No more room for Tiny
Slowly, steadily, reimagining the size of this world
I have been running up against all my edges recently. The edges of a stable job, stable income, walk to work, walk home, day, day, day, now all gone— what is wrong? A voice inside me quietly thrums: this is unsurprising. You are not writing. You continue avoiding your largeness. Do not avoid the work and then beg for succulence.
It is terrifying and refreshing to be called out like this by my own knowing. Yes. The largeness of this life I crave has to be built by my hands and takes loving work. No one else will show up for it first. It is so easy to dream and not act. So easy to set the intention and then vanish. So easy to imagine how electrifying this existence could be, and then sit back and passively observe. Something ancient in me has bellowed, ENOUGH. She sent me a fever and a clear message: “Love and good food. Living off the land, in the land. Bathing in the river. Family and friends sitting out under the stars, around a fire, sharing stories. Riddles that inspire good-natured arguments. Healing the ill. Entering each alkaline moment so intensely that it could expand into an entire world. A kingdom” (Sophie Strand).
I feel so fiercely it is time to recenter and rewild the role of Women in our world. And the inextricable connection between what is Woman and what is Earth. I feel an urgency about this. And I don’t know where to begin, but I feel I cannot just dream anymore, so this is what I’ve got: I have been walking everyday to one tree and sitting with my back against him as the sun touches us. I have been reading books that terrify me and break me open. I have been shaking in my bed with a fever. I am selling most of my shoes. Learning to walk barefoot. I have removed the main character screeching that is social media. And I am writing this right now.
I am going to put some of my recent journal writings here. More for myself than anything. Thinking so much of John O’ Donohue’s words:
“I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”
I have wished for this for so long and yet here I am, surprising myself by who I am, and suddenly all at once wishing I was less large and more containable and existed with just a bit less fervor. But that is not my womb’s wish. The tiny world is gone. Because I am realizing there is no more time for women to live in tiny worlds far too small for their beauty and knowing. There is only time for the largeness in me to reach out and touch the largeness in you. For our magic to dance together. For us to take action on our dreams. No one else is going to birth the world we want. Yes, that is frightening. But also a little relieving. You know why? Because then there is a path to be woven that changes what has been. Because then, when one of us says: There is work to do, together, we rise.
Journal entries from the last bit of time
January 18, 2025
You can never lose this, a small embedded voice within me whispers. Impossible to capture, the essence of spirit. Art dances the furthest in, but still, its true whole remains formless. We take to form again and again to saturate ourselves into every permutation of spirit. We throw ourselves in, clustering around the edges.
It threads & winds its way around my heart, like this earthy living wind, tinged with sweetness and salt. Do not refuse majesty. Do not refuse death.
Dance with it. All of it.
You have begged to be stung. Your spirit arrived windswept. Allow it to blow this flimsy, pretend outline of you aside. She has served you well, but the real you is unfathomable. The real you is the River. The real you is begging to sing.
You can ignore your destiny all you like, but you cannot escape the loving eye of God.
She will always find you and set you free.
I prayed to have Spirit speak through me. Within moments, I grew clear. Within moments, she arrived.
I never left, She is whispering.
Birth me in the quiet. Escape the city. I have so much to say.
There are so many stories I am here to tell. Stories and dreams and laughter. The hawks have returned, Look up. I am those silent, gliding wings.
Creamy white, edges dipped in black.
I fly in spirals, soaring beyond the gap. I am uncontainable, wild. Pulsing with reverent, laughing spirit.
Don’t be afraid, Beloved.
I hear the whisper. You have arrived at nothing you can lose. It was lost before. Remembered now. Never lost. You cannot lose what is real.
I will no longer be separated from the moon. I will now live as one with the cry of the hawk, the sun.
I feel the quickening of fate, only this time it feels like an opening, a widening, a draft of possibility. This time fate seeks to make me edgeless, boundless. To bring the Godly into form. To use me completely.
The Divine may always work through you. But when you welcome her in consciously with open arms, doves fly free of their cages, blood purifies,
the river pours on,
and atop the river is you,
slow darkness,
outlined by maddening, ephemeral
light.
January 19, 2025
Pressed against the Earth noticing every detail. So many mornings I have taken for granted. How much time went by? Half an hour? Four?
Noticing each bead of dew on the blades of grass. The blades holding the water like an offering. I began standing with my bare feet in the Earth. The bird song. The flap of the jay’s wings. The way the cold, clean shock of air carries the sea, carries dawn, carries other lives. I am resolved to only exist beyond the limitations of walls as much as I can. Returning to the indoors with nothing but reverence & gratitude in my heart.
Then I moved down, palms against the Earth, head bowed. An acupuncture needle against Gaia’s magnificent body. What do you need from me?
The coo of the dove. The whisper of wind, a flock of sparrows against the dust sky.
Not close enough.
I pull up my pant legs. I kneel bare against her wet skin. She holds me as I hold her. I feel others around the globe holding her where my arms don’t reach.
We are all one body, I remember.
Remember the real you, not the you you grew up as, She tells me. Off the phone. Into the dark, wild of the woods. Real water. You don’t need to pay for healing. Tend to me as I tend to you by first watering, fertilizing, and adoring the landscape that is your body, which is in fact an extension of my own. Then, you will have adequate energy to tend to me.
Off the digital world. Return to the slowness of my roots, my leaves, my violet dawn. You will be transformed into your trueness. Back into the new way. Pure heart guidance, God, my back, my breath will lead you now. You cannot transfigure the world by following it. And you were not brought here to follow; you were brought here to lead.
Others rise to feed. I remain. My forehead touching her skin now.
Shock of cold remembrance.
When, at last, I rise,
my hair is holding dew.
January 23, 2025
An old man walks toward your car
grey fuzzy hair,
a gait that does not pull the world in
as yours did
it is funny to imagine him as you
like I stepped into a different sort of day
and there you are
85, a whole life underway
It is both hopeful and devastating
Like I emerged suddenly in a different time
One where I open my door,
and there you are.
February 1, 2025
I need to completely rewild myself and be brimming with the fertile ripeness of what it means to live as a woman right now with a voice.
Terrifies me to put my journals here. They are the veins of my raw fleshy heart, but I am tired of living where it is comfortable. So here it is: my dripping, budding heart. I love her.
I have withering tolerance for what is not real and alive, aching and thrumming. So it is my promise to you and to myself to be a woman of soil and seeds, of leopards and rich night from this moment on.
I am rebirthing this space. Into what? I do not exactly know. All I know is it is for women of the river. For women and Earth and a new way. For what is timeless and what is real. For us <3
x, s