Uncle Ralph died at 67—retirement age. I used to think, ‘I can’t wait to move abroad when I retire.’ Now I know: I can’t afford to wait to live. I don’t want anyone to learn who I am at my funeral. I want to be known now.”
I’m leaving the U.S. Not to flee, but to free. Freedom isn’t free. It’s costing me something—the familiar, the known.
It’s funny, isn’t it? We are taught to actively not love ourselves. We speak up when we don’t need. We are silenced when we don’t need. It’s the silencing that kills us.
The universe—love itself!—really is conspiring in your ways that exceed your wildest everything. Let it! Don’t limit love. Don’t limit opportunities. Let be what is. Let come what may. Call the good forth. Call the beautiful and patient and kind. Call love to surround you and invade you. May love overwhelm you so that even the most simple, most mundane becomes profound.
Love, thank You that as I am is precisely enough because I am who You– the God of I AM THAT I AM!– made us to be. Help us remember our enoughness when the world would deceive us or have us forget.
I woke up, drifting in and out of sleep. Between land of the living and land of the divine. And in my comings and goings, lines of prose wrote themselves.
In the dark, I hear her.
In the dark, she knows the parts of me I’ve hidden from myself.
In the dark, I begin to know myself more, too.
I joined the Zoom. And the merriment and shock and surprise when I saw 3 Black women staring back at me. Could I have planned it any better? NOPE! Y’all know I live for people of the global majority. Not in jest, but in ernest. I have breath in my body to help others like myself. And it was immediately evident that I need them as much as they need me.
Truth be told? I don’t know if I’m “ready”. But I do know I’m willing. So this is me, reclaiming all my divine, God-given power. Standing in it. Resting in it. And being strengthened by it, too.
But perhaps that’s mothering, too. Saying what needs to be said and not being able to say everything, too. As the space of listening closes and grows smaller, our hearts grow bigger, our yearning grows deeper, and our love grows fonder.
