My Heart

A year ago I shared a beautiful afternoon with Kristen and John. Kristen unveiled this amazing medicine painting to me for the first time. It was love at first sight and I am still completely mesmerized by each detail. It’s so familiar and so precious that I can barely believe it exists and that I get to look at it whenever I desire. I took it home, hung it over my bed. Its energy immediately clicked into place at the center of my everything and began communicating its transmission to me.
Over the last year, I realized that this painting is an altar and a sacred tool that is available for my healing 24/7/365. It is my heart AND it’s a beautiful love story of partnership on a journey of partnering with myself, partnering the natural world, and partnering with spirit. It’s the past, present, and future fused into one golden moment that is always available, always emitting the exact medicine I am praying for at any given moment and offering me the chance to shift my awareness so that I can see it clearly. The beauty of what already exists in my life and always has is so bright, almost blinding.
I’ve sat in front of or laid beneath this painting so many times. I see so many intimate moments between my heart and the natural world that occur in real-time all the time. I’m learning to trust those moments and that magic to always be there for me when I remember to seek out and create the space for it.
The earth is here for me and I am here for the earth when I walk slowly and lovingly upon trails over the land I inhabit. I am here for the deer, the hummingbirds, the water birds, the peace eagles, the coyotes, and all the creatures tiny and large that live here with me and share these moments with me. I am here for the sunrises and sunsets over the bay, I am here for the nights with full moons and the nights full of stars, I am here for the tide coming in and the tide coming out. I am here praying in moments of smoke and fire when the air has become toxic. This is my home for better or for worse. I grieve the impact the horrors of our careless actions slowly deliver to our doorstep, and I celebrate the beauty and healing that always comes afterward.
These things mean more to me than I can ever express. I witness them all the time with a prayer in my heart to share this feeling of the unimaginable magic and mystery that creates such beauty and deep heartbreak. My prayer is about a human partner to witness life with, but what this journey has taught me is that I am that partner. I have learned about partnership most by partnering with myself and with the world around me. My prayers are seen and met in every moment, perhaps in ways I never could have imagined. And I want so much more than I can imagine so it makes sense to trust that divine wisdom has my back and let myself be guided when I can bear to release trying to control every fine detail of my life.
One of my absolute favorite occurrences in this life is discovering ways that my prayers have actually been answered even when I may feel at times like they have not. Having a deep prayer that I’ve spent years finding thousands of different ways to articulate and express has been the most profound and heartbreaking teacher.
Today I realize that it’s just the beginning. I’m always taking the first step though I’m already halfway up the mountain and simultaneously in the middle of the desert. I know so little about myself and this life even as I stand as high as I’ve ever been on top of volumes and volumes of my dissertation about this life, my prayers, and what it all means.
I have no idea what it all means, but I like it all. I am in love with it all, because it’s what I’ve got to be in love with.
That is what I am grateful for:
For loving what I’ve got, for knowing it can all change in a moment.
For trusting that I’ll be able to love the next moment and the next because I’ll meet myself in each moment with love, kindness, compassion, and grace, just like I’ve prayed for to be met by a partner, just like the way each new day greets me with beautiful light and each phase of the moon illuminates a different part of my soul, and each tiny flutter of a hummingbird encounter uplifts my spirit and jumpstarts my heart, and each midnight blossom of the wachuma flower makes me trust more fully the miraculousness of life.
I am so grateful for my life. Thank you.

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