In the startling simplicity of nature, a few things become apparent:

1. For most of us, everything is, actually, okay

2. Quietness is a refuge where what matters clarifies, and what doesn’t falls away

3. Renewal is often as simple as slowing down

In the busyness of our lives, so much becomes complicated. Yet it turns out we are surrounded by universal medicine: trees, sunlight, water, air, plants, soil, moon, stars, sky. The trappings of our dear and darling Earth. The perfect antidote to our common woes.

After nearly a week of traveling across the world, enduring jet lag, and sharing a miniature space with family, it was a tree beside the house here on the Greek island of Lesvos that granted me the relief I needed.

Under the pine tree, I swear I sensed the breath of Sappho as I listened to the music of its thin, slender leaves. With needles like violin bows, it played the air into a wisping thrum of promise—the lingering echoes of overwhelm leaving with the breeze. It was then that I had what felt like my first good exhale in ages.

Though not quite the same as a hug from a grandma, the canopies of trees still have their own embrace. An ability to help us let things drop away.

I am particularly enchanted by the pine. There is something certain about it. It is precise in its holding, earnest in its aura of calm. Its hypnotic whirring—low and all-encompassing—reminds me of a master sound healer, erasing excess, erasing what is not mine, erasing psychic dust and accumulation.

But I am also enchanted by the fig tree, its flapping leaves and its growing fruit, still hard but weeks away from ripeness, in the last moments of its secret, readying on its own time. And the olive trees with their astonishing fecundity, yielding so much oil that we must give half away. And the strong sturdy oak at the back of the property, giving steadiness, keeping watch, offering shelter from the formidable sun.

Never mind the herd of goats that are our neighbors, and the drove of donkeys just down the way. Especially never mind about the sheep and their little collar bells, or the time we returned home on a starry night only to find a stampede of them huddled together, thick as thieves, one big ringing, chiming sea of cozy white dreams. (!)

I did not set out to write about enchantment, yet here I am, losing my cool.

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I suppose that is just the way it is: nature cannot be separated from wonder. Is that because it is the first animation? Life abounds all around us, and with it, our perception of what is already here and what is possible awakens.

Even death turns the ol’ cog wheels. On a visit to the donkeys today, my son and I walked past a tall, dead flower that looked like a petrified skeleton of itself. Its petals had not fallen. The flower did not wilt, in the traditional sense. Instead, it dried up and continued to stand as it once did in its glory days as a chief pollinator. It is a relic of its own dignity.

What I am saying is, it’s never a bad idea to spend some time outside. Regardless of how severe or simple our moment might be, nature remains a crowned angel in our harem of reprieve.

Enjoy this post?

Check out the full exposé I wrote on The Romance Myth

About the Author:

I’m Sky, a writer, poet, mother, and mentor, and author of A Ceremony Called Life (Sounds True). Transfixed by the things we cannot see, I write mythopoetic essays in protection and reverence of love, eros, and intimacy, which I regard as the very pulse beneath ordinary life. I hope my pieces here will inspire you to live with the ferocious urgency your life deserves, and to love like there is nothing more important in the entire world.

Want to go deeper? Here’s how I can help:

📞 Book a Dreamland Session, for mythopoetic guidance on love, longing, intimacy, heartbreak, emotional truth, aliveness, and the deeper story unfolding beneath your life.

🕸️ If you want to stay connected beyond Substack, find me on Instagram

💬 Feel free to like or comment on this newsletter so more Substack users can find it!

We will not remain the same. It’s one thing we can always count on.

We are always in a state of perpetual transformation. Sometimes it is obvious, other times we cruise along while the undercurrent quietly does its work.

There’s a particular state I’m interested in right now, most certainly because I am in it: the period when something subtle is edging to emerge, a deep inner change… like a new shape from deep within that’s slowly making its way to the surface, and as it does, it morphs everything it materially touches into the consequence of its resonance. And as it does, it integrates.

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It can come after a long haul in a deep state, or after a period of grief, when things are more steady but the paradigm shift is still integrating. The inner world is quite amorphous, so really it can come anytime in any moment of life. Right now, I’m noticing a certain contextual aesthetic of calm after the storm—the new shape was formed by the prior experience, and now it has a level of inner integrity, but the outer life doesn’t yet correspond to it. I see it like an actual shape, a hologram, the opposite of a mold—de-molding the outer life to take shape according to its new data.

It’s a moment of in between. It can be uncomfortable, yet also it can be inspiring as we feel ourselves more from the vista of this new place—this new location in the large infinite territory of being. Wow, so this is what life is like from here?! (And again, years later: Wow, and this is what life is like from here!?)

In such moments, whether the change is seismic or subtle, we’re in a period of ushering.

We are custodians to our inner worlds. It’s important that our spiritual life precede our outer life, meaning: it’s important that we listen to what’s happening inside, and allow it to inform us and guide us in our material worlds.

Sometimes something from deep within is at the brink of emerging. It breaks the ocean’s surface only to sink back down again, out of sight. It’s doing something: what, we know not, but we know its work is essential. Essential to our vitality, to our wholeness, to our embodiment, and to our peace.

The work of ushering is delicate and mysterious. It requires that we listen, that we do not feign, that we do not push anything forward, that we do not fake it til we make it. It requires a habit of checking the pulse of that which is emerging, remaining in contact with it in our normal daily lives. Being available to sense it, as if it were a quiet little mouse not sure if it wants to come out. And when it begins to emerge forward, in a subtle thrust, in another break above the surface—we maintain contact, we see through it, we feel through it, we nurture it with our attention, we will it to continue.

Mine, it lives in my belly. Sometimes my gallbladder. In the cosmic, beyond me. In you, it can be anywhere. It can also be nowhere.

It comes on its own, seemingly of its own free will, until one day it is simply another part of our being. And on and on it goes, until the next one, which even right now, quietly works its way through symbol, shape, and sound in the seabed and the water of our perpetual, incredible beings.

Love, Sky

Enjoy this post?

If this piece moved you, you might also enjoy my essay about a dream, a realization, and the risk of loving deeply:

About the Author:

I’m Sky, a writer, poet, mother, and mentor, and author of A Ceremony Called Life (Sounds True). Transfixed by the things we cannot see, I write mythopoetic essays in protection and reverence of love, eros, and intimacy, which I regard as the very pulse beneath ordinary life. I hope my pieces here will inspire you to live with the ferocious urgency your life deserves, and to love like there is nothing more important in the entire world.

Want to go deeper? Here’s how I can help:

📞 Book a Dreamland Session, for mythopoetic guidance on love, longing, intimacy, heartbreak, emotional truth, aliveness, and the deeper story unfolding beneath your life.

🕸️ If you want to stay connected beyond Substack, find me on Instagram

💬 Feel free to like or comment on this newsletter so more Substack users can find it!

I’m sitting outside, feet in the pool, in a kind of godly daze from the combined effects of exhaustion + meditation. It’s the woodpecker that I notice first. The jagged movements of his head turning, his very cool hairstyle, that he’s rather dainty—and I’m fascinated that he pecks wood.

Then the large dragonfly that swoops past my face, changing the frequency of the air as he darts. Then the fact that there are many dragonflies, and now more birds: two, both larger than the woodpecker who has since flown off, sweeping at each other in a quick fit, only to disappear before a fourth bird appears, larger than them all and with a bright yellow chest, squawking away, sitting on the metal pull-up bar the previous tenant left behind.

The breeze full of our ancestors’ dreams.

And I am a part of all of this. The realization enters me like a slow honey IV drip. It’s not that I haven’t noticed it before. Living within an awareness of our interrelatedness is a north star for me. But this was something else—another nuance, another tilt of the head giving, with grace, a shade just different enough to give more texture to the sunrise of possibility.

I am a part of all of this. Looking around just dumbly enough to be in a sort of beginner’s mind, I am struck by the busyness of the surrounding natural world. Endless sounds and movements, a rich, bustling ecosystem where every scurrying insect, every speck of dirt, every animal living or dead has its place and is part of the essential collaboration of life.

And that means me too. Wait a second. That means me too. I have a place in all of this. I am part of the essential collaboration of life.

The dawning of the new subtlety of perspective opens up something in my body and mind. If I have a place, then my work has a place. If I have a place, then my voice has a place. If I have a place, then my body has a place. And all places also exist in relationship, so I have natural relationships that benefit not just the ecosystem of my own life, but also the ecosystem of life itself.

Some people wince at the word God, but I feel at home in it. It doesn’t matter what we call this origin of love that creates the whole world, it just matters that we meet it. And that we keep re-meeting it, in new ways, over and over again. Because it will talk to us forever. It will open up the window shades where we did not even know they were drawn. All we have to do is listen, and be willing.

I find much relief and wonder when I consider the fact of our interrelatedness, when I again open the endless book of our belonging and scan its pages, when I rest my attention upon the sparkling web that connects us to everyone and everything. What respite there is in knowing that we all have our place, and that to insist on the health of our personal ecosystems is to insist on the health of our species, our cultures, our world.

Enjoy this post?

If this piece moved you, you might also enjoy Holy Smallness—a meditative reflection on the quiet power of divine precision, tininess, and humility.

About the Author:

I’m Sky, a writer, poet, mother, and mentor, and author of A Ceremony Called Life (Sounds True). Transfixed by the things we cannot see, I write mythopoetic essays in protection and reverence of love, eros, and intimacy, which I regard as the very pulse beneath ordinary life. I hope my pieces here will inspire you to live with the ferocious urgency your life deserves, and to love like there is nothing more important in the entire world.

Want to go deeper? Here’s how I can help:

📞 Book a Dreamland Session, for mythopoetic guidance on love, longing, intimacy, heartbreak, emotional truth, aliveness, and the deeper story unfolding beneath your life.

🕸️ If you want to stay connected beyond Substack, find me Instagram

💬 Feel free to like or comment on this newsletter so more Substack users can find it!

The softness of my gaze drapes around my lover like gauze, exciting him in secrecy and promise.

I can glance sideways and quickly catch the effervescence of a stranger’s beautiful laugh, then come back to center enriched.

I wake up shaken from a dream and drag its leftovers into the first shared words with my beloved in the morning. Or I don’t.

Or I do, and then forgiveness comes like a horse, reined and harnessed.

Attentive and attended.

I listen into the periphery, and am invigorated and deepened by my relation to life. Birds singing. Motorcycles passing. The wind rustling the leaves.

We are fed by what we give attention.

What we give attention, grows.

My incredible, good-hearted husband doesn’t say the right thing and I pass over it like dust, or I savor it like humanness on display at a fine art gallery.

My son—my God, my son—he’s asking me about keeping his friends’ secrets or he’s cracking up as he makes some bizarre face-sound combination that only an 8-year-old can make, and there’s nothing else but him and my love for him. I am washed. My attention is holy. He is glory. My blood is instantly healthier. If only I could catch more.

Or, again, my husband—this time reciting his vows at our wedding and everyone is watching us, but there’s no one there, there’s nothing else but his soft brown eyes shining down on me, as if the sun were brown, his tears with their water of the world, the prisms he caused.

And the type of attention that erupts by urgency, like when we are face-to-face with our mortality and we suddenly wake up, or our loved one is dying and we are jolted into the imperative, non-negotiable need to absorb every bit of them that we can perceive, sense, feel.

Love is urgent. Life is urgent.

There is also pain, and fractured attention, like buzzing anxiety and not being able to sit still for more than five minutes, not being able to complete a task. So I give up—not from grace, but from necessity—and focus into the feeling. I concentrate into it and it becomes vascular, it opens. And then something changes, and my attention relaxes and becomes available for perhaps greener pastures.

I can listen to you speak from a place of softness, open and yielding, empty enough to really catch you, to really feel you. I can listen from the origin of attention. Or I can listen from the “origin” of “me,” perhaps with harshness and certainty, with preconceived notions, with the texture of that gritty road to nowhere. But if I’m going to bother to listen to you at all, I hope I won’t. I’d rather find out what you mean and be touched by it, be moved by it, and then see what then needs attending and harnessing next.

I’d rather find out what beautiful thing wants to live, wants to flourish.

We can nourish, grow, and push out possibilities via our concentration—we can usher potential down the birth canal. Or it can be relaxed, effortless, delectable. Either way, it is the eye of the needle.

Always: if it is in order. If it is what will be.

We can listen for the origin of the sound within the sound. The origin of the pulse within the pulse.

We can listen for the origin of our lover’s breath as they pant in our bed. As they cry in our arms.

We can listen and be moved into higher volume, or lesser volume, or closer contact, or quieter contact, when the origin of our attention is there, we become art and we produce art.

We can live the urgency of life and of love. We can attend to it in this profound and respectful way.

I find it impossibly enchanting, and even erotic, to experience attention as this aesthetic tool—one capable of intonation and gesturing, one capable of rendering shapes and textures of lived experience. Yes, I am ringmaster and mistress, midwife and song! Yes—we are the continuation of love.

Enjoy this post?

If this piece moved you, you might also enjoy this essay about an incredible dream I had and the realization it gave me.

About the Author:

I’m Sky, a writer, poet, mother, and mentor, and author of A Ceremony Called Life (Sounds True). Transfixed by the things we cannot see, I write mythopoetic essays in protection and reverence of love, eros, and intimacy, which I regard as the very pulse beneath ordinary life. I hope my pieces here will inspire you to live with the ferocious urgency your life deserves, and to love like there is nothing more important in the entire world.

Want to go deeper? Here’s how I can help:

Book a Dreamland Session, for mythopoetic guidance on love, longing, intimacy, heartbreak, emotional truth, aliveness, and the deeper story unfolding beneath your life.

🕸️ If you want to stay connected beyond Substack, find me Instagram

💬 Feel free to like or comment on this newsletter so more Substack users can find it!

I was dreaming of crowded streets, busy shops, peak NYC saturation of people everywhere.

I’m out with some friends, people I don’t recognize from my actual life.

My partner and son are somewhere nearby.

Suddenly, my purse is gone. I have no recollection of where I’ve left it. Looking around the sea of heads is not reassuring, and I start to panic, realizing I likely will not get it back.

My bag! It’s gone! I left it somewhere! I tell the folks I’m with, who have no qualms about revealing their utter disinterest as they look at me blankly and return to whatever it was they were doing.

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Outrage builds inside of me. My phone is in there. My wallet. My keys. My keys to the car which is my portal out of here. I try to temper myself with the usual self-modulation techniques, none of which work. Instead, the narrative demands I express myself, no circumventions.

So I do. The people-friends listen as I basically say what the hell, my bag is gone, help me figure this out—(and, silently: you-call-yourselves-friends?!). In response, the lovely effigies of my projection decide to collaborate, and together we retrace our steps.

Long story short, I have a eureka moment where I remember leaving behind the bag at a restaurant; go there alone; offer a reward to the waiters should they return it; receive the bag back from the waiters who seem to have thought the reward offer was overkill; pass them $20 as a thank-you (and not the $100 I had, up until that moment, intended to give them).

Off I go to find my partner, Bhavi, and I spot him like Waldo in the wily dross of populace. He’s heading into some cathedral dome shaped venue for a rave festival type of concert—horrid news. But he pauses as he sees me coming, waiting for my approach.

Once we’re face to face, I start going on about how we can leave now, I found my bag and I have my keys, let’s get out of here—but the guy is a caveman-mannequin with nothing to say.

This is weird, I’m thinking. What’s going on with my Bhavi? He stares at me, mute, and I get the point that he wants to go to the concert, that he is going to the concert, so I drop it and head to the ticket guy to get it all over with.

Except—dreams—ticket guy won’t let me in, or he’s hassling me, and I’m delayed, and then Bhavi walks straight past me to go enjoy himself. Really, what the hell. Real life Bhavi would never.

Ticket guy gives it up and lets me in, I start following Bhavi who is making his way to a bunch of too-groovy kids with whom I’d rather not, and when he notices I’m right there behind him, he does not bother to wait. He does not bother to wait.

In that very moment, I become lucid. I think to myself Bhavi would never act like this. I must be dreaming. The second the thought strikes, I wake within the dream. Just like that, as if on cue. And continued to dream, awake.

It is worth knowing that the only other thing that has reliably woken me up within a dream before is the technique of counting my fingers. In our dreams, we never have five, so sometimes I’ll count them and there’s four or seven or long spindly things, and then I’m cued that it’s a dream and I wake up inside of it.

But now, with the dawning of this new dream, I am painfully aware that my subconscious has formed a fundamental fact that Bhavi is so kind, so wonderful to me, that a mere, relatively harmless instance of him acting contrary to that indicates that I am not in reality.

Lying in bed at 6am, I am wide-eyed, startled by the landmark that my psyche has formed. Also, I am impressed. This man has become such a haven of safety that he’s made it to the bedrock of my subconscious as the archetype of safety itself—(no pressure). Well done, him.

In some ways, this is the ultimate risk of love I’ve always longed to take: To find someone safe enough, wonderful enough, that I may surrender and nest into them without any need for differentiation or defense.

But my God, eventually the man will die (hopefully after me), or eventually he will be a massive prick and fuck up, or whatever it is, eventually my precious little bedrock of Bhavi-is-safety will be called into question, will splinter, will face the wrath of day, and I know it will make me grieve, and fiercely.

I will eventually grieve because of how good this love is, but it will be the kind of grief held by the health and integrity this love has helped make of my bones. It will not be the sort of grief that only leaves me in shreds, the kind that comes when, underneath it all, there was never the solidness or safety needed to foster and endure growth¹. Underneath it all, I am strengthening, not shackling.

Love is always a risk, but it is not always worth the risk. This is the kind that is.

The dream evaporates and I am left with its distillation: in one hand, I hold what is real, albeit temporary, albeit mortal—the gratitude for a profound love that has carried the ethos of grace deep into my psyche, that has brought me a healing I can only be partially aware of.

In the other hand, I hold the still-evaporating memory of the reflecting, shimmering illusions that were woven into the dream, the threads that showed me parts of myself as I am today.

I’m dreaming of overcrowding because I’ve been overwhelmed. I’m dreaming of friends I don’t recognize who don’t listen because I’ve recently been hurt. I’m dreaming of $60 fancy plastic brown toothbrushes, (by the way, in the store beside the restaurant), because things here are fantastically overpriced.

By high noon, the detritus is gone and the nugget has cured: Bhavi has become a symbol of safety and kindness to my psyche, and I’m not going to try to undo that. I know it will only make inevitable future grief stronger, but I can’t afford to be cheap if I’m going to keep dreaming awake.

Have you ever had a dream that made you realize something profound about yourself, your mind, your life?

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Enjoy this post?

If this piece moved you, you might also enjoy this essay about how the quality of our focus can breed art, love, and liberation.

About the Author:

I’m Sky, a writer, poet, mother, and mentor, and author of A Ceremony Called Life (Sounds True). Transfixed by the things we cannot see, I write mythopoetic essays in protection and reverence of love, eros, and intimacy, which I regard as the very pulse beneath ordinary life. I hope my pieces here will inspire you to live with the ferocious urgency your life deserves, and to love like there is nothing more important in the entire world.

Want to go deeper? Here’s how I can help:

📞 Book a Dreamland Session, for mythopoetic guidance on love, longing, intimacy, heartbreak, emotional truth, aliveness, and the deeper story unfolding beneath your life.

🕸️ If you want to stay connected beyond Substack, find me Instagram

💬 Feel free to like or comment on this newsletter so more Substack users can find it!

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Life, the Universe, et. al. is one gigantic forever unknown mystery. We all know this, but really consider it: The “mystery” is one gigantic thing, like a sparkling shimmering blackness, and within it is every single possibility of everything we could ever imagine and beyond. Like the Universe and its stars, it contains within it every single mathematical possibility AND the formulaic equation of their physical manifestation. Pause.

I am not going to get new-age. Rather, I am getting into this metaphysical portrait because I’m amazed and joyfully stupefied by the truly mystical reality we live within—and, I BELIEVE IN IT. What I mean is, I am sure that the more we look the mystery in the eye, the more we get real about it, the more we attune ourselves towards it through our focus, our wonderment, with our antennas bending in its direction as if we are liste…

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Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

I started out young, fresh, confident, infallible. Sufficiently arrogant and full of magical thinking. As the years ticked on, thanks to a little self-awareness and the reflections of friends, the arrogance began to chip away. It was a defense mechanism—growing up in a house with an emotionally abusive father-tyrant, arrogance was the most reliable way to preserve any sense of self. Whatever he said, whatever he did, fucking whatever, because I knew what I thought and what I thought was right and he couldn’t ever get the best of me. I knew who I was with pride.

In a Starbucks parking lot in 2001, slurping up the last bits of a mocha frappucinno with my then best friend Heather, we’re talking about something and I take over the conversation with how it relates to me. She dampens …

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