I’m sick. And here’s the last good poem I wrote when I was a few semesters deep into acupuncture school. I was hollowed out. Art from a sick person.

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I’m fresh off a week of work in LA, simultaneously exhausted and refreshed. Working at Nora’s felt closer to working at my original studio than any other place I’ve worked. It was just me — Nora was out of town and graciously left me the use of her house, her car, her cats.

Each morning I woke naturally at 6:30am, 7:30am mountain time. At home, books wer…

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Time has grown over. We were back at Eli’s house yesterday, where we used to live all together during a time of rawer transition. Last year. There was a thin raspberry bramble in a corner of the narrow front yard. It was sparse enough that Joey could sleep under it, tall enough that it towered over Esmeralda, a year younger and smaller than now. We’d sp…

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The sun just set on the longest day of the year and Joey is in the building. I’m sitting at the desk in my home treatment space and she’s behind me, in a little nest she made of the pillow and blanket I just used to meditate with the third mystery herb in Earth Spirit Springtime School of Belonging.

We work with an unknown herb all week, taking drops and seeing what it’s like, listening to what it has to say. On Sundays we get together to share our experiences and find out what the herb is. This week I took the herb, but I was busy. My sister and her youngest kid came to town, I worked a bit, and set up a new treatment space at Maya’s in Boulder.

Meanwhile, the luckiest days of the year came and went. I dosed little drops and delegated — asked my guides to do to the abundance magic for me in my absence, bring whatever needed attention to my attention. Turns out what needed my attention (again?) was my birth. I didn’t think there was much to process — I had a beautiful homebirth with Sophie, Miles, and Carlos humming me through labor and birth at home. Out came Esmeralda.

But something new was bubbling up. I don’t want to talk about the ins and outs, but with the aid of mystery herb 3, my weekly doula mentorship, 2 hours on the phone with Soph, and a little thinking about my birth has revealed a deeper understanding of my power and how it leaks. I have a huge capacity for connecting, holding space, listening and responding, but I have a habit of not believing myself. I underwrite my power and defer to some other authority outside myself. I forget what I already know.

I wrote last week about a client deep in grief regarding her body’s decline and the changing trajectory of her elder years. This week she was back to her usual antics, flying around on her walker, flipping her legs up on the treatment table, cracking jokes. The wheel indeed kept turning, or you could say “the treatment” was successful.

What I didn’t write about last week was how I spent my 20s working with patients in the end stages of their lives. Patients who all died, many of whom were not old. This isn’t a death flex, but it was as if those patients called out to me to witness their declines like flowers in bloom calling out to be made into an essence. I listened and now years later, thanks to those terminal teachers, I have the width to witness without closing in. To treat, to exist, without needing to fix it all.

Today as I sat in flower club group meditation, the clouds outside seemed to draw closed across the sun like curtains, surrounding me in a soft cocoonish light. My heart opened and I found a fresh interior space, like how a tree falls in the forest, letting light break through the canopy to illuminate the forest floor below. Here is the space of connection.

Through the connection came clarity — how giving away my power during my birth made it easier to give away my power as a new parent, as a new parent going back to work. How easy it is to forget what I know and who I am. And space — how ok it is, it is all freely available and always was. I’m protected and cared for. I don’t live or practice medicine alone.

Fino revealed the herb is Motherwort. They said something like — Motherwort draws the frayed fractured energy that pools around us and brings it all together, in and through us. Mends the heart, brings us back to self.

I’m learning the same thing in a hundred different ways. The way that Fino talks about making essences — tuning in, listening and responding from a place of connection, remembering what we know — is exactly how Ehrland teaches about Japanese acupuncture. The ability to connect intuitively, spirit to spirit, is the way to healing. It’s exactly the same as what I’m learning about Mary Magdalene’s gospel and Jesus’s secret message. The heart is a beacon of connection to an unseen realm of abundance. The key is not to forget this innate cosmic freedom. Stay tuned for my rebrand from On Earth Acupuncture to Jesus’s Secret & Son.

And with that, me and motherwort are going to bed. I hope this week reveals for you a pathway to connection. There are many doorways to the divine, many flowers on the forest floor.

Hi from Sunday morning, drinking coffee and eating peas with Esmeralda. There are things to do but nowhere to be, no one to be. The field bindweed is in bloom, we made an essence of the flowers and the morning.

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Last week, my friends picked me up at 4:15am and we drove to Breckenridge to hike a 14er, one of 58 mountains in Colorado over 14,000 feet above sea level. The trail starts around 10,850 feet elevation, sloping up over log-terraced steps — step up up up through stands of pine and fir. Then no trees at all as the environment gets harsher. Just rocks, lic…

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Hey freaks. I had a second newsletter written when I published the first one. It was a nice story about something cool that happened in an acupuncture treatment and included the words bunnies and teachers. But that was a whole five days ago and now my mood is totally different. I don’t want to talk about how cool…

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It’s afternoon, I’m home in Colorado, and I just stepped out of my daughter Esmeralda’s room. She’s hanging out alone before falling asleep for her nap, which she needs because we’ve been party all morning with our friends Maya and Cal. We were having a cozy emo morning, missing Carlos who’s tattooing in NY, but Maya’s fun grounding presence coaxed us o…

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