I close my eyes and try to imagine. We use imagination because of what we already know. If we have one version of reality, what is a possible version of “other,” and how do we create that from what we have now?

Currently, I am imagining this: people able to buy food in abundance for themselves and their families, holidays spent around tables with sacred stories being shared, people having what they need, when they need it, like healthcare six months down the road. I imagine land being taken care of, communities thriving.

The reality, at least in America, is that we are in a government shutdown, and the Trump administration has openly chosen to keep food from people who need it most. They have openly chosen to restrict flights so that people can’t see each other over the holidays. They are actively causing damage, trauma, and pain to millions of people across America, and we are begging Democrats not to join them in it.

But it’s about more than just political parties, how we align ourselves. It’s about the stories we tell, the ones we choose to live into.

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Why am I writing about algorithms and empires? Because they are everywhere, controlling and restricting us, making monsters out of us, polluting our very souls. We exist in a heavy and difficult time, and I need us to hold space right here, right now, as we dream of what’s ahead.

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Let’s break this down a little.

Algorithm comes from the Latinized name of Persian Mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

An algorithm in and of itself is incredibly useful, a way to understand patterns and systems, to use math to understand the world.

But what’s happened with algorithms today, with the rise of social media and an increase in consumerism paired with AI? As creatives, we struggle to keep up with the constant noise, feeling like we have to fight for a space on the timeline.

Empire comes from the Latin imperium, meaning to “command” and dominate, or even to have authority.

So, we see that algorithms, when empty of humanity, become predatory and empty, and empire, when given its full reign, ends in war, oppression, and hate. And in the world we live in today, both algorithms and empires are saying a lot about who we are as human beings.

So the first way, the very first way we can begin to live beyond algorithms and empires, is to return to the dust, aki, earth, to return to our wild selves, to find our relationship with Segmekwe refreshed and refined.

Be wild; this is how to clear the river. In its original form, the river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. IT is made up of divine paradox. It is an entirely interior process.

—Clarissa Pinkola Etsés

Want to escape the technological grip on your life? Get to the woods, to the river, to a quiet spot of the house where you can stare at the leaves falling from trees or birds flying by.

Want to more deeply understand how empire works? Study the uses of land, the ways we’ve made a profit off the backs of land care, how we view the earth herself as a commodity.

Ecology Books from Birchbark Books

I have lived this dance in my own life, going from being connected to nature when I was young, losing it as an adolescent, and finding it again. I understand the disconnect, the longing, the fear that comes when we realize we have a wild self that’s been waiting for us to come home.

Find your wild river, and clean it up.

Begin writing love letters to Mother Earth.

Start following Indigenous ecology groups or learn about the LANDBACK movement.

Hold acorns in your hands instead of a phone. Carry stones in your pockets.

As Manchán Magan writes

The land holds memories within it.

The holidays are coming, a time when algorithms try to convince us that we need more stuff, when empires try to tell us that our consumerism and fleeting joy matter more than love of our neighbor.

So this holiday season, ground yourself in deeper practices—celebrate the Winter Solstice, practice grounding with Mother Earth, choose to clean up the river that has always been flowing within you.

Buy my children's book, Winter's Gifts

This is where we begin.

Book Updates!

A few folks have left some really lovely reviews of the book—chii migwetch! Please leave a review if you can, where you can—it will take less than five minutes and helps me immensely.

We are breezing through Autumn headed toward Winter! I have a few events left this year.

Nov 20th event info here

I’ll have some online writing workshop events coming in the winter, so please stay tuned! These events are some of my favorite ways to engage in writing from a spiritual space, so please join us when you can!

Next week we are starting a brand new series here at The Liminality Journal on alchemizing the soul to get through chaotic times, but before we get there I want to share about an artist that I am really enjoying right now.

This is my process as an author and artist, how I get to the books I publish and the words I share with you here every week:

1. I get really sad about the state of the world

2. I get really pissed about the state of the world

3. I exercise/climb/play and spend time with the beautiful people in my life

4. I eventually calm down and turn to nature/quiet/space

5. I alchemize my sadness and rage into words

As I’ve been reflecting on this process, I decided I wanted to introduce you to Ren Gill, an artist I’ve recently found who has become an inspiration to my work and has led me to asking deeper, better questions about my own theology, holding space for me to work through that rage and alchemize it into meaningful medicine.

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First, since I’m sharing about the theology of Ren’s music, I just want to define what I mean by theology—the exploration of god(s)/the universe/The Sacred. While some people may have a more narrow view of this, mine is more universal, holds space for all sort of religious and spiritual beliefs and backgrounds, and is deeply and radically rooted in decolonization and liminality.

I found Ren’s music on Instagram one day recently, and have slowly been digging deeper into his songs the last few months. Ren is a Welsh singer-songwriter, musician, rapper, producer, and director, whose musical career has spanned years from studying in university to forming more than one band and now creating his own music with a lot of incredible collaboration partners. In 2023 he released Sick Boi, which hit the UK number 1 in 2023 as well, and was self-produced.

Ren covers topics like colonialism, greed and institutional oppression in his music, and also a range of topics relating to mental health, suicide, faith, and his own struggles with Lyme disease.

And as soon as I started listening to his music, I related deeply to it—to the humanness of it, with all its crass honesty and deep questions, with the ways he helps us view ourselves and our connections to one another. He raps about his own chronic illnesses, which I appreciate as someone diagnosed with a chronic illness myself; his music and interviews/social media posts about health and care and art hold space for the everyday struggles of so many people in our daily lives and bodies.

I also love that he celebrates our millennial era of 90s music, with some songs reflecting the styles of groups like Rage Against the Machine, Beastie Boys, and Kriss Kross, among others.

The first theme I appreciate and want to share about is radical community. Often anti-capitalist language is used in his music and he has a passion for supporting independent artists and local community, and I appreciate everyone who shares about this, as we in the United States live under the rule of a president who is solely motivated by greed and his own ideals of manifest destiny, and we fight against corporations on a daily basis as artists and citizens.

Here’s a first song, Money Game Pt 2, from a series of songs on this topic—how greed corrupts us. And as we understand and deal with greed in the world, how are we to understand who God is, and how we are called to support one another? Many of us are pointing back to community again and again both as a theological grounding and as a way to stand up against systems like consumerism and capitalism and colonialism. I write about this in my new book, Everything Is a Story, because to honor our stories is to honor how they grow into the systemic issues we have today.

The lyrics I want you to listen for, which are clever and deep and call out the way greed is insatiable and buried deep within us, show up in the middle of the song:

(My favorite lines of this song are sell stocks, sell diamonds, sell rocks, sell water to a fish, sell the time to a clock—that is exactly what colonization has done and continues to do today. How are we to resist?)

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As we make way for truth telling in our stories, words, music, and art, we create space to explore deep topics of liminality, doubt, and hope, and I’ve seen this again and again through my career in writing.

Doubt, hope and liminality show up in Ren’s music constantly, along with themes exploring the ways we fight for ourselves and our own healing, and the reality that there is often no answer or relief to the questions we carry, and that’s okay.

In 2022 Ren released a song that went viral, called Hi Ren, a story of the inner struggle between the different parts of ourselves, and learning to honor them, to dance with them, to learn from them. His musicality is incredibly bold and moving, and reveals how talented and passionate he is about his medicine, his art.

At the end of the video, Ren shares a monologue, and I think it’s a really important one for a lot of people, especially the ideas of the pendulum swing between “good” and “evil” or “light” and “dark”, or what we perceive those to be inside ourselves.

I share about the pendulum swing of belief/spirituality with people a lot, as a way to help us understand that it is normal for us to question and change our beliefs, and it’s okay that we don’t always find an exact balancing place—that maybe the entire journey of our questions, our doubts, our hopes, is about the journey itself, that it is what makes us human.

We honor the softness of surrender.

Read the lyrics from Hi Ren below, and then take some time to watch the music video.

I’ve only scratched the surface of Ren’s music for us, but I hope you’ll hold this as a reminder that art is both radical and everyday.

Art points us to the humanness in ourselves, to the sacredness in ourselves and in the world, and is meant to help us ask deep, enduring questions of all of it.

An an Indigenous woman, I know my ancestors saw iterations of the very horrors we’re seeing today—greed, hate, colonialism, racism, institutional oppression, war machines. They lived through their own cycles of oppression, of governments controlling the ways they lived their everyday lives, taking away their livelihood, their homes, their human rights, their spiritual rights, their cultural connections.

Still, here we are today. The spirit of resistance is strong, lingering, a shkode, fire, that we hold on to. And sometimes, music pulls that out of us right when we need it.

Art is meant to help us dig into the deepest questions about ourselves, about whatever or whoever God is or isn’t, and about how we are meant to survive on this earth, individually and collectively.

I’ll leave you with this video, for those of you who’d like a bit of jazz, from Ren’s band The Big Push (also a really fun busking album).

In all that you do, let yourself take the fear/rage/exhaustion and alchemize it into the very ideas that shape our reality into something better.

Thanks for being here. Your support means now to me more than ever, as we survive the chaos of the world. Words are medicine, stories are medicine, and the way we use art to resist in the world deeply matters.

Onward.

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Preorder Everything Is a Story here!

Come spend a week with me at Iona, Scotland. Festival of writing and storytelling this October, right as my new book launches in the UK!

I was tidying up my living room this morning and noticed the (sometimes absolutely overwhelming) presence of my kids’ stuff— baseball cards, LEGO creations, nerf darts, fantasy chapter books, more baseball memorabilia, arts and crafts supplies—scattered across every surface of the place.

I picked up two well-worn baseballs and a bobble-head figure, and instead of putting them by the stairs to be taken to a bedroom later in the day, I placed them in a different part of the living room, realizing how much I cherish those weathered baseballs, the glove that goes with them, the stacks of cards, the LEGO creations.

My kids’ lives have become my life in the very best and sometimes messiest ways, and they constantly hold a mirror up to my own messes with tenderness.

I love reading home decorating books. I love home decorating magazines, and I’m especially drawn to them as the seasons change, as I’m looking around and asking what I can tweak here and there, what can be rearranged to bring a fresh perspective.

I have my own particular style of eclectic decorating, which feels like vignettes, or, for a better choice of words at least for me, altars of special items all over the place. Maybe, at the end of the day, I’ve modeled this for the kids for better and for worse—to collect items that mean something, to gather pictures and books (and more books!) and rocks and seashells and let them take up sacred space.

Travis has traveled to many parts of the world and brings things home to us—magnets and books, bracelets and rocks that hold memory.

I’ve been thinking a lot about surrender and acceptance for the past several months.

If you’re like me and you grew up with any sort of trauma or chaos in childhood, it makes sense that as adults we would cherish control, cherish knowing what comes next and how we can be prepared for anything, always.

The irony is that life is best lived with a dance between control and surrender. We actually let go to feel more alive. We let go in order to let in the things that matter.

We let go to realize that our lives are mostly ours, but not completely. We hold space for the mystical, the magical, the sacred to seep in and create space, too. We let go of preconceived notions and beliefs. We let go of our own identities and boxes, too.

I’d never choose to scatter my home with baseball cards and craft supplies, but they’ve become a part of me, and I’m learning to surrender to them.

Recently I was walking a labyrinth at my friend Terry’s home in the North of Ireland. He’d carved a sacred space in his garden, a loop of time, but beyond time. I journeyed back and forth, from the “beginning” of the loop to the “end” of it, walking until something emerged in me.

It takes me a while to unfurl, to loosen. Control can be rooted in anxious feelings and over-preparation, making sure the spiritual moments happen but that we aren’t too thrown off by them.

As I walked for at least ten minutes in the spiral, I found my way to a steady rhythm. Then I noticed Grandfather Sun, so I turned to stand in his presence, to say good morning and whisper a word of thanks. I’d unfurled a bit, but I was still holding on, unsure.

Then I heard that deep whisper, the kind that we call God or Spirit or an Ancestor or Kche Mnedo, that tender voice that shows up when you want it to but think it won’t:

But will you let me love you?

This, for me, is at the heart of things, and I hadn’t known it until recently. It is one thing to love. It is another thing to admit that we’d like to be loved. It is fully another thing to allow ourselves to be fully loved.

And when we’ve been abandoned before by parents or partners or someone we love, we begin a quiet narrative that maybe we’re not meant to be fully loved. Maybe we don’t know how to be.

This is where surrender shows up once again. This is where we think we’ve decorated our home one way and realize that other streaks of magic have seeped in, ones that annoy us sometimes, that might cause a mess, but make everything soaked with color and meaning and intention.

We think our life is ours, until we realize it’s only mostly ours.

We think we are loved until we realize we want to be loved more.

We think we know surrender until we learn to really unfurl ourselves so that we can fully, wholly, face the sun.

Upcoming Events!

June 10th 7pm How To Resist In Our Personal Lives

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June 25th 7pm Practicing Resistance in Community

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Friends,

I’m coming to you with so much love and care right now—we need it. Sometimes I wish I was a more harsh person, that I handled things with more gusto, more rage, like maybe I process things in a wrong or weak way.

I know it’s not a helpful way to think, but if I’m being honest with you, it’s what I’m thinking about deep down lately. And I also remember that rage is experienced in different ways by many of us. How do we hold our rage? How do we work our way through it? What is injustice-fueled rage’s essence in our lives?

How do we handle this time we are living in? It’s the same question repeated again and again: how do we get through this together, and are we playing our part in the change?

Quite a few years back, I was on a panel for a speaking event. When I saw a video of the panel later, I was horrified to realize that when I wasn’t speaking and was listening to the other panelists, I was swaying from side to side—left to right, left to right—as I listened, as I processed and prepared my own words.

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I found that I did the same thing when I was in the North of Ireland last year—in our closing session, as I was deeply processing what we’d been through together over the last week, I was swaying again—left to right, left to right.

My newfound friend Miriam pointed it out to me, but in a beautiful way. She thanked me for swaying, for showing this form of comfort-making in an exhausting but beautiful environment.

Now I notice it more often in my daily life, when I take to swaying left to right, when I notice that I need some space to breathe, when I notice that I need to slow down and comfort myself, slow down and focus.

I still get embarrassed by it, that I’m sitting here in a coffee shop outside Philly swaying left to right as I read a book that I’m endorsing later, as I write to you here.

Left to right, left to right.

This week is the Spring Equinox, a liminal space, a shifting time when the veil thins a bit and we show up to the world differently. Of course, it’s a perfect day to read my new book, Spring’s Miracles, to ask what it means to embrace your questions, your bravery, to take deep breaths to the four directions.

Order the book here.

So, I invite you into rituals of comfort, of paying attention, in a world that wants us to stretch our attention in a desperate attempt to to completely burn out in the process.

Paying attention to your breath is not selfish.

Facing your fears is not selfish.

Protecting the world you know is not selfish.

Swaying left to right is not selfish.

Slowly drinking that cup of coffee is not selfish.

This is the point in my life when I, ironically (or maybe it’s not ironic at all), come back to my own writing to remind myself of who I am. I can convince you as my reader to take care of yourself, to find your place in the weary world. And to a certain extent, we are always writing to ourselves as authors, too.

So here, I ask myself if I’ve taken my own advice. Am I trusting myself to make my own way in the world, trusting my gifts, the words I’m writing to you here, that they are enough, that they matter? Does this matter?

Order my book Living Resistance here.

I must care about the earth. I must care about my trans kin being targeted. I must care about Mahmoud and his precious wife who is waiting for his return in agony. I must care for my friends of other religions who experience hate crimes; anti-semitism and anti-Muslim sentiments every day of their lives. I must care about my Indigenous kin, about the rights of Black voters, about the history of Japanese internment camps and about how immigrants are being targeted by this administration. I must care about disability rights in a nation built on ableism and the ways we take advantage of the poor and prop up the wealthy. I must care.

And I’m not finished, I could go on and on, the list never-ending because we must care about one another. I must, we must care about all of it.

And we must focus our energy on what we can hold space for, and we must sway back and forth a little along the way.

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See the rhythms, the progression, the dance, the constant ebb and flow? See the ways we are all connected?

I’m not giving you a permission slip to care about yourself. Permission slips are temporary, and I want you to care about your well-being forever.

Tear up the permission slip.

This is about sustaining a life of fierce love, tender care, and community action.

This is about a life of resistance, of deep breathing, of stretching to love.

Stretch with me, friends.

We are all we’ve got.

I finished reading another
book on Spiritual Matters,
and you’d think that afterward
I’d feel all high and mighty, 
like I was floating on clouds
above everyone else, a goddess
of cosmic wisdom. 

Instead I feel as if I’ve been
dipped in a river, maybe 
baptized there, or maybe settled
deep into a cave where every
word I read now settles with
me for a few years until I truly
understand their meaning. 

It is no use trying to come up
with ways to be the wisest one
in the room; after all, we are here
recycling and repurposing each
other's stories in hopes that this
particular dose of medicine might
be the one you actually needed 
for your weary heart.

Instead, we sink deeper, allowing
all that medicine we’ve consumed 
to do its work, to change us, to
enter our bloodstream and make us
into the versions of ourselves we
hope are just like the mystics that
pray for God to be found among them,
in the lowly places where the meek
inherit everything.

Friends,

It’s March. We’ve made it, the month of Spring. These days I practice the dance of zooming in and out, that’s the best way I can describe it.

I zoom into my everyday life, into the realities of an America that feels like its crumbling, and then I zoom back out to all of history, existence, time and space, whatever that is, and ask big questions of what my gifts and purposes are here.

It’s both a feeling of being totally grounded and totally groundless, and somehow, that’s comforting, or, if not comforting, at least remind me that I am human and this is the dance that being human requires of me sometimes.

The words I share with you today are from a journal I kept in 2016/2017, these words from autumn of 2016, as Trump was becoming president for the first time, as Standing Rock was happening. It was a huge time of transformation for me, and I felt it in my writing.

Here are the words I wrote. I hope they bring you comfort and care, and push you into deeper compassion, that they help you with the dancing and zooming in and out around you.

The Sun-bathed, moon-gleamed sky has seen the history of everything.

She watches wars—men and women against men and women, the oppressed against the oppressor, the broken against those who break them.

She has watched babies being born, all creatures come to their end at one time or another.

She births herself, rain and cloud and thunder, to remind us that she is still a willing and active force to be reckoned with.

But still, she sees.

She sees children bombed in their schools, protestors fighting to keep her water clean.

She sees miracles happen and the worst disasters unfold in real time.

Read more

I had a vision recently, early in the morning as my body and mind were waking up to another day.

I was standing at the shore of an ocean, it was daytime, the sky a hazy blue, the sun calling me toward the waves. At first, I was bringing one friend along with me to stand there and hold space by the water.

But suddenly, there were hundreds, thousands of people gathering there, this almost global, if not certainly communal, urge for everyone to stand there by the water.

And there we were, all of us, gathered together at the edge of the ocean. But we weren’t there to swim, or to chat, or to celebrate. We were there to listen.

We were all silent.

Like we’ve all been so hungry for someone to quiet our aches, to shush us like babies, to lull us into peace, if even for a few moments.

We were ceremonially gathering at the water’s edge, choosing to pause the noise.

I’m going to hold onto this vision for a long time, and I think we need it right now.

I recently shared in Notes these words:

I know we are obviously all here because we love and believe in words. But right now we are over saturated by them—on social media, in the news, yes even in our substack newsletters.

I want words that come from the deep places of silence where I’ve been listening, not reactionary words. I want medicine words.

How about you?

We are oversaturated. And here I am, writing that to you on Substack—the irony, I know!

I promise you this: I won’t ever write something here unless I know I need to write it. That’s why I didn’t start out The Liminality Journal with a statement like “I’ll send you a post twice a week” because that forces a kind of pressure to just throw more words onto the internet, and I am really uninterested in that.

I will write to you when I have something I need to say, something that’s been sitting in me for a least a few days, working its way through me. I’ll write to you when I want you to know something about my work, because if words are medicine, I want us to celebrate that medicine together. And in May, we will write daily poetry together as an act of resistance, care, and solidarity.

So, here we are.

Will you stand at the edge of the ocean with me and simply listen?

I don’t mean this simply as a metaphor. I mean: will you get quiet daily, spend time listening to The Sacred, to your own soul? Will you quiet the noise, get off social media, check the news responsibly, and hold space around you?

We all need each other to do this. Gather with me.

I have been longing for water so much lately, so this vision doesn’t surprise me. I’m feeling overwhelmed, and water is a balm for physical pain and spiritual chaos, a lull to quiet us, to hold us, just there at the shore.

I recently sent an apology message to someone on Facebook because a few years ago, I responded to a kind and curious message with an (only slightly) vague Instagram post instead of engaging with the person in a direct conversation. Why?

Because I was living in a reactionary way on social media, thinking that even as an Indigenous woman I needed to make a statement about everything and anything, that I needed to show everyone what it’s really like, that I needed to add to the “conversation” when I really adding to the noise. And I regretted it immediately.

Make no mistake, I receive messages that are certainly worth calling out as an example of how we shouldn’t be with one another, but this one wasn’t that. He was curious and kind, and I wasn’t.

I could have chosen to sit with his message for a few days, even a week, and I would have realized that it was one worth responding to in a way that fostered kinship. But I didn’t, and because I didn’t, I only added to the noise and toxic energy of the internet at the expense of a wonderful connection.

I needed the edge of the water then, and I need it now.

I worry for us in this moment, that we stretch and reach for any possible way to bring outrage to ourselves and one another in these spaces. And I know friends, there is plenty to be outraged about—share that, respond as you need, engage community—but also hold space at the edge of your ocean.

Words are medicine

Words are medicine

Words are medicine

Go find your medicine at the water’s edge.

I want to share a few exciting things with you!

First, Spring’s Miracles is out next week!

Pre-order a signed copy of the book here

And as a bonus, below is the seek and find that comes with Spring’s Miracles, feel free to download it now!

Spring's Miracles 9780593577851 Seek & Find Activity Sheet

2.9MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

And lastly, some really exciting news: I’m headed to Iona, Scotland for the launch of my upcoming book, Everything Is a Story!

I’ll be launching the book at a Writer’s Festival this October, and would love for you to come! If you are a writer or creative and want to spend a few days with others sharing, creating, and holding space at the edges of the water together, please join us.

There is a special opportunity to join a wonderful community on a pilgrimage to Iona led by Interfaith Alignment:

Journey with a group from Alignment to the sacred Isle of Iona
to live and work and learn in community for a special week of storytelling. Meet authors from around the world and find space for your own practices of writing.

You can find all the information here, we hope to see you this fall!

Friends,

We are almost done with this series, Portals of Poetry & Prayer.

I hope that however you’ve shown up here, however you show up to ideas of prayer and spirituality, you’re finding space to explore and hold care with yourself and the world around you.

The Comfort of Global Prayer is about as expansive an idea as I can bring to you today, and I’m happy to leave it as that.

I will touch on my ideas within this big idea, but I want you to take some time with it, too.

There are portals of prayer and spirit all around us, and I find comfort in knowing that is true all over the world, this globe we were born to, this globe we will pass away in that holds all of us, all of our stories.

So, our global prayers are held here, too.

As I’ve shared before, I was recently in Northern Ireland, and it was my first time traveling internationally alone. I found that this reality automatically created a sense of awareness in me—not just that I am a young woman traveling alone and have to watch out for myself (of course that’s true), but that I felt this thin space happening, a connection to all the people and places I was coming into contact with every moment of every day.

I was experiencing a visceral kind of liminality, and I’m grateful for that. When we travel to other places, to new places especially, we are thrust into a childlike wonder if we let ourselves get there. We explore culture, religion, language, stories, fashion, food, everything becoming a teacher to us.

In Ireland I was learning how people there pray, all and each of them, how they view their world, their environment, the challenges to all of it.

I was learning to pray differently in the presence of a beech tree that befriended me. I was learning how goats pray when they are hungry, or how we show up in exhausted gratitude to a big meal at the end of a busy day. I was learning why we pray to Saint Brigid, why we pray at holy water wells, why we pray when we are sad or lost, afraid and hoping for peace.

Prayer is everywhere, and when we look, when we walk through the portals, we learn something about ourselves, about The Sacred.

And a way that we experience global prayer is through poetry.

Think about the ways prayer shows up in our lives.

Stay in the spiritual fire. Let it cook you. This is a prayer that Rumi prayed for all of us.

To begin, begin. This is a prayer Wordsworth prayed over us.

Now I become myself. May Sarton prays.

A prayer-blessing of Saint Brigid finds us:

May Brigid bless the house wherein we dwell.
Bless every fireside, every wall and door.
Bless every heart that beats beneath its roof.
Bless every hand that toils to bring its joy.
Bless every foot that walks portals through.
May Brigid bless the house that shelters us.

A Potawatomi prayer from James Thunder, of the Forest County Potawatomi:

I pray to our Creator that we look back so that we may see ahead. Let us examine our lives so that we are respectful to our fellow humans and to nature. Let us respect our children and, above all, let us live our lives in accordance with our beliefs.

Let us share our natural resources for the good
of our People. Let us work for clean air and water and pray for the courage to stand up to those who would abuse our Mother Earth.

And from Joel Cross (@asoulcalledjoel), a prayer of holding this day:

Whatever happens this day, may you use it to awaken your heart. May your energy be directed by your highest intentions to find deeper connections, greater authenticity, and more love.

I think by now we’ve established a few things here:

1. that prayer is beautifully simple but can become complicated as well

2. that we can misuse prayer to harm ourselves and one another

3. and that prayer teaches us what it means to be human

So as we hold the realities of what’s happening around the world, may we find some comfort in the ways we show up to The Sacred, to God, to The Divine, Kche Mnedo (The Great Spirit), whoever or however.

May we wrap prayer around us like a blanket, to hold and bless, to tend and love.

In the spirit of global prayer, I want to share a project I’m ja part of called Calendar of Light by Interfaith Alignment.

This is a beautiful resource to use during the holiday season, and I encourage you to check it out. Each day you can receive a sacred gift from someone around the world of 5 minutes of peace and light.

Click here to check it out

If you’re free on January 9th, I encourage you to join me for a writing workshop on the journey of children’s publishing through childlikeness. I’m really excited for this space, and absolutely love working with Writing the Wild.

Please register here

It’s been so lovely to see Winter’s Gifts popping up in bookshops around the country!

If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, please do, and friends, if you could take a moment to lave a review on a website or for a bookstore, that would really mean a lot to me.

You can check out more on my entire book series HERE and remember there are seek and find sheets that are free to download for a special winter evening!

I would like to live
like a river flows,
carried by the surprise
of its own unfolding.

John O'Donohue

Friends,

Have you ever prayed to a river, to the sky or stars, to Mother Earth in all of her complex being?

Have you ever prayed to a god you’re not sure you believe in? Have you ever prayed to the open air in hopes that someone, somewhere, will notice? Have you ever prayed to your ancestors as you ask for guidance in this one precious life?

You’re not alone. Prayer, in fact, may be one of the most universal things about us as humans, a longing to connect our inner world with the world around us, with the cosmos, with the Infinite.

In this series on portals of poetry and prayer, we’ve thought about how prayer is a childlike portal to the Sacred, and we’ve considered how we are harmed by the ideas and institutions we’ve created around prayer.

When we begin to come to terms with this, that we live in a world in which, perhaps, prayer can become distorted, a thing used for power and control over one another and the earth, we have to ask who we are praying to now.

As we’ve grown older, as we’ve been shaped by our experiences in the world, both individual and collective, how do we understand who or what we are praying to?

When I was young, it gave me a lot of comfort to think of God as a Father, Abba, protector, caregiver. I think, probably, because my relationship to my own father was strained, confusing, nonexistent in some ways. I was comforted by this idea of a father-like figure in my life.

The flip side of this, though, was the southern baptist, colonial idea of God as brutal father, God as Zeus-like judge. So while I had this tenderness toward who I understood God to be, I had this confusing idea of a very judgmental, patriarchal god as well.

It was one of the most confusing aspects of my faith (and probably still is, if I’m honest). As I was writing my first book, Glory Happening, I’d discovered the work of Richard Rohr and the deep histories of the desert fathers and mothers—an expansive idea of God as Mystery. It freed me.

I needed this desperately, and in many ways, it connected me to things I couldn’t yet name but have since understood, an understanding that my Potawatomi and Celtic ancestors understood, ideas and embodiments of God in a world connected by love and kinship and tenderness.

In 2020 I spoke at Baylor University to a group of students in which a small, right-wing conservative group decided to verbally attack me and continue the pursuit with online vitriol even after I went back to Atlanta where I’d lived. They were angry that I used the term “Mother Mystery” in one of my prayers, which I actually didn’t, but once they spoke it, I knew it would be a powerful moment to reclaim our ideas of the sacred once again.

So I wrote this in protest:

Mother Mystery,
Comfort those who cannot be comforted by a government that continually fails them.
Comfort those whose leaders blame them for their oppression.
Comfort the children, the elderly, the tired, the immunocompromised.
Comfort those who nobody listened to.
Turn us back again and again to the goodness of this earth,
that we may remember what it means to be in awe, even when it’s hard.
Fill us with an urgency to practice our communal calling as people, to decolonize our ways of individualistic selfishness.
Draw us together, to you, to a vision of a better way.
We rest in your holy goodness.
We rest in knowing that
winter will hold us as we ask what it means to be
human right now.
Onward and amen.

Yes, what if we pray to God as Mother? What if we pray to God as Mystery? What if we expand and expand and expand, the light and love expanding within and without us?

Just as we approach prayer with childlikeness, just as we ask big questions about how our ideas of prayer can harm, we get to ask who or what we understand we are praying to.

I often ask myself who I pray to.

Kche Mnedo

Mamogosnan

Segmekwe

Brigid

The Sacred

Mystery

My ancestors

Future generations

The Universe

The trees

The ocean

God, maybe

We have ideas of how to heal the world, how to heal ourselves, and we access that power through prayer. We access it when we become expansive enough to imagine a better world, a world grounded in kinship and love.

If, in the deepest parts of our souls, we long for kinship and love and want to be guided by them, then who or what we pray to will be fueled by that sacred fire, the fire of belonging and reciprocity.

That’s how interfaith work makes sense—we hold that solidarity in how we pray, and respect who we pray to, while holding the tenderness of our own humanity in the balance of it all.

I guess, what I’m trying to say, is that I don’t really care who you pray to, but what you embody as you approach prayer, because that changes everything.

Maybe the whole point of this isn’t to get the right answers, anyway. It’s about expanding beyond ourselves into the sacred imaginal, as Cynthia Bourgeault describes it:

…it is also and primarily supremely the realm of cosmic assistance. It is the “place” from which saints, teachers, masters, and all manner of abler souls reach out across the apparent divide between the worlds to support or where necessary modify earthly outcomes in tandem with willing and attuned hearts here below.

In other words, we shape our souls, our inner world, around love and care and kinship, and when we pray, we take that with us, and whoever we pray to holds it all with us, and the whole world changes a little because of that moment. How beautiful.

Mirabai Starr writes in her book Ordinary Mysticism

The liberation of all beings is tied up with your own awakening.

So, we awaken. We expand. We ask questions. We stay childlike. We wonder who’s listening. And we keep praying, because prayer is a sacred portal.

I recently spoke to a local elementary school, and it was such a gift. I love sharing my children’s books with communities and students.

In December, my dear friend Asha Frost and I are hosting a family winter storytime! It’s free, on December 13th from 7-8pm ET. I hope you’ll join us to celebrate my book Winter’s Gifts and her new oracle deck, which you can preorder here!

Register for the free storytime at this link!

And lastly, here is a recent Instagram post about simple sentences you can share with your family and friends this Thanksgiving about Indigenous people.

Friends,

October is coming to an end, and as we head into November, I’m wondering how we are going to enter into it.

While leading a session at the retreat in Northern Ireland, we talked (and sang) about the idea of a doorway, a portal, that when we choose to gather together, whether physically or from far in spaces like this, we are intentionally entering through a doorway. We are declaring that it matters how we hold space with and for one another.

I know things are heavy right now.

Let me say it again:

I know things are heavy right now.

Take a deep breath. Cry and grieve. Weep and wail. Laugh to get it all out sometimes. Take a nap or two. Ask people to please vote. Pray for a world of peace. Tell someone you love them. Tell yourself that you’re loved, and buy some flowers to prove it. Test the love of God, the Sacred, the Great Mystery, and find that at the end of the day, the answer is yes, you are dearly, dearly loved.

I’ve gone back and forth, asking whether I should write a new series right now, with the election coming up, with so many things going on individually and collectively. But then I thought about why I write.

I write to remind us to keep going. I write so that we can heal. I write so we can ask questions together about this thing called life.

So, I want to hold space for words, for poetry, for ideas to emerge and change and take us on a journey.

And I want to explore three things as we do it:

portals

poetry

and prayer.

I ask that you hold space with me here, in this, and remember that portals are expansive, poetry is expansive, and prayer is expansive.

It’s no secret that I bring my own religious trauma into this space, as many of us do. So we hold ourselves tenderly as we ask how our world expands. I can’t wait to do that with you, no matter who becomes the next president of the United States, no matter what’s happening here or around the world.

In all of our humanness, we ask how the everyday portals of poetry and prayer show themselves to us, and when possible, we choose to walk through.

Below are the five parts that we will be exploring together in the coming weeks:

1. Portals of Childlike Prayer

2. Are we harmed by prayer or by institutions?

3. Who are we praying to now?

4. The comfort of prayer (global prayer)

5. How prayer brings us home to ourselves and each other

So today, let’s think about the Portals of Childlike Prayer.

One of my favorite Sara Groves songs is called “Maybe There’s a Loving God” about a young girl who doesn’t seem to fit the mold of her family, society, or religion, and finds herself again and again splayed out in the backyard staring up at the sky, pondering the universe and if/how much she is loved.

I don’t listen to a lot of “Christian” music anymore, but this song has always been a tenderly beautiful one for me, a reminder that we can show up to The Sacred in the unique and beautiful ways that we need to, even if our families, communities, or society doesn’t understand.

My favorite lines from the song:

Maybe I was made this way
To think and to reason and to question and to pray
And I have never prayed a lot
But maybe there's a loving God

Maybe this was made for me
For lying on my back in the middle of a field
Maybe that's a selfish thought
Or maybe there's a loving God

This young person thinks they haven’t ever really prayed, and as I sing the song, I want to grab and hold them tightly, and tell them that all of it was prayer, the entire time.

There are portals of prayer all around us, and approaching prayer with childlikeness is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves and the world around us. As many great mystics of our time approach prayer, we approach it with curiosity, tenderness, and care, with surrender.

Think back—what was prayer like for you as a child, and what shaped your ideas of prayer?

I grew up Southern Baptist, so prayer was strict and mandatory, and left me feeling like I was constantly failing if I didn’t want to pray a certain way, for long enough, or with enough conviction.

So, like much of my spiritual evolution, I am trying to experience prayer as expansive, from the ways I write about prayer in my first book, Glory Happening, like this:

I have discovered you, and I am discovering you.

In the watchful hours of the night, I watch my little one

and you watch me.

In the bright light hours of day, we play, all of us,

and work and toil, back into the waxing moon’s shadow.

And there we quiet down again.

And there we are discovered,

and there we discover.

And later, to the way I write about prayer in Living Resistance, that we breathe in and out prayer all the time, and it is our resistance to a heavy and hurting world.

So, maybe we should lie on our backs in the middle of a field more often than we do.

Maybe we should stop and recognize that tending a garden, writing in a journal, slowly sipping coffee, laughing with our friends, marveling at a spider’s web, are all embodiments of prayer, all portals to the divine.

And if that is prayer, maybe everything is prayer, and the childlike curiosity in us can open up our hearts and accept that.

Practice:

If you’d like to write a poem reflecting on this, below is my poem and a prompt:

If I prayed the way a child would…

If I prayed the way a child would,

I’d laugh at a world of wonder,

holding mystery with my palms up,

reaching out for the universe to claim me

in a steady, tender embrace.

If I prayed the way a child would,

I’d marvel at the lit candle by my side

and draw pictures of starlight in my journal.

I’d make a pact with the sun and the moon

to never, ever forget each other’s goodness.

If I prayed the way a child would,

I would hold the world’s hopes and dreams close

and shed, equally, tears for every hurting heart,

and suddenly realize that we are all connected

and held in the same, tender heart of God.

I’d smile and wipe my tears, determined to never let go

of the refrain “Everything is beautiful” even if

understanding it takes me a lifetime.

This week, on October 31st, I celebrate the one-year anniversary of my first children’s book, Winter’s Gifts, being out in the world!

Will you do me a few favors to celebrate?

1. Post about Winter’s Gifts to social media and encourage folks to order it

2. Review it on Amazon or Goodreads

3. Plan a storytime with friends

4. Order a few copies for yourself or others

5. Ask your local bookstore to sell it

Thank you for being my community.

Onward through portals of prayer.

Friends,

I am so excited to share with you this exclusive interview with author Matthias Roberts about his new book, Holy Runaways!

This book fits so beautifully into the After Church series that we are really diving into starting next week, and I’m so glad to share his words with you. So many folks have been “burned by religion” as the subtitle of the book states, and we are looking for both community but also for care along the way.

Matthias captured so much of my own heart, grief, longing, confusion and complexity in the words of this book, and reminded me that I’m not alone on this spiritual journey, whatever it looks like.

How do we rebuild our lives after the grief and the pain? How do we manage when we realize that there are religious spaces where maybe we weren’t ever fully wanted? How do we hold space for others who are having the same experiences?

I was honored to endorse Holy Runaways. Here’s what I said:

“For anyone who has a traumatic relationship to the often-toxic institution that is American Christianity, Holy Runaways is a book that will hold your hand and remind you that you aren’t alone. The stories and wisdom in this book will help us come home to ourselves and recognize that God (or The Sacred) was here all along, waiting in the wide world for us to learn to deeply love the runaways in ourselves and one another.”

Matthias writes with a clarity and tenderness, and his words are such a gift to every reader. I hope you’ll enjoy our chat below.

I want to point you to his website where you can learn more about his work, and please click the links after the interview to buy the book!

Now, onto the interview!

Tell us more about the title of the book and why it was important for you to frame this idea of “holy runaways.”

One common theme that comes up when I talk with folks about their experiences leaving harmful religion is the pervasive sense that we are doing something wrong by leaving, or running away. It’s almost as if many of us believe we are giving up on something we shouldn’t. That we are the problem. I wanted to reframe that and explore the idea that maybe we are doing something incredibly holy by saying goodbye to the places that have harmed us and searching for something different and better.

What did you learn about yourself writing this book? We all continue to evolve spiritually as we write a book, how did that show up in your life?

That’s an understatement. I feel like any creative undertaking can almost inevitably speed up that evolution. When I first started imagining this book, I thought I knew what I wanted to say. When I got halfway into writing the book, I realized that most of the things I thought I was writing about I didn’t really believe anymore. That led to a crisis, which delayed the first draft by many months (much to my editor’s chagrin.) This is a continual lesson I’m learning: trying to pinpoint a moment of that evolution and put it on a page is an impossible task. Yet it’s worth trying. I had to ask myself, “Am I going to write what I used to believe, or am I going to attempt to be honest with myself and write what I think I believe right now.” I’m still learning how to be honest with myself, and therefore with others. That is not to say I am constantly lying. It is to say, I often don’t know what I think I know.

“I think we are more than just confused, fearful, or misguided runaways. I think we are holy.” I love the power of this quote so much, and I’ve encountered Christians who are so scared for the future of Christianity because they feel so troubled by those who leave. What would you say to the runaways, and what would you say to those fearful Christians?

To both, I’d ask, “When was the last time you rested?” For us runaways, it’s so easy to get caught up in the idea that we have to figure everything out right now. I think that is an extension of the fear you’re describing here, the fear that there’s something inherently dangerous about being in unknown places. I return to the words of Jesus from John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you…do not be afraid.” Do we believe that peace and rest is available to us right now, in this very moment? If so, how might we put down these frantic questions and exhale?

In a nation of so many toxic institutions, how do you think we can stay grounded with The Sacred and our own holy belonging? How do you personally do that?

I think one of the ways we can do this is by leaning into the practices of grief and anger. I believe these are spiritual practices that allow us to get closer to our pain, closer to the places that hurt. We feel these things for a reason, but so many of us have been taught to put them aside. The more we ignore our pain, the less grounded we are going to feel. 

I want to emphasize the “practice” part. It takes time to become familiar with these places in ourselves.

How does your work as a queer therapist and theologian overlap? You write a lot about your experiences and how your story has been shaped, but what does that look like today? What liminal spaces do you inhabit?

It would be reductive to say that most of the harm queer people have experienced is because of poor theology, but, in the same breath, so much of the harm that queer folks have experienced is because of poor theology. This is as true within the church as it is outside of the church. As a therapist, I deeply believe that if we aren’t engaging the collective systems of harm around us, we aren’t interacting with the whole picture. It’s rare that I explicitly discuss theology within my therapy room, I am not a Christian therapist, but there is almost always a theological component at play whenever we start to engage harm.

What was the best part of writing this book? The hardest part?

There’s a single answer here. Both the best and hardest part was trying to write about God.

Imagine someone sitting down to read this book. What do you hope they experience in your stories and your wisdom? How do you hope it changes them, encourages them, challenges them?

My biggest hope is that people will experience companionship as they read. I hope this book will help wrap language around the pain so many of us have carried but don’t know how to describe. The written word is a powerful way to experience community and part of how we heal is by being able to bring our pain into community. I hope this book facilitates a sliver of that.

Share with us a favorite quote or section of the book and what it means to you. 

This is from a chapter called “Wind” and I think it captures both the joy and difficulty I experienced while attempting to write about God:

Recently, I was explaining my work to a new acquaintance, who immediately asked, “So are you still religious then?”

I stumbled and stammered. “Kind of? I’m not sure. Um, I don’t really know anymore.”

And that was the truth.

This is also the truth: When I’m out walking my dog, listening to the wind in the trees and feeling the warmth of morning sun on my face, I breathe in something that is more than just salty Puget Sound air. Something that is big, elemental, and comforting. And as I exhale, I whisper, “Thank you, Jesus.”

Yes, maybe it’s a habit from when I was a kid, a reflex. But in the moment, it’s a sincere prayer arising from somewhere deep within me. In those moments, I do believe.

But there are other moments when I hear someone say something that reveals their religious faith, something that would have been perfectly normal for me to say a few years ago. Something like: “It seems like evil is trying to hold you back from your calling.”

Overhearing this in a coffee shop, I blink, try to make sense of it, and my body jolts as I realize I don’t think that way anymore.

In such moments, I tell myself I don’t believe in God. In fact, I want nothing to do with belief.

And yet there are many other moments when I’m sitting in my office as someone tries to find words to describe horrific experiences of abuse they’ve suffered. I know then, in the core of my being, that I do still believe in evil.

I harbor so many fragments of a faith that once felt whole, now scattered randomly around me. I can pick one up and look at it, thinking, This looks pretty! I’m going to hold on to this. But later I’ll trip over one of those fragments and discover it has cut me deeply, painfully. I’ll curse and ask, “Why haven’t I thrown this away yet?”

My only answer is, “I don’t know.”

Click here to buy Holy Runaways!

Friends,

I’m feeling excited, anxious, and anticipatory to share with you our new Liminality Journal series called After Church.

This series will be a deep-dive into my own journey leaving institutional Christian spaces, building off of so much of what I’ve written about in my books, with stories and, I hope, safety for those who are on similar journeys.

Today I’m introducing the series, and then we will go deeper into the 5 phases of leaving church spaces:

1. Recognizing

2. Leaving

3. Grieving

4. Widening (or exploring)

5. Trusting (or settling)

You’ll learn more about each of these as we go, but I want to tell you why I decided to write on this.

First, before I begin, a little note: this is my story. If you read it and you’re feeling threatened or worried for the future of the church, I can’t help you with that, and I ask you to hold an open heart and mind to learn from those who have chosen to leave. By sharing my story, I’m not saying that those who go to church are awful people, but I’m acknowledging the liminality of all of it, the tension we all hold in trying to make these difficult decisions. If you’re reading my stories and it’s triggering your own religious trauma, please don’t feel the need to keep reading. I hope that my words help those of us with religious trauma to keep moving forward toward community and love, and this series is especially for you.

As a public speaker, I travel all over the country and share my words and books with a lot of different people. Many of these spaces are Christian spaces, specifically progressive churches or church conferences.

And it’s always interesting, being asked where I go to church or what denomination I’m a part of. If I’m honest, I’ve never felt drawn to any denomination, and have, in fact, felt pretty uncomfortable in the face of those questions. So when asked, I am honest with people that I don’t go to church, and I’m not part of a denomination.

And I can often see it on their faces, even if it flashes across their eyes just for an instant. How can you be a faith leader if you don’t teach on the Bible or go to church?

Well, that’s why I’m writing this series, I guess.

I want us to remember that our spiritual journeys are meant to be, and should be, expansive, and that as human beings, we are allowed to shift and change throughout our lives. If anything, this is a series about evolution and the spiritual journey, about how I got here and where I hope to go.

Subscribe now

It’s taken me a bit of time, but for the most part, I’m not really that worried about those questions I get anymore, and I know that I’m public enough about my story that when someone brings me to speak in their spaces, they know who they are going to get:

I’m an Indigenous woman, raised in the Southern Baptist tradition followed by various other church communities, who has found herself in an expansive spirituality where she can ask questions and explore The Sacred while trying to decolonize as best she can.

And I think a lot of you are in similar places, too.

So this series is for us to explore together, to ask questions together, and yes, to grieve together.

First, we recognize that something has shifted in us and we have a decision to make.

Next, we choose to leave the spaces that are harming us.

Then, we enter a season of grieving, and this can just be really hard.

After grief we begin widening or exploring, where we ask what might come next for us.

Finally, we trust, mostly ourselves, to enter into new spaces of community, whatever that looks like for us.

Sure, you could call this a deconstruction series. I can just feel the discomfort coming through the screen from some of you who read those words. There has been criticism of deconstruction by a lot of people (some of it very valid when it’s used in mostly white spaces), but I push back against the idea that deconstruction will only lead to, well, destruction.

Many of us have left church spaces because we had to in order to find ourselves, and we have found ourselves. So at this moment, I’m not really interested in framing it as deconstruction, but as a larger process that takes time and is, often, cyclical and not linear.

Like the first time I prayed in Potawatomi and recognized that there was something missing in my life, I had to leave institutional church spaces to recognize the expansive world of The Sacred and how welcomed I am there.

I believe the liminal spaces where many of us live today after church are sacred spaces.

So, I’m inviting you to take some deep breaths here, and join me on this journey.

Thank you for being here.

Stay tuned.

A few quick reminders:

I’ll be in Indiana this week, with a book signing at Notre Dame on Wednesday evening and then keynote at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary on Thursday evening for their Rooted & Grounded conference. If you’re in the area, please visit!

And on October 17th at 2pm ET, I’ll be chatting with author Katherine May about Living Resistance for her fabulous book club!

If you’d like to join us, register here, and make sure you use the password linnet.

I have a very special surprise for you today! I had the honor to read an early copy of Simran Jeet Singh’s new book The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. It’s a gorgeous book that offers stories about the Sikh experience, our sacred and shared humanity, and the complexity of caring for one another in a seemingly divided world.

I asked Simran a few questions about this book, and below is our conversation. I’m so excited to introduce you to his work, and after you spend some time with these words, head over to his website and purchase the book! You’ll be so glad you did.

You write about how differences in people make you feel more curious than judgmental. Do you think we’ve lost the ability to be kindly curious about one another in America? And how might we gain that curiosity back?

I don’t know if we’ve lost the ability to be kindly curious about one another in America, but it’s certainly easier right now to meet difference with judgement rather than curiosity. Judging others is easier, and it’s especially easy when it’s people we don’t know and feel afraid of. By closing ourselves off to them, we don’t have to grapple with the possibility that they might carry some truth too, or that we might have something to learn from them.

But I’ve learned firsthand the pain that comes from closing ourselves off to the world and one another – and the violent consequences that can ensue from that, too. It’s difficult to engage people who are different from us, especially those we disagree with. And yet, the stakes are too high not too. I refuse to become the kind of person who diminishes others because of their own ego, or at least, I’m trying my very hardest to stay humble and open and receptive. As so many spiritual traditions teach us, including my own Sikh faith, it’s the openness and humility that gives us the best chance at happiness in our lives.

You write, “I have learned that deflecting ignorance and hate doesn’t help anyone, and that we won’t ever truly care for one another until we connect with one another. I have also learned that we can’t lecture our way into people’s hearts, and that opening ourselves up to strangers takes courageous vulnerability. The greatest payoff of sharing ourselves with one another is going beyond our individual experiences and seeing life from other viewpoints.”

What do believe the role of storytelling and story sharing plays in our lives as we try to connect with others?

I learned early that we can’t lecture our way into people’s hearts and that information alone won’t get us dignity or equity. What we really need to do is create a point of connection – empathy – so that we invite others to care for us. Some might accept the invitation, and some might not, but the challenge is to first create the opening so that people feel comfortable entering into your heart.

This is where storytelling comes in for me, because by simply opening my heart up to the world, I have found that it can open other people’s hearts, too. And while I sometimes worry that this approach is self-centered, I remind myself that the stories we share can be about us, but they don’t have to be centered on us – at least not when we bring them forward as vehicles for insights that go beyond ourselves.

That’s how I have come to view the power of storytelling. Stories are windows and mirrors and sliding doors, and they are even more than that. They are gifts of heart-opening that we can give to ourselves and to others.  

I loved these lines from the book:

“This is what Sikh wisdom has taught me. Liberation is not about what happens to us after we die; it’s about the here and now. It is about unlocking our potential and unfettering ourselves from anything that keeps us from connection, love, and joy within this life.”

I love this so much, and it holds such deep wisdom for so many of us. Especially growing up in the evangelical church that told me my reward was in heaven, I felt so separate from practicing connecting and joy here and now. So, what is one way to practice love and joy on a small level? 

There are so many opportunities for us to live in the present, and we each have our own challenges, distractions that take away our attention from the current moment and put our attention elsewhere. For me, the challenges can sometimes be work, or planning family travel, or worrying about the future of our world.

When I find myself out of sync, and distracted by the important realities all around me, I try to take a step back and regain my balance. What is going on around me at this current moment? What needs my attention right now? And most importantly, what am I grateful for? It’s this simple practice that helps ground me and recenter me, and bring me back to an appreciation for all that we have with us in the current moment.

There were many moments in the book where you share about how much your traditions mean to you. I loved reading about your turban. You write,

“Every morning as I wrap my turban around my head, I look in the mirror and reflect on the Sikh values that it represents. Oneness. Love. Justice. Service. Equality.”

This reminds me of how I feel when I braid my own hair or my son’s hair—these special traditions that tether us to love. What traditions do you hope your children carry with them as they grow older?

More than anything, I want my children to be happy, and this is why I’m hopeful they will cherish their Sikh heritage. It’s brought me so much joy, and I’d love for it to bring them joy, too. As part of that, I love combing and braiding their long, uncut hair before school every morning. It’s hard to describe, but there’s something connective about that. I think about the generations of Sikhs in my family and community who have performed the daily ritual with their own children for centuries.

I also hope with all hopes that my daughters support my favorite basketball team, the San Antonio Spurs. They don’t have to carry the same love for the Spurs as I do (as if that’s even possible). But I would love to share that with them. And it would break my heart if they came home one day wearing a Celtics or Lakers jersey!

What message would you give to educators, activists and organizers who are trying to do meaningful work in the world right now?

Do it anyway. This is a simple teaching that I’ve picked up that has really served me well over the years.

What you’re doing today is not popular. Do it anyway.

What you’re doing today is extremely difficult. Do it anyway.

What you’re doing today is thankless and unnoticed. Do it anyway.

What you’re doing today is not appropriately appreciated or compensated. Do it anyway.

What I learn from my Sikh faith is that we do the right thing and serve others not just because it makes the world better and more just, but because it makes us better and more just. It’s hard to fully see this and feel this, especially when it seems like the world is against us. But remember that you are also growing from all the love you are giving so generously. So despite how challenging and thankless it is, do it anyway.

In this book, you bring up so many important topics, including colonization and the stories we tell about one another. This section about the golden rule is really important, especially for Americans who grew up hearing this so often:

“It struck me that a similar impulse underlies the golden rule: Whatever I want for myself is what others want, too. This assumption may be well intentioned, but it’s also problematic. It’s self‐centered to think that everyone wants the same things we do, and to boot, it could result in a savior mentality in which we presume to know what’s best for others. Misguided outlooks like these give us the sense of being generous while also masking the harm we might cause others.”

I loved that you brought this up! The deep underlying colonialism that exists in the golden rule as often bothered me too. And there’s so much to learn in our inter faith wisdom with this—decolonizing how we talk about connection and treatment of one another. How will interfaith work help us heal?

Interfaith work can help us heal, but only if we can approach it with humility and openness. Too often, we enter into these spaces unaware of how even our best of intentions result in marginalizing others – and interfaith organizing is not immune to this. We have to begin asking ourselves who is at the table and who is not; who is overrepresented and who is underrepresented; and what are the assumptions we’re making about what constitutes good religion.

I’m a believer in interfaith engagement. When you grow up in a minority religious tradition, you don’t have much option but to enter the frame, because it’s one of the few onramps to equity. And through the process, I’ve made many great friends and have witnessed people doing incredible work to build bridges across difference. I love that.

I think the next frontier for interfaith activists will be similar to what we’re seeing for activists in other spheres. How do we approach this work in ways that are truly inclusive, in which one group is not centered, in which we interrogate our established norms and commit to creating equal footing for all parties. I think our push for religious equity is coming soon, and I’m excited to be part of that effort. 

I’m so grateful to Simran for giving us the gift of his experiences and viewpoints.

Go grab a copy of the book, read it with friends, and explore how Sikh wisdom can transform your world.

Onward!

Friends,

We took a bit of a break from this series for the month of May to write poems together, and in June, I caught my breath. I’m excited to jump back into our Somebody That I Used to Know series with this piece I wrote years ago called A Chemical Reaction of the Soul.

It’s just a fun, creative read, and I remember feeling so much the passion of what words can mean when I wrote it. My early days of blogging were punctuated by chasing toddlers around and smelling the coffee brewing at the coffee shop where my partner Travis worked.

Writing then was different—less stressful, maybe, but no less curious than the journey is today. So, here’s the piece, and as always, the bold words are my current self interacting with my past self.

Hope you enjoy!

A Chemical Reaction of the Soul

​​I’ll be the first to admit that I know little about chemistry.

But recently I had a conversation with my son about chemical reactions, how something as simple as baking a cake becomes a chemical reaction–because the cake can never go back to being flour, salt, sugar, or eggs. It has transformed.

Neither can my coffee, that is ground and immersed in water inside the coffee maker, go back to being the original bean again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of deconstructing or decolonizing my faith.

If you’ve read my book, Native, you know that I frame this conversation of decolonization through an everyday lens, a choice we make to disrupt the status quo of colonialism that is constantly around us.

When I first began writing and published my first book, Glory Happening, I was just starting my deconstruction journey, which naturally led me to deeper questions of what colonization has done to so many of us and how we move forward from here.

About two years ago I had a conversation with a friend that ended in the realization that I am no longer the person I was in high school and college.

My perspectives on faith and the church have shifted, along with who I believe should be included and excluded in such matters. Since then, I’ve left the institutional church, and have conversations with others who have done the same. What will it take for especially majority white churches to recognize the complicity in colonization over the years?

I often travel and speak to those churches, and the reality is, the church really needs to transform, to become something (or somebody) else, and never look back, except to learn from our mistakes and make sure we don’t repeat the oppression we’ve historically enacted on others. Otherwise, too many of us will continue to leave, and we will find healing in spaces that have nothing to do with the faiths we were raised in.

It seems I’ve become someone else over the years, but still hold in tact the original essence of who I’ve always been.

Is it possible to have a sort of chemical reaction of the soul? Is it possible that we transform so that we cannot be what we once were?

I believe that’s a healthier version of ourselves, and if we’re really honest, fighting against transformation will leave us unhappy, missing out on new aspects of ourselves that are waiting to be discovered.

When we refuse to change, to evolve, to transform, we become stuck in only what we’ve known, because we’re scared to ask questions. But the question-asking, the wondering and wandering– it’s what helps those chemical reactions of the soul take place. All of those substances combine in us to bring transformation.

My coffee, steaming in my cup with cream and sugar, will never be a coffee bean again.

It has some sort of new purpose.

Just the same, my life journey today, embracing my Potawatomi identity and asking the American church how it can be better, is a version of myself that cannot forget what it has seen or go back to what it once was.

If coffee transforms, so can we.

And each fall leaf,

every flower,

every bird’s egg that hatches,

each child that grows and matures,

a caterpillar that will become a butterfly,

every pumpkin pie or fortune cookie or veggie omelet–

a chemical reaction in the world, a transformation.

So if we aren’t who we were yesterday, and we’re not yet transformed into who we’ll be tomorrow, who are we today?

Maybe we simply ARE,

this transforming thing,

the cake that’s still in the oven,

the coffee that’s being ground.

Maybe we’re inside the middle of transformation, where it hurts a little, the caterpillar making its way toward the butterfly.

While we are in this cocoon, dreaming of who we’ll be, working toward it, we acknowledge that this space, right now, is necessary and good in the process, and we cannot skip it.

You and I are in the midst of our chemical reaction of the soul, and we cannot go back now.

The only way is forward,

and into glorious, unknown light.

Iw, amen.

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Friends,

Thank you for being here. The Liminality Journal is a space to explore our questions, to ask what it means to be human, and to journey toward wholeness together through poetry and prose.

As a free subscriber, you can check out all the posts in this series by scrolling through past posts!

In August I’m starting a new series for paid subscribers called Questions with Kait: writer’s life series, where I’ll be answering questions and sharing about the writing process! If you’re a writer (or aspire to be one) or know someone who might be interested in this series, please share it!

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Hey, friends.

Some of you know this about me, and some of you don’t.

I’ve embodied many experiences and beliefs in my 33 years of life.

I’ve been cautious of vaccines and in favor of them.

I’ve been a registered Republican (for no good reason but upbringing) and a registered Democrat (while wanting nothing to do with either of them).

I’ve been pro-healthy-sex and part of the purity movement.

I’ve been ignorant and I’ve learned to be better.

I’ve messed up and I’ve tried again.

I’ve been a people-pleaser and a boundary-enforcer.

I’ve been actively assimilating and worked toward decolonization.

I’ve hurt people and I’ve been hurt by people.

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Do you see where I’m going with this? We are, of course, more than the seemingly opposing positions we’ve taken over the years. We are complex and nuanced, too.

The title of today’s piece is Having Grace for the Person You Have Been and this is a tough one. I even write about this at the end of my book, Native:

One of the most anxiety-ridden realities of writing a book is that these words are trapped in time. As I write, you are getting the Kaitlin of her thirtieth year of life, the one who has only learned as much as she can by this point. By this time next year, she will know new things, and those things will shape her. She will have found better ways to express love, better language to fight hate, and will have learned more from the books that have yet to be written by others in the world doing extraordinary work.

What you get right now is me, and I pray that as I grow, you hold that space with me, and that as you grow, I hold that space with you. May we look back on our long-ago selves with kind- ness and know that there were always things we should have done better.

I can’t wait to see where this journey takes us—together.

I wrote this as the afterword of the book because I’ve seen this time after time—authors get berated for what they wrote when they should have known better. But the problem is, we didn’t know better yet. We were still learning. We were still ignorant of something.

I am someone who is constantly learning. Like a little kid, I light up when I make a new connection. It excites me to no end to find new ways of being human that are equitable and courageous. I need that in my life— it doesn’t mean I won’t make mistakes.

But it does mean I am committed to learning a better way, and I believe you are, too, and that’s why you’re here.

I wrote this blog post while I was working on Native, as I was processing all of this.

So, I hope these words speak to you, and remind you to have some grace for who you’ve been, who you are now, and who you’ll be in an hour, tomorrow, next year.

Having Grace for the Person You have been:

I am in the middle of writing my second book. Anyone who has written a book, or even an article that is published, knows the embarrassment that comes with looking back on something you’ve written and wondering, How on earth did I think that? Really. I think this all the time about previous stuff I wrote, which is why I started this series!

Our cheeks flush red and we hope that our current Twitter followers don’t judge us by our ignorance. We hope that they will understand how much we’ve grown, how much work we’re doing to be better than we once were while also helping hold us accountable to who we should be.

I wrote a piece a few months ago on the death of John Allen Chau, missionary to the Sentinelese Islands who endangered an Indigenous people, and they acted to protect themselves. As I read the story, I thought back to the young woman I once was, the young woman in the baptist church who was so sure that she would save the world and bring the people around her to Jesus. Love was mixed with colonization, and I had no idea that I was playing a part in one of the greatest tragedies to happen upon mankind: destroying one another in the name of Jesus. This is a tension that I know a lot of us face who grew up in evangelical Christian spaces. We are still complicit, even as we work to decolonize.

And so, as I write my second book, I fear for the woman I will become and the one I am now. I feel like I’m learning a thousand lessons a day from Twitter and parenting alone, so what if I read my own words two years from now and I’m disgusted with what I see? This space has been evolving for me— I have gained better boundaries with social media over the last two years. It is a space to work, to write, but not a space where strangers or trolls get to define my identity.

There, it seems, I must find grace for who I once was. I must find grace for the woman I have been.

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It took some time for me, in therapy over the last year, to learn that I need to look back with a constant love note to the girl I was, the girl who didn’t understand fully the systems that shaped her. She was full of love, but sometimes had trouble finding the right outlet for it. She was fueled by community and connection, yet she didn’t have words for it.

I know now.

And yet, I don’t know much.

And when I’m older, I will say the same things.

I meet people all the time who, when I tell them something about the struggle of being Indigenous or a part of our history that is often covered up, they say, “I just didn’t know, I’m so sorry.” In that moment, I’m not looking for an apology; I’m pointing to our education and church systems that have so badly prepared us for conversations like this, systems that erase the stories of Indigenous peoples and people of color.

I’m looking to say, “You didn’t know, but now you do. What happens next? What you will do for the next generation?” This is still something really important that I hold to when I travel and speak, when I share stories, when I write books. I don’t think people change when they are shamed into it. I think we change when we realize it brings us all closer to one another, to Divine Love. I really do believe we can tell the truth in fiercely gentle ways, naming the wrong while extending an invitation to what can be better.

Does that mean I allow people to walk all over me as I try to explain colonization to them? Of course not. I am often distrustful of people, and have stopped expecting the best from everyone. Some people are not ready to begin truth-telling as the path to healing, and I know that. But I will hold space and hope for the ones that are ready, and we will do it together.

Our dearest Mary Oliver said,

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Well, perhaps one thing we should plan to do is know RIGHT NOW that we will be disappointed in a few things about who we are.

Perhaps if we know RIGHT NOW that we will be ever growing, ever changing, ever evolving, we will have more grace even for future us.

I live in a spotlight on social media, as do many. Educators, activists, commentary writers, journalists, religious leaders, politicians– we are put under a scrutiny that is well-deserved, because we are speaking on behalf of not only ourselves but those we wish so much to better care for.

I speak on behalf of my own story as a mixed woman who is Indigenous and white, and yet, when others see me, I represent so much of the Indigenous story. It’s not right, of course; we are not a monolith, and we have individual experiences, layered with privilege or lack of it. We’ve got to be honest about that, too.

There will be plenty of unrelenting criticism.

There will be plenty of rage over things we’ve said and done, over things we’ve left unsaid and undone.

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And there should be, because we are looking in a mirror. We are asking to see who we really are as America, and we are asking for our systems of oppression to be taken down. That should happen, and the way of grace says that it should happen with holy fire.

As Rumi writes, “Stay in the spiritual fire. Let it cook you.”

Perhaps, in this space, if we begin with grace for ourselves, we will learn to follow with grace for one another.

We live in an era in which people like to out-woke one another, all in vain. But I wouldn’t dare call myself woke when there’s still so much waking to do.

This statement allows me to recognize that I haven’t arrived, and if I haven’t arrived, neither did the nine year old me whose father had just left, and neither will the 80 year old me who is struggling with what it means to age with kindness and sometimes feel alone.

This statement allows me to apologize when I get it wrong and work to make it right, like I’ve seen others do.

What if we chose the way of grace?

What if, when we know our own faults, we also know our own strengths?

And if we know our own faults and our own strengths, can we call those out of each other when the time is right?

Our systems of oppression must be toppled. That will never change.

The question is, what kind of people will we be in the midst of it?

We can be people full of grace and full of anger, make no mistake about that. Our anger leads us to ask questions, and grace is the partner that holds our hand along the way.

Can you feel that?

Can you believe that?

Perhaps the child that still sits in a chair in the corner of your soul is asking you to tell them something. Sometimes we need to go back and read our own words to ourselves. These words made me cry. I need to practice loving my child self more—how about you??

Perhaps the young adult that still rests at the pit of your stomach wants you to say, “It’s okay. I get it,” and mean it.

Perhaps the person that you’ve sought to understand but can’t needs you to step into the fray and speak, “I want to know your story and understand.”

With grace.

With grace.

With grace.

With fierce love that invites us into a better way, too.

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Hello, friends!

This coming Saturday is Spring Solstice, so look for something special from me in your inbox toward the end of the week! You know I love a good ritual, and I can’t wait to share a new one with you.

Today, we’re getting down to it—a piece I wrote a few years ago called Are We Saved or Traumatized by American Christianity? oof.

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This is a tough one, and you may not agree with what I write or embody here. Growing up in the Southern Baptist church and being deeply entrenched in evangelical white churches for years, I didn’t have language for a lot of this stuff until more recently, and this was one of those pieces that I just really needed to write.

As always, the bolded words are me today interacting with me then. I hope the words here are helpful for you, wherever you are on your spiritual journey.

Here we go:

Are We Saved or Traumatized by (white) American Christianity?

When I was seven years old, I prayed the “sinner’s prayer,” asking Jesus to “come into my heart” to save me from sin and death. If you grew up in a conservative Christian household, maybe you did the same. From that point on, my spiritual life was shaped by this duality: saved or not saved, bound for heaven or bound for hell.

It affected every relationship I had, because it affected me at the core of who I am. How do you explain any of this to a seven year old, a nine year old—as soon as we are “saved” we are expected to take on a huge responsibility. I had no idea that in the following years I would be shouldered with responsibilities I never should have had as a child/teenager, and it took years of therapy to unpack all of that.

In bible studies and at youth events, I grew up learning about how to best share our “personal testimony,” that story of how we came to be saved, how we were transformed from sinners to people who look more and more like Jesus every day.

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The problem was that the Jesus we were being trained to look like doesn't look anything like the actual Jesus-- we were being trained as cogs in the machine of Christian empire. The wild thing is that we were constantly made to feel like possibly that first prayer didn’t quite take. Did we mean it? Have we sinned too much since for God to have taken it all back? In the coming years during the “invitation” at church I’d go forward every now and then, go sit in a room with an older person counseling me through whether I need to be re-saved. Living in a state of fear over your soul’s destination on a daily basis? That ticks the trauma box for me, folks.

Every time I was asked about my testimony, I would chase my memories back to my seven year old self, trying to find some fault in her. I wondered if, in that moment she prayed that prayer, she had some transformation, that a veil was lifted, that she saw everything around her more clearly. Surely, there were some awful underlying sins that she was hiding. Surely, she was a heathen before she prayed that prayer. Maybe she was extra selfish, and that was her downfall. Maybe she wasn’t grateful enough and needed the promise of heaven to fix it.

Maybe, though, she was just a kid, sacredly created and wholly loved by Mystery. In Native, I write about this a lot toward the end of the book. I write about those endless journal entries that begin with “God, I’m so sorry I didn’t do enough for you today.” I write about how I hope something better for my own kids, that they know they are beloved and held by a Sacred and loving God that values everything about them. It has absolutely nothing to do with a prayer. It has nothing to do with a white-washed Jesus or a testimony told at the right moment to save a soul.

As an adult, thanks to therapy and other safe spaces created with friends and family, I can revisit myself as a child. I can ask her questions, scan the recesses of her mind and imagination and see where she saw beauty and where she felt pain. As an adult, I can ask myself what my own trauma and anxiety stems from so that I can walk, write, sing, cry, run, or sometimes crawl my way through healing. And today I can visit Kaitlin when she was 22, 25, 30, yesterday years old. I can speak to her, hold space, ask questions without fear or shame.

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It is enduringly hard work, but if we are to dismantle some of the dangers associated with the colonizing evangelical Christianity we’ve inherited, we’ve got to look our trauma in the eye and hold the institutions accountable that caused that trauma.

Am I saying that every church member, youth pastor, and evangelical is a monster?

No.

I am saying that collectively we’ve done monstrous things, and we need to pay attention to the damage done in spaces where we promised someone salvation from themselves based on a one-time prayer and snap of the fingers.

This interesting thing has happened to me over the last few years—in dreams, maybe once or twice a month, I have the opportunity to hang out with people from my younger Baptist years, or I’m walking into my childhood church, afraid, uncomfortable, wondering. The other night I dreamt that I was hanging out with people, feeling very un-seen, until I ran into Jason Momoa, and I was like “Hey Jason, I feel lonely here and I don’t know what kind of Christian I am,” and he was like, “Yeah me too” so we left and that was that. The point of the dream wasn’t Jason, but perhaps he represented all the other people living multiple identities, trying to figure out where they fit. That’s more complex than “did you pray the prayer” and we shouldn’t act like that’s all there is to this faith (or any faith for that matter). We are lonely as hell a lot of the time.

Maybe we need to go back and ask our child-selves some questions.

Maybe we need to give them some room to ask us questions.

Today, the stories of Jesus tell me of a man, a human, who used spit and dirt to heal. He escaped to countrysides and water to remember his connection to the land. He told empire to back the hell off, and he held the oppressed and the young close to his own heart without shaming them into submission. He made some mistakes and said some things he maybe shouldn’t have, too. I guess claiming all of that humanness scares us, but how can we escape it? In white American Christianity we want everything so damn spotless we forget how lovely it is to simply be human. Complex as hell, yes. But lovely, too.

I grew up hearing that we are to be in the world, but not of the world.

But today, all I want is to hold space in this world with my relatives, human and non-human alike.

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As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us.” God, I love this quote. I always will.

If anything, the church has lost its ability to find its place in the midst of sacred creation. The church has been power hungry for too long, and has forgotten its need to stay humble and gentle, to learn from the world and the creatures in it, and to learn from the least of these when it has lost its way.

We lost our way when prayer became a weapon that we wielded toward others we thought needed saving.

Do we need to be saved from anything? Probably. We see the way that systems of hate and white supremacy have permeated the earth and destroyed people. We’ve seen how dangerous the ideas of in vs out, black vs white, us vs them can be. Maybe we need to save ourselves and each other from that wreckage. But we have to ask ourselves better questions and hold space for better answers.

Little Kaitlin? She saw something holy in the world around her, an awe and wonder that was slowly replaced with fear and shame.

We must do better by future generations inheriting a belovedly created and wholly loved world, and their wholly beautiful place in it.

We must be willing to lead them, and to stop and let them lead us. In order to be good ancestors, we begin with soft yet fierce love today.

There was a profound moment in our household when we realized that our kids don’t know anything about heaven or hell—if you’re a Christian reading this, you might be appalled, but there’s a beauty in talking about our spirits being gathered among the stars, as our ancestors believed, the Milky Way, the Spirit Path, and to move on to another place we may not understand but that is sacred nonetheless.

I’ll let my kids grow up believing in themselves and their friends, believing in love and the way that it moves here and beyond us somehow.

Are we saved or traumatized by this colonial Christianity we’ve inherited? Our kids deserve better than having to answer this question. May we give them opportunities to explore an expansive spirituality for themselves, and may we cheer them on along the way.

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Welcome to The Liminality Journal! If this is the first time you’re reading, I am so glad you’re here! If you joined me earlier this week, I celebrated the release of this newsletter with you, and I’ve shared something new for the past few days since the launch, just to celebrate (be sure to check out those previous posts too).

I am so glad you’re here, because I have something important to share with you today. I’ve been learning the difficult but beautiful and empowering lesson of trusting myself over the last few years, and I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned.

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Trusting ourselves is a process that is so completely liminal— we are traversing so many boundaries within ourselves, from childhood through adulthood, trying to learn what our own voice sounds like, trying to distinguish our actual intuition from what we’ve been told is our intuition. It’s such a tender space to live with, and I think it’s important to talk about.

So first, let me take you back to my beginning.

I was a kid who always felt and processed deeply. I was drawn to people, relationship, and the beauty of the world. But the older I got, the less I learned to trust that sensitivity; maybe I learned that it was unnecessary, or even a nuisance. I had relationships, but couldn’t always access my own voice in them.

Of course, trauma plays a part in the process as well, and with childhood trauma comes these pivotal moments of trying to discern whose voice you’re hearing— your own, or whatever you’re told along the way. For me, especially after my parents’ divorce when I was 9, anxiety and/or worry gradually took the place of that healthy sense of deep rootedness in my life. I began to lose trust in myself, my body, and my ways of understanding the world around me.

I can recall numerous times in adolescence when I had the opportunity to make a decision, and I didn’t. Instead of taking the initiative to make a decision, I leaned back into the traps, and status quo, of toxic people-pleasing and codependence in relationships. I asked others to make decisions for me, or I altogether avoided conversations that were difficult or perceived as difficult.

In other words, I didn’t know how to trust myself.

I believe it’s a particular problem within the white, evangelical church in America, the way we’re taught (and groomed) as women to be compliant and “nice,” to smile and work as hard as we can to never rock the boat. We are thrust into a world of patriarchy and complementarianism, where the most important thing is to do as we are told as young women (and on into every age beyond that), and, essentially, to keep our opinions to ourselves. We are most successful when we learn to listen and obey well, no matter the cost to our own knowing.

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So you can see how it might be difficult, not to find our voices, but to recognize that we’ve always had voices in the first place.

I noticed something else, too, about the way this works. We are afraid to speak, to name, to imagine, or to explore our voices, identities and intuition because of fear itself. What if they get angry with me? What if I lose them? What if they tell someone I’m awful? What if I get hurt? What if I hurt someone else? What if, what if, what if until we’ve closed ourselves off completely and others answering for us is the only option.

So, what happens when, for whatever reason, we begin to trust ourselves again? In Glennon Doyle’s newest book Untamed, she writes, “When women lose themselves, the world loses its way…we need women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves.”

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In other words, we learn to trust ourselves again, and here’s what happens when we do that:

1. Controllers will get mad (but they still lose their power). Those who have relied on us to keep our mouths shut and to stay loyal to the status quo of our own smallness will get angry when we set boundaries and begin to voice our opinions and knowing. It’s what happens when so many of us leave the church, relationships, or marriages that have harmed our sense of self worth— we are told that we are being selfish, that our boundaries are actually the toxic thing, and that we are nothing without those rules tightened around us. When we speak up and trust our own intuition again, controllers will get angry about it, but we will work on our own liberation, anyway.

2. We will get scared—but for different reasons. Learning to trust yourself again is difficult and can feel scary as hell, with a constant ebb and flow into and out of that trust. I often catch myself still acting out of trauma or people-pleasing, saying yes to things I should say no to, worrying when I want to fully trust my gut. But even the scariness of those moments means that we are catching ourselves in the process of learning to trust, and that leads toward empowerment. It’s not the fear of what if that I described earlier, but a fear of what’s next? And that is a beautiful question to ask if we embrace it with our whole selves and remember that we are not alone.

3. We will learn that trust is a lifelong process. So often, especially in our day in age, I think we get to burnout so quickly because we want the quick fix for everything. As with so many things, trusting ourselves is meant to take a lifetime. So much of this work is reconnecting to our child selves, speaking kindly to them, loving them, and learning who we are today. It involves dreaming about who we want to be 10, 15, 20 years from now, and that means exploring and celebrating ourselves along the way.

I don’t know what the path will be for you. Maybe it’s a partner who reminds you daily that your voice matters. Maybe it’s leaving relationships that are toxic. Maybe you need to step away from a work or social situation that demeans you again and again. Whatever the reason, however you take the path, I hope you take it. I hope you learn to trust yourself again, because it is holy, sacred work, the work of traversing the boundaries and finding that our own knowing was always there, waiting for us to come home to them.

Don’t forget, most of my writing will remain free, because I believe that sharing my words with all of you is what creates this community. For free subscribers, you’ll still get access to my essays and some original poetry. 

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• a look into my life as an essayist and poet

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Onward, friends, into the knowing.

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