The Energy of Beginning

Eager Days

Even without children in the house, the shift is unmistakable. In the last days of August, the world begins to lean toward September. On a recent morning at a local coffee shop, the rhythm of life seemed to sharpen. College freshmen gathered with their bright new backpacks, laughter spilling as they recounted summer adventures. Nearby, a young child grinned at her mother, telling her for the hundredth time how wonderful first grade was going to be. The air itself vibrated with anticipation.

After the long sprawl of summer, life gathers itself differently in these days. Where July invited lingering and leisure, now the season calls for attention, for readiness. Even small moments, like overhearing excited chatter or seeing the shuffle of feet and pages, feel like invitations to step into something new.

This energy is not limited to classrooms. Writers may find themselves drawn to fresh pages, gardeners toward autumn planting, and artists toward renewed focus. Small gestures—rearranging a corner of the home, beginning a daily walk, or opening a book that has waited patiently on a shelf—can ride this current. As a student, I remember the scent of new books, the crisp paper, freshly sharpened pencils and inks. Those smells brought smiles to my face and charged my heart with anticipation for what the year might bring.

On mornings when I tend the garden, fill the bird feeders, or watch Piper splash in her pool, that same vibrant pulse is present. The season’s energy announces itself insistently, ready to be taken up. There is no roll call, no schedule required—only the invitation to notice it, to step fully into the momentum, and to let it guide the work, the play, and the small, deliberate beginnings of each day.

No Rules, Except Discovery

Rachel Pollack, in her Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning novel Unquenchable Fire, offers a declaration that feels at once daring and deeply reassuring:

“There are no rules, except discovery. There is no tradition, except invention.”

These words invite us to step beyond the familiar boundaries we often place around creativity, learning, and spiritual practice. They suggest that the most meaningful work of our lives arises when we relinquish the comfort of rigid prescriptions and allow ourselves to enter into a genuine dialogue with the unknown. Discovery is not a matter of passively waiting for inspiration to arrive; it is the active pursuit of new insights, the willingness to ask questions that may have no immediate answers, and the capacity to notice the unexpected along the way. 

Invention, as Rachel frames it, transforms the idea of tradition. The past becomes neither a relic to be preserved unchanged nor an obstacle to be discarded entirely. Instead, it becomes a foundation from which we create anew. We take what has been given to us—stories, rituals, ideas—and reshape them in ways that reflect the realities of our own time, our personal experiences, and the visions we hold for the future. Tradition, in this sense, becomes a living organism, evolving through each contribution we make.

Rachel’s words resonate because they illuminate the courage required to live and work in this manner. Discovery calls us to risk uncertainty for the sake of authenticity, to take steps that may feel awkward or untested in the hope of uncovering something genuine. Invention asks us to weave our own thread into the greater tapestry, knowing that what we create today may guide, inspire, or challenge those who come after us.

When we embrace this philosophy, we grant ourselves the freedom to shape our own path while also becoming mapmakers for others. We honor the spirit of discovery by venturing forward without a predetermined route, and we uphold the vitality of tradition by daring to invent within it.

Re-entry

 A Month Went Quiet

I didn’t post last month. That’s not a confession—it’s just what happened.

Other work needed my focus, and I gave it. Amid an unusual month, I spent time tending the part of me that needs stillness to write with honesty. I protected it, reassured it that the physical act of putting thoughts to paper would reignite, and it has.

I’m grateful for the flow. I’ve missed it more than I admitted out loud.

Momentum and attention are again realigned. In my office, Lulu is purring and bounding in and out of her window box, my pens are filled with fresh ink, and a cup of Paris tea is steaming alongside me.

The Architecture of Resilience

Living the Sacred Balance in a Shifting World

There is a force running through our world with undeniable urgency. It is no longer hidden. It asserts itself, it interrupts, and it challenges what we once believed was unshakable. Anyone living with even a thread of awareness is being called to attention. This is a time to stay alert, to choose engagement over complacency. Whether the shift enters through collective upheaval, personal unraveling, or a sudden and unshakable knowing, it demands that we bring spiritual ideals into daily, visible practice.

The balance between the sacred feminine and sacred masculine is emerging as an essential part of that work. These energies are not symbols to be admired from a distance. They are living forces that call for embodiment. The feminine offers intuitive wisdom, receptivity, and restoration. The masculine brings clarity, structure, and direction. Together, they create a dynamic field of integrity. Without integration, one becomes exaggerated. The feminine without anchoring risks dissociation. The masculine without soul becomes control.

This spiritual tension is not meant to be solved. It is intended to be lived. That living happens through honest action, through presence in relationships, through choices that honor both care and accountability. Too often, the divine feminine has been confined to abstraction while the divine masculine has been distorted into dominance. What is needed now is a return to wholeness through practice. Wholeness through effort. Wholeness through attention to the small, deliberate acts that bring Spirit into form.

The daily world still runs on outdated rhythms. The machinery of 3D existence—acceleration, competition, disconnection—presses against the deeper rhythm that is rising. Those who are aligning with 5D awareness can feel the difference. It is quieter, but it is more demanding. It does not tolerate false agreements or borrowed beliefs. It insists that we clear out what cannot hold the frequency of truth.

The current cosmic shifts are not background phenomena. They shape bodies, choices, dreams, and emotions. They act as filters. They expose distortion. They stir unresolved grief, lingering attachments, and ancient fears. Some of what surfaces belongs to us. Much of it does not. Part of resilience now is the discernment to tell the difference. 

When emotional debris appears, we are being invited to recognize it without clinging to it. The flotsam and jetsam of the past—outgrown identities, broken systems, inherited burdens—are surfacing so we can leave them behind with awareness rather than denial. These remnants are loud for a reason. They are asking to be witnessed before they go. 

Resilience in this moment is not measured by how much we can carry. It is measured by our capacity to stay aligned while the landscape shifts. The sacred balance must be lived in the kitchen, in the workplace, in moments of disagreement, in choices around time and rest. It is present when we listen fully. It is present when we speak without harm. It is present when we allow silence to hold what words cannot yet express.

Those who embody this balance move differently. They do not seek approval, nor do they respond out of fear. Their steadiness is built from choices made in solitude and tested in community. Their clarity does not come from superiority, but from alignment with something real. They have allowed both tenderness and strength to teach them.

To live this way requires intention. It requires leaving behind roles that once brought safety. It requires a daily return to presence. There is no final mastery. There is only the next breath, the next choice, the next conversation shaped by wholeness rather than reaction.

May we choose to walk from that place, deliberate, rooted, and awake.

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Quiet Agreements

Quiet Agreements 

June 19th marks two years since Lulu joined our family.

At the time, I didn’t think I was ready. Two weeks after our beloved border-aussie died, our heart-cat passed too. The loss felt total. I was gutted, moving through a world that had gone quiet in every sense. Where I once could hear the trees whisper, sense deer before they appeared, see the land spirits around our home, now there was nothing. No shimmer at the edge of the woods, no knowing before a moment happened. It was as if my psychic senses had suddenly gone offline. I understood this to be a part of grief, but knowing that didn’t make the silence easier to bear.

What unsettled me most wasn’t just the quiet, but how absolute it was. I didn’t know how to navigate that kind of stillness. I trusted my senses would return in time, but I couldn’t see the path forward. I felt alone in a way I hadn’t before. And then Lulu arrived.

It was Callie who first felt the opening. Our neighbor had reached out to her, asking if we knew anyone looking to adopt a cat, and sent a photo of a blue-eyed, mackerel-striped tabby from a home where, being afraid of the young children, she hadn’t fit. At that time, her name was Luna. We walked over to meet her, and that was when we learned the neighbor would be away for four weeks, with no one lined up to visit regularly. We said we’d gladly care for her while she was gone. Callie gently suggested, “Well, how about a trial adoption?” I hesitated. I couldn’t feel the cat the way I once would have. I didn’t have the usual intuitive knowing to guide me. I couldn’t sense Luna at all in the way I was used to. So I leaned into Callie’s clarity. She recognized a possibility I couldn’t yet see, and I trusted her enough to move toward it. That was how Lulu came into our home. And because I always enjoy giving my pets fun, full names, she became Lucy Lu Augusta Moon.

Four months later, a former client sent a text. She had recently rescued a two-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever but said the dog wasn’t happy with them and seemed afraid of their granddaughter. She wondered if we might consider giving her a home. I had met the dog once, six months earlier. Again, I paused. The ache was still so present, and I wasn’t sure I had room to welcome another being into that space. My senses were still quiet in the way I had once relied on them. I was slowly learning, or relearning, how to engage with an animal and the world around me in a different way. I was beginning to re-open to the language of physical cues, body signals, and the quiet observations that reveal how to meet a creature’s needs and enrich their life. Then Callie looked at me and said, “How about us?” Not just a yes to the dog, but a yes to whatever it might mean for all of us to try again.

That’s how Piper joined us. Like Lulu, she had come from a place where she hadn’t fully been seen. And like Lulu, she arrived quietly, without fanfare, but carrying something unmistakable. Her full name, as it quickly became, is Golden Song of Magick.

I still couldn’t connect with them the way I was used to connecting—with that inner pulse, that quiet communion I had always trusted. So I relied on Callie’s interpretations. Of them. Of me. Of the needs of the three of us. She was the one who translated the space between us, the one who felt into their rhythms when I couldn’t. I watched her tenderness, her attunement, and let that become my orientation point.

In the absence of my psychic senses, I made a choice. I returned to grounded basics, to the tangible world I could still touch and study. I reacquainted myself with the subtle body language of animals. I watched plants and trees to anticipate shifts in weather. I observed wild birds and animals, tracking their cues for gathering, foraging, and storing. These steady disciplines gave me rhythm and presence. They were real, alive, and accessible even in silence.

Over time, the quiet began to shift. Some of my gifts returned slowly, others with a sudden flash. As I regained my ability to walk in both the seen and unseen, I recognized that those basic, natural practices had shaped me in essential ways. They gave me a clearer path between the worlds I inhabit. They deepened my attention and reminded me how to belong.

Lulu’s gaze started to feel familiar. Piper’s body settled more easily beside mine. The land began to soften around the edges again. I can’t say exactly when it happened, only that something began returning.

We make gentle soul agreements with the animals who enter our lives. Not in theory, but in practice. In the shared rhythms of daily life, in showing up, in choosing to stay curious. Lulu and Piper didn’t arrive to fix me. They came to live beside me. To stay present in a world that had fractured, but not ended.

Callie and I didn’t come to save them. We’re healing and growing together. We allow space for each of us to grow into who we are. No one is leading or following. We are learning how to live in the in-between. We are learning how to say yes, even if we are unsure.

No Throne, No Crown

No Kings Day – Holding Down the Fort

Today is No Kings Day. A declaration. A refusal. A collective cry against authoritarianism in all its guises. While many are gathering in the streets, marching, chanting, standing shoulder to shoulder in fierce solidarity, I am here at home. I am not absent. I am not idle. I am present in a different way.

My phone is charged and in hand. I am the emergency contact, the lifeline, the one who stays out of custody so I can be the first call from it. My house is the safe place. I know this role is vital. I know it saves lives and soothes fear. But still, my activist heart twists at not being beside them in body. I long to raise my voice in the crowd, to feel the pavement under boots worn from protest. It’s not guilt I feel—it’s ache.

I wear black: hoodie, pants, Poe’s “Nevermore” on my chest. The flags out front fly with layered defiance: Pride in every color, the American flag inverted. My home is marked. My stance is visible. My voice, though not echoed in chants, is whispered in the readiness of this space and the strength of my watchfulness. I am here. I am holding down the fort. I am alert, awake, and absolutely in this fight.

To all of us, marchers, supporters, watchers in the shadows, we form the net that catches each other. We are the movement, together.

Chant for No Kings Day:

No throne, no crown, no gilded lie
We rise, we fight, we do not die
No kings, no lords, no stolen seat
The people’s will will not retreat

Stay safe. Stay loud. Stay ready.

The Holiness of Writing

Writing has an unmistakable sanctity that does not depend on genre, audience, or outcome. It resides in the act, the deliberate choice of words, and the vulnerable reaching towards meaning. Writing may be solitary, but it is never isolated. Each time we begin, we step into a lineage of those who have attempted to render the invisible visible, to make internal landscapes intelligible. This impulse is neither trivial nor merely expressive. It is devotional. In setting pen to paper or fingers to keys, we do more than create; we consecrate. 

The page is not an altar, yet it receives what we place upon it with the same stillness. It accepts our disordered thoughts, fragmentary insights, half-formed griefs, and tentative joys. To write it to meet oneself without evasion. It is to encounter thought in transit, to give shape to feeling before it hardens into a cliche or vanishes altogether. In this way, writing becomes a ceremony, a repeated gesture towards coherence. It does not require belief, only participation. There is a quiet holiness in the writer's return, draft after draft, day after day, regardless of inspiration. The discipline of presence, the willingness to labor in language without assurance of outcome, is its own form of faith.

At its best, writing opens a channel between author and reader and between the conscious mind and the deeper, stranger voices that murmur beneath the surface. Sometimes it feels like something wishes to be spoken through us, and our task is not to invent but to attune. The sentence that arrives unbidden, the paragraph that seems to assemble itself, these moments are not accidents. They are revelations earned through attentiveness. Writing becomes an instrument of listening. It requires humility and a readiness to follow the current of thought rather than force it towards predetermined ends. This is not passive work. It is rigorous and exacting, yet porous enough to permit the unexpected.

There is a form of sacred reciprocity in writing that connects with another human being. When a reader encounters your words and finds a glimmer of recognition or solace, a deepened question or a softened certainty, something quietly extraordinary occurs. You have bridged distance, not just spatial or temporal, but existential. You have extended a hand through language, and it has been met. This exchange may never be named or acknowledged aloud, but it leaves its trace. Writing enables communion in a world that so often insists on separation. This practice evolves into a form of self-expression and a demonstration of radical generosity.

And yet, not every piece must be shared. Some writing exists solely to clarify, mourn, celebrate, or survive. Private writing holds its sacredness. It marks the moment a thought found form, that instant a feeling was recognized and honored in language. To keep a journal, write a letter never sent, and name one's truth in solitude are acts of reverence. They testify to the dignity of the inner life. They affirm that articulation is not always a performance but sometimes a form of prayer.

To call writing holy is not to romanticize its difficulty. The process can be halting, tedious, even maddening. The right word may evade capture for hours. Sentences collapse under their own weight. Whole pages may require abandonment. But even these frustrations are part of the offering. Holiness is not measured by ease. It is measured by presence, by the constancy with which we return to the page and risk saying what we mean. 

Writing asks for slowness and more intimacy in a world that often privileges speed and spectacle. It invites us to dwell, reflect, and witness. It reminds us that language, at its most potent, does more than inform; it transforms. Through writing, we record our experiences, refine our perception, cultivate empathy, and shape how we understand ourselves and others.

Whether your words are destined for print, whispered into a private notebook, or hovering somewhere in the mind awaiting their moment, know that the act itself is enough. To write is to honor the impulse to make meaning. To write is to participate in a lineage of sacred attention. And in doing so, you are not simply creating. You are consecrating the space between silence and speech, between the self and the world.