1. Truth: There’s a lot more to writing a book than just the writing. It won’t go the way you planned, expected, or hoped. It will absolutely test your patience, your ability to stay with something even though it seems like you aren’t getting anywhere. One part of the not writing for me right now is the realization that other aspects of my experience need tended, nourished, supported, and honored, and it won’t work to ask them to wait. Life keeps coming at you and has to be attended to and things will absolutely get in the way, require you to redirect your effort. A simple example for me right now is I sprained a ligament in one of my fingers and have to wear a splint for the next six weeks, which means that finger doesn’t bend and is making typing very slow and messy.

2. Truth: The last three years have been A LOT. I retired, I was (am) burnt out, menopause, COVID-19, losing my teaching gigs because of the necessary and reasonable restrictions and precautions of living in a global pandemic, losing my sangha, the death cult that is the USA and all the various ways it manifests, the climate crisis, losing Sam and Angela, ETC. Like I said in a text to my mom the other day, “life is tough, and there is no easy way out.” And yet, I am very lucky, privileged to have a core group of smart and funny people who REALLY love me, access to healthcare and medication and vaccines, a nutritionist (HAES), a therapist, multiple practices that help me to be soft enough to stay open and strong enough to stay, good books and podcasts, a supportive gym community, movement practices that bring me joy and make me feel good, ETC.

3. Truth: Being human is hard; don’t give up. It seems to be that simple, and that impossible. There’s no denying how difficult this is, how much grief and suffering exists, how much harm we do even when we are trying so hard not to, AND it is also so beautiful to be alive, to love, to experience a sunrise or cuddle a dog or plant a garden or make someone laugh. As Andrew Boyd says in this book Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the The Universe, “You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” Not easy.

One wish: May whatever support you need to keep going find its way to you, quickly and without effort, and linger as long as you need it.