Category Archives: beauty

the life that is waiting

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The life that is waiting for me is real and gritty and human
and full of struggle and love and disappointment and joy and connection.
The people there are real and flawed
and I still have to do my work
and clean the bathroom
and deal with my husband’s snoring and dirty socks.

It is not a sugar coated, glossy magazine styled life.

Will I quest for this life?
Will I give up the illusion that life can be,
is suppose to be, Pinterest and Instagram’s love child
for the sweat and heartbreak of the flesh and real,
growing older,
bones of living?

Will I give up my fantasy life for the one that beats here, now?

I don’t know.
Because it requires me to walk through the pain held in this body, this spirit, this life now.

 

These words came the other morning in response to a prompt.

“We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~ Joseph Campbell

I filtered through many dreamy, transformed, glittery, visions of my life that is waiting for me before this truth spilled itself. The life I have been waiting for, the one that waits for me, is the one I have. If I let myself live it. Not because it is perfect, but because it is mine. It is imperfect and raw and tattered around the edges and within it beats my very real and vulnerable heart.

It holds, I hold, each of us holds, a universe of all things. I often say there is a sensuality to living and this is what I mean. That living this life brings us into our body, into our felt reality of grief and joy, beauty and pain, anger and forgiveness. This is the glory and grace that is full living.

It is the pain in your muscles when you have worked out. It is the puffy eyes after a good cry. It is the delicate breeze with just enough chill to send you for a sweater. It is a lover’s touch, a baby’s giggle, the smell of dinner cooking, the anger caught in your throat, the spinning thoughts at 2am, the break up, the death, the sun rising each and every single day no matter what and the warm cup of tea that will greet it.

In my journal I said I didn’t know if I would choose this life. This real and gritty journey. As soon as I set down my pen my elemental nature I knew I would, knows that I do. It took the self attached to perfection and doing it right, who is so tired of fighting, it took this self a bit longer to sort through her resistance. To set down her striving and forcing.

I will continue to collect what strikes my fancy on Pinterest because it is fun and inspirational. I will continue to court beauty on Instagram, mine and others, because it is a worthy practice of the sensual heart. Dreamy, glittery, inspirational beauty is not bad. In fact it seeds the path before us- if we make space for the inevitable and very human bumps and hurts along the way. I have been judging them as wrong and proof of my failing. I have been trying to make them go away instead of allowing them to teach me. Deepen me. Heal me.

When I say there is a sensuality to living, I mean the all of living. I needed the reminder. Because life has been dull and hard and I have been discouraged. I will continue to need the reminder because I am human and get pulled to shiny, glittery, illusions and judge myself by them. Perhaps you do too.

I needed to dive deeper than the false gold of perfection to find where my heart lies. I found it in the real and gritty glory and mess of this life, here.

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I have openings for a few new private coaching clients beginning August. If you feel that having support in diving deeper into your sensuality of living, your own bone and flesh life that is waiting for you, let’s connect and see how I may be able to help.

because some days the world seems out to break your heart

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It is okay to take a break and smell the air after it has rained.
It is fine to look closely at the wet ground knowing treasure lives there.
It is acceptable to stand in the misty damp with out shoes on.
It is all right to wish for the birds to sing just for you.
It is allowed to play in and savor a world that also makes you weep in pain and grief.

In fact, it is necessary, required, essential, practical and sacred homecoming to yourself; to feel the aliveness of the earth
rising to meet you exactly and fully where you are in just this excruciating moment.

This is the way of the devotional self, the practice of finding yourself in the larger flow of the world, the simplicity of belonging to the cosmos simply because you are here.

This is how we stay sane in a world that on too many days seems out to break our hearts.

beautiful rightness and the quest for our elemental nature

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I integrate slowly. Like honey that has been stored in a cold place, the flow is incremental. I want the resolution, the insight, the clarity right now because the tension in the waiting is uncomfortable. I am often impatient and judgmental with myself. And yet, I can’t, I won’t, jump into things with out my inner alignment anymore. Age and wisdom have done their parts to temper my restlessness and drive for action at the cost of readiness and timing.

I get caught in the bias for fast and quick. I love the feeling of the pieces falling into place, the grand download of the plan, the a-ha moment, the “Eureka! I’ve found it” exhilaration that propels me into inspired action and swift progress. In my frustration with slow I forget that these moments of flashing clarity never come without the ground work having been laid by stretches of time learning, exploring, practicing, and allowing.

Every drop of honey is the work of untold numbers of bees. The blossoms that attracts those bees only burst forth after a cold winter. Most of the time the work and time tending are unnoticed or unacknowledged. We, I at least, separate this necessary tending work and time from the triumphant outcome, therefore making that outcome more important than what created it. To have a robust harvest, good and nourishing cultivation must take place first.

Is my pace really any slower than others? More than some and less than others I have observed. Years of living and self exploration, coaching and reading for others, studying the way our individual energy works, what I know is that my way is my way. Just as yours is uniquely yours. There is a beautiful rightness to our way- for us.

It is this ‘beautiful rightness” that I truly crave rather than the faster pace I get hooked into. Not the way it looks for others, which can be so seductive. It always seems easier for those magical others I admire. This ease I project onto others is an illusion of my own flawed expectations. Their way is not mine, nor mine theirs.

It is this Beautiful Rightness I help others find for themselves.

I also call this our Elemental Nature. When we trust it, honor it, use it, lean into it as the the powerful gift it is, our life feels like it is truly ours and we are at home in it.

It is already inside you, I help you listen to it.

Human Design Readings illuminate how your individual energy is designed to flow and how best it in the highest and most effective way. Lumina Guidance is a deep, soul dive intuitive season bringing in Human Design (you do not need to have had a reading) Tarot and Oracle cards to explore what is unfolding in your life right now. Personal Coaching is sustained support as you discover and live more true to your own beautiful and uniquely right way. We each have a life path that is only our own.

In a world that all to often seems built on competition, comparison and the never ending demands to achieve a cookie cutter version of success, it is a radical and sovereign thing to embrace your own way. No matter what way that is.

the world is in conversation with us- always

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This afternoon.

I pulled a card.

A Turning in the Journey.

After weeks of rain and storms, I perused the plants in our tiny garden. A preliminary check to see what is happening as Spring approaches. A plant I thought died last summer is coming back to life.

A Bleeding Heart.

I moved my altar to the space under the window. The place it has wanted to be since we moved here a year and half ago. I resisted this spot because often I try and control the way energy flows in my personal spaces when I feel out of control in other ways.

I laid on my bed watching the clouds out of my bedroom window. Dark grey, stormy clouds against white fluffy ones, against the blue sky. The setting sun, warm through the glass takes the chill off of the room. I wonder what is changing in me and for me as I feel the shift in seasons staring. The first blossoms are on the trees, daffodils are in full glory, the days are getting longer.

A turn in the journey, Bleeding Hearts, sacred space evolution, the seasonal wheel turning.

The world is in conversation with me. Elegant and simple, always happening, always speaking its language of symbol and metaphor. My heart understands even as my mind tries to reason and dissect, extrapolate and predict, trashing about assigning meanings that are forced and overly complected. Ever scrambling to pin down the Mystery.

The most essential part of being in communion with the world is realizing you already are. Follow the stream of what grabs your attention. A deck of cards, something peeking out of the soil, an empty space begging to filled, a bone deep desire to lay down and watch some clouds.

It requires a type of listening. With your body, your senses, your imagination, your non-linear self. It is a quality I attribute to the “sensuality of living”. The ebb and flow of life through and around us, touching our being in concrete and interdementional ways.

When your soul settles you know you have the message, whether or not it comes in words that make any sense at all.

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Oracles are one of my favorite ways to listen to the conversation the world wants to have with us. So, if you want a little message of self love, Intuitive Love Notes are still available- until February 28.

intuitive love notes

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I have created a new reading. I hope you like it.
I am calling it Intuitive Love notes, because, well, who doesn’t love a love note.

And it’s February.

And the world is crazy and don’t we all need a bit of soul magic and connection to our deeper selves? I know I do.

Think of it as one part insight, one part message from your soul.
The result?
Poetic words guiding you home to yourself.

One of my most reliable tools for times when I am off center, or need a nudge in a better direction is Tarot.

Not because it will tell my future, but because it will point me to what needs my attention so I create the future I want.

The imagery and archetypes of the Tarot hold a potent mirror and offer wise guidance evoking our deepest knowing and insight.

An Intuitive Love Note is a potent, one card missive of love and support for your precious self given in my style of poetically expressed insight. Each reading will also include a prompt or two to take things deeper along with the traditional meaning of the card; all delivered in a beautiful PDF document to your email. If you heave experienced my Oracle Alchemy readings, this is similar in format, but more compact.

The deck I am using for this reading? The delicious Vintage Erotic Tarot. A sensuous, sepia colored, powerfully feminine take on the traditional Tarot just perfect for a love note! (Yes, there is nudity. I find it a refreshingly natural depiction of woman’s bodies in celebration of feminine energy and embodiment. And, it may not be your kind of subject matter, in which case this reading would not be your thing.) But If you are feeling separated from yourself or wanting some intuitive self love, this may be just for you.

Here is what I know. Unless we are in touch with the beauty we are, unless we know where to look for it when we feel ourselves waning, unless we take even just a wee bit of time to connect into what nourishes us, we wither. We doubt. We open the gates of despair and hopelessness.

A Love Note is a soft whisper guiding you home to yourself. Available until the end of February.

All the details are here.

 

i seek beauty at times like this

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singlefallleaf

I think about what I want to write here and all my grand ideas fizzle. The blank page fills with starts and dead ends. The truth is I have no grand ideas right now. I fluctuate between despair, rage, wishfulness, conviction, and tiny glimmers of hope.

And so I seek out Beauty. Consciously cultivate my relationship with this language of the Divine. I believe in the power of beauty to sooth, to heal, to inspire, to bring us home to ourselves. This is the practice that returns me to myself when the world has pulled me too far away.

I can trust Beauty. Not Vanity, that deception that masquerades as Beauty, a glamor that disguises emptiness and false promises. Beauty reveals, it doesn’t hide.

There is a soul to Beauty.  A living breath of holy incarnation. It shows itself in a baby’s smile, a withered rose, a mud soaked and haggard first responder, a lover’s disappointment, a poet’s words. I can point to Beauty forever and yet I will never be able to truly describe it.

Beauty is an experience. At once as mundane and ever present as I am willing to see, and as an intangible miracle offering a glimpse into the Mysteries. This is the path I walk as I am finding myself again. Weaving between the known and unknown, the ordinary and extraordinary, wiling to see Beauty hidden and obvious. When I let it, it cracks me open to Truth.

So I seek Beauty at times like this, when I am so easy overcome by the fears and hurts of the day, when urgency for something else clouds what is always here all along.

The essence of life that is running through everything.