Let me be a fountain instead of a thorned rose, and you will be a mountain (you always were)
No Place Like Home by Jeff Foster
It was always your calling, you see,
to find a way to love yourself deeply,
to not beg for love, or seek it externally,
or wait for it, or try to hold on to it,
but to drench yourself with it, moment by precious moment.
Do not abandon yourself when you feel abandoned,
for there is a pain worse than abandonment:
The abandonment of self, the flight from where you are.
Running from yourself when you most need yourself.
TRUST YOUR WINTERS
There are days I doubted it would. I was convinced this past winter was too hard and the storms too violent. There was a stretch of about a month when it rained everyday, with spans of record-breaking torrential pours, and I worried our garden would wash away (some of it did). But yesterday out in our little orchard I was delightfully stunned - the fruit trees are budding! Peach, plum, nectarine and apple trees have all sprouted tightly bound promises.
UNCONDITIONAL
a birthday prayer
The Never-ending Ending Of Things by Jeannette Encinias
The Fortune of Motherhood: A Birth Story
Deep in the timeless space of a heavy contraction I envisioned the energy it must have taken the universe to be born, and that this birth felt like a microcosm of the original big bang - carrying with it the same magnitude of exquisite profundity. I thought - if the cosmos could yield to the birthing contractions, so could I. After all, aren’t I made of the same star stuff?
10 RULES FOR BEING HUMAN
There is no way out but through...
“A wound not fully felt consumes from the inside. We must run very hard if we want to stay one step ahead of this pain. Exhausted, we try to bury it with drugs, alcohol, overwork, television, physical activity. We are a very creative species—we can use just about anything to anesthetize ourselves. But in doing so, we also remove ourselves from feeling the joy. Life becomes less, and if we are even slightly numb, it is hard for us to find the wisdom we need in our lives and our world.” - Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation
it keeps getting better
a miracle of pleasure
I am divinity and I am a fucking mess.
reflections from the well of grief
Reflections on my time at the bottom of the well of grief, on the help I got that lifted me out, and how I am enjoying this new, tender self that has emerged through my difficult year of multiple heartbreaks.
I also share my summer selections of books, podcasts and playlists that I have been enjoying lately.
ANTIFRAGILITY
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. . . .
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors...”
The binary is a distraction from waking up to the elegant complexity of life.
When you bloom, I bloom
𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠. It's contagious. When we witness someone else transforming, evolving, maturing, it does something to us... we get the signal that it's okay, and even life-affirming to change. In watching others grow, we are given another model and road map to use in our own personal growth journey.
This is your reminder that you'll consistently deepen
One of the many blessings of hardship is that it brings us closer to the good ones in our life. We find our soul family when we see who shows up when things get messy. And the added bonus is that our friendship is changed by the opportunity for depth- it expands, develops, matures and gets juicier.
WE ARE INVITED TO SHOW UP FOR ALL OF LIFE, NOT JUST THE PARTS WE AREN’T AFRAID OF
Hello friends new and old, my name is Kadhi. And I, like you, am a Lover.
Yesterday’s post was shared and saved more than anything I’ve ever posted, and I really felt it’s ripple out there. I spent the day thinking about why Louise Erdrich’s words struck such a chord with so many of us. “You are here to risk your heart,” she tells us. How terrifying! (and exhilarating!) “You have to love, “You have to feel” through it all, she says. “You are here to be swallowed up.” [gulp]
