I Won't Let You Fall

At the beginning of Death Cab for Cutie's song, "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," you can hear Benjamin Gibbard take a breath.

There is, of course, plenty to unpack from that song already, but I truly believe that single, shaky breath before it even really begins, is perhaps the most integral part.

Following anything into the dark is no small feat. Whatever you are pursuing - another person, love, a deeper understanding of yourself or someone you love, a new adventure in life - stepping into the unknown is truly, gut-wrenchingly terrifying. How could it not be? We only know what we already know.

This weekend I drove to Southern Utah to spend some slow time alone with myself in the snow and the stars and the red sand. I thought about forks in our paths and the moments when we reach them. I wondered why the trails that require us to be brave consistently lead to our most meaningful discoveries.

Throughout all of that pondering over campfire coffee at sunrise, I kept coming back to that single, shaky breath before. Because it is okay to be afraid of that first step.

Doing it scared is just as brave. Honestly that fear shows us that we're approaching something that matters to us. Anything we build meaning from requires courage.

It is okay if it takes a moment, or five, or ten. It’s okay to take that long, deep, calming breath - even if it rattles with fear.

The real poetry is in what you choose to come next.

Ray Bradbury talks about how we must be brave enough to jump off of cliffs for the things that matter most, because we will build our wings on the way down. If you’re lucky enough, you might even have someone willing to make that leap into the abyss of unknowns with you.

I hope when you reach those edges, you decide some things in life are worth leaning in for.

Trusting

I like a good story's start, don't get me wrong.

But my favorite beginning always comes at the end. I love the buzzing white noise of happily-ever-afters that follow like a blank sheet of paper, so full of empty importance. I throw my soul into conjuring the most breathtakingly, achingly beautiful scenarios that could ever possibly follow and to forever choose to believe that somewhere - in some galaxy, some song, some time, something, some way I cannot understand - they are real.

It's not that different from believing in God, I suppose.

We all want to believe that a beginning comes at the close. That our hearts are more stardust than science and are eternal in a way we can only really feel in our bones. Ask me for proof and I'll plant you gardens until you're ready to see magic bloom. I'll pull pages from my favorite anthologies, fold them into proper paper airplanes and fly little holy letters in your direction until you feel the collective weight of every breath that has ever been entirely exhaled at the last lines of, "To Begin With, The Sweet Grass."

Can you feel that heaviness in your hands? Are you strong enough to lift it to eye-level and tell it you love it to its center, though you don't know who or what it is or why?

It's not that different from falling in love, I suppose.

Maybe we were born to believe.

Intention

I didn't set any New Year's Resolutions this year, but I chose a word to guide me:

Intention

I'm done believing in accidents. The idea that the world just stumbles us along into coincidences as shinning as love and as meaningful as our grittiest challenges... it's never really sat steadily with me.

I want to look at my life like the blank canvas and pregnant possibility that it is. I want to design my days to overflow with love and lay my path to point toward the woman I hope to be becoming.

I'm ready to use the courage I've found to create.

I want to face each person I encounter with abundant care. I want to individualize my love - to sit with you beneath a sea of stars on your darker dusks, and to help lift you up when you're feeling strong enough to stand.

I want to examine where I'd love to be in life and trace that path backwards until I see the steps between. Then, I want to brave enough to take them.

The older I get, the more precious I feel each season becoming. Someday has suddenly become tomorrow, and I'm finding that possibility is only promised to those who reach for it.

So I'm opening my arms, accepting that a lack of accidents is empowering. The bigger picture and purpose is us. Our agency is an endless opportunity. The ripples we make so often reach farther than we ever could have imagined.

Here's to another beautiful year of plans, and the abundance of grace that surrounds their every waver, wither, and, best of all - bloom.

Mi Abuelita

Mi Abuelita,

When I heard that you were gone, all I could think of was your color.

You were always humming, always singing, always trilling some funny little notes with a twist of your hips. Cooking steaming pots of arroz con frijoles negroes and making Spanish tortillas, fried plantains by the plateful, filling your fridge with tiny plastic cups of flan and natilla.

You loved flowers and tended your lawn like it was the palace grounds - picking up every little stick and stone, mowing the grass until the day we finally begged you to stop, showing off leggy shoots of dicentra to anyone who passed by your little corner of the world. You would unabashedly watch your telenovelas and cover our eyes for the parts that were beyond our years.

If there is one regret that I have, it is that I didn’t ever know enough Spanish to tell you exactly how much I love you.

So here we are, with me pouring that love into English words, hoping that wherever you are now, language is no longer a boundary.

Abuela, your strength was a force. You were the most opinionated, sassy, loud, brave, and absolutely colorful person I have ever known. You were so proud of the family you created here and you gave up everything you knew in Cuba so that we could grow up knowing a different world.

On the days when I don’t feel quite bright enough, I will think of your strength and your color and remember that blood runs in my veins, too.

Thank you for being my grandma.

I am so, so honored to be your granddaughter.

Forever and always, until we meet again - I love you.

Your Lilita ♡

Aleida Ventura Freijoso Garcia

July 14, 1933 - June 28, 2023

I Hope Joy Finds You

This is one of my current favorite corners of the world to spend my mornings in.

However, as I have not yet found the perfect big vintage velvet armchair, today, I'm so perfectly happy to sit here, cross-legged on the floor with a big creaky French window breezing open at my back.

The sunshine is silhouetting the mountains and spilling gold slivers across these hardwood floors that have seen a hundred years of footsteps, tip-toes, slow dances, and paw pads.

My quiet cup of coffee is lazily steaming on the sill while an old folk album lights up the room, and of course, my favorite wobbly old chair has been doing a most noble job serving as a makeshift writing surface, leaving my scrawling cursive lacking in legibility but overflowing with fresh character.

I love when joy finds you unannounced - on the sleepy Sunday mornings and laced throughout the in-betweens - making you slow and still enough to touch toes with the simple truths that make us whole.

Wing-Building Lessons

One year ago, I was sitting in my childhood bedroom dreaming of the cradle of mountains I'm standing in. I was heartbroken from so much leaving.

But throughout all of the heartbreak, this past year has been woven with the sort of growth that stretches you to places you never imagined you could reach, and there is something so blindingly beautiful in that discovery.

Today, one year later, I'm pausing my run to lean against a log by Maisie's favorite brook, bathing in a golden blaze of autumn hues glittering down from the branches above me. As I've watched the seasons changing around me this morning, I've let myself sink into a smile and a silent celebration of how, after everything, I've discovered how to pick up the pieces and find my way here - to find my way home.

I made it back to the place that I love most and have been taking every opportunity I can to revel in its wildest sides. I'm rapidly rediscovering my body and healing through a renewed joy in movement and slowing down enough to cook food that nourishes me. I'm finding new strength and feeling the miles become easier beneath my legs each day that I rise early enough to chase them. I'm spending every moment I can creating a community here that makes my heart feel full to bursting. I've made the most incredible friendships over the past month alone that I hope I never lose close touch with, all while pouring new love into my most rooted relationships, and continuing to seek out new hearts that shine. I'm spending my days designing work that I love and am truly proud of.

I'm not waiting for an invitation from life anymore. In keeping with my favorite Vonnegut quote, I am leaping off the cliffs and I am building my wings on the way down. I'm finding myself by flying.

And, you know what?

I don't have a doubt in my mind that they will keep on carrying me - to what is meant for me, to where I belong -

To a life that feels like home.

First Steps & Frogging

I'm sitting here pulling apart an unsalvageable project that I've spent the past few days on, and I think that my favorite thing about knitting is how comfortable it teaches you to be with starting over.

Sometimes things don't turn out how we expected or wanted them to, and that's okay. It's frustrating and painful when we realize after days, or sometimes weeks or months (or years - I see you, armless sweater that I never finished) of hard, careful work, and pouring our love into something, that we long ago strayed from the steps we were following and it can't be fixed or saved.

I'm learning that the times I had to close chapters earlier than I expected... they weren't really endings - they were (often incredibly messy) untanglings (this is not a real plural word, don't use it in school) that made room for fresh starts.

The realization that something needs to come apart never really gets easier. I honestly believe that if you are doing it right, that piece is supposed to hurt. It means you care with your whole heart about getting it right.

What matters is having the wisdom to know if and when that time arrives, and, most importantly, having the courage - when you are ready - to choose to start again.

Eventually, you'll have something beautiful. Not perfect. Not without flaws. But something created with intention and care and love - something that keeps you warm.

Help It Grow

I used to be a planner. In the fifth grade, I was looking at course catalogs for collegiate marine biology programs in Honolulu. I knew the adventures I would embark upon, the trajectory of my career, the precise date I would get married to a paper doll placeholder, the type of house I was going to make my home.

But, if there is one thing I have learned in the years that have unfolded since then, it’s that there is a huge difference between planning - and dreaming.

Plans are fragile. They’re rigid and they shatter as easily as porcelain when things like promises are dropped.

Dreams, on the other hand, create a picture - an artistic landscape of days to come that leaves room for interpretation, for deviation, for variation - for change.

Dreaming is an art that leaves space for our breath to be taken away and for the unimaginable to give us what we need the most, even on the occasions where it is what we want the least.

Dreaming allows us to pull in the colors of yesterday to blend with our hopes of tomorrow - creating meaning to be found in the middle. Each new chapter is cream-colored canvas, stretched on a scaffold, open and precocious in its becoming, and only reached for when we are ready. Dreaming allows us to be intentional about who we are becoming, little by little, day by day.

Of course, we’ve all heard that “some things never change.” I always believed that love was simply one of things, but I was wrong.

Love is alive, and therefore it has to change - to grow like roots beneath our feet that tangle us together as we reach for the light. When love stays still and stagnant, it just isn’t love anymore.

So, maybe the very things that “never change," are exactly the things that change the very most - the things that dreams hold space for. We just have to make the conscious and reiterative choice to let them grow.

I am learning not to plan my life away, but instead, to dream - to make space for things like love to change and grow into something more beautiful than I ever could have originally imagined them to be.

I am learning not to plan, but to paint.

You Deserve the Sweetest Love ☽

I really like the (admittedly fairly corny) show, "This Is Us." Most of that love is thanks to the story of the father and mother of the family, Jack and Rebecca.

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They have that glowing, best friend, belly laughter, adventure buddy, joyful, hard-working, home-sweet-home, authentic, and organic kind of love that I have always dreamed of building with right one.

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I recently was watching an episode of their beautiful little story, and there was one scene with the two of them, just laughing together. It wasn't a remarkable moment by any means, but it made me pause.

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Because in that moment, I felt this really sweet hope, and bright, renewed faith, that after everything that has happened this past year, my own story will still unfold one day.

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Because I deserve a love like that. And so do you.

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I deserve a love like the one I have written scrawly cursive lines about on every scrap of paper I could get my hands on, since I was nine years old.

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I deserve not to settle for someone who doesn't see me.

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I deserve one for the ages, and one for dancing barefoot across the kitchen floor to James Taylor records.

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Jack gives Rebecca a gold crescent moon necklace in one of the early episodes, because on the night that they met, she was singing the Cat Stevens song, "Moonshadow" - which is also one of my favorite songs.

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So I had this sweet little reminder made - of all the joy that is and will be.

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I believe in that kind of love again - for the first time in a really, really, really long time - and it makes my heart so happy.

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Maybe, broken hearts aren't actually broken. Maybe a part of them just gets hidden away in the shadows for a while - waiting until we are ready to embrace the light again.

Chrysalises & Courage

Some things in the world never change and that is a beautiful thing.

When I was a little girl, I used to look forward to the end of summer all year long, when I'd run on tan, bug-bitten legs through meadows of milkweed plants as tall as me, searching for the tiny white dew drop eggs of monarch butterflies on the undersides of leaves.

I named them all French Fry and waited patiently for the weeks that felt like years to pass until this very moment: when they emerge dizzily from their golden green shadows, pause a long moment to find their wings, and then, when they are ready - move forward.

Some things never change: home, late summer and its storms, this process I've had the joy of seeing a dozen times. But to the orange butterfly now lazily drifting outside my window, everything is new.

It takes courage to lean on the constants in life when the world seems entirely upside down, but maybe my monarchs are exactly the lesson I needed today - in practice, in unraveling, in trust.

Love with the Courage of a Wildflower

This is to thank the persistent late-night phone-callers, the “this reminded me of you” book-loaners, the letter-writers, and the over-thinkers

I waited for three days. When the brown envelope nested in my mailbox, dripping in the handwriting of yesterdays—my heart melted into a pool of joy, deep enough to reflect back the woman I have become in the years born since the last time we met.

I waited for three days to ask for a reply address. Not because I couldn’t stop thinking of that beautiful letter full of photographs, but because this whole “courageous kindness” thing was a novelty requiring more trust than I have. I wasn’t prepared for this; I wasn’t equipped. I wasn’t ready to be reminded of how loved I was that day.

When did we forget how to love? When did we forget how to be loved? When did we become afraid of caring “too much”?

Somewhere along the road, we allowed ourselves to become comfortably complacent with distance. That has never sat well with me.

We seem to confuse the words “caring” and “careful.”

Caring shouldn’t be a careful act. It requires a pinch of reckless abandon throughout the day—saying: “I know you are hurting, I know you are afraid, but I am not going to let you be alone in the dark.”

Here’s the thing: I want to care too much.

I would like to love so hard it blisters my soul—knowing full well the scars might make it hard to call me “pretty.” I want to wear my ferocious heart on my three-quarter sleeve, knowing “care” isn’t grown of geniality, but of courage.

I want to buy you a cup of coffee on your best and worst days, write you notes and leave them scattered around your house, show up on your porch in the pouring rain with my ukulele just to say hello, send you postcards brimming with adventures and run away with you for weekends with no maps. I want to love you in a litany of little things.

This courageous kindness requires us to be open. Being open, being vulnerable, is no small undertaking. Vulnerability is a real wash of a word that has become inebriated with loss of agency, loss of the upper hand, loss of power. Let us change that notion and share our hearts instead, knowing truly that vulnerability is not weakness, but strength.

Some days I am afraid. Some days you are too. I often hide my half-ironed insecurities behind smiles and silence. My walls show their weakness in blushed cheeks and inopportune laughter.

Nonetheless, I am choosing to do my very best to be brave, to be open, to love wholeheartedly.

Let me be a wildflower. Let me wear my thorns alongside my pink petals and grow in the places you need to be beautiful. I want to scatter the seeds across meadows.

Let us feel nothing in a little way.

I want to love bravely.

Shine On, Sugar

A long lost love always used to say that his perfect woman would be someone who could “keep up.” All of his doubts and insecurities around our relationship pivoted on that one point: could I keep up?

I tried. I ran until my feet were blistered and the breath ran ragged through my lungs. At the moments where I was too tired to take a single step further, I would ambush myself with a series of self-punishing accusations: Why wasn’t I just faster? Why wasn’t I just better?

I am relentlessly optimistic to a fault. I tend to love the world and its occupants more than myself. I see the good in others, sometimes while standing chest-deep in an avalanche of bad, and never fail to withhold the same kindness to my own faults.

The problem with that brand of optimism is that one day you turn around to find you’ve spent nearly a decade becoming your very own overly-aggressive sideline soccer mom.

I built a sanctuary around my heart to seal it off from the constant barrage of demoralizing questions: why, why, why? Why was I not enough?

I asked so many questions during those years. But I never stopped to ask why the “love of my life” spent all of his days running away from me.

The thing about playing a sadistic rendition of follow-the-leader with two people, is that the faster runner gets to decide every which way you turn. Every direction is coordinated with a waypoint on their map, winding you towards some blurry nondescript and ultimately nonexistent finish line.

Loving is not a race. I would rather notice the immaculate intricacy of each precious moment and adventure, than trip through my life attempting to pack the galaxies into a spoonful of time, while the brightest light already lies in my arms.

I want to hold onto the way your eyes look against a bluebird sky on a clear summer day. I want to learn each freckle on the nape of your neck and memorize the little branches that appear beside your eyes when you laugh with your whole heart.

If I get you, I want to sit right here, in this forested meadow, and hold your hand. I want to build our home, board by board - each pane of glass reminding us of the translucent space we traversed to finally find one another. I want to pick wildflowers from the field to place in the chipped pottery vase on our antique table, and lie in a tangle of flannel sheets with the windows left slightly ajar to the late summer evening - moonlight weaving silver webs through the breezy screens.

Home is here, everywhere, and nowhere - the simple stars that bore our bones.

On Gentleness

I am constantly trying to remember.

When I was a young girl, my mother would echo the mishaps of my clumsy, mosquito-bitten legs with the patiently metered words: “Slow & Careful.”

Slowing down often feels impossible when attempted in one fell swoop, so instead I meditate on the mantra: “Be gentle.” Be gentle with yourself and be gentle with the world.

I’m finding that being gentle necessitates slowing down. When you slow down, you appreciate, when you appreciate, you experience gratitude in the quotidian, and when you experience gratitude, you discover joy—all of which is a complex unraveling of a simple skein. You are happier.

Being gentle makes my mind a butterfly net. I catch thoughts formed in anger and frustration on open palms, forgive them, try again, and set them free.

Distraction has so proliferated our lives that we are utterly unaware of its influence.

When you watch the clock wishing you were anywhere but here, catch yourself. If you spend your life wishing for the time, the place, the situation you believe will make you happy, you will wish your life away. Happiness never leaves us; it is a light left always on. Choose joy, choose the light—it has already chosen you.

Move into each moment and you will always be home.

Lost and Found

Lately I’ve been feeling a little lost. By a little lost, I mean that frustrated, wind-blew-my-map-off-the-side-of-this-mountain, blisters-on-my-heels-and-no-end-in-sight, hit-a-bump-in-the-road-and-spilled-my-latte-all-over-my-atlas brand of lost. And don’t get me wrong–a spoiled map is a beautiful thing to tuck into a shoebox one day. If you did happen to spill your coffee, the ink percolating through paper veins may even lend resemblance to abstract works that the MoCA would be clambering to get their paws on. However, what your map will have trouble doing, is getting you from Point A to Point B.

The funny thing about being lost, is that the first question people feel the need to ask you is: “Where are you?”

People always ask this first, and it is the most wonderful and the most frustrating question in this whole wide world. 

Wonderful, because the reason people will ask, is that they love you, and will drop absolutely everything in their hands to come pick you up.

Frustrating, because the question usually results in me frantically looking around, licking my thumb and holding it up to the breeze, lifting up my cracked compass like a cell phone with no service–hoping maybe if I just tilt it a little to the left and stand on tip toes, the Earth’s magnetic fields might cooperate and bend the little arrows to point homewards.
 
The other funny thing about being lost, is that it is the most exhilarating, adventurous, terror that one can really traipse into. One moment I’ll have stumbled upon the most wonderful view of mountains, valleys, and sun-soaked islands. The next, I’ll be digging around in my pack for more moleskin to save my scrawny ankles from the bite of my boots.

All in all, I’ve found that being lost is a blessing in itself because it means I’m moving forward.

This weekend a kindred soul and I decided to lose ourselves in the expanses of a national forest. The first day, we were so excited about the journey, that we left a little more than we normally would up to chance. We decided to hike straight to the coast from the center of the park. Ten miles later, we were standing on Atlantic cliffs debating the direction of the tide. Ten minutes after that, we were reaching realization that the bus network did not begin to run until later in the summer and that the blessing of a technology-hiatus could simultaneously be a bit of a hindrance. Ten minutes after that, we were running through which options would land us in front of a lobster in the shortest amount of time. 

We wandered back along the shore path to the closest hiker’s center– discussing the possibility of trying our hands at hitchhiking, estimating the time it would take to walk to the car, drawing hiking trails with the pads of our fingers and finally, speculating how long it might take to run to the car in hiking boots…

As we finally approached the center, we caught a glimpse of a young couple trying desperately to use their cell phone which was somehow cooperating the slightest bit more than either of our own. I sat down on a tree trunk and waited for my hiking partner to fill his Nalgene.

He jogged down the slight incline with a brave face on, prepared to run. I jokingly held up my useless phone; suggesting we hail a cab.

As if by divine intervention, we heard the crunch of gravel and watched in suspended disbelief as a clunky minivan stuttered into the drive. The young couple in front of us leapt up as the two of us began elbowing one another furiously between whispers of “You ask!” 

The window keeled down exhaustedly to the steely drawl of Neil Young. A hairy bear of an arm leaned across the passenger seat, jostling the handful of lanyards swinging from the rearview. “You all need to get into town too?” 

Maybe sometimes being lost is just where we need to be. 

Maybe even when we do have the map and do have our arrows pointing home and are just too exhausted to imagine making it there–rendering our maps as good as useless–maybe that is when we are gifted a lesson in faith.

So where am I?

I’m lost. I wish I could tell you where I am and how to find me, but if I knew those answers, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

Just stay on the path and keep calling to me, I’ll follow your voice and meet you there.

The Art of Handwritten Letters

I would like to acknowledge the irony of clattering keys beneath my fingertips as I write these words. Pardon it for the time being, if you will.

Writing letters is a sacred practice in my life. My desk becomes a tabernacle, my ink communion wine. All I ask is that today, tonight—wherever time holds you just now—I ask that you humor me, and drink.

Nothing is more terrible than the realization that we endow only a balmily blasé effort on the ones we love. I’ve lost myself in the disaster of knowing precisely where my girlhood best friend summered while having forgotten altogether where the freckles in her eyes catch the light when she’s scheming our next rousing adventure.

Apart from touching palms across cappuccinos, I’ve never felt nearer to another than I do when I’m holding their words in my hands.

And so, I write.

I have a collection of letters littering my life on everything from coffee-ringed napkins to letterpress stationery. I’ve written to everyone from my notional children to my equally theoretical husband to my infinitely more palpable family to my sixth-grade camp counselors. I pour all of my love into letters—to lifelong friends and complete strangers—to those who have shaped my worldview and my love of lemon squares. I have realized that love isn’t so much a matter of quantity—but quality.

I have let myself loose in a simple idea: If you love someone, let them know.

Five or so years ago, I began terming my collection of cursive, “The Letter Project.”

I continued to write, but with far less fervor as time passed on. That decline continued until just this year.

A dear friend of mine passed away. After the smoke faded, as I sat in dumb stillness, I began furiously searching for a scrap of paper with which to write a letter—the only thing I knew to do. I reached for a tired copy of Pride and Prejudice and yanked the folded piece of paper bookmarking where I’d most recently fallen asleep. I began writing her a letter. I told her how much she meant to me. I told her how much I already missed her. I told her how I had always meant to write her while she shared this world. I told her everything I wished I could say—not sprawled on the floor of my bedroom alone, but while sharing in just one more evanescent twilight on the backpacking trip that first brought us together; letting the stars rather than spent tissues litter the space around me.

I began to share my project with friends and family. The process was simple:

1. Reflect

What would you want to say and who would you say it to?

2. Write five letters

Write them by hand!

3. Encourage your recipients to do the same

Five times five times five times five...

Handwritten letters are braille maps of our souls. You can run your fingertips over scrawled indentations and quite literally feel the words, “All my love.”

I wish that I could hand each and every one of you a letter, this very night—but since I can’t, know that you have “All my love” always, and tonight—send yours to someone you love, too.

40 Little Ways to Have a Happy Day

1. Wake up on your own
2. Take a long, hot shower while listening to your favorite music
3. Sing in the shower
4. Wear something that makes you feel beautiful (because you are beautiful)
5. Smile at yourself in the mirror
6. Have a slow cup of coffee to start the day
7. Buy a cup of coffee for someone who needs one
8. Listen to Billie Holiday
9. Read the newspaper
10. Recycle your newspaper
11. Say “good morning” to everyone you run into
12. Smile at strangers
13. Say please and thank you
14. Read a book (especially a classic or an old favorite)
15. Go for a walk outside
16. Look people in the eyes
17. Flip over any tails-up pennies you stumble upon, so that someone else can have a lucky day
18. Cook a warm meal for someone you love
19. Open a bottle of wine with dinner
20. Put your phone away when you talk to people
21. Ask an old friend out for lunch
22. Hand-write a letter to someone
23. Call your parents
24. Call your grandparents
25. Pay for the person behind you in line
26. Look through old photographs
27. Write something
28. Light a candle
29. People-watch in a park
30. Try something you’ve never done before
31. Take a bath
32. Go for a drive
33. Buy flowers, just to brighten up your kitchen table
34. Hug people when you say hello
35. Make a fire
36. Watch an old movie under a pile of blankets
37. Have a steaming cup of tea before bed
38. Make someone else’s day
39. Take the long way home
40. Breathe deeply, pause, and find joy whenever you have a moment.
Remember, it’s in the little things that happy hides.