The stories we tell, to ourselves and to others, have the power to conjure reality. Sometimes we get so swept along by the events of our lives that we forget to bring presence to the as-yet-unmanifest dream we have for our lives, and for the world. Magic doesn't require the world to act first, to prove itself, or miraculously appear. Magic is the act of behaving as if the thing we are becoming is guaranteed, speaking and moving as if it carries that secret in each step.

Rememory: The process of re-authoring our experiences, taking ownership of those narratives through which we've been ventriloquized, by bending or reframing our story to better represent us.

Storywells: Stories serve to remind us that whatever difficulties we might be experiencing have been encountered many times before. We are not alone; we are connected to an ancestral storehouse of experience, and embedded within those tales are the solutions and instructions for how to navigate difficulty with grace and wisdom.

Recognize the invisible hands that guide you, the breath that breathes you, the walls and roof that keep cold from chilling you, the water that magically springs from your taps, the long line of ancestors whose every step made your incarnation possible. You belong to these holy helpers. You have undisputed membership. In your recognition of this wealth, your own life cannot help but become an offering back to that which feeds you. 

Live your life as it were an endless offering of beauty.

Real worth can only be achieved in relation to the greater whole.

When we heal an ancestral pattern, we are healing backwards through time, liberating all those souls who were left unresolved, unforgiven and misunderstood.

Longing is a memory of belonging to god.

That which you seek is seeking you. 

We live our lives in avoidance of those places and risks which might lead to our rejection, pre-emptively excluding ourselves, then suffering the same loneliness as if the rejection had come from the outside.

Vulnerabravery: When we let ourselves be undefended we find our true strength.

We are the product of several generations of ungrieved wounds. Focused on survival, our ancestors had little choice but to retaliate or repress the wrongs that had been done to them, so that they could persevere. But with so few elders in our midst who teach about the importance of grieving, or who create culture and ritual around honouring grief, we fee alone with our private suffering. We rarely witness the grief of others because of it cultural taboo, causing us to believe our own grief is shameful and weird. 

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Learning to grieve well must begin with the self. There are ruins in each of us. A place where 'what once was' lives on like an echo, haunting the landscape of our lives with its weathered foundations. Abandoned, scavenged, and dismantled by time, the ruin is the holiest place in our heart. It is the ways in which we have been broken that have earned us a place to stand. It is in our life's absences that a wild longing is born. This ruined place is a temple in which to worship, to throw down our grief and forgetting, and praise what remains. After all, these remains are the evidence of how greatly we have loved and they should be venerated as the legacy of survival that they are. 

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The events of your loss, the discrepancies in your upbringing, the deficits in your making, are what shape you uniquely. Your limitations are what give rise to the imagination, and your regrets are what put you into right relationship with your future. So you must bless every grief you've encountered on your exquisite and treacherous courtship of Self, for they've made you the slow diamond that you are...If each of us has the tenacity to retrieve the elixirs of our discomforts, our combined medicine can heal the collective wound. 

Grief is the response to a broken bond of belonging. Whether through the loss of a loved one, a way of life, or a cherished community, grief is the reaction to being torn from what you love. As Martín Prechtel teaches, the words for grief and praise are the same in the Tz'utujil language because you can only grieve what you have dearly loved. 

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We grieve the loves we've lost. We grieve our abilities vanishing through illness or age. We grieve the loss of faith in our religion. We grieve our children leaving home. We grieve the paths we didn't walk. We grieve the family we never had. We grieve the suffering of the planet. But while grief may look like an expression of pain that serves no purpose, it is actually the soul's acknowledgment of what we value. Grief is the honour we pay to that which is dear to us. And it is only through the connection to what we cherish that we can know how to move forward. In this way, grief is motion. 

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Grief is the expression of healing in motion. As you make the seemingly bottomless descent, it helps to remember that grief is downpour your soul has been thirsting for. Because what remains hidden for too long doesn't change. It is calcified in place, often sealed by shame, left untouched and forgotten by time. But when it can finally come into the open to be seen, it is exposed to new conditions and it begins to move. It rises on a salty geyser of tears, sometimes sung to the surface by a terrific moan, streaming down our cheeks until it moistens the soil where we stand, preparing us for new growth. 

Imagine the size of your fear, revulsion, and shame embraced and you will have successfully estimated the power of your wholeness.

Some people are just meant to pass through your life, taking or leaving comfort, bringing catharsis, or serving as a catalyst. Love will burn hot and cold, but neither extreme can be withstood for too long. Let love take its time with you. Let it surprise you when it comes back even though you thought it was lost. Let it circle around you, let it seek to understand what you love. Let it deepen in endurance, as only history can guarantee. 

Disappointment is the secret teacher of devotion. It calls forward your unwavering fidelity to the path.

The Grandmother Well

Most of us feel an agonizing longing to contribute something meaningful to the deficits of our time. But weeks, months and even years can disappear in just keeping up on the treadmill of life's demands. We are in a constant state of being responsive to the world's requirements of us. Whether it's our everyday to-do list, which never seems to shrink, or how we wait to be notified of opportunities and invitations, this 'call and response' relationship with the external world is such a deeply ingrained habit that we barely know another way to live. But the truth is, if we really want to make an eloquent offering of our lives, we have to step out of that dependency on the external world and locate our source of guidance within.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

The healthiest forms of belonging allow for, and even require, periods of exile or separation in order to mature into greater capacities.

The Great Forgetting: The rupture that each of us feels in our lives; that place of wounding where we override our bodies, ignore our intuitions, and supplant our inner knowing with ' other people's information.' What we call dreaming is treated as illusory, while the false constructions of consensus reality are taken as real.

The only antidote to perfectionism is to turn away from every whiff of plastic and gloss and follow our grief, pursue our imperfections, and exaggerate our eccentricities until the things we once sought to hide reveal themselves as our majesty. 

For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep and the outsiders. For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos. For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones.
May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know.
May you give up your allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation.
May you be willing to be unlikeable, and in the process be utterly loved.
May you be impervious to the wrongful projections of others, and may you deliver your disagreements with precision and grace.
May you see, with the consummate clarity of nature moving through you, that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately needed to sing us out of this muddle.
May you feel shored up, supported, entwined, and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world.
May you know for certain that even as you stand by yourself, you are not alone.