What is Waiting for You?

I'm sitting in my office this morning as the icy snow flakes tick on my window and the chill coming through these tiny windows of this nook I've called an office for the last 3 years wraps itself around my shoulders.

I've been thinking about us, Love, and about how hard it feels many more days than we'd like to admit to get up and get going, to be a force for good in a world that feels like its gone completely mad, to move through the doubt and questioning while the dishes pile up in the sink.

The duality of light and dark playing out on our Facebook feeds and in our conversations with our sweet selves is enough to make us just want to hit the snooze button and say forget it to the big dreams we concocted in our journals at the start of the New Year a few weeks ago.

But something keeps us plodding along.

The wonder of words on the page that appear out of nowhere as the divine gift we needed or the realization that we're not the only ones who feel the way we feel after reading a poem that changes our life.

I was saddened to hear of Mary Oliver's passing this week. Her poetry has been a like a clearing in the woods, a soft place to land when life gets over-complicated in the way that it does.

Her words, always clear, concise, vividly transporting me to a place in nature I've once known.

Her poetry opening us to serve as a launching pad to the questions we find ourselves asking.

On this Sacred Sunday, I wanted to share my most beloved Mary Oliver poem with you.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

...

I think this is it.

"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

In our lives, our relationships, our careers and businesses, we only have to let ourselves love what we are lead to love.

It's here where the doubt slows itself down to a whisper versus the roar that has reverberated through our minds for longer than we can remember.

It's here when we can write something worth sharing simply because it makes our hearts beat faster, not because someone said it's the thing that will get the most likes. 

It's here where we come home and invite others in to share in this sacred space with us. 

This is the space where we realize we have everything we need...and when we slow ourselves enough to give to the whole, rather than wait for the perfect moment to join in on what's already been done...

We become free.

I changed the format of my weekly emails months ago because I wanted to write from a place that looked like me giving to the whole of things, rather than writing to fit in to the cadence of what's already been done. 

I believe that when we carve out sacred space for ourselves and our tender hears to birth what belongs solely to us, we change the course of history for the world, like a farmer transforms the face of his land with each seed he plants at the start of a new season. 

I promise you, dear friend, that the thing you can't stop thinking about, the stirring that wakes you in night is calling to you because it's yours.

But we can't discover what that is unless we give it room to breathe without the background noise of those who are still searching for what's theirs.

Sit down with it.

Give it a blank page + a cleansing breath.

Allow it to come to life without the influence of deadlines or algorithms. 

Be patient with the miracles blooming before you.

Still yourself enough to feel the discomfort that comes with birthing something that's new. 

Inside that sacred pain is new life and new ways of being that have come through you to give to the whole of all things.

xo
Amber