🐚 Glad tidings, full tides, can’t lose
On water, water, omg so much water
I have spent the last week and a half away from home, in sunny California. Well, usually sunny. It has rained for much of my visit, not just a light sprinkling of rain, but the torrential flood of a month’s worth over the span of a few days. “It’ll be good for the plants,” everyone found themselves saying, soaking wet and shivering during our sightseeing tour of a mountaintop estate, where we couldn’t see more than three feet in front of us. “This place could really use the rain.”
I came into this trip with a plan, knowing it would be hard on me to be away from my home, my dogs, my family, my routines — a plan of daily walks. Journalling. Meditation. A date night with my partner. Why is it that these things are harder to choose when I’m out of my rhythms and natural defaults? They do require choosing, like when I first started building the habits in the first place, require carving out time for myself, when time with these people I love feels so precious and rare, living with a continent between us.
A few days ago, just before the solstice, I leaned on the railing of the pier at Pismo Beach as a couple of us spectators watched a group of surfers. The air was thick, our hair waterlogged and curling, whether in the water or not. The surfers, three of them, waited. Sat on their boards and watched the waves incoming. But more than that, than the watching, I noticed them feel out the swells. Feel for where the crest would fall and if the timing was right.
Surfing, like so many things, seems a game of patience. Of waiting out the swells and learning to discern their differences. Of what will be worth leaning into with effort and what’s worth waiting a little longer for.
As for my inner world, the waves have been turbulent lately. Have been longing for something other than where I am now, have been longing for normalcy and ease and connection. Are tired of this discomfort I am in, have been in for a while now, that feels less like a choice and more like an inevitability. The portal, maybe. Traversing the path into a new way of being and learning to release the old way as I go.
As I honour this Full Moon in Cancer, the fresh start of the solstice, the nostalgia of Christmas and the incoming new calendar year, maybe it’s expected that so much water has greeted me at the threshold. That the questions I’m in at the moment are ones of home, and belonging, and tending to the hearth that I carry within myself, when the circumstances and expectations are different than the ones that usually support me.
So much of this past year has been an exploration of the tension between external ambition and internal processing — has been, for a change, prioritizing the world within the shell of my body over impressing the world around me. My successes feel different, now. Quieter, less describable, yet more hardwon. A trust that what arises in me has value and is worth listening to. A willingness to show up and be seen in my trying. A clarity that I can be misunderstood and still be okay.
If there is one thing I’d like to honour releasing, it’s this — the need to know where it’s going. I am in a better place now than when I first started writing this, a few days ago. The sun did come out again eventually. Yet I t turns out, I can sit in the waves, in the fog, in the mist, seeing just three feet in front of me, and feel it out as I go. Sit of the surface of the cresting tide, knowing there are depths below getting tumbled up, and simply take in what I can, trusting that is enough to work with. That if I make a practice of noticing, even in discomfort, the right time will be apparent. I will know it in my bones.
Noticings
🤍 The holidays can be a challenging period, that can kick up a lot of joy, and grief, and loneliness, and frustration. I am holding you and the full range of your emotions in my heart. If it’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with you, it means you’re human. You’ve got this, my friend, and I hope you can find some rest this season.
💫 My books are still open for tarot readings. Book a live reading or an asynchronous one to tune into reframes for your year ahead.
🛎️ I have been practicing a new-to-me form of meditation, working with a mantra, using the 1 Giant Mind app. It has been very helpful on the road, to have a word I can return to that opens something in me, like the chime of a bell, that is so portable and can be done anywhere. I am using it as I write these words to you, even. The app is free to practice with as you learn the methodology.
🛌 The cozy life encapsulated, from Ellen Bass:
