From Rushing To Feeling The Rush

I've spent half a decade moving at full speed to do near impossible things. Most of those ambitions have made it earth side. I've created value, served movements, broken through barriers, and contributed to life-changing experiences for hundreds of people. I've released two books and said what I have to say. I could be satisfied with my legacy, if this was it. It's rare to be able to say this at 35. But along the way, I nearly lost sight of why any of this mattered.

The mushrooms cracked my heart open and tended my wounds ten years ago, and I've spent most of my working life since then searching for a way to thank them. At the edge of burnout, I dug a deeper well inside myself over and over again, while struggling to stay spiritually afloat myself. A shift, a rebalancing, was both inevitable and necessary. I'm experiencing the first month in years, where my weekdays aren't stacked with Zoom calls and frantic office hours as a default. I don't have to be everything for everyone. The mushrooms helped me reconnect with my heart, and yet the experience also catalyzed a decade of very heady work. Lots to look at there.

Now... thing are getting quiet. I'm fulfilled. I'm resting, but on a subterranean level, I'm still so tired. I'm carving out space to reconnect with the roots of it all; with my own desires for my life, as a woman, a mother, a partner, a friend, a creator, a creature who is alive in her body for just this precious moment. I don't want to squander the magic chasing achievement, or even impact. I believe there is a healthy way to exist in community that meets the needs of the individuals and the whole. I'm convinced we can all thrive without anyone sacrificing too much. I'm also convinced it's perfectly valid to prioritize one's own joy.

Space To Feel

Last summer, I shared a dreamy weekend in Bend with a lover who was preparing to leave the country indefinitely. I didn't know then, that it would be the last time I'd see him. I set aside the uncertainties and chose to risk delight.

We trekked through Smith Rock toward a secluded watering hole to sun ourselves on the warm rocks. We crushed juniper berries between our fingers. Listened to the crisp snap of pine needles beneath us. We entangled ourselves behind a rock, naked in the rushing water and shared our more tender stories, as though the current could carry off the residual shame from our painful memories, the babbling stream drowning out the heart’s impulses to stay hidden. 

I remember how the openness made room for laughter. After a twilight dinner, satiated and giddy, I let the music of the night wrap me in contentment. By the walk home, there was nothing lingering in the air around me but the scent of Hawthorne blooms and the steady thrum of the Deschutes River. For this moment, I wasn't preoccupied with tasks or responsibilities or the needs of my family and community. I was just a woman on a walk, hand in hand, saying goodbye to someone and wondering what lay ahead. I was a person, feeling.

The sky was open and huge above us, and as the moon grew bright I let my lungs fill further than fear often permits. I exhaled the heartaches and hopes I’d been holding, to be transmuted by the spirit-dense high desert air. Then, in the silence, at the end of The Perfect Day beside My Impossible Lover, I could feel my heart’s desires more palpably, the ones that are often only whispering at the edges of my awareness while I do the obvious, "important" things.

The Dream

He asked me about my Dream. Not my dreams, not my ambitions, but the Big One. The one I think about in the quiet of the night when I wonder whether I am still on the right path. I can’t remember ever being asked something so essential and personal. I hesitated to speak freely, because we both seemed to sense that he would not be in the picture I was painting. Still, grateful for the exercise, I fumbled through an attempt to articulate a felt sense of my ideal life in retrospect.

A year later, I keep coming back to this memory and finding the same answer. What I want is simple; I want true and lasting togetherness. That is what I dream of and am often afraid to reach for. I want to be with the people who claim me as family, on land that nourishes us. I want our rebellion against the toxic overculture to look more like gardens and swap meets and celebrations than protests. I want to hold closely and be held while we fumble through our tangled, unique and intertwining paths toward fulfillment and expression.

I'm holding out for a deep sense of home and a trusted partner to share it with. Sun-soaked mornings with the freedom to decide how they’re spent. A long table filled with friends and family and creative collaborators, feasts overflowing. Gatherings that stretch past sunset on our patch of land. Where matters little.

I want to wake up beside someone truly exceptional who makes my heart and body sing, who I can love fully and perpetually. I want the person I choose to choose me, too. In equal measure. I want to be securely held at the limits of my own resolve by someone who is unwavering. I want to come home to the warm embrace that quiets all the noise and chaos of the world, a soft spot to land after all the adventuring and creating that thrills and drives us.

I want to live a life filled to the brim. I want the work of my hands to mean something and the kind embrace and loving regard I offer the world to be felt long after I am gone. I want Moses to know limitless wonder and belonging. I want to look back with the juice dripping down my chin and know that I have made the most of this fleeting gift. I want to love so deeply that my heart has to stretch to hold the vastness and complexity of it all.

What a rush.

With so much choice available to us at every moment, and with so much beyond our control, nurturing such a dream is gut wrenching. It will never be totally safe to feel it all. To love anything: a dream, a child, a partner, a place, is to confront the potential and reality of its loss. To hold on firmly enough to bring a dream to life, while constantly letting go of attachment and expectation, is to have your heart broken over and over for the cause of love. To bring a beautiful vision into reality often feels like more of an ordeal than an achievement alone, a bunch of tiny deaths on the route to newness. It’s a process I crave over and over. Giving birth, building an enterprise, escaping the comfort zone, healing wounds, giving your creativity to the world, and embracing new love are all processes that leave you fundamentally changed.

I know how transient the magic of connection can be, part of what makes it so potent and precious being the palpable sense that it could change or be gone at any moment. The love that lasts will surprise me. So I resolve to not miss the forest for the trees. The specifics, no matter how glimmering, aren’t really the point. At the end of the day, I am on a beautiful path. So are the people I have dreamed with over the years and those to come. How we intertwine our chosen lives, how we choose to be in orbit, is something precious to be honored and trusted. And ultimately, we are all mirrors to each other, offering small and great gifts to help us on our way, orbiting through this lifetime and others as soul family on the greatest adventure we can conceive.

For now, I'm tending the soil for what's to come. I am looking forward to this season of rest, creating, belonging, expanding, learning, loving, trying, failing, cringing, and feeling it all.

XO
Bex