After the Beginning

what blooms when we start

Author’s Note: Hello dear reader. Below, you will find an introduction to the new theme I would like to explore over the upcoming weeks. This newsletter is part insight, and part upkeep. If you want more insight, this week I will be introducing a new (monthly) section called Gentle Reminders for paid subscribers. I intend to keep all my writing free, but want to offer something to express my immense gratitude for those of you who have chosen to support my work financially; it means so much to me.

Photo by Hebert Santos: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-person-holding-sunflowers-2602912/

here is the beginning…

Suddenly it’s spring and my mind is blooming with projects. This spring instead of the normal feeling of being burnt out by my New Year’s goals, I feel like I gave those goals enough time to remain in the dreamy and percolating state of winter. It is just now that they are beginning to take tangible shape. The “What I want to do”, ephemeral and drifting, is becoming the “How I want to do it.”, concrete and actionable, albeit still very much at the beginning. 

Although this beginning is exciting, I can feel in myself the urge to skip over the seedlings. I either want to rush to the final product or slow myself down to a complete stop. I am all too fast or too slow, and not much of an inbetween. 

Normally, during spring, with its ambition, I think of metaphors related to the Earth. You’ve already read a month of my words, expressing how the Earth embodies death, transition and not knowing. I see these musings as precursors to the inevitable beginning. 

This beginning arrives after one cycle has ended and we’ve crawled, clawed, climbed our way back to the surface where a new sense of knowing remains in its infancy about to be planted. From this beginning, I wonder, what comes next? —

I believe in consistency as a spiritual practice. As such, I refuse to bow down to hustle just because that’s how I have been taught, so scared of the “What if I don’t/ can’t/ haven’t” I do too much. Likewise, I cannot spend my time back in winter in my own imaginings. The weather is getting warmer and there is work to be done. 

—What comes next, then, is a pace of my own creation, of which I want to look to Water for answers. 

Water is a new meditation for me. Yes, I often stare in awe at the ocean (who doesn’t) and feel an affinity with Water’s many emotional states, but to really sit down and ask Water what she might teach me, about moving through and with my life, is a new exploration. 

One which in this season of beginnings I hope you explore with me. 

Come April (the season of spring showers), I intend to write more in depth essays about water, for now though, here are a few ideas that have resonated with me of late.

• My friend wrote a beautiful poem in which she called life a marvelous sinking and since reading her words I can’t stop thinking about how I am lying within this sinking–

  floating, tumbling, sometimes
  swimming along.

• I pulled two cards from another friend’s flower deck while meditating on water:

  Don’t postpone your life, your life is now. 
  & I accept myself 100% as I am in this moment. 
  
  This brings up the thought: Water is so sure of itself. 

• All of these words, poem and card deck, were written in Castellano (Spanish) first, a language that when I think in it feels far more watery than English. The words fluid, flowing, romantic come to mind.

Watery Thoughts Please

I’ll leave you with the following questions: 

1. What is your relationship to water? 

2. Have any watery poetry or art you would like to share?

   I recently enjoyed this poem by Mary Oliver “Some Herons”

With love,

Kim