Dearest Friends,
I still feel upside down and inside out in terms of hemispheres. My body reminds me that October is the month I love the most because of its fiery colors, its otherworldly festivities, and of course, the fact I get to practice the lifesaving art of winter hygge.
But here, in this little house where magnolias and palm trees wave to me from outside the windows, I now wake to an October sun that salutates itself all the way across the front porch. I wonder how on earth I will make pumpkins look scary with sunlight streaming through them.
I have been here in Australia for almost 1 year now, having moved from Denmark in a state of emotional disconnection. I call this year, ‘the year of the split palm’.
You know that crease in your palm where halfway up it splits a little to the left and also a little to the right? The lifeline, where that small fleshy rivet diverges like a road in a quiet forest? There’s one crease that strays off it into a dead-end while the other crease hugs the fat mound around the thumb. Long and defiant, this longer crease curls all the way up to meet your index finger.
Yes, that is this year for me. The place where it splits off and another life that I could have chosen wanders off without me.
It is a year that will forever be marked in me. As these past few years have called many of us here into a personal crisis, so too have I come to meet myself more fully through the questioning of what it is I really want in this life - and which, if any, nourishing belief systems I have to support me on that journey.
We are mighty are we not, for choosing this crease, not really knowing which one it is that we’re walking?
I came here to heal. And how frightening it is that the Universe delivers what we long for most! Because what it took to actually heal was to break completely, like a messy fracture that needed to be reset by breaking the bone cleanly. But I am grateful, deeply grateful for this opportunity to know myself more. And I don’t care much for the label that others have diagnosed me with- I just care that I came through it with more love than I started with.
Is that not healing? The gathering of Love when there seems nothing left alive - is that not what true healing is, dear friends?
And how perfect is the Latin origin of the word, Crisis?
"A vitally important state of things, at which point, change must come, for better or worse,”
Change must come, for better or worse. Amen to that.
This time has been a churning and uprooting of things I never even knew were weeds in me. Beliefs sometimes look so innocent from the outside, don’t they? And as it turns out, you can desire something deeply - and also subconsciously believe you are completely incapable and unworthy of achieving it too.
How awkward it is to be human sometimes.
I’ve been making remedial poetry from my struggles for years but sometimes, (and often as it is with unresolved trauma) it is better to pull out with your bare hands what is causing that ache so something new can grow in its peaty burrow.
And this something new must be a thing of beauty, so we can just bask in it without having to pickle it, tincture it, or seep it in honey just so we can make something good from it.
This recent uprooting has been very literal for me, but of course, it’s also symbolic of what is going on within too. Is this not always the case for us? Our internal struggles showing up in people, in places, our homes, our work, our relationships…
Creating purpose from pain is whole-body integration at its deepest level. It’s how we thread ourselves through the needle of the Divine. Unable to create sense of what hurts us, we become frayed yarn without a purpose or direction, we become point-less to which we cannot weave ourselves through the fabric of our most meaningful life.
But struggle and anxiety can become personality traits too - unknowing ways of separating ourselves from a deeper healing. No matter how much good art we make from this deep ache inside of us, it can have a way of shooting straight up again like rouge bamboo.
To uproot the belief of struggle, the earth will need tilling, thick clumps of rocks, and forgotten treasures will surface. Hands will get messy, foreheads will bead and sweat - and sometimes you will not know your tears from the rain, nor your body from the black earth.
But if you keep going, if you keep pivoting upon the central axes of the Heart, you will come to see that inside this ache is in fact the very soul showing you the way out.
You might feel like you’re losing everything, but if you still have love, you’ve lost nothing of real value.
As long as your work is to show up in the garden and tend to the mind as a whole, then you are doing your soul-work. You can always tell is you are doing soul work when love remains.
I’ll leave you with a poem that makes all of this a little more simple. That’s the beauty of poetry, it speaks simply to us in a way only the deepest part of us will understand.
Thank you to all who keep this space alive, who share these words with friends, and who support the paid part of this newsletter. All of this, all of you, are held in my grateful heart.
Sez
P.S, Healing HER II will be out this November. If you haven’t read the first edition, you can find it here. The first book is about Intention, and this one is themed around Surrender (what a year to have written it!) Can’t wait to connect with you over this topic ♥
