That election night, four years ago - perhaps it’s burned in your body memory too? - I ran out of words, gave up, and… decided to read the entire Harry Potter series. Reality was intolerable and – I fled. This time is different. We are different. Reflections on the special women who taught me how.

We know that trees send messages underground to each other, that they pump nutrients to young sprouts, that they are in constant communication. But they also engage in a funny kind of dance called, of all things, crown shyness. Crown, or in Latin, as fate would have it, corona.

One of the great gifts of getting older is when old distortions finally rub off to reveal the truth underneath: To live fully, you’ll need to fill up with what you are. This isn’t about perfectionism or comparison, just embrace. We could call it occupancy or embodiment, but I love full because it turns that old insult right on its head and reclaims it. It replaces a shouldn’t with a yes.

Many of us have this yearning to make (or write or cook or paint) and share the thing we’ve made. It’s a thread that runs through my writing workshops and with clients in my office. To create and be witnessed feed us on a fundamental level. But creativity does not often love a microscope; the process needs some space, some mystery, a little less reason.

A friend furrows her brow. "I made it through winter," she says. "I did so well this year. But suddenly, I feel like I'm totally falling apart. Like, isn't spring supposed to be flowery? Shouldn't this be the easy part?" We laugh at this, that anything might be the easy part.

English is beautiful sometimes.

Because fixed has several meanings:

We can fix as in repair or mend. Our water line, the broken coffee mug, the ear of our child’s rabbit stuffie.

But fixed is also fastened in place. As in stuck. Unmoving.

In this sense, fixed is actually a very good description of what happens when we aren’t well. Whether we’re talking about a group of muscles or a sense of despair, in very real ways recovering our health means we need to become UNfixed.

The garden brings me to the truth of growth and becoming in its haphazard, uneven beauty. If I want to enjoy it, there's just no room for perfectionism.

When a child's simple question leads beneath jargon to a different way of understanding how we heal. (And really, "Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy" is such a mouthful! Here's a clearer way in).

“We are here to remind each other of who we already are." When the kids' raucous band practice leads back to a fundamental truth on the difference between care taking and taking care.

Exploring the mysteries of writing by way of swimming. "We discover our buoyancy not by curling and compressing - that posture will sink us - but in opening and releasing. The water holds us when we trust it at our backs. In this tenderest place, we float."

So much political violence is predicated on our distance. It asks that we stay far away, put humans in categories, categories in boxes, fear those boxes, check them off, move on.

No.

When we are willing to get in close, we align ourselves with each other’s humanity. We say: we’re in this together, you and me.

If we are committed to movement, we need to move. And rarely are new movements graceful. They are bumbling and unfamiliar and create something we haven’t seen before. We don’t need to wait until we figure it out before we act.

The truth is that for many of us, those to do lists ramp up right when the din of our actual discomfort gets too loud to bear. Instead of slowing down to notice what’s really happening – loneliness, exhaustion, overwhelm – we put window dressing on the tender spots, gloss them over with busy-ness. It’s comically bad timing: Just when we’re feeling less than together, we wag our fingers at ourselves to get it together.

Ruminating on grief and celebration in the loss of a sweet pup: “Animals can do the same for us; their touch and constancy melting us into who we were to begin with. Until we are irrevocably marked by love.”

A million internet tests will tell you if you are extroverted or introverted, but for me the designation is fluid and comes back to this: What nourishes you most of all, at this very moment?

Our old patterns are like this. Yes, we’re totally sick of them, ready to not need or hurt or bend in the way we have. But, then… they were so useful once. They did serve a purpose. Still, what if we could repurpose those old habits and put them in the service of new choices?

A few months ago, I wrote here about issues I was having in my hands that necessitated a pause in my massage practice. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen this, but the hiatus gifted me the space to ask important questions: What kind of healing work really resonates? What supports meaningful change and health? How is the work sustainable?

There are times when, by habit or determination, nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel (pick your back-breaking metaphor!), we are plugging along in our lives, and then, with a sudden thwack, we hit upon a truth we wish we’d never seen. Or maybe (if we are being honest) we’d been trying to avoid all along.

Early spring feels like the season for these stark questions. It offers a kind of invitation to burn the bracken in the early bonfire, to set out the seed trays, empty the shelves. The act of tending to what is here – even when it’s muck-covered and colorless – sends out a kind of secret faith that growth is coming. Despite the evidence, despite the pace.

Given the chance to be outside, to be moving, to be with his people – the dog almost visibly hums with the joy of it all. True, the other 98% of the time he’s laid out on his side by the fire, showing age in the way he moves. But he seems to say something else: Yes, I am achey and older, but also resilient. Perhaps this is the trick to health: to drop so fully into the present that the can’t stories fall away.