BLOG
Sovereignty In the Midst of the Chaos
To be sovereign is to acknowledge reality with all of its disruptions and injustice, with all of its loss and inconsistencies, and to still remain rooted in who you are.
To be sovereign is to be able to respond to the day, not matter when it starts.
I have been up since 4:15 am.
It wasn't because I've set an ambitious writing schedule or that I'm into sunrise meditation. No, I was escorting a five year old to the potty and then sharing my pillow with her. As is so often the way these day, she woke up with "a scary dream." And - happy spring - there's no chance she'll fall sleep once she hears the first bird announce the dawn.
And so here I am, utterly exhausted on another Monday. The details of my sleep deprivation story only differ only slightly from any other I've told over the last decade of motherhood.
But here's what's different: I am waking up today to tell a story of sovereignty.
In the past, my Monday story has often been about pushing through the exhaustion to be a nice enough mom, turn in decent work for clients, and try to serve something other than frozen pizza for dinner.
But this Monday, I realized I can do it differently. My responsibilities as a mama, partner, and entrepreneur look fairly similar from the outside, but there's a shift in me.
It's a shift toward stillness, toward sitting with what is rather than the way it "should be." In part, that's because I've developed a daily meditation habit (just not at sunrise!). In part, it's because I have spent enough time reading and writing about sovereignty that I have actually made it part of my life and way of being.
To be sovereign is to acknowledge reality with all of its disruptions and injustice, with all of its loss and inconsistencies, and to still remain rooted in who you are.
To be sovereign is to be able to respond to the day, not matter when it starts.
When you embody your own sovereignty you're going to have a very different experience than when you're in reactivity mode, lost in the details and tossed about by the craziness around you.
Today, I look like someone's tired mom, a weary woman making extra coffee and snarling about the noise and making it quite clear her patience is at a premium.
But I am also know myself to be the quiet, confident ruler of my own life who can find herself on the other side of a short, frustrating night. I know myself to be sovereign in this reality of mine, despite the chaos.
Because of the chaos.
What about you? What threw you off your rhythm last night and today? What practices help you root back into your own power and presence?
Perhaps you'd like to get to know your own sovereign self a bit better so you can handle the next round of chaos that life will inevitably throw your way. Join us for Your Sovereign Awakening, the program that inspires you to awaken your own magic, your own self-worth, and your own power.
We begin on Monday, May 13. Get the details here:
An October Story for the Children of the Moon and the Daughters of the Earth
Conversations with my daughter enliven and exhaust me sometimes, especially when we’re trying to sort through stories about our beautiful, brutal, complicated world. Trying to put things into words she can understand when I realize I don’t even have the words...
Ultimately, these conversations offer the best stories and make me a better storyteller.
On the Friday before what you and I might habitually call Columbus Day weekend, my fourth grader and I went for a hike down by the Mahicantuck. I’m quite certain you’d simply call this “river that flows two ways” the Hudson.
This river is tidal. It rises and falls twice in a day and the salt from the Atlantic can reach all the way to Poughkeepsie during drought conditions. I am an ocean girl, born and raised, and the Hudson Valley can seem so desperately land locked… I forget that the river is just a few miles from my front door. I certainly forget that it has salt in its hair and sand in its shoes.
If only my mermaid self could remember that she has always been at home here. Then, maybe I’d be able to put down roots that would help me better weather the storms - those in this New York sky and those that churn on the internet and in the ethers beyond.
My daughter was born in this place. She’s made of this river and its tributaries. She’s held by its ridges and mountains and she skips along the trail and navigates the uneven ground as naturally as a grown faun - or is she now a young doe?
She tells me what she learned about Indigenous Peoples’ Day, about the story of Taíno boy who had his doubts about the men who arrived in their great boats. We talk about the way the boy was right and how the explorers became colonizers who would destroy the native way of life. We talked about how complicated it was, to feel grateful we lived on such beautiful, sacred land while knowing that it meant the removal and destruction of those were here first.
Conversations with my daughter enliven and exhaust me sometimes, especially when we’re trying to sort through stories about our beautiful, brutal, complicated world. Trying to put things into words she can understand when I realize I don’t even have the words.... This is one more thing they forgot to teach us in parenting school.
I hadn’t had time for my morning meditation that day and was craving it, so, as we approached the river’s edge, I suggested we do a “sit spot,” a mindfulness practice she’d learned in her wilderness program.
The water was high. All this autumn rain was keeping the salt-kissed currents well south of us, but I swear I smelled the sea. Tucked between the trees and the underbrush, we found a clear boulder, a perfect place to rest, our feet dangling over the steadily moving river five feet below.
I was entwining myself with the elements, feeling the sun and the wind and filling myself with the splash of the wavelets. I needed this. I needed to arrive at a point in motherhood when my older child and I could enjoy a long moment of silence, when she could respect the dance of nature’s movement and stillness.
So much felt possible now that I had a daughter who could allow her mother some stillness. I’d spent so many years of going through the motions of mothering. I felt like I’d earned the pause.
As I let my mind fly with the gulls, my girl was quietly busy beside me, grinding a tiny stone against our rocky seat. She was making a fine pile of dust. I glanced over to see her dabbing it on the tip of her nose, her eyes crossed as she focused.
Perhaps it would have been nice to mediate a little longer, but this was a rare afternoon, just for the two of us - the first hike we’d taken alone since her sister was born four years ago.
I think it must have been her idea to paint me. I didn’t know if it crossed her mind that this is how kids have “played Indian” for hundreds of years, but I didn’t mention it because I was caught up in a different world of history and myth.
I’ve been rereading The Mists of Avalon and felt that old yearning to be amongst the priestesses with the blue crescents between their brows. This book had rewritten my relationship with the Catholicism that raised me back when I was not so much older than my daughter is now. It was necessary to make that sacred sisterhood real in this moment with my girl, here at the rocky edge of a rushing river, so I asked her to draw the moon on my forehead. And then, with the last bit of powder, I did the same for her.
It felt necessary to put words to this sweet little act, so I suggested we speak a prayer to the moon and ask her for a blessing. My wise, huge-hearted daughter, who has been raised to see the Goddess in the earth and in the sky and question why many people think God lives only in a Church, suggested “peace and love.”
This was the end of the week when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Around the country, women in particular were holding their collective breath. We waited to see if that man would be confirmed and added the Supreme Court. I didn’t have any peace and light left in me, and the kind of love I had was the fierce kind that felt more like a hurricane than a mild October breeze.
Though I was filled with prayers that began something like “by the power of this mighty river, by this great mother earth, women must be believed,” I was doing all I could to just look like Mom on the outside. My daughter has been raised to call her a feminist and she’s more politically aware than most nine year-olds, but I’d barely mentioned the Supreme Court. She knew it as one more messy political thing that would inspire mommy and daddy to go to an event in support of our democratic congressional candidate that night.
And so, I was called to walk the edge between speaking the truth and protecting the last shreds of my daughter’s innocence yet again. I couldn’t erase or disown my weary heart or my boiling blood - this was a prayer to the Goddess, after all, and I needed to be straight with her about what really needed on this earth right now.
I tried to tilt the specifics of my rage and said I was thinking about justice and about protecting people who are less powerful than the guys who have been in charge for so long.
We threw stones into the water to seal our prayers. We walked back to the car with golden moon dust on our faces. Later in the day, I’d listen to Susan Collins’s long rambling speech in support of the lifetime appointee who showed himself to be anything but an impartial, even-tempered potential jurist.
And the river would keep flowing with moon blessed tides. The autumn would stretch to become more brilliant before the weather turned and the leaves would be stripped and laid winter bare.
My daughter would grow and her innocence would slip away with every conversation, newscast, and great big book.
I would hold this story in the treasure chest with those that make me a woman raising up children, a woman with her eyes widening further open day by day, a woman full of rage and hope, a woman trying to find her way home.
In honor of my daughter's ninth birthday, I invite anyone who loves this story to book a Story Healing Session for just $109 (offer valid through November 1, 2019).
You can get all the details on what’s included in this practical, magical offering here.
Book your one-on-one session with me to talk about the story you long to tell, the story that gets stuck in your throat and needs to be healed before it can be told.
Are you dreaming the dream or doing the dream?
It's Friday, and that means I am breaking a rule by breaking out of my writing bubble, but I trust that it's ok to give myself permission to do that.
My current work in progress describes how the Celtic Sovereignty Goddess guides women through the transitions of modern life. Why write a book about crowning the queen within if you can't rewrite a few rules along the way? Especially when I'm taking these moments to write to you and the rest of my beloved community of healers, writers, and creatives.
My little one is home with me today, and it might make more sense to hit the grocery store and put away all that laundry so I can empty the baskets and start the whole process again. But, instead, I'm giving myself permission to let her watch Moana for the twelfth time and I am using this stolen hour to do the dream.This is new for me. Until just a few weeks ago, I'd never allow myself to sit down and work on my creative projects before the kids' bedtime. It seems the Sovereignty Goddess is whispering: it's time.
Dreaming Time and Doing Time
This life I lead, as a mother and a creative entrepreneur, it offers ample time for dreaming.
Driving the kids around, throwing together yet another soup, dealing with all that laundry... When the girls amuse one another and when I remind myself that it's ok to turn off NPR (the madness in Washington will go on whether I listen to every news report or not), I find new vast new territories within my own mind.
Yes, this life with small children may give me time to dream, but it often leaves very little time to do. I have time for my clients, of course. I have time to co-create the podcast. But time to actually do my own writing? That has often seemed impossible...
But then, this book project awoke within me. Re-awoke, I might say, but I am not 100% sure that's a word.
With the spring rains, with the rising tides of my own life, and the churning waters of these tumultuous times in the collective, the Sovereignty Goddess rose out of the earth, out of the past, and out of my own past studies and told me it was time. (Get a taste of her magic here.)
And so, the S.G. gets my creative doing time every Friday, and she gets lots of dreamtime in between. And I feel more alive than I have in long, long time.
Out of the Barren Territory of "Just a Dream"
I'm realizing how much effort I have put into dreaming the dream, and how little I devoted to doing the dream. This long time habit has left me feeling barren and lost... I was terribly accustomed to the bitter cycle of feeling inspired and then feeling disappointed as all those ideas just faded into the ethers.
What about you... are you able to dream the dream but just don't have the time and space to do the dream?
I'd love to talk with you about how I can help you capture that creative energy and turn it into words on a page that touch the hearts of your readers and potential clients.
Book a 15 minute session and we'll talk about how writing coaching can support your creative practice and transform your professional practice.
Time, rest, work, and the shaping of a writing life
“Women can have it all, but not all at the same time.” Brilliant, successful people from Betty Friedan to Madeline Albright to Oprah to Anne-Marie Slaughter are credited with this line. I don’t think anyone is irritated about plagiarism because truth is truth and amplifying shared wisdom raises everyone up.
I need to come clean: right now, I’m not occupied with writing a seminal feminist text or running the State Department or establishing myself as the ultimate media mogul.
Nope, my reality isn’t nearly as high profile or quite so life and death. It’s just as real though. I’m dancing with the daily truth about the choices that must be made: “this, not that.”
The "thises" and the "yeses"
My “thises” include mothering sick children and tending to my own wintertime ailments. When I’m not tossing tissues in the trash, I’m taking on copywriting work and writing coaching commitments for healers who are changing the world, one client at a time.
I’m also immersed in the Practice of Being Seen community for therapists and its delightfully demanding sister project, the Practice of Being Seen podcast.
On the podcast, we talk a lot about the various roles we play as individuals, as professionals, and as change agents. Often, it’s about “you can do more than one thing, but let's think about how that will feel...”
That’s what we explored in the recent discussion we had about Resistance & The Princess-Rebel Role Model. You can be both princess and rebel because, let’s be honest, we often want to be saved just as much as we want to change the world. But what does that really look like in practice? (Listen in and decide whether it’s something you can really do at the same time.)
The "thats" and the "not todays"
But the act of podcasting - and doing all the behind the scenes work it takes to make it happen - creates a whole new bunch of “thises” and excludes a whole lot of “that.”
As you may have noticed, blogging about writing and the creative quest have been in the “not that, not today” pile for some time. That’s due to the concrete realities that contain our boundless universe and give our lives some kind of reliable shape. I assume you know these - very real the constraints of time and energy?
The shaping of the time. The container of rest.
All this has me thinking about time and energy more than ever. I’m thinking about as discernment too. And I have a couple of resources for you to check out that speak right to what I know is a very common concern for so many of us - particularly those who try to fit parenting and entrepreneuring and client supporting and creating and self care all into one day.
Jeffrey Davis of Tracking Wonder invited me to write about my tango with time. It felt good to offer up some of my finite number of hours to Stop trying to make time. Enter into relationship with time.
In the post, I talk about how “I enter into relationship with time so that I can see the relationships between my ideas and the work I want to manifest.” The patience and the resources it takes to enter into such a productive relationship rely on one essential thing: rest.
Karen Brody’s work with yoga nidra has long been a source of solace and support, and I’m thrilled to tell you that she has a nine-month immersion in yoga nidra coming up.
This sleep-based meditation is radically necessary and powerful, but that isn’t the only reason I am so excited to share the program… Daring to Rest: Wild Woman Writer is specifically for women who know they have a story to tell. A playwright and author as well as a yoga nidra expert, Karen is the perfect woman to combine story, sleep, and personal revolution.
Ultimately, yes, it does come down to balance
It's as trendy to scoff at balance as it is to strive for it. When the contemporary tussle over a word becomes too much for me, I look to the ancients.
This is the latest image in my #365MagicWords series. As I am thinking of shaping time and prioritizing rest, and I am also thinking of the Eqyptian Goddess Maat who was the keeper of universal balance. The daughter of the Sun and the wife of the moon, she had great wings and always wore an ostrich feather headdress. She was the embodiment of justice and the grounding of reality.
A fine spirit guide for these tumultuous, over scheduled times, yes?
Your stories can heal and serve - but only if you're ready to tell them
These roads are like grooves in my unconscious mind. They’re direct routes into who I really am, but they exist just a few degrees beyond the coordinates of my everyday reality. My daughters and I are driving through my hometown, but I’m not sure they know where they are. They’re focused on seeing friends and the promised ice cream cones and eventually getting to “Neana’s bench.”
I don’t live here anymore. That’s nothing new, of course. I left Cape Cod when I was eighteen just like every other kid with the means and the desire knows to do. But my family doesn’t live in this town anymore either. Strangers dwell in the house where I grew up. All that’s left of our name in this town is etched into my mom’s memorial bench in the church garden.
When we cross into Barnstable, I stop worrying about the most direct path between point A and point B. I trust that I still know seven ways to get everywhere (essential knowledge when you grow up in a tourist town). Soon, I realize I am not choosing streets, I am navigating time.
The lane to my elementary school. Lindsay DiPesa’s old house. The soccer fields that used to be a farm. The rec center where I was a camp counselor. My ex-boyfriend’s parents’ historic home. (Curiously, I ended up passing that place twice, but then, I always ended up back in that relationship even when I tried to leave!)
Every residential area, every sand strewn road has a memory rolled into the pavement. There are hundreds of stories I could tell my girls. Instead, we listen to the radio station that served as the soundtrack to my childhood, and I say nothing.
I’m hoarding my stories. I don’t trust my voice and I don’t trust the tears that threaten every time I remember what the parents of thirty years ago looked like when they stood with their kids at the bus stop on fall mornings. I don’t have the energy to weave these reflections into something that matters to my kids.
If I point out the library, I would feel obligated to say how sad I am that the tree where my mom and I played Piglet and Pooh was cut down to make more parking. If I describe how we used to rent videos from that village store they’ll want to watch something on the iPad.
The good news: you get to choose what stories you tell. Choose the stories that nourish you and your audience.
My girls are still young. For now, I generally get to craft the container of their reality and control what influences their understanding of the world. The goal is to protect them, of course, but I also get to protect myself - especially when I’m lost in tender pockets of grief that are much too much for them to bear.
Telling them more about where mama played and worked and biked and learned might have added to their carseat experience, but it would have cost me too much.
Well-balanced stories heal, protect, and serve.
I talk a lot about the Story Triangle and how you need to balance the needs and interests of your audience with your own needs and interests all while keeping an eye on what makes a story meaningful and compelling.
The Story Triangle is your guide as you tell a story. It enables you to appeal to your audience and honor your authentic voice and make the narrative work. It can also help you decide whether you can tell the story at all.
In an attempt to be a “good” mom who gives the gift of my own history to my children, I could have seized the moment and played tour guide. After all, every kid loves to know what things were like for mom and dad so they can squeal at our primitive ways and also feel connected over all the things that feel just the same. The commentary about seaside suburban life in the 80s and 90s would have filled the whole drive.
But that would have pushed me further off balance than any mama should have to bear, however.
The Story Triangle would have been pushed off kilter and, because these things have real life consequences, when you’re a family in tight quarters, someone would have ended up in tears.
The same is true when you’re a writer telling a story meant to build online community and attract ideal clients. Telling a story that’s too intimate and exposes raw wounds doesn’t serve you or your ideal clients. You get a massive TMI hangover and your readers aren’t so sure you’re the person to help them heal.
The good news: my family still gets to go to the Cape frequently to visit my Dad and my stepmom, though it’s to a different town I’ll probably never really get to know.
I trust that next chapter of my story will be a cheerful one, and one that I’m able to tell with a strong voice. There will be many more chances to take that trip down all the lanes of memory when the girls are older and when my wounds are more fully healed.
There's something to be said for seizing the moment and telling a story when it's timely and fresh. But remember: the story, the audience, and you, the storyteller, are best served when you wait for the right healing moment.