A note from Erin:
Hi, dear beautiful human,
I am sending a little bird of kindness and warm greetings on a swift migration from my heart to yours. Thank goodness we don’t have to hold the heartbreak of these times alone. I’m so grateful we’re connected.
It’s September, one of my favorite months, and it seems to be flying by! I can’t quite comprehend that the new year will be here in just over 3 months. In the meantime, I’m savoring the sensory details of this beloved season: the lovely cool temperatures when my morning cuppa feels so good in my hands, the dark mornings when I sit by candlelight in our quiet meditation room, the jars of sunflowers, zinnias, and dahlias cut from the yard and placed all around the house, and the abundant harvest from the garden and farmers’ market coming on strong! I seem to be ancestrally compelled to put up the harvest while it’s here, so this weekend will have me in the kitchen slow-roasting tomatoes, making tomato sauce, dehydrating apples, canning peaches, blanching chard and sweet corn for the freezer, and more. Then there is the herb harvest, and the seed saving, and the fall planting… Good thing I love having my hands in the dirt and/or smelling like garlic! I’m looking forward to a grounding weekend in the kitchen and the garden.
I’m also excitedly getting ready for my once-a-year Women Embodied 9-month practice circle, which starts on September 24th, which somehow turns out to be Wednesday! (Seriously – how is it already late September!?)
These days continue to be full of heartbreak and abundant beauty, heavy with loss and rich in possibility. May we remember our hearts are as vast as the sky. Our open hearts have the space and capacity to hold life in all its diverse expressions, and to say with greatest kindness, inside and outside ourselves, again and again, “You are welcome here. I care about your suffering.” Let us pour our compassion and prayers for peace into the wounded places we can see from where we are. There are so many.
As Rilke wrote, “Ah, the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.” How true. I’m feeling that so acutely, day by day, with this blessed shift into autumn, and the sweetness and melancholy that always accompany this beloved autumn season.
I learned today that a friend passed away suddenly last week. We were just recently connecting in July about our shared love of Andrea Gibson and rhubarb. She shared these words about what I wrote about Andrea’s death: “My heart felt that exact word you used: pierced, by their declaration of “I fucking loved my life!”
She also shared with me in July that she’d been sick for 10 weeks with viral flu and a bacterial chest infection. Perhaps it was the presence of the late-stage cancer of which she was not yet aware. I’m heartbroken. I’m also reminded of the preciousness of each day we’re blessed to have.
My brilliant friend Janisse wrote these words this week, and they’ve been resonating in me, so I want to share them with you too:
“What I want most is this joy. The news keeps trying to steal it.
Joy is a choice, it seems to me, especially with hatred being manufactured and spooned out to us like candy. Choosing love, creativity, and abundance seems important.
I can’t fix the world but I can choose to be happy…
I know we can’t ignore the violence and the rhetoric and the danger. I feel myself, now, that I am sometimes in danger, that many people are in danger. But to dwell there is a choice.
If you have a worry—did I leave the kettle boiling?—do whatever needs to be done to take care of the worry. If you have a worry and nothing can be done, then why worry?
Why rob ourselves of joy?
Why not notice what’s alive, what’s beautiful, what’s working, what you have manifested, what you have built, what you have been given, what’s hopeful, what’s good?
Standing in all that is a choice too, a powerful choice, even a revolutionary choice, a choice to stand, even as the news worsens, in joy.”
Knowing our end could come anytime, as happened for my friend last week, Janisse’s reminder feels ever more important. This is our one wild and precious life, after all. And it’s passing. I wrote to Janisse in response to her beautiful essay: “I find I can’t really trust people these days who either only dwell in the horror or only dwell in the joy. The honest welcoming and reckoning with both feels like the true ground we need to stand on.”
Does it feel like that to you too?
I remind myself of this: There are people whose calling and whose profession it is to be involved in politics, law, and media. That is not me. I can’t fix it. Not my job. Not my expertise.
There are people whose calling and passion is to be frontline activists, phone banking, marching, and showing up in politicians’ offices. That’s only rarely me.
I value all of those folks immensely!
My work is in the realm of soma, soul, community, and deep ecology. My work is in helping to restore human beings to our natural bodies and our indigenous souls, and nurturing sane and beautiful culture, at the roots, right now. And I’ll claim wholeheartedly as well what Mary Oliver said: My work is loving the world. It is good to know what and where our work is, and to cheer each other on in our work, whatever it may be. It all matters.
My upcoming class, Women Embodied, is aimed at this personal and cultural healing, and this embodied, world-loving presence. I believe this, too, matters. Deeply.
I have just 3 spots left in the all-online cohort, and 2 spots left in the local Salt Lake City group.
Here is the invitation from my heart, to Women Embodied, especially for the women+ reading this missive:
I invite you to join me
to grow courageous intimacy with your life
to practice listening deeply
to rewild your curiosity
to live your life as an act of love
to remember your sovereignty
to root yourself in the depths
to make your love of life contagious
to dedicate yourself to the welfare of life, now and in the future
to plant and nurture beautiful seeds
to make room for the full range of your capacity to feel grief and praise and everything in between
to bow deeply to what is
and to rise to your full uprightness, without apology
to be still, silent, and spacious
to move your body with clarity, flexibility, integrity, and pleasure
to tune to the living intelligence humming in everything,
including every cell in your body
to grow your grounded, clear-eyed warmth and compassion
to live intentionally with the wish to benefit others and all of life, including the future ones and the ancestors
to embody living ancient wisdom
to embody playfulness and laughter
to powerfully deepen your inner and outer trust
to grow your willingness to abide in not-knowing
to inhabit your bones
to relish the soft animal of your body
to revel in paradox
to inhabit your natural, unbreakable belonging
to empower your hara and heart as powerful foundations for a clear head
to free the genius hiding behind your wounds
to free yourself, free others, and serve every day
to dwell in possibility
to let go of perfection and welcome the beautiful mess of life
to become empelvised, embellied, empowered
to use whatever arises in your life in support of these intentions
and to be a fully embodied woman of wisdom.
This is somatic soul activism, and it is powerful. Embodied wise women change the culture and change the world.
I have 2 spots left in the SLC local group and 3 spots left in the online group.
Don’t wait to fill out your application if you’d like to join the circle. We’d love to have you!
Whether you join me or not, may your own embodied presence be an ever-open doorway to feeling at home, to experiencing your deep belonging, and the felt beauty of this precious, temporary aliveness.
From my heart,
Erin
p.s. It’s always worth revisiting these wise words from Dr. E:
Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity can cause to be set in motion. Be outrageous in forgiving. Be dramatic in reconciling. Mistakes? Back up and make them as right as you can, then move on. Be off the charts in kindness. In whatever you are called to, strive to be devoted to it in all aspects large and small. Fall short? Try again. Mastery is made in increments, not in leaps. Be brave, be fierce, be visionary. Mend the parts of the world that are “within your reach.” To strive to live this way is the most dramatic gift you can ever give to the world.
Consider yourselves assigned.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.
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