature understands what humans forget, and that is that transformation spends most of its time unseen.

We always want the evidence and signs that something is working.

Spring is the season of trust. The trees trust. The seeds trust.

The birds leave and somehow know when to return. The caterpillar enters a process knowing there is no turning back. Nothing in nature appears scared or anxious that it is being unproductive or that nothing is happening.

People do.

Humans panic in these seasons, or sit in anticipation of the escape of summer.

It is a quiet season of waiting, and it is always uncertain. There are thunderstorms, lots of wind and rain, breezy coolish damp days.

I never really enjoyed Spring for these same reasons and now I find myself loving it. I enjoy it before the peak and frenzy of summer begins, where many of us decide to fun-pack and overstimulate our lives.

Spring feels so hopeful. It reminds me that things are happening under the surface and in the boredom of it all. Again and again, nature will tell the same story.

What looks like a death is often a rebirth.

I now experience Spring as a preparation, a gathering of life that is getting ready for aliveness and expansion.

Every season offers us a chance to begin again.

These signs over the past few weeks were something I was really able to digest and capture while documenting moments of my life. The synchronicities and stories of transformation and rebirth.

I really felt that this year.

xP

One of Millie’s friends was sleeping over.

The girls were curled up together on the couch like sisters.

Dave was making homemade pizza from the dough I made earlier.

The girls headed upstairs after they ate there pizza and they were giggling at baby photos of themselves on the digital slideshow.

They had settled into that sleepover magic where everything is funny.

Then Dave turned on music.

Millie and I started dancing around the kitchen, while her friend was changing into her pajamas.

Holding hands.

Jumping around.

Whipping our hair everywhere.

I got dizzy halfway through and stopped.

“Oh my god, I need a break.”

Without even thinking she looked at me and said,

“No, keep going mom.

Come on.

This is how you get through life.”

I remember looking over at Dave and laughing.

Did she really just say that?

And he threw his hands up like,

“Yup, she did.”

What stopped me wasn’t what she said.

It was how quickly she said it.

She was right.

Children remember things adults forget.

Life is the dance floor.

Love is the music.

And this is how we move through it.

Most days, I think we’re working so hard to understand life that we forget to dance with it.

Feel it, press play, keep dancing.

xP