In the heart of this transition, I welcome feeling everything

We're handing over our beloved Ritual Mischief to her new family in just 8 days.

Only eight days left running my own herbalist practice/organization/business.

Only eight days left to get all our recipes documented for the new family, all our digital files and paperwork in order, and supplies and products and ingredients and furniture organized so well that others will understand what's what, even when I'm not present– all in readiness to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Only eight days before I return to experiencing the land and fields and forests and plants here again as friends and neighbors and advisors and ancestors and healers, but not as business partners anymore. As joyful as that was for the past 7 years, I find myself glad about that. Have you ever been gracefully booted out of a forest by the trees who insist it's time for you to return to libraries, coffee shops, full-time reimagining, and to overlapping and joyful circles of human beings again? I have. Running your own business is a beautiful thing, until it isn't. I worked too many hours, then I denied the truth that I wanted a change, got depressed, to the point that I almost forgot the joy of sitting in a field just to sit there. Or finding or planting a plant simply for the beauty of her presence. Almost. The land and forests here don't stand for self-harming nonsense. And, being part of that land now, neither do I. Most days.

So, yeah. Eight days. I'm so excited! And I'm a mess right now. A happy mess.

Although I don't have most of their great slang, I feel like a teenager this month. I am feeling all the feels here. I shift from excited and happy to nostalgic and grateful to sad and grieving to curious and full of wonder about what comes next. The chaos of the larger human world swirls around outside of me like a massive Midwestern thunderstorm deep-quiet rumbling in the distance: one that may or may not decide to drop tornadoes on us, or our loved ones, today. And yet I feel remarkably calm here. In the eye of the storm of transition. Even though those emotional swings I mention can happen here across the span of a few minutes or an hour now, not just the span of weeks or months.

Here, in the heart of the transition where all emotions are welcome, in walks Calm, cool as a cucumber drinking Scotch neat. Calm invited herself over, didn't knock, doesn't care about the mess, strolled in, sat down, and then, open-eyed, prepared a seat for all the rest. Calm welcomes the happy, and the sad, the grieving, the curious, the worried, the angry, the rage, and the wonder, too. I'm not a "Keep calm and carry on" kind of person at all. I'm a "feel all your feelings, stay with them, befriend them, ask them about their day or month or year, and then share them when you're ready to" kind of person. So. This confident, open, and chill presence, Calm, making herself right at home within me is surprising me. Who is this? How is she doing this? I'm not entirely sure. It's a mystery. And, I'm still a mess. I'm just feeling fine with that.

This confident, open, and chill presence, Calm, making herself at home within me is surprising me.
Who is this?
How is she doing this?
I'm not entirely sure.

I'm calm, in part, because I'm fully aware of the holiness of this moment. The ordinary moment. For me, finding the right family to take Ritual Mischief is a sacred turning point in a sacred journey. I feel like how I imagine someone else might respond to learning that the new pope is a cool human being almost entirely disinclined to be silent in the face of cruelty, injustice, intentional starvation, man-made poverty, torture, and other violences.

Calm, and I'm still aware of the chaos of the larger world. Especially the horror show that is multiple active genocide zones on our home planet: places our dear friends live, and their friends and family members have died unimaginably horrifying deaths. Places where both the weaponry and the attitudes that kill people are often Made In The U.S.A. And, I'm aware and fighting the embrace of creepy, cruelty-centered fascism and turning the U.S. into a weapon of mass poverty generation, mass violence generation, mass environmental destruction, and full-blown police state that so many of the elected, billionaire ass-kissing cowards in the U.S. federal government are insisting we absolutely must become now. As if their vacant-eyed or dead-eyed cowardice is appealing to anyone with a pulse, a heart, and a brain. Nonsense.

I'm also still watching other elected officials stay up night after night trying to protect Americans on all fronts and trying to stop death-by-a-thousand-cuts everywhere, most recently to Medicaid– millions of elders in nursing homes could be turned out onto the streets if they have nobody in their lives to give a home to them. All so that billionaires can be given more money. And, I'm watching and supporting and being among those demanding due process for everyone here, and protecting our rights, including our ability to simply decide what happens with our own bodies. I'm still speaking up, and even still going to protests weekly or every other week now too, because, like all days, this is our time to learn exactly what we would have done to stop Hitler sooner. To stop the needless deaths of millions more civilians that ignoring men like these always seems to bring. Men who would rather lie and torture and maim and kill millions than face their own wounds. I refuse to be a head-in-the-sand-er. A look-away-er. Silent. Even in the moments I look away to recharge by mind and spirit, my heart is in the fight, always. My heart never looks away. She doesn't have to. She's strong AF.

My heart never looks away. She doesn't have to.
She's strong AF.

I'm also a care partner for Mom, likely in her final year thanks to Alzheimer's disease, and family support for Dad, who has no other close family here. D's struggled with a cascade of unexpected health issues this year, too, so I'm supporting him emotionally and as an herbalist, some days, too.

It's a lot. Not as much as what many others are holding now. Largely because I'm friends with the land here and also all these family members are mostly pure joy to me. And because, at the moment anyway, nobody is trying to round me up and ship me off to a for-profit prison or just kill me outright for existing or speaking up for what's right. Not yet.

Still. It's a lot. And.

For about a month here, I have to focus much closer to home. I have to. No choice. The sale of my business is happening in just 8 days. I can't give my handwritten, hand-improved-for-years, illegible-to-everyone-but-me recipe cards for 50 herbal products to the new family. Those all have to become readable, useful digital files. And I'm giving the new family everything I can to help them take this business and grow with it– from land and plant relationships and wisdom and seasonal harvesting cycles, to lists of worthwhile markets and lovely landowners and packaging and ingredients suppliers, to our wholesaler catalog, brand information, and product label templates. Figuring out how to shift website and social media account ownership. Shopify + Daniel makes the website and domain name switches easier. But uugghh, I just want to punch Meta, Instagram, and Facebook in their arrogant faceless faces every damn day now. Ick. And, even creating the sales agreements to sell the business, which I've never done before, is taking longer than expected. So. Much. Paperwork!

Thank goodness Barbara has been around to help create documentation– she's been a much-needed anchor for the kite that is me now. Yes, already

I am a kite some days.

Other days, I'm the wind.

I know this now, though everyone else can't see it yet.

Summer's approaching fast, and my writer self is already down the block mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I'm wandering the beaches and woods of my own imagination, I'm telling plants and fields and tress and insects about the new family, and I'm reentering new doorways into the heart field of my home planet: finding new libraries and coffee shops and bookshops and park benches and mossy patches in the centers of forests, and towns, to visit. All to write in. I get to write again!!!!! In my head I'm already crafting ceremonies of return to my beloved wandering, floating freely not only on land but in the clouds and among the stars too. And I'm already mentally visiting friends I haven't seen in months or years because I was deepening my relationship with the land here. And helping keep elders alive and thriving through a pandemic and other illnesses. And growing a business. As it turns out, I was growing a business for a remarkable red-haired girl and her family. I would say "Not my own family," but the truth is, they are. They already feel like family to me.

One upside of right now is that everything I'm creating to let the business go I'm either improving or creating straight out of my own knowledge and head. It's time consuming because there's a lot to cover, but it's also simple. I'm just putting myself and my love on paper, er, digital paper. I can do that. I've always done that. So, I can simultaneously work on the paperwork of transition this month and also pay close attention to how I'm feeling now. This simple, straightforward, deadline-built-in work has caused me to pay even closer attention to my own emotional and spiritual and mental states the past few months and to pay closer attention to loved ones, too.

I love doing that. Paying closer attention.

So, this is how I'm feeling today, here in the heart of a major–actually several major– transitions. Lucky.

I feel lucky.

Lucky to be here. Lucky to witness where my love and interest and country goes next. Lucky not to know what's coming next this summer.

Standing on the shoulders of every lovely and messy being before me, and around me, I am my own calm in the storm now.

This is new. In the past, I didn't return to my default state– feeling lucky and happy and grateful to be alive– until after the big transition, when I knew I was on stable ground again.

Standing on the shoulders of every lovely and messy being before me, and around me, I am my own calm in the storm today.

But I'm not a stable-ground kind of being, am I? I never have been. Many in my family are, but I'm not.

I like being up in the air. Uncertain. Wandering. Wondering. In the spaces between things, noticing. I love the mystery. Expanding the mystery. Changing in small ways daily and in big ways more often than I'm usually ready for.

That I get to be here, doing this, without being actively hunted, starved, tortured, imprisoned, or slaughtered, in 2025, is a privilege I could never in good conscience ignore.

I wept this week, several times, for how lucky I am. Here in the transition, where, in the past, I was weeping from overwhelm, frustration, exhaustion, fear, and despair.

Not because any of this is easy.

Not because life is easy. It's really not.

But because I welcome who I am now. I bring who I really am now, I AM welcome, and I don't apologize for who I am anymore. Just under the wire before turning 55. ;-)

I am Belonging, Wandering, Wonder, and Welcome– care to join us? I welcome all my own emotions and all the emotions of the people around me. It took a while, but I'm here, I'm me, I belong, and I'm welcome exactly as I am, even with my life-long propensity to wander and wonder and daydream and weep when those around me are holding back tears that they really need to shed. I am an Empath. SBB. Sensitive Beyond Belief. I am a Dreamer of worlds. Dreaming only at night is just not enough.

Gratitude has become my most loyal companion as a result. Gratitude for this life. This moment. This joy. This unbearable pain of being connected to the whole of humanity as billionaires decide more must suffer and die just to obscure that they never feel like they're enough, can never have enough. Billions don't cut it, and you can no longer hide it, when you hate yourself. Generosity– the wildly beautiful and shockingly impractical son of Gratitude– follows in her wake within me. As does her trickster child, Humor, with a twinkle in their eyes and mischief always on their mind. Who I am, and these close friends of mine, cannot be taken from me by the vacant-eyed women and dead-eyed men trying to run the U.S. into the ground. The sad, disconnected assholes can try, but they cannot separate me from me like their abusive parents once insisted they do to themselves. We are loved here. Well loved. Only I can separate me from me. And I don't do that anymore. We're done with that.

I am Belonging, Wandering, Wonder, and Welcome– care to join us?

Now that I've finally stopped fighting and hiding who I am– and thanks to this welcoming of all emotions my people and planet laid the intricate foundation for within me– strangely, I even have extra time these days. Time for rest and dreaming. Time for protesting. Time for reading. Time for caregiving. Time for helping. No time for what I don't care about and time for all the things I care most about, including witnessing what resisting, downplaying, ignoring, belittling, hiding, and stifling our true selves and feelings does to people. It eventually overwhelms us and spills out of us as exhaustion, or anger, feeling brittle, going numb, hating humanity as a whole sometimes (preferable to hating yourself most days), feeling isolated, being disappointed all the time, disconnecting from feelings intentionally because you don't have the time or energy for them (aka, time for your true self), being trapped in cycles of blaming others and feeling powerless to change anything, non-stop worry, depression, distracting ourselves, abusing ourselves and others, and lashing out at safe others even when it's not even them who we're actually mad at.

And illness and disease. Hiding our true selves and hiding our emotions from others, and especially hiding them from ourselves, makes us sick. Wow are people sick a lot these days. At least in my country.

I take this day by day now. This being my true self. This welcoming all emotions. The living are always a work in progress. Today, at least, I'm welcoming all my emotions and all the emotions of those I love and those I meet. I listen to what others are feeling, even when it's not easy. And I give voice to what I'm feeling, even when it's not pretty. And because I am doing that regularly now, I'm not tired anymore.

I listen to what others are feeling, even when it's not easy. And I give voice to what I'm feeling, even when it's not pretty.

I'm not tired anymore!!! Not chronically, anyway.

I'm not exhausted. I'm not even angry most of the time, even though most of us have ample reasons, and every right, to be livid round the clock. Nothing wrong with anger and rage, but I'm too old for settling for anger and rage 24x7. I'm old enough to know that every moment and every chance we get to see who we are and say who we are and hear others' voices and choose what we feel and how we respond out of a universe (or multiverse) of options are immeasurable gifts.

So, I am what I choose to be now.

I choose to be well rested. I choose to focus on what matters most to me and those I love. I choose to let go of what I needed to let go of today. I'm unlearning stale ways of being, daily. I'm supporting those I love when I can and receiving support gladly most days too. I'm being who I really am. Not hiding. I'm even drawing the right next people to me–or being drawn to them– from new writer and creator and activist friends to old friends to the lion-hearted humans taking Ritual Mischief forward next. That's what being your true self and welcoming all emotions and sharing them with trusted others can get us. It gets us us: well rested, curious, listening, loving, real human beings.

We don't have to fear that. That got us here.

Here, in the heart of these big, terrifying transitions– personal, family, community, regional, and global– I am welcome as I am now. Exactly as I really am. Feeling and sharing the emotions I really feel. Being the wiser in writing but socially awkward oddball in person that I've always been. This time, loving that about me. About us.

I belong here. So do you. And we both know it.

That's what can happen when we welcome feeling everything.